Beyond the World of Apu

John W Hood’s Beyond the World of Apu: The Films of Satyajit Ray, published by Orient Longman, is a very low-profile book – I can find hardly anything on it online – but a very rewarding one. The essays here are elegantly and carefully written, and create a pleasantly reflective mood that somehow mirrors the experience of watching Ray’s cinema.
Ray was a multifaceted filmmaker and his oeuvre covered many themes, settings and styles, ranging from the stark but affectionate rural narrative of Pather Panchali to the cynical corporate-life urbanity of Seemabaddha, and from the wordy clash of ideologies in Ghare Baire to the imaginative visual flourishes of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Hirak Rajar Deshe. For the sake of convenience, Hood arranges the 29 films into nine broad chapters with such titles as “The Calcutta Triptych”, “The Urban Middle Class”, “The Tribute to Tagore” and “The Cry Against Tradition”. This arrangement isn’t always satisfying – it’s more cosmetic than organic, as Hood himself admits, and at least one of the classifications, the chapter “An Early Pastiche”, is arbitrary – but it serves the purpose well enough. Besides, any impression that Beyond the World of Apu might be a disjointed or incoherent work vanishes when you actually get down to the essays on the individual films – it’s here that Hood’s love for Ray’s cinema makes itself felt.
The format of these essays is misleadingly simple: at first glance, they appear to be lengthy plot synopses with a few comments thrown in here and there. But to read them more closely is to be impressed by Hood’s rigorous attention to detail in watching each film (this is comparable to Tim Dirks’ astonishingly detailed Greatest Films website), making notes on it, discussing sequences and characters at length and observing thematic connections or contrasts between different works.
This in-depth treatment also means that Hood can avoid emphatic black-and-white judgements. Though he stresses the importance of acknowledging that not every Ray film is a masterpiece (and categorically names the ones that he considers the director’s lesser works), he gives himself the space to discuss the strong points of the flawed films as well as the less satisfactory aspects of the masterpieces. He doesn’t gloss over any film, but at the same time his respect for Ray’s artistry never encumbers his critical faculties – he observes, for instance, that with the exception of Uttam Kumar’s performance in Nayak, Ray’s films are full of “hackneyed images of drunkenness” (and, on at least one occasion, a trite portrayal of mental illness and senility), and that some of the later works are verbose and pedantic. Though I disagreed with him on some specifics about the films, most of the arguments he uses to back up his opinions are difficult to quibble with. (One notable exception: discussing one of Ray’s late, lesser works Shakha Prashakha, Hood points to the excessive use of English words and phrases as a flaw because of “the sometimes heavy Indianness of their enunciation”. This didn’t make much sense to me; in real life, the sort of people depicted in the film do use a lot of English words and phrases, and speak them in heavy Indian accents.)
But in essence, this isn’t the sort of film writing that sets out to be instructive or didactic: Hood is first and foremost a movie-lover articulately engaging with the career of a filmmaker he greatly admires. And that’s an appropriate approach to this particular director, for the beauty of Ray’s best work lies in observation rather than judgement; in the interplay between characters and in little details and vignettes that add texture to a narrative. (Personally speaking, I have a hard time pointing to a single favourite scene – or even two or three favourite scenes – in a cherished Ray film: the overall experience is so much more satisfying than its composite parts.)
In his Introduction, Hood clearly states his objectives. “[This book] aims to be no more than a critical examination of 29 works of art, based simply on the texts themselves. It is not in any way biographical, nor does it make any claim to offer film history.” Beyond the World of Apu is a fine demonstration of these assertions. In its ordered structuring and clear setting out of goals, it resembles a lengthy specialised thesis in places, but it’s also an accessible work that avoids academic jargon or the sort of “critspeak” that might distance the casual (but engaged) viewer of Ray’s films. My own litmus test for the book’s effectiveness was that I was equally engrossed by the essays on the films I haven’t seen (or remember dimly) as on the ones I have seen. Hood’s book lacks the intensely personal touch of Robin Wood’s The Apu Trilogy (sadly out of print now), but as a comprehensive study of Ray’s career it belongs in the top tier. Despite its occasional formalness, this is a warm and inclusive work of movie analysis, a fitting tribute to the art of a man whose work is characterised by affection and empathy for the human spirit.
[Did a version of this review for the New Sunday Express]

Speaking of Films - review

Did this for Business Standard - it appeared in today’s edition.

