… And What About Auteurs?

Credible information about this community undoubtedly reveals that creativity is one of the primary elements that each one possesses. When we watch a splendid motion picture, which has an impressionable “wow” factor, we notice the ingenuity of the maker and what contributions have flowed in to build such a marvelous creation. We comment, “Oh ………. was in his elements!” How many of us ever ponder over the “observations” the maker had made, before spilling them out and reconstructing them into what we have just seen? The “out-of-box” thinking is what we keep harping about. But on what facts is the “out-of-box” thinking created? The more the facts, the more reliable is your thinking. What is it that lets the individual collect more facts in the same limited permissible time? Perceptiveness?

One of the first modern motion picture producers we can recall is Cecil B. DeMille the maker of “The 10 Commandments,” which had surpassed all the pictures made thus far (1956) in its plot, the art and the technology used. Although the plot of the film was based on the Old Testament with the story of Moses as the highlight, DeMille researched beyond the Bible to collect facts. He tried and tested every actor in the lead roles right from Charlton Heston, Yul Bryner, Anne Baxter to the less significant ones. He went into the detailing of art, special effects and even the wardrobe, before taking a final call. It is said that in this movie, when Yvonne De Carlo, who was cast as Moses’s wife Sephora, insisted that the western looks in her eyes need not be camouflaged with a contact lens, as she possessed grey eyes and that positioned her differently, he agreed much in misalignment with his firmness with other actors on this issue. That is the kind of detailing he went into. Why would not “The 10 Commandments” have been the most successful films of 1956 and the most financially successful film of that decade?

Cecil was born of Henry Churchill DeMille and Matilda Beatrice DeMille in 1881 in North Carolina, U.S.A. and inherited his passion for theatrics and biblical allegories from his father Henry, whereas the intelligence, the ardent desire to research and his strong will from Beatrice. The assortment of these attributes made Cecil become what he has been famous for. Cecil lost his father to a strange typhoid when he was just 12. It was the determination of his mother that took him and the family through all the turmoil, as his father had left no wealth. Cecil graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his father Henry was a faculty member at one point in time. He completed his studies on scholarship. Although Cecil started his career as an actor in the Broadway theatres also helping his brother who pursued his career as a playwright and also picking up assignments of producing plays, he couldn’t achieve much success there. He had a wife and a baby daughter to support. He joined hands with Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn and some other East Coast business persons to launch Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Under this banner he labored hard with his crew, moving from place to place to shoot his first feature film “The Squaw Man,” which was released in 1914. Cecil broke all conventions of making a 20 min film by making this film one hour long. He did not also follow the practice of shooting films at Edendale (where most studios were situated), but did so at Hollywood. The film created a sensation and not only did it establish the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, but also there was no looking back. After five years and 30 hit films, DeMille became Hollywood’s most successful director. [Although the Lasky feature Play company had a shaky start, the company’s success became assured when it joined with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Films Company and Frank Garbutt’s Bosworth, Inc. to distribute films through the newly formed Paramount Pictures Corporation headed by W. W. Hodkinson. In 1916 the three production companies merged to form the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, and then assumed control of Paramount.]

The Roaring 20’s were the boom years and DeMille took full advantage, opening the Mercury Aviation Company, one of America’s first commercial airlines. He was also a real estate speculator, an underwriter of political campaigns, and a Bank of America executive, approving loans for other filmmakers.

Cecil B. DeMille

The arrival of the “talkies” did not deter the resolve that Cecil had. His resilience assisted him to transition his approach. He even devised a microphone boom, a soundproof camera blimp [housing] and also popularized the camera crane.

The Great Depression of the early 1930s took the toll on DeMille too. His M-G-M contract was not renewed, where he started his career with the “talkies.” After years of success in Hollywood, DeMille, took a beating in the stock market collapse in 1929 and faced the challenge of being unemployed and nearly broke. However, Cecil managed to obtain a one-picture deal to produce and direct “The Sign Of The Cross.” His old studio, Paramount, put up half the budget and DeMille financed the balance on his own. “The Sign Of The Cross” proved to be a tremendous hit, and DeMille remained with Paramount for the rest of his career. In 1936, he signed on as host of the Lux Radio Theater a dramatic anthology series that aired over the CBS radio network, and these radio appearances made Cecil B. DeMille a household name.

