Person · film director and writer
Satyajit Ray
/ʃot̪ːod͡ʒit̪ rae̯/
Also known as Satyajit Rāy, Manik
Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) was the Calcutta film director whose Pather Panchali of 1955, the first film of the Apu Trilogy, won eleven international prizes, including the first Best Human Document award at Cannes in 1956. He came to film through book design and illustration, studied at Tagore's Visva-Bharati, and scripted, cast, scored and edited much of his own work. He directed 36 films, wrote the Feluda and Professor Shonku stories, and in 1992 received both an Academy Honorary Award and the Bharat Ratna.
- Date
- 1921 – 1992
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Pather Panchali was shot without a script, from Ray's drawings and notes; he had first met the novel as an illustrator of a children's edition, Aam Antir Bhepu, and some of those illustrations appear as shots in the film.
Connections (5)
- InfluencedRabindranath Tagore
In 1961, at Prime Minister Nehru's insistence, Ray made the documentary Rabindranath Tagore for the poet's birth centenary, a tribute to the person who likely most influenced him, and said its reliance on static material cost him the work of three features. His own favourite film, Charulata (1964), adapts Tagore's story Nastanirh, and in 1984 he completed Ghare Baire from Tagore's novel, a script he first drafted in the 1940s.
- Studied atSantiniketan
In 1940 Ray's mother persuaded her reluctant son to study fine art at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, the university Tagore founded. There he came to appreciate Oriental art, learned much from Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee, about whom he later made the documentary The Inner Eye, and visited the cave temples of Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta. He left the course in 1942, but the visual training shaped both his illustration and his cinema.
- Based atKolkata
Ray was born and died in Calcutta and worked there all his life. He began in 1943 as a junior visualiser at the British advertising agency D.J. Keymer, designed covers for Signet Press, joined the addas at the Coffee House, and co-founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. Jean Renoir's arrival in 1949 to shoot The River, with Ray scouting locations for him, pushed him towards Pather Panchali, and the city became his subject in the Calcutta trilogy of 1970–75.
- Associated withBismillah Khan
Bismillah Khan appears as the shehnai player in Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958), among the musicians at the concerts of the declining zamindar Biswambhar Roy, with Begum Akhtar as the thumri singer Durga Bai and music by Vilayat Khan. It was Ray's first film to make classical Indian music and dance central to the story, and it won the Best Music Award at the first Moscow International Film Festival.
- Associated withRavi Shankar
Ravi Shankar, then early in his career, composed the score for Pather Panchali (1955) and went on to the rest of the Apu Trilogy. According to Andrew Robinson he saw only about half the film in rough cut, hummed Ray a folk-based tune that became the film's bamboo-flute theme, and wrote most of the score in one night session of about eleven hours, with solo sitar pieces on the ragas Desh and Todi.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Satyajit Ray"; "Pather Panchali"; "Jalsaghar". Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (2004).
Open Satyajit Ray in the repository →