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Satyajit Ray by Helen Goritsas Helen Goritsas is a Sydney-based film enthusiast - a regular cinemagoer, writer, film student and filmmaker. |
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Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta into an exceptionally talented family who were prominent in Bengali arts and letters. His father died when he was an infant and his mother and her younger brother's family brought him up. After graduating from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1940, he studied art at Rabindranath Tagore's University in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. He took up commercial advertising and he also designed covers and illustrated books brought out by Signet Press. One of these books was an edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhya's novel, Pather Panchali, which was to become his first film. In 1947 Ray established the Calcutta Film Society. During a six month trip to Europe in 1950, he managed to see 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (1948), which greatly inspired him. He returned convinced that it was possible to make realist cinema and with an amateur crew he endeavoured to prove this to the world. In 1955, after incredible financial hardship (shooting on the film stopped for over a year) his adaptation of Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) was completed. Prior to the 1956 Cannes Festival, Indian Cinema was relatively unknown in the West, just as Japanese cinema had been prior to Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). However, with Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray suddenly assumed great importance. The film went on to win numerous awards abroad including Best Human Document at Cannes. Pather Panchali's success launched an extraordinary international film career for Ray. A prolific filmmaker, during his lifetime Ray directed 36 films, comprising of features, documentaries and short stories. These include the renowned Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito [1956] and Apur Sansar [1959]), Jalsaghar (1958), Postmaster (1961), Charulata (1964), Days and Nights in the Forest (1969) and Pikoo (1980) along with a host of his lesser known works which themselves stand up as fine examples of story telling. His films encompass a diversity of moods, techniques, and genres: comedy, satire, fantasy and tragedy. Usually he made films in a realist mode, but he also experimented with surrealism and fantasy.
Pather Panchali was based on the aforementioned famous novel of the '30s depicting a poor Bengali family's grim struggle for survival. In this story, a father, although talented artistically, is compelled to eke out a living for his wife and two children by collecting rents. For a long time he struggles to bring up the family in its ancestral home, but ultimately he is forced to abandon the home. Aparajito (The Unvanquished) forms the second part of this great trilogy. It deals with the adolescence of Apu following his father's death. Sarbojaya, after some hardships, takes Apu to live in her uncle's household in the country. The local schoolmaster nurtures Apu's interest in learning and in the wider world, and at 16 Apu wins a scholarship to study in Calcutta. Caught up in the excitement of the city, he visits his mother reluctantly and rarely. She is lonely and dying but refuses to appeal to his sympathy for fear of impeding his education. Finally a letter from his uncle brings Apu home, one day too late. After the funeral, Apu, refusing to follow his father into the priesthood, leaves again for the city.
Before concluding the trilogy Ray made Paras Pather (The Philosopher's Stone, 1958), a satirical comedy about a poor clerk who chances on a magic stone that turns all metal to gold. The concluding film in the trilogy is Apu Sansar (The World of Apu), in many ways the most mature and deeply felt of the three works. Apu, now a grown man, marries, writes his first novel, and then loses his wife Aparna in childbirth. Shattered, Apu refuses to his son, blaming him for Aparna's death and he wanders off in anguished solitude. Five years later his friend Pulu unearths him and at last he is reunited with his son. This event gives him the vitality and joy with which to face the future. The theme of change, of the countervailing gains and losses attendant on the forces of progress, has often been identified as the central preoccupation of Ray's work. This theme, underlying much of the Apu trilogy, finds its most overt expression in Jalsaghar (The Music Room), an underrated film and one of Ray's finest achievements. Jalsaghar is the story of Biswambhar, a feudal lord who ruins himself through holding music concerts to outclass the boorish upstart son of a moneylender. The film as a whole explores the idea that truly great art is created in that space of time just before disintegration takes over. Time seems to be frozen for Biswambhar and it is within this act of refusal that his ruin lies. The inner struggle between traditional and modern values in Indian life has coloured several other Ray films. Devi (The Goddess, 1960) is essentially a story exploring the dangers of religious fanaticism and superstition. Daya is a young bride at the end of the 19th century who (because her father-in-law has a vision) suddenly believes that she is the reincarnation of the goddess Kali. The gullible Daya accepts the worship of the people around her, but she eventually becomes a victim of a quarrel that develops between her husband and her father. To mark the centenary of the birth of Rabindranath Tagore, Ray made Teen Kanya (Three Daughters) in 1961. The Postmaster is the first of the three-part series making up Teen Kanya. A young man from Calcutta, exiled as postmaster in a remote village begins teaching a young orphan girl (who tends his house) to read and write. Acting out of sheer boredom, he is too selfish to notice her growing attachment to him, and when the chance of a transfer comes he leaves without consideration. The second episode, Samapti, is a comedy about a young law student who rejects the dull bride chosen by his mother and marries the village tomboy. The third episode is Monihara, a ghost story about a wife who returns after her death to claim her husband's last gift.
