Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali, is being screened by GalleryFilm on 16 November at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Andrew Robinson will be introducing the film. He is the author of about twenty books, including the definitive biography Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (1989/2004) and a large-format photographic book Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema (2005); he also edited three screenplays by Ray, including The Chess Players. He is now planning a short study of Ray’s Apu Trilogy.

Durga in Pather Panchali

Andrew Robinson recalls his meetings with the film director Satyajit Ray, one of the giants of world cinema.

Part 1

You might not think that Satyajit Ray and John Huston, the larger-than-life director of The Maltese Falcon and Moby Dick, would have much in common. But when I was writing a biography of Ray in the 1980s, I received a letter from Huston about Ray and his work. “I recognised the footage as the work of a great film-maker. I liked Ray enormously on first encounter. Everything he did and said supported my feelings on viewing the film.”

The footage in question was from Ray’s maiden venture, Pather Panchali. Huston saw it in a rough cut in Calcutta in 1954 and strongly recommended it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the film received its world premiere in 1955.

Today Pather Panchali has become an enduring classic of world cinema, besides being the film that put Indian cinema on the international map. Even if you see nothing else by Satyajit Ray, none of his more than 30 feature films, you have to see Pather Panchali. This film, alone, was probably what persuaded the Hollywood Academy to give Ray an Oscar for lifetime achievement just before his death in 1992.

Apu and Durga running to catch a glimpse of a train, a famous scene of the film

Akira Kurosawa, perhaps the greatest of Ray’s admirers among his fellow directors, told me: “Mr Ray is a wonderful and respectful man. I feel that he is a ‘giant’ of the movie industry.” Kurosawa’s first impression of Ray when they met in Japan was of his great height, his candid manner and his piercing gaze. “It came to me spontaneously that such sublime creations could only be the work of such a man.”

I too had the same feeling of harmony between the man and his films when I first met Ray. He had come to London to give an on-stage interview at the National Film Theatre in 1982, and the organisers had put him in the Savoy Hotel near by. I went there for an interview and almost immediately we started talking in detail about his films and his life.

The conversation lasted more than three hours. His extraordinary articulacy did not strike me until afterwards, when I discovered from my tape-recording that he spoke in complete sentences, with punctuation. But I remember being surprised by the ease with which he fitted into a British context while remaining uniquely himself. Only when I got to know him better did he admit: “I don’t feel very creative when I’m abroad somehow. I need to be in my chair in Calcutta!”

Eight months later I arrived in Calcutta for the first time to watch the shooting of Ray’s lavish period film The Home and the World, based on the novel by Rabindranath Tagore. I was commissioned to cover it for American Cinematographer – the ideal excuse to pry into every aspect of its production.

I soon got to know the city from a unique perspective: Ray on the hunt for props, costumes and materials to suit Tagore’s period settings, in the shops and homes of his intricate network of relatives, friends and contacts. “Come any time. We are very busy shopping around getting props from people’s houses,” Ray had told me over the phone at my hotel – and he meant exactly that.

I tagged along as he and his assistants went calmly in pursuit of a wind-up gramophone of circa 1907 vintage, a pistol that originally belonged to Tagore’s grandfather, imitation classical figurines and other objets d’art, and bric-a-brac of all kinds from a shop stuffed with the relics of the Raj.

Everything we collected was put into his Ambassador car (a version of the 1950s Morris Oxford ubiquitous in India), then we all climbed in too and bumped over Calcutta’s potholes towards the studios. I could imagine no other world-famous film director used to operating quite like this.

Andrew Robinson continues his description of  his meetings with Ray on Friday.