The following years saw many a stand of Cecil B. DeMille vis-à-vis the American Federation of Radio Artists and the Screen Directors’ Guild as controversial and shrouded in mystery, but the conclusion one draws was that he was firm on what he stood for. Continuing with his filming and film-making Cecil put in his last straw for “The 10 Commandments,” so much so that despite his having taken ill he finished the film with his shots in Egypt. Cecil died in 1959.

Here was a character who waged wars against all challenges, defied unprincipled actions and braved it up to prove that he was one of the greatest film-makers, the world had ever produced. There was no doubt that he stood by his passion, but how could he every time foresee his pursuit shadowed by danger and awaken his own self to greener pastures where his success lay? Indeed a fabulous insightfulness or a sense of perceptiveness that a man could capture and imbibe for all times to come. He kept himself informed and was alert to what was happening around him. So keen was he about his perfection to the tee that he and his perceptiveness worked round the clock till he breathed his last. Buried beneath a windswept sand dune, just outside the small farming town of Guadalupe on the central California coast, there lies a vast, century-old slab of Hollywood history. To realize his vision in the days before special effects, DeMille led a cast and crew of 3,500 to the desolate Guadalupe dunes, 150 miles north of Los Angeles, where carpenters crafted an ersatz Ancient Egypt from 168,000 meters of lumber, 11,000 kg of nails and 300 tons of plaster. The set was designed by Paul Iribe, one of the founders of the French Art Deco movement, who called for four 40-ton statues of Rameses the Great, eight imposing plaster lions, more than a dozen sphinxes and a 120ft-high backdrop of symbols and hieroglyphs. Memphis was rebuilt! This was in addition to his shots in Egypt.

Let us turn to another great film maker and this time from Asia—Akira Kurosawa—born on March 10, 1910, in Oimachi, a part of the Ōmori district of Tokyo, which was laced with a network of small rivers that were used by many locals in earlier times for drying harvested nori (a kind of a seaweed), a staple Japanese diet. It is worth mentioning here that the Meiji Restoration period in Japan spanned from 1868 to 1912, which had just ended when Akira was born, was actually responsible for the emergence of Japan as a modernized nation in the early 20th century. Father Isamu Kurosawa, a descendant of a samurai family from the northern Japanese island of Honshu and a Director of an Army physical education school, was therefore open to western traditions and considered theatre and motion pictures to have educational merit. He encouraged his children to watch films. As a consequence Akira was not only the captain of the school Kendo (a derivative of the Kenjitsu form of swordsmanship) team, but also went to see films as early as at the age of six.

Kurosawa was highly influenced by two other people in his early life—one was his primary school teacher, Seiji Tachikawa. “The fact that at such a time I encountered such free and innovative education with such creative impulse behind it….that I encountered a teacher like Mr. Tachikawa....I cherish among the rarest blessings,” recounts Kurosawa in the book “The Warrior’s Camera,” by Stephen Prince. He inspired him to kindle his first passion and that was drawing and painting. Like all Japanese I have known personally, explaining complications through drawings or through pictures comes naturally; Kurosawa was no exception and was one who stood out exceptionally, because he had it in him as a trained talent. Later he used the technique to explain his themes to his crew in film-making as movie-frames.

The Kurosawa family was not poor. They had a servant in their household and might have been considered wealthy if not for Isamu’s many dependents. Akira, the youngest sibling, had three older brothers (one of whom died before he was born) and four older sisters, Shigeyo, Haruyo, Taneyo, and Momoyo. At the time of Akira’s birth, his oldest brother and sister were already adults, living outside the home and had started families of their own; Kurosawa spent his youth with the three younger sisters and his older brother Heigo, who was born in 1906. Heigo, was addicted to the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Maksim Gorky. He also introduced Akira to Western art and the auteur cinema of Fritz Lang, John Ford, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Sergei Eisenstein. One specific incident which Kurosawa recollects is the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake that devastated Tokyo in 1923. Heigo took the 13-year-old Akira to view the destruction, and when the younger brother wanted to look away from the human corpses and animal carcasses which were scattered everywhere, Heigo stopped him and instead encouraged him to face his fears by confronting them directly. Although Heigo committed suicide when Akira was just 23 years old, he was the one who prepared him to face reality and empathize with the common man.

