CREATIVE

EXCELLENCE IN MANAGEMENT: THEME PAPER ON SATYAJIT RAY

BY, ALOK INAMDAR REG N O: 0 23/47 SEC - A

SATYAJIT RAY The Master Film Maker

INTRODUCTION
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature. Ray's grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray was a writer, illustrator, philosopher, publisher, amateur astronomer and a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social movement in nineteenth century Bengal. Sukumar Ray, Upendrakishore's son and father to Satyajit, was a pioneering Bengali writer of nonsense rhyme and children's literature, an illustrator and a critic. Ray was born to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray in Kolkata. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves of Vittorio De Sica during a visit to London. Ray directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes film festival. Alongside Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), the three films form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a number of awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1991.

ANALYSIS OF CREATIVITY
I am a great movie fan and fond of movies, which highlight the tacit side of human nature. Satyajit Ray was one such director who was able to capture the human essence. His movies delved into appreciating the innate nature of mankind & millions across the world could identify with his characters. Satyajit Ray received many labels in his lifetime most of them admiring, adulatory, some critical. Critics and

scholars have marveled at his craftsmanship, mastery of detail and storytelling techniques. He has been called the last Bengali Renaissance man, the inheritor and an exemplar of the Tagore tradition, a classic chronicler of changes being wrought in a traditional society, a humanist, an internationalist and a modernist. All these can be defended and debated. But two charges against him are not defendable: that Ray was not political or not political enough; that he was a humanist and modernist. About the first, one can argue that Satyajit Ray, at a certain level in all his films negotiated the polyps of the political Unconscious. However, the way he did it, as I have tried to show, changed over time. Second, Ray was a modernist in the sense that his medium was a modern invention that he used to perfection. However, this mostly applied to the use of the medium and not to the material he grafted on it. The latter came in various shades of Indian life, particularly life in Bengal. He attempted to represent this, mediated by great artistic sensibility and with attentiveness to complexity and diversity. The East/West confluence produced modernity in Bengal that can be traced to antecedents in prior histories of early modernities outside the Modern West. The same thing can be said about humanism, which certainly has a long and illustrious tradition in India. Ray's films illumined lives. No one made films on such diverse subjects before him the way he did; and it remains to be seen whether another director would do so in the future. Whatever Ray was, it is impossible, as he said himself, to label him or put him in a pigeonhole. PATHER PANCHALI HIS BEGINNING The saga of Ray began in 1954 with his first movie, Pather Panchali. The movie was based on Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay's epic novel of the same name. It was allegedly an influential encounter with Jean Renoir in Calcutta that inspired him to make his first movie. The project only really took off when his mother, Suprabha Ray got the then Chief Minister, Dr. B. C. Roy, to provide state funding. It was through Mrs. Bela Sen, a close personal friend of his that she got through to him. But with them came a request from the then Director of Information in the state, a request that Ray could not fulfill. He was asked to play down the poverty bit, show some rural prosperity at the end, a green paddy with field stalks of rice swaying in the breeze. Fortunately his refusal did not affect the funding of the project. Ironically, Pather Panchali received much critical acclaim from abroad before it was released for public screening in India and hailed as a masterpiece here. In the fall of 1954, Monroe Wheeler, a director at the Museum of Mordern Art(MOMA) in New York, met Ray in Calcutta. He was shown some stills and

immediately asked for the movie to be sent to an exhibition opening at MOMA the following year. John Huston, in Calcutta scouting for locations for "The Man Who Would Be King", commented, "A grim and serious piece of film making which should go down well in the West" after seeing a half-hour of rough cuts of the visual highlights- among them the scene of a running train in a field of white Kaash. Wheeler was even more enthusiastic on getting glowing reports from Huston and a hastily finished print was sent to New York in May 1955. Here it was screened without subtitles to an adoring audience moved by the film's humanist appeal and imaginative photography. Pather Panchali was screened for the Bengali audiences in August 1955. Drawing on his expertise in publicity obtained during his tenure as an executive at D.G. Keymer & Co., a British Advertising firm in Calcutta, Ray designed five billboards for the film. The response was gratifying, to say the least, with Ray later commenting, "For the first time I tasted triumph, with unknown young people elbowing their way through the milling crowd to kiss the hem of my garment as it were." The film was a box office hit from day one. Not only had Ray made a great film, he had also laid the foundation for the now world famous "Apu Trilogy". Pather Panchali is about Apu in his early years, born into a poor family in a Bengal village, struggling to make ends meet. It tells the story of how he forms a bond with his elder sister and how they roam about, exploring the world around their village and ends with the family moving away after the death of Durga, his sister. The second movie in the trilogy is Aparajito, which is basically about Apu growing up and growing away from his mother. The highlight of the film is the mother-son relationship and conflict. The last movie in the trilogy is Apur Sansar. It is about Apu's struggle to survive in a big city. How he goes to the countryside on a visit and ends up marrying a woman who he had never seen. How he is shattered after her death in childbirth and rejects his own son and the eventual reconciliation in the end.

