Tag Archives: Satyajit Ray

Manas Mukul Pal's debut feature Sahaj Pather Gappo released in September 2017 is quite different from the popular or even the parallel trends in Bengali cinema. It is refreshingly different in spite of its weaknesses. Silhouette editor Amitava Nag writes a critique (but not a review) drawing parallels with a Tamil film Kaaka Muttai which...

Impressed by Utpal Dutt’s interpretation of Othello, the famous filmmaker Madhu Bose offered him the role of Indo-Anglian poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. This was the beginning of a long career marked by a thick portfolio of films in Hindi and Bengali while the stage remained his first love and his troupe continued its movement in serious political...

An Unfilmed Visual Script: Satyajit Ray’s Ravi Shankar is a very different and special book. It embeds within itself, a 32 page drawing book containing more than a 100 sketches by Satyajit Ray of sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar playing the sitar on a stage. The drawings capture the mood of the musical flow through form (shape) and suggested movement....

Abesh Das has written a Bengali book on Tapan Sinha’s oeuvre of unique cinema named Tapan Sinha – Sarbik Chalachchitra Bikhha. Silhouette editor Amitava Nag speaks to the author to explore what inspired him to write this book and to find out the distinct features of Sinha’s films.

The recently concluded Kolkata International Film Festival threw up a few interesting films including Katarina Zrinka Matijevic’s The Trampoline, Maria Govan’s Play the Devil, Kim Ki Duk’s Net and Kristina Grozeva-Petar Valchanov’s Glory among others. Silhouette editor Amitava Nag finds the use of eyes in these films to be affecting. They seem...

This was no traditional screenplay. Satyajit Ray 'drew' the script of his first film Pather Panchali in a sketch book, using the sketches as a visual guide when he started shooting eventually. The Pather Panchali Sketchbook recently published by Harper Collins Publishers India in association with the Satyajit Ray Society was launched...

The Calcutta Film Society was registered in October 1947, with Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Dasgupta, Manojendu Majumdar and Purnendu Narayan as the founding members. The society became an important and integral part of the film culture that thrived in Calcutta and remained relevant for decades even though most of its founding members are no more. A Silhouette...

This is not a biography since Soumitra himself doesn’t believe in one as he mentions in his note on the book. It is also not a comprehensive analysis of Soumitra’s work; rather it is an introduction to twenty of his most favourite roles, as selected by him, along with an attempt to showcase the many sides of an incomparable artist. It was tough...

Destroyed by nitrate fires, stripped bare of silver, decaying in locked cans in hot and humid, unfavourable weather conditions or sold by the kilo in flea markets, the films of India, including the classics are meeting a tragic fate. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder of Film Heritage Foundation highlighted the critical lack of preservation and restoration...

On reading Pather Panchali one cannot help feeling that Bibhuti Bhushan’s construction of Apu has given Ray an understanding of child psychology. Most importantly, Ray imbibed from Pather Panchali, the leit motif of his body of films. This recurring motif is Apu. We encounter Apu not only in Apu trilogy, but also in Pratidwandhi, Seemabaddha and his...

Soumitra narrowed his focus on Ray’s handling of actors – how awe-inspiring it was to find that he would probably never cast someone who doesn’t seem fit for the role apart from a very few deviations.

As the years passed, I began to feel that the main character in several of the following movies of Satyajit Ray could be seen as a figure of Apu proceeding on his journey of discovery in the world and establishing new relationships with others. He became also a sort of model for many of us to imitate until one could see him in Manomahan Mitra (The Lovely...

Escape is a theme in both films, with the Beatles given more opportunity for and being much better at it than Arindam. His escape comes mostly in dreams, and even they turn dark after offering a few moments of fantasy and fulfillment.

Indian cinema reveals a wide variety of masculinities in the male protagonist, from God figures drawn from Hindu mythology to saints derived from the stories of saint poets; from swash-buckling, sword-swinging heroes whose aim is to rescue damsels in distress to the generous, kind-hearted, affectionate and self-sacrificing hero who gives up his love...

Ray’s extraordinary Calcutta films have not attracted a fraction of the analysis devoted to his early work. Western critics have tended, with the exception of Andrew Robinson and one or two others, to underestimate their qualities; at home, they were often dismissed at the time as politically timid and have almost been forgotten of late.

Ray, in his characteristic swagger, put it down to the puerile nature of his native Bengali audience and the ‘backward, stupid and trashy’ quality of contemporaneous work in the Bengali film industry.

Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), the 1969 masterpiece by Satyajit Ray, looks at the vagaries and vicissitudes of the “new generation” then.

The quest to create strong, powerful and most importantly - relevant visual syntax for the written word is alive in every serious director working in the medium today.

Ever since the emergence of regional cinema in India, Bengal and it’s films and film makers have played a dominant role in the shaping of cinematic history of the country. As such, cinema in Bengal, has taken many interesting twist and turns. Since the days of the “bioscope” in the 1890s, Bengali cinema has followed a rather zigzag pattern. This...

Ray’s preoccupation with truth, beauty and goodness is destined to survive because it essentially presents a human programme, man’s perpetual struggle to become human.

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.’

In the works of Ray himself we will find that he made black-white after making films in colour as well, to him, it’s the subject which demands the medium and the treatment.