The Indian Express Celebrates Ray's 97th Birthday

    Source:indianexpress.com
Written by Shivangi Jalan |New Delhi |Published: May 2, 2018 2:42:57 pm

Interesting facts about the legendary filmmaker: Satyajit Ray on his 97th Birthday. 

Legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray would have celebrated his 97th birthday today. The filmmaker not only played a major role in placing India on the global cinematic map but his works continue to inspire a number of acclaimed filmmakers even today. No wonder, acclaimed filmmakers like Christopher Nolan call Ray’s first film Pather Panchali one of the best films in the history of filmmaking. On his 97th birth anniversary, here’s looking at some interesting facts about Satyajit Ray’s life.

Fact No. 1. Satyajit Ray belonged to a family of writers. In his early life, Ray was a huge fan of Oriental art. His frequent visits to Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta caves stimulated his love for Indian art. He had started his career as an illustrator working for different companies.

Fact No. 2. He was even assigned the job to design the cover for the children’s version of Pather Panchali, renamed as Aam Antir Bhepu. While illustrating the book, Ray got hugely influenced by the story and even made it the subject of his feature debut. Shots of his illustrations also featured in the film.

Fact No. 3. Only after getting introduced to French director Jean Renoir did Ray get especially interested in filmmaking. During his three-month stint in London, Satyajit Ray watched a staggering total of 99 films but among them, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) by Vittorio De Sica had the most profound impact on him. It is said that he walked out of the theatre determined to be a filmmaker.

Fact No. 4. Satyajit Ray’s first film Pather Panchali was shot for three years. Also, the film’s cast and crew were all rookies, making the shooting even more difficult.

Fact No. 5. Ray even struggled with the film’s funding for a long time as he was determined on not changing any part of the story or perspective to the whims of a producer. The budget was so shoe-string that Ray had to sell a lot of his personal belongings to complete the film. Only after taking a loan from the Bengal government, Ray was able to release the film in 1955. It went on to receive great critical and commercial success, not just in India but also globally.

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Fact No. 6. For Aparajito, the second film of the Apu trilogy, much of the story is drawn from Satyajit Ray’s own experiences. For instance, Apu going to Calcutta and finding lodging with a printer echoes the young Satyajit Ray living above his grandfather’s printing press. 

Fact No. 7. Ray was also able to launch two industry stalwarts with his final Apu film, Apur Sansar. While Soumitra Chatterjee who played the grown-up Apu collaborated with Ray in almost every film he directed, Apu’s bride Aparna was played by the 14-year-old Sharmila Tagore.

Fact No. 8. After the famous Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray experimented with genres. He also went on to make films on the British Raj period, various documentaries including one on Rabindranath Tagore and even comedies like Mahapurush. His major films in this period include Charulata, Devi and Sandesh.

Fact No. 9. This might come as a shock to many but Ray had accused Steven Spielberg of borrowing the basic idea from his unrealised sci-fi film The Alien for his E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. He went on record and said, “At least two of the Spielberg-Lucas films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET, would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies. Some days back Arthur Clark telephoned me from London, saying that I should file a copyright case and should not take it lying down.”

Fact No. 10. Satyajit Ray even delved into the genres of fantasy, science fiction, detective dramas and historical dramas in his later years. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an Honorary Academy Award in 1992. On April 23 in the same year, Ray breathed his last but his brilliant legacy sure lives on.

Happy Birthday Satyajit Ray

Growing up in the Calcutta of the 1980’s and early ’90s meant living with power shortages and political shutdowns. Nothing else happened. But we Bengalis drew solace from the fact that we had Jyoti Basu, Mother Teresa and Satyajit Ray (not necessarily in that order).

For a generation that had only seen communist rule in the state, West Bengal Communist Party leader Basu, the longest-lived of the three until his death in January at the age of 95, was the patriarch whom we saw often on our grainy black-and-white television sets string along the corridors of Writers’ Building, the state secretariat. Mother Teresa was the woman who could get foreign celebrities to make a pit stop in the “black hole” just to meet her.

And then there was Ray, who belonged to one of the most illustrious Bengali families, towered at 6 feet 5 inches and had a deep baritone, making him an intimidating presence to those lucky enough to meet him. But to us teenagers he brought real joy.

Ray’s work spanned a century of Bengali life – from the late 19th century at the peak of the Bengal cultural renaissance when Charulata falls for her brother-in-law Amal, to the partition of Bengal in 1905 when the psuedo-revolutionary Sandip tries to seduce his friend’s wife Bimala in “Ghare Baire” (Home and the World), to the turbulent Calcutta of the 1970s where the protagonist Siddhartha tells an interview board in “Pratidwandi” (The Adversary) that the triumph of the human spirit in Vietnam was the most significant event of the last 10 years, more than the moon landing.

“To a large extent Satyajit Ray introduced naturalism to the cinema of India,” said Pranav Ashar, president of The Taj Enlighten Film Society.

We watched transfixed as Ray wove his magic wand over each frame – whether it was wonderstruck Apu and Durga running through fields to catch a glimpse of a train in “Pather Panchali,” Ray’s first film, known in English as “Song of the little Road,” or the angst of the decadent landowner Biswambhar Roy in Jalsaghar (The Music Room). Even his children’s films were scathing commentaries on class conflict.

“The main attraction to me of Ray’s work is his abiding humanism,” said Arup K. De, 53, of the Kolkata-based Satyajit Ray Society, which works to preserve the director’s films. “His works transcend the barriers of time and culture, even though he was a deeply-rooted Bengali.”

Ray retained a spirit of quintessential “Bengaliness,” even amidst his refined western sensibilities. Of the other two great film-makers who were his contemporaries – Ritwik Ghatak was always something of a maverick while Mrinal Sen came across as too political. Ray showed us our middle-class pathos and angst.

The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa once said of Ray, “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”

One quibble. People outside Bengal often overlook Ray as a writer. Even if he hadn’t made a single film in his lifetime, Ray would remain immortal to this Bengali for literary works like the detective series Feluda.

By Subhadip Sircar.

Source: India realtime