Satyajit Ray

Cet ouvrage, au programme du baccalauréat « Cinéma et audiovisuel », vous propose de découvrir cette œuvre du patrimoine développant des thématiques chères au réalisateur :
la naissance de la presse et son développement spécifique en Inde ;
l’émergence d’un nouvel idéal national et les premiers mouvements politiques indiens ;
les prémices de l’Inde moderne et la place de la femme dans cette Inde à venir.
Sans oublier la force dramaturgique du film, sa dominante esthétique et son influence sur un champ visuel indien plus large.

He  comisariado el ciclo de cine Gandules 17 'Rebeldes y peligrosas'  para el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona. Entre los días 8 a 24 de agosto se han proyectado las películas 'No soy un ángel' (Wesley Ruggles, 1933)  'Johnny Guitar' (Nicholas Ray, 1954), 'La gran ciudad' (Mahanagar) Satyajit Ray, 1963), 'Instinto Básico' (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), 'Mommy'  (Xavier Dolan, 2014), 'Girlhood '(Bande de filles) (Céline Sciamma , 2014), 'La calle de la vergüenza' (Akasen Chitai) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956), 'La novia vestía de negro' (François Truffaut ,1968) y 'Nacidas para sufrir' (Miguel Albaladejo, 2009).
Una programación que tiene como eje la rebeldía y la peligrosidad, personajes femeninos que dinamitan los mandatos de género y sobre todo no asumen el rol de víctimas. Aquí tenéis la presentación al Ciclo así como las críticas de las películas.
Toda la info en: http://www.cccb.org/es/marco/ficha/gandules17-gas-natural-fenosa/226829

This piece is a summarised extract from a section of a Preface earlier written by me to a book on the works of renowned film directors, titled 'Authors and Auteurs' by Shubhayan Chakrabarti, a young film analyst of much promise.] At the core of the cinematic finesse suffusing 'Pather Panchali' ('Song of the Little Road') and its two sequels (based on a novel bearing the same title by a noted Bengali author, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay), lies the humanist art of sensitive and sophisticated treatment of unsophisticated characters. The well-known influences on Ray-such as those of Jean Renoir and Vittorio De Sica-are evident in the trilogy, but the art forms of the European masters seem to have been intrinsically and transformationally absorbed in the new milieu of the very Indian, and very Bengali, socio-cultural ethos. The art of social realism animates the essence, the spirit, that runs through the trilogy, depicting "ordinary life in a society where the members are not necessarily striving for higher spiritual awareness like the Romantics, but blending in and adapting to the functions of the industrial world or perishing in the attempt." The settings, the characters, the impulses, are of everyday India, but all of that seem to be universally related to those of Italian Neorealism as depicted in De Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves.'

This paper offers a critique of Satyajit Ray’s literature for young adults, a major part of which was dedicated to his popular and favorite sleuth, Feluda. The primary contention of this paper is that, since it was conceived on the pages of the Ray family magazine Sandesh, the Feluda stories have followed a rather taut, moral architecture that cannot be explained only in terms of categories that literature for young adults or children permit. The first part of the paper discusses at length the possible origins and formative influences of Ray’s sleuth. The second part proposes three hypotheses that consider the entrenched phallocentrism and gentrified eco-system of the stories as both a psychoanalytic and a cultural problematic.

While Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy is often studied for the
manner in which he uses the cinematic media to depict urbanization and its discontents, Mrinal Sen’s trilogy is contextualized within the filmmaker’s leftist politics. In discussing the cinematic idiom of the Calcutta trilogies, Ray’s and Sen’s use of formal strategies, identified as integral to international cinematic movements like the French New
Wave, emerge as a point of departure. However, this article argues that Ray’s and Sen’s adaptation, rejection, and modification of such strategies remain intertwined with their attempts to historically trace the world in which they and their characters lived.

Tracing the journey of artistic engagements with the Indian Modernist artist Benode Behari Mukherjee's works, starting from Satyajit Ray's 1982 documentary 'Inner Eye' to a 2020 exhibition 'After Sight' in London, this article reassesses scholarly and artistic encounters with Benode Behari's artistic consciousness in the light of international Modernist art movements and the artist's lifelong search for an ideal form. The role of nature in the development of his artistic uniqueness and ingenuity is discussed; as Benode Behari has often been erroneously imagined as a metropolis-centric Modernist artist, thereby also bringing to focus the broad subject of the significance of nature and the pastoral idyll in the development of Bengali Modernism and modern South Asian artistic consciousness. In this piece, a trajectory of the reception of his works is also drawn.

