Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta, India, on May 2, 1921. The only child of an illustrious Bengali family, his grandfather was a writer, illustrator and publisher, a tradition followed by his father, a poet, who died when Satyajit was only two years old. for which the future filmmaker was raised by his mother.

With such ancestral background, he knew how to combine the English cultural tradition with the Bengali one, which would be noticed in his wonderful cinematographic work. Although he was trained in economics at the University of Calcutta, he later studied Fine Arts at Santiniketan, at the Visva-Bharati University of Rabindranath Tagore, whose influence was decisive; precisely to Tagore he dedicated a documentary in 1961 on the occasion of his centenary. After his training was completed, he began working in an advertising agency and added tasks as an illustrator, designer and typographer, following his family tradition.

A great lover of cinema, including that of Hollywood, he came to work as a critic, and soaked himself in film theory with magazines such as Sight and Sound; his self-taught training included watching movies, such as Sergei M. Eisenstein ‘s Ivan the Terrible , or getting hold of a copy of the script for René Clair ‘s The Ghost Goes West, the first time a film script fell into his hands. He appreciated it all, saying that if he could only take one film with him to a deserted island, he would choose one of the Marx Brothers. Throughout his life he would write numerous articles, later published in book form under the title “Our films, their films” in 1976; there he addresses both Indian cinema and the great films of the masters who left a deep mark on him.

The year of India’s independence, he promotes the country’s first film club. Precisely his work illustrating the novel “The road song”, by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, aroused in him concerns about the possibility of transferring it to the screen, an idea in which he obtained the encouragement of Jean Renoir . He previously worked with the French director as an assistant on that marvelous little gem entitled El río , helping him in the search for locations, and there were no shortage of previous unsuccessful attempts to place scripts and even participate in a film that was not a dish to his liking as an artistic director. . Before dedicating himself fully to films, Ray had married Bijoya Ray in 1948, who gave him a son, Sandip Ray, also a film director, although without the impact of his mother.

Despite the importance of the film industry in India, and the elegance with which he spoke about everything and everyone, the truth is that Ray did not connect with the type of popular films that were made in his country, and he complained about the limitations when dealing with more complex plots. He understood that celluloid made it possible to unify love stories, songs and choreographies, which in this way could be enjoyed by simple people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to access that mode of escape, so welcome in circumstances of misery. But Ray thought that cinema could perform a more relevant social function, and acquire the category of art. And that was what he proposed when he began his journey behind the camera with La canción del camino(1955), the first of the three films that make up the Apu trilogy, and the second of which, The Invincible(1958), gave him the Golden Lion in Venice. It was a disadvantage to shoot in Bengali -a minority language compared to Hindi-, and to tackle a beautiful naturalistic story, brimming with authenticity and unusual in mainstream cinema. But in the end, in the good results of the public, the fact that Bandyopadhyay’s novel was relatively well-known weighed more, and also the praise of his work in the West; the simple story of a family in the countryside, with its daily joys and difficulties, the natural elements, and unexpected death, connected well with the successful Italian neorealism, which Ray knew, although he did not take it to the extreme, it featured professional actors and city boys.

In Jalshagar (1958) he changed the gait shown with Apu’s avatars somewhat, partly to demonstrate his versatility to the producers. It was an adaptation of the play by Tarashankar Banerjeeabout the decline of a social class, and where the music room where part of the action takes place gave an excuse to give presence to such an important element in Indian cinema, and which Ray considered required a justification to give it presence, it should be inserted in the narrative naturally. The director recounted his difficulties in finding the dilapidated palace that was to serve as the film’s setting, the providential finding of the perfect place on the advice of an unknown person, Chudhurys’s palace, and the final information provided by Banerjee himself that this was exactly the The location in which he thought when he wrote his novel, its owner would have served as inspiration for the character of the rajah. The filming of the film also marked Ray for a fatal fatal accident involving an employee,

He also showed signs of being able to give his stories a magical realism tone with Parash Pathar (1958) and Devi (1960). In the latter he dealt with the issue of credulity and superstition in religious practices, something he also addressed in Mahapurush (1965) with a satirical tone by depicting the way in which a holy phony takes advantage of the sorrows of others. And in 1962 he wrote his first original screenplay and it premiered with color in Kanchenjungha .. But above this or that atmosphere, Ray’s gaze always dominates in his films, which is the open and unprejudiced gaze of a humanist, who subtly captures the psychology of perfectly credible flesh and blood characters. So you can take a look at the world of cinema in Nayak (1966), which follows a jaded Bollywood star on her train journey, where she is questioned by a journalist who is not dazzled by the halo of her fame, but Ultimately what matters are people and their concerns. Similarly, that in Kapurush(1965) the protagonist is a film scriptwriter, it doesn’t matter as much as the description of his cowardice and regret when he meets an old love, a woman now married and to whom he did not know how to reciprocate at the time as the circumstances demanded.

Ray paints the woman in the fantastic Mahanagar (1963) with great delicacy and intelligence, where the protagonist successfully joins the world of work, which embitters her husband, who has problems at work. Or female loneliness in Charulata (1964), based on a story by Tagore, in which a husband too busy trying to run a newspaper is inattentive to his boring wife, who is a literary talent and who could find love in other part.

Ray frequently adapted literary works, and would be heavily criticized for the liberties he took with the texts. He explained that if “I use someone else’s story, it obviously means that I find some aspects of the story attractive for certain reasons. These aspects are always evident in the film. Others that I judge unsatisfactory I discard or modify according to my needs. I don’t care if the purists rage that I stray from the original.” He also personally took care of the music for his films, perfectly linked with the images. And although he admired the audacity of the European avant-garde, he was aware that they were not within his reach. He always kept in mind that his cinema had to find a wide audience, and the experiments did not serve that purpose;

Try everything, dazzled by the man and the beauty of the world. It is possible to make a detective story with Chiriyakhana (1967) or paint two chess players disconnected from what is happening around them in Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977). Or turn to the subject of knowledge in Pratidwandi (1972), the beginning of the Calcutta trilogy, which is completed with Seemabaddha (1974), the story of a “climber”, and Jana Aranya (1976), which deals with corruption in the big city.

Hollywood would end up honoring Ray with an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 1992, the year of his death. However, his one attempt to do something in the movie mecca did not leave a good taste in his mouth. Indeed, he wrote a screenplay titled “The Alien,” based on his own 1962 science fiction short story “Bankubabur Bandhu”; Arthur C. Clarke ‘s enthusiasm led him to the Columbia table, and there was even talk of bringing Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando on board the project; After the script circulated around the studios and was not produced, Clarke and the filmmaker found many similarities in Steven Spielberg ‘s subsequent film E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial.(1982), although the Cincinnati director would claim not to know Ray’s script.

Fantastic adventures for children devised by their grandfather would give rise to another trilogy starring Goopy and Bagha, incredibly commercial in India: the first two installments were signed by Ray in 1968 and 1980, while his son Sandip would shoot the third in 1991. In 1983 he suffered a heart attack, and his health would not be the same again; Fortunately, he had the help of his son to continue making films. So in 1984 he returned to Tagore with one of the actresses with whom he worked the most, Soumitra Chatterjee , in The World of Bimala , where the condition of women was once again the main theme of the film. The filmography of Ray Agantuk closes(1991), shot a year before his death, and in which some scholars have wanted to see a kind of self-portrait, by painting an old man, a mysterious character who reappears in his family’s life after a long time.