Ray's first original script was for Kanchanjungha (1962), which was also his first picture in colour and the first film for which Ray composed the score. Filmed entirely on location in Darjeeling, it traces the varied activities of a vacationing family dominated by the father, a rich Calcutta businessman. Yet another disillusioned character is the taxi-driver protagonist of Abhijan (The Expedition, 1962). In Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), Ray tackles the problem of whether or not both a husband and wife should take up jobs to maintain the family. The Big City is set in contemporary India, but the issue at stake - that being a woman's place in society - is essentially the same in Charulata (1964), which takes place in 1879 and is based on another story by Tagore. Admirers of Ray's work have often quarrelled as to which are his best films. Most have agreed however that Charulata is among the very finest. Ray himself rates it as his favourite. "It's the one with the fewest flaws." (John Wakeman, 1988, p. 845.) After the confident mastery of Charulata, Ray seemed for the rest of the decade to lose his sureness of touch, unable to come satisfactorily to terms either with his material or with the world around him. Films such as Kapurush-o-Mahapurush (The Crowd and the Holy Man, 1965), Nayak (The Hero, 1966) and Chiriakhana (The Zoo, 1967) contain little of Ray's personal touch. It was not until Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1969) that Ray returned to form. In this accomplished work, Ray isolates and removes a group of modern young Calcuttans from their natural habitat in order to study their attitudes and reactions and to reveal aspects of their respective characters. During the late-'60s, Ray made a fairytale for adults in Goopy Gyn Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1968) and then went on to make The City Trilogy (comprising of Pratidwandi [The Adversary, 1970], Seemabaddha [Company Limited, 1971] and Jana Aranya [The Middleman, 1975]) but before its completion a number of other film projects intervened. Two documentaries from this period are Sikkim (1971), a travelogue on the northern border kingdom, and The Inner Eye (1972), a short tribute to the blind artist Binod Behari Mukherjee. Between these two documentaries, however, Ray made Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), his second colour film.
In 1961 Ray had revived Sandesh, the children's magazine founded by his grandfather and continued by his father until his premature death. From this time, alongside his movie-making he also produced a constant flow of illustrations, verses, translations and stories for the magazine. Several of his stories featured Felu Mittar, a private detective and it is one of these that he adapted for his second children's film Sonar Kella (The Fortress, 1974). Like all of Ray's children's films it was hugely successful. Wary of making films in a language in which he was not proficient, Ray resisted the idea of moving outside the restricted Bengali. However, he was persuaded to aim for a wider audience by making his first film in Hindu, Shatranji Ke Kilhari (The Chess Players, 1977), a period piece set in Lucknow 1856. In this film Ray traces two parallel stories. While General Outram, the British resident, moves to oust Wajid Ali Shah from the throne of Oudh and annex the Kingdom for the East India Company, two of Wajid's indolent nawabs, indifferent to history, play endless games of chess. Although a strong film, it would seem Ray failed to adequately mesh the two separate strands of the plot as he intended. After The Chess Players, Ray returned to making films for children. Ray adapted another of his short stories for Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, 1978). The plot revolves around a stolen gold statuette, which Felu eventually recovers in the face of bribes from assorted heavies. Ray followed this film with Hirok Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds, 1980), a sequel to Goopy and Bagha in which the two characters find themselves in a police state where idealists are exiled and dissenters are brainwashed. In 1981, as a result of a successful revival of Ray's work in Paris, ORTF commissioned a new work, Pikoo, a 27-minute fiction film. Pikoo is a story which depicts a family crisis through the uncomprehending eyes of the six-year-old son. The same year, Ray was commissioned to make a film for Indian TV. The resulting film was Sadgati (Deliverance) a 50-minute piece filmed in Hindi, which relates a story of callous exploitation. In 1984 Ray made Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World), telling the story of a love triangle in which the characters are forced to confront the wider effects of their own limitations. Due to his medical condition (which resulted from a heart attack during the making of The Home and the World), Satyajit