Early life and background
Satyajit Ray's ancestry can be traced back for at least
ten generations.Ray's grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray
was a writer, illustrator, philosopher, publisher, amateur
astronomer and a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious
and social movement in nineteenth century Bengal. He also
set up a printing press by the name of U. Ray and Sons,
which formed a crucial backdrop to Satyajit's life. Sukumar
Ray, Upendrakishore's son and father to Satyajit, was
a pioneering Bengali writer of nonsense rhyme and children's
literature, an illustrator and a critic. Ray was born
to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray in Kolkata. Sukumar Ray died
when Satyajit was barely three, and the family survived
on Suprabha Ray's meager income. Ray studied at Ballygunge
Government High School, Calcutta, and completed his B.A.
(Hons.) in economics at Presidency College of the University
of Calcutta, though his interest was always in fine arts.
In 1940, his mother insisted that he study at the Visva-Bharati
University at Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore.
Ray was reluctant due to his love of Kolkata, and the
low opinion of the intellectual life at Santiniketan His
mother's persuasion and his respect for Tagore finally
convinced him to try. In Santiniketan, Ray came to appreciate
Oriental art. He later admitted that he learned much from
the famous painters Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
Later he produced a documentary film, The Inner Eye, about
Mukherjee. His visits to Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta
stimulated his admiration for Indian art.In 1943, Ray
started work at D.J. Keymer, a British-run advertising
agency, as a "junior visualiser," earning eighty
rupees a month. Although he liked visual design (graphic
design) and he was mostly treated well, there was tension
between the British and Indian employees of the firm.
The British were better paid, and Ray felt that "the
clients were generally stupid."Later, Ray also worked
for Signet Press, a new publishing house started by D.
K. Gupta. Gupta asked Ray to create cover designs for
books to be published by Signet Press and gave him complete
artistic freedom. Ray designed covers for many books,
including Jibanananda Das's Banalata Sen, and Rupasi Bangla,
Jim Corbett's Maneaters of Kumaon, and Jawaharlal Nehru's
Discovery of India. He worked on a children's version
of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan
Bandopadhyay, renamed as Aam Antir Bhepu (The mango-seed
whistle). Designing the cover and illustrating the book,
Ray was deeply influenced by the work. He used it as the
subject of his first film, and featured his illustrations
as shots in his groundbreaking film.Along with Chidananda
Dasgupta and others, Ray founded the Calcutta Film Society
in 1947. They screened many foreign films, many of which
Ray watched and seriously studied. He befriended the American
GIs stationed in Kolkata during World War II, who kept
him informed about the latest American films showing in
the city. He came to know a RAF employee, Norman Clare,
who shared Ray's passion for films, chess and western
classical music.In 1949, Ray married Bijoya Das, his first
cousin and longtime sweetheart. The couple had a son,
Sandip, who is now a film director. In the same year,
French director Jean Renoir came to Kolkata to shoot his
film The River. Ray helped him to find locations in the
countryside. Ray told Renoir about his idea of filming
Pather Panchali, which had long been on his mind, and
Renoir encouraged him in the project. In 1950, D.J. Keymer
sent Ray to London to work at its headquarters office.
During his three months in London, Ray watched 99 films.
Among these was the neorealist film Ladri di biciclette
(Bicycle Thief) (1948) by Vittorio De Sica, which had
a profound impact on him. Ray later said that he came
out of the theater determined to become a filmmaker.
The Apu Years (19501959)
Ray decided to use Pather Panchali (1928), the classic
bildungsroman of Bengali literature, as the basis for
his first film. The semi-autobiographical novel describes
the maturation of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village.Ray
gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman
Subrata Mitra and art director Bansi Chandragupta went
on to achieve great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly
amateur actors. He started shooting in late 1952 with
his personal savings and hoped to raise more money once
he had some passages shot, but did not succeed on his
terms.[12] As a result, Ray shot Pather Panchali over
three years, an unusually long period, based on when he
or his production manager Anil Chowdhury could raise additional
funds. He refused funding from sources who wanted a change
in script or supervision over production. He also ignored
advice from the government to incorporate a happy ending,
but he did receive funding that allowed him to complete
the film. Ray showed an early film passage to Anglo-Irish
director John Huston, who was in India scouting locations
for The Man Who Would Be King. The passage was of the
vision which Apu and his sister have of the train running
through the countryside, the only sequence which Ray had
yet filmed due to his small budget. Huston notified Monroe
Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that
a major talent was on the horizon.With a loan from the
West Bengal government, Ray finally completed the film.
