| FINALLY RAY GOES ONLINE FOR CINE ENTHUSIASTS |
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D.N.Ghosh, president of the society,and Sandip
Ray, member-secretary,lighting the lamp at the website launch ceremony, while Souradeep,
Ray's grandson,looks on. |
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The website on Satyajit Ray (www.worldofray.com) was launched on 26 August 2006 at Kolkata’s ITC Sonar Bangla hotel. The site was inaugurated by Somnath Chatterjee, Speaker of the Lok Sabha in India, who happened to be the former President of the Satyajit Ray Society which hosts the site. Prominent among others present were Sudarsan Roychoudhury, West Bengal’s Minister for Education, and D.N. Ghosh and Sandip Ray, President and Member-Secretary of the Society, respectively. It was also the occasion for the release of a brochure of the Society, which was done by Sudarsan Roychoudhury. The news of the website was widely covered in India and abroad by the print, audio-visual and online media, both before and after its launch. Here we reproduce a few reports.
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| India's Oscar winner will be online soon |
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Satyajeet Ray the Oscar winning film director and his work would soon be online. The Satyajit Ray Film Society, set up in 1993, wants to bridge the gap between Ray aficionados and the material available on Ray and hence will soon be launching a website www.worldofray.com on the 26th of August.
The website will look into the work of Ray as a filmmaker, ad-designer, illustrator, photographer, graphic artist and author. Millions of fans will also be able to avail of the information of the whereabouts of different merchandise on Ray. There will also be an e-shop where Ray fans can order books and CDs of his films.
Not many of his fans know that Ray’s numerous books have been translated into an array of languages such as French, German, Persian, Japanese, Spanish,
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| Mr. Somenath Chatterjee, Speaker of the Lok Sabha, speaking at the website launch. |
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Hindi, English. The 35-40 section website will contain a segment containing the information on the films made on Satyajit Ray. So it looks like Ray fans are all set to experience the magic of the Cinematic Genius Satyajeet Ray because of the internet. God bless the internet!
Hindustan Times, 4 August, 2006
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| Ray riches set to go online |
July 18, 2006 - Satyajit Ray and his fascinating world are all set to inch a little closer to the master’s fans strewn across the globe thanks to a soon-to-be-unveiled website devoted to the wide-ranging creative output of the versatile colossus.
The website, created by the Kolkata-based Ray Society, is scheduled for formal launch on August 26, the 51st anniversary of the release of the master’s internationally acclaimed first film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road).
According to filmmaker Sandip Ray, the late maestro’s son and member-secretary of the Ray Society, the new website, worldofray.com, has already been formally registered.
“Our aim,” says Sandip Ray, “is to make the site as user-friendly as possible. A dry academic website won’t work. You have to grab the attention of users through attractive giveaways.”
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| Souradeep Ray,flanked by Sandip Ray and Somenath Chatterjee at the website launched. |
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While delivering a blend of entertainment and information, the exhaustive website will provide Satyajit Ray admirers and scholars access to everything that they need to know about the man and his work.
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Apart from audio and video clips from his classic films, worldofray.com will contain a range of sketchbooks, drawings and posters made by Ray during the different stages of his illustrious filmmaking and literary career.
The Ray Society (abbreviated from The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Films) was formed in the mid 1990s under the aegis of the Ray Film and Study Collection (Ray FASC) of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Somnath Chatterjee, Lok Sabha Speaker, was the president of The Ray Society.
Ray FASC currently holds as many as thirty 35mm titles and a large number of digitised sketchbooks, besides stills, posters, books, journals and articles on Ray and by Ray in ten world languages. The collection also has several hundred books illustrating Ray’s graphic art.
Ray FASC, with over ten thousand items in its kitty, is by far the world’s largest and most comprehensive archive on the filmmaker. The collection came into existence after UCSC celebrated Ray’s 70th birthday on May 2, 1991, with an exhibition of his artwork and books alongside the screening of one of his classic films.
According to Prof Dilip K Basu, prime mover and director of Ray FASC, 17 of the master’s films have already been restored and are now available for public distribution. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has committed millions of dollars to the restoration of the remaining Ray films.
The multi-talented Ray – filmmaker, writer, music composer, graphic artist, illustrator, and designer – was a master storyteller and a consummate craftsman. Understandably, his body of work is humongous in multiple fields – cinema, film theory, literature, poster design and graphic art.
Few filmmakers in the annals of cinema have had as much control over the medium as Ray. He wrote his own screenplays, handpicked every single member of the cast, directed his films, composed the musical score, cranked the camera, did the production design, contributed actively to the editing of his films, and even designed his own credit titles and publicity material.
Indeed, the new website will be a whole world in itself – it will have something on offer for everybody.
Saibal Chatterjee Hindustan Times, 18 July, 2006
Kolkata: A website on Satyajit Ray will be launched on August 26 - the 51st anniversary of the commercial release of his maiden film Pather Panchali.
