Better late than never, I suppose. This month - May 2nd, to be precise - was the centennial of Bengali director Satyajit Ray. While this piece was supposed to be ready then, many factors contributed to its delay. One of which was how intimidating the legacy of this master of cinema is. In any case, before June dawns on us, let's celebrate the great Satyajit Ray and the outstanding collection the Criterion Channel curated for the occasion. Right now, you can find 17 of the director's features plus a 1984 documentary about his work streaming on the platform. For any cinephile with access to the Criterion Channel, this is a treasure trove that shouldn't be missed or ignored…
Satyajit Ray was born in 1921 to a family of artists whose history can be traced back ten generations. His father, Sukumar, was a poet who died when his son was three, leaving behind a family that struggled to survive on the matriarch's income. Despite studying economics early on, Ray's interests always lay in the arts. In 1940, under his mother's insistence, the young man left Kolkata to ingress in the Visva-Bharati University, whose founder, Rabindranath Tagore, would be the subject of one of Ray's future films. Through the 40s, the future cineaste pursued a career in graphic design and founded the Calcutta Film Society, where foreign films were screened and discussed by avid cinephiles.
In 1949, when French director Jean Renoir arrived in India to shoot The River, Ray became a vital help to the film's production. Working as a location scout and assisting Renoir, Ray's dreams of adapting Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali to the big screen were rekindled and fortified. At the start of the 1950s, he was sent to work in London, where he continued his cinematic education, watching everything he could. The work of Italian Neorealists was of particular interest and impact, influencing the visual idioms he would later perfect in the celebrated Apu trilogy. After watching De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Ray decided something that would change his life forevermore – no matter what, he would become a filmmaker.
PATHER PANCHALI (1955)
His career as a film director spans nearly four decades, twenty-nine features, and various shorts. Through these works, Ray refined a filmography shining with humanistic grandeur but also great humility. The man's films rarely call attention to their ambition, focusing on small-scale incidents, stories of the domestic realm, or grand philosophical narratives synthesized into simple conversational tableaux and quiet observations. Indeed, the director's debut was a miracle of observational cinema, where lyrical sensibilities and merciless realism intersect to reveal a world seen through the eyes of children. We are made to look at the story just as the boy Apu does, with the cinematic form conjuring powerful empathy, wonderment, and sentimental devastation.
Despite working with an inexperienced crew, Ray's first film was a stone-cold masterpiece. Screened at Cannes after getting a modest commercial release in India, Pather Panchali caused a sensation among film lovers worldwide. The story of a poor Bengali family trying to survive through hardship moved and surprised western audiences, showing a facet of Indian cinema few abroad had seen. Despite the hegemony of Bollywood, it's vital to take into account that the cinema of India is a varied and multifaceted creature, an industry divided into regions whose cultural and linguistic divergences lead to very distinct sorts of artistic expression and tradition. What's new to outsiders can often glimmer with the unwarranted illusion of innovation. Nevertheless, it helps that Pather Panchali is one of the greatest films ever made about a child's perspective of the world. Regardless of the validity of its unprecedentedness, it's majestic.
APARAJITO (1956)
Throughout his working years, Satyajit Ray became an artist of many facets. From his beginnings in Kolkota, this master of cinema was a genius director, a writer, a musician and film score composer, illustrator, book and magazine editor, and much more. Helped along by the growing visibility of international cinema in the postwar years, Ray would come to be a cultural icon both to his homeland of Bengal, the whole of India, and the world at large. In some regards, the Apu Trilogy that started with Pather Panchali saw the young maverick mature into a master in a matter of years. Aparajito, the first film's sequel, finds Apu growing up, his family moving from country to city, maternal sacrifices demanded by harsh conditions. Of all of Ray's films, it's the one that always makes me teary-eyed, an emotional gut-punch whose bruise will likely never fade.
The way the sun paints the forest in soft kaleidoscopes of light and shadow in Pather Panchali, the sludgy-grey contrasts and gauzy illuminations of city and rural country in Aparajito – Ray's cinema is full of such poetic imagery. Out of the mundane, he uncovers pictures worthy of celluloid immortality, reveries that are as drawn from desiring dreams as they are rooted in unvarnished authenticity. However, it's also a cinema of text and deep conversation. The final film in the Apu Trilogy, 1959's The World of Apu, would find Ray exploring those textual aspects in full bloom. The diptych structure of the flick might make it less dramatically consistent than its predecessors. Still, there's an adult complexity to the ideas that transcend Pather Panchali's youthful simplicity and the melodrama of Aparajito. The artist grows along with his art, his characters, his world.
THE MUSIC ROOM (1958)
All that being said, I must confess that my favorite of Satyajit Ray's films is a somewhat forgotten gem lost amidst the Apu trilogy's furor. 1958's The Music Room shows that, while his movies often focused on the middle and working classes, Ray's attention could be shifted to the upper echelons of wealth and lose none of its sharpness, wit, or generosity. In a creation that feels like foreboding anticipation of Visconti's The Leopard, the Bengali director portrays an aristocrat lost in memories of glory gone by. It's the tale of a man coming to grips with his obsolescence, understanding that the world he cherished has died and the new order has no place for people like him. His dreams will be forever as immaterial as the imagined reflections that fill his mirrored halls, a palace in a state of perpetual and incandescent remembrance. Few artists have ever created a more potent depiction of the painful process by which the past and its traditions must die at the hands of modernity.
