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The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. … I feel that he (Ray) is a "giant" of the movie industry….. Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.
-- Akira Kurosawa |
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When I saw the footage of Pather Panchali in Calcutta in 1954 I was deeply impressed and recognised it as the work of a great filmmaker. My subsequent meeting with Ray was a high point in my visit to India. Everything he did and said supported my feelings upon viewing his film.
-- John Huston
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I think he (Ray) has it in his blood. Though he is very young still, he is the father of Indian cinema.
-- Jean Renoir
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I have a fascination for Satyajit Ray's films. My first experience of them was Pather Panchali . I was so taken with it that I sketched many drawings inspired by it. The world of the Bengali villages stirred me. My 1986 exhibition ‘From Gitanjali to Pather Panchali ' was my tribute to Ray's film.
-- M.F. Husain
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My admiration for Satyajit Ray is total. I am very thankful to him because through his films I have known India with a deep insight.
-- Michelangelo Antonioni |
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I am extremely sorry I never took a photograph of Satyajit Ray. I have tremendous admiration for his work, and I enjoyed so much speaking to him each time I met him that I completely forgot to take a snap. Please excuse me for being such a bad journalist!
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson |
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I must admit I get rather restive when people write saying that my first published story was my best: perhaps Satyajit feels the same about his own first-born. But surely Pather Panchali is one of the most hear-breakingly beautiful films ever made: there are scenes which I need never view again, because they are burnt upon my memory.
-- Arthur C. Clarke |
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When I first saw Pather Panchali in 1956 at Cannes, it struck me like thunder. When I met Satyajit Ray in 1956 in Brussels, he looked like Krishna the mighty God. Since then he has been my great master; through him and through his works I learned how to live and how to love.
-- Kashiko Kawakita
Satyajit Ray, I salute you. The greatest of our poets of the cinema.
-- Ben Kingsley |
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Satyajit Ray is a great Indian who has contributed a new idiom to the cinema and brought us the wealth of a great civilisation we hardly knew anything about. We shall always remain indebted to him.
-- Yehudi Menuhin
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Apart from being one of the greatest filmmakers of our time, Ray is a most singular symbol of what is best and most revered in Indian cinema. I am proud that we, the Indian filmmakers of the present generation, are greatly indebted to Satyajit Ray for having taught us to look at the Indian reality in ways different and deeper than was ever attempted before.
-- Adoor Gopalkrishnan
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‘I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it,' Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray's first film, Pather Panchali , and it's true: this movie, made for next to nothing, mostly with untrained actors, by a director who was learning (and making up) the rules as he went along, is a work of such lyrical and emotional force that it becomes, for its audiences, as potent as their most deeply personal memories.
-- Salman Rushdie
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Here is the discovery of the (Cannes) festival: Lament of the Road ( Pather Panchali ) from India. A Bengali film by Satyajit Ray who, incidentally, worked with Jean Renoir on The River . Here is great purity and surprising cinematic lyricism. It is one of those rare works in which nothing seems to happen, but where we feel that we are being given a piece of life itself, |
unembellished, where we see before our eyes people living their daily lives with their small joys and their great affliction. …..The director does not go looking for beautiful pictures, they come to him naturally; his people, who are not professional actors, have an extraordinary presence….. Satyajit Ray, the Flaherty of Bengal, undertook this film back in 1952, along with a few friends, non-professional like himself, and an amateur photographer. …..It's a film worthy of a grand prize.
-- Lotte H. Eisner
Report of Cannes Film Festival where Pather Panchali picked up the Best Human Document Award |
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Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa are among the most prodigious personalities in the cinema since it came into being. They are not, like the Americans, looking for a property. They are doing on film what the old novelists of the nineteenth century did. They are describing their societies, their cultures, in the modern medium. Their work hangs together; it's about their view of the world, being given in different ways at different times.
