Live Breaking News & Updates on Satyajit Ray At 100
Stay updated with breaking news from Satyajit ray at 100. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Satyajit Ray centenary: Professor Shonku’s world no longer exists. Can he still cast a spell? Satyajit Ray’s eccentric super-scientist charmed generations of Bengali children, once upon a time. Today’s children may be less impressed. Dhritiman Chaterji in Professor Shonku O El Dorado (2019) | SVF My school days in the early 1980s were enriched by Satyajit Ray’s movies and children’s stories. Ray’s Trilokeshwar Shonku, an ex-professor of Scottish Church College and an eccentric super-scientist, is perhaps one of the writer’s greatest creations. Indrani Majumdar, who translated some of the 38 Shonku stories in The Mystery of Munroe Island and Other Stories (2015) and ....
Kanika Majumdar in Teen Kanya (1961) | Satyajit Ray Productions Satyajit Ray’s birth centenary will be celebrated on multiple fronts. Some will remember his movies, others his delightful stories for youngsters and adults, and yet other his film scores. Ray began composing his own music with Teen Kanya Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and Baksha Badal (1970). Contemporary composer Alokananda Dasgupta tells Scroll.in about what made Ray’s music unique and what can we learn from it today. Satyajit Ray didn’t only focus on just the background score. He also created theme tracks. My introduction to films and background score happened via Satyajit Ray. I didn’t understand what I watched or heard, but I picked up the music and the dialogue which I would discuss with friends and cousins. ....
“Read it again. I’m sending you a copy.” I used to live on Grey Street Extension in Hatibagan, which was where Manik-da sent me the book. I read it once more; then Manik-da sent for me to read the script to me. It didn’t, however, spell out the last scene. “How will the film end?” I asked. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. But he didn’t. When we went directly to shoot the final scene, we performed the way Manik-da instructed us to. Shailen-babu held out his hand, and I held out mine. “There must be a small gap,” Manik-da said. “Your hands mustn’t touch.” That was how it was. ....
Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar (1958) | Satyajit Ray Productions Astonishingly, folded in between the films that comprise the celebrated Apu Trilogy , are two movies inspired by Bengali literature and Satyajit Ray’s association with two outstanding Bengali character actors: Tulsi Chakraborty in Parash Pathar and Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar. The first is perhaps minor (in spite of Chakraborty’s phenomenal performance) and is now mostly forgotten. However the latter is among the three or four greatest films in Ray’s oeuvre, and Chhabi Biswas’s performance is unsurpassed in his own illustrious career. Elegiac in tone, Jalsaghar (The Music Room) is, to quote John Russell Taylor, “an atmospheric piece”. It occasionally reminds one of Orson Welles’s ....
Chunibala Devi in Pather Panchali (1955) | Government of West Bengal/Criterion Collection is among the most assured filmmaking debuts in the annals of cinema. Ray’s adaptation of a portion of Bhibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the same name was released in 1955. Sixty-six years later, the spell cast by the chronicle of a family in rural Bengal is intact. Pather Panchali revolves around the hardscrabble lives of Harihar, his wife Sarbajaya and their children Durga and Apu. Harihar’s elderly cousin Indir Thakrun also lives with the family and is particularly close to Durga. Sarbajaya, weighted down by poverty, is often rude to Indir, causing her to temporarily seek shelter with another relative in the village. ....