MOVIES A GENIUS AT WORK

To Ray a film was pictures, words, movement, drama, music and story, a thousand expressive visual and aural elements. These, he pointed out, can be packed for simultaneous display in a segment not lasting even a minute. In several essays, Ray describes how an understanding of this complex language dawned on him along with its intrinsic affinity to music, and marked difference from theater.

While a student at Shantiniketan, Tagore's rural university, he spent much of his spare time listening to Western classical music. "My response to Western classical music was immediate and decisive," writes Ray. "If films were fun and thrills and escape, the pursuit of music was something undertaken with deadly seriousness." The discovery that something fun and something serious could be joined together gave him great delight. Ray found it significant that most of the pioneers of motion pictures, those who helped to create its grammar and its language were responsive to music. He specifically mentions Griffith in the U.S., Abel Gance in France, Eisenstein and Pudovkin in the SovietUnion. Ray was especially taken by Griffith, who virtually created the language of cinema. Griffith realized that images could be invested with meaning, and such meaningful images could be strung together like sentences in a story, and the story could be made to unfold with the grace and fluency of music. The conflict of drama, the plot of the fiction, light and shade in painting, all of these have a place in cinema. But image and sound, expressed in audio-visual terms, have a different language altogether. As an art form, Ray recognized, cinema is unique image in motion pictures is not just a picture, it is an eloquent picture. It does not begin or end with just being a picture as it does in painting. It has sound which complements the image. One has to keep one's eyes as well as ears open and alert to follow the language of cinema. If there is no sound in a scene, the absence itself is meaningful. Silence, as one sees time and again in Ray's films, can be equally eloquent in conveying a message. While taking the plunge with Pather Panchali, Ray was prepared to break all conventions of Indian cinema. Little did he realize that such a resolution would also extend to conventions of Western cinema. "One day's work with camera and actors taught me more than all the dozen books," Ray admitted later. He had to find out for himself "how to catch the hushed stillness of dusk in a Bengali village when the wind drops and turns the ponds into sheets of glass, dappled by the leaves of shaluk and shapla, and the smoke from the ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape and the plaintive blows on conch shells from homes far and near are joined by the chorus of crickets which rises as the light falls, until all one sees are the stars in the sky, and the stars that blink and swirl in the thickets." Capturing the chorus of crickets or fireflies at nightfall on camera presented Ray with the kind of challenge that he loved to face in ingenious ways. Here he was forced into improvisation, not of the musical sort, yet something that remained a Satyajit Ray hallmark of filmmaking. The light that the fireflies gave off was too weak to be filmed. So Ray and his crew figured out a way to show the blinking

light a bunch of bare-bodied assistants wearing black loincloths and holding tiny flashing bulbs hopped around in total darkness. The audience sees this simulated dance of fireflies in Aparajito, the second film of the trilogy.

DRIVERS OF CREATIVITY SATYAJIT RAY

One can locate three major compositional periods in Ray's work and life. The first period (1955-1964) was remarkable for its robust optimism, celebration of the human spirit as well as a certain satisfaction and self-confidence in assuming full auteurship. Ray was not only directing and scripting, he was scoring the music and increasingly taking charge of the camera-work. During this period, he directed, arguably, his greatest films following a trajectory that can be traced back to his family background, his education in art, music and letters, and to the East-West cultural confluence that captured what one can call "Calcutta Modern." One must point out that this phase coincides with the first flush of independence in India or the idea of India that was being forged with yet to be tested forces of nationalism/internationalism, secularism, humanism and modernism of the Nehru era (1947-64). From the mid-sixties through the seventies, all of the above came under a dark spell. There were two wars one with China early on and one with Pakistan in 1965. Growing unemployment among the urban middle classes and an agricultural crisis created by a command economy had brought parts of the country face-to-face with famine. In addition, there was an increased disaffection and restlessness among the intelligentsia and politicians. The war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution in China had radicalized Calcutta's urban youths and many of its artists, writers and filmmakers. Revolutionary violence and the violence of the counter-revolutionary forces gripped the city. Calcutta, noted as a friendly and safe city, became a dangerous place to live. The Bangladesh war and the influx of millions of refugees fleeing Pakistani pogrom, filled Calcutta and its outskirts. The successful Indian Army operations, the birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation were capped by India's first nuclear test in 1974. The anti-Indira Gandhi agitation led to the imposition of the "Emergency" in 1975. This gave Indians a bitter taste of living under an authoritarian government. The Government clamped harsh and draconian measures on the citizens. Yet there were hardly any signs of protest: people followed orders, streets were cleaner, the economy showed growth and the trains were running on time. Ray, however, was troubled. The films he made during this period clearly projected a troubled vision of India. The "Calcutta Trilogy" Partidwandi, Seemabaddha, Jana Aranya was a powerful portrait of