In the Kuroda Primary School, where Kurosawa went to, after his father’s retirement and where he met his extraordinary teacher, Seiji Tachikawa, he also befriended Keinosuke Uekusa, who became a playwright and screenplay writer later and worked in collaboration with Akira.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Kurosawa pursued his love of literature and painting, and he wrote essays that were published in his class magazine. He became a leading student in these fields, while failing in subjects such as mathematics and compulsory military training, though the economic growth Japan had enjoyed in the 1910s gave way to runaway inflation and industrial unrest in the 1920s. The Great Kanto Earthquake was preceded by nationwide rice riots. Takashi Hara, leader of the “Taisho Democracy,” was assassinated, and as older Meiji-era statesmen died off, the country became conservative and militaristic. Kurosawa’s father, though a military man and an antisocialist, was appalled by the changes that were taking place. He was horrified by the 1923 murder of anarchist Sakae Osugi by militant extremists and the 1928 assassination of Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin by Japanese Army officers, along with the subsequent arrest of Japanese Communist Party members. Kurosawa might well have been pressed into military service himself if not for the sympathetic Army physician who remembered and respected his father. Upon his conscription examination in 1930, Kurosawa received the Japanese equivalent of 4-F status. Deemed physically unfit, he was never drafted, even in the last, desperate days of the Pacific War, when young boys and old men were pulled into active duty. “I often wonder what would have happened if I had actually been drafted,” Kurosawa reflected in his autobiography.

But as Japan slided down further into economic depression, his family’s finances grew bad to worse, and they moved again, this time to the Ebisu section of Shibuya, in Tokyo. Only gradually did it dawn on Kurosawa that each time his family moved, it was invariably to a smaller house, reflecting the worsening of their fortunes. In the late 1920s, oblivious to their situation, Kurosawa had decided that he wanted to become a painter. His father did not discourage him, but insisted he apply to art school. Kurosawa resisted such formal training, though, and failed to pass the entrance examination for the one art school to which he applied. Four months after Heigo’s suicide, his oldest brother, Masayasu, died too, leaving Kurosawa his family’s only surviving son. His ambitions to become an artist had gone almost nowhere, and he began to have doubts about his abilities. The economy and his personal finances were so bad he could not even afford paints and canvases. Japan had invaded China, and political turmoil was brewing all over the world.

Kurosawa spent the next two years aimlessly trying to see his future. Then, one day in late 1935, he saw an ad in a newspaper that changed the direction of his life. Photo Chemical Laboratories (or, as it was known, P. C. L.), a new film studio, was hiring assistant directors. Photo Chemical Laboratories was one of Japan’s earliest film companies. It was bought in 1936 by Ichizo Kobayashi to form the production base that would become Toho. In 1941 and 1942, Kurosawa launched his writing career. The very next year, in 1943, he directed his first movie: Sanshiro Sugata. Five years later, Kurosawa met Toshiro Mifune and cast him in his 1948 movie Drunken Angel. Kurosawa cast Mifune many more times up until 1965, when after Red Beard the pair had a dispute and split their separate ways. His films have won many awards over the years, including academy awards, as he opened the world of Japanese cinema up to many moviegoers of the west. Many of his western admires have worked with him on projects, such as George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Unfortunately, in Japan his films were not as highly regarded, and for the most part the Japanese public looked down on his obviously western influenced films. Thankfully, Kurosawa continued his work and became good friends with director Ishiro Honda, for who he collaborated with on most of his productions near the end of his career. Kurosawa crafted an utterly unique style that combines elements of traditional Japanese theatre (Noh drama and kabuki, for example) with an unparalleled sensitivity to the global reach of human dramas. His seemingly fearless willingness to tackle any theme, genre, or setting distinguished him as one of the most inventive directors of the 20th century. “The films of Akira Kurosawa join a deep sense of tradition with a commitment to artistic innovation—a combination that characterizes much of the best filmmaking in the Far East during the past 20 years,” said Mark Winokur and Bruce Holsinger in year 2000.

