Movie & Music Director: Satyajit Ray - Page 5

Ray, Satyajit (1921-1992) Oscar winning film director, photographer, painter, writer of juvenile literature and musicologist. Satyajit Ray was born in Kolkata on 2 May 1921. His parents hailed from the village Masua of kishoreganj district of Bangladesh. His father, Sukumar Ray, a noted writer, editor and photographer, graduated from Manchester University School of Technology and was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. His mother, Suprova Ray, was a singer and earned repute for her skills in handicrafts. His grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, was a well-known litterateur, painter, photographer, block designer and editor of the juvenile journal Sandesh (1913). Satyajit's wife Bijoya Ray was a musicologist and a film actress. His son Swandip Ray is a noted photographer, graphic artist and a film director. Satyajit Ray lost his father when he was only two and a half years old and his mother brought him up at the house of his maternal uncle. While still at school he developed interest in photography, music and painting. Satyajit passed his matriculation from Calcutta's Baliganj Government High School and graduated from presidency college with honours in economics. In 1940, he got admitted at Viswabharati in santiniketan. Satyajit Ray began his working life in 1943 as a commercial artist of an advertising company. He added a new dimension to the vocabulary and design of advertisements. As an artist, he designed book covers and drew pictures for newspapers. In 1947, he and some of his friends formed 'Calcutta Film Society'. Next year he got an opportunity to be acquainted with the work and personality of the famous French filmmaker, Jean Renoir, who came to Calcutta to make a part of his film, The River. Later, Satyajit established 'Kanak Pictures' for making films. He wrote the scenario of an advertising film A Perfect Day. In 1950, Satyajit went to London in connection with his job. Instantly, he became a member of London Film Club and during his stay there for five months, he saw about a hundred films. He also got acquainted with persons like the British filmmaker, Lindsay Anderson and film specialists Peneloppi Huston and Gavin Lambert. He was highly impressed by The Bicycle Thief directed by Italian Vittorio D Sica and decided to make a film on bibhutibhushan bandyopadhyay's novel pather panchali. On his return home in October 1950, he wrote the scenario of the projected film. He began its shooting in 1952 with a cast of non-professionals. But even after incurring debts and selling out personal assets, including ornaments and books, he could not complete the work. He could collect only Rs 17,500 by mortgaging his insurance policy and borrowing from friends and relatives. He kept his expenditures low by hiring an old camera, making economy on food and transport, and carrying out shooting at a place in Calcutta suburbs. Satyajit could finally find a producer, who, however, provided Rs 40,000 only. Only one third of the work for the film could be accomplished with the money thus collected and after that, the work was stopped. He then approached the West Bengal government for support. Despite bureaucratic reluctance, chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy intervened to assume the responsibility of producing the film. Still unfinished, Pather Panchali was invited for show in an exhibition in New York in April 1955. The film was completed and released in Calcutta in August the same year. After release, it was acclaimed the world over and earned many prizes and awards. In 1955, it won the award of the President of India and the prize of the West Bengal Association of Journalists. The same year it won the special jury award for 'the best human document' at the French international film festival. It also won prizes in festivals held in many other countries and cities including Spain, Denmark, Japan, Edinburgh, Manila, San Francisco, Berlin, and Vancouver. Aparajita, the second film of Satyajit released in 1956, brought him three prestigious awards at the Venice Film Festival, Golden Lion, Cinema Nuveau and Critics award. From 1956 up to his death in 1992, Satayjit devoted all his thoughts and time in filmmaking. He is recognised as one of the world's top ten filmmakers. In his filmmaking carrier, he made 28 feature films, 5 documentary films and 3 tele-films. He received 40 awards of the Indian government and at least 60 international awards. Berlin Film Festival Committee declared in 1978 that the three most talented film personalities of the world of all times are Charlie Chaplin, Hjalmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray. Satyajit Ray wrote scenario for many films and performed as music director in many more. He was a reputed writer too. Some of his published books are: Biswa Chalacchitra, Ekei Bole Shooting, Our Films Their Films, Feluda Series, Shanku Series, and Piku's Diary. Satyajit Ray died in Calcutta on 23 April 1992. Films of Satyajit Ray include Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajita (1956), Parashpathar (1958), Jalsaghar (1958), Apur Sangsar (1959), Devi (1960), Tin Kanya (1961); documentary films: Rabindranath (1961), Kanchanjangha (1962), Abhijan (1962), Mahanagar (1963), Charulata (1964), Kapurush O Mahapurush (1965), Nayak (1966), Chidiakhana (1967), Goopi Gain Bagha Bain (1968), Aranyer Dinratri (1969), Pratidwandi (1970), Simabadda (1971), Sikkim (1971), Inner Eye (1972), Ashani Sangket (1973), Shonar Kella (1974), Janaranya (1975), Bala (1976), Satranch ki Khiladi (1977), Joybaba Felunath (1978), Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980), Piku (1982), Satgati (1982), Ghare Baire (1984), Sukumar Roy (1987), Ganoshatru (1989), Shakha Proshakha (1990), and Agantuk (1991). Awards During 1955 and 1966 Pather Panchali won 11 international awards in addition to Indian awards and his Aparajita won five awards in Venice, San Francisco, Berlin and Denmark. Almost all other full-length feature films of Satyajit also won international awards. His documentaries, Rabindranath and Inner Eye, and the TV film Satgati won international awards. Personally he was honoured with special awards at home and abroad including honorary doctorates from many universities, Viswabharati's Desikottam, Dada Saheb Falke prize, Magsaysay award, French Legion of Honour (1987), Bharatratna (1992), and Special Oscar (1992). [Amanul Haq]

