As we celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray, we revisit a piece that celebrated American filmmaker Martin Scorsese penned for a news paper in 2020. He wrote about the inimitable Ray, “In the relatively short history of cinema, Satyajit Ray is one of the names that we all need to know, whose films we all need to see. And to revisit, as I do pretty frequently.”
Scorsese went on to praise Ray for presenting a nuanced perspective of India to the international audiences. Previously, what was made in the west about the country was tinged with colonial hangover. “For those of us here in the West, the Apu trilogy — Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959) — was a milestone,” Scorsese said. “We were used to seeing India on screen but through a purely colonial perspective, which obviously meant that the principal characters were Westerners and the “extras”, the people who provided the local colour and the background detail, were Indians. We had no idea whether the stories were happening in Gujarat, Kashmir, West Bengal or Maharashtra — it was just “India”.”
“The pictures told stories of everyday life in a vein that was somewhat similar to Italian neo-realism. And the artistry? The filmmaking? It took my breath away. It was poetic, immediate, sweeping and intimate, all at the same time,” he wrote about Ray’s complete control over his craft.
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