Rashomon marked the entrance of Japanese film onto the world stage; it won several awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, and an Academy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards in 1952, and is now considered one of the greatest films ever made. We observe in most his pictures, as in Rashomon that repetition was essentially a component of Kurosawa, but the art of doing so creatively was not any man’s cup of tea. Recurrence of the same act or similar acts in different perspectives and contexts would add colors to the situation and not appear to be repetitive but on the contrary be reiterative; and this can be seen through only by a perceptive person who has a wealth of capturing different situations and registering them. Another feature was “pauses” which helped the viewer to reflect and muse over his impressions. Now, here was a perceptive person keeping in mind the variance in the audience of comprehending the content in its appropriate context and also this was tantamount to giving his viewers time to grasp. The leaning on the west was displayed in many of his themes and that too emerged to assume another prominent character. How could a civilization that was distant and in the far-east yield a film maker with a grasp on such ideas? Childhood motivation from father Isamu to watch films from the west and appreciation for occidental events and readings that brother Heigo was pursuant of, left an indelible mark on Akira’s thinking trends to evolve on his contemporariness and therefore his creations. The modern west could not be ignored by him, despite his emergence from a far-east culture. The world was already moving toward a global awareness and Akira Kurosawa was one of those early respondents who chose to respond positively. Of course, not a single film of his was bereft of humanism. The central characteristics highlighted here can nowhere else be born but in a film maker’s perceptiveness. The credentials bestowed on Akira Kurosawa to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Award in 1965 (for the first time in eight years for a film personality) states “the Board recognizes his perceptive use of the film to probe the moral dilemma of man amidst the tumultuous remaking of his values and environment of the mid-20th century”…. humanism was at the forefront for Akira.

In the late 1960s, the Japanese film industry was beginning to take a dip. Television was becoming popular. Looking at the international stature of Kurosawa, his dire need for work and his attempt to suicide in 1971, the then Soviet Union in 1973 invited him to direct Dersu Uzala, based on a Russian story which Kurosawa was attracted to since his assistant director days. This film again was awarded an Academy Award in 1976. I wish to recall the attention of readers to the life of Ernest Hemingway, who also could not take the downside befallen on him. Perceptiveness needs to be complemented with faith and resilience. The continued failure of acceptance of Kurosawa and his scripts in the commercial Japanese film world was because of high production costs and it was only because of his American admirers such as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas that 20th Century Fox agreed to purchase the international distribution rights of his film Kagemusha, which won the Cannes International Film Festival Golden Palm in 1980. Kurosawa died in 1998, after an arrest of his heart.

I cannot but let myself go not mentioning Satyajit Ray in this sequel. “The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. … I feel that he is a ‘giant’ of the movie industry,” said Akira Kurosawa in 1975 about Ray.

Born on May 2, 1921 in Kolkata, in an affluent Bengali family which boasted of a rich heritage in art and literature, Satyajit Ray was the only son of Sukumar and Suprabha Ray. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, also known as Upendrakishore Ray, who was a famous Bengali writer himself apart from being a painter, violin player and composer, technologist and entrepreneur, was Satyajit’s grandfather. Kalinath Ray, the great grandfather was a scholar in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. He was expert in English and Persian languages and in the traditional Indian and British Indian legal systems. He became a topmost expert for interpreting old land deeds written in Persian and in helping the landowners to get the best deal from the newly introduced British legal system in India. He became affluent and in due course the family was able to afford two elephants. He belonged to Mymensingh—now Bangladesh. However, Upendrakishore was adopted by Harikishore—stated to be more old fashioned and a zamindar (feudal landlord) in the same area—a childless cousin of Kalinath.

This did not prevent Upendrakishore from shooting into prominence with his compositions for resurrecting the Brahmo Samaj—the small spiritually activist sect founded amongst the intelligentsia in Bengal by Raja Ram Mohan Ray to resist conversions into Christianity. Although, known for various hallmark contributions, his invaluable and unforgettable gift for the society was to establish and publish the magazine Sandesh for children, which has remained popular till today. Upendrokishore did not live long and was survived by his son, Sukumar who carried forward the legacy. He too was a trained printing technologist but preferred to write for children on nonconventional themes and in unconventional styles. His toil resulted in nonsensical masterpieces such as the assortment of poems Abol Tabol (Gibberish), the fable HaJaBaRaLa (The Absurdity), the collection of short stories Pagla Dashu (Crazy Dashu) and the play Chalachitta Chanchari.