It was released in 1955 to great critical and popular
success. It earned numerous prizes and had long runs in
both India and abroad. In India, the reaction to the film
was enthusiastic; The Times of India wrote that "It
is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema Pather
Panchali is pure cinema." In the United Kingdom,
Lindsay Anderson wrote a glowing review of the film. But,
the reaction was not uniformly positive. After watching
the movie, François Truffaut is reported to have
said, "I dont want to see a movie of peasants
eating with their hands." Bosley Crowther, then the
most influential critic of The New York Times, wrote a
scathing review of the film. Its American distributor
Ed Harrison was worried Crowther's review would dissuade
audiences, but the film had an exceptionally long run
when released in the United States.Ray's international
career started in earnest after the success of his next
film, Aparajito (The Unvanquished). This film shows the
eternal struggle between the ambitions of a young man,
Apu, and the mother who loves him. Critics such as Mrinal
Sen and Ritwik Ghatak rank it higher than Ray's first
film. Aparajito won the Golden Lion at the Venice film
festival, bringing Ray considerable acclaim. Before completing
The Apu Trilogy, Ray directed and released two other films:
the comic Parash Pathar (The Philosopher's Stone), and
Jalsaghar (The Music Room), a film about the decadence
of the Zamindars, considered one of his most important
works.While making Aparajito, Ray had not planned a trilogy,
but after he was asked about the idea in Venice, it appealed
to him. He finished the last of the trilogy, Apur Sansar
(The World of Apu) in 1959. Critics Robin Wood and Aparna
Sen found this to be the supreme achievement of the trilogy.
Ray introduced two of his favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee
and Sharmila Tagore, in this film. It opens with Apu living
in a Kolkata house in near-poverty. He becomes involved
in an unusual marriage with Aparna. The scenes of their
life together form "one of the cinema's classic affirmative
depictions of married life." They suffer tragedy.
After Apur Sansar was harshly criticised by a Bengali
critic, Ray wrote an article defending it. He rarely responded
to critics during his filmmaking career, but also later
defended his film Charulata, his personal favourite.Ray's
film successes had little influence on his personal life
in the years to come. He continued to live with his wife
and children in a rented house, with his mother, uncle
and other members of his extended family.
From Devi to Charulata (19591964)
During this period, Ray composed films on the British
Raj period (such as Devi), a documentary on Tagore, a
comic film (Mahapurush) and his first film from an original
screenplay (Kanchenjungha). He also made a series of films
that, taken together, are considered by critics among
the most deeply felt portrayals of Indian women on screen.Ray
followed Apur Sansar with Devi (The Goddess), a film in
which he examined the superstitions in the Hindu society.
Sharmila Tagore starred as Doyamoyee, a young wife who
is deified by her father-in-law. Ray was worried that
the censor board might block his film, or at least make
him re-cut it, but Devi was spared. In 1961, on the insistence
of Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ray was commissioned
to make a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore, on the occasion
of the poet's birth centennial, a tribute to the person
who likely most influenced Ray. Due to limited footage
of Tagore, Ray faced the challenge of making a film out
of mainly static material. He said that it took as much
work as three feature films.In the same year, together
with Subhas Mukhopadhyay and others, Ray was able to revive
Sandesh, the children's magazine which his grandfather
once published. Ray had been saving money for some years
to make this possible. A duality in the name (Sandesh
means both "news" in Bengali and also a sweet
popular dessert) set the tone of the magazine (both educational
and entertaining). Ray began to make illustrations for
it, as well as to write stories and essays for children.
