In 1946, a film by Chetan Anand, with music by Ravi Shankar, won a prize at Cannes. Yet, in1948, Satyajit Ray wrote an article complaining that Indian films were shit. No doubt, he was taking a dig at his uncle, Nitin Bose, who introduced playback singing to Indian Cinema and was living large in Bombay. Indeed, it was there that Ray married his cousin who was a rising singer and actress working for her Uncle.
It not widely known that Indian films often had better cinematography and production values than British films even in the Twenties and the Thirties. Americans, like Ellis Dungan in Madras, and Germans, like Josef Wirsching, helped develop a sui generis romantic style of cinematography which gave Indian films a unique selling point- the playback song- provided Indian music appealed which it did in many Asian countries- or even Greece.
Obviously, the War and subsequent foreign currency crunch posed difficulties for Indian Cinema but it was in robust enough health. Ray, however, complains that Indian Cinema was 'escapist'. Yet there were plenty of Leftist films at that time.
Ray held that- 'The raw material of cinema is life itself'. Ray was obviously wrong. The raw material of cinema is theatre and opera. As film technology developed. directors could leave the studio and enter an ekphrastic and epic mode. In India, the 'talkies' gave Cinema a 'killer app'- viz song and dance sequences which drew on an ancient musical tradition. Great screenwriters like Karunanidhi could reach a mass audience with powerful dialogue of a political type. This meant that the film industry could go beyond depicting society. It could transform it. By the end of the Sixties, in Tamil Nadu, 'reel society' took over the administration of real society. MGR may have made plenty of escapist movies but he had a message which allowed Society itself to begin to escape from abject hopelessness.
Ray said- “It is incredible that a country that has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film-maker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.”
This at any rate, is the average Indians view of Ray. It isn't the Guardian's view which, if India is concerned, is bound to be not just patronizing but puerile and admonitory in a self-satirizing fashion. Consider the following.
Martin Scorsese described the work of Satyajit Ray as “treasures of cinema” that should be watched by “everyone with an interest in film”.
But Scorsese never made anything similar to Ray (the script-writer for Taxi Driver does not mention Ray as an influence) whereas his films have influenced countless Indian movies. Apparently, his 'interest' in Ray's films did not extend to imitation in any particular. Scorsese's films are full of drama and emotion. Ray's films are tedious. They may be 'treasures' but nobody covets them. Like the British Crown jewels, only foreigners queue up to view them. The Brits may not want them stolen, but they do acknowledge that they are as boring as shit.
The Japanese master Akira Kurosawa
whose Samurai movies influenced countless American movies. Movies should feature sex and death and have some moments of comic relief. Ray wouldn't touch anything which couldn't bore the pants off you from 500 feet.
went further: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”
Which is cool if we can watch gangsters shoot each other or Samurai slice open each others bellies. The whole point of going into a cinema hall is to get away from the sun and the moon and the wind and the rain.
Given how rarely the Bengali director’s work is now available to view,
because it is as boring as shit
many film lovers will not have seen some of the foundational wonders of the art form.
Unless the Guardian tricked them into doing so.
So the British Film Institute is to be congratulated for its retrospective of Ray.
Why? They've been at it for decades. The thing is the reflex action of a brain dead bureaucracy.
Running to the end of August and screening in cinemas across the UK, it takes in everything he made for the big screen.
So, not his hilarious TV gameshow ' Name that Fart!' which kept us entertained through the dark days of the Emergency. Shame.
If Ray is known for anything in Britain and the US, it is his 1955 classic Pather Panchali (Song of the Open Road), which tells the story of a family in a little village in the Indian state of Bengal, living a life of complete penury.
They were poor, but they were happy playing name that fart with an elderly lady whose lack of teeth made her impersonations of various Viceroys utterly hilarious.
It was a work of amateurs: Ray’s debut as director, first-time actors and an inexperienced crew.
