Biography on satyajit ray interview questions
Satyajit Ray was one of the first Indian filmmakers to gain international recognition for his work. In this 1981 interview with Cineaste magazine, Ray discussed how his political and personal beliefs related to his role as a filmmaker, and what political and social issues were most significant to him in his films. Another important consideration for Ray was his audience. He explained that while film as an art form originated in Europe and was frequently judged by Western standards, he wanted to make films that were meaningful for Indian audiences, especially those in his home province of West Bengal, India.
The Interview :-
Cineaste: How did Pather Panchali change you. Did it help you discover Bengal?
Satyajit Ray: I certainly discovered rural life while making Pather Panchali. There's no question of that. I'd been city-born, city-bred, so I didn't know the village firsthand. While hunting locations in rural areas, and, after finding the village and spending some time there, I began to understand. Talking to people, reacting to moods, to the landscape, to the sights and sounds—all this helped. But it's not just people who have been brought up in villages who can make films about village life. An outside view is also able to penetrate.
Cineaste: What have been other influences on your work?
Ray: Bibhuti Bhushan [the author of The Apu Trilogy and Distant Thunder] influenced me very much. In fact, I knew about village life by reading Pather Panchali. I felt a rapport with him, with the village and his attitude towards it, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to make Pather Panchali in the first place. I was deeply moved by the book. India's preeminent film director, Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) came to public attention in 1955 with Pather Panchali, the first installment of what became known as the Apu trilogy. It was the motion picture that introduced Indian cinema to the West. Initially critics considered Ray a poetic chronicler of Bengali village life, but soon he showed himself adept at making movies that incorporate contemporary urban life (Branches of the Tree), Indian history (The Lonely Wife), comedy (The Philosopher's Stone), musical fantasy (Kingdom of Diamonds), children's subjects (The Golden Fortress), and even documentary elements (Rabindranath Tagore). Satyajit Ray: Interviews reveals a genial, generous, unpre-tentious, immensely knowledgeable man who, for all his fame, remained to the end amusedly indifferent to movie-world glamour. Scripting, casting, directing, music-scoring, camera-operating, working closely on art direction and editing, even designing his own credit titles and publicity material--Ray did it all almost from the start of his career. His films come close to being wholly personal expressions yet achieve a global resonance. Bert Cardullo is professor of American culture and literature at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey. He lives on the island of Chios. Satyajit Ray was interviewed by Lindsay Anderson at the NFT, in 1969 or 1970. In this interview, the director discusses his early films and influences, the novelists he has adapted, and the evolution and future of his film-making. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lindsay Anderson: I've left all my notes behind, which is a Freudian error because he hates this sort of thing and when I'm in his position I hate it. So we're going to make the best of it with your cooperation. I think what Mr Ray likes best is concrete questions rather than speculative questions because, like any artist, these can best be answered by looking at his work. I always think that, in Britain, we are terribly ignorant about India, as befits an ex-imperialist nation. There's a tendency to call you an Indian film-maker, when it would be more accurate to call you a Bengali film-maker. Would you accept that? Satyajit Ray: I suppose so. Yes. LA: We don't know much about the Indian cinema apart from your films. There are three centres of production, each representing a very different type of film-making, which I got to know a little bit about at the '65 film festival. We were flown to Madras, Calcutta and Bombay and one realised what a distinction there is between the Bombay film-makers, who are Hindi, the Madras film-makers, who are Tamil... SR: And Hindi too... LA: Yes, but a very different tradition. But Bombay is the centre of commercial film-making, really. SR: So is Madras. We also try to be commercial in our own way. LA: Well, one never likes to be called uncommercial, because our aim is to be commercial. But I thought I'd ask something about the Bengali cinema, which has a tradition of its own, was there a tradition of making films in Bengal when you started? SR: We have been making films ever since the silent days of the 1920s, I should imagine. I think the first feature was made in Bombay in 1913, not s In conversation with Barun Chanda, an actor who started his career as the protagonist of a Satyajit Ray film and now is a bi-lingual writer of fiction and more recently, a non-fiction published by Om Books International, Satyajit Ray:The Man Who Knew Too Much “[O]ne would like to remember Ray as one of the last truly great renaissance men of Bengal, moulded much in the tradition of Tagore, in the sense that his genius manifested itself in manifold directions: film-making, photography, writing, composing poetry, limericks, music, designing, drawing, developing new typefaces, you name it. “For a long time, he was also our most distinguished cultural ambassador to the world.” This perhaps is the one of the most apt descriptions of a man whose films were legendary in our lifetime and a part of the concluding chapter in The Man Who Knew Too Much by Barun Chanda. The book is an exhaustive account of Ray and his major films, how he made the films, what were the influences he had, how he directed the films and how versatile he was. Chanda is clearly impacted by this giant of Bengal renaissance, which started with Raja Ram Mohan Roy in the eighteenth century and encompassed Tagore. The book is as much a memoir by Chanda about Satyajit Ray as it is a narrative about his films. Structured unusually, this non-fiction has an introduction sandwiched between two sections, the first being Chanda’s own interaction with Ray as a hero of his award-winning film, Seemabadha[1](1971), and the making of the movie; the second being the narrative that covers the titular content (borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1956 thriller), The Man Who Knew Too Much, about the genius of Ray as a filmmaker. Chanda shows us how Ray was truly unique and very gifted. He would remember all the dialogues and be intent on being involved with every part of film making, from costumes to camera, lighting and makeup — which is probably why his films had a unique touch so much s
I have also been moved by Tagore's work, which is not necessarily rural. Of course, our cultural background, our cultural makeup, is a fusion of East and West. This applies to anybody who has been educated in the city in India and who has been exposed to the classics of English literature. After all, our