Ray is a great director, and ipso facto cannot be typical of anything, perhaps not even reliably himself (it is the prerogative of all great artists constantly to take us by surprise). But it seems reasonable to assume that he must have come from something and fit into some sort of context. And so of course he does. Not particularly a cinematic context: eighteen years after the appearance of Pather Panchali, the first of the Apu trilogy, he is still a solitary figure, a unique talent in Indian cinema, and t...

I should confront the problem … of the accessibility of Ray's films for western audiences: can we feel any confidence that we are adequately understanding, intellectually and emotionally, works which are the product of a culture very different from our own? The problem has two aspects. One is content, our intermittent sense that certain passages or details in the films may mean something more, or something different, to Indian audiences. The other is tempo: the chief explicit grumble in the We...

In general, Satyajit Ray's films embarrass the critics. Admirers go impressionistic, talk airily of Human Values, and look offended when asked to be more precise. Detractors are no less vague. Some of them call his work charming, in a tone which could hardly carry more weight of suspicion and distrust, or say they are not interested in the problems of the Indian peasantry. Only M. Truffaut, in describing Pather Panchali as Europeanised and insipid, has firmly placed himself in the opposition. This mu...

"It adds years to your life," the young men from Calcutta in Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest say of the country quiet, and it's easy to believe. Ray's images are so emotionally saturated that they become suspended in time and, in some cases, fixed forever. Satyajit Ray's films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director. I think it must be because our involvement with his characters is so direct that we...

The color imagery of Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder" is so expressive that I regretted the need to look down to the subtitles; it took precious time away from the faces and bodies, with their hint of something passive, self-absorbed—a narcissism of the flesh…. The film is delicately, ambiguously beautiful; the shadowing comes from our knowledge … that the people we're looking at are endangered. It is a lyric chronicle of a way of life just before its extinct...

The world-wide acclaim given to Satyajit Ray's Bengali trilogy has tended to overshadow his other films, none of which has received much of a showing in the West. In the case of The Philosopher's Stone, a mild comedy made as a commercial intermezzb, the loss is negligible; but Jalsaghar or The Music Room (made before Apu) was fobbed off with a minor prize at the 1959 Moscow Festival and then mysteriously disappeared. Fortunately, after two attempts, Jalsaghar was captured for last year'...

Light shimmering on the water; what appears to be a dead hand floating just beneath the surface; then the hand idly begins to toy with the ripples, and the camera gently pans to reveal a girl dreamily bathing in the river and staring up at the sky as five fighter planes sweep by in formation: "How beautiful", she exclaims, "like a flight of cranes". This sequence of images immediately following the credits of Distant Thunder (themselves placed over images of tranquil nature and s...

[Roughly] two-thirds of The World of Apu, with which Ray closes his trilogy, are well worth the trouble, and some of this is as fine, in its own way, as the best of Pather Panchali…. Ray is so thoroughly in command of his material that for the first hour or so the reality of people, of their differentiated and changing worlds, leaps unquestioned from the screen. Looking back over this film and back over the trilogy as a whole, you see that it was chiefly this reality of persons and backgrounds that s...

To attempt to annex Satyajit Ray as the last Victorian would be absurd. But it isn't merely because Charulata is set in 1880, and full of references to Gladstone and Macaulay, to English politics and the rotundities of nineteenth century leader writers, that one is made aware of the connections. The film brings together the two characters who seem most thoroughly to arouse Ray's sympathies, and who have appeared most persistently in his films. And neither of them is, in Western terms, quite of...

[Perhaps] the most remarkable aspect of Ray's body of work is its range and versatility. Even within the trilogy, each of the films is strikingly different from the others: Pather Panchali, a Dovzhenko-like poem of the earth and of human lives coming to definition against the anonymity of nature's cycles; Aparajito, owing less perhaps to De Sica than to Zavattini in the latter's call for an open form; and The World of Apu, in which a narrative of spiritual questing that reminds one of H...

[Ray's first] films—Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and The World of Apu, form a kind of unified triptych of childhood, adolescence, and young manhood. The Music Room leisurely and patiently unfolds the story of the decline of the last member of a once mighty Indian noble family, revealing the man's character by quiet, ever-acute observation. The film has the quality and complexity usually reserved to an extremely good novel, without losing any of the visual beauty inherent to a first-rate ...

Distant Thunder, a rare color film by Satyajit Ray, is perhaps the master film-maker's loveliest, but it could take the cake as his most simple-minded and literal…. Ray gets in a few social barbs at the huszling middle class. But while Ray plants the seed for satire, he doesn't go anywhere with it. It's a red herring—the calm before the storm.

Satyajit Ray, the noted Indian director, is up to his usual lack of tricks in his latest film, Kanchenjungha. Once again he has dared to make a movie of such stately pace and conventionality of imagery that it—and the audience—always teeters on the brink of boredom. Once again his characters are fictional familiars—archetypes in danger of becoming stereotypes. Once again his story is little more than a cliché. And once again, by a magic that is peculiarly his own, he forces us to...

