2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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
6. 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".
7. RAY'S LITERARY CAREER
1961-1992, 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.
9. 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