Ray was told by his doctors not to do any location work and he was forced to shoot in studios. Unfortunately, this constraint of shooting does mar the last of his films as a whole. This is true of not only Ganashatru (Enemy of the People, 1989) but also Shakha Prashakha (Branches of the Tree, 1990) and Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991). * * * * There is perhaps no filmmaker who exercised such total control over his work as Satyajit Ray. He was responsible for scripting, casting, directing, scoring, operating the camera, working closely on art direction and editing, even designing his own credit titles and publicity material. His films come as close to complete personal expression as may be possible in cinema. Ray's style grows out of the material itself, and from an inner compulsion to express it clearly. The thread that ties the body of his work together is its strong humanist basis. By his own admission his films are the antithesis of conventional Hollywood films, both in style and content. His characters are generally of average ability and talents. Perverted or bizarre behaviour, violence and explicit sex, rarely appear in his films. His interest lies in characters with roots in their society. What fascinates him is the struggle and corruption of the conscience-stricken person. He brought real concerns of real people to the screen. His works serve to remind us of the wholeness and sanctity of the individual. Above all, Ray's is a cinema of thought and feeling, in which the feeling is deliberately restrained because it is so intense. Although Ray continued to experiment with subject matter and style more than most directors, he always held true to his original conviction that the finest cinema uses strong, simple themes containing hundreds of little, apparently irrelevant details, which only help to intensify the illusion of actuality better. These themes cannot come from the passing fashions of the period; they must be drawn from permanent values.
By depicting physical environments with the utmost truth and by exploring human relationships to their limits, Ray reveals many aspects of the human condition. Through particulars, he reaches universality, conveying through his cinema this co-existence. Much of his cinema's strength lies in the total impression of its average moments, moments that can't be picked out as necessarily striking scenes. This is because he strikes a carefully judged balance between form and content. He does not let one part override the other. He was known to reject locations because he thought them too spectacular and overpowering, stating they would upset the balance. In the last few decades we have seen greater emphasis on form and technique in film at the expense of content. Form has come to be identified as the content of film. With formalism reigning supreme, subject matter has disappeared. Meaning has been divorced from the subject and a steady dehumanisation in cinema has resulted. What is refreshing about Satyajit Ray and his films is that they represent sanity and faith in humanity. With him, the subject comes first and with the material on hand he allows it to dictate the form. Throughout his career, Satyajit Ray maintained that the best technique of filmmaking was the one that was not noticeable, that technique was merely a means to an end. He disliked the idea of a film that drew attention to its style rather than the contents. That is why his work touches one as a revelation of artistry. For at the same time, he reveals his attitude, his sympathies, and his overall outlook in a subtle manner, through hints and via undertones. There are no direct messages in his films. But their meanings are clear, thanks to structural coherence.
Ray makes us re-evaluate the commonplace. He has the remarkable capacity of transforming the utterly mundane into the excitement of an adventure. There is the ability to recognise the mythic in the ordinary, such as in the train sequence of Pather Panchali where the humming telegraph poles hold Durga and Apu in a spell. In addition, he has the extraordinary capacity of evoking the unsaid. When viewing one of his films we often think we know what one of his characters is thinking and feeling, without a single word of dialogue. This ability to create a sense of intimate connection between people of vastly different cultures is Ray's greatest achievement. More then any of his contemporaries in world cinema, he can create an awareness of the ordinary man, and he doesn't do it in the abstract, but by using the simplest, most common and concrete details such as a gesture or a glance. What is also distinctive in Ray's work is that the rhythm in his films seems almost meditative. There is a contemplative quality in the magnificent flow of images and sounds that evokes an attitude of acceptance and detachment, which is profoundly Indian. His compassionate work arises from a philosophical tradition that brings detachment and freedom from fear, celebrates joy in birth and life and accepts death with grace. This perspective attempts to create the whole out of a fineness of detail. Ray succeeded in making Indian cinema, for the first time in its history, something to be taken seriously, and in so doing, created a body of work of distinct range and richness. Helen Goritsas, May 2002
