Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was a Bengali film director, writer, and illustrator. He was one of the greatest Indian filmmakers of the 20th century. Ray was born in Calcutta into a Bengali family which was prominent in the field of arts and literature. Starting his career as a commercial artist, he was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing Vittorio De Sica's Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves during a visit to London.
Ray directed 36 films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, calligrapher, music composer, graphic designer and film critic. He authored several short stories and novels, meant primarily for young children and teenagers. Feluda, the sleuth, and Professor Shonku, the scientist in his science fiction stories, are popular fictional characters created by him. He was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University.
Ray's first film, Pather Panchali, won eleven international prizes, including the inaugural Best Human Document award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. This film, along with Aparajito and Apur Sansar , form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, and editing, and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a Golden Lion, a Golden Bear, 2 Silver Bears, a number of additional awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. The Government of India honored him with the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award, in 1992. Ray had received many noticeable awards and gained a prestigious position over his life time.
Biography
Lineage
Satyajit Ray's ancestry can be traced back for at least ten generations. His family had acquired the name 'Ray' from the Mughals. Although they were Bengali Kayasthas, the Rays were 'Vaishnavas' as against majority Bengali Kayasthas who were 'Shaktos'.From the history of the Ray family, it is known that one of their earlier ancestors Shri Ramsunder Deo was a native of Chakdah, Nadia District, Bengal. From there, he migrated to Sherpur in East Bengal in search of fate. Raja Gunichandra, the Zamindar of Jashodal, met him in the Zamindar House of Sherpur and was immediately impressed by him. He took Ramsunder with him to his estate in Jashodal, gave him a part of his Zamindari and made him his son-in-law.
Satyajit Ray's grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray, was a writer, illustrator, philosopher, publisher, amateur astronomer, and a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social movement in 19th-century Bengal. He also set up a printing press by the name of U. Ray and Sons, which formed a crucial backdrop to Satyajit's life. Sukumar Ray, Upendrakishore's son and father of Satyajit, was an illustrator, critic, and a pioneering Bengali writer of nonsense rhyme and children's literature.
Early life and background
Satyajit Ray was born to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray in Calcutta. Sukumar died when Satyajit was barely three, and the family survived on Suprabha Ray's meager income. Ray studied at Ballygunge Government High School in Calcutta, and completed his BA in economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, though his interest was always in the fine arts.In 1940, his mother insisted that he study at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore. Ray was reluctant to go, due to his fondness for Calcutta and the low regard for the intellectual life at Santiniketan. His mother's persuasiveness and his respect for Tagore finally convinced him to try. In Santiniketan, Ray came to appreciate Oriental art. He later admitted that he learned much from the famous painters Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee. Later he produced a documentary film, The Inner Eye, about Mukherjee. His visits to Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta stimulated his admiration for Indian art.
In 1943, Ray started work at D.J. Keymer, a British-run advertising agency, as a "junior visualiser," earning 80 rupees a month. Although he liked visual design and he was mostly treated well, there was tension between the British and Indian employees of the firm. The British were better paid, and Ray felt that "the clients were generally stupid." Later, Ray worked for Signet Press, a new publishing house started by D. K. Gupta. Gupta asked Ray to create cover designs for books to be published by Signet Press and gave him complete artistic freedom. Ray designed covers for many books, including Jibanananda Das's Banalata Sen, and Rupasi Bangla, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Chander Pahar, Jim Corbett's Maneaters of Kumaon, and Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India. He worked on a children's version of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, renamed as Aam Antir Bhepu. Designing the cover and illustrating the book, Ray was deeply influenced by the work. He used it as the subject of his first film, and featured his illustrations as shots in his ground-breaking film.
Along with Chidananda Dasgupta and others, Ray founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. They screened many foreign films, many of which Ray watched and seriously studied. He befriended the American GIs stationed in Calcutta during World War II, who kept him informed about the latest American films showing in the city. He came to know a RAF employee, Norman Clare, who shared Ray's passion for films, chess and western classical music.