Ray had spent ten years visualizing Bibhuti's trilogy. He was an artist. There was genuine merit to the cinematography. As Nitin Bose said, the guy should have stuck to art-direction. Ray was bad at dialogue and plot and not being as boring as shit. Also, the whole point of Indian cinema was that the songs push forward the plot. Ray offered operatic sets without any actual opera. Jalsaghar is shit because the songs are unrelated to the plot- which is paper thin. On the other hand, a film he directed for a friend, Abhijan (1962), did quite well. This is the movie Scorcese says influenced his 'Taxi Driver' though they are nothing alike. It even had a fight scene- shitty though it was. It wasn't that Bengalis refused to pay for watchable movies, it was just that Ray wasn't any good at making them and, anyway, his job as a buddhijivi was to be as boring as shit.
Shooting was constantly interrupted by the lack of money and dragged on for years. The music was composed by Ravi Shankar, who was not then the sitar legend he was about to become.
At the age of 10, Ravi Shankar had joined, his older brother, Uday's internationally acclaimed dance troupe in which Guru Dutt and Zohra Segal got their start. Marrying music to the action being depicted was second nature to him. He founded the Indian National Orchestra for AIR in 1952. He was already a sought after music director for the Bombay cinema. Though a purist in some respects, Ravi Shankar wanted people to enjoy music. Ray too may have wanted to make watchable movies. But Calcutta considered such things vulgar. Not to be as boring shit was bad form. Tagore would not have approved.
Somehow, the near-innocence of everyone involved helped give the final work its sense of conveying a very pure, intimate story. The Observer’s film critic Philip French later praised it as “one of the greatest pictures ever made”.
I thought so too, till I was forced to watch that shite. The India Soc at my Collidge put on a Ray retrospective and muggins got stuck with fetching and returning the cinema reels from the Indian High Commission. Some whiteys did turn up. Indians stayed away. Thus everybody else raved about Ray while explaining to me why they couldn't attend any of the screenings due to dog ate my homework and anyway my grandmother just died. Not the one who died last week or the one who died the week before. This is was a different grandmother.
But the singular mistake made by some critics was to see it as a simple story, simply told. It was instead a complex work made by a scholar of film.
No. It was simple because Bibhuti's story was simple. That was why it was affecting. As Harindranth, Sarojini Naidu's younger brother and Ray's close associate , said 'it is simple to be happy. It is difficult to be simple'. Simple-mindedness, however, palls if exploited for commercial gain more particularly if it pretends to be above that sort of thing. This was the buddhijivi dilemma.
Reality is complex. Bengal had its 'tantra' but that magic had been lost or was much diminished. Bibhuti's occultist 'Taradas Tantrik'- kept alive by his son- gives us a glimpse of the complexity undergirding the poorer class of Bengali's cognitive coping with the crumbling of Pax Britannica and the cascading catastrophes of self-rule.
Ray had met Jean Renoir and studied Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.
There was some dramatic tension to their work.
He was from a family of writers and social reformers who had figured in the 19th-century Bengal renaissance,
There were many such families. The question was whether they collectively decided to underperform so as to end up feeling very virtuous about being as boring as shit. Bibhuti once worked for the Cow Protection (Gau rakhsa) Society back in the 1920's. His grandson plans to carry forward the Apu trilogy thus- ' Modern Apu would try to understand issues that plague society, and the world: jobless techies landless tribals, radicals pushing devious agendas across the country, border tensions and growing divide between the rich and poor, even tales of gau-rakshahs and the misery of the Rohingyas.
So, Hindu Gau rakshaks are evil but Rohingya Muslims (not the Hindus they initially killed) are good. This is moral inversion with a vengeance. Why settle just for being boring when you can carp at your own people in a boring and predictably perverse manner?
The anonymous Guardian writer speaks of the 19th century Bengali Renaissance in the following terms-
that answer and challenge by Bengalis to the British colonialists and their culture.
