Satyajit Ray: The cinematic poet of human emotions and Bengali realism.

 Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) was an Indian filmmaker and one of the dozen or so great masters of world cinema. He made his films in Bengali, languages. And yet, his films are of universal interest. They are about things that make up the human race – relationships, emotions, struggles, conflicts, joys and sorrows.

 Satyajit Ray was truly a Renaissance man, an auteur who had complete control over all the aspects of his films.  The stories he told were very articulate representations of ordinary life, of ordinary people. Most of his editing took place in the camera, and he was very, very certain about the scene he wanted to shoot.  He is largely remembered as the consummate auteur. His most famous contribution to world cinema was Pather Panchali, the first movie of the Apu Trilogy.

His first film, Pather Panchali, is an adaptation of a 1929 novel about a young boy, Apu, growing up in rural Bengal, where the abject poverty of his family does little to suppress his youthful inquisitiveness and awakening sensibilities. Ray followed Apu’s progress in two further films – ‘Aparajito’ (1956) and ‘Apur Sansar’ (1959) – in which the maturing boy moves to Calcutta to take up studies and find his place in the adult world.  It was an incisive foray into colonial village life in Bengal and artfully depicted sombre Indian traditions and mores.

Ray’s 1964 film ‘Charulata’ is a perfect example of this more concentrated approach, a closeted, short story-like drama set almost entirely within a house and its grounds in 1880s Calcutta. While her wealthy husband, Bhupati, busies himself with running his own newspaper, his wife, Charu, occupies her time reading, relaxing and spying on passers-by through her field glasses. But the arrival of her husband’s young cousin not only sends ripples of adulterous desire through her pinned-butterfly existence, but also sets Charu along her own path towards an artistic awakening as a writer.

In the movie, the loneliness of Charulata is portrayed through images of doors, windows and grills, showing the interrelationship between the indoors and the outdoors,  and the birth and death of her emotions. She uses a pair of binoculars to watch the inaccessible world to get closer to it and find her freedom.. Through her binoculars, she looks at what is bright outside from a dark room. Here, the play of light of shadow brilliantly suggests her state. 

 

Set in the 1920s, Jalsaghar, after the Indian government had abolished the feudal zamindari system, stars Chhabi Biswas as a landed aristocrat, Roy, who sequesters himself in his grand home, taking refuge in his beloved classical music while the winds of change rage through the outside world. Ray brings Roy’s perfumed world to life with glittering images of fireworks, gleaming chandeliers and the cavernous extravagance of his music room, where he invites sitarists and dancers to entertain him and his guests. But there are also portentous images of doom – a lightning storm, an insect drowning in a goblet, a spider crawling across the portrait of one of his illustrious ancestors – that suggest these musicians are merely fiddling while Roy’s Rome burns.

 

Satyajit Ray, the master storyteller, has left a cinematic heritage that belongs as much to India as to the world.  The cinema of Satyajit Ray is a rare blend of intellect and emotion. His films depict a fine sensitivity without using melodrama or dramatic excesses. He evolved a cinematic style that is almost invisible. He strongly believed – “The best technique is the one that’s not noticeable”.

Ray was deeply concerned with the social identity of his characters. He believed that the behaviour of people emerges from their existence in a particular place and time in a particular social context. This was and is largely ignored in most popular Indian song-and-dance films. Even the names of characters and places are made as “universal” as possible.

On the other hand, the extraordinary believability of Ray’s characters comes from their being firmly rooted in a well-defined society, usually Bengali life in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Curiously, the feeling of “universality” stems from this authentic localism and specifics. He generally suggests the context by meaningful details, gradually forming an enveloping world.

He used colour very carefully. He preferred the colours to be closest to what he had used at the shoot. He chose the costumes and the décor very carefully and did not like the laboratory to do any colour corrections.

Ray uses the mise-en-scène according to the outdoor scenes on locations and a preferred studio for indoor shoots. His team worked with limited resources but with great technical resourcefulness. Ray believed that a film set was built for the camera and for the camera angles only. Anything that was not effective through the camera was a waste of good money and effort, however pleasing it might look to the naked eye. His camera moves as per the needs of the situation, rather than out of any fixed notions of style. It is this conviction that makes the opening of Charulata so exceptional. Ray does not call attention to the camerawork; the cinematography acts on the mind as part of a complete form.

He would start working on music in very early stages of a production – sometimes as early as the script stage. He would keep notes of the music ideas as they evolved. After completing the final edit, he would usually shut himself in his study for several days to compose the music. He meticulously wrote the scores in either Indian or Western notation, depending on the musicians. To him, the role of music was to make things simpler for the audience. He experimented with mixing Western and Indian elements in his scores. He composed background music that belonged to a particular film rather than to any recognisable tradition.

Most of Ray’s characters are, however, of average ability and talents—unlike the subjects of his documentary films. It was the inner struggle and corruption of the conscience-stricken person that fascinated Ray; his films primarily concern thought and feeling, rather than action and plot.

His films generally seem slow, but that is how his images linger and are visually pleasing to understand. If one listens to the background scores, one gets drawn into the mood and the period of the film. Every detail meaningfully contributes to his storytelling.