Irrespective of the election results, Bengal, which once prided itself in intellectual heritage and broadmindedness, has got mired in a vortex of narrow identity politics.
Shikha Mukerjee | Revisiting the legend @100: Ray’s iconic role to endure
Published : May 2, 2021, 12:20 am IST
Updated : May 2, 2021, 12:20 am IST
Ray did not start out as a filmmaker with an agenda. He was a storyteller. But he responded to the shifts and changes in the world at large
In the Bengali perception, Ray was an icon; his work was quintessentially Bengali, but his contribution was recognised as India’s gift to world cinema.
Cultural power surpasses the transient aggregation of political heft in West Bengal. In the natural order of things, there is a rise and a fall of political leaders and political parties, and power waxes and wanes in proportion to the will exercised by the people as voters. Ousting a cultural icon from his, and more rarely her, space in the pantheon of secular deities is an entirely different matter; it has not happened in recent memory.
Satyajit Ray Death Anniversary: 5 best movies by the legendary filmmaker
Satyajit Ray is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers in film history
Satyajit Ray was an Indian film director, scriptwriter, documentary filmmaker, author, lyricist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher and music composer.
He is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers in film history.
Ray was born in Calcutta which was prominent in the field of arts and literature. He started his career as a commercial artist, he was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing Vittorio De Sica s Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves during a visit to London.
Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar (1958) | Satyajit Ray Productions
Astonishingly, folded in between the films that comprise the celebrated Apu Trilogy
, are two movies inspired by Bengali literature and Satyajit Ray’s association with two outstanding Bengali character actors: Tulsi Chakraborty in
Parash Pathar and Chhabi Biswas in
Jalsaghar. The first is perhaps minor (in spite of Chakraborty’s phenomenal performance) and is now mostly forgotten. However the latter is among the three or four greatest films in Ray’s oeuvre,
and Chhabi Biswas’s performance is unsurpassed in his own illustrious career.
Elegiac in tone,
Jalsaghar (The Music Room) is, to quote John Russell Taylor, “an atmospheric piece”. It occasionally reminds one of Orson Welles’s
Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) | Satyajit Ray Productions
Satyajit Ray arrived on the planet nearly a hundred years ago in 1921 and in the world of cinema with Pather Panchali in 1955. Devi and Jalsaghar
. Apur Sansar
, the concluding chapter of the trilogy, introduced Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore. Both actors would become an indelible part of Ray’s cinematic universe.
The haunting Devi
, set in nineteenth-century Bengal and at the intersection of blind faith and rationality, was Tagore’s first lead role. She plays Doyamayee, a member of an aristocratic family who is declared to be the living embodiment of the goddess Kali by her father-in-law Kalikinkar (Chhabi Biswas). The gentle and tradition-bound Doyamayee is unable to resist the cult that builds up around her. Her husband Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee) is equally unable to persuade his father that his wife is all too human.