-- Vidia S. Naipaul
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To one who has seen Part One (of the Apu Trilogy), two things are now evident. The film now seems better than it did because the second was made; and the director, Mr. Ray, is in the process of creating a national film epic unlike anything — in size and soul — since the Soviet Maxim trilogy of 1938-40. Further, as a record of a people's life, in its daily travail and its largest aspects, it bears comparison with Flaherty's Nanook and Maona.
-- Stanley Kauffman
Pather Panchali is perhaps the finest piece of filmed folklore since Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North . It is a pastoral poem dappled with the play of brilliant images and strong, dark feelings, a luminous revelation of Indian life in language that all the world can understand.
-- Time, 1958 |
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Whatever I imagined thousand times and dreamt, Satyajit Ray had laboured hard to make it neatly. A tremendous and overwheling difference — which place him on the throne of the creator of our new age. No one will ever be able to displace him from there.
-- Ritwik Ghatak |
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The work of Satyajit Ray presents a remarkably insightful understanding of the relations between cultures, and his ideas remain pertinent to the great cultural debates in the contemporary world, not least in India.
-- Amartya Sen |
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In film after film, he (Ray) investigates India's social institutions and the power structures to which they give rise, or vice versa. He works out, in concrete terms, the conflicts and issues of his times, both in his own state of Bengal and in the larger Indian nation.
-- Darius Cooper
For us in India, and specially in Bengal, the sense of the end of an era is overwhelming. For Ray represented a set of high moral values and large world view, at once deeply Indian and universal, that has sustained the best in Indian tradition through a series of great men of Indian renaissance of the 19th and the 20th centuries, of whom Ray was the last. What lends greater poignancy to our loss is that the ideals nurtured by this great men for nearly 200 years is in grave peril today.
-- Chidananda Das Gupta
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Sometime in April or May 1991, Satyajit Ray called me twice during the day. …….He called to remind us of a special screening (of Agantuk ) being organised in a small theatre. When my wife and I got there …..Over a dozen shoulders, Ray saw us and greeted us with unusual warmth. He looked confident and serene. I could almost read his mind. He seemed to be saying: You shall see, I have given my all! Then, just before the 120-minute screening began, he looked at Utpal Dutt, his lead actor, and said with remarkable energy: "Utpal, do not forget what I told you." Then a meaningful pause. "Didn't I tell you that you are my protagonist?" he said. Possibly he meant more, perhaps ‘spokesman'. Which, allegedly, he did call Dutt in an interview…… Deeply moved, Dutt bent down and touched his feet. Utpal Dutt bending down and touched his feet! Never seen before, never heard of. Never, ever. Unbelievable! We were amazed.
-- Mrinal Sen |
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When I did see [ Pather Panchali ]... I was bowled over. Here was an Indian film that was a film or that matched my concept of a film and a great one at that. It was the first film made in India that I had ever seen which did not embarrass, annoy, or bore me.
-- Robert Steel
It is true that the India Ray describes betrays his own bourgeois affiliations, since it caters largely to the interests of his class... [more relevant] is the question of how representative is Ray's India?
-- Suranjan Ganguly
Can we [ the Western audience ] feel any confidence that we are adequately understanding, intellectually and emotionally, works which are the product of a culture very different from our own? ... What is remarkable is how seldom in Ray's films the spectator is pulled up by any specific obstacle arising from cultural differences ... Ray is less interested in expressing ideas than in communicating emotional experience. "
-- Robin Wood |
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Out of his great body of work, my own particular favourite is his film Charulata. Although he was such a superb visual artist, Ray's main inspiration was literary. He always wrote his own scripts (as well as directing them and composing his own original score!) and his greatest films were all adaptations of favorite novels and stories, including Charulata , which was based on a novella by Tagore. It doesn't seem to matter through what medium — novels, plays, films, music — the most potent influences reach us. All great works stimulate a hopeful emulation that ends occasionally, as in the films of Satyajit Ray, in radiant success — ensuring the continuation of this business of influence and inspiration that makes us all try and try and try again.
-- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala |
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Like Renoir and DeSica, Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is. It is difficult to discuss art which is an affirmation of life, without fear of becoming maudlin. But is there any other kind of art, on screen or elsewhere? 'In cinema,' Ray says, 'we must select everything for the camera according to the richness of its power to reveal.' Ray is sometimes (for us Westerners, and perhaps for Easterners also?) a little boring, but what major artist outside film and drama isn't? What he has to give us is so rich, so contemplative in approach (and this we are completely unused to in the film medium — except perhaps in documentary), that we begin to accept out lapses of attention during the tedious moments with the same kind of |
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relaxation and confidence and affection that we feel for the boring sketches in the great novels, the epic poems.
-- Pauline Kael |
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Satyajit Ray is an extraordinary filmmaker with a long and illustrious career who has had a profound influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world. By honoring Satyajit Ray, the Academy will help bring his work to the attention of a larger public, particularly to young filmmakers, on whom his work will certainly have a positive effect.
-- George Lucas
Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar |
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Satyajit Ray is among the world's greatest directors, living or dead...Isn't it curious that the newest, the most modern of the arts, has found one of its deepest, most fluent expressions in the work of an artist like Ray, who must make his seem less films--many have been masterpieces--in a chaotic and volatile corner of one of the world's oldest cultures, amidst the most stringent shortages of today's advanced movie-making material and equipment?...It would be fitting to honour this great man, who has influenced so many other film makers in all parts of the world, and to salute him with a Lifetime Award in the spring of 1992.
-- James Ivory
Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar, 1991 |
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His extraordinary body of work has not only greatly influenced so many filmmakers, but has profoundly affected their humanitarian attitude. The seeming "simplicity" of his films is the mark of a truly great master and I would be overjoyed if he were to be honored by the Academy.
-- John Schlesinger
Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar, 1991
Ray's magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact, will always stay with me. …We would like to bring to your attention, and to the attention of the distinguished board of directors of the Academy, a master filmmaker, Satyajit Ray... Though somewhat unwell, during the past few years he has completed two additional films, centered around his deeply humanitarian vision. His work is in the company of that of living contemporaries like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini.
-- Martin Scorsese
Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar, 1991 |
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I want to add my voice to those of Scorsese and Merchant in asking the Academy grant Satyajit Ray an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award. I have admired his films for many years and for me he is the filmic voice of India, speaking for the people of all classes of the country...He is the most sensitive and eloquent artist and it can truly be said in his case that when we honor him we are honoring ourselves.
-- Elia Kazan
Nominating Ray for Life Time Achievement Oscar, 1991
In recognition of his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures, and of his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world.
-- Academy Award Citation, 1992 |
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"I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it (Pather Panchali). It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river. People are born, live out their lives, and then accept their deaths. Without the least effort and without any sudden jerks, Ray paints his picture, but its effect on the audience is to stir up deep passions. How does he achieve this? There is nothing irrelevant or haphazard in his cinematographic technique. In that lies the secret of its excellence."
-- As reported in Eksan, 1987 (Translation of remarks made in Moscow in 1975) |
"I was in high school and I happened to see 'Pather Panchali' on television. Dubbed in English. With commercials. "It didn't matter. It didn't matter. The image of the Indian culture we had had before, and I'm talking I was 14 years old or 15 years old, were usually through colonialist eyes. And when Satyajit Ray did his films you suddenly not understood the culture because the culture was so complex but you became attached to the culture through the people, and it didn't matter what they were speaking, what they were wearing, what their customs were. Their customs were very, very interesting and surprising, and you suddenly began to realize there are other cultures in the world."
-- Martin Scorsese Pays Tribute to Satyajit Ray , Washington Post, February 28, 2002
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"He did not give a damn about supposedly accepted tempo....Ray had the courage, knowledge and conviction to do it at the tempo and form he believed correct --- that's why his films could be describes as most beautiful pieces of compositions, poems."
-- Lord Richard Attenborough, Actor and Director, 2006 |
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| Contributed by AKD and UC |
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