Later he was to write: “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. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. It is incredible that a country that has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film-maker. Ray railed at the poor quality of Indian cinema: “The raw material of cinema is life itself. The question is: what does one learn from one’s mistakes? And how deep are the scars? How great is the blow to one’s ego, to one’s confidence and above all else: to the trust in one’s own judgement? Enough to put one off? For some, a minority, the passion endures but for the vast majority it falls by the wayside. They were an ill-matched pair, and the whole venture had an air of farce about it, painful though it was for both of them at the time.” įailure, for every fledgling director, is almost always inevitable, at least at the very start. It was also a time of famine, when bodies literally littered the streets.Īround 1946 Ray began writing film scripts as a hobby, a year later he co-founded a film society and in “1948 the genial Harisadhan Das Gupta…embarked with Satyajit on an attempt to film Tagore’s “Ghare Baire” (“The Home and the World”). Keymer, at a salary of eighty rupees per month. “…A few years later, when the idea of filming “Pather Panchali” first took root in his mind, Satyajit considered approaching Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay for the rights to the novel but he held back, fearful of a rebuff because of his lack of resources.” Īt the time, Ray was working in Calcutta as a junior visualiser for the British-owned advertising agency, D. Some of the scenes that appealed to him then, such as the children huddling together during the storm, later found their way onto celluloid.”

“In 1944” Robinson tells us, Ray “made some woodcuts of simple vitality for an abridgement for children of the novel “Pather Panchali”. If there ever were proof needed that life itself is a miracle it’s this singular and extraordinary film.Īs is my habit I’ll use (mainly) a single source, for the sake of simplicity, this time Andrew Robinson’s masterful account of Satyajit Ray: “The Inner Eye”. How it came to be is an extraordinary story in its own right and deserves recounting. It is, I contend, the best motion picture ever made. In 1955 a film was shown in New York that was a miracle and remains so today: “Pather Panchali”, (The Song of the Little Road) by Satyajit Ray. How are we to value it? How are we to see it? As banal and mundane or something completely different? And the question of the everyday is perennial. The question of the value of life has confronted many it is the key, for example, to understanding “War and Peace”, a most appropriate book for our day and age. Yes, you might ask, Nietzsche speaks of being positive, despite the reality we’re all confronted with and of overcoming innumerable horrors, but how can one go on living knowing all one knows? Has life itself value if so much horror and evil so palpably exist? Having written so much about war, bestiality, cynicism, misery and murder of late I have a morbid fear of depressing even the most ardent of spirits.

Pather panchali book