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Satyajit Ray
(Shyām Benegal, 1984) |
Any Indian artist who wins international recognition is guaranteed an enthusiastic reception at home. Most Indian artists with international reputations have acquired these reputations in areas related to the traditional arts of India.
Satyajit Ray ranks among the few to have excelled in an area far from the Indian domain and, more important, to have received recognition for it from his peers around the world. An unhappy consequence of this was that the greater the enconiums heaped upon Ray by informed audiences outside India, the more difficult it became for Indian critics to make an honest assessment of his work. Ray himself was openly contemptuous of the Indian film critic and this only accentuated the habitual sense of unworthiness which afflicts the latter; Ray came to be regarded as above by most critics in India. When the Government awarded the only
Bharat Ratna ever given to an artist, to Satyajit Ray, it announced officially that Ray was
the quintessential Indian artist. A spurious patriotic value also became attached to his work and Ray was no longer beheld as a filmmaker among filmmakers. Where an artist is best judged through a dispassionate assessment of his output, the aura around Ray made it inevitable that his later (inferior) films would be judged by what one knew of Ray,
a priori. A deafening critical silence enveloped the filmmaker and this may have contributed to the obvious deterioration in his artistic sensibility. The following is an attempt to break the silence around Ray's (now embalmed) reputation; it is an attempt to understand some of his inadequacies, some of his failings as a contemporary artist.
In an article entitled 'Satyajit Ray: The First Ten Years' which was published in 1965, Chidananda Dasgupta argued that in the films made until that year, Ray had accepted the worlds conceived by other artists and portrayed them, but the filmmaker had made no attempt to comprehend his own 'contemporary world of burning trams, communal riots and food shortages.' The socio-political environment in this period virtually cried out for the artist's attention and Ray did heed this cry by making his Calcutta Trilogy – Pratidwandi (1970), Seemabadha (1971) and Janaranya (1975) – during the decade. Curiously enough, these films were once again adaptations of novels/stories of other writers although the writers he used now were his contemporaries.
Most of Satyajit Ray's films are adaptations of literary works – his own stories if not those of other writers. Every film made by Ray has a straightforward, linear narrative and I may not be contradicted if I suggest that Ray thought out his films first as stories, first conceived of them literally and then proceeded to find the appropriate images with which to relate them to us, visually. The written word may have been more important to Ray than it was to many of the world's major directors (Antonioni, Fellini, Tarkovsky) who conceived of their films less 'literally'. Understanding Ray's literary sensibility may therefore go some way in helping us understanding his cinema more deeply.
The relationship between literature and film has often been written about but the repeating of a few key aspects of this relationship is necessary. Films which are adapted from literature fall into several categories. One factor which is recognised by most students of cinema is that the greatest kind of literature does not translate easily into the best kind of cinema. A great work of literature is often so complete, so fully realised that the filmmaker may be left with no unrealised possibilities which can be taken to fruition. Secondly, the filmmaker adapting a literary classic may tend to subordinate his own vision to that of the writer and this can rarely help his work. While adaptations of literary classics are sometimes immensely respectable, there is the tendency for one interpretation to replace the rich ambiguity of the literary text. Adaptations of Shakespeare by Grigori Kozintsev (King Lear, Hamlet), Kurosawa (Throne of Blood, Ran) and Laurence Olivier (Henry V) can be cited here as examples; the film, whatever its merits, suffers in comparison with the written work just as all stage productions of one of Shakespeare's great tragedies must suffer in comparison with the play as it is written. The screen adaptation of a great literary work is like the Word made flesh, a kind of degradation is inherent in the process of adaptation, in the process of transformation.
The other end of the spectrum of film-adaptations is occupied by another kind of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that it is only the inferior literary work which produces good cinema. Godard himself often adapted little known pulp novels and, obviously, his end products bear little resemblance to their literary sources (Pierrot Le Fou, Le Petit Soldat).
Nedless to say, this kind of film must be very selective with regard to possible literary sources. The cinematic possibilities of the literary work must be 'discovered'i the average pulp novel (the inferiority of which is never in doubt) will not readily yield much to any filmmaker.
