Every time you watched a Satyajit Ray film you discovered something new. Every frame, every film lent itself to multiple interpretations. Little wonder then, when Shyam Benegal, as a youngster with dreams of becoming a filmmaker, went to watch the film, Pather Panchali, he watched it with rapt attention. It was, to use a popular term, a game-changer for Benegal.
At the end of the film's show in Calcutta, he went back to the turnstiles, purchased a ticket for the next show and went right in. He repeated the exercise the next day. Every time he watched the film he found newer shades, newer meaning; the film's specificity doing nothing to curb its universal appeal. This book, sober yet scintillating, has similar qualities. You read one piece by the inimitable Ray, you enjoy it. With time you soak it in, and come back to the same piece a little later. This time the layers begin to peel off.
The qualities of detailing, the enviable ability to make the obvious interesting and to make mundane enthusing, begin to grip you. Ray never shouts, never screams for attention, he merely nudges you, plods you on. And before you realise, he has a grip over you. If as a filmmaker he often had the viewers spellbound, he displays similar polish as an author. Ray uses words with a felicity that is natural; he chooses instances and individuals with care. It is all the more laudable considering his son, Sandip, a noted filmmaker himself, used all tools of research to put together these essays, some of which have been printed earlier in publications no longer extant. If, for instance, in the piece on Jean Renoir, you begin by making a note of the fine details you missed of Calcutta suburbs, you come back to realise that Ray was actually talking of the filmmaker, how he grasped Calcutta as an outsider but his sensibilities were all French.
As a writer, he just alludes to very human qualities, does not wax eloquent. Quoting Renoir, Ray calls a temple simply “humble … maybe one man built, and maybe the same man worships in it”. Renoir's receptivity comes to the fore as does his inability to internalise the moment.
Tool of escapism
Ditto when at the end of the piece Ray talks of Indian cinema. Without slipping into negativity, he reveals the state of Hindi cinema. “Of our film-producing provinces, Bombay has devised a perfect formula to entice and amuse the illiterate multitude that forms the bulk of our film audiences.” Without a hammer, Ray tells us that for our film-watching public — often largely brought up by the working class — cinema is a tool of escapism.
He is on an equally good footing when it comes to talking of Bibhuti Bhusan, and how he found it to be “one of the most filmable of all Bengali novels”. It is here that Ray does not shy away from admitting that when he adapted a literary work to cinema, he believed in a process called “transformation” and, as in the case of Pather Panchali, though he “left out much from the book, what remained so closely conformed to what people liked in the book that the omissions were largely forgiven”.
However, it is in the chapter “The Confronting Question” that Ray actually sparkles, and comes across as a practitioner of art who was never in awe of the West. “The cinema of the West today is a depressing vista on the whole. It is a cinema mainly of the youth turned cynical, heretical. Nothing is sacred any more. Conventions are there to be scoffed at, flouted.” The piece was written in 1970, you could whisper it all over again. Therein lay the genius of Ray. His literary work, like his cinematic oeuvre, transcends the limitations of time and space. He does not forecast things, but his words have a trenchant quality not easily attained by lesser mortals.
And here in this book, he shows his not-so-insignificant ability with pen and brush. His sketches of Akira Kurosawa, John Ford and Rabindranath Tagore reveal a man sure of his space and moment. You could say it about the book too.
DEEP FOCUS — Reflections on Cinema: Satyajit Ray, Edited by Sandip Ray; HarperCollins Publishers, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 450.
