I am creating this entry so that I can easily direct my friends here for information on the legendary Indian film director, Satyajit Ray. Though Ray is a well-known name in the movie world, especially in US and Europe, it occurred to me that there are many who haven't yet had a chance to see his films. I whole-heartedly recommend his best known movie, 'Pather Panchali' (Song of the Road) for them.To give an idea about what critics have to say about Ray's works, here is a collection of a few of the praises that were heaped on Ray by some of the famous figures from the film world- directors, critics and authors:
Academy Award Citation, 1992: (Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Audrey Hepburn)"In recognition of his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures, and of his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world.”
Akira Kurosawa: "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.""The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. … I feel that he is a "giant" of the movie industry."
Richard Attenborough: [on Pather Panchali] "One of the most exquisite pieces of cinema in existence".
Martin Scorsese: "His work is in the company of that of living contemporaries like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini.""Ray's magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact, will always stay with me."
"I was in high school and I happened to see 'Pather Panchali' on television. Dubbed in English. With commercials. "It didn't matter. It didn't matter. The image of the Indian culture we had had before, and I'm talking I was 14 years old or 15 years old, were usually through colonialist eyes. And when Satyajit Ray did his films you suddenly not understood the culture because the culture was so complex but you became attached to the culture through the people, and it didn't matter what they were speaking, what they were wearing, what their customs were. Their customs were very, very interesting and surprising, and you suddenly began to realize there are other cultures in the world." - Martin Scorsese Pays Tribute to Satyajit Ray , Washington Post, February 28, 2002
Arthur C. Clark: "Pather Panchali is one of the most heart-breakingly beautiful films ever made; there are scenes which I need never view again, because they are burnt into my memory."
George Lucas: "Satyajit Ray is an extraordinary filmmaker with a long and illustrious career who has had a profound influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world. By honoring Satyajit Ray, the Academy will help bring his work to the attention of a larger public, particularly to young filmmakers, on whom his work will certainly have a positive effect."(Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar, 1991)
Pauline Kael: "Like Renoir and DeSica, Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is. It is difficult to discuss art which is an affirmation of life, without fear of becoming maudlin. But is there any other kind of art, on screen or elsewhere? "In cinema," Ray says, "we must select everything for the camera according to the richness of its power to reveal."
“Satyajit Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director”
Robert Steel: "[When] I did see [Pather Panchali]... I was bowled over. Here was an Indian film that was a film or that matched my concept of a film and a great one at that. It was the first film made in India that I had ever seen which did not embarrass, annoy, or bore me."- Montage Special Issue on Satyajit Ray, 1966
James Ivory: "Satyajit Ray is among the world's greatest directors, living or dead...It would be fitting to honour this great man, who has influenced so many other film makers in all parts of the world, and to salute him with a Lifetime Award in the spring of 1992."(Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar, 1991)
Elia Kazan: "I want to add my voice to those of Scorsese and Merchant in asking the Academy grant Satyajit Ray an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award. I have admired his films for many years and for me he is the filmic voice of India, speaking for the people of all classes of the country... He is the most sensitive and eloquent artist and it can truly be said in his case that when we honor him we are honoring ourselves."
Adib, Times of India, 1956: "There is nothing glib here. There is nothing patchy. Nothing spills over the edges. Everything is clear and in focus. The images speak and we listen with our eyes."
John Schlesinger: "...his extraordinary body of work has not only greatly influenced so many filmmakers, but has profoundly affected their humanitarian attitude".
V.S.Naipaul: ''Ray's films about India are really novels. They have a unity of his vision."[on the conversation between General Outram and Captain Weston in Shatranj Ke Khiladi/The Chess Players]: "It's like a Shakespeare scene. Only three hundred words are spoken but goodness! - terrific things happen."
J.M.Coetzee: [in his novel, Youth]: "At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode - he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which - catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended".
Amartya Sen (Nobel Laureate Economics): "The work of Satyajit Ray presents a remarkably insightful understanding of the relations between cultures, and his ideas remain pertinent to the great cultural debates in the contemporary world, not least in India." - Satyajit Ray and the art of Universalism, The New Republic, April 1, 1996.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: "Out of his great body of work, my own particular favorite is his film Charulata. Although he was such a superb visual artist, Ray's main inspiration was literary. He always wrote his own scripts (as well as directing them and composing his own original score!) and his greatest films were all adaptations of favorite novels and stories, including Charulata, which was based on a novella by Tagore."
Time, 1958: "Pather Panchali is perhaps the finest piece of filmed folklore since Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North. It is a pastoral poem dappled with the play of brilliant images and strong, dark feelings, a luminous revelation of Indian life in language that all the world can understand."
Darius Cooper, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Between Tradition and Modernity, 2000:"Beneath the variety of narrative discourses that he develops, Ray is intent in telling us another story. In film after film, he investigates India's social institutions and the power structures to which they give rise, or vice versa.
Robin Wood: "...What is remarkable is how seldom in Ray's films the spectator is pulled up by any specific obstacle arising from cultural differences ... Ray is less interested in expressing ideas than in communicating emotional experience. "
Roger Ebert: "The great, sad, gentle sweep of 'The Apu Trilogy' remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. The three films, which were made in India by Satyajit Ray between 1950 and 1959, swept the top prizes at Cannes, Venice and London, and created a new cinema for India--whose prolific film industry had traditionally stayed within the narrow confines of swashbuckling musical romances. Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture....['The Apu Trilogy'] is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray."