Between the two ends of the spectrum lies a whole range of cinematic possibilities. Some adaptations, which fall in the middle region of the spectrum, are more faithful than others but very few of them either depart as completely from their literary sources as Godard would have them, or approach their sources with the reverence reserved for a literary classic. Coppola's version of Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather' and Renoir's version of 'Nana' by Zola are both landmark films although both of them are quite faithful to their sources but the sources themselves are hardly of equal merit. Satyajit Ray's adaptation of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay's 'Pather Panchali' is faithful to the novel, but no one can deny that the film is also an independent triumph and (together with the other two films in the trilogy) perhaps the single greatest contribution to Indian cinema.
What is the relationship between Satyajit Ray's films and the literary sources they draw from? Comparisons have often been made between Ray and Jean Renoir and while both of them used the linear method of storytelling, it would be apt to point out a difference or two. Renoir often worked with very minor literary works (La Chienne) and his films based on these works go far beyond theirliterary sources. It is nowpossible to speak of a 'Renoirean' vision in cinema just as one speaks of a 'Kafkaesque' vision in literature. Ray may have been closer in temperament to Vittorio De Sica, Georges Franju or John Huston, a filmmaker as a versatile storyteller. Ray rarely indicated any thematic preferences and a deeper examination of his oeuvre tends to show that his films do not often rise above the sources they draw from. Charulatha and The Apu Trilogy still constitute his best films and when Ray did not use the best literary material (his Calcutta trilogy) his films seem sadly mundane.
Jean Renoir himself authored one novel a entitled 'The Notebooks of Captain Georges' and while the novel is not a literary classic, it is thematically very close to his work on the screen. Satyajit Ray was a much more proliflc writer than Renoir; do his stories reveal anything about his concerns, about his thematic preoccupations? Ray is best known for his detective stories featuring 'Feluda' and science fiction revolving around Professor Shanku. These stories are best described as 'sub-Conan Doyle' and are essentially juvenile works of flction. A few years ago, Penguin (India) brought out a collection of some of his other stories ('Twenty Stories') and these stories are once again, unmistakably juvenile; they are often very well-told but they seem too insubstantial to merit serious attention. The stories belong to various genres (ghost stories, science flction) but it is not this which gives the stories their juvenile stamp; the more closely we read the stories, the more it begins to seem that it is not the subject matter but the sensibility brought to bear on them which is juvenile. To illustrate, some of the stories in the collection are ghost stories and the ghost story is essentlally 'adult' fare because it deals with subject matter which is often morbid and obsessive. A recurring motif in the ghost story is the dead person seeking revenge or retribution who haunts a living individual or a place. If no vengeance or retribution is involved the dead person had an obsessive desire or purpose which remained unfulfllled. The haunting is inevitably the consequence of an extreme or 'dark' emotional condition; to express it very simply, only individuals whose lives experience intensely negative emotions (hatred, jealousy, despair) can aspire to ghosthood in death. In Ray's ghost stories, all extreme conditions are avoided. The existence of the ghost is often the flrst presumption upon which the story is founded, and the dark moment which created the ghost is never gone back to. Sometimes, Ray also violates a convention by making the ghost the object of a positive emotion. A cat or even a doll which is loved by its owner becomes a ghost which is visible not only to the owner but to others as well. This effect is often amusing but our suspicion regarding Ray's inability to deal with extreme emotions tends to remain. In the flnal analysis, Ray's supernatural stories are never strong or powerful enough to touch-the irrational parts of our being; they remain too timid to be anything more than amusing.
Let me cite one more example from the same book which illustrates Ray's curious failing. In one story entitled 'Sadhan Babu's Suspicions', a naturally suspicious man receives a mysterious package. At about the same time, the decapitated body of one of the man's former acquaintances is discovered somewhere and Ray makes the man suspect that the package contains the severed head. Ray may have been inspired by the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Cardboard Box' in which the ears of a murdered man are despatched to the man's lover by a jealous rival. In Ray's story, no darker emotions like jealousy are ever permitted entrance. The emotional foundation necessary to make us believe that Sadhan Babu's suspicions might be true, is never laid. We never learn why the old acquaintance of the protagonist was beheaded or why the murderer should choose to make Sadhan Babu the recipient of the head. Ray obviously thinks it adequate for the reader to know that the suspected murderer is a 'dangerous crook' and that Sadhan Babu once had a minor altercation with him. Needless to say, when Ray attempts to surprise us with the information that the contents of the package are actually innocuous, the surprise ending falls flat on its face.