Writing became his major source of income in the years
to come.In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha. Based on
his first original screenplay, it was his first film in
colour. The film tells of an upper-class family spending
an afternoon in Darjeeling, a picturesque hill town in
West Bengal. They try to arrange the engagement of their
youngest daughter to a highly paid engineer educated in
London. He had first conceived shooting the film in a
large mansion, but later decided to film it in the famous
hill town. He used the many shades of light and mist to
reflect the tension in the drama. Ray noted that while
his script allowed shooting to be possible under any lighting
conditions, a commercial film contingent present at the
same time in Darjeeling failed to shoot a single scene,
as they only wanted to do so in sunshine.In the sixties,
Ray visited Japan and took particular pleasure in meeting
the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, for whom he had very high
regard. While at home, he would take an occasional break
from the hectic city life by going to places such as Darjeeling
or Puri to complete a script in isolation.In 1964 Ray
made Charulata (The Lonely Wife); it was the culmination
of this period of work, and regarded by many critics as
his most accomplished film. Based on "Nastanirh",
a short story of Tagore, the film tells of a lonely wife,
Charu, in 19th-century Bengal, and her growing feelings
for her brother-in-law Amal. Critics have referred to
this as Ray's Mozartian masterpiece. He said the film
contained the least flaws among his work, and it was his
only work which, given a chance, he would make exactly
the same way. Madhabi Mukherjee's performance as Charu,
and the work of both Subrata Mitra and Bansi Chandragupta
in the film, have been highly praised. Other films in
this period include Mahanagar (The Big City), Teen Kanya
(Three Daughters), Abhijan (The Expedition) and Kapurush
o Mahapurush (The Coward and the Holy Man).
New directions (19651982)
In the post-Charulata period, Ray took on projects
of increasing variety, ranging from fantasy to science
fiction to detective films to historical drama. Ray also
made considerable formal experimentation during this period.
He expressed contemporary issues of Indian life, responding
to a perceived lack of these issues in his films. The
first major film in this period is Nayak (The Hero), the
story of a screen hero traveling in a train and meeting
a young, sympathetic female journalist. Starring Uttam
Kumar and Sharmila Tagore, in the twenty-four hours of
the journey, the film explores the inner conflict of the
apparently highly successful matinée idol. In spite
of the film's receiving a "Critics prize" at
the Berlin Festival, it had a generally muted reception.In
1967, Ray wrote a script for a film to be called The Alien,
based on his short story "Bankubabur Bandhu"
("Banku Babu's Friend") which he wrote in 1962
for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. Columbia Pictures
was the producer for what was a planned U.S.-India co-production,
and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando were cast as the leading
actors. Ray found that his script had been copyrighted
and the fee appropriated by Mike Wilson. Wilson had initially
approached Ray through their mutual friend, Arthur C.
Clarke, to represent him in Hollywood. Wilson copyrighted
the script credited to Mike Wilson & Satyajit Ray,
although he contributed only one word. Ray later said
that he never received a penny for the script. After Brando
dropped out of the project, the project tried to replace
him with James Coburn, but Ray became disillusioned and
returned to Kolkata. Columbia expressed interest in reviving
the project several times in the 1970s and 1980s, but
nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, Clarke
and Ray saw similarities in the film to his earlier Alien
script. In a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, Ray had discussed
the collapse of his American co-project. His biographer
Andrew Robinson provided more details in The Inner Eye
(1989). Ray believed that Spielberg's film would not have
been possible without copies of his script of The Alien
having been available in the United States. Spielberg
has denied this charge. Besides The Alien, two other unrealized
projects which Ray had intended to direct were adaptations
of the ancient Indian epic, the Maha-bha-rata, and E.
M. Forster's 1924 novel A Passage to India.In 1969, Ray
released what would be commercially the most successful
of his films. Based on a children's story written by his
grandfather, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of
Goopy and Bagha), it is a musical fantasy. Goopy the singer
and Bagha the drummer, equipped by three gifts allowed
by the King of Ghosts, set out on a fantastic journey.
They try to stop an impending war between two neighbouring
kingdoms. Among his most expensive enterprises, the film
project was difficult to finance. Ray abandoned his desire
to shoot it in colour, as he turned down an offer that
would have forced him to cast a certain Bollywood actor
as the lead.Ray made a film from a novel by the young
poet and writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay. Featuring a musical
motif structure acclaimed as more complex than Charulata,
Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) traces
four urban young men going to the forests for a vacation.