In 1949, Ray married Bijoya Das, his first cousin and long-time sweetheart. The couple had a son, Sandip Ray, who is now a film director. In the same year, French director Jean Renoir came to Calcutta to shoot his film The River. Ray helped him to find locations in the countryside. Ray told Renoir about his idea of filming Pather Panchali, which had long been on his mind, and Renoir encouraged him in the project. In 1950, D.J. Keymer sent Ray to London to work at its headquarters office. During his six months in London, Ray watched 99 films. Among these was the neorealist film Ladri di biciclette by Vittorio De Sica, which had a profound impact on him. Ray later said that he came out of the theater determined to become a film-maker.
Career
The Apu years (1950–59)
Ray decided to use Pather Panchali, the classic Bildungsroman of Bengali literature, as the basis for his first film.Pather Panchali was a semi-autobiographical novel describing the maturation of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village.Ray gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman Subrata Mitra and art director Bansi Chandragupta went on to achieve great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly amateur actors. After unsuccessful attempts to persuade many producers to put up the money needed for the project, Ray started shooting in late 1952 with his personal savings and hoped to raise more money once he had some passages shot, but did not succeed on his terms. As a result, Ray shot Pather Panchali over two and a half years, an unusually long period, based on when he or his production manager Anil Chowdhury could raise additional funds. He refused funding from sources who wanted a change in script or supervision over production. He also ignored advice from the government to incorporate a happy ending, but he did receive funding that allowed him to complete the film. Ray showed an early film passage to the American director John Huston, who was in India scouting locations for The Man Who Would Be King. The passage was of the vision which Apu and his sister have of the train running through the countryside, the only sequence which Ray had yet filmed due to his small budget. Huston notified Monroe Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art that a major talent was on the horizon.
With a loan from the West Bengal government, Ray finally completed the film. It was released in 1955 to great critical and popular success. It earned numerous prizes and had long runs in both India and abroad. In India, the reaction to the film was enthusiastic; The Times of India wrote that "It is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema Pather Panchali is pure cinema." In the United Kingdom, Lindsay Anderson wrote a glowing review of the film. But, the reaction was not uniformly positive. After watching the movie, François Truffaut is reported to have said, "I don't want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands." Bosley Crowther, then the most influential critic of The New York Times, wrote a scathing review of the film. Its American distributor Ed Harrison was worried Crowther's review would dissuade audiences, but the film had an exceptionally long run when released in the United States. A film still used on the original poster for the movie featured in The Family of Man, the Museum of Modern Art exhibition that was seen by 9 million visitors. It is a low-angle shot of the hero Apu having his hair brushed by his sister Durga and adoring mother Sarbojaya. Of the thirteen images the exhibition depicting India it was the only one made by an Indian photographer. Curator Edward Steichen credited it to Ray, but because Ray was not known to be a photographer, it is likely the author of this photograph, of a scene directed by Ray, was the film's cinematographer, Subrata Mitra.
Ray's international career started in earnest after the success of his next film, Aparajito. This film shows the eternal struggle between the ambitions of a young man, Apu, and the mother who loves him. Critics such as Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak rank it higher than Ray's first film. Aparajito won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, bringing Ray considerable acclaim. Before completing The Apu Trilogy, Ray directed and released two other films: the comic Parash Pathar, and Jalsaghar, a film about the decadence of the Zamindars, considered one of his most important works.
While making Aparajito, Ray had not planned a trilogy, but after he was asked about the idea in Venice, it appealed to him. He finished the last of the trilogy, Apur Sansar in 1959. Critics Robin Wood and Aparna Sen found this to be the supreme achievement of the trilogy. Ray introduced two of his favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore, in this film. It opens with Apu living in a Calcutta house in near-poverty. He becomes involved in an unusual marriage with Aparna. The scenes of their life together form "one of the cinema's classic affirmative depictions of married life." They suffer tragedy. After Apur Sansar was harshly criticised by a Bengali critic, Ray wrote an article defending it. He rarely responded to critics during his filmmaking career, but also later defended his film Charulata, his personal favourite.