Here you go - "Ore baba Dekho Cheye" MP3 - one song from the "Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen" 😊 -



Film and Music direction by Satayjit Ray! Sung by Anup Ghoshal (FYI: the male voice of - "tujhse naraaz nehi zindegi..." from Masoom)

You can listen to the other songs of the movie online at : http://www.satyajitray.com/downloads/music/index.php

Thanks Qwestji, Barnaliji for sharing such wonderful articles.

Originally posted by: soulsoup

Here you go - "Ore baba Dekho Cheye" MP3 - one song from the "Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen" 😊 -

Film and Music direction by Satayjit Ray! Sung by Anup Ghoshal (FYI: the male voice of - "tujhse naraaz nehi zindegi..." from Masoom)

You can listen to the other songs of the movie online at : http://www.satyajitray.com/downloads/music/index.php

Thanks Dada, saw that Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen movie when I was in school.

Thanks Anol, Qwest & VJ again..wonderful info 👏

Satyajit Ray on a location
Satyajit Ray, on the sets of
Ganashatru, 1989.
Denis Darzacq


Satyajit Ray, on the sets of Ganashatru, 1989 Denis Darzacq
Pather Panchali, 1955. Teknica

Logo design by Ray for Devi
(The Goddess, 1960).
Ray Family


Ray Composing music Nemai Ghosh

Ray Tarapada Bannerjee


Ray receiving the Oscar in Calcatta in a satellite telecast

Originally posted by: Barnali

The universe in his back yard

Sentimental sell-out or visionary with a common touch?Ten years after the death of India's cinematic giant,Derek Malcolm remembers Satyajit Ray


Thursday May 2, 2002
The Guardian

At over six feet tall, Satyajit Ray was an imposing figure who towered over most of his fellow Bengalis.And the general opinion - not denied by many in India, even in Bollywood (most of whose output he despised) - is that his films towered over those of the sub continent's other film-makers. But now, 10 years after his death, as retrospectives are prepared worldwide in his honour, will his slightly reticent classicism and overt humanism have the same appeal? Ray's work is, after all, the direct antithesis of most contemporary cinema, especially that emanating from Hollywood and Bollywood, the world's two strongest commercial industries, hooked as they are on rip-roaring special effects and visuals. His films never shout, and often just whisper. They are carefully considered, deeply serious documents about people and their troubles in an age when we seem to value facile and impermanent entertainment first.


They do not use stars: once a very well-known Hindi actor begged me to ask Ray to give him even a small part on one of his films. Ray laughingly refused. They also come from deep within a Bengali culture that the west, and even a good many Indians, may never completely understand.


The French, for instance, no slouches where the auteurs of Hollywood were concerned, took years to admit that Satyajit Ray was as great a director as Nicholas Ray, his American namesake, with no less a judge than Franois Truffaut leading the doubters, complaining that Pather Panchali was simply yet another sentimental stab at neorealism among the peasantry.


The opening shot at revaluing Ray here is the commercial release this week of Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), his first and possibly most famous film and the opening instalment of the Apu trilogy. The second will be a full-scale retrospective beginning at the National Film Theatre in London in July. And despite the gear-change required when one confronts a Ray film for the first time, it's odds-on that a good many will be seduced.


