A marked shift in realising this moral decay on screen is apparent from
Aranyer Din Ratri to his Calcutta trilogy
Pratidwandi,
Jana Aranya. In
Pratidwandi, Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha declares that he doesn’t want to leave Kolkata, no matter that he is unemployed, with his mind unable to find an ideological footing. The film coincided with the Naxalite movement that began in Bengal, with the caste system and land rights at its root.
Still from ‘Pratidwandi’.
It’s no coincidence that the trilogy charted the course of Indira Gandhi’s India as it inched towards Emergency, creating a swelling anger at the state. Ray’s films still focused on capturing the Bengali Brahmin’s, or more importantly, India’s ruling class’s frustration with itself and the country. The trilogy’s protagonists Siddhartha in
UPDATED: May 6, 2021 07:42 IST
Portrait by Raghu Rai
Ray, for me, is a mythical being and that mythical quality reflects in his films. I discovered him quite late in life and am still understanding him. It was his Pather Panchali (1955) which changed my life and made me fall in love with cinema. The first time I tried watching it, I was in Class 5. My father had taken me to a theatre in Ichapur in 24 Parganas. I slept through it. During my second attempt, in Delhi, I, like my classmates, left the screening midway. Back then my passion lay more in sports. It was, finally, at my third attempt that I watched the film. That was at Siri Fort. I was howling by the end, especially when Durga died. I went home dazed, wondering how a film could be so simple yet magical.
100 Years of Satyajit Ray: a tribute to The Apu Trilogy
May 2, 2021, saw the start of celebrations of the 100th birthday of the great Bengali filmmaker,
Satyajit Ray. Ray’s films were probably amongst the earliest Indian films I’d seen, long before Bollywood would grab my attention. I love many of Ray’s films:
Devi from 1960 (starring the sublime Sharmila Tagore) is a particular favourite, and is a commentary on religious devotion and fundamentalism, and, particular, on a system that both places women on pedestals as goddesses even as it removes their agency and represses them.
Charulata (apparently the film Ray himself cited as his own favourite of all his films) is an exercise in subtle storytelling and gave us the irrepressible Amal, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, who literally stole my heart in so many films. But no Ray film touches my heart so completely as do the three films in the
India is celebrating the birth centenary of one of her greatest sons, Satyajit Ray, in a variety of ways. Sunday (May 2, 2021), marks the centenary of Ray, the Indian master who won an honorary Oscar in 1992, shortly before his death, and remains the country’s best known filmmaker internationally. Ray debuted with “Pather Panchali”
Seven-time National Film Award-winning actor Babita has garnered her career with powerful performances. She shares her memories of working with eminent filmmaker Satyajit Ray, on the maestro's birth centenary. "I still remember the first time that I visited Satyajit Ray's residence with my elder sister Shuchanda," she shares. "Wearing my best shade of red lipstick, I had put