SATYAJITRAIAPARNA.P

SATYAJITRAY

Satyajit Ray [2 May 1921 – 23 April 1992) was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteur of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves during a visit to London.

SATYAJITRAY Ray directed thirty-seven films, including

feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, PatherPanchali (1955), won eleven international awards. Alongside Aparajito (1956) and ApurSansar (1959), the three films form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a number of awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1991.

AWARDS, HONOURS AND RECOGNITIONS

Numerous awards were bestowed on Ray throughout his lifetime, including 32 National Film Awards by the Government of India, in addition to awards at international film festivals. At the Berlin Film Festival, he was one of only three filmmakers to win the Silver Bear for Best Director more than once and holds the record for the most number of Golden Bear nominations, with seven. At the Venice Film Festival, where he had previously won a Golden Lion for Aparajito (1956), he was awarded the Golden Lion Honorary Award in 1982.That same year, he received an honorary "Hommage à Satyajit Ray" award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival Ray is the second film personality after Chaplin to have been awarded honorary doctorates by Oxford University. He was awarded the DadasahebPhalke Award in 1985 and the Legion of Honor by the President of France in 1987. The Government of India awarded him the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna shortly before his death. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ray an honorary Oscar in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement

Ray with his Academy award just days before his death.

LITERARY WORKS Ray created two very popular characters in

Bengali children's literature—Feluda, a sleuth, and Professor Shonku, a scientist. He was a prominent writer of science fiction in Bengali or any Indian language for that matter. He also wrote short stories which were published as volumes of 12 stories, always with names playing on the word twelve (for example Aker pitthe dui, or literally "Two on top of one"). Ray's interest in puzzles and puns is reflected in his stories,Feluda often has to solve a puzzle to get to the bottom of a case. The Feludastories are narrated by Topshe, his cousin, something of a Watson to Feluda'sHolmes. The science fictions of Shonku are presented as a diary discovered after the scientist himself had mysteriously disappeared. Ray's short stories give full reign to his interest in the macabre, in suspense and other aspects that he avoided in film, making for an interesting psychological study.Most of his writings have now been translated into English, and are finding a new group of readers.

Cover of a collection of Satyajit Ray's short stories

CRITICAL AND POPULAR RESPONSE

Ray's work has been described as reverberating with humanism and universality, and of deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity. Praise has often been heaped on his work by many, including Akira Kurosawa, who declared, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon."But his detractors find his films glacially slow, moving like a "majestic snail."Some find his humanism simple-minded, and his work anti-modern and claim that they lack new modes of expression or experimentation found in works of Ray's contemporaries like Jean-Luc GodardStanley Kauffman wrote, some critics believe that Ray "assumes [viewers] can be interested in a film that simply dwells in its characters, rather than one that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives." Ray himself commented that this slowness is something he can do nothing about. Kurosawa defended him by saying that Ray's films were not slow at all, "His work can be described as flowing composedly, like a big river".

RAY'S LITERARY CAREER1961-1992, WRITER OF NON-FICTION, STORIES AND NOVELS

In 1961, Ray revived Sandesh, a children's magazine founded by his grandfather, to which he continued to contribute illustrations, verses and stories throughout his life.

Ray wrote numerous short stories, articles, and novels in Bengali.

He made a significant contribution to children's literature in Bengali. Most of his fiction was written for teen age children. His detective stories and novels were particularly popular with them.

His stories are unpretentious and entertaining. The subjects included: adventure, detective stories, fantasy, science fiction and even horror.

 

PATHERPANCHALI

PATHERPANCHALI

Pather Panchali was to be shot in sequence as Ray had realized that he would be learning as they went along. He had to discover for himself, "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 Saluki and Shale, and the smoke from the ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape and the plaintive blows on conch shells from homes far and near are joined by the chorus of crickets which rises as the light falls, until