Satayajit Ray -part 2

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

Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson

Andrew Robinson will be introducing the film. He is the author of the definitive biography Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye which will be for sale on the evening and a large-format photographic book Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema.  He is now planning a short study of Ray’s Apu Trilogy.

Andrew Robinson continues his article recalling his meetings with Ray in Culcutta in 1983 during the filming of the lavish period film The Home and the World.

Read Part 1

When I first entered Satyajit Ray’s flat in Calcutta, I found him discussing the exact kind of button required by one of his costume designs with a member of his production team. This was typical of his attention to detail. No director, including Chaplin, was more personally responsible for his films. He wrote his scripts solo. He designed the sets and costumes. He acted out the roles for his actors with consummate nuance.

Ray operating a camera

He operated the camera and he edited each frame. He composed the music. He even designed the credits and posters, having earlier worked as a graphic designer and illustrator.

Almost the only thing he chose not to do was act for his camera. He spurned offers from other directors too. “Why not act?”, Marlon Brando once asked Ray in a televised conversation. “No, it’s better behind the camera,” he replied firmly (and a shade tactlessly). “It would be too tedious.”

Calcutta is more prosperous today, but in Ray’s time it was a byword for poverty and deprivation. The day I first visited the studios with him, there was an extended power cut and the studios were lit by hurricane lamps. Ray examined the almost-finished set and instructed his art director on the precise manner in which the curtains should fall, the shape of the half-moon windows above the doors and other details. “It looks rather spectral, doesn’t it?” he said with a smile.

In the clear light of day, I realised what I had missed on our nocturnal visit: the primitive lighting arrangements, the lack of air-conditioning and the ineffective soundproofing. There were some very persistent pigeons roosting in the roof of the studio, which had sometimes to be driven off with stones so that shooting could continue. One of Ray’s assistant directors volunteered: “We are proof against all hazards.” Ray remarked, without a trace of affectation: “After all, we do have the bare essentials -and the rest is here, in my head. I don’t think you need any more than that really.”

Home and the World, Bimala

About creativity, he once told me: “This whole business of creation, of the ideas that come in a flash, cannot be explained by science. I don’t know what can explain it but I know that the best ideas come at moments when you’re not even thinking of it. It’s a very private thing really.”

Satyajit himself was certainly very much a private person. Although he knew himself extremely well, he was guarded about revealing that knowledge to anyone else. This protective shell led many people, both at home in Bengal and in the wider world, to think of Ray as aloof and arrogant. But I never felt he was. I have yet to meet anyone with a genuine feeling for a subject that interested Ray who did not enjoy talking to him about it – cinema, music, painting, literature, a new scientific theory, cricket, the fast-changing face of Calcutta, or any of a host of other things, often quite unexpected. Late in life, he even developed an addiction to the one-armed bandits at a casino in Kathmandu.

Pather Panchali - Little Durga and Indir Thakrun

“He’s become a slot-machine freak,” said his son with a grin, who shot a television film there based on one of his father’s novellas.

Ray’s friend James Ivory wrote to me that seeing Pather Panchali in the USA in the late 1950s “literally changed my life” – it set him on the road to directing films in India, and then in the West.

Satyajit Ray and his films changed my life too, and I shall forever be grateful to him.