Ray wrote his memoirs during his filming of the Apu Trilogy which has been published as.
Ray's film successes had little influence on his personal life in the years to come. He continued to live with his wife and children in a rented house, with his mother, uncle and other members of his extended family.
From ''Devi'' to ''Charulata'' (1959–64)
During this period, Ray composed films on the British Raj period, a documentary on Tagore, a comic film and his first film from an original screenplay. He also made a series of films that, taken together, are considered by critics among the most deeply felt portrayals of Indian women on screen.Ray followed Apur Sansar with Devi, a film in which he examined the superstitions in Hindu society. Sharmila Tagore starred as Doyamoyee, a young wife who is deified by her father-in-law. Ray was worried that the censor board might block his film, or at least make him re-cut it, but Devi was spared. In 1961, on the insistence of Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ray was commissioned to make a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore, on the occasion of the poet's birth centennial, a tribute to the person who likely most influenced Ray. Due to limited footage of Tagore, Ray faced the challenge of making a film out of mainly static material. He said that it took as much work as three feature films.
In the same year, together with Subhas Mukhopadhyay and others, Ray was able to revive Sandesh, the children's magazine which his grandfather had founded. Ray had been saving money for some years to make this possible. A duality in the name set the tone of the magazine. Ray began to make illustrations for it, as well as to write stories and essays for children. Writing became his major source of income.
In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha. Based on his first original screenplay, it was his first film in colour. The film tells of an upper-class family spending an afternoon in Darjeeling, a picturesque hill town in West Bengal. They try to arrange the engagement of their youngest daughter to a highly paid engineer educated in London. He had first conceived shooting the film in a large mansion, but later decided to film it in the famous hill town. He used the many shades of light and mist to reflect the tension in the drama. Ray noted that while his script allowed shooting to be possible under any lighting conditions, a commercial film contingent present at the same time in Darjeeling failed to shoot a single scene, as they only wanted to do so in sunshine.
In the sixties, Ray visited Japan and took particular pleasure in meeting the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, for whom he had very high regard. While at home, he would take an occasional break from the hectic city life by going to places such as Darjeeling or Puri to complete a script in isolation.
In 1964 Ray made Charulata ; it was the culmination of this period of work, and regarded by many critics as his most accomplished film. Based on "Nastanirh", a short story of Tagore, the film tells of a lonely wife, Charu, in 19th-century Bengal, and her growing feelings for her brother-in-law Amal. Critics have referred to this as Ray's Mozartian masterpiece. He said the film contained the fewest flaws among his work, and it was his only work which, given a chance, he would make exactly the same way. Charulata won him the Best Director prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Madhabi Mukherjee's performance as Charu, and the work of both Subrata Mitra and Bansi Chandragupta in the film, have been highly praised. Other films in this period include Mahanagar, Teen Kanya, Abhijan, Kapurush and Mahapurush.