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The late Satyajit Ray often expressed regret about the lack of quality writing on cinema by its own practitioners. "Filmmaking is such a demanding process that directors – especially those who keep up a steady output – rarely have time to assemble their thoughts," he said. Time constraints aren’t the only factor; many leading directors tend to be reluctant to discuss their own work at length, much less expound on cinema in general. But Ray himself is one of the exceptions. Non-Bengali readers might be familiar with his earlier work, Our Films, Their Films, a collection of essays that was first published in 1976. Now we have Speaking of Films, a translation of a collection known in Bengal as Bishay Chalachitra.

It’s taken a puzzlingly long time for the first English version of Bishay Chalachitra to appear, but it was worth the wait: Gopa Majumdar’s translation is impeccable, retaining all the qualities we associate with the director - gentle yet firm, avuncular, instructive but conversational. In the 18 essays collected here, Ray covers topics ranging from the history of Bengali cinema to the importance of background music in a film ("in India the problem a composer must face is not one of paucity but of abundance"). There are reflections on great directors of the past, personal glimpses into the vicissitudes of the filmmaking process, and anecdotes, like the amusingly incongruous one about Kanu Banerjee - Pather Panchali’s Harihar - ruining a shot by repeatedly saying "mohanbagan" (the football club) instead of "mohanbhog" (the sweet). Ray also uses the scenarios of some of his movies to illuminate the problems in translation from page to screen. And there are moving personal profiles, based on his experiences with the blind painter Benode Bihari and with the extraordinary Chunnibala Devi, whose performance as the old pishi in Pather Panchali was one of the miracles of screen acting (and of serendipitous casting).

The master director discusses, at some length, the synthesis between form and content: the two qualities must ideally work in unison, he says, but it is possible for some films to aspire to high artistic achievement even with an abundance of one quality relative to the other; the austerity of the Japanese director Ozu (who refused to employ even widely accepted cinematic devices like the dissolve and the pan) can coexist with the joyful experimentation of Nouvelle Wave enfant terribles like Truffaut and Godard. At the same time, however, Ray sounds a cautionary warning to those who would seek to break established cinematic norms without a clear understanding of them, "for the creation of new rules requires a thorough knowledge of the old ones". This essay, written in the late 1960s, has a strong contemporary resonance, given the dilettantism and the "anything goes" attitude we see so much of today.

Even Ray’s biggest fans sometimes feel alienated by the levels of perfection the man reached (hence the frequently voiced preference for the erratic brilliance of Ritwik Ghatak over the polished finesse of Ray’s best films). This extended to his personal conduct too; he never came across as the sort who would, for instance, deign to participate in a messy verbal scuffle. In that context it’s fun to see him take on critics who wrote uncharitable things about Apur Sansar and Charulata. The occasional traces of peevishness in Ray’s tone here ("I do not know if Mr Rudra understands anything of literature. Of films he understands nothing, but it is not just that. He doesn’t understand even when things are explained to him.") are more engaging than his counterarguments (which are brilliantly made anyway).

But these little glimpses of petulance notwithstanding, almost everything Ray did was marked by empathy. His ability to see various sides of a debate (mirrored in the boundless grace of his movies, where even in situations of extreme conflict and turmoil, one can relate to the predicaments of several different characters) brings richness and depth to his writing. Rarely has a major director been so generous in articulating his thoughts, not only about his own films and the cinema of his country, but also about the history of the medium and how it has been influenced by societal backdrops in different regions. For all this, and for the lucidity and perceptiveness with which he did it, we can continue to be grateful.