Ray demonstrates his failing very often in his stories. This failing gives us such an important clue to his sensibility as an artist that one is tempted to examine his most important films in its light. As an example, Charulatha is regarded as one of Ray's flnest films and it was also his own personal favourite. The last few minutes of Charulatha are intended to be the most intense moments of the film because it is in these moments that the husband discovers his wife's love for another man. But do the last moments of the film really succeed? The husband is shown getting into a carriage and allowing himself to be driven aimlessly around Calcutta. We are treated to several close-ups of the man's saturnine countenance but Ray is unable to find a single image which might suggest the husband's true emotional condition with any degree of precision. The reconciliation between the husband and wife which follows soon after sheds no light on their changed relationship and one leaves the film feeling faintly dissatisfied. In contrast, Ray is eloquence itself when dealing with the gentler emotions – the bored housewife, her mild flirtations, the young cousin who is conscious of his own charm and the poor-relation who casually misuses his benefactor's trust to help himself financially.
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Apur sansār, 1957 |
Ray's admirers are likely to ask if a deeper grasp of the more extreme emotions, an understanding of the darker aspects of human behaviour are always necessary. The answer to this question could be that a filmmaker like Ray whose primary interest is in social relationships at the individual level is severely handicapped without this faculty in adequate measure. Ray's best films rarely venture into this uncertain territory:
Pather Panchali has intense moments but these moments use pathos as the dominant emotion and Ray is comfortable with pathos. The same observation can be made about
Aparajito but with
Apur Sansar, something goes serously wrong. This film may have given us the most exquisite portrayal of marital love on the Indian screen but the death of Apu's young wife virtually destroys the film. Ray relies on Apu's beard and his aimless wandering to suggest a private hell and any discerning filmgoer will only find this inadequate. Apu's throwing away of his incomplete manuscript has been lauded universally by critics but the gesture is far too grand to communicate the complete privacy of Apu's despair. One also doesn't know what Apu has been writing; we only know he is a 'writer'. If Apu's gesture emphasises the privacy of his emotional state by negating what he is in the process of communicating to the world, doesn't our ignorance of what Apu was attempting to communicate make the negation itself less effective?
Ray's unwitting denial of the darker side of our emotions sometimes means that his films do not rise above the level of kitsch, however well-crafted they may be (Kanchenjunga, Ashani Sanket, Nayak). There is no evidence that Ray was aware of this inadequacy in his work but, in his better films, he got over it by using standard, acceptable images at intense moments: a close-up of two hands reaching out towards each other (Charulatha) represents an emotional reconciliation; the moral turmoil of a young businessman who has just procured his best friend's sister for a potential customer is represented by a heavy tread and a downcast look (Janaranya). Ray is so precise and eloquent in his handling of the gentler human emotions that his use of the cinematic cliche at more intense moments is only too clear to the discerning eye. It must, however, be admitted in Ray's favour that the cliched moments are never overplayed and this may explain why they have generally escaped notice.
[in "Deep Focus", VI, 1996, pp. 39-46]
Films di Satyajit Rāy citati nel testo (in parentesi, oltre alla traslitterazione e alle date, vengono riportati anche i titoli inglesi con cui i film sono conosciuti)
The Apu Trilogy:
Pather Panchali (Pather pānchālī; Song of the Road, 1995)
Aparajito (Aparājito; The Unvanquished, 1956)
Apur Sansar (Apur sansār; The World of Apu, 1957)
Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973)
Charulatha (Chārulatā; The Lonely Wife, 1964)
Janaranya (The Middleman, 1975)
Kanchenjunga (Kanchanjangā, 1962)
Nayak (Nāyak; The Hero, 1966)
Pratidwandi (Pratidvandvī; The Adversary o Siddhartha and the City, 1970)
Seemabadha (Sīmābaddh; Company Limited, 1971)
Nota
Bharat Ratna = Bhārat ratn (lett. "gioiello dell'India") la più alta onorificenza conferita dal governo indiano per servizi straordinari resi al paese.