New directions (1965–82)
In the post-Charulata period, Ray took on projects of increasing variety, ranging from fantasy to science fiction to detective films to historical drama. Ray also made considerable formal experimentation during this period. He expressed contemporary issues of Indian life, responding to a perceived lack of these issues in his films. The first major film in this period is Nayak, the story of a screen hero travelling in a train and meeting a young, sympathetic female journalist. Starring Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore, in the twenty-four hours of the journey, the film explores the inner conflict of the apparently highly successful matinée idol. In spite of the film's receiving a "Critics prize" at the Berlin International Film Festival, it had a generally muted reception.In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a film to be called The Alien, based on his short story "Bankubabur Bandhu", which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. Columbia Pictures was the producer for what was a planned US-India co-production, and Marlon Brando and Peter Sellers were cast as the leading actors. Ray found that his script had been copyrighted and the fee appropriated by Michael Wilson. Wilson had initially approached Ray through their mutual friend, Arthur C. Clarke, to represent him in Hollywood. Wilson copyrighted the script credited to Mike Wilson & Satyajit Ray, although he contributed only one word. Ray later said that he never received a penny for the script. After Brando dropped out of the project, the project tried to replace him with James Coburn, but Ray became disillusioned and returned to Calcutta. Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 1970s and 1980s, but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, Clarke and Ray saw similarities in the film to his earlier Alien script. Ray claimed that this film plagiarized his script. Ray said that Steven Spielberg's movie "would not have been possible without my script of 'The Alien' being available throughout America in mimeographed copies." Spielberg denied any plagiarism by saying, "I was a kid in high school when this script was circulating in Hollywood.". Besides The Alien, two other unrealised projects that Ray had intended to direct were adaptations of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahābhārata, and E. M. Forster's 1924 novel A Passage to India.
In 1969, Ray released what would be commercially the most successful of his films. Based on a children's story written by his grandfather, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, it is a musical fantasy. Goopy the singer and Bagha the drummer, endowed with three gifts by the King of Ghosts, set out on a fantastic journey. They try to stop an impending war between two neighboring kingdoms. Among his most expensive enterprises, the film project was difficult to finance. Ray abandoned his desire to shoot it in color, as he turned down an offer that would have forced him to cast a certain Hindi film actor as the lead.
Ray made a film from a novel by the young poet and writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay. Featuring a musical motif structure acclaimed as more complex than Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri traces four urban young men going to the forests for a vacation. They try to leave their daily lives behind. All but one of them become involved in encounters with women, which becomes a deep study of the Indian middle class. According to Robin Wood, "a single sequence ... would offer material for a short essay".
After Aranyer Din Ratri, Ray addressed contemporary Bengali life. He completed what became known as the Calcutta trilogy: Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha, and Jana Aranya, three films that were conceived separately but had thematic connections. Pratidwandi is about an idealist young graduate; if disillusioned at the end of film, he is still uncorrupted. Jana Aranya showed a young man giving in to the culture of corruption to make a living. Seemabaddha portrayed an already successful man giving up his morality for further gains. In the first film, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces a new, elliptical narrative style, such as scenes in negative, dream sequences, and abrupt flashbacks. In the 1970s, Ray adapted two of his popular stories as detective films. Though mainly addressed to children and young adults, both Sonar Kella and Joi Baba Felunath found some critical following.
Ray considered making a film on the Bangladesh Liberation War but later abandoned the idea. He said that, as a filmmaker, he was more interested in the travails of the refugees and not the politics. In 1977, Ray completed Shatranj Ke Khilari, a Hindustani film based on a short story by Munshi Premchand. It was set in Lucknow in the state of Oudh, a year before the Indian rebellion of 1857. A commentary on issues related to the colonisation of India by the British, this was Ray's first feature film in a language other than Bengali. It is his most expensive and star-studded film, featuring Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Amjad Khan, Shabana Azmi, Victor Bannerjee and Richard Attenborough.
In 1980, Ray made a sequel to Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a somewhat political Hirak Rajar Deshe. The kingdom of the evil Diamond King, or Hirok Raj, is an allusion to India during Indira Gandhi's emergency period. Along with his acclaimed short film Pikoo and hour-long Hindi film, Sadgati, this was the culmination of his work in this period.
