Showing posts with label Aparajito. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aparajito. Show all posts
There's no country where they haven't heard of Satyajit Ray-Shyam Benegal
8:12 AM
Niharika Lal (BOMBAY TIMES; May 6, 2022)
Veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal, who recently inaugurated the Satyajit Ray’s Gallery at the National Museum of Indian Cinema (NMIC) in Mumbai, as part of the filmmaker’s 101st birth anniversary celebrations – talks about what makes Ray iconic, an original and a marker for Indian cinema (“Everything is either before or after Ray”).
‘SATYAJIT RAY PUT INDIAN CINEMA ON THE WORLD MAP’
Ray’s Pather Panchali had its world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York as far back as 1955. And according to Benegal, it was Ray who put Indian cinema on the world map. He explains, “Ray is that one Indian filmmaker whom everybody knows. In fact, there is no country in the world where they don’t know who Satyajit Ray was. If you go to a West African country – Niger in Nigeria, for example – and utter the words ‘Satyajit Ray’, they will know him. Everybody recognized Indian cinema because of Ray.”
‘IF IT WASN’T FOR RAY, WE WOULD NOT HAVE HAD AN FTII,IT STARTED BECAUSE OF HIM’
Talking about Ray’s reputation as one of the most original filmmakers, Benegal says, “Indian cinema was developing in a particular way when Satyajit Ray came on to the scene, and then there was a great amount of transformation. And therefore, he is a marker — there’s before Satyajit Ray and after Satyajit Ray.”
He adds, “If it wasn’t for Ray, we would not have had an Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). It started because of him. The whole idea was that filmmaking is not just about moving pictures — people singing and dancing and speaking dialogues. It’s an art form of its own. He not only made the audience and filmmakers conscious of the fact that cinema is an art, but also the government.”
‘RAY WAS A MULTI-FACETED GENIUS’
The NMIC — in association with the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), Kolkata — has created a gallery on Ray, with a life-size statue of Ray set up at the NMIC. Here, visitors can interactively explore Ray’s filmography and get a glimpse of many of his films’ scenes. Says Benegal, “I find the gallery wonderful because it is very well-curated. The design gives an idea of what kind of filmmaker Ray was. He was not just a filmmaker, but a multi-faceted genius. He used to design his film’s posters, titles, and even storyboards. I don’t think we’ve had anybody quite like Satyajit Ray since his time – before or after.”
‘THERE WERE DEBATES LIKE – WOH TOH SIRF BANGLA MEIN FILM BANATA HAI, HOW CAN HE BE CONSIDERED AN INDIAN FILMMAKER?’
Despite the global accolades garnered by Ray, Benegal says that the Mumbai film industry continued to consider Ray as a regional filmmaker. He said, “Unke uss zamane mein bahut grudge hoti thi. Mumbai film industry used to feel – ‘Woh toh regional filmmaker hai. Hindi mein film nahi banata hai’. That’s why he made Shatranj Ke Khiladi. They used to say – ‘Woh toh sirf Bangla mein film banata hai, how can he be considered an Indian filmmaker?’ Iss kism ke debates hote thay.”
REVISTING RAY’S CLASSICS
This month, a three-day Satyajit Ray Film Festival was organized in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Pune, in honour of the filmmaker, from May 2-4. In Mumbai, the opening film was Aparajito, about which Shyam Benegal says, “This is a film which is, again, underrated in its style. After Pather Panchali, when Aparajito came out in 1956,everybody felt that it didn’t match up to the original. But the funny part of this is that Aparajito is a very fine film. The Banaras sequence in it is just outstanding, and the way he used the city in Aparajito is very unique.”
The making of Satyajit Ray and the birth of Indian global cinema
7:49 AM
His first film, Pather Panchali, took Indian cinema to a different league and there was no looking back after that. The legend that was Satyajit Ray can perhaps best be understood if one considers the different influences on his life, from Tagore to his illustrious family
Suman Ghosh (THE TIMES OF INDIA; December 5, 2021)
When Satyajit Ray was a little boy, his mother took him to meet Rabindranath Tagore at his abode in Santiniketan. Ray wanted Tagore to inscribe a poem in his notebook. Tagore obliged and wrote this:
Many miles I have roamed, over many a day
From this land to that, ready for the price to pay
Mountain ranges and oceans too, lay in my way
Yet two steps from my door, with wide open eyes,
I did not see the dewdrop, on a single sheaf of rice
After handing this over to the boy, he told his mother: “Let him keep this, and when he is a little older, he will understand this.” Later in life, the boy shook the film world by portraying the story of a small village in Bengal called Nishchindipur in Pather Panchali. He did focus on a “dewdrop” close to his homeland and was able to emanate an effect that inspired generations of filmmakers all over the world, from Martin Scorsese to Abbas Kiarostami, and put Indian cinema on the world map.
The reason I mention the Tagore poem is that it summarises Ray’s philosophy of life and his films. Though very local in nature, his films managed to strike a universal chord, hence were global in reach. Reflecting on the oeuvre of Ray, almost 65 years after the above incident, another Santiniketan protégée, Amartya Sen, delivering the Ray Memorial lecture in 1995 had this to say: “The great filmmaker’s eagerness to seek the larger unit (ultimately his ability to talk to the whole world) combined well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small: the individuality of each person.”