Filmography Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (1955) 115min B/W Aparajito (The Unvanquished) (1956) 113 min B/W Parash Pathar (The Philosopher's Stone) (1957) 111 min B/W Jalsaghar (The Music Room) (1958) 100 min B/W Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959) 106 min B/W Devi (The Goddess) (1960), 93 min B/W Rabindranath Tagore (Documentary, 1961) 54 min B/W Teen Kanya (Three Daughters) (1961) (comprising of Postmaster [56 min], Samapti [56 min] and Monihara [61mins], all B/W). (There also exist different versions of this film, combining only two of the three stories, under the title Two Daughters.) Kanchenjungha (1962) 102 min Colour Abhijan (The Expedition) (1962) 150min B/W Mahanagar (The Big City) (1963) 131 min B/W Charulata (The Lonely Wife) (1964) 117 min B/W Two (1964) 15 min B/W Kapurush-O-Mahapurush (The Crowd and the Holy Man) (1965) (Two-part film - The Crowd and The Holy Man, running at 74 min and 65 min respectively, B/W) Nayak (The Hero) (1966) 120 min B/W Chiriakhana (The Zoo) (1967) 125 min B/W Goopy Gyn Bagha Byne (Adventures of Goopy and Bagha) (1968) 132 min B/W & Colour Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) (1969) 115 min B/W Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970) 110 min B/W Sikkim (Documentary, 1971) 60 min B/W Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971) 112 min B/W The Inner Eye (Documentary, 1972) 20 min Colour Asani Sanket (Distant Thunder) (1973) 101 min Colour Sonar Kella (The Fortress) (1974) 120 min Colour Jana Aranya (The Middleman) (1975) 131 min B/W Bala (Documentary, 1976) 33 min Colour Shatrani Ke Khilari (The Chess Players) (1977) 113 min Colour Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God) (1978) 112 min Colour Pikoo (Pikoo's Day) (Short, 1980) 26 min Colour Hirak Rajar Deshe (Kingdom of Diamonds) (1980) 118 min Colour Sadgati (The Deliverance) (1981) 52 min Colour Ghare Baire (Home and the World) (1984) 140 min Colour Sukumar Ray (Documentary, 1987) 30 min Colour Ganashatru (Enemy of the People) (1989) 100 min Colour Shakha Proshakha (Branches of the Tree) (1990) 121 min Colour Agantuk (The Stranger) (1991) 120 min colour
Select Bibliography Cowie, Peter, 50 Major Filmmakers, New York, Tanity Press, 1975. Das Gupta, Chidananda, Film India Satyajit Ray, Bombay, Tata Press, 1981. Nyce, Ben, Satyajit Ray: A Study of his Films, New York, Greenwood Press 1988 Robinson, Andrew, Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye, Great Britain, WBC Ltd Bristol & Maesteg, 1989. Seton, Marie, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray, London, St Ann's, Press 1971. Montage No 5/6 July 1966, Anandam Film Society Publication, Bombay. World Film Directors, Volume 11 1945-1958, Wilson Company, 1988. |
The Music Room is a film led to greatness by Satyajit Ray's devotion to a single mood: elegiac. Ray isn't alone in sculpting this great piece. The acting by Chabi Biswas as the crumbling aristocrat Huzur Biswambhar Roy, cinematography by Subrata Mitra and music direction by Ustad Vilayat Khan all contribute immensely. Set in the 1930's with the emerging nouveau riche, Roy is the last in a long of rich patriarchs, stumbling as his estate diminishes but clinging till the end to his refined means. Roy lives in a mansion in the middle of a desert, a symbol of his isolation from encroaching destitute. Roy is frequently filmed alone, as are other subjects (his dog, horse, elephant). The film begins with the elderly Huzur sitting alone, staring blankly in his back garden overlooking a once proud space. He is served by one of his two humble and loyal servants. The story flashes back some 15-20 years to a more glorious time when the younger Huzur, with his young son Khoka and wife Padma (the realist/pragmatist to Huzur's idealism) was the class of his region, hosting luxurious concerts in his home. Huzur's centerpiece, his ivory tower and final refuge from the external reality/realism is the titular music room. The room reflects Huzur, his pride, his heirloom, his inner soul. Ray draws us in spatially, in concentric circles, from the outer oasis, to the backyard pool/yard, to the mansion, to the music room and further yet, the music room's stage. Likewise Mitra's camera often, and nearly always in relation to Roy, dollies inwards toward Roy. The movement not only serves to honor the character and make us feel more empathy toward him, but counterpoints the film's maze-like construction.