The last phase (1983–92)
In 1983, while working on Ghare Baire, Ray suffered a heart attack; it would severely limit his productivity in the remaining 9 years of his life. Ghare Baire was completed in 1984 with the help of Ray's son because of his health condition. He had wanted to film this Tagore novel on the dangers of fervent nationalism for a long time and wrote the first draft of a script for it in the 1940s. Despite rough patches due to Ray's illness, the film did receive some critical acclaim. It had the first kiss fully portrayed in Ray's films. In 1987, Ray recovered some of his form in his 1990 film Shakha Proshakha. In it, an old man, who has lived a life of honesty, comes to learn of the corruption of three of his sons. The final scene shows the father finding solace only in the companionship of his fourth son, who is uncorrupted but mentally ill due to a head injury sustained while he was away studying in England. Ray's last film, Agantuk, is lighter in mood but not in theme. When a long-lost uncle arrives to visit his niece in Calcutta, he arouses suspicion as to his motive. This provokes far-ranging questions in the film about civilisation.In 1992, Ray's health deteriorated due to heart complications. He was admitted to a hospital but never recovered. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an Honorary Academy Award. Ray is the first and the only Indian, yet, to receive the honor. Twenty-four days before his death, Ray accepted the award, presented by Audrey Hepburn via video link in a gravely ill condition, calling it the "Best achievement of movie-making career." He died on 23 April 1992, 9 days before his 71st birthday.
Filmmaking style and influences
Ray, in his own words, had been subconsciously paying a tribute to Jean Renoir throughout his whole creative career, who had influenced him the most. He had also acknowledged De Sica, whom he thought to have represented Italian Neorealism best, having taught him the cramming of cinematic details into a single shot, and utilizing amateur actors and actresses. He has admitted to have learnt the craft of cinema from Old Hollywood Masters such as John Ford, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch. He had deep respect and admiration for his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, whom he considered giants. Among others, he learnt the use of freeze frame shots from Truffaut and jump cuts and dispensasion of fades and s from Godard. Although he admired Godard's "revolutionary" early phase, the later phase totally felt like "alien" to him. He deeply adored his peer Michelangelo Antonioni, but hated his Blow-Up, which he considered having "very little inner movement". He also considered Stanley Kubrick a "superb technician".Although Ray has stated to have had very little influence from Sergei Eisenstein, films like Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Charulata and Sadgati contains scenes which show striking use of montage. A picture of Eisenstein still hangs in his drawing room.
The narrative structure of Ray's films bear strong resemblance to musical forms such as sonata, fugue and rondo. Kanchenjunga, Nayak and Aranyer Din Ratri are examples of this musical narrative structure. In Ray's own words, "Films, like Western composed music, exist as an inflexible pattern in time."
Ray considered script-writing to be an integral part of direction. Initially he refused to make a film in any language other than Bengali. In his two non-Bengali feature films, he wrote the script in English; translators translated it into Hindustani under Ray's supervision. Ray's eye for detail was matched by that of his art director Bansi Chandragupta. His influence on the early films was so important that Ray would always write scripts in English before creating a Bengali version, so that the non-Bengali Chandragupta would be able to read it. The craft of Subrata Mitra garnered praise for the cinematography of Ray's films. A number of critics thought that his departure from Ray's crew lowered the quality of cinematography in the following films. Mitra stopped working for him after Nayak. Mitra developed "bounce lighting", a technique to reflect light from cloth to create a diffused, realistic light even on a set.
Ray's regular film editor was Dulal Datta, but the director usually dictated the editing while Datta did the actual work. Because of financial reasons and Ray's meticulous planning, his films were mostly cut in-camera. At the beginning of his career, Ray worked with Indian classical musicians, including Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, and Ali Akbar Khan. He found that their first loyalty was to musical traditions, and not to his film. He had a greater understanding of Western classical forms, which he wanted to use for his films set in an urban milieu. Starting with Teen Kanya, Ray began to compose his own scores.
He used actors of diverse backgrounds, from famous film stars to people who had never seen a film. Robin Wood and others have lauded him as the best director of children, pointing out memorable performances in the roles of Apu and Durga, Ratan and Mukul. Depending on the talent or experience of the actor, Ray varied the intensity of his direction, from virtually nothing with actors such as Utpal Dutt, to using the actor as a puppet. Actors who had worked for Ray praised his customary trust but said he could also treat incompetence with total contempt.
