SPEAKING OF FILM: SATYAJIT RAY

Contributed by James MacGregor

That foremost of India’s filmmakers, the late Satyajit Ray, has for many years been universally accepted as a truly great director of world stature, but many of his thoughts on films and filmmaking have been denied us because they were recorded in his native Bengali. Penguin Books India have now overturned this barrier with this translation by Gopa Majumdar of papers from Ray’s estate.

Films and the language and grammar of Cinema were a life-long study for Ray. All his life he strove for greater personal understanding of the works of others and used all this accumulated knowledge to serve his own vision; something he achieved so effectively as to become an internationally acknowledged master of cinema.

Majumdar has included many papers written or published before only in Bengali, such as Chalachitra, a compilation ofarticles on cinema Ray published over 25 years ago, now appearing in English for the first time. Also included in Majumdar’s book is the text of My Life, My Work, the Amal Bhattacharji lecture Satyajit Ray delivered in 1982.

From the release of his first feature Pather Panchali (The Little Road) in 1955 with immediate recognition of his talents at the Cannes Film Festival, Ray was seen as a remarkable filmmaker. His films were all set in India, in Bengali language,which ironically made his films less accessible to his many countrymen speaking Hindi or other languages. Despite this barrier, his films have a resonance that is universally understood, about what it is to be a human being, with all the flaws,
expectations, frustrations and joys that are in important part of all our experience.

Ray delighted in the myriad of significant details that tell us about ourselves and which are all part of the bigger picture of all of us as individual people. He was inspired by Italian Neo-realist Vittorio De Sica’s portrayal in Bicycle Thieves, of ordinary life in the poverty-stricken outskirts of post-war Rome, to also want to shoot entirely on location using amateur actors.

The book takes us right into his working methods and his innovations and inside the challenges of making films that will connect with people but also opens up to greater understanding, the work of a host of other western filmmakers Ray admired. From Jean Renoir and De Sica to Orson Welles, Hitchcock and Kurosawa; from the pioneers of early Russian cinema to the greats of early Soviet cinema, like Tisse, Dovzhenko and Eisenstein. All are revealed through Ray’s critical insights and analyses, now rendered into English and made more accessible by this book.
Translator Gopa Majumdar clearly has a precise ear for language. Ray’s words take on a life and an existence of their own under her pen. You can hear Ray’s voice coming through clear, in her rendition of his words:

“It’s not possible to understand the language of cinema unless one keeps both one’s eyes and ears open. If a scene does not have any sound, even its absence can convey a special meaning. Silence itself becomes its message.”

Publisher: Penguin Books India


Author: Satyajit Ray. Translated by Gopa Majumdar.


Paperback: 220 pages: 

List Price: £10. available from The Satyajit Ray Foundation