Satyajit Ray had no ordinary background!

Satyajit had to move to his maternal uncle’s house at the age of three along with his mother, as they had to quit their own lavishly spaced house, following changing of hands of the family printing business. His mother supplemented the family earning by teaching needle work and Satyajit went to the Ballygunge Government School, when he was eight. He proved to be an average student but was keener to go through film magazines that he stumbled upon, some of which were the like of the “Picturegoer” and the “Photoplay,” which made him familiar with Hollywood. Also he cared to listen to Western Classical on gramophone records. When he was short of 15, he qualified the matriculation examination (school final) and his mother was intense about his higher education. He went to the Presidency College, starting with a graduation course in Science (first two years) and completed his graduation with Economics in the final year. Evidently over the years Ray’s quest was inclined more toward films and film making and also toward compositions such that of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart rather than his allotted pursuit of academics. Eminent film-makers, such as Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford, Frank Capra, and William Wyler, caught his fancy and he became a loyal subscriber to Sight & Sound, a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute.

Satyajit decided to give up further academic chase after his graduation in 1939 when he was 18. He sought an apprenticeship in commercial art, without having acquired any formal training. His mother insisted on such training, as she felt he was too young to be employed anywhere; and eventually he went to learn painting at Shantiniketan, after several reluctances…though not commercial art! It was difficult to ward away his mother’s insistence and the lure of the proximity that Kavi Guru enjoyed with his father and grandfather. Young urban Satyajit got introduced to rural India through his outbound sketching excursions. Binode Behari Mukherjee, the art teacher was responsible for initiating Satyajit into homegrown and oriental art, including that from the Far East. He had been till then exposed only to the western forms. The interest in film making had germinated while in Shantiniketan amidst listening to Western Classical Music gramophone records and reading books on film making found in the library. The idea to make films however came in later. Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941 and Ray was back home in 1942. His intermittent visits to Kolkata were insufficient to quench his desire for being updated with the latest happenings, his love for his cousin Bijoya and above all the films that he missed including “Citizen Kane,” a film by Orson Welles which had won many rave reviews.

By April 1943, Satyajit Ray had joined a British advertising agency, D.J. Keymer. He was taken in as a junior visualizer (kind of an apprenticeship). However, he spent 13 years here itself, learning the creative skills needed in the field. Ray was fascinated by typography—remember the art of printing ran in the blood—both that of Bengali and of English and created numerous ground-breaking advertising campaigns. (“Ray Roman” and “Ray Bizarre,” which were his designed type-faces [fonts], won an international competition in 1971). He brought in more of Indian motifs and calligraphic elements to advertising. This love for typography and illustration would often surface in the credits and the publicity posters of his films, later. His senior colleague at D. J. Keymer, D. K. Gupta started a publishing house “Signet Press”* and Ray was roped in to do the cover jackets. In 1944, D. K. Gupta decided to bring out an abridged version of a novel by Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, Pather Panchali. Until then, Ray had not read much of Bengali literature. By his own admission, he was still unfamiliar with many of Tagore’s works. Ray was asked to illustrate the abridged version of the novel. The book itself made a lasting impression. D. K. Gupta, also a former editor of a Bengali film magazine, told Ray that the abridged version of the book could make a very good film.

This long association with D. K. Gupta’s Signet Press for designing covers and illustrations for books granted Satyajit Ray with an opportunity to read Bengali literature. Some of the books, he designed the jackets for, were later adapted by him for his films.

The World War II having got over, there was a spillage of American cinema in Kolkata and Satyajit made his best to watch as many. In 1947, with a few friends such as Bansi Chandra Gupta, Ray cofounded Calcutta’s first film society which screened Battleship Potemkin as the first. With his flair for writing Ray started contributing to film magazines and newspapers both in English and Bengali. Writing screenplays was another passion that he developed soon. One of his friends, Harisadhan Dasgupta had acquired rights for producing Tagore’s “Ghare Baire” and Ray wrote the screenplay. The film was never produced as Ray would not budge from changing his script, as insisted by a doctor friend of the producer. Ghare Baire was produced 35 years later with Ray finding his earlier attempt an amateurish one.

