A Filmmaker's Filmmaker

Charulata (The Lonely Wife)

Satyajit Ray is one of the great directors in the pantheon of world cinema, although the vast body of his work is rarely screened. If familiar with this Indian filmmaker's movies, Westerners are most likely to have seen one of the films in his award-winning Apu Trilogy from the Fifties. Others may remember his poignant acceptance speech when he received an honorary Academy Award in 1992, delivered from his hospital bed in Kolkata shortly before his death in 1992. While many may know his name, few know his work. The Austin Film Society's mini retrospective of Ray's films is a fabulous opportunity to remedy this shortcoming.

Ray's first film, Pather Panchali, made with amateur actors and an inexperienced crew, and shot over three years, won awards at Cannes in 1956 and established his reputation. This was followed by Aparajito, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and Apur Sansar. The three films, which comprise the Apu Trilogy, follow the life of a small boy in an impoverished village in Bengal as he moves to Kolkata, leaving his mother behind, and ekes a near-poverty existence in the big city. (Ray's My Years With Apu: A Memoir is a must-read for filmmaker wannabes.)

After the trilogy, Ray went on to make a film (or more) a year over the next 25 years. The films in the AFS retrospective are mostly from Ray's early period. Mahanagar (The Big City), which screened last week, is about a woman's journey to independence and self-discovery in a strait-jacketed, male-dominated world. Charulata (The Lonely Wife), the film of greatest acclaim in the series, tracks the awakening of emotions wrought by a new relationship with a kindred spirit. Kapurush (The Coward), Mahapurush (The Holy Man) and Nayak (The Hero) focus on human frailties – the results and regrets of inertia and inaction, the duplicity and gullibility inherent in our interactions, and the fears and diffidences just below the surface that we often hide from others if not ourselves. Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God) is a mystery about a stolen statue of Ganesh that involves a greedy, acquisitive businessman and a fraudulent holy man.

In addition to directing, Ray wrote the screenplays and the music for all these films, and personally managed the casting and editing. Ray's genius was his ability to project the inner minds of his characters. He does this with a poet's sensitivity to nuance in gesture and expression, the juxtaposition of images, and the use of music. It is this mastery of the different aspects of filmmaking that makes him the quintessential filmmaker's filmmaker. Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, James Ivory, François Truffaut, and Carlos Saura have all expressed their debts. Scorsese admits to regularly watching Ray's films to get inspired and recharged.

Ray's movies are not the typical blockbuster musical melodramas of Bollywood. Influenced by the neorealism of films such as de Sica's Bicycle Thieves, he depicts a world in which people find themselves trapped – sometimes by their own doing, sometimes by abject poverty, social conventions, or unrelenting tragedy. And yet, these films remain affirmations of the human spirit. More than the survival of hardships, Ray's films are about how life under difficult conditions can be made palatable through such things as the pleasure found in new relationships and connections, the excitement of a passing train, or the joy of monsoon rain.

Ultimately, Ray's achievement is that he has used film to capture – lyrically, unsparingly, majestically – the multidimensionality of being human. It is our instinctive recognition of the universality of this "truth" that makes his films not just memorable but timeless.  

All screenings are at 7:30pm on Thursdays at the Marchesa Hall & Theatre, except for Kapurush, which screens on Tuesday, Oct. 14.

The Eyes and Ears of Bengal: Six Classic Films by Satyajit Ray

Oct. 9: Charulata (The Lonely Wife)

Oct. 14: Kapurush (The Coward)

Oct. 23 Mahapurush (The Holy Man)

Oct. 30: Nayak (The Hero)

Nov. 6: Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God)