Whenever the career of Satyajit Ray is discussed, it is always about his films. But he also left his mark as an illustrator and artist, a facet still unknown to many. His book cover designs to book illustrations; his portraits to his invention of new typography; these are all world-class creations. Most of the original artwork has been lost. A few copies of the original are found here and there. This paper tries to analytically break down his artwork and origin and tries to offer a glimpse of Satyajit Ray's majestic works of art to the world.

Through reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), I will delineate Ray's formal and enunciatory cinematic usages and their applications in Sadgati, along with the critique of Premchand's progressive realism and aesthetics. I address the aporia of the aesthetic to caste issues by exploring and reconfiguring caste in terms of the delineation of Dalit life-worlds in Ray's and Premchand's narratives through modalities of the aesthetic-ethical framework.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2015.11933011

Being an advocate of the Nehruvian vision of building a modern India, Satyajit Ray never failed to push through his cinema his ideas and opinions of an equal, fair and civilized society bound by reason and intellect, not orthodox beliefs. His brilliant aesthetic view and humanistic approach to films brought out exceptional narratives that usually represented the neglected and ostracized class of the society. Ray was a strong supporter of women emancipation from the clutches of the patriarchal society and devoted many of his films to this cause. Along with many of his well-known motion pictures like Charulata (The Lonely Wife), Debi (The Goddess), or Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), he produced Mahanagar (The Big City) to reveal to the spectators the need to liberate women from their domestic cages and earn independence, respect and equality by uprooting the patriarchal culture. Mahanagar presents to the spectators a view of what a just, harmonious, equal and modern society should look like.

This article examines the aesthetic use of sound in Satyajit Ray’s films to retrace his position in Indian cinema as a reference point in the practices of synchronised monaural sound. Ray is traditionally considered to be an auteur and a cultural icon – his legacy being on the fringes of popular mainstream Indian cinema. The specifics of sound practice and the nature of sonic experience in his films, however, remain largely under-explored. In this context, I argue that Ray’s treatment of sound in his films highlights a recognition of listening to place by means of a keen observation and recording of the site in monaural synchronised sound practice, which has created a precedence for realistic auditory settings later championed by Indian filmmakers in the contemporary digital era. Investigating how Ray’s use of ambient sounds contributes to establishing an auditory setting and to constructing a sense of reality in his films, this article suggests that Ray initiated a tradition of audiographic realism in Indian cinema, which had hitherto been predominantly vococentric since the coming of sound in the 1930s. By situating Ray’s sound work within the longer trajectories of sound practice in Indian cinema, this article contributes more widely to the global histories of film sound, and illustrates the diverse threads and traditions that comprise monaural sound practices beyond the more commonly mapped territories of European and American film history.

In his career spanning nearly forty years, Satyajit Ray had made twenty eight feature films, five documentary films, two short films and one film for television. In this formidable oeuvre, we encounter many children. In some films children are the main characters, in some they are supporting characters, in some films they are minor but significant characters and some children make a memorable guest appearance.
This paper examines the appearance, characters and narrative significance of children in Ray's films.

This paper provides an account of Satyajit Ray’s (An Oscar-winner Bengali Filmmaker, musicologist, painter, and writer) calligraphic techniques. Satyajit Ray designed two English typefaces, viz., Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre. This paper concentrates on Ray’s artistic playing with the Bangla graphemes as it is revealed in the cine posters and cine promo-brochures’ covers (This paper excludes book-cover designs by Ray). The authors of this paper found deep impact of
(a) Artistic pattern of European staff notation in the graphemic syntagms;
(b) Alpana (“ritual painting” mainly practiced by Bengali women at the time of religious festival; the term denotes 'to coat with’. Generally categorized as “Folk”-Art cf. http://banglapedia.search.com.bd/HT/A_0211.htm) in Ray’s graphemic representations.
Thus, so-called division between classical and folk art is blurred in Ray’s representation of Bangla graphemes. The three-tier X-height of Bangla graphemes was presented in a manner of musical map and the contours, curves in between horizontal and vertical meeting-point, follow the patterns of alpana. Authors also showed the metamorphosis of graphemes (This might be designated as “Archewriting”) as a living object/ subject in Ray’s manipulation of Bangla graphemes. Author also mentioned Ray’s calligraphic impact on the Bangla printing technology. Bengali children, when is to be introduced in the Language Art (especially Bangla writing system), may practice alpana with a festive mood for the easement of their finger-movements and for alpana’s affinity with the Bangla graphemes.





http://linguistlist.org/pubs/papers/browse-papers-action.cfm?PaperID=8162

Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray are two high-flying names in the sky of art, culture and literature. They have glorified Bengal as well as India in the sphere of whole universe. Tagore wrote many legendary novels which were later taken as the scripts of Indian films. Such an epoch making novel of Tagore was Nostonirh (The Broken Nest) which was transformed into a film in the hand of renowned director, Satyajit Ray. Ray not only took the story, he also mixed the plot with his imagination. This compilation leads the novel to become almost a similar famous film in Bengali, 'Charulata'. My article will try to highlight this artistic approach of Ray along with his adoption of the novel.