Here is a film-maker whose greatness is even more obvious now than when he died, shortly after receiving from Hollywood the honorary Oscar that he valued so much. This is partly because we now realise that there are very few directors still working who deserve to be considered in anything like the same light, and partly because Ray's last few films, when he was stricken with heart trouble, forbidden to go on location, and reminded of his frailty by an ambulance permanently waiting outside the set, were not his most dynamic work.


That the Oscar from Hollywood almost came too late was a scandal, and it was only at the insistence of Martin Scorsese and other internationally minded US film-makers that he got one at all. He won, at one time or another, practically every other prize available to him. Once, after dinner at his flat in Calcutta, his wife Bijoya asked me whether I would like to see the trophies. Ray was reluctant at first but then led me into his bedroom and pulled out a large trunk from under his bed. It was crammed full of statuettes and citations from all over the world.


The reason he was so pleased to win his Oscar was that, though he was a Bengali through and through, he was also a great admirer of American cinema, having seen the best of it in London as a young man employed there with an advertising agency. He loved film-makers such as John Ford and admired the skill and universality of the best of Hollywood cinema.


His second great love was for Jean Renoir, for whom he scouted locations for The River and who encouraged him to take the plunge into film- making. He was passionate also about the Italian neorealists whose work was so influential in the 1950s. The first of the 100 or so films he saw in London was De Sica's The Bicycle Thieves. De Sica's classic gave him the hope that he could make Pather Panchali - the story of a boy called Apu born into an impoverished Brahmin family in a Bengali village, taken from a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay - with a mostly amateur cast.


It was not an easy process. In Subatra Mitra he had a cinemato- grapher who was as inexperienced as he was, and he also had very little money. He had to borrow from his insurance company and from relatives, and even to pawn Bijoya's jewellery in order to shoot 4,000ft of edited footage that might persuade a producer to back a film with no songs and dances, and which was to be shot entirely on location and without any professional crew.


After he had produced this and hawked the result around as many producers as he knew, he almost gave up. The gap in shooting lasted almost a year until the chief minister of Bengal was persuaded to help, even though one of his officials thought the famous scene in which the procession of a sweet seller, Apu and a dog is reflected in a pond was running backwards.


The film was finished just in time, with Ravi Shankar completing a masterly score in less than a weekend. The voice of the boy who played Apu didn't break, though everyone thought it would at any moment, and the old woman who is so marvellous in the film didn't die, as Ray thought she might.


In the end, Ray got nothing in the way of payment for the film. He did, however, win international fame for what one critic opined was "India's first adult film".It won best human document at Cannes and the president's gold and silver medals in India.


If this was superb film-making under the most difficult conditions, the rest of Ray's large body of work was often made under almost equal pressure. Added to that, although he made generally praised masterpieces such as the rest of the Apu trilogy, The Music Room, Charulata and Days and Nights in the Forest, he was sometimes virulently criticised.


In the 1950s and early 1960s the radical movement, represented in the Indian cinema by the Godardian work of Ray's fellow Bengali Mrinal Sen, frequently attacked Ray for his lack of obvious polemic and his refusal to openly espouse political causes in his films. Some close to the Indian government accused Ray of "exporting poverty" and giving the world a view of India that was too critical and depressing. An ancillary accusation was that he was too western a director, making films about the Indian poor for middle-class audiences at foreign festivals. Many of India's younger directors deeply resented the fact that he seldom took much interest in their very different, more radical work, or was critical of it.


In Britain, an attempt was made at one Edinburgh film festival to claim that Ritwik Ghatak, the brilliant but unstable Marxist Bengali director, was the superior artist, even though the two men admired each other and were both heavily influenced by the great Bengali poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore.


He was also much praised. Kurosawa, the great Japanese director, once said that not to have seen the cinema of Ray "means existing in a world without seeing the sun and the moon". And Pauline Kael wrote, after seeing Days and Nights in the Forest: "Ray's films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director. I think it must be because our involvement with his characters is so direct that we are caught up in a blend of the fully accessible and the inexplicable, the redolent, the mysterious. No artist has ever done more than Satyajit Ray to make us re-evaluate the commonplace."


Through all this, often wondering at the way he came to be regarded as India's proudest export in official circles and yet still found it so difficult to make his films, he ploughed on. He wrote his own scripts, often composed his own music, invariably looked through the camera himself rather than relying on his cinematographers and directed each film from production designs and drawings that he had made himself.


