Indian cinema had been drawn drenched in colours long before Ray began loading Eastman colour rolls on his camera. His best films were shot in Black & White. They lacked the magical splendour of sunshine and rains or searing whistling of a train of Pather Panchali or the classical precision of Charulata. The tall man was crouched between the Arriflex camera as it rolled on a trolley was not the same director again. Victor Banerji who performed in Ghare Baire, when asked to compare Ray with David Lean merely said: You don’t compare autocracy with democracy! At the time of making Ghare- Baire, he had a paralytic heart attack in 1983. Elia Kazan described the film as ‘poetry on celluloid’. He had sketched how a possessed Durga would look like in the film Devi. His production staff were his disciplined troop. Ray was a picture of a dictator on the set, his words having the ring of an army commander. It’s a cultural crescendo that Ray could alone conjure. Based on a Tagore novel Nastanirh, Ray is elegance personified when dealing with gentle emotion a bored housewife with writerly ambitions, the young male cousin supremely conscious of his own charm and Kishore Kumar crooning ‘Ami chini go chini Tomake Ago Bedeshini’. Charulata (1964) is considered as his finest film and was also his personal favourite.
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The Apu films touched the creative minds as an overpowering coming of age story, in perfect tune with the genre of adolescent fiction that was to later explore in TV cartoon stories, like the Simpsons. However, the Apu trilogy remains the corner stone of his oeuvre. In a career spanning 37 years with 29 feature films, Ray has left behind a body of work, an array of interests which can be the envy of any artistic person. More than his accent, which had a BBC quality about it, it was his sharp understatement that sounded alien in the typical Indian social evenings. There was an Englishness in his personality. He was a man of great social charm in every gathering from the enlightened chic to the local wana be. Children used to skip their home work to read his Feluda stories as they appeared in Puja annual numbers.
He remained a great influence, just as De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (1948) which represented Italian neorealism at its best. Renoir while shooting his film, River (1951) solicited his help for finding locations. Much before the release of the Apu trilogy, his reputation as a book designer stood on a wooden plank. For nobody else in the Indian film industry is as multi-faceted as Ray. Even if they were, it would not have made much of a difference. Talents like Adoor Gopalkrishnan, a later day Ray of the South, had not risen yet. Ray’s contemporaries like Ritwick Ghatak and Mrinal Sen were the local flavour at best. Penelope Houston wrote: Ray’s Bengal would remain Cinema’s India! His passion for western classical music was triggered by his German Jewish Professor. Binod Bihari Ray taught him how the small details in Indian art signify bigger meaning, a quality that his films would later demonstrate. Satyajit Ray joined Santiniketan in 1940 and discovered oriental art, Japanese woodcuts, & Chinese landscapes. Indira joined Shantiniketan in 1934 and sang hymns, meditated and took to Manipuri dance, earning encomiums from the Gurudev. Santiniketan & Tagore connected them both. PM Indira Gandhi, four years older but an intrepid admirer and friend, scrupulously invited visiting foreign dignitaries to private screening of the national icon in a way that no Indian art personality ever had been with the solitary exception perhaps of Tagore. In the 60s & 70s, his reputation became stratospheric. Odisha govt suspends Tahasildar for alleged complicity in sand smugglingĭuring the release of the Apu trilogy (1955-59), his cinematic apotheosis was complete.