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Satyajit Ray |
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Director / Screenwriter /
Composer / Producer |
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1921 - 1992 |
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Born May 2,
Calcutta, West Bengal, India |
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Key
Production Country: India
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Key Genres:
Drama, Psychological Drama, Family Drama, Rural Drama, Comedy Drama, Urban Drama |
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Key
Collaborators: Dulal
Dutta (Editor), Bansi Chandragupta (Production Designer), Soumitra Chatterjee (Leading Player), Subrata Mitra
(Cinematographer), Soumendu Roy
(Cinematographer), Anil Chatterjee (Leading Player), Chhabi Biswas
(Leading Player), Victor Banerjee (Leading Player), Sharmila Tagore (Leading Player), Ravi Shankar
(Composer) |
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Highly Recommended: Aparajito
(1956)*, The Music Room (1958)*, The World of Apu (1959)*, Charulata (1964)* |
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Recommended: Pather
Panchali (1955)*, Kanchenjungha (1962), The Big City (1963), Days and Nights in the
Forest (1970)*, Distant Thunder (1973), Pikoor Diary [TV] (1981) |
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Worth a Look: Devi
(1960), Rabindranath Tagore (1961), Two Daughters (1961), Siddhartha and the City (1970),
The Chess Players (1977), The Home
and the World (1984)**, The Branches of the Tree (1990) |
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* Listed in TSPDT's
1,000 Greatest Films
section; **
Listed in TSPDT's
Ain't Nobody's Blues But My Own
section. |
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Links: [
Amazon
] [
IMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film Reference ]
[
Satyajit
Ray.org ] [
Satyajit Ray
Film & Study Collection ]
[
Wikipedia ] [
Manas Biography ]
[
Guardian
Unlimited Article ] [
Upperstall
Profile ] [
Calcutta
Web Profile ] [
The
Satyajit Ray Foundation ] |
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Books: [
Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray
] [
Satyajit Ray: Interviews ] [
The
Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity ] [
Satyajit
Ray ] [
Satyajit
Ray: A Study of His Films ] [
Satyajit
Ray: A Vision of Cinema ] [
Best of Satyajit Ray ] [
Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye: The Biography of a Master Film-Maker ] [
Our Films Their Films ] [
Satyajit Ray: Beyond the Frame ] |
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"From
the beginning of his career as a filmmaker, Satyajit Ray was
interested in finding ways to reveal the mind and thoughts of
his characters. Because the range of his sympathy was wide, he
has been accused of softening the presence of evil in his
cinematic world. But a director who aims to represent the
currents and cross-currents of feeling within people is likely
to disclose to viewers the humanness even in reprehensible
figures." -
Satti Khanna (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998) |
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"His
reputation rests firmly on his detached, unsentimental humanism,
and on an ability to derive subtle emotional nuances and ironies
from a simple but effective marshalling of performance,
dialogue, decor and composition. He has been his own
scriptwriter, designer, composer and cameraman on many of his
films; he is a consummate artist whose faith in the cinema as a
medium to rank alongside the other art forms remains undimmed." -
Geoff
Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989) |
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"Ray maintained a high artistic level in most of his subsequent
films but found it impossible to match the authenticity,
sincerity, beauty, and magic of the Apu trilogy. At the
same time, Ray's later output boasts a bolder, more complex
style and a sharper, more pointed voice. Above all, he sustained
throughout his career the humanist values that have made his
films universally appealing." -
(The
MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
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"Has compassionately documented his people and culture for
the world to see. This director essentially examines the social,
political, and religious strata in Indian society." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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"When
I'm shooting on location, you get ideas on the spot - new
angles. You make not major changes but important modifications,
that you can't do on a set. I do that because you have to be
economical." - Satyajit Ray |
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Please
note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based
only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director
that we haven't seen include An Enemy of the People (1989) and Agantuk
(1991). |
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"No
other film-maker, apart maybe from
Kurosawa
(though his depiction of women is notably inferior to
Ray’s), has encompassed a whole culture; and no other
film-maker, full stop, has covered such a range, from pure
farce to high tragedy and from musical fantasies to
detective stories. Satyajit Ray, whatever some superficial
or ignorant critics may say, is not primarily the maker of
the Apu Trilogy. I fear that his range may never be
fully understood, given that the films describe Bengal,
which (unlike Japan) is of little political, economic or
cultural importance to the world – and in a language unknown
even to most Indians. But I hope his extraordinary diversity
may gradually sink in, as his work at last becomes widely
available on video and DVD."
-
Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The
Inner Eye |
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●
Top 250 Directors |
| ●
100 Essential Directors (Pop
Matters) |
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●
501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers |
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See Also |
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Wes Anderson |
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Ingmar Bergman |
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Vittorio De Sica |
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●
Ken Loach |
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●
Deepa Mehta (External Link) |
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●
Mira Nair |
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Jean Renoir |
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Roberto Rossellini |
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Mrinal Sen |
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Giuseppe Tornatore |
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François Truffaut |
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