Many of the film's best moments take place in the music room. For example, the first concert during the flashback, in which the camera encircles Roy surrounded by his guests and cuts into the long takes only to underscore Roy's sense of tranquillity and contentment; the concert which is interrupted by the tragic news of his son and wife's drowning; and the final concert, Roy's swan song which leads to his psychological break from reality into momentary insanity (he imagines the candles in the room extinguishing themselves one by one). In each of the concerts the music varies. In the first we have more of an ensemble piece; in the second the singer dominates with his emotive voicing; and a phenomenal dancer highlights the third. The final concert occurs years after Roy, saddened by the double deaths of his wife and son and his failing estate, has closed the music room and remained living on the mansion's second floor. With all his gold, silver, and jewellery gone all that remains is a little money. He uses it to stage one final concert. Roy's continued carelessness toward his economic state can be read in several ways. If we read it critically, it becomes a sign of his selfishness and disregard for his families well-being. In another sense his gesture can be seen as an act of defiance against the upstart moneylender who is out to show Roy up, and a romantic tribute to the "class of class." A third meaning, psychological, can see the acts as a reflection of how deeply ingrained the caste system and colonialism are in India.
When the drunken Roy explains to his servant why he is different from Tulsi, the estate manager, he speaks in English and refers to his "blood," and then points to the three portraits of his ancestral forefathers (father, grandfather, great grandfather) that hang around the music room's huge mirror. Ray's genius is in balancing these three readings so that our emotional relation to the character is complex and in a sense more critical and involved. The film ends with the drunken-maddened Roy, against the wishes of his servants (servile to the end), riding his horse for one last jaunt through the desert. The final moments are reminiscent of Kenji Mizoguchi, especially Sansho the Bailiff (camera movement that moves away from the center action; set in an arid zone). Roy is thrown violently off his horse. The servants run to their fatally hurt, bleeding master. With the earlier death of his son and now himself, his rich, aristocratic lineage has come to an end. In this touching moment Ray has the camera track away (left) from the body to stop at his fallen headgear. This image dissolves to the final shot: that of the darkened chandelier swinging aimlessly in the darkened music room.
| Ajantrik (1958) |
The other pillar of Indian cinema greatness is Ray's (lesser known) contemporary, Ritwik Ghatak. In the same year as Ray's majestic The Music Room , Ghatak made his first feature film, Ajantrik , also a film about obsession (to be more precise, not the first film he made, which would be Nagarik , but his first film to be released). The film begins with two comic-relief men looking for a taxi to drive them to a nearby village. A boy leads them to an obstreperous taxi driver with a battered, ancient Chevrolet. Roughed up and haggard, the two men finally arrive at their destination. At this point Ghatak shifts the film's emphasis from the two men to the cab driver, and we slowly learn of the cab driver's (Bimal) obsessive relationship with his car. Kali Bammerjee's performance as Bimal is excellent, displaying subtle nuances of a character slowly losing touch with reality. At first Ghatak treats Bimal's obsession humorously. Bimal treats his car as a living thing, giving it a name (Jagaddal), pampering it, and defending it against insults (as one may protect a lover). Ghatak underscores the humor in this relationship formally, with for example human gurgling sounds as Bimal feeds the radiator, and moments of fantasy (the car's headlights move about as if they were eyes).
| Ritwik Ghatak |
The film's tone and style shift approximately halfway into the film, with humour and playfulness giving way to an eerie subjectivity (less dialogue, a more pronounced emphasis on the landscape, heightened use of ambient music and sound effects). A key moment in signaling this shift occurs during an extended solo drive when Ghatak cleverly manipulates the conventional use of point of view cutting. A disturbed Bimal is driving along mountainous roads. Ghatak cuts from third person shots of Bimal in medium close- up at the wheel and point of view shots where we see the hood of the car and the road. However, in one of the supposed point of view shots we are shocked when we see his car enter the frame from a bend in the road! The shot is equivalent to those trick point of view shots found in the films of Carl Dreyer or Michelangelo Antonioni where a shot clearly begins as a character's subjective point of view but then as the camera continues to pan or dolly it picks up the character in the frame, shifting the point of view to third person. The simple effect creates a jarring sense of disorientation that places us poetically into Bimal's crumbling psyche.
