Satyajit Ray, Ray's Films, and Ray-Movie
It was the last that in many ways proved the most decisive. The 'magic horse of poetry'3 elaborated into a perennialist and humanist 'Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is'4 to virtually invent a Ray-movie surprisingly unvarying in o reviewer comment over the past three decades. 'Ray's genius is for the lyrical, for the contemplation of life as a blend of material and spiritual beauty.'5 Rarely located in the actual historical context of its making or its plot ('. .. timeless and international. Its story and characters are applicable on any place on earth'6). Ray-movie remained black-and-white, usually in middle-grey tones avoiding harsh extremes, documenting individual gesture with loving precision in themes set mainly in rural India or in tum-of-the-century Calcutta. The projection of oriental phantasy into this post-war 'third' world later extended to the film-maker, even to his English speaking accent (That presence became articulated in the most beautiful use of English I have ever heard. . . . The sensitive exactness of the words he used was . . . the most perfect revelation of why he could make a film like Father Panchali'f '... talked briefly and simply in a strong, pleasant, and above all musical voice of indefinable accenf8).
Ray himself has on a few rare occasions expressed his discomfort over this kind of typecasting, saying for instance to a Sunday Observer interviewer that it was no longer enough for him that ja film he makes be called a masterpiece: he wanted intelligent comment.
I am fully aware now, thanks to my western critics, of the western traits in my films. They have so often been brought to my notice that I can actually name them: irony, understatement, humour, open endings. ... It is not as if I find myself saying: Ah, now for a bit of British understatement. They are used intuitively to best serve the needs of the subject.. .9
Asked by Shyam Benegal (in the latter's documentary Satyajit Ray, 1984) why early twentieth-century Bengali literature was such a major source for his film stories, he went to some length to deny that he made only period movies, pointing to his contemporary Calcutta films, his original screenplays and his children's fantasies. And towards the end, with Ganashatru / An Enemy of the People (1989), Shakha Proshakha / Branches of a Tree (1990) and Agantuk / The Stranger (1991), he said with increasing frustration that he was no longer interested in the past, he wanted to set his films in current events and on phenomena like institutionalized corruption, and now felt the need to write his own stories rather than base them on available fiction.
Until the early seventies Ray was seen in India as an influential member of its first generation of post-Independence artists. This generation of film-makers, writers, theatre directors and painters worked with vastly different individual programmes, nevertheless defined collectively through a common, and often stated, desire to integrate their nationalist legacy into a globalizing aesthetic of modernism. Through the sixties, several essays by Ray updated the early acknowledgements to Renoir and De Sica to now include the editing of Kurosawa and Ford, Truffaut's tracking camera
Journal of Arts 6* Ideas