Tagore’s influence on the Ray family was since the times of Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhury — Satyajit Ray’s grandfather — who was a writer, painter, singer and a pioneer of the Bengali printing industry. Tagore was an enthusiastic advocate of Upendrakishore’s writing, encouraging him to translate and adapt stories from abroad as well as from Indian legends, but as a frequent visitor to their house, Tagore came to regard Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray’s father, as one of his favourite young friends.
Sukumar Ray was a genius himself who excelled in many fields. He graduated with double honours in physics and chemistry from the esteemed Presidency College and also started the Nonsense Club around that time. His nonsense rhymes are folklore in Bengal, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. He was an adept photographer, and in 1922, he became the second Indian to be made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Thus, the influence of both his grandfather, whom he had not seen, and his father who passed away when he was not even three, was evident in Satyajit Ray.
But I also want to emphasise the influence of women in Ray’s life at a younger age, since the portrayal of well-etched women characters — Karuna Banerjee in Aparajito, Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata, Kapurush and Mahanagar, Sharmila Tagore in Apur Sansar, Devi and Aranyer Din Ratri, to name a few — formed a strong element in his films.
Kadambini Ganguly, who was the first woman physician of India, was one of Ray’s ancestors. It was Kadambini who delivered Ray and although he never knew her (she died when he was only two), he felt her influence through the profound effect she had on all the Ray women, including his mother, Suprabha Ray, who was a very strong and dignified lady. After the untimely death of her husband, she moved to her brother’s house at Bhowanipore with her three-year-old son. As a young widow, she travelled every day by bus during the 1930s and 40s from south to north Calcutta, where she worked as superintendent of the handicraft department at Vidyasagar Bani Bhawan. This reminds one of Madhabi Mukherjee’s character of a working woman in Ray’s Mahanagar.
Ray’s mother was excellent in knitting and stitching, and an excellent sculptor too, whose engraving of Gautam Buddha still finds a place at his Bishop Lefroy Road home (in Calcutta). It was his mother who brought him up, taught him, looked after him, cared for him, and communicated the family’s creative and literary legacy. In fact it was his mother who convinced him to spend time at Santiniketan in the proximity of Tagore at a formative stage in his life. There, he learnt art from the great Nandalal Bose.
In Ray’s Aparajito, world cinema witnessed one of the most endearing mother-son relationships ever seen on celluloid. One wonders how much of it was autobiographical, though the source material is from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s classic.
If one delves into his earliest awareness of cinema, one must date back to his grandfather’s printing press. The printing press in Apur Sansar comes to mind reading about those stories from his childhood. In the block-making section of the printing press there was a huge imported process camera whose operator Ramdohin became his friend. One imagines little Toto in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 masterpiece Cinema Paradiso in such a setting, where the projectionist Alfredo instills a deep love of films in the boy. But the story in his memoirs, which I find extremely cinematic, was a bit later in life at his uncles’ house. At noon when summer rays of the bright sun got in through a chink in the shutters of the bedroom, Ray would lie there alone for hours watching the “free bioscope” created on the wall: a large inverted image of the traffic outside.
Magic lanterns were popular toys in Bengali homes around that period. It was a box with a tube at the front containing a lens, a chimney on top and a handle on the right-hand side. The film ran on two reels with a kerosene lamp for light source. Ray himself suspected that his first inklings of a fascination with cinema started from those images. Ingmar Bergman, another giant of world cinema, also had a similar inspiration through magic lanterns in childhood and subsequently named his autobiography ‘The Magic Lantern’.
A little later in life, Ray infused himself with influences from music, painting, drama, and a host of other art forms which contributed to the artist that he was. His subsequent journey of getting addicted to films and his struggle to make Pather Panchali are quite well documented. His films gathered accolades all over the world and put Indian films firmly in the firmament of cinema history.
I find it quite intriguing that although Ray had straddled disparate subjects in his films, he never ventured out of a classical storytelling style – an orderly unfolding of events with a beginning, a middle and an end; a firm rein applied to emotion, and an avoidance of disorientation.
He never experimented with form and structure in his films, unlike Mrinal Sen or Mani Kaul in the Indian filmmaking context. The famous ghost dance in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne was the closest foray Ray made into cinematic experimentation. Was it mainly because the films which prompted his interest in filmmaking were of the classical Hollywood tradition — the films of John Ford, Frank Capra or Billy Wilder — or that he was not brave enough to venture out of his comfort zone?
One might get an idea of his thought process from his own writings. He was an ardent admirer of the French New Wave of the 60s and singled out Godard as the thoroughgoing iconoclast. He wrote of how Godard changed basic cinema language in his films. But he was also aware that Godard’s cinema can be boiled down to a cinema of the head, not the heart, and therefore a cinema of the minority. Ray was extremely conscious of the “audience connect”.