What on earth does this mean? Ray's people were compradors who came up thanks to the Brits who, as Raja Ram Mohan Roy said, kept Hindus safe from Muslims in Bengal. Rabindranath tried to drum this message home again and again but the buddhijivis of Bengal went on clamouring to have their own throats slit. True, back when Calcutta was described as 'the second city of the Empire', the Brits arranged for Hindus to have a sort of franchise on Spirituality. Ireland would do Literature. Scotland would do Enterprise. The Welsh, being horny buggers, would do adultery and Socialism by Stealth. The Bengalis would do vacuous mystical shite. The real challenge the Hindus of Bengal faced was the Muslim majority. There was Partition. But some districts of West Bengal are now Muslim majority. Thus Bibhuti's grandson is right to weep for Rohingyas and recoil from Gau Rakshaks. But he may have to move to Bihar to do so.
Just as Bengalis’ thinking was often too myriad-minded for their imperial rulers,
Shakespeare was myriad-minded. Where is the Bengali Shakespeare? Tagore's plays just got shittier and shittier. Bengali Cinema, though continuing to supply plots and first rate directors and cinematographer and musicians and so forth to Mumbai, declined decade after decade.
so Ray’s work is almost more diverse than can be easily reckoned with by critics.
Boring shite which is diverse is still boring shite.
He made children’s films
which this child considered shite. Kids like dishum dishum fighting or broad comedy or scary ghosts or adventure stories with lots of wild animals and wicked villains. Sonar Kella looked promising. Mum said it was an exciting detective film but she decamped quickly enough. Like most lovers of Ray's films she preferred her love to remain pure and untainted by any empirical exposure to her idol's oeuvre. What followed was boring, stupid, shite. There was no treasure and no ghost. The kid- far from being a hero or having occult powers- was simply stupid.
Mums started forcing their kids to watch 'Goopy & Bagha' after they realized it was as boring as shit. Ray himself complained- 'One, allegedly discerning, critic remarked apropos of my previous film, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, that it gave a clear indication of the director’s striving to pander to the box office. And this about a film that broke completely fresh ground, was based on a comparatively unknown story by an author who was certainly not Sarat Chandra Chatterjee in popularity, used no stars, cast a completely unknown artiste and another comparatively unknown in two leading roles, used songs entirely legitimately perhaps for the first time, inserted a near-abstract dance, seven minutes long to the music of abstract and unfamiliar south Indian percussion and, finally, provided no romance, no sentimentality and only two females who appear for barely five minutes in the very last scene of the film. How discerning can you get?’
Normal producers thank a critic who says what they have made is box office gold. A proper Bengali buddhijivi gets very angry. He explains that he worked very very hard to make sure his film was un-fucking-watchable. Mums should send their kids to see it as a punishment. True, this means the producer makes a little profit but it's in a good cause- boring kiddies to death.
and adaptations of Ibsen;
One adaptation. But it was utterly stupid. Unlike nineteenth century Norway, Indian municipalities don't have much power. If a Doctor finds that there is a source of infection in the water supply he is duty-bound to inform higher authorities. The District Collector too has to take cognizance and must inform the Provincial Capital and then implements the relevant provision of the Infectious Diseases Act. There is no question of a Doctor having to battle local superstition. He has to follow regulations as does everybody else concerned. True, there can be a local 'dharna' or other protest against enforcement- but that involves fighting the police. Nobody can blame any government servant because the poor fellow was just trying to avoid an official reprimand or a posting to some shithole. It is enough to say 'I have a daughter whom I have to get married' for any mob which comes baying for your blood to cool down and leave you alone.
he wrote detective stories and was an accomplished artist.
The man had great talent. So did all the other Bengalis. But they conspired to be as boring and stupid as possible because....urm.... if they weren't boring and stupid then they'd get rich. Wealth is vulgar. Any fucking Marwari can get rich.
He was alive to the struggle of women in post-independence India
There is an old Tamils saying- behind every great man, there is a publicity-hungry woman trying to push him off the stage to claim all the glory for herself. Well, it is a middle aged Tamil saying this- unless you consider 59 a very advanced age.
and also intervened in debates on capitalism.
It's bad. We should have crapitalism constituted by boring crap.
His City trilogy shows the great metropolis of Kolkata, the capital of Bengal, in advanced decay,
It had turned into a shithole. That's true enough.
unable to provide jobs for its intelligent, impatient young people.
who wanted the wage but refused to work. How can employers demand labor from us? We have buses to burn and tea to drink.