In 1949, Jean Renoir had come to Kolkata to shoot his film “The River.” Satyajit made it a point to see him in the hotel that he was staying in; and soon impressed with the knowledge of films that he possessed, Renoir saw to it that he was travelling with him in the drive to identify locations. He even shared with him his outline and the illustrations that he had made for Pather Panchali, when Renoir asked him if he was planning to make a film. Although Ray wanted to be a part of *Incidentally Signet Press had also published two books of Satyajit Ray’s father Sukumar Ray; Abol-Tabol (meaning Hocus-Pocus) and Ha-ja-ba-ra-la (meaning Higgledy Pigleddy).

This film making unit, he couldn’t, because he was transferred to its London office by D. J. Keymer, where he had already become the Art Director. Before departing for London, Satyajit had married his cousin Bijoya who was deeply interested in his films and music.

A business trip to London in 1950 proved a turning point. Ray and wife travelled to London by ship, a journey that took 16 days. With him, he was carrying a notebook in which he had made some notes on making a film of Pather Panchali. In this six-months long stay abroad, Ray must have seen about a hundred films including Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves.” “Bicycle Thieves” made a profound impression on Ray. Later, in the introduction of “Our Films, Their Films,” (a collection of articles written by him between 1948 and 1971) he wrote- “All through my stay in London, the lessons of Bicycle Thieves and neo-realist cinema stayed with me.” The film had reconfirmed his conviction that it was possible to make realistic cinema with an almost entirely amateur cast and shooting at actual locations.

Upon his return Satyajit lost no time in putting things together. In the perspective of not having any film-making experience, he gathered young men with different backgrounds as technicians, such as Subrata Mitra, who was actually a still photographer but was literally cajoled into the role of a cinematographer. In order to make his ideas about the film more comprehensible to the potential producers, Satyajit carried a small note-book, filled with sketches, dialogue and the treatment. Producers were intrigued and overjoyed with this script along with another sketchbook that illustrated the key dramatic moments of the film, but while many of them were impressed, none came forward to produce the film. The editorial team of “Probashi,” an e-magazine on Art and Culture comments thus,

Two years were lost in the search for a producer. The persistence, which was so intense, drove Rayto begin building on a belief that unless he had a few shots or a part of the film ready, he would not be able to successfully scout around for a legitimate producer. On borrowed money against his insurance policy and small loans from dear friends, Ray ventured with his team into unusual outdoor locations to make parts of the film. There were many dampening remarks from the conventional film makers who were dependent on studio shooting for natural happenings such as rain. Against all odds Ray captured the rain shots in the midst of Kans Grass (Saccharum spontaneum) with his amateur cast, only to postpone his second shot to the following year, as stray cattle had grazed the fields captured in the first shot. While the efforts to push through the shots with a mix of mostly amateur artistes and a few professional screen or stage actors were on, untiring endeavors to spot a producer continued. Bimal Roy’s “Do Bighaa Zameen” (Half an acre of land) made in 1952 had many natural outdoor shots and its winning the Prix International at the Cannes festival in 1954 and Kurosawa’s “Rashoman,” emboldened Ray with the trend he was following in film making. Ray discovered for himself,

In 1953, the find for a producer ended with Ana Dutta, who promised more funds after watching the results following the release of his last film. Satyajit embarked on his shooting mission and even took leave for a month from D. J. Keymer to achieve what he wished (till now he was shooting only at weekends) to. But soon he discovered that the promise the producer had made could not be fulfilled, as his last film was a disaster. The project started running out of funds and Ray had to pledge Bijoya’s jewelery as a collateral (the last alternative an Indian would opt for) to keep the work going, only for a few days more. Ray returned to his agency. The footage Ray had covered was edited, but there were no takers for funding the project further. Ray’s Production Manager Anil Choudhury suggested that the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Dr. B. C. Roy be approached, which worked and the Government agreed to fund the film. In this situation of turmoil, September 1953 also saw the birth of his son Sandeep. Ray resumed the work after one whole year in 1954. The money from the Government was being released in installments and replenishment of funds was happening only after accounts for previous expenses were submitted. Ray had to cope with it.