In reference to Bimal, Ritwik Ghatak has said: "You can call my protagonist, Bimal, a lunatic, a child, or a tribal. At one level they are all the same. They react to lifeless things almost passionately. This is an ancient, archetypal reaction....The tribal songs and dances in Ajantrik describe the whole cycle of life - birth, hunting, marriage, death, ancestor worship, and rebirth. This is the main theme of Ajantrik , this law of life.." Throughout the film characters treat Bimal's obsession with ridicule, scorn or puzzlement. Their actions and dialogue often raise the question of why Bimal is not able to sever his irrational association with this crumpling, decrepit vehicle. Even after the car finally gives in to its age, Bimal, an otherwise miser, spends a huge amount of money on new car parts to render life (only temporarily) back to Jagaddal. One could offer a metaphorical reading of this "fear of separation." Ghatak was born in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the then center of cultural activity in East Bengal. The Independence of India in 1947 led to the partition of Bengal (West/East Bengali), which left collective emotional and psychological scars on many Bengali families. Ghatak, who greatly lamented the division of Bengal, has dealt with this pain of separation overtly in many of his later films. Perhaps, subconsciously, it was already present in Ajantrik ? In either case, as a study in obsessive behavior or a metaphorical enactment of political partition, Ajantrik is a remarkable first feature.
Western Influences on Satyajit Ray
The contributions of Satyajit Ray to the Bengali and to Indian cinema in general has not been matched by any other filmmakers, both past and present. The Apu Trilogy itself would be enough to place him on the pedestal of filmmaking and there would be no doubt about the genius of Ray's talent in the film world after the Trilogy. Ray's niche in the hall of fame of international cinema is firmly secure. The number of awards apart, Ray now shares the dizzying heights where only a handful of film makers sit. As Lindsay Anderson, the British filmmaker and critic once said: "I would compare Satyajit Ray to Eisenstein, Chaplin, Kurosawa, Bergman and Antonioni. He is among the greatest in world cinema." In 1978, the Berlin Film Festival committee adjudged him one of the three all-time masters of the cinema, a rare honour he shared with Chaplin and Bergman, the same year Oxford University conferred on him an honorary doctorate. Many critics called him the complete filmmaker who wrote his own scripts, composed the film scores, made sketches for the costumes and sets and even designed the posters of his films.
Ray grew up in Calcutta, which in 18th/19th c. was the seat of the British Empire in India. The merger of the East and the West gave birth to the Bengali Renaissance and to the educated middle-class of which Ray and his family was an integral part. This fusion of the East and the West is deeply embedded in Ray's art-- the same kind of fusion one can find in Rabindranath Tagore's humanistic fusion of classical Indian tradition and Western liberal thoughts. Tagore himself was the principal architect and guiding spirit of the Bengali Renaissance and at one time Ray was a pupil of Tagore's art school at Shantiniketan. This kind of upbringing and education imbued Ray with traditional Bengali/Indian culture along with significant aspects of Western art and culture. Ray knew his cultures very well. David Ansen (Newsweek, 1981), the film critic of the Newsweek once wrote that few film artists could equal "the Renaissance man" for sheer cultural depth, which Ray possessed innately. How, when and where did he pick up such influences which eventually impacted on his art and craft, is an intriguing and an interesting question.
One major factor appears to be that Ray had learnt his art mainly from the Western cinema. The directors he repeatedly referred to, while talking about filmmaking, were Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, John Ford and Frank Capra to name a few. He had also expressed admiration for directors as diverse as Bergman and Hitchcock. Ray met the French director Jean Renoir who was filming The River in Calcutta and it was Lindsay Anderson who asked Ray to write about Renoir for a Cine magazine called the Sequence, which Ray did by interviewing Renoir.
Earlier in his younger days, his two passions were films and music, in fact music preceded films in terms of his interest. He had grown up in an atmosphere of Bengali songs and Brahmo hymns where he participated in the family choir. But Ray hankered for something more dramatic than the vedic chants and Tagore songs, which he found in the symphonic music of the West. As he himself said: "At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music." (Sumit Mitra, 1983; p.73)
At the age of thirteen, Ray went looking for bargains in music shops of Calcutta with one of his school friends, and one of the treasures he found was Beethoven's 5th Symphony, and then he stumbled upon Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik. According to his friend, after the great discovery he lay awake the whole night. The logic, symmetry and the beauty of Mozart's music was not lost on Satyajit Ray. Ray once said : "As a small boy I had read about Beethoven in the Book of Knowledge, now I was listening enraptured to his sonatas and symphonies." Later in his professional life he learnt to play the piano which he played with "professional ease". His expertise in Western classical music was well recognized. Adi Gazdar, the Calcutta- based classical pianist once confirmed, that Ray was "one of the best connoisseurs of Western classical music in the country."
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