They try to leave their daily lives behind. All but one
of them become involved in encounters with women, which
becomes a deep study of the Indian middle class. According
to Robin Wood, "a single sequence [of the film] ...
would offer material for a short essay".After Aranyer,
Ray addressed contemporary Bengali life. He completed
what became known as the Calcutta Trilogy: Pratidwandi
(1970), Seemabaddha (1971), and Jana Aranya (1975), three
films that were conceived separately but had thematic
connections. Pratidwandi (The Adversary) is about an idealist
young graduate; if disillusioned at the end of film, he
is still uncorrupted. Jana Aranya (The Middleman) showed
a young man giving in to the culture of corruption to
make a living. Seemabaddha (Company Limited) portrayed
an already successful man giving up his morality for further
gains. In the first film, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces
a new, elliptical narrative style, such as scenes in negative,
dream sequences, and abrupt flashbacks. In the 1970s,
Ray adapted two of his popular stories as detective films.
Though mainly addressed to children and young adults,
both Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) and Joy Baba Felunath
(The Elephant God) found some critical following.Ray considered
making a film on the Bangladesh Liberation War but later
abandoned the idea. He said that, as a filmmaker, he was
more interested in the travails of the refugees and not
the politics. In 1977, Ray completed Shatranj Ke Khiladi
(The Chess Players), a Hindi film based on a story by
Munshi Premchand. It was set in Lucknow in the state of
Oudh, a year before the Indian rebellion of 1857. A commentary
on issues related to the colonization of India by the
British, this was Ray's first feature film in a language
other than Bengali. It is his most expensive and star-studded
film, featuring Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Amjad Khan,
Shabana Azmi, Victor Bannerjee and Richard Attenborough.In
1980, Ray made a sequel to Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a somewhat
political Hirak Rajar Deshe (Kingdom of Diamonds). The
kingdom of the evil Diamond King, or Hirok Raj, is an
allusion to India during Indira Gandhi's emergency period.
Along with his acclaimed short film Pikoo (Pikoo's Diary)
and hour-long Hindi film, Sadgati, this was the culmination
of his work in this period.
The last phase (19831992)
In 1983, while working on Ghare Baire (Home and the
World), Ray suffered a heart attack; it would severely
limit his productivity in the remaining 9 years of his
life. Ghare Baire was completed in 1984 with the help
of Ray's son (who operated the camera from then on) because
of his health condition. He had wanted to film this Tagore
novel on the dangers of fervent nationalism for a long
time, and wrote a first draft of a script for it in the
1940s. In spite of rough patches due to Ray's illness,
the film did receive some critical acclaim. It had the
first kiss fully portrayed in Ray's films. In 1987, he
made a documentary on his father, Sukumar Ray. Ray's last
three films, made after his recovery and with medical
strictures in place, were shot mostly indoors, and have
a distinctive style. They have more dialogue than his
earlier films and are often regarded as inferior to his
earlier body of work. The first, Ganashatru (An Enemy
of the People) is an adaptation of the famous Ibsen play,
and considered the weakest of the three. Ray recovered
some of his form in his 1990 film Shakha Proshakha (Branches
of the Tree). In it, an old man, who has lived a life
of honesty, comes to learn of the corruption of three
of his sons. The final scene shows the father finding
solace only in the companionship of his fourth son, who
is uncorrupted but mentally ill. Ray's last film, Agantuk
(The Stranger), is lighter in mood but not in theme. When
a long-lost uncle arrives to visit his niece in Kolkata,
he arouses suspicion as to his motive. This provokes far-ranging
questions in the film about civilization.In 1992, Ray's
health deteriorated due to heart complications. He was
admitted to a hospital, and would never recover. An honorary
Oscar was awarded to him weeks before his death, which
he received in a gravely ill condition. He died on 23
April 1992 at the age of 70.
Film craft
Satyajit Ray considered script-writing to be an integral
part of direction. Initially he refused to make a film
in any language other than Bengali. In his two non-Bengali
feature films, he wrote the script in English; translators
interpreted it in Hindi or Urdu under Ray's supervision.