The ontology of time and space has always been a subject of materialist prospectus bearing a halo effect of 'modernity' and 'progress'. The enquiry into the sign of modern is a mechanical category of production where substantial copies of 'progress' have religiously been equated with a break from the past. This breaking away from the centre (soul) is, of course, associated with a desire for the non-native design. Simultaneously, the past becomes historicized as primitive dangers while the present/'modern' morphs into a non-past spectacular diffusion. Satyajit Ray reloads his artillery of the cerebral one last time in his masterpiece titled, Agantuk (The Stranger), where he pits the idea of a spectral past having an agency to redo the class binary against the totalitarian time(s) in a modern urban space which prides itself on the abuse of power-as-civility. Ray introduces a nuclear family of three (a married couple and their son) where the protagonist, Manmohan Mitra, returns as an archived data in the body of a forgotten relative. His entry into the house ruptures the canny knots of the 'home' where the director exposes limits of the modernized time. This paper tries to analyze how Ray uses the motif of 'travel' in its cinematic cloth to critique the ingestion of global progress as nothing but an accumulation of fallen spectacles that commodify both a subject who is consuming the object-in-time (progress) and also the object that is all the time getting alienated from its own subjective merit. Mitra becomes the mouthpiece of the director for conveying the paradoxes of time-as-capital in the burgeoning of speculative modernity.

This paper tries to understand the impact of Italian Neorealism on Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray. Bringing the film 'Pather Panchali' created by Ray in 1955, it shows the various aspects of styles used in realism and its extrapolations made in the film.

Rabindranath Tagore’s literature spanned the most glorious years of Indian history. Large-scale social reforms were introduced, both by the colonial rulers and the colonized society, the prime target of which were women. Tagore, in his literature, exposed the unjust social structure that oppressed women on one hand and created spirited women who defied tradition on the other. Rabindranath Tagore displayed an outstanding understanding of the women’s psyche and encouraged greater freedom and decision-making power for women in the family and the larger
society. Satyajit Ray translated many of his works into films and while borrowing Tagore’s imagination, added his own insight. It is this representation of the “new woman” that I aim to examine through their great pieces [Broken Nest (Nashtanir) & Charulata] and the difference in its representation owing to the different context of time.

O livro de Denilson Lopes desenvolve, em uma perspectiva sócio-histórica e transdisciplinar, a relação entre melancolia e neo-barroco. A melancolia – sensibilidade estética, catastrófica, antiutópica – se define pela aflição diante da passagem do tempo. Trata-se de uma sensibilidade cristalizada como um imaginário no período barroco e que retorna na segunda metade do século 20 como neo-barroco.
Dentro da fragmentação do texto é possível vislumbrar cinco partes: neo-barroco, camp, dandismo, viagens e leveza. E para sua análise o autor escolheu três romances – A Menina Morta, de Cornelio Penna, Crônica da Casa Assassinada, de Lúcio Cardoso, e Ópera dos Mortos, de Autran Dourado – e quatro filmes – O Leopardo, Ludwig e Violência e Paixão, de Luchino Visconti, e Salão de Música, de Satyajit Ray.
A partir das categorias tempo, espaço e subjetividade, a obra é realizada por duas mediações: a imagem material, poética e cronotópica da casa como ruína, labirinto, teatro do mundo (espetáculo e artificialidade); e o personagem alegórico dos herdeiros e príncipes despojados de poder. Linhagem que inclui os poetas ultra-românticos, os dândis decadentistas, os punks góticos e todos aqueles que não se adequam ao império da velocidade e efemeridade contemporâneas. Os que delicadamente se afastam do centro das atenções.
Os romances traduzem uma tradição do Barroco no Brasil, distinta da expressa na literatura hispano-americana contemporânea. Já os filmes, ao diluir ou perverter as fronteiras entre cinema clássico e moderno, constituem um solo sobre o qual pode ser pensada uma narrativa de pós-vanguarda.
Para além de interesses acadêmicos, o livro é um acerto enviesado e pessoal com os anos 80, uma viagem pela dor e pela solidão, um confronto com a fugacidade dos afetos e uma busca quase desesperada de beleza e leveza. Para Denilson Lopes, a melancolia constitui, neste fim de século, uma porta de entrada para repensar nossa época por meio da arte, o que levaremos para o próximo milênio, o que queremos.
Silviano Santiago escreve a respeito de Nós os mortos: “A melancolia foi tomada no belo trabalho de Denilson não como tema objetivo extraído de textos teóricos e de obras artísticas, mas como matéria para um narrador em primeira pessoa escrever uma prosa ficcional erudita. Para evitar o suicídio da estirpe dos melancólicos, exige-se a autocontemplação estilizada dos pares. A pulsão de morte do narrador neutraliza a pulsão de vida do leitor. Nós os mortos. “O que somos sem essa pedagogia da morte?” – o narrador pergunta