With full of admiration of his cinematic style and impeccable craft, British Film Academy Director Roger Manvell had said, “In the restrained style he has adopted, Ray has become a master of technique. He takes his timing from the nature of the people and their environment; his camera is the intent, unobtrusive observer of reactions; his editing the discreet, economical transition from one value to the next."
Though a master technician and a superb craftsman, Ray always credited life to be the best kind of inspiration for a popular medium like cinema. In his own words, "For a popular medium, the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and have its roots in it. No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of the theme and the dishonesty of treatment."
Literary works
Ray created two popular fictional characters in Bengali children's literature—Feluda, a detective, and Professor Shonku, a scientist. The Feluda stories are narrated by Topesh Ranjan Mitra aka Topse, his teenage cousin, something of a Watson to Feluda's Holmes. The science fictions of Shonku are presented as a diary discovered after the scientist had mysteriously disappeared. Ray also wrote a collection of nonsense verse named Today Bandha Ghorar Dim, which includes a translation of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky". He wrote a collection of humorous stories of Mullah Nasiruddin in Bengali.His short stories were published as collections of 12 stories, in which the overall title played with the word twelve. Ray's interest in puzzles and puns is reflected in his stories. Ray's short stories give full rein to his interest in the macabre, in suspense and other aspects that he avoided in film, making for an interesting psychological study. Most of his writings have been translated into English. Most of his screenplays have been published in Bengali in the literary journal Eksan. Ray wrote an autobiography about his childhood years, Jakhan Choto Chilam, translated to English as Childhood Days.
Ray penned his experiences during the period when he filmed the Apu Trilogy in his memoirs titled.
He also wrote essays on film, published as the collections: Our Films, Their Films, Bishoy Chalachchitra, and Ekei Bole Shooting. During the mid-1990s, Ray's film essays and an anthology of short stories were also published in English in the West. Our Films, Their Films is an anthology of film criticism by Ray. The book contains articles and personal journal excerpts. The book is presented in two sections: Ray first discusses Indian film, before turning his attention toward Hollywood, specific filmmakers, and movements such as Italian neorealism. His book Bishoy Chalachchitra was published in translation in 2006 as Speaking of Films. It contains a compact description of his philosophy of different aspects of the cinemas.
Ray as calligrapher
Satyajit Ray designed four typefaces for roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, and Holiday script, apart from numerous Bengali ones for the Sandesh magazine. Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre won an international competition in 1971. In certain circles of Calcutta, Ray continued to be known as an eminent graphic designer, well into his film career. Ray illustrated all his books and designed covers for them, as well as creating all publicity material for his films, i.e., Ray's artistic playing with the Bengali graphemes was also revealed in the cine posters and cine promo-brochures' covers. He also designed covers of several books by other authors. In his calligraphic technique there are deep impacts of:Artistic pattern of European musical staff notation in the graphemic syntagms;
alpana as a living object/subject in Ray's positive manipulation of Bengali graphemes.
Personal life
Ray married his cousin Bijoya Ray in 1945. Together, they had a son, Sandip Ray.He had a youthful infatuation with Beethoven, which went to the extent of heroic adulation. He went on to become one of the most distinguished connoisseurs of Western Classical Music in India.
A workaholic, heavy-smoker and teetotaler, Ray valued work more than anything else in the world. He worked 12 hours a day, usually getting to bed at two o'clock in the morning. He loved collecting archival, antique materials, manuscripts, rare gramophone records, paintings and rare books. He was a superb illustrator, mastered every styles of visual art, and could mimic any painter, as evidenced in his book and magazine covers, posters, literary illustrations and advertisement campaigns.
