Born into an artistic, literary and musical family, Satyajit Ray (1921 – 1992) inherited all of those skills and, as if the fates had been conspiring many generations before, each one of those talents would find full expression in a cinema that united a poetic vision, musical rhythm and microscopic realism. Initially studying economics in college, Ray instead flourished as an art student, carrying on his father’s flair for illustration. While working as a graphic artist for Signet Press in the 40s, Ray illustrated an abridged version of the popular novel Pather Panchali, distilling what he described as Bandyopadhyay’s “encyclopedia of life in rural Bengal” to its essential visual elements. Meanwhile, he was also a longtime cinephile and started the Calcutta Film Society in 1947, showing mainly European arthouse fare. 

While the film of Pather Panchali lingered somewhere in the back of his mind, Ray had a famously encouraging experience with Jean Renoir, who was on location for his India-set The River (1951) followed by seeing Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist techniques in Bicycle Thieves (1948). These incidents sufficiently inspired him to set to work on a film in his own style, with the people and materials at hand. Pather Panchali had been long gestating on many levels inside Ray’s psyche, and even once production began, it only gradually came into being over the few years it took to make on and off, depending on finances. After a ten-day marathon edit to meet a deadline, it simply appeared on the screen a perfect film, as if it were always meant to be. Though his funding would improve, the resourcefulness and experimentation that made Pather Panchali possible set the stage for his future, economical working methods. 

Ray was the consummate, efficient auteur, and became even more so over the course of his career. Always the writer of his films, Ray also became the primary camera operator since Charulata (1964), the music composer since Three Daughters (Teen Kanya, 1961), and had his hand in the art direction, the casting and the editing—some of it completed in camera—as well as the title sequences and even the design of the publicity materials. His control was detailed and precise but not overbearing. He usually only rehearsed the day of the shoot and tried to capture his scenes in as few takes as possible. Many of his and his crew’s innovations in Indian film include shooting on location, the use of natural light and conditions, the casting of nonprofessional actors and not using makeup. His first cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, introduced bounced lighting to film production in Aparajito, bringing a cloudy-sky softness to interior scenes. All of these, of course, were essential in capturing a searing realism—one that, with the exception of two later films, was also wholly devoted to Ray’s native Bengal, including its renowned writers, whose works he often adapted.

With Pather Panchali, Ray instantly put India on the serious, artful cinema map, and he continues to posthumously reign as that country’s most famous director (not to mention his various other legacies, including music composer, writer, calligrapher, illustrator and children’s magazine editor). Contradictorily, it was through his deep dedication to Bengal that Ray became an international star. Much of his successful crossover to the west acknowledges his films’ powerful, elemental humanity both despite and because of their very specific locations in time, space and culture. “This uniqueness and this universality, and the coexistence of the two,” Ray claimed, “is what I mainly try to convey through my films.” Representing different kinds of human experience with empathy, Ray’s films discover poetry and truth within everyday minutia, the ephemeral, the ineffable and the subtlest movements. Kurosawa commented that Pather Panchali is “the kind of film that flows with the serenity and the nobility of a big river.” This sublime power courses through all of Ray’s films, in varying manifestations, and seems to enter not through the eyes, but the heart. – Brittany Gravely

Continuing in the spring of 2025, this two-part series presents all of the Satyajit Ray films in the HFA collection—consisting mainly of his earlier works as well as a few mid-career films. Only one print, Aparajito, is not in the archive; a DCP from Janus Films completes the miraculous Apu trilogy.