He also wrote children's books and made children's films, illustrating them himself and following in the footsteps of his grandfather and father, both of whom left behind work that children still read today.


His own words probably sum up the intentions of his art best: "In 1928, I went with my mother to Tagore's university. I had my little autograph book, newly bought, and my mother gave the book to Tagore and said: 'My son would like a few lines of verse from you.' And he said: 'Leave the book with me.' The next day he said: 'I have written something for you, which you won't understand now, but when you grow up you will understand it."


It read: "I have travelled all around the world to see the rivers and the mountains, and I've spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths, I have seen everything. But I forgot to see just outside my house a dewdrop on a little blade of grass, a dewdrop which reflects in its convexity the whole universe around you." What Ray did was to reflect in his best films precisely what Tagore had taught him.

👏 Wonderful article!

Ashani Sanket, 1973
[Distant Thunder]

In 1942, at the height of the Second World War, Japan, having successfully secured and occupied Singapore, advanced the emperor's ambitious military operation to India's neighboring country of Burma. In response to the nation's aggressive Asian campaign, the British sought to regain and reinforce strategic Allied positions in the Pacific by stemming the tide of Japanese militarism, deploying troops to the region and, with them, diverting resources from the populous imperial colony. It is within the global uncertainty of this turbulent human history that a well-respected, educated man, Gangacharan Chakravarti (Soumitra Chatterjee) has decided to settle in a small, remote village of Natungaon in Bengal with his attractive young wife Ananga (Babita). As the only Brahmin residents in the entire rural village, Gangacharan and his wife are in an opportune position to exploit the immeasurable privileges afforded their socially prominent caste. To this end, Gangacharan has decided to open the first elementary school in the village in order to supplement his comfortable income as the only doctor in the area, and to further take advantage of his fluency in Sanskrit to serve as the town's ceremonial priest. His knowledge of modern science and traditional ritual soon proves auspicious when he is summoned to perform a sacred ceremony for a remote village in the naive hope that his prayers would spare the townspeople from a rampant outbreak of cholera that has already reached epidemic proportions in a neighboring village. Dispensing practical advice on disinfection and hygiene in an indigenously more palatable form of a mystical protection ritual, the humble villagers spare no expense in expressing their gratitude to the priest by showering him with a wagonload of food and assorted presents for his trip home. However, traces of the war's far-reaching effects into the lives of the unsuspecting villagers begin to surface when Ananga is stopped on the roadside by an indigent, elderly brahmin who begins to insinuate himself into the deferential, younger brahmin's graces by soliciting handouts and free meals on the pretense of visiting him to seek advice. As the rice shortage leads to soaring inflation and widespread rationing, the villagers soon resort to acts of self-denial, theft, banditry, and even violence as austerity, want, and despair become inextricably symptomatic of their increasingly subhuman daily existence.

Adapted from the novel by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Distant Thunder is a provocative and compelling examination of the devastating humanitarian crisis that resulted from the British government's deliberate re-appropriation of food and critical supplies to support the Pacific War campaign that lead to the man-made famine of Bengal in 1943 and ultimately resulted in the death of over two million people. From the opening image of a series of fighter planes flying in formation as they cast a shadow on the river while Ananga bathes (a curious sight that the heroine likens to a flock of cranes in flight), Satyajit Ray presents an implicit (and figuratively obtrusive) correlation, not only between a distant, foreign war and a politically isolated (if not disenfranchised) domestic population, but more importantly, the violation of nature through conceptually abstract, but integrally man-made devices. Ray further illustrates the violation of nature, not only through the repeated imagery of warplanes flying overhead (a seeming metaphor for imperial sovereignty over their native land), but also through anecdotal references to the skyrocketing price of rice, the appearance of an inscrutable disfigured man near a pottery kiln (whose scars were unintentionally self-induced - and therefore, essentially man-made - resulting from accidentally exploded fireworks), and escalating incidents of base human behavior. However, by focusing on Gangacharan and Ananga's humbling plight and continued perseverance, Ray transcends a purely social critique of the man-made famine in favor of presenting the resulting social egalitarianism that eschews class segregation in times of mutual hardship and common injustice. In the end, it is overwhelming sense of human interconnectedness that renews hope for the young, struggling couple: an enlightened awareness and true sense of place borne of compassion, altruism, sacrifice, and engaged social responsibility.