Satyajit Ray's first film not only made its director famous, it was also the first film from India to be successful with audiences in India and which critics and cinephiles in Europe and the USA were able to classify in their own categories. Where does this dual resonance come from? Ray himself thinks about art […]
Dilapidated cars speeding along potholed country roads, cab drivers loitering in cheap bars, pimping and opium trafficking, sensual attractions and fistfights: Satyajit Ray and his lead actor Soumitra Chatterjee invite us into a world of physical impulses and spaces beyond what is usually associated with Ray's oeuvre. Film historian Ravi Vasudevan is the co-director of […]
Frankfurt Conference on the Report of the Independent Expert Group of the Federal Government Anti-Muslim racism is a problem in Germany and manifests itself in different ways in all parts of society - this is the conclusion of the Independent Expert Group on Anti-Muslim Racism set up by the German government. After more than two […]
PRATIDWANDI (The Rival) is a sharp-eyed portrait of Ray's beloved home city of Calcutta in the midst of political and social upheaval. The film is also Ray's examination of the new Indian cinema and Third Cinema. The exploration of political subjectivity, masculinity and social decline goes hand in hand with aesthetic experiments in dealing with […]
Who creates and preserves the canon of cinema? If you follow the material history of Satyajit Ray's JALSAGHAR, which tells the story of the downfall of a music-obsessed landowner, you come across a global power structure for archiving, preserving and restoring films. Using the journey around the world of the camera negative, the "original" of […]
Reviled by contemporaries as apolitical, Satyajit Ray's films nevertheless open up radically new ways of theoretically conceptualizing post-colonial presents and futures. JANA ARANYA (The Mediator) shows the extent to which historiography and, in particular, historians' reflections on temporality are anticipated in Ray's films and also enriched by them. Rochona Majumdar is a professor in the […]
"This film could not have been a novel...": this is how Satyajit Ray spoke about KANCHENJUNGHA from 1962, which tells a family story from a summer retreat in Darjeeling and was only lukewarmly received in India and beyond. In light of the colonial legacy and the complex modernity of the Indian novel, the strangely reserved […]
DEVI, which Ray filmed after the Apu trilogy, is a family drama about the conflict between faith and reason. Ray fearlessly and critically tells a reversal of the Oedipus myth, in which a feudal landowner declares his beautiful daughter-in-law to be the incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali and claims her for himself in the […]