aqui começa a viagem de pensar uma genealogia da melancolia a partir do Barroco e pensar um outro neobarroco em romances brasielrios em diálogos com filmes europeus que se distinguem da tradição hispano-americana, propondo uma caminho diferente de Carpentier/Lezama Lima/Sarduy/Perlongher

The figure of the socially-engaged detective who transcends his – a high- ly gendered agency operates here – generically-sanctioned roles as a glorified intellec- tual mercenary or “gumshoe”, solver of conundrums and “tangled skeins”, champion of the rule-of-law and keeper of the last resort, while attempting to uphold a universe of moral and ethical values that, simultaneously, do not stray too far from the high road of societal and political acceptability, is a figure to conjure within the literary history of Bengal in the twentieth century. In the present essay, the attempt will be made to study, through a comparativist’s prism, this gravitas, endowed by society, which is associated with the image of the successful private investigator in Bengal; often, his is a voice striking a blow for the spirit of rational enquiry, as with Feluda, and, in other cases, he upholds the dignity of the traditional order/s, while exposing its/their soft under- belly of moral corruption and criminal collusion, as with Byomkesh Bakshi.

Through a reading of Satyajit Ray's iconic 1964 film Charulata as a contemplation on the medium of cinema, this article re-visits the concept of "the cinema-effect" central to Ashish Rajadhyaksha's 2009 book 'Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency'.

My paper is a critical investigation of the socio-political situation of the Indianised spectral king (Bhooter Raja) in Satyajit Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) and also focus on Ray's handling of the marginalised in the movie. I read the movie as an allegory of postcolonial struggle told from a regional perspective. Ray's portrayal of the Bhooter Raja (The king of ghosts) is typically Indianised. He deliberately deviates from the colonial tradition of Gothic fiction and customised Upendrakishore's tale as a postcolonial narrative. My paper focuses on Ray's vision of regional postcolonialism.

The Indian short story is not merely a derivative of the Western genre, but owes much to the great story-telling tradition of Indian antiquity. The mythical and legendary tales as well as folktales have provided a fertile soil for the modern Indian short story to germinate. Beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian short story flourished in the twentieth century. It became evident by the end of the past century that the canon is attuned to Indian landscape whose heterogeneous people and their diverse experiences it reflects so faithfully. The Indian short story as a distinct genre resembles a “multicoloured glass” scattering myriad hues which is analogous to the diversity of our country itself. The variegated and unbeaten genre righteously deserves critical attention which it has been deprived of.

With twenty-seven scholarly articles by academics, professors and researchers, the present critical volume is a tribute to an affluent but neglected genre of Indian literature. In accord with the genre itself, the scope of the book allows for such diversity as the classic writers like Tagore and Manto; the feminist writers like Ismat Chughtai, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande and Indira Goswami; the dalit writers like Bama and Ajay Navaria; the diaspora writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. The reworking of myth by Mahasweta Devi, the nature lore of Ruskin Bond, the saga of exile by the Kashmiri Pandits, the satire of Hari Shankar Parsai, the macabre tales of Satyajit Ray, the problematics of identity in Manoj Das and memory in Temsula Ao—all are taken into consideration within the structure of a single volume to make this a stimulating overview for students and scholars of Indian literature.