Although Ray was always a poet of the intimate, these films also allude to the war in Vietnam,
which the Vietnamese won by not doing stupid boring shit.
the fight for independence in Bangladesh
which the Indian army won by not doing stupid boring shit
and the moral depths to which capitalism can push those desperate enough.
Spoiler alert- they start sucking each other off in the belief that they are prostitutes. Then they find out that they aren't prostitutes at all. The moral of this story is that, under Capitalism, prossies demand payment up-front before sucking you off. Failure to understand this can lead to all sorts of tragic complications.
In Jana Aranya (the Middleman), Somnath, a talented history graduate,
'talented history graduate' is like saying ' sexy chemistry teacher'. It may be true but it is unlikely.
gives up his dreams of scholarship
studying what? The history of boringness in Bengal?
for low-grade commerce. The film ends with him procuring a sex worker for a client. The woman turns out to be someone he knows.
because she was an even more talented history graduate and is engaged in higher value adding commerce.
This was the second film Ray made on the basis of novels by Shankar- a sort of dingy Arthur Hailey.
When Ray died in 1992, Kolkata came to a standstill.
But nobody noticed. That's the sort of City it was back then.
This 6ft 3in man was rightly celebrated as one of the city’s most towering artists.
By peeps wot refused to watch his films- sure.
But he was more than a Bengali, or even an Indian, film-maker; he was one of the greatest figures in postwar world cinema.
The greatest figures in Tamil Cinema became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The greatest Telugu actor became Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. Political Cinema can actually take over politics and generate better outcomes.
The Spectator has a slightly better article by one Tanjil Rashid on the Ray retrospective.
It is titled 'the man who changed Indian cinema' even though Ray didn't change shit coz cinema is a commercial activity and the market for boring shit is very limited. On the other hand, to be fair, Ray did make a detective movie which was a box office success in Bengal. It was called 'Chiryakhana' and is considered his worst film because though tedious shite, at least some people got murdered which kept the audience's interest.
At 6ft 4½in tall, Satyajit Ray was head and shoulders above his countrymen. His height was unheard of among Bengalis, ‘a low-lying people in a low-lying land’, as the colonial saying went.
It was General A.K Niyazi who said that. He was not a tall man by any means. But he surrendered to a Jewish General cheerfully enough.
With his stature, jawline and baritone voice, he might have been a Bollywood hero.
Nope. Too tall and too dark.
Instead, he chose to tower over the world of art-house cinema,
in which everybody is always towering. Peeps will pay for mediocre thrills & spills. Who will sit through boring shite if aint by a genius?
a directorial giant among the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini,
who were imitated. Ray wasn't imitated. Indeed, he wasn't watched.
alongside whom he is credited with inducting cinema into the temple of high culture.
Evelyn Waugh depicted a snobbish film buff in his earliest foray into fiction. That was back in the early Twenties. Shantaram could be said to have inducted Indian cinema into 'high culture'. But it was already in the temple. Even Gandhi watched Vijay Bhatt's Ram Rajya. It was the first Indian film released in America. Aan was the first commercially released film to do well in Western markets. That was in 1952.
His standing was secured with his first film, Pather Panchali, which premièred at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955. India then only churned out musicals which, as Ray later put it, ‘present a synthetic, non-existent society’.
Coz James Bond really exists- right? The fact is India had musical theatre from which Cinema evolved organically. It also had avant garde shite of a deeply boring type. But nobody watched that tripe. Still, collaboration with the Germans had helped India Cinema in the late twenties and early Thirties. Devika Rani, a niece of Tagore, and her husband, a Shantiniketan alumni cashing in on the Tagore craze, trained in Germany. Their film 'Karma' did quite well in England but despite a 4 minute long kiss, it bombed in India. That was in 1933.
Bengal was making popular movies back then. They pleased a genuinely existing society. Ray's films didn't.
He spearheaded a new school of Indian cinema that was self-consciously artistic and realist.
