by RICHARD PHILLIPS
Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatterjee in a scene from Apur Sansar
After more than a year of painstaking work, Indian director Satyajit Ray’s cinematic milestone, The Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar), has been fully restored in a new 4K reconstruction by Janus Films. The original negatives of the trilogy were severely damaged by fire in a British film lab in 1993, almost a year after Ray’s death.
The trilogy, which includes new subtitles and a digitally remastered version of Ravi Shankar’s original soundtrack, is currently screening in selected North American cinemas (click here for a full list of screening times and venues) with forthcoming international screenings and releases on DVD and Blu-ray.
A short trailer of the trilogy is available here. Below is a review of Ray’s masterwork by Richard Phillips and originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on August 2, 2001.
One of the more memorable screenings at the 2001 Sydney Film Festival was Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy—Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apu Sansar (1959)—which traces the life of a Bengali family and their son Apu, as he moves from childhood in a rural village, through his youth in Benares where the family later moves, to manhood and marriage in Calcutta.
The Apu Trilogy, which made Satyajit Ray India’s first internationally recognised director, helped to redefine cinema for the most serious Indian filmmakers at this time and influenced and encouraged many others internationally. Such was the power of Ray’s work that Japanese master director Akira Kurosawa remarked: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”
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Italian neo-realism, which had a profound impact on Ray and other filmmakers, was characterised by its naturalistic documentary style, on-location shooting, conversational speech rather than literary dialogue, and the use of mainly non-professional actors. De Sica’s film follows the heartrending efforts of a poor Italian man and his son to recover a stolen bicycle the father needs in order to get to work.
The Bicycle Thief, Ray wrote in a 1951 essay, was “a triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of the cinema” and the “simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its production make it the ideal film for the Indian filmmaker to study.”
“The present blind worship of technique emphasises the poverty of genuine inspiration among our directors,” Ray continued. “For a popular medium, the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and have its roots in it. No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of theme and dishonesty of treatment. The filmmaker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica, and not [Cecil B.] DeMille, should be his ideal.”
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Rightly regarded as one of the century’s leading film directors by international critics, Ray encountered many detractors in his own country. In 1980, former film star and MP Nargis Dutt denounced him in the Indian parliament for “exporting images of India’s poverty for foreign audiences.” Ray earned the wrath of Hindu chauvinists who claimed he was an “Orientalist,” or Westernised Indian, who had renounced Indian culture.
These crude criticisms coincided with the rise of Hindu fundamentalists who blame all of India’s social ills on foreign influences and other religions, and insist that India must become an exclusivist Hindu state. Today these extremists hold power through the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has repeatedly sought to suppress the works of artists, film directors and historians that in any way cut across or are critical of their right-wing, communalist view of Indian society.
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