The  mythological  is  a  genre  that  is  inscribed  into  the  originary  myth  of  Indian  cinema  itself.  Indian  cinema,  as  far  as  it’s  known,  began  its  journey  from  the  desire  of  Dadashaheb  Phalke  to  see  Indian  mythical  figures  onscreen  –  which  led  to  the  production  of  Raja  Harishchandra,  arguably  the  first  Indian  film  to  be  made.  Since  then  the  mythical  has  enjoyed  considerable  success  amongst  viewing  audiences  in  various  parts  of  India,  across  different  times  and  covering  a  wide  range  of  mythic  subjects  in  their  representation.  This  paper  seeks  to  inquire  into  a  particular  sub-genre  of  the  mythical  –  the  Goddess  film,  through  a  comparative  analysis  of  two  films  –  Kodi  Ramakrishna’s  1995  film  Ammoru  and  Satyajit  Ray’s  1960  film  Devi.  It  should  be  noted  that  the  two  films  should  not  the  conflated  in  terms  of  their  representational  strategies,  viewing  publics  and  historical  context.  The  commonality  between  them  lies  in  the  fact  that  both  centre  on  the  divine  figure  of  the  Mother  Goddess.  Even  here  drawing  we  must  draw  our  parallels  very  carefully.  The  Mother  Goddess  in  Ammoru  is  a  representation  of  a  subaltern  deity,  while  in  Devi  Ray’s  narrative  revolves  around  the  mainstream  religious  figure  of  Durga/Kali  which  is  the  largest  Hindu  religious  festival  of  Bengal.  A  detailed  ethnographic  analysis  of  the  commonalities  between  the  two  deities  can  doubtless  reap  rich  rewards,  but  such  is  not  the  scope  of  this  paper.
This  paper  will  seek  to  focus  mainly  on  the  formal  strategies  employed  by  the  two  filmmakers  in  mobilising  the  divine  image  of  the  Goddess.  Keeping  in  mind  that  Ammoru  is  a  mythological  in  the  traditional  sense,  while  Ray’s  film  is  a  questioning  of  the  cult  of  the  Goddess,  I  seek  to  analyse  the  realist  idiom  of  Ray  and  the  melodramatic  idiom  of  Ramakrishna.  One  of  the  questions  that  this  paper  seeks  to  explore  is  what  happens  to  the  realist  ethic  of  Ray  when  he  enters  the  domain  of  the  religious  and  how  he  negotiates  and  critiques  that  space.  The  other  question  is  of  the  mythic  function  itself  that  compels  a  male  imagination  to  reify  the  woman  into  the  figure  of  the  Mother,  particularly  in  contentious  times  when  the  traditional  status  quo  of  the  society  and  the  values  it  represents  are  in  contention  with  emergent  values.

A nest to the prized jewels of pre-modern and modern Indian art, Raj Ashraya: A Collection Museum and the home of the collectors Roohi and Rajiv Savara conceal on its first floor a fifteen feet long display bejeweled with works of the stalwarts of Indian art that glimmers of a narrative of the Bengal School: the ‘Santiniketan Wall’.

Abstract Through reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), I will delineate Ray's formal and enunciatory cinematic usages and their applications in Sadgati, along with the critique of Premchand's progressive realism and aesthetics. I address the aporia of the aesthetic to caste issues by exploring and reconfiguring caste in terms of the delineation of Dalit life-worlds in Ray's and Premchand's narratives through modalities of the aesthetic-ethical framework. Engaging recent research on trauma and media concerned primarily with visual evidence—testimony as well as commemoration, precarity and grievability of lives—I attempt to bridge the gap between postcolonial and cinema studies for cross- fertilization of ideas and productive interface between them. By studying one medium's translation, transmission, transformation and appropriation of the other, I wish to enhance not only our understanding of both media but also hope to contribute to studies of comparative poetics and cross-media cultural translation.

Lucknow is a city with magnificent history, architecture, culture and literature where once great musicians, poets and artists were patronized by the rich city elites and Nawabs, who made it the mecca of Hindustani art and culture. This book speaks of the rich tradition, history and culture during the final days of Lucknow's last Nawab, Wajid Ali Shah, through Satyajit Ray's major motion picture Shatranj Ke Khiladi or The Chess Players. In this book, Ray's narrative and socio-cultural representation of Lucknow are pitched against the original work of Munshi Premchand's short story by the same name, from which it was inspired. This work attempts to study Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khiladi in light of the actual historical events of nineteenth-century Lucknow, just before its annexation by the Raj.

This work analyzes that period as depicted by Ray on celluloid, and the theme broadly highlights or rather studies the 'Imperial Manliness and Colonial Effeminacy', 'Politics of Annexation', 'Decadent Royalty' and 'Evolution of Performing Arts' during the reign of Wajid Ali Shah.

https://www.amazon.in/Satyajit-Rays-Shatranj-Khilari-Colonialism/dp/1645875695/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=biswadeep+chakraborty&qid=1622829189&sr=8-2