CHARULATA (1964)
As the 50s made way for the 60s, Ray's films continued to evolve, his cinema growing in ambition and artistic sophistication, in dramatic subtlety and social awareness. Devi, The Big City, and Charulata form a sort of unofficial trilogy in which Ray explores a woman's role in Indian society with intoxicating craft. Be it the perils of mortal adoration mixed up with religious idolatry, the newfound independence of the working woman, or the loneliness of a repressed 19th-century housewife, these films feature some of the best characterizations and performances in Ray's rich filmography. In this loose tryptic, such simple gestures as accepting a gifted lipstick can reverberate like a tectonic shift. Charulata is especially lovely in this regard, being a film where the camera movement is as crucial to our understanding of the conflict as the actors in front of the lens.
The isolation of the titular lady is given shape by the camerawork that, done by Ray himself, assumes his leading lady's gaze and frames her as a prisoner in a gilded cage of bourgeois comfort. For a more blatant visual mechanism, notice how the director has the characters enter into the story. While Pather Panchali's reveal of the kid Apu may be Ray's best introductory moment, the cousin's arrival into the domestic lethargy of Charulata isn't far behind. The man's presence disrupts the equilibrium of the household in such irreversible ways that he's like an elemental force. The director has him blast into the film along with a barrage of wind. In that riveting instant, metaphorical and literal storms manifest at the same time. No wonder that, after such disruption, there's a new sense of freedom coursing through the film's veins, culminating in a swinging shot that would come to inspire many future filmmakers. As she tastes genuine joy, the world around Charulata bleeds into a waterfall of light and restless undefinition.
THE HERO (1966)
There's a lot to say about the rest of Ray's output of the 60s and 70s. For instance, The Hero's locomoting metatextuality and oneiric passages are fascinating. Still, this write-up is already too long, so let's speed things up and move towards the end of Satyajit Ray's filmography.
Great artists seldom produce their best work in the autumn years of their lives. It's fair to say Satyajit Ray falls victim to this fate. However, while works like The Home and the World, An Enemy of the People, and The Stranger may not reach the sublime perfection of The Apu Trilogy, they are still remarkable creations. If anything, the older Ray gained impetus and philosophical discipline, using the model of the chamber drama to articulate challenging ideas, especially at the level of politics. Please make no mistake, Satyajit Ray's cinema was always political. How that nature revealed itself is what changed with the passing years. The sublimated whispers of his early works became a vociferous shout during his later years. Perchance this evolution reflects an evolving sense of urgency, even some despair. The young man has years to waste, while the older man counts his hours. Subtlety is the privilege of those who can't see their end glimmering in the ominous horizon. That's not to say Ray's cinema became blunt, only that his discourse was no longer subtext.
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (1989)
Of course, one should never underestimate this man's mastery of visual storytelling. Even as his body betrayed him and the director had to stop operating his camera or working on location, the film narratives still unfurled with elegance.
Take two scenes of marital discord from the last few decades of Ray's career. In 1977's The Chess Players, both the main story and a chess match are interrupted by a lateral movement of wifely discontent. The flat lighting of rich salons is temporarily abandoned for the penumbra of private quarters in which man and woman reveal their lacerated souls while avoiding the other's gaze. It's gorgeously shot, backlit portraiture that finds beauty in the quarrel. In another film, 1989's An Enemy of the People, Ray's adaptation of an Ibsen play adds a religious twist to its sociological conundrums and manifests these changes in the faith-based fractures of a loving couple. Again, the story stops. Again a complicated dialogue is staged within a game of averted looks. Here, though, none of the parties wants to hurt their spouse, so instead of darkness, there's light, the closeups are shared rather than combatively individual, and tentative honesty flowers in place of barbed confessions. Just blocking and lighting make all the difference, while the form is kept simple enough that the words are still the actual meat of the interaction. Both scenes are delicate reminders of Ray's genius, how unassuming it could be, how powerful it often was.
THE STRANGER (1991)
Through Satyajit Ray's many films, one can chart the painful movements of a nation beset by radical change. Unlike many other cineastes, the Indian auteur never let his camera strand too far away from the smallness of people. Whether cataloging a boy's life or exorcising the ghost of British colonialism, Ray rarely foregrounds the movements of history, politics, and culture. Sometimes, like in The Chess Players, history literally happens as a reflective B-plot in the background of the "main" action. Instead of demonstrative didacticism, we get to know the social forces that shape the human cosmos by the way people navigate through them. Be it a noble king or a peasant girl, all of Ray's characters are at the mercy of a world much bigger than them. Their negotiation of this existence defines their movies, making them into complex jewels of humanistic cinema.
All the films mentioned in this piece are available in the aforementioned "Satyajit Ray at 100" collection.