And which looked for a little money from the foreign release to break even coz Indians wouldn't watch that shite.
The acclaim was rapturous. Pather Panchali and its sequels in the Apu trilogy between them won top prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice, and now rank among the greatest movies of all time.
Because they were made in a puerile version of the West's own dated neo-expressionist idiom. This suited India's begging bowl diplomacy. Don't ask for much plot or dialogue from an Indian movie. Just concentrate on the fact that these peeps be as poor as fuck. Refill their begging bowl by all means. They clearly can't do anything for themselves.
Restored versions will soon be screened at a BFI retrospective. But where did they come from?
The Gandhian soul of the Nehruvian begging bowl of a country that was a shithole.
To say ‘India’ does no justice to their origins.
Say boring Bengali buddhijivi cunts and you have done more than justice.
Ray was born in Calcutta – the second city of the British Empire –
It stopped being that in 1911- i.e. before he was born. Delhi became the Capital.
in 1921, and was steeped in the Bengal Renaissance spawned there by the arrival of western ideas.
Spawned there by the defeat of Muslim power. Instead of trying to write Persian shite, Ray's people switched to writing English shite till the Brits politely but firmly suggested that they should stick to Bengali.
Its leading light – and Ray’s foremost influence – was Rabindranath Tagore, the poet who in 1912 became the first non-white Nobel laureate.
On the basis of a slim volume of verse. The more the West read Tagore, the more they realized that the biggest bores are not the tidal bores of the Brahmaputra but those associated with Shantiniketan.
But Ray was the true capstone of the renaissance.
His films got progressively less watchable decade by decade. This was not renaissance. It was retardation.
Where Tagore was a traditional oriental sage, Ray made his art out of – in his words – ‘one of the greatest inventions of the West with the most far-reaching artistic potential’.
It had more than artistic potential. It could change the world. That's what happened with Tamil Cinema.
The Bengal Renaissance was powered by renaissance men.
of a deeply boring sort- sure.
Tagore was a composer, painter and playwright, too.
But everything he produced was equally boring and stupid.
But the talents mastered by the Ray family were more distinctively modern.
If Guttenberg is modern- okay.
They had once been Sanskrit scholars, but Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury began the family tradition of experimenting with art and technology. As well as being a writer, Upendrakishore ran a printing press specialising in illustrations, inventing various techniques and writing about them in scientific journals. Ray’s father, Sukumar Ray, studied printmaking and photography in London, before becoming a celebrated poet.
In Bengal- sure. But Bengal was declining in importance.
So Satyajit Ray was a third-generation renaissance man,
he had artistic gifts and could write well enough. But he was deeply boring.
his talent synthesised out of his forebears.
who were less boring.
Growing up at the family printing press, smelling of turpentine and surrounded by ink and woodblocks, would leave a strong impression on him. After a degree in physics and economics from Calcutta University, Ray studied modern painting, Japanese calligraphy and western classical music at Santiniketan, Tagore’s utopian university. He got a job in advertising as an art director, as well as designing book jackets and prize-winning typefaces on the side.
Ray story-boarded his early films well. He made a virtue of his economic constraints. But Cinema is a commercial enterprise. You need big budgets to do interesting stuff. This does mean you can't afford to bore your customers to tears.
All the while, movies were flickering in his mind. During the war, GIs would take Ray out to watch Hollywood films at their base. A first experience of filmmaking came soon after, when Renoir was in Bengal to shoot The River.
Which is terribly boring. Other Rumer Godden books were turned into watchable movies- Black Narcissus, which came out in 1947 did well at the box office. 'The River' was praised and won prizes but didn't do very well commercially. Scorcese raves about it but then he also raves about Ray.
Having befriended the master of ‘poetic realism’ (a term later applied to his own films), Ray scouted for locations. Then, on a business trip to London, he saw Bicycle Thieves and, as he said years later, it ‘gored’ him: ‘I came out of the theatre my mind firmly made up. I would become a filmmaker.’