Critical and popular response
Ray's work has been described as full of humanism and universality, and of a deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa said, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon." But his detractors find his films glacially slow, moving like a "majestic snail." Some find his work anti-modern; they criticize him for lacking the new modes of expression or experimentation found in works of Ray's contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc Godard. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote, some critics believe that Ray assumes that viewers "can be interested in a film that simply dwells in its characters, rather than one that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives." Ray said he could do nothing about the slow pace. Kurosawa defended him by saying that Ray's films were not slow, "His work can be described as flowing composedly, like a big river".Critics have often compared Ray to artists in the cinema and other media, such as Chekhov, Renoir, De Sica, Hawks or Mozart. The writer V. S. Naipaul compared a scene in Shatranj Ki Khiladi to a Shakespearean play; he wrote, "only three hundred words are spoken but goodness! – terrific things happen." Even critics who did not like the aesthetics of Ray's films generally acknowledged his ability to encompass a whole culture with all its nuances. Ray's obituary in The Independent included the question, "Who else can compete?" His work was promoted in France by The Studio des Ursuline cinema. With full of positive admiration for most of Ray's films, celebrated film critic Roger Ebert had cited "Apu Trilogy" among the great movies.
Praising his contribution to the world of cinema, Martin Scorsese mentions: "His work is in the company of that of living contemporaries like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini."
Director of classics like "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now", Francis Ford Coppola cited him to be a major influence in life. With deep words of praise for Ray's 1960 classic "Devi", what he had considered to be his best work and a "cinematic milestone"; he further admitted to know of Indian cinema through Ray's works.
Recently, on a visit to India, celebrated filmmaker Christopher Nolan expresses his admiration for Ray's first film, "Pather Panchali". Nolan expressed, "I have had the pleasure of watching Ray’s Pather Panchali recently, which I hadn’t seen before. I think it is one of the best films ever made. It is an extraordinary piece of work."
Political ideologues took issue with Ray's work. In a public debate during the 1960s, Ray and the Marxist filmmaker Mrinal Sen engaged in an argument. Sen criticised him for casting a matinée idol such as Uttam Kumar, whom he considered a compromise. Ray said that Sen only attacked "easy targets", i.e. the Bengali middle-classes. However Ray himself has made movies on Bengali middle class in films like Pratidwandi and Jana Aranya set during the period of the naxalite movement in Bengal. Advocates of socialism said that Ray was not "committed" to the cause of the nation's downtrodden classes; some critics accused him of glorifying poverty in Pather Panchali and Ashani Sanket through lyricism and aesthetics. They said he provided no solution to conflicts in the stories, and was unable to overcome his bourgeois background. During the naxalite movements in the 1970s, agitators once came close to causing physical harm to his son, Sandip. Early in 1980, Ray was criticised by an Indian M.P. and former actress Nargis Dutt, who accused Ray of "exporting poverty." She wanted him to make films to represent "Modern India."
Legacy
Satyajit Ray is a cultural icon in India and in Bengali communities worldwide. Following his death, the city of Calcutta came to a virtual standstill, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered around his house to pay their last respects. Satyajit Ray's influence has been widespread and deep in Bengali cinema; a number of Bengali directors, including Aparna Sen, Rituparno Ghosh and Gautam Ghose as well as Vishal Bhardwaj, Dibakar Banerjee, Shyam Benegal and Sujoy Ghosh from Hindi cinema in India, Tareq Masud and Tanvir Mokammel in Bangladesh, and Aneel Ahmad in England, have been influenced by his film craft. Across the spectrum, filmmakers such as Budhdhadeb Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalakrishnan have acknowledged his seminal contribution to Indian cinema. Beyond India, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, François Truffaut, Carlos Saura, Isao Takahata, Wes Anderson, Danny Boyle Christopher Nolan and many other noted filmmakers from all over the world have been influenced by his cinematic style, with many others such as Akira Kurosawa praising his work. Gregory Nava's 1995 film My Family had a final scene that repeated that of Apur Sansar. Ira Sachs's 2005 work Forty Shades of Blue was a loose remake of Charulata. Other references to Ray films are found, for example, in recent works such as Sacred Evil, the Elements trilogy of Deepa Mehta. According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly, the "youthful coming-of-age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy". The trilogy also introduced the bounce lighting technique. Kanchenjungha introduced a narrative structure that resembles later hyperlink cinema. Pratidwandi helped pioneer photo-negative flashback and X-ray digression techniques.Together with Madhabi Mukherjee, Ray was the first Indian film figure to be featured on a foreign stamp. In 2004, Ray was ranked number 13 in BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time.
