Not to see Ray’s films was like not seeing the sun or the moon, said Akira Kurosawa. A retrospective affords you the chance
Martin Scorsese described the work of Satyajit Ray as “treasures of cinema” that should be watched by “everyone with an interest in film”. The Japanese master Akira Kurosawa went further: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” Given how rarely the Bengali director’s work is now available to view, many film lovers will not have seen some of the foundational wonders of the art form. So the British Film Institute is to be congratulated for its retrospective of Ray. Running to the end of August and screening in cinemas across the UK, it takes in everything he made for the big screen.
If Ray is known for anything in Britain and the US, it is his 1955 classic Pather Panchali (Song of the Open Road), which tells the story of a family in a little village in the Indian state of Bengal, living a life of complete penury. It was a work of amateurs: Ray’s debut as director, first-time actors and an inexperienced crew. Shooting was constantly interrupted by the lack of money and dragged on for years. The music was composed by Ravi Shankar, who was not then the sitar legend he was about to become. Somehow, the near-innocence of everyone involved helped give the final work its sense of conveying a very pure, intimate story. The Observer’s film critic Philip French later praised it as “one of the greatest pictures ever made”. But the singular mistake made by some critics was to see it as a simple story, simply told. It was instead a complex work made by a scholar of film. Ray had met Jean Renoir and studied Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. He was from a family of writers and social reformers who had figured in the 19th-century Bengal renaissance, that answer and challenge by Bengalis to the British colonialists and their culture.