Bicycle Thieves has real drama. Italy had been devastated by the War. The film captures the courage of a people who would soon lift themselves up into security and affluence. Ray's shite had no drama. Bengal had been in continual decline since 1911. Under Nehru, Rossellini was brought in to make 'Matr Bhumi' (motherland) to showcase India's diversity. Sadly he eloped with Bimal Roy's niece.
Ray had been illustrating an edition of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali coming-of-age novel about Apu, the free-spirited son of a poor village playwright who wants to get an education and, eventually, become a novelist.
Bibhuti Babu could write well. I believe his son carried on his series of horror series 'Taranath Tantrik' which is now a web series. Hopefully his grandson can continue the Apu trilogy in a vein yet more boring.
More broadly, it’s about transitioning from a traditional rural society to a modern, industrial one.
Sadly the Commies ran amok. In February 1968, a mob started raping and killing girls who had come for 'Ashok Kumar Night'- a popular concert. Soon, industrialists were being stripped and beaten and Judges were being killed. Industrialists fled and so no 'modern industrial' society was created. Ray responded by becoming a 'useful idiot' of the Left. Say what you like, the buddhijivi has a lively survival instinct.
It was perfect for Ray to adapt, because for him it also reflected the artistic transition that had been generations in the making for the Rays, from village Pandits with their Sanskrit scrolls to the pinnacle of modern culture, the motion picture.
TV was better than the motion picture. You Tube is even better. If you want to make boring shite, do it on your i-phone.
The scene that viewers never forget from the film Ray made of Pather Panchali is that of Apu running through a field of sugarcane to catch his first glimpse of a steam train in the distance.
The scene I can never forget is of Mummy abandoning me at the Children's Film Festival to watch Sonar Kella and running away very fast. Indeed, many Indians rush off to get glimpse of railway-train or bus or bullock cart rather than watch boring Bengali shite.
It’s the modern world cutting through village India, the India that would one day be swept away beneath a cloud of engine smoke.
Unless everybody went on strike because America is very evil and should kindly send PL480 food shipments. Also, please give prizes to boring Bengalis otherwise they will sulk and sulk.
With all its forceful motion, that iconic scene – that moment in history – could only be captured with the newly fashioned movie camera.
Very true. Ray's daddy and grandaddy used to run after train while doing oil painting to capture the scene. This was fault of British Raj. But true culprit is Capitalism. Boo to Capitalism!
Otherwise there is really no better description of the ineffable experience of watching – and listening to – the Apu films than Ray’s account of learning on the job while filming it:
“You had to find out yourself how to catch the hushed stillness of dusk in a Bengali village, when the wind drops and turns the ponds into sheets of glass dappled by the leaves of the trees, and the smoke from ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape, and the plaintive blows on conch shells from homes far and wide are joined by the chorus of crickets, which rises as the light falls, until all one sees are the stars in the sky, and the stars blink and swirl in the thickets.'
This is poetic. The question is why the fuck you'd want to catch that 'hushed stillness' save if you are advertising a brand of ghutka.
The film’s lyrical envisioning of nature comes directly from Tagore, who once wrote a poem for the young Ray, imploring him, despite all his urbane experience, never to ‘forget the dew drop glistening on the ear of the corn’.
and then bore the shite out of everybody with your endless reminiscences of various cognitively challenged dew-drops you have known.
Over the course of his 37 films, Ray acquired the most complete mastery of filmmaking of any director.
boring filmmaking- sure.
Just as his father and grandfather not only wrote their books, but also did the illustrations, typesetting, printing and binding, Ray crafted his films’ every element.
Did he also watch that shite? If so, 'you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.'
He didn’t just direct, he’d operate the camera himself.
Indeed, he had to be physically stopped from playing the heroine in his films.
He wrote the screenplays, often based on his own short stories and novels. He did the editing, designed all sets, costumes and posters, scouted locations, sourced props, composed scores, wrote songs, cast actors, even did the make-up.
He was a thrifty fellow. Apparently his books sold so he had a good enough material standard of living.