Iranian master filmmaker, Majid Majidi has expressed his deep admiration to Satyajit Ray. While discussing the inspirations for making his first feature film on India Beyond the Clouds, which is a foreign land and culture for the director; Majidi expressed, "I have learned a lot about India based on the works of remarkable Indian director Satyajit Ray so it was my dream to make a film in his land. His view point is very valuable to me and I love whatever he has done, so one of the main reasons behind making this film is my admiration for Satyajit Ray and his work".
Many literary works include references to Ray or his work, including Saul Bellow's Herzog and J. M. Coetzee's . Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories contains fish characters named Goopy and Bagha, a tribute to Ray's fantasy film. In 1993, UC Santa Cruz established the Satyajit Ray Film and Study collection, and in 1995, the Government of India set up Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute for studies related to film. In 2007, the BBC declared that two Feluda stories would be made into radio programs. During the London Film Festival, a regular "Satyajit Ray Award" is given to a first-time feature director whose film best captures "the artistry, compassion and humanity of Ray's vision". Wes Anderson has claimed Ray as an influence on his work; his 2007 film, The Darjeeling Limited, set in India, is dedicated to Ray. Ray also a graphic designer, designed most of his film posters, combining folk-art and calligraphy to create themes ranging from mysterious, surreal to comical; an exhibition his posters was held at British Film Institute in 2013.
In 2016, during the shooting of the film Double Feluda, Satyajit's only son, Sandip Ray, filmed his father's famous library.
Preservation
The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Satyajit Ray's films: Abhijan in 2001, Aparajito in 1996, Apur Sansar in 1996, Charulata in 1996, Devi in 1996, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in 2003, Jalsaghar in 1996, Jana Aranya in 1996, Joi Baba Felunath in 2007, Kapurush in 2005, Mahanagar in 1996, Mahapurush in 2005, Nayak in 2004, Parash Pathar in 2007, Pather Panchali in 1996, Seemabaddha in 2001, Shatranj ke Khilari in 2010, Sikkim in 2007, Teen Kanya in 1996, and the short film Two in 2006. The Academy Film Archive additionally holds prints of other Ray films as part of its Satyajit Ray Collection.Awards, honours and recognitions
Ray received many awards, including 32 National Film Awards by the Government of India, and awards at international film festivals. At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, he was awarded with the Honorable Prize for the contribution to cinema. At the Berlin International Film Festival, he was one of only four filmmakers to win the Silver Bear for Best Director more than once and holds the record for the most number of Golden Bear nominations, with seven. At the Venice Film Festival, where he had previously won a Golden Lion for Aparajito, he was awarded the Golden Lion Honorary Award in 1982. That same year, he received an honorary "Hommage à Satyajit Ray" award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.Ray is the second film personality after Chaplin to have been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. He was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1985 and the Legion of Honor by the President of France in 1987. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 1965 and the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, shortly before his death. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ray an Honorary Oscar in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement. It was one of his favourite actresses, Audrey Hepburn, who represented the Academy on that day in Calcutta. Ray, unable to attend the ceremony due to his illness, gave his acceptance speech to the Academy via live video feed from the hospital bed. In 1992 he was posthumously awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco International Film Festival; it was accepted on his behalf by actress Sharmila Tagore.
Participants in a 2004 BBC poll voted him thirteenth of the "Greatest Bengali of all time". In 1992, the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll ranked Ray at No. 7 in its list of "Top 10 Directors" of all time, making him the highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll. In 2002, the Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll ranked Ray at No. 22 in its list of all-time greatest directors, thus making him the fourth highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll.
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly magazine ranked Ray at No. 25 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list. In 2007, Total Film magazine included Ray in its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.