Satyajit Ray : A Veteran Film Maker of India. Review on Satyajit Ray

Oscar award winner Satyajit Ray was a veteran film maker of India and has an embarked image in Indian cinema history. This great auteur's childhood attached with our birth place Giridih. Today we know a number of brilliant and well known film makers but Satyajit Ray is perhaps the most well known Indian filmmaker coz mostly he made his films in Bengali language though Ray had left them behind him if you go through about this persona's achievement who in a different way had glorified art of India. Perhaps no filmmakers who exercised such total control over his work as Satyajit Ray did. He was responsible for scripting, casting, directing, scoring, operating the camera, working closely on art direction and editing, even designing his own credit titles.

During 1950-60 no one had to move foreign countries, in those period Satyajit Ray was a traced figure in Italy, US, Russia and UK. His films are of universal interest that demonstrates a remarkable humanism race, relationships, emotions, struggle and joys. He was also a writer of repute revived children fictions, his short stories, novellas, poems and articles immensely popular. He loved his ancestor's place Giridih (my hometown) as much as he sketched one of his great fictional character appearing in a series of science fiction books scientist Professor Shonku's residing place in Giridih beside the river Usri.

Satyajit Ray was born in 1921 in Calcutta, his father Sukumar Ray was a brilliant writer and his mother an exceptional singer. After graduating from Calcutta's Presidency College, on his mother's persuasion Ray went to Shantiniketan an open university founded by Rabindranath Tagore. Ray started to work as a visualizer with a British advertising agency, then he started cover design for books in a press, books and arts were close to him, 1949 he met a French director Jean Renoir who had asked Ray to scout him on forest and river locations to shoot his film The River. Ray got an opportunity to visit London where he watched more than hundred films in a few months and it was Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thief that inspired him to make true his dream from Pather Panchali a classical Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. He returned India and gathered inexperienced crew, amateur artist  and started to shot Pather Panchali on his personal savings, the film was completed in three years by the financial add of Bengal Government because his personal savings were not enough.

In Pather Panchali Satyajit Ray strikes a graceful balance between nostalgic idealism and poignant realism, the life in a village through the eyes of two young children Apu and Durga. Depicting a poor Bengali family's grim struggle for survival. Pather Panchali was released and got popular success in India and abroad. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali, won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Document  at Cannes. Ray had based Apu Trilogy from Pather Panchali the two others are Aprajito and Apur Sansar. With this extraordinary film Satyajit Ray suddenly assumed great importance. After the confident mastery of Pather Panchali Satyajit Ray given a series of films, he directed 36 films, comprising of features, documentaries and short stories. Ray's first original script was for Kanchanjungha which was his first color picture, entirely film was filmed in Darjeeling.

During the late-'60s, Ray made a fairytale for adults in Goopy Gyn Bagha Byne. *Jwahar Lal Nehru requested him to make a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore to mark the centenary of the birth of Tagore. Ray made *Teen Kanya, The Postmaster is the first of three part series a postmaster transferred from Calcutta to a remote village begins teaching a young orphan girl who tends her house, he is too selfish to notice her growing attachment to him, and he leaves when the chance of a transfer comes, * the second episode Sampati is comedy about *a law student who rejects the dull bride chosen by his mother and the third Monihara a ghost story about a wife who claim her husband's last gift after her death. In Devi Ray exposes the destructive power of ignorance in the absence of rational thought of spirituality in a decadent, selfish society.

he was persuaded to aim for a wider audience by making his first Hindi film on Prem Chand's story, Shatranji Ke Kilhari  casted with expensive stars like Sanjeev Kumar, Amjad Khan, Saeed Jaffery, Richard Attenborough (the director of Gandhi) and Shabana Azmi. Pikoo a half an hour fiction film in which story depicts a family crisis through the uncomprehending eyes of six year old child and same year Ray commissioned to make Sadgati for TV with Smita Patil and Om Puri which relates story of untouchable exploitation, ailing Dukhi and suffering from fever agrees to work a Brahman's house at 7 Rs. only. While chopping a huge log of wood his anger increase with each blow, due to physical debilities and hunger he dies while chopping wood, Ray created here very touchable scene with his brilliant talent. Dukhi's dead body is lying in a place where Brahamans go to get water, the Brahmans use a forked stick to pick up one leg of died Dukhi ties a rope around it and hauls the body off to the spot where untouchables and animals are cremated. Ray's ability to move the audience without melodrama or emotional manipulation is a precise art. He maintained the best technique of filmmaking the technique which was merely a means to an end.

*During his lifetime he won 32 National Film Awards, Dadasaheb Phalke Award, Bharat Ratna Award, honorary doctorates by Oxford University, Legion of Honor by France President, and finally Oscar award for Lifetime achievement in 1992.

*I remember during March-April in 1992 a series of Ray's film was relying on Door Darshan because that time he was on dying bed, since then I got opportunity to watch his 7-8 movies, Pathar Panchali's in black & white scene the young girl steals mango and gives an old lady, old lady's wrinkle face is still in my memory, Om Puri and Smita's role in Sadgati was perfect and genuine, the scream that the late Smita Patil receives the tragic fate of her husband, it is undoubtedly one of her most memorable performances. Satyajit Ray created a body of work of distinct range and richness in Cinema by art and culture, a number of film makers have influenced by his cinematography style.

If you have time then get an opportunity to watch any one of Ray's film and I believe definitely you will repeat Akira's sentence about him "if you didn't seen the cinema of Ray means you are existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon",