The films of Satyajit Ray's Calcutta trilogy, made between 1970 and 1976, illuminate the educated, urban burgeoisie of his hometown. Realized between PRATIDWANDI (The Rival, 1970) and JANA ARANYA (The Mediator, 1976), SEEMABADDHA (Restricted) criticizes the corruption, exploitation and moral laxity that Ray saw as accompanying the rise of a new middle class. Daniel Fairfax […]
APUR SANSAR (1959), the third film in the Apu trilogy, paints a picture of domestic happiness in the midst of economic hardship. At the same time, the richness of nature from the first two films is transformed here into a feeling of wasteland. This double tension can also be understood against the backdrop of the […]
Satyajit Ray occupies a central position in research on Indian cinema. His films are usually read in terms of humanism and realism. DEVI and MONIHARA (The Lost Jewels), the centerpiece of the episodic film The Three Daughters and Ray's only horror film, offer an opportunity to reflect on the uncanny and the non-human in his […]
Four tourists from the city travel to the Bengal countryside and experience the ecology of the forests, the tribal life of the indigenous people and their village festivals. The journey away from the city becomes an exploratory journey into the life of the soul, in which the travelers' self-image is at stake and which leads […]
APARAJITO tells two intertwined stories, that of a boy's exciting departure into the world and that of the loss of his mother at his departure. The film can be seen in the light of Satyajit Ray's own biography and a life experience of cosmopolitanism with strong roots in a particular, hybrid cultural milieu in Bengal. […]
Made three years apart, Ray's Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) and Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Covered Star, 1960) both tell stories of women in professional life. The two films show intersecting but radically different views of Calcutta after independence and the division into India and Pakistan. Ghatak's approach to cinema and Bengal sheds […]
Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) is about the loneliness of a young woman whose wealthy husband is absorbed in his political and publishing projects. Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) becomes a figure of modernity itself, insofar as her curious outward gaze becomes an inward gaze that exposes her loneliness, her self-perception and her emotional world. Priyadarshini Shanker is […]
Ray's 1969 musical, which became one of his biggest hits, was based on a short story written by his grandfather for the magazine Sandesh, which he had founded in 1913 to improve the quality of literature for children in Bengal. In his adaptation, Ray transforms this enchanting story of two untalented musicians into a musical. […]
PARASH PATHAR (The Philosopher's Stone) from 1958 is a light-footed thought-experiment that was initially dismissed by critics and educated audiences as a comedy that was only of local interest, but which has layers and references that point far beyond that. Ray liked to talk about how much fun he had making it. Joy, rather than […]