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Satyajit Ray Society Vision |
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Over the last decade or so, The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Films, popularly known as the Satyajit Ray Society, has been at work, silently but diligently, for the preservation of the legacy of Satyajit Ray, as diverse as it is massive --- as a filmmaker, music composer, artist, writer and graphic designer. The mission of the Society is to make that legacy accessible not only to the lovers of art, literature and cinema all the world over but to the people at large as well.
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As a first step, our work involved collating a very large paper archive that Ray has left behind. These included thousands of pages of manuscripts, illustrations, musical scores and notation sheets, films, movie-stills, graphics, note books, photographs, posters, book covers, awards, memorabilia and much else, not to speak of a library with more than 10,000 books. All this had to be painstakingly sorted, catalogued and indexed. Much of it was deteriorating badly and had to be acid-treated and cleaned page by page. The expertise needed was highly specialized and we often had to seek expert help from abroad. The material was then scanned, once again, page by page, item by item, before converting them into digital images on good quality CDs.
Much has been said and written about Satyajit Ray's outstanding contributions to Indian cinema and to world cinema. Not enough, however, is known about the remarkable felicity and finesse with which |
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Ray had touched different creative disciplines during his lifetime and enriched them. Indeed, as a graphic artist, a writer of detective novels, adventures and science fiction, a critical essayist or as a composer of music, the width of Ray's intellectual reach was so extensive that it might surprise many of Ray's large following outside Bengal. Happily, this grand inheritance has now been restored. We can safely claim that the material we have in our collection is, by far, the most comprehensive of its kind. Indeed, we are now in a unique position to create a complete reference site on Ray that will interest not only Ray's considerable following worldwide, but will also satisfy scholars, historians, biographers and academic researchers on Ray and his cultural oeuvre. |
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In the first few phases of our plan, we have completed digitizing a substantial part of the material in our collection. The process, however, is by no means complete. The work that remains to be done is estimated to take another two years to complete. In many ways, it is going to be an open-ended process. New material keeps on cropping up from likely and unlikely sources all the time. Besides, Ray's iconic stature in the world of cinema makes sure that events on Ray continue to take place in many places of the World all the year round. All this will continually give rise to fresh material for updating and for dissemination. It would be fair to admit that technical and other practical limitations on the website project forced us to limit our horizon and attempt to present no more than fleeting glimpses from the wide spectrum of the rich legacy of the versatile genius that Ray was. Nevertheless, we feel that the site will, in its present form, address a long felt need for a much fuller source of information on Ray than is presently available on the web. As our work on restoration progressed, we felt acutely the need to think seriously about ways to disseminate Ray's rich legacy and make this treasure accessible to a much wider body of Ray aficionados all over the world. Our website, “ World of Ray”, is the first major step in that direction. |
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Where do we go from here? Indeed, we have “miles to go.” The Satyajit Ray society is a non-profit organization with no source of revenue of its own. It is our good fortune that we have had full backing from institutional and corporate donors in the various projects we have completed so far. We are indeed grateful to our donors, as all admirers of Ray across the globe would be, for their generous and unstinted support to the Satyajit Ray Society. Elsewhere on the website, we have named them individually and acknowledged our deep gratitude to them. Their support has given us strength and the courage to look at the challenges that lie ahead of us confidently. |
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| The Golden Fortress |
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Our immediate priorities include fine-tuning the web site in phases to make it more exhaustive and interesting. It will need continual updating and enrichment. We have plans to make it more interactive in the next phase of our work. We also have in our collection an impressive bunch of letters written in hand by Ray to associates, friends and fans. We want to build on it by launching a drive to trace and obtain Ray's correspondence with his many friends and admirers across the world. The website should come in handy in that global effort. |
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We also need to address a major gap in our collection. This relates to films made by Ray. Sadly, many of his priceless films had been preserved poorly and were in danger of being lost to posterity for ever. In collaboration with our sister unit in San Francisco (Satyajit Ray Fasc), the Satyajit Ray Society had enlisted the support of AMPASA (of the Academy Awards fame) in California, USA, and we were able to get quite a number of Ray's films restored by them. |
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| The Big City |
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Happily, these films are now back in their pristine state and safely held in AMPASA's custody. However, there remains quite a few Ray films that need urgent restoration. As many of you will know, restoration of feature films is an extremely expensive process. Besides, the logistics behind obtaining original copies and getting them shipped overseas for restoration is quite a challenge. This will be a major future project for us. We want to have in our collection every film that Ray made, properly restored, so that they are available for viewers in future. |
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Restoration of films presupposes facilities for their safe storage. There is no vault in India that meets the stringent quality standards required for safe storage. Not only do we need to build a vault of the right specifications to house all films of Ray, there is a pressing need to make it an integral part of a much wider initiative to build, as we have mentioned earlier, a platform for permanent storage and display of the material in our collection to the wider world. Our ultimate vision is to build a Museum in Kolkata dedicated to Satyajit Ray. The Museum will have a vault for permanent storage and much else to make Ray freely accessible to all visitors to the Ray Museum. There will be an auditorium where films will be shown and discussions / lectures held. And there will be adequate space where specimens from Ray's work and art would be displayed along with interactive equipment that visitors will be able to use to know Ray better. We also envisage a study centre and a library in the Museum along with facilities for scholars from across the globe to come and conduct research on Ray.
We realize these are major projects. Naturally, they will require meticulous planning and a very large effort on mobilization. These we are committed to in the days that lie ahead of us. Given the generous support we have always received from the corporate and institutional community in all our projects, and the fact that the need to preserve Ray's priceless heritage has never needed belabouring, we feel confident that there will be no dearth of support to help us realize our vision when we are ready for it.So we renew our appeal to individual Ray admires the world over and the national and international corporate communities to assist us financially in our cause. Now that we have formally opened our web window to Ray lovers all over the world and given them glimpses of the treasure that is our common legacy, we feel all the more confident that we shall redeem our pledge. |
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