Ray's eye for detail was matched by that of his art director
Bansi Chandragupta. His influence on the early films was
so important that Ray would always write scripts in English
before creating a Bengali version, so that the non-Bengali
Chandragupta would be able to read it. The craft of Subrata
Mitra garnered praise for the cinematography of Ray's
films. A number of critics thought that his departure
from Ray's crew lowered the quality of cinematography
in the following films. Though Ray openly praised Mitra,
his single-mindedness in taking over operation of the
camera after Charulata caused Mitra to stop working for
him after 1966. Mitra developed "bounce lighting",
a technique to reflect light from cloth to create a diffused,
realistic light even on a set. Ray acknowledged his debts
to Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut of the
French New Wave for introducing new technical and cinematic
innovations.Ray's regular editor was Dulal Datta, but
the director usually dictated the editing while Datta
did the actual work. Because of financial reasons and
Ray's meticulous planning, his films were mostly cut "on
the camera" (apart from Pather Panchali). At the
beginning of his career, Ray worked with Indian classical
musicians, including Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Ali
Akbar Khan. He found that their first loyalty was to musical
traditions, and not to his film. He had a greater understanding
of western classical forms, which he wanted to use for
his films set in an urban milieu. Starting with Teen Kanya,
Ray began to compose his own scores.He used actors of
diverse backgrounds, from famous film stars to people
who had never seen a film (as in Aparajito). Robin Wood
and others have lauded him as the best director of children,
pointing out memorable performances in the roles of Apu
and Durga (Pather Panchali), Ratan (Postmaster) and Mukul
(Sonar Kella). Depending on the talent or experience of
the actor, Ray varied the intensity of his direction,
from virtually nothing with actors such as Utpal Dutt,
to using the actor as "a puppet" (Subir Banerjee
as young Apu or Sharmila Tagore as Aparna). Actors who
had worked for Ray praised his customary trust but said
he could also treat incompetence with "total contempt".
Literary works
Ray created two very popular characters in Bengali
children's literatureFeluda, a sleuth, and Professor
Shonku, a scientist. He was a prominent writer of science
fiction. Feluda often has to solve a puzzle to get to
the bottom of a case. The Feluda stories are narrated
by Topshe, his cousin, something of a Watson to Feluda's
Holmes. The science fictions of Shonku are presented as
a diary discovered after the scientist had mysteriously
disappeared. Ray also wrote a collection of nonsense verse
named Today Bandha Ghorar Dim, which includes a translation
of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky". He wrote a
collection of humorous stories of Mullah Nasiruddin in
Bengali. His short stories for adults were published as
collections of 12 stories, in which the overall title
played with 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. Ray's
short stories give full rein 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 been translated into English, and are
finding a new group of readers.Most of his screenplays
have been published in Bengali in the literary journal
Eksan. Ray wrote an autobiography about his childhood
years, Jakhan Choto Chilam (1982).He also wrote essays
on film, published as the collections: Our Films, Their
Films (1976), along with Bishoy Chalachchitra (1976),
Ekei Bole Shooting (1979). During the mid-1990s, Ray's
film essays and an anthology of short stories were also
published in English in the West. Our Films, Their Films
is an anthology of film criticism by Ray. The book contains
articles and personal journal excerpts. The book is presented
in two sections: Ray first discusses Indian film, before
turning his attention toward Hollywood, specific filmmakers
(Charlie Chaplin and Akira Kurosawa), and movements such
as Italian neorealism. His book Bishoy Chalachchitra was
published in translation in 2006 as Speaking of Films.
It contains a compact description of his philosophy of
different aspects of the cinema. Satyajit Ray designed
four typefaces for roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre,
Daphnis, and Holiday Script, apart from numerous Bengali
ones for the Sandesh magazine. Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre
won an international competition in 1971. In certain circles
of Kolkata, Ray continued to be known as an eminent graphic
designer, well into his film career. Ray illustrated all
his books and designed covers for them, as well as creating
all publicity material for his films. He also designed
covers of several books by other authors.
Critical and popular response
Ray's work has been described as full of humanism
and universality, and of a deceptive simplicity with deep
underlying complexity. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa
said, "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; they criticize
him for lacking the new modes of expression or experimentation
found in works of Ray's contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc
Godard. As Stanley 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 said he could do nothing about the slow pace. Kurosawa
defended him by saying that Ray's films were not slow,
"His work can be described as flowing composedly,
like a big river".Critics have often compared Ray
to artists in the cinema and other media, such as Anton
Chekhov, Renoir, De Sica, Howard Hawks or Mozart. The
writer V. S. Naipaul compared a scene in Shatranj Ki Khiladi
(The Chess Players) to a Shakespearean play; he wrote,
"only three hundred words are spoken but goodness!
terrific things happen." Even critics who
did not like the aesthetics of Ray's films generally acknowledged
his ability to encompass a whole culture with all its
nuances. Ray's obituary in The Independent included the
question, "Who else can compete?"Political ideologues
took issue with Ray's work. In a public debate during
the 1960s, Ray and the Marxist filmmaker Mrinal Sen engaged
in an argument. Sen criticized him for casting a matinée
idol such as Uttam Kumar, whom he considered a compromise.