[It] was indeed a miracle for even so modest a talent as Satyajit Ray's to emerge with Pather Panchali two decades ago. It is not so much that Ray's films are slow, or pallid, or derivative, or choppy, or technically rudimentary—though they are all of these things, too—as that they are, for the most part, dull. Pather and the other two films of the so-called Apu Trilogy seemed better than what followed, perhaps because of the novelty of seeing films from India. What impressed me ...

[Mahanagar] dramatizes a disconcerting shift in the roles of women, and hence in the patterns of family life and emotional life generally. (pp. 46-7) American viewers, living in a culture which went through the emergence of women from the home a generation ago, will mostly find the film sentimental, and for them its appeal will be largely ethnographic: Ray is very good at catching the atmosphere of the Bengali household, the small glances and movements by which the inhabitants of the crowded apartment conve...

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players … is the ambivalence with which Ray views the matter of politics and progress, recalling the fact that twenty years ago, in Jalsaghar, he demonstrated how an aristocratic landowner's irredeemable social negligence might yet aspire to a state of grace through his overruling delight in beauty. There, more overtly but no more inescapably than in the new film, Ray's direction recorded the death of a way of life, ...

Ray's films—arguably the most considerable achievement in the art of our time—have made only a modest impact in relation to their quality. What the curious but weary West has wanted from India has been its peripheral and largely discarded mysticism, not its human problems and statistics of defeat. Where much of even the best cinema is a game, played in isolation and its interest dependent on awareness of cultural cross-references and its own improvizations, Ray's films have an or...

American interest in Satyajit Ray appears to have peaked in the Peace Corps era of the early '60s. One wonders if he didn't forfeit his status as a Third World filmmaker once it became apparent that his theme was not the plight of India's landless masses but the social evolution of its Brahman bourgeoisie. That The Middleman (1975) … reiterates Ray's obsessive concern should be obvious from its title. What's uncharacteristic about the film—Ray's best s...

On a first glance you might see Devi [The Goddess] … as no more than a film with a thesis, Ibsen in an Indian setting…. The thesis, it seems, is clear; and in fact is nothing less than the latent theme of the Apu trilogy made articulate….

Apart from suggesting an echo of the end of Grapes of Wrath in the closing compositions of Pather Panchali, I'd prefer to turn to one or two allegations of amateurism levelled against Ray—notably Paul Dehn's objection to the 'elementary' use in Panchali of long tracking shots. To me these shots are often among the most magical moments of the picture: the children pursuing the sweet-seller, the train sequence, or Apu running after Durga across the fields when they have quar...

Satyajit Ray made Mahanagar … in Calcutta in 1963. It came to the London Film Festival in 1964, and we remembered it as lightweight Ray with an especially rich quota of humour. That is how it still seems, with the humour marvellously perceptive about the little things that are really the big things of life. This conflict within the family between tradition and progress, between the old culture and the new enlightenment, that runs through all Ray's films, is after all a feature of the human con...

Satyajit Ray can reveal reality as can no other director in the world. He can give us the squelch of mud so that our feet are sucked into it; and the sound of birds frantically chattering so that we might reach out and touch a wing in flight; and the nearness of a great sluggish river so that we, too, are governed by it. One feels it possible to touch a Ray film, to make real tactile contact with objects and people which, in other films, we might admire for the patterns they made or the attitudes they struc...

It is always a trifle embarrassing to set down in unadorned outline the story of one of Satyajit Ray's films, for in that form they generally seem too small, too simple to support the critical enthusiasm they generate. (p. 126) [In The Big City], it all seems rather banal. But it is perfectly wonderful when you see it unfold at Mr. Ray's customary unforced pace in his customary unfancy style. The real substance of his films lies between their plot lines, in the interaction of his almost Chekho...

The handful of Ray's films that one has been able to see reveal his major theme as being the conflict between the generations in India, between the older generation who lived under the British Raj, and the younger generation who have grown up in a modern, independent land. (pp. 28-9) On paper [the plot of The Goddess] seems preposterous in this day and age. But Ray's handling of the characters is so discreet, and the acting of the father, son and his wife is so convincing that never once does ...

The World of Apu should not be qualified by the 'final part of a trilogy' tag. It stands surely on its own, prologue included, and this is not to overlook the fact that an extra dimension can be gained by seeing it after the earlier two films, Pather Panchali and Aparajito. This film is more than the sum of the successful contributions of a handful of technicians, and although its milieu is absolutely convincing and established without pretension it should not be patronised by being deemed sig...

That [Distant Thunder] falls short of Ray's best work is probably true enough, and worth saying. No less worth saying, however briefly and belatedly, is that I've seen no other film this year or last which seems to me to approach it. [What] the film is about is less [the famine it depicts] than the transformations wrought by that famine on the lives of one couple. Characteristically, the principals aren't some neo-realist-style impoverished everyman-and-woman but a Brahmin teacher and h...

