Satyajit Ray - Reflection On Cinema

DEEP FOCUS

Reflections on Cinema

Satyajit Ray

Edited by Sandip Ray

in association with

Dhritiman Chaterji, Arup K. De
Deepak Mukerjee, Debasis Mukhopadhyay

Foreword by

Shyam Benegal

HarperCollins Publishers India

Society for the Preservation of
Satyajit Ray Films

Awards conferred on Satyajit Ray, by both Indian and international organizations, include:

1958 : Padmashree, India 1965: Padmabhushan, India 1967 : Magsaysay Award, Manila 1971: Star of Yugoslavia

1973 : Doctor of Letters, Delhi University

1974 : D. Litt., Royal College of Arts, London 1976 : Padma Vibhushan, India

1978 : D. Litt., Oxford University; Special Award, Berlin Film Festival; Deshikottam, Visva-Bharati University, India

1979 : Special Award, Moscow Film Festival

1980 : D. Litt., Burdwan University, India; D. Litt., Jadavpur University, India

1981 : Doctorate, Benaras Hindu University, India; D. Litt., North Bengal University, India

1982 : Hommage a Satyajit Ray, Cannes Film Festival; Vidyasagar Award, Govt. of West Bengal

1983 : Fellowship, The British Film Institute

1985 : D. Litt., Calcutta University; Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India; Soviet Land Nehru Award, Soviet Union

1986 : Fellowship, Sangeet Natak Academy, India

1987 : Legion dHonneur, France; D. Litt., Rabindra Bharati University, India

1992 : Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, USA; Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement, San Francisco International Film Festival; Bharat Ratna, India

Part One
THE FILM-MAKERS
CRAFT

NATIONAL STYLES IN
CINEMA

LOOK AT THE flowers, said Jean Renoir one day while on a search for suitable locales in a suburb of Calcutta for his film The River. Look at the flowers, he said. They are very beautiful. But you get flowers in America too. Poinsettias? They grow wild in California, in my own garden. But look at the clump of bananas, and the green pond at its foot. You dont get that in California. That is Bengal, and that is [here Renoir used the one word that in his vocabulary meant wholehearted approval] fantastic.

Among other things which Renoir thought fantastic and hoped to use in his film were a temple on the bank of the Hooghly (so humble... maybe one man built it, and maybe the same man worships in it); a boat any boat on the river (ageless, like an Egyptian bas-relief); a woman drawing water from a well; saris hanging from the verandahs of Bowbazar residences; the music of an anonymous flautist in Waterloo Street; the patterns of cow dung on the wall of a village hut...

The Statesman, 14 August 1949

Cinema being first and foremost a pictorial medium, and the integrity of atmosphere being the first essential of a good film, the problem which faced Renoir and which his painters eye was able to solve with comparative ease was that of selecting the visual elements which would be pictorially effective, and at the same time truly evocative of the spirit of Bengal. And because the narrative technique of cinema admits of dawdling, these elements had to be the quintessential ones so that the director could make his points and create his atmosphere with a minimum of film footage.

Search for style

In searching for locations, therefore, Renoir was also searching for a style. But being an alien and a European, there is a limit to which he could probe into the complexity that is India. The most he could do was to concentrate on the external aspect and leave the rest to his own French sensibility.

In cinema, as in any other art, the truly indigenous style can be evolved only by a director working in his own country, in the full awareness of his past heritage and present environment.

In the days of the silent cinema, the film-makers of the world formed one large family. Using the technique of mime, which is a more or less universally understood language, they turned the cinema into a truly international medium. With the coming of sound, mime gave way to the spoken word and a new technique of realistic acting was evolved to suit the requirements of the medium. Not that stylization had to go. As Chaplin has demonstrated in Monsieur Verdoux, an Englishman can make a film about a Frenchman in an American studio, and yet invest it with a basic universal appeal. But the main contribution of sound was an enormous advance towards realism, and a consequent enrichment of the medium as an expression of the ethos of a particular country.

For is there a truer reflection of a nations inner life than the American cinema? The average American film is a slick, shallow, diverting and completely inconsequential thing. Its rhythm is that of jazz, its tempo that of the automobile and the rollercoaster, and its streaks of nostalgia and sentimentality have their ancestry in the Blues and Way down upon the Swanee river. Yet it must be reckoned with, as jazz is real and the machine is real. And because cinema has the unique property of absorbing and alchemizing the influence of inferior arts, some American films are good, and some more than good. The reason why some notable European directors have failed in Hollywood is their inability to effect a synthesis between jazz and their native European idioms. Those who have retained the integrity of their style have done better. We may mention the films of Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, and one of the very best, Renoirs The Southerner, which is American in content but completely French in feeling.

French films

The French cinema itself is perhaps the richest in its absorption of all that is best in French culture in its painting and poetry, its music and literature.

One of the main reasons for this is the prevalence of avant-garde experiments in which, apart from professional film-makers, writers like Andr Malraux, Jacques Prvert and Jean Anouilh, painters like Fernand Lger and Man Ray, musicians like Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud participated. The spirit of experiment persists even in the commercial cinema, so that Jean Cocteau takes an innocuous and touching fairy tale, embellishes it with Dadaist touches and makes of it a commercial and artistic success.

In Monsieur Vincent, one of the great films of our time, there is a scene which shows Vincent spending a night in a French slum in the ramshackle garret of a young man afflicted with a wasting disease. As Vincent lies in the darkness and deathly quiet of the room, snatches of neighbourhood sounds begin to seep in through the skylight the drone of a hurdy-gurdy, the monotonous rat-tat of a handloom. The sick man begins to make wry consumptive comments which identify and illuminate each individual sound, while all the time the camera holds on the shadowy form of Vincents head, only a gleam in his left eye showing that he is awake and alive to his surroundings. This one scene, lasting barely a minute and a half, reveals the poetry and subtlety, the humour and humanity of the best French cinema.

Possessing neither the subtlety and emotional candour of the French, nor the bravado of the American, the British cinema had to go through a particularly ignominious period until the war, and the consequent expansion of the documentary gave the needed impetus. Since then we have had films like Brief Encounter, The Way Ahead and This Happy Breed which have caught the national character admirably. But the fondness for half-shades and other genteel qualities we recognize as British is not exactly conducive to good cinema. Hence the frequent falling on fantasy (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), on Shakespeare (Laurence Olivier), on Dickens (David Lean). At present the future well-being of the British cinema lies in the hands of a handful of directors gifted enough to overcome the ethnological handicaps.