Satyajit Ray

A CURA DELLA REDAZIONE

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Ha dato rinomanza artistica internazionale al cinema del suo paese. "Nel 1950 andai in Inghilterra ed ebbi occasione di vedere i primi film neorealisti italiani. Improvvisamente mi resi conto che opere come Ladri di biciclette erano state fatte con pochi soldi e senza attori professionisti. Questo veramente mi aprì gli occhi. Durante il viaggio di ritorno scrissi l'intera sceneggiatura di Pather Panchali". Nel frattempo, Jean Renoir girava in India Il fiume (1951) che ebbe pure un forte influsso su Ray. Cominciato nel 1952, Pather Panchali, per difficoltà finanziarie, fu terminato nel marzo del 1955. Al festival di Cannes della primavera 1966 Pather Panchali (Il lamento del sentiero) costituì una rivelazione analoga a quella del giapponese Rashomon a Venezia nel 1951. Il film successivo, Apanajito (L'invitto), ottenne invece a Venezia il Leone d'oro nel 1957, bruciando sul traguardo Le notti bianche di Visconti. La trilogia si sarebbe conclusa più tardi con Apur Sansar (Il mondo di Apu, 1959) e sarebbe stata denominata "trilogia di Apu" dal nome del protagonista: un fanciullo che diventa uomo e, in questo suo sviluppo, consegna l'immagine spirituale di una civiltà alle soglie di profondi mutamenti. È un'epica dell'India moderna espressa nei toni lirici, contemplativi e introspettivi tipici dell'arte e del pensiero di questo paese. Tuttavia il bengali, la lingua in cui era scritto il romanzo originario di Bibhutibhusan Bandapaddhay e in cui parlano i personaggi di Ray, riguarda appena il due per cento (anche se è un due per cento piuttosto attivo) della popolazione dell'Unione Indiana, il che può dare un'idea dell'isolamento in cui si trova il regista. Invece la spinta che Ray diede al cinema bengalese, e specialmente ai giovani, è abbastanza notevole. Tra la seconda e la terza parte della trilogia, il regista girò due film: fallito il primo, Parash Pathar (La pietra filosofale), ma non trascurabile, il secondo, Jalsaghar (Il salotto da musica). Nel 1960-61 Ray si occupò del centenario di Rabindranath Tagore realizzando contemporaneamente due film celebrativi: Tre figlie, un trittico da suoi racconti brevi, in cui per la prima volta compose lui stesso il commento musicale, e un documentario-omaggio al novelliere, poeta, pittore, musicista e filosofo, in cui per la prima volta usò il colore. Anche Kanchenjungha (nome d'una montagna) è a colori e, per la prima volta, su soggetto proprio. Un film "alla Antonioni», si disse in India; mentre più fedele al suo inconfondibile stile venne giudicato il precedente Devi (La dèa), giunto a Cannes nel 1962: storia di un padre devoto che vede nella nuora l'incarnazione della dea Kali e, per superstizione religiosa, rovina la vita della giovane coppia, cui d'altronde è molto affezionato. Con Abhijan (Spedizione) R. presentò una commedia, colorita e pittoresca di 'neorealismo minore'. Segue una trilogia che potremmo chiamare "matrimoniale"nella carriera di Ray: i primi due film, Mahanagar (La grande città) e Charulata (La donna sola) presentati e premiati a Berlino rispettivamente nel 1964 e nel 1965, sono eccellenti. Entrambi basati su una coppia di sposi e sulla introspezione di difficili vittorie morali, hanno al centro squisite figure femminili, sempre interpretate dall'attrice Madhabi Mukherjee, protagonista anche del successivo Kapurush (Il vile) ammesso in concorso a Venezia nel 1965, ma purtroppo assai meno felice.

TERRENCE RAFFERTY

The New York Times

“I find I am inimical to the idea of making two similar films in succession,” wrote the great Indian director Satyajit Ray in 1966, and in this, as in everything he wrote or filmed, he spoke the truth.
At that point, 11 years after the premiere of his first movie, “Pather Panchali,” he had written and directed 13 features, all of which will be on view at the Walter Reade Theater starting Wednesday, along with seven from the next decade of his career. The films are at least as various as his statement suggests, and you’re not likely to worry, as Ray did in 1966, whether their diversity indicates “a restlessness of mind, an indecision, a lack of direction resulting in a blurring of outlook — or if there is an underlying something which binds my disparate works together.”
Restless, yes. Blurry, never. And the “underlying something,” which is simply his bottomless curiosity about how people negotiate the most urgent demands of nature and culture, is impossible to mistake, no matter what kind of Satyajit Ray movie you’re watching.
Some of the films in this series (co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Columbia University), like the nutty fairy-tale picaresque “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne” (1968), can be a little baffling for non-Indian audiences; nothing travels worse than folk humor. And some might make you feel as if you needed to know a good deal more about the history and politics of the subcontinent — and specifically Ray’s native Bengal, where most of his stories are set — to understand the finer nuances of the characters’ behavior. Ray, however, has nuances to burn: you can miss quite a few and still feel as if you know his people intimately.