This was partly a budgetary necessity since, strictly speaking, Ray was an amateur filmmaker – non-professional, like the cast of Pather Panchali – because his films rarely more than broke even. Typically, he made more money composing scores for other films than from directing his own. He earned his living by writing mystery novels, translating Lewis Carroll, and from publishing the children’s magazine that Upendrakishore had founded.
He was a gentleman- that's true enough. There's nothing wrong in being a talented hobbyist who considers commercial success to be vulgar.
The Indian government neglected him.
Not really. The problem with giving boring shitheads prizes is that you might have to sit through their boring shite. Still 'Ray won thirty-five National Film Awards during his four-decade career. Six of his films—Pather Panchali, Apur Sansar (1959), Charulata (1964), Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968), Seemabaddha (1971), and Agantuk (1991)—won the Best Feature Film.' He was given the Padma Bhushan, the highest civilian award, before he died. Sadly, the right wing BJP Government of Atal Behari Vajpayee refused to grant any award to Ray's 'Biraktikara byakti' despite admitting to never having watched it! Since anyone who watches Ray's masterwork dies immediately of boredom, it follows that so long as death occurs, Ray may still be making movies!
It’s true that when Pather Panchali, a self-funded film, ran aground, the state stepped in with completion funding. It came out of the infrastructure budget because it was assumed the film – which means ‘Song of the Little Road’ – had something to do with road-building works.
That money should have gone to mathematical economists working on turnpike theorems. The point about Tagore, Ray etc. is that they were less shite than Amartya Sen or Sukhamoy-how-shite-am-I Charkrofuckwit.
Generally, though, the ruling class ignored him,
while the masses thronged to his movies- right?
embarrassed by what they felt was Ray’s unpatriotic depiction of India as backward and impoverished.
India specialized in begging bowl diplomacy. That's one reason the Kremlin didn't want India to go Communist.
Ray, a consummate aesthete, portrayed the world as he saw it,
he portrayed Bengal, not the world. It wasn't actually a boring place. Indeed, it was more interesting than average.
not as the ideologues of the day wished it to be.
They wanted it to be a shithole.
Greater recognition came from abroad. The President of France flew to Calcutta to present Ray with the Légion d’honneur.
Dominic Lapierre's 'City of Joy' had been a big hit in 1985. The French did produce a short film of Ray's as well as the interminable and stupid 'Shakha proshakha'. But then they think Jerry Lewis is a comic genius.
Oxford University gave him an honorary doctorate, the first for a filmmaker since Chaplin. Finally, Audrey Hepburn put on a sari (and, bizarrely, an Indian accent) to give Ray the Academy Award he deserved.
He insisted she pronounce his name right. Once you go Bong it is difficult to go back.
Watching Ray give his acceptance speech for that Oscar – for lifetime achievement – from his hospital bed has a dramatic irony as moving as any scene from his movies, because we know that three weeks later, he would be dead.
So would we, if we watched his movies.
That so many, east and west, admire Ray’s films should end the age-old debate about whether non-Bengalis can appreciate them.
Even Bengalis don't watch them. Some pretend to have watched them. But tell a Bengali how moved you were by 'Biraktikara byakti' and he will immediately start picking holes in it and saying things like 'Ray's last good film was Jana Aranya. Read Bakhtin on chronotopes. He has explained everything'.
No art form has transcended more borders, and touched more hearts, than cinema.
All art aspires to the condition of revenge porn.
At a time when left and right alike stress cultural boundaries, this retrospective reminds one that a truly great film ‘leaves its regional moorings and rises to a plane of universal gestures and universal emotions’. They’re Ray’s words, and he lived them.
The were boring words. His life was interesting enough. But, given his talent, it could have spectacular. Indeed, he could have helped Bengal as Karunanidhi or MGR helped Tamil Nadu. I'm kidding. Ray was bhadralok. His lack of academic credentials meant that he couldn't be a talentless bore. He had to be a bore despite his talent. Still, he represents a moment of post-Independence relative optimism. Then Ashok Kumar Night happened. Bengal declined into a thuggocracy. Ray was part of the problem. Death was the only solution.
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