Company Limited has a bleak, slightly off-key title to British ears and this quality of getting things just that shade wrong is an element in what it is all about. The film takes its place in a trio (the other two, Days and Nights in the Forest and The Adversary) concerned with the effects of what we did to India and Indians. We left them a language, English, and a way of life not unconnected with capitalism. These facts Mr Ray now occupies himself with stressing and, under their impact, he seems to be prod...

The influences of the Italian cinema on Satyajit Ray are quite clear. [Aparajito (The Unconquered)] … confirms the significance of the two influences we perceived two years ago at Cannes in Pather panchali (The Song of the Road), the first episode of the trilogy: first, the Zavattini and De Sica of Bicycle Thief and The Children Are Watching Us …, and, second, the lyric documentary quality of Flaherty and of the Renoir of The River. But Ray's "universities"—in the G...

Days and Nights in the Forest … the very title rings with enchantment, and the old Ray magic is soon at work again…. [Whereas] it would be impossible to detach Chekhov's characters, or indeed James's, from their very precise social contexts, Ray's characters seem to belong so essentially to no other time than their own that they could step quite easily out of Charulata into Days and Nights in the Forest, bridging three-quarters of a century in the process. Partly, of cours...

"Charulata," Satyajit Ray's most nearly flawless film apart from his great Apu trilogy, is a flowing, opulent tale that seems to be lit from the inside like a velvet-lined carriage with a lantern in it rocked by a hot monsoon wind. The film carries an exquisite period flavor of the eighteen-seventies in Bengal. (p. 48) The film leaves one with a sense of great things unfulfilled but never of mania. Like Ray's "The Music Room," which has tones of "The Cherry O...

The World of Apu seems to me not only the most successful, the most brilliant, the most moving, and the most important of the three parts of Mr. Ray's trilogy, but also probably the most important single film made since the introduction of sound. (p. 53) It's difficult to give the full flavor of this film; it's difficult to describe the extraordinary success with which Ray has succeeded in stripping away several more veils from reality than any film-maker has ever removed before. Moreov...

The Middleman is no exact sequel [to Company Limited], for Ray's portrait of the sad inter-relationship between amorality and success is painted in far greater detail and in darker colours. There is more explicit emphasis on the break-up of India's past traditions…. Religion is specifically degraded…. Unlike many other directors (Altman, for instance), Ray can depict sour and cynical characters or events without being sour himself: from the opening scenes the film bristles with t...

It is in Charulata that both the statement and the art reach their height. For the first time since the trilogy, Ray has something different and important to say, and says it really well. It is, to me, his masterpiece since the trilogy. In a classically Indian fusion of decoration and expression, its miniature-painting-like images acquire an autonomy and poise. Its rhythm, gentle as in all Ray's films, never falters, and Ray's own musical score, competent and interesting in previous films, for...

[It] is right for a film to preserve the indigenous quality of its country of origin, but Ray is unique among Indian filmmakers in that he has combined this with a cinematic idiom that is acceptable outside India. His films are very slow, but the influence of neo-realism and a flair for poetic imagery has brought them nearer to us than other Indian films have ever been. Even so, the slowness of Ray is less consistently cinematic than the slowness of, say, Antonioni. At times he is content to let the subject...

[The Hero is] a witty and ironic film Ray made in 1966. It is quintessential Ray, a simple story moving at what has been so aptly described as "the pace of a majestic snail," its protagonist projected on a broad canvas so subtly crammed with insights, perceptions, and wry comment that its compassionate awareness of the human comedy sticks to the mind's ribs with surprising persistency…. Ray provides a worldliness and sophistication to break the journey, with the tiniest of moment...

Company Limited is an impeccable ideological tract detailing the exact price in human dignity and decency to be paid for a stake in the corridors of power. As always with Ray, the message is all the better and richer for being conveyed obliquely…. [The] secret motivation of Company Limited is the mournful yearning of Chekhov's characters, not this time for the seemingly unattainable city but for the 'provincial' life that has been lost…. Company Limited may not have the ex...

Neglect is benign for some artists. An American novelist named William March was thought by some to be a neglected fine writer until a large anthology of his work was published; that finished March. The Indian director, Satyajit Ray, is a first-class artist, until you see his films. As long as he isn't imported, one can talk about injustice and neglect. But then along comes a Ray film, and, allowing for such exceptions as Aparajito and Charulata, it is usually a mild and fairly dull item. [Days and N...

["Nayak the Hero"] is the achievement of a great film director working outside his usual style, fumbling sometimes with surrealism, using flashbacks that flaw the usual concord of his sense of storytelling, but sometimes illumining it by lines that suddenly show character in movement, like the glare of a torch catching a figure on a staircase. (p. 67) Penelope Gilliatt, "The Fastest Anachronism in the West," in The New Yorker (© 1974 by The New Yorker Magazine...