Monroe Wheeler, a director of Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and its head of the department of exhibitions and publications, New York came to Kolkata in the autumn of 1954 to collect certain Indian highlights for an exhibition. Ray perchance bumped into him and laid down some stills from his films. Wheeler offered to hold a world premier at MOMA. Ray’s work was validated by John Huston the maker of “The man would be King” who came to India six months later in search of locations. Having watched only a 15 to 20 min silent rough-cut, John Huston was convinced. His evaluation submitted to Wheeler, paved the way for the film to premier at MOMA. Once the deadline for the premier was set, it was day and night work for Ray. Satyajit had settled for Pandit Ravi Shankar the famous sitar maestro to score the music for the film, but the latter had very little time to spare as he was mostly travelling. Just as John Huston did, Ravi Shankar saw but only half of the film and composed the music in one go of 11 hours. Though exhausted, Ray was quite happy with the outcome. The film could be finalized only a night before the day of its dispatch. Weeks after the screening at MOMA, a letter arrived from them. It was strewn with accolades of how well it was accepted even without the subtitles! In 1955, just a few months later, Kolkata saw the release of the film with the audience gradually picking up numbers and eventually packed theatres. B.C. Roy the Chief Minister of West Bengal was so impressed that he wanted Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister to watch the film in his ensuing visit to Kolkata. Nehru recommended the film as India’s entry to the Cannes’ Film Festival of 1956. It was a fight till the end. Since the screening was scheduled at midnight the jury was missing as France has a “holiday season” then (the Labour Day, the Ascension Day etc.) A special screening was organized with the full jury, despite this, and the film won “The Best Human Document” prize. Ray had done it!

From then onwards there was no looking back. Not only what followed were great compliments, tributes and awards both at home and abroad, but also Ray had decided to quit his job at D. J. Keymer and take a plunge into film making. Notwithstanding the fact that he had become a world class director, he had set a benchmark for Indian Cinema and his films that followed had to be better than the one before. He created the Apu Trilogy as a sequel to Pather Panchali, that being inclusive, Aparajito in 1956 and Apur Sansar 1959. Sunil Singh, of San Francisco Bay, who maintains and monitors the site SatyajitRay.org says,

On March 30, 1992, Ray was honored with a “lifetime achievement” award [Honorary Academy Award], while he was in the Hospital on his deathbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ray died on April 23, 1992 and did not live to see the India Ratna (the highest award of India) awarded to him the same year.

There can be none better a description of the essence of Ray’s films than

Film Director Martin Scorsese thus paid his tributes to Satyajit Ray, in Washington Post, February 28, 2002.

The three great film makers that we have seen, came not only from different social backgrounds and cultural heritages, but also from dissimilar geographical surroundings, yet we found many attributes common. What stood out are their aspirations of putting in their best to every creation of theirs through untiring persistence. And what is remarkably astonishing is the rebel in them that loaded them to push unforeseen themes and techniques for filming. Incidentally, today, there is a throb in the management world to recognize rebel thoughts that are constructive, so as to enable effective employee engagement.

But what eventually gets displayed as a common feature in their personalities and also their works, is their contextual comprehension of the contemporary milieu, the timely mention of the issues, the need to introspect them and possible alternatives to redress them. Alertness to every single happening and the social awareness of behavioral indicators of different characters portrayed that had been registered by them for embedding in their theme for filming had been outstanding.

Notwithstanding the fact that all three film makers served their audiences a potion that had a blend of changing mores in society, essentially there’s no second thought that their individual perceptiveness had played its inevitable role. While Cecil B. DeMille brought forth epical features in a style that was acceptable to the contemporary world, Kurosawa and Ray went into the critical detailed perspectives of their respective hinterland and its backdrop. Had it not been for the eye for detail and every tiny bit indexed in the mind for reproduction at the appropriate time, their performances would not have been what we witness today and what they have become famous for.