The radiant “Charulata” (1964), for example, takes place in Calcutta in 1880, and its characters, educated and well off, spend a lot of their time in earnest discussion of literature and politics of the day. Their spirited debates are full of names few Westerners will have heard and issues perhaps long forgotten even by Bengalis. What is clear, though, is their fierce passion for ideas, and the small, surprising ways in which that passion colors their feelings for one another.
That’s how dialogue usually works in Ray movies, even ones like “Charulata” and the superb, Chekhovian ensemble piece “Days and Nights in the Forest” (1970). Ray is always less interested in what people are saying than why, and in his best pictures the most revealing moments tend to be silent, or nearly so.
The fluid opening sequence of “Charulata” is six almost-wordless minutes of a woman — the title character, played by the beautiful, fiery-eyed Madhabi Mukherjee — walking rather aimlessly from one room to another in her house. The languid rhythm of her steps tells us how wearily familiar everything seems to her, and the rapt attention she devotes to people passing on the street tells us something sadder still: in her comfortable but unstimulating life, the ordinary activities of ordinary people look exotic, wondrous. She watches everyday life with opera glasses, to feel a little closer.
Ray has a particular affection for the watchful, for patient observers like this lonely wife and like Apu, the child hero of “Pather Panchali,” who becomes a student in “Aparajito” (1956) and then a husband and father in “The World of Apu” (1959), looking at life a little differently at every stage but always looking, searching for clues about who he’s going to be.
The Apu Trilogy is easily Ray’s best-known work, largely by default: few of the films he made between “The World of Apu” and his death in 1992 are available on DVD in the United States and Britain, and theatrical retrospectives like Lincoln Center’s are, for an artist of his stature, shockingly rare.
This series is full of memorable, affecting movies that have been just about impossible to see in recent years, like “Devi” (1960), a remarkable exploration of religious madness, and “Kanchenjungha” (1962), Ray’s first color film. “Kanchenjungha” chronicles a few hours in the lives of a wealthy Calcutta family vacationing in Darjeeling and manages, with no action more dramatic than strolling and talking, to create a startlingly vivid (and, of course, nuanced) portrait of Indian society in transition.
The films that may resonate most strongly in 2009, though, are the ones that deal with economic hardship and the strange parallel universe that is business, big or small. The grinding rural poverty of “Pather Panchali” is powerfully rendered, but it’s not entirely typical of Ray’s approach to the vexed question of money and its absence. Abject need is, in a way, too stark, too absolute for his restless sensibility.
He’s more at home with situations like that of the struggling middle-class family of “Mahanagar” (1963), who have just a bit less income than they require and therefore have to make awkward choices: in this case, the wife (again, Ms. Mukherjee) takes a job, and she discovers that the world outside the home is both more exciting than the world within and much uglier.
“Mahanagar” has a happy ending, of a highly ambiguous sort. By the time Ray made “The Adversary” (1971) — the first of what has come to be called the Calcutta Trilogy, though the plots and characters of the three films are unrelated — the economic and political landscape of India had darkened considerably. He had to watch even more closely, and more coldly, to understand this changing world.
The protagonist of “The Adversary” is a recent university graduate who can’t find a job and is briefly tempted by violent revolution. The second film, “Company Limited” (1971), is perhaps Ray’s chilliest, bleakest vision of his society, the story of a rising young executive who squirms out of a potentially promotion-killing crisis by devious, dangerous means. He gets the promotion, but there’s a pesky observer in this film, too: his quiet, intelligent sister-in-law, with whom he is slightly in love and who knows, in the end, exactly what he has done in the name of success.
Somnath Bannerjee (Pradip Mukherjee), the hero of the third film, “The Middleman” (1975), is the most interesting and the most tragic, because he embodies aspects of both his predecessors: unemployed for the first half of the film, and in the second half beginning to succeed as an independent operator in what his mentor calls the “order-supply” business. The term for his position as a commercial middleman is dalaal, which in Bengali can also mean pimp. He isn’t a villain — hardly any of Ray’s characters are — but he is, as so many in these films are, a young man who lacks the courage to fail in the eyes of the world.
Somnath’s a watcher, watching himself, but not rigorously enough. Even when, as in this picture’s devastating final scenes, he hates the self he is becoming, he can’t stop what he’s doing: it’s as if he were looking at someone else.
And in the audience you watch in melancholy horror because you’re looking through the eyes of Satyajit Ray. The “underlying something” of his rich, various body of work is, ultimately, a kind of close observer’s faith: if you can see the world clearly enough, you’ll never be a stranger to yourself.
“First Light: Satyajit Ray From the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy” opens Wednesday and runs through April 30 at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 875-5600, filmlinc.com.
Da The New York Times, 10 Aprile 2009

FERNALDO DI GIAMMATTEO

Bengalese, discendente di una famiglia di letterati e di artisti, ha la possibilità di compiere studi regolari, di laurearsi in economia e in fisica, di seguire i corsi di Rabindranath Tagore e di occuparsi di pubblicità, prima di compiere un viaggio in Europa dove s'imbatte nei maggiori film del neorealismo (lo colpisce in particolare Ladri di biciclette). Incuriosito dalla presenza di Jean Renoir venuto in India per girare Il fiume (1951), prende seriamente in considerazione l'idea di fondare una società per produrre film che documentino la realtà nazionale piuttosto che narrare le favole e i melodrammi della tradizione. Si materializza così, fra grandi difficoltà, la spettacolosa impresa della «trilogia di Apu», gruppo di film ricavati dal romanzo di uno scrittore bengalese.

Rassegna stampa di Satyajit Ray