So any experimentation with the syntax of film language would alienate the audience, and hence it was not a viable proposition for him. The stigma of esotericism always bothered him. According to him, “avant-gardism” is a luxury which we cannot yet afford in our country. That begs the question, given the strong analytical grasp which Ray had on the craft of cinema, would he have been a different type of filmmaker, experimenting with basic cinematic language at a much deeper level, if he had the luxury which French cinema afforded to the greats? These are counterfactual questions, but worth pondering.
How Lee Kline managed to restore Apu Trilogy despite the reels being burnt
7:38 AM
Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; October 26, 2015)
One of the highlights of the
17th MAMI Mumbai Film Festival partnered by Mumbai Mirror is Satyajit
Ray's Apu Trilogy. Digitally restored prints of Pather Panchali (1955),
Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959) will be screened at Jio MAMI
which opens on October 29.Quiz Lee Kline, the restorer who has presided over the technical group at The Criterion Collection for the last 20 years, on the biggest challenge he faced on this project, and he says it started with tracking down the original negatives. Eleven reels of Aparajito, nine reels of Pather Panchali and two reels of Apur Sansar were located in the vaults of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. “But because of a fire, parts of the negatives were warped from the heat and those were the hardest to restore,“ he reminisces.
The fire started in July 1993 at Hendersons Film Laboratories in South London and many of the Ray films which had just arrived from India en route to LA were badly burnt. Still, the negatives were shipped to the US and tucked away for two decades.
Kline was at Sony Studios' post-production facility, Colorworks, when the first of the burnt reels was delivered. He opened one of the cans to be faced with a warped reel with frayed edges, heads burnt, the film brittle and flaky. There was residue from tape, glue and wax all over the reel, yet, surprisingly, 30 digitised seconds revealed perfect images of Aparajito lying in between the sprocket holes.
Reel 3b of Aparajito was hand-carried to Bolgna, Italy, where after initial tests they realised the only way forward was to repair as much of the negative as possible and scan pin-registered wet gate, the most expensive procedure. The Criterion partnered with the Academy to fund the project. L'Ummagine Ritrovato offered a substantial discount. After a year at Bologna, repairing and scanning the restored negative, and hours of digital repairs and colour grading at The Criterion, they combed the archives for alternative film to replace the missing shots. They found it at Janus, a wing of the Criterion, and the Academy, along with some fine grain positives and dupe negatives at the British Film Institute.
“A complete assembly of the entire film was created in a digital timeline with an edit decision list identifying the best sections or shots of each film to be used. The scanning and digital restoration were kept in 4K resolution so that it would be the most affordable,“ explains Kline.
He admits that Apur Sansar had
very little original negative remaining after the fire, but because it
was made later, they had access to the best quality safety elements. And
the 35 mm fine grain that they ended up using almost in its entirety
printed well and had an excellent grey scale, so the final result is
exceptional even without access to the negative.“Pather Panchali was in the worst condition. The optically printed dissolves in the film were made crudely and quickly, and they were cut into the negative so they would snap out of the beautiful images surrounding them. Certain scenes in the negative were replaced by duplicate footage, so they looked generationally inferior to other sections. Wax was applied on the surface of the entire negative to preserve it, but the fire had melted it. Wet-gate scanning helped but only 40 per cent of the original negative could ultimately be used due to missing footage or extreme warping of the film which made the image unwatchable,“ explains Kline.
Aparajito had the most usable footage from the repaired and restored negatives. The replacement film too was also in good condition, so the final version is better than the restored Pather Panchali. “The filmmaking and editing was also more advanced, so the optically printed shots for dissolves and fades are more sophisticated,“ he says.
Months were also spent fixing scratches and tears, warping, flicker and instability, cleaning the dirt and upgrading the sound. Ryan Hullings, supervisor of the audio department at The Criterion, informs that most of the soundtracks were so damaged they were completely unusable. “The best surviving sound element uncovered for Pather Panchali was a 35 mm magnetic track provided by the Academy. It's a safety master made in the '90s after the fire. Working primarily in Pro Tools and using various digital tools, we manually removed the vestiges of age (clicks, pops, crackle, thumps, hiss, hum, distortion, dropouts), shaped the timbre using EQs and tightly synchronised sound with picture. I believe the film sounds better now than at any time since the day of its release,“ Ryan asserts.
For authenticity, they intentionally didn't smooth out the occasional abrupt change in room tone or dialogue quality resulting from the overdubbing of a line or a coarse audio edit.
Suitable audio sources for Apur Sansar were the most difficult to come by. The best source, a 35mm print, was incomplete so several reels from a second, inferior print were used to fill the gaps, and then another 35 mm mag which had been previously restored so sounded very different from the other two prints to complete the soundtrack. “For Aparajito we were lucky to turn up a decent, complete 35 mm print in Italy that was transferred in Bologna. It conformed easily to match our picture master, which was a relief."
Satyajit Ray's son Sandip met the restorers in Kolkata before they started and kept in touch throughout. Says Kline, “The biggest honour was when he came to New York for the premiere of the restored Pather Panchali at the Museum of Modern Art 50 years after it was shown there by his father and said his father would have liked what we did.“
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