Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta on May 2, 1921. His father, Late Sukumar Ray was an eminent poet and writer in the history of Bengali literature. In 1940, after receiving his degree in science and economics from Calcutta University, he attended Tagore's Viswa-Bharati University. His first movie Pather Panchali (1955) won several International Awards and set Ray as a world-class director. He died on April twenty-third, 1992.
There is perhaps no filmmaker who exercised such total control over his work as Satyajit Ray. He was responsible for scripting, casting, directing, scoring, operating the camera, working closely on art direction and editing, even designing his own credit titles and publicity material. His films come as close to complete personal expression as may be possible in cinema. Ray's style grows out of the material itself, and from an inner compulsion to express it clearly. The thread that ties the body of his work together is its strong humanist basis. By his own admission, his films are the antithesis of conventional Hollywood films, both in style and content. His characters are generally of average ability and talents. Perverted or bizarre behavior, violence and explicit sex, rarely appear in his films. His interest lies in characters with roots in their society. What fascinates him is the struggle and corruption of the conscience-stricken person. He brought real concerns of real people to the screen. His works serve to remind us of the wholeness and sanctity of the individual. Above all, Ray's is a cinema of thought and feeling, in which the feeling is deliberately restrained because it is so intense. Although Ray continued to experiment with subject matter and style more than most directors, he always held true to his original conviction that the finest cinema uses strong, simple themes containing hundreds of little, apparently irrelevant details, which only help to intensify the illusion of actuality better. These themes cannot come from the passing fashions of the period; they must be drawn from permanent values.
Ray was born in Calcutta into an exceptionally talented family who were prominent in Bengali arts and letters. His father died when he was an infant and his mother and her younger brother's family brought him up. After graduating from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1940, he studied art at Rabindranath Tagore's University in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. He took up commercial advertising and he also designed covers and illustrated books brought out by Signet Press. One of these books was an edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhya's novel, "Pather Panchali," which was to become his first film. In 1947, Ray established the Calcutta Film Society. During a six month trip to Europe in 1950, he managed to see 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (1948), which greatly inspired him. He returned convinced that it was possible to make realist cinema and with an amateur crew he endeavored to prove this to the world.
In 1955, after incredible financial hardship (shooting on the film stopped for over a year) his adaptation of Pather Panchali was completed. Prior to the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, Indian Cinema was relatively unknown in the West, just as Japanese cinema had been prior to Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). However, with Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray suddenly assumed great importance. The film went on to win numerous awards abroad including Best Human Document at Cannes. Pather Panchali's success launched an extraordinary international film career for Ray.
A prolific filmmaker, during his lifetime Ray directed 36 films, comprising of features, documentaries and short stories. These include the renowned Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959)), Jalsaghar (1958), Postmaster (1961), Charulata (1964), Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) and Pikoor Diary (1981) along with a host of his lesser known works which themselves stand up as fine examples of story telling. His films encompass a diversity of moods, techniques, and genres: comedy, satire, fantasy and tragedy. Usually he made films in a realist mode, but he also experimented with surrealism and fantasy. The theme of change, of the countervailing gains and losses attendant on the forces of progress, has often been identified as the central preoccupation of Ray's work. This theme, underlying much of the Apu trilogy, finds its most overt expression in Jalsaghar. Also the inner struggle between traditional and modern values in Indian life has colored several other Ray films. For instance, Devi (1960) is essentially a story exploring the dangers of religious fanaticism and superstition.
In 1961, Ray had revived "Sandesh," the children's magazine founded by his grandfather and continued by his father until his premature death. From this time, alongside his movie-making, he also produced a constant flow of illustrations, verses, translations and stories for the magazine. Several of his stories featured Felu Mittar, a private detective and it is one of these that he adapted for his second children's film Sonar Kella (1974). Like all of Ray's children's films it was hugely successful. Wary of making films in a language in which he was not proficient, Ray resisted the idea of moving outside the restricted Bengali. However, he was persuaded to aim for a wider audience by making his first film in Hindu, Shatranji Ke Kilhari (1977), a period piece set in Lucknow 1856.
Due to his medical condition, which resulted from a heart attack during the making of Ghare-Baire (1984), Satyajit Ray was told by his doctors not to do any location work and he was forced to shoot in studios. Unfortunately, this constraint of shooting does mar the last of his films as a whole. This is true of not only Ganashatru (1989) but also Shakha Prashakha (1990) and Agantuk (1991).
In 1992, Ray's health deteriorated due to heart complications. He was admitted to a hospital but never recovered. Twenty-four days before his death, Ray was presented with an Honorary Academy Award by Audrey Hepburn via video-link; he was in gravely ill condition, but gave an acceptance speech, calling it the "best achievement of [his] movie-making career."