Ray said that Sen only attacked "easy targets",
i.e. the Bengali middle-classes. Advocates of socialism
said that Ray was not "committed" to the cause
of the nation's downtrodden classes; some critics accused
him of glorifying poverty in Pather Panchali and Ashani
Sanket (Distant Thunder) through lyricism and aesthetics.
They said he provided no solution to conflicts in the
stories, and was unable to overcome his bourgeoisie background.
During the naxalite movements in the 1970s, agitators
once came close to causing physical harm to his son, Sandip.
Early in 1980, Ray was criticized by an Indian M.P. and
former actress Nargis Dutt, who accused Ray of "exporting
poverty." She wanted him to make films to represent
"Modern India."
Legacy
Satyajit Ray is a cultural icon in India and in Bengali
communities worldwide. Following his death, the city of
Kolkata came to a virtual standstill, as hundreds of thousands
of people gathered around his house to pay their last
respects. Satyajit Ray's influence has been widespread
and deep in Bengali cinema; a number of Bengali directors,
including Aparna Sen, Rituparno Ghosh and Gautam Ghose
in India, Tareq Masud and Tanvir Mokammel in Bangladesh,
and Aneel Ahmad in England, have been influenced by his
film craft. Across the spectrum, filmmakers such as Budhdhadeb
Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalakrishnan have acknowledged
his seminal contribution to Indian cinema. Beyond India,
filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, James Ivory, Abbas
Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, François Truffaut, Carlos
Saura, Isao Takahata and Danny Boyle have been influenced
by his cinematic style, with many others such as Akira
Kurosawa praising his work.[56] Gregory Nava's 1995 film
My Family had a final scene that repeated that of Apur
Sansar. Ira Sachs's 2005 work Forty Shades of Blue was
a loose remake of Charulata. Other references to Ray films
are found, for example, in recent works such as Sacred
Evil, the Elements trilogy of Deepa Mehta and even in
films of Jean-Luc Godard. According to Michael Sragow
of The Atlantic Monthly, the "youthful coming-of-age
dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties
owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy". The trilogy
also introduced the bounce lighting technique. Kanchenjungha
(1962) introduced a narrative structure that resembles
later hyperlink cinema. Pratidwandi (1972) helped pioneer
photo-negative flashback and X-ray digression techniques.The
character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in the American animated
television series The Simpsons was named in homage to
Ray's popular character from The Apu Trilogy. Together
with Madhabi Mukherjee, Ray was the first Indian film
figure to be featured on a foreign stamp (Dominica).Many
literary works include references to Ray or his work,
including Saul Bellow's Herzog and J. M. Coetzee's Youth.
Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories contains
fish characters named Goopy and Bagha, a tribute to Ray's
fantasy film. In 1993, UC Santa Cruz established the Satyajit
Ray Film and Study collection, and in 1995, the Government
of India set up Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute
for studies related to film. In 2007, British Broadcasting
Corporation declared that two Feluda stories would be
made into radio programs. During the London Film Festival,
a regular "Satyajit Ray Award" is given to a
first-time feature director whose film best captures "the
artistry, compassion and humanity of Ray's vision".
Wes Anderson has claimed Ray as an influence on his work;
his 2007 film, The Darjeeling Limited, set in India, is
dedicated to Ray.
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 Dadasaheb
Phalke 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.
It was one of his favourite actresses, Audrey Hepburn,
who represented the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences on that day in Calcutta. Ray, unable to attend
the ceremony due to his illness, gave his acceptance speech
to the Academy via live video feed in his home. In 1992
he was posthumously awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for
Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco
International Film Festival; it was accepted on his behalf
by actress Sharmila Tagore.In 1992, the Sight & Sound
Critics' Top Ten Poll ranked Ray at #7 in its list of
"Top 10 Directors" of all time, making him the
highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll. In 2002,
the Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll ranked
Ray at #22 in its list of all-time greatest directors,
thus making him the fourth highest-ranking Asian filmmaker
in the poll. In 1996, Entertainment Weekly magazine ranked
Ray at #25 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list.
In 2007, Total Film magazine included Ray in its "100
Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.
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