alienation, waywardness and moral collapse among the urban youth. Aranyer Din Ratri, a major film, shows a rape scene; Ashani Sanket, a grim and poignant narrative on the Bengal Famine of 1943 was made during the Bangladesh war. This film shows rape as well. Shatranj Ke Khilari, made during the Emergency shows through irony and the metaphor of a chess game how the king of Oudh, more a poet, composer and singer than a ruler submitted to the British take-over, as his people subjected themselves to the alien rule fleeing from the villages as the British-Indian Army marched in. The two short films Pikoo and Sadgati refused to equivocate or distance themselves from issues of adultery and untouchability. Even his so called "escapist" films, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Sonar Kella, Hirak Rajar Deshe, Joi Baba Felunath, carried not-so-hidden messages against wars, crooks, goons and love of lucre and greed. In mid-life, at the height of his creative best, Ray seemed to have suffered a "crisis" arguably a personal one, but certainly one in his world-view, the way he looked at people and things around him. Increasingly, he became a loner, isolating himself in his Bishop Lefroy Road apartment. He even seriously considered leaving Calcutta his beloved cinematic city. The third and last phase saw Ray's "crisis" come full circle. He became even more isolated and distant, telling his tales in enunciatory terms. Unlike the early Ray genres, his films became frankly "wordy," declaring a didactic Ray voice that sought social correctives through acts of enunciation in cinema in Ghare Baire. Based on a Tagore novel, Ray was recasting Tagore's time-tested shibboleths against narrow nationalism, mix of religion and politics, demagogues and their dishonesties. Stricken by two heart attacks, Ray was now involuntarily isolated on doctor's orders. When his condition somewhat stabilized in 1987, he begged his doctors to let him make a film or two: modest family dramas shot indoors under their watchful eyes. Before he passed on, he made three such pluvies (or movies that were more plays than movies) marking the years 1988, 1989 and 1990 as if he was counting time and using the medium for the message. Ganashatru addressed the questions of the late Capitalist corruption, and manipulation of religion, people, politics and environment. It is Ray's contemporary Indian version of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. Shakha Prashakha also addresses issues of the late Capitalism as it impacts family values corroding traditional generational bonding on the inside, and the fetishization of "black" money as the individuated upwardly ambitious try to make a living on the outside. To the protagonist-enuciator, who like Ray, is a heart patient, "honesty" becomes an obsessive compulsion mediated in the mood swings of music and madness. The signifier is a son who suffers the swings, seldom talks and is dysfunctional. The third in this

trilogy is Agantuk. An emotionally charged film, Ray literally plants his own voice in it. He briefly sings three times in place of the enunciator-protagonist.

CONCLUSION

AWARDS & RECOGNITIONS Numerous awards were bestowed on Ray throughout his lifetime, including 32 National Film Awards by the Government of India, in addition to awards at international film festivals. At the Berlin Film Festival, he was one of only three filmmakers to win the Silver Bear for Best Director more than once and holds the record for the most number of Golden Bear nominations, with seven. At the Venice Film Festival, where he had previously won a Golden Lion for Aparajito (1956), he was awarded the Golden Lion Honorary Award in 1982. That same year, he received an honorary "Hommage Satyajit Ray" award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Ray is the second film personality after Chaplin to have been awarded honorary doctorates by Oxford University. The President of France awarded him the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1985 and the Legion of Honor in 1987. The Government of India awarded him the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna shortly before his death. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ray an honorary Oscar in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement. It was one of his favorite actresses, Audrey Hepburn, who represented the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on that day in Calcutta. Ray, unable to attend the ceremony due to his illness, gave his acceptance speech to the Academy via live video feed in his home. In 1992 he was posthumously awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 1992, the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll ranked Ray at #7 in its list of "Top 10 Directors" of all time, making him the highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll. In 2002, the Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll ranked Ray at #22 in its list of all-time greatest directors, thus making him the fourth highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll. In 1996, Entertainment Weekly magazine ranked Ray at #25 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list. In 2007, Total Film magazine included Ray in its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.

 PERSONAL LEARNINGS The conflict of drama, the plot of the fiction, light and shade in painting, all of these have a place in cinema. But image and sound, expressed in audio-visual terms, have a different language altogether. As an art form, Ray recognized, cinema is unique image in motion pictures is not just a picture, it is an eloquent picture. It does not begin or end with just being a picture as it does in painting. It has sound which complements the image. One has to keep one's eyes as well as ears open and alert to follow the language of cinema. If there is no sound in a scene, the absence itself is meaningful. Silence, as one sees time and again in Ray's films, can be equally eloquent in conveying a message. Being a great movie fan, the art of Satyajit Ray was a great eye opener to the world of great direction. It helps individuals identify with the emotions portrayed in the films. This quality was a beginning of a new wave of movie making across India, which helped develop a new form of direction. The beauty and depth of a character was built by Satyajit Ray not based on artificial support but rather on the intent of conveying the necessary message through the character. All these factors provide a great learning and deeply satisfying experience while watching a film made by Satyajit Ray.

REFERENCE
1. http://www.scribd.com/doc/61249115/Satyajit-Ray-The-Inner-Eye-The-Biography-of-a-Master-Film- Maker#logout 2. http://satyajitray.ucsc.edu/biography.html 3. http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/20260/sample/9780521620260wsn01.pdf 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyajit_Ray 5. http://satyajitray.tripod.com/index.html