The website with nearly 250 pages will provide a wide range of information on the renowned film-maker.The website - www.worldofray.com - will include hundreds of photographs, including rare ones taken by Ray himself, as well as numerous write-ups — on his stint as film director, music composer, costume designer, fiction writer, typographer and ad designer.
Among the photographs are one shot by him of the Italian film-maker, Michelangelo Antoninio, and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa on elephant back in Agra and another of the three together at the Taj Mahal, dating back to more than three decades ago, Arup Dey, Chief Executive Officer, The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Films, told The Hindu here.
A special section of the website is devoted to the director's comments on sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar. Also, one can read the script of Ray's version of The Alien, his unmade film. The website also features several video and audio clips from Ray's films and his music.
The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Films has been working for more than a decade to restore and preserve the legacy of the director. More than 70,000 of his manuscripts, scripts, scrapbooks, cover designs and book illustrations have been preserved, Mr. Dey said.
The paper restoration work is being carried out at Ray's residence here.
The film restoration project has been undertaken in tandem with the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences Archives, based in Los Angeles, U.S. "So far, 16 of Ray's classics have been restored by the Academy," Mr. Dey added.
Special Correspondent The Hindu, 21 August, 2006
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| Finally, Ray goes online for cine enthusiasts |
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| Sandip Ray speaking to the press at the website launch ceremony. |
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Monday, August 28, 2006, Kolkata - Indian cinema's versatile genius Satyajit Ray, who was conferred the Lifetime Oscar in 1992 when he was at his deathbed, now goes virtually global with the launch of a comprehensive website on his work and life.
www.worldofray.com, a comprehensive 250-page website with every aspect of the life and times of the maestro, is the Satyajit Ray Society's tribute to the most venerated Bengali after Rabindranath Tagore and the creator of the Apu trilogy.
The site, which comes 14 years after his death, is full of rare photos of the shooting of his films, stills from his celluloid gems, anecdotes and other information, including rare cover designs of his books and film posters.
It offers a rare glimpse into Ray's original sketches in 1950 that became the storyboard of the ground breaking 1955 film 'Pather Panchali' ('Ballad of the Road').
Ray joined the British advertising agency D.J. Keymer in Kolkata in 1943 as a junior designer, a job that helped him bloom into a graphic artist, typographer, book-jacket designer and illustrator.
He went to London in 1950 on a commission from the company and saw many films, including Vittorio De Sica's 'Ladri di biciclette' ('The Bicycle Thief', 1948) and Jean Renoir's 'La Règle du jeu' ('Rules of the Game', 1939), which made abiding impressions.
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According to the site, while returning from London by sea, Ray illustrated a children's edition of 'Pather Panchali', a semi-autobiographical novel by noted Bengali author Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee.
The sketches became storyboard elements when he made the film from the novel.
The release of 'Pather Panchali' in 1955 brought Satyajit Ray instant international and national recognition and changed the language of Indian cinema forever as he went on to make two sequels of the character Apu - 'Aparajito' and 'Apur Sansar'.
The site also has information about Sandesh, the four-generation-old children's magazine that has become synonymous with the family of Satyajit Ray.
It was the first successful periodical for young people in Bengal, launched by Ray's grandfather Upendrakishore in 1913, the year Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize for his collection of poems 'Gitanjali'.
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During a recent launch of the site in Kolkata, the Satyajit Ray Society, which hosted the site, made an earnest appeal to the West Bengal government for a piece of land or an existing structure that could be turned into a Ray Museum.
The society also appealed for restoration of the works of Ray, whose films made another contemporary Japanese genius Akira Kurosawa comment 'not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon'.
Filmmaker, son and Ray Society secretary Sandip Ray said: 'We would make an earnest appeal to the West Bengal government to give us a piece of land or existing structure that can be appropriately adapted to suit our requirements.'
'We would also appeal to the centre in the ministries concerned with information and culture to renew the kind of support they had once arranged for us, but did not fructify because of technical hitches,' added society president D.N. Ghosh.
Ghosh outlined a five-point agenda for restoration work of Ray's works.
While 17 films, of the 36 gems of Ray, have been restored under the existing arrangements with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science Archives, the Ray Society would be given one copy of the restored print provided the society has a vault that meets the stringent international quality standards for safe storage.
'We therefore need a vault that can house not only the films that have been restored but all the remaining available films for which a good deal of work remains to be done,' he said.
The Ray Society also plans to build a museum in Kolkata dedicated to Ray. 'Our aim is not have just a vault for the films but make it an integral part of his legacy that will hold the entire cultural legacy of Ray,' he said.
'Then we would like to built an auditorium and a space to built a gallery on Ray,' he added.
'Finally, we also envisage a study centre and library in the museum along with facilities for scholars from across the globe to come and conduct research on Ray.'
India enews.com, 28 August, 2006
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