sign in sign up
<<
Home , Academy Film Archive, Agantuk, Anil Chatterjee, Aranyer Din Ratri, Balasaraswati, Dhritiman Chatterjee

22 The second part of our major season reveals the enduring versatility and masterly Satyajit Ray: Part Two style of the Indian director. But his later output is marked by a darkening mood that reflects Ray’s This second part of Ray’s career begins And his exquisite historical drama about on a sunny note. The Adventures of the British military takeover of ambivalence towards the society he lived in, Goopy and Bagha was his most popular in 1856, The Chess Players, was equally argues Andrew Robinson. film in , with children and adults concerned with individual morality singing its Bengali songs on the streets as with political systems. But his two for months. ‘Maharaja, We Salute You’ detective films, The Golden Fortress was spontaneously sung by the crowds and The Elephant God, based on his at Ray’s funeral in 1992. own Holmes-and-Watson-style Bengali But then his mood darkened, first into the duo, betrayed a declining belief in official wincing irony of Days and Nights in the justice. In Deliverance, a stark attack on Forest, afterwards into a political trilogy: the cruelty of Untouchability, Ray moved The Adversary, Company Limited about as far from the hopefulness of and The Middleman. From 1969, the as it was possible to go. Naxalite movement inspired by Maoism Ray’s last three films, though not without rocked Bengal through terrorist acts his trademark comedy, were urgent by young , followed by horrific warnings to his fellow citizens against police and army reprisals, and a period religious fundamentalism and social of national Emergency declared by Indira corruption. Unfortunately, they were Gandhi in 1975, in which she became prescient, given the notorious destruction in effect a dictator. While Ray felt some of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 by a sympathy for revolution, as shown in the Hindu mob and numerous later bribery relatively optimistic first film, he never scandals. But they were also works of supported violence, and was increasingly art that speak to everyone. As the great disgusted by the immorality of politicians, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, businessmen and ordinary individuals, a long-time Ray aficionado, truly skewered in the later two films. remarked of Branches of the Tree: ‘It is of His emotion-laden portrait of the man-made distressing beauty’. Bengal Famine of 1943, Distant Thunder, See p7 for in person managed to retain faith in individual See p20 for Ray course and poster display compassion, despite the historical death of millions from hunger and disease.

The Home and the World WHAT’S ON 23 Film Season | Satyajit RaySatyajit | Season Film

In partnership with Restoration and Print Credits The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Prints courtesy of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center Collection at the Academy Film Archive Ray Bala The Golden Fortress The Academy Film Archive’s Satyajit The Kingdom of Diamonds Ray Preservation Project is an ongoing Deliverance effort to preserve and restore Ray’s work. It began after he received an honorary Academy Award (1992): producers of An Enemy of the People Branches of the Tree the Oscar telecast were dismayed by Ray The Adventures of Goopy the poor condition of the few US copies The Stranger 1999. Dir Goutam Ghosh. 105min and Bagha of his films. As he had worked on nonflammable ‘safety’ film, which can Goutam Ghosh’s documentary begins Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation deteriorate in warm, moist environments with Audrey Hepburn at the affecting India 1968. With Tapen Chatterjee, Rabi Project at the Academy Film Archive. Oscar ceremony in 1992 where Ray Ghosh, . 118min. EST. U (like India’s) many of Ray’s works were Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive in jeopardy. The Academy collaborated was unavoidably absent, and closes Based on a story by his grandfather, with the Satyajit Ray Society, producers Company Limited with his childhood encounter with The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha who worked with Ray, the National The Middleman who wrote released Ray’s pent-up love of fantasy, Archive of India, the Film Foundation, The Chess Players a vital poem in his autograph book. given free rein in his grandfather’s the Merchant Ivory Foundation and The Elephant God The rest is largely chronological, with writing and song-composing. The film the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha celebrated highlights from the films is iconic in Bengal – and admired by at the University of California, Sikkim linked to recorded comments by Ray. Salman Rushdie – but its spell has Two Santa Cruz. To date, the Academy has The frequent and intelligent attention not been so strong in the West. The preserved 18 features and one short. to Ray’s drawings and shooting six-and-a-half-minute ‘Dance of the notebooks, plus musical extracts, Ghosts’ is a tour-de-force. Plus, Two captures his exceptional versatility. (1964. 15min), an enchanting, wordless short about a rich boy’s rivalry with a poor boy.

Sun 1 Sept 20:40 NFT2 Sun 1 Sept 18:00 NFT2 Wed 4 Sept 20:40 NFT2 Sat 7 Sept 15:40 NFT2

Follow us 24 WHAT’S ON

INTRO

Bala Film Season | Satyajit Ray

Days and Nights in the Forest The Adversary Sikkim + The Inner Eye India 1971. 55min India 1972. 20min. Some EST India 1970. With , India 1970. With , Documentary attracted Ray most The Inner Eye is small masterpiece , Sharmila Tagore. 115min. Indira Devi, Debraj Roy. 110min. EST. PG when it focused on an individual. about the career of a painter, EST. PG Ray’s most openly political film, based Sikkim, however, is a portrait of a Binode Bihari Mukherjee, perhaps As in Kanchenjungha, a group of on a novel by Sunil Ganguli, was an small Himalayan state, politically the finest modern Indian artist, Calcutta Bengalis – four young male up-to-the minute response to the independent in 1971 but absorbed despite the fact that he went blind. friends – are taken out of their normal mayhem of the Naxalite movement in into India in 1975. Ray was He was also Ray’s teacher, so his urban environment. They go on a Bengal. Its protagonist, played with commissioned by its ruler, which film is both personal and profound, jaunt by car to a tribal area, in search compelling assurance by Dhritiman limited his freedom; later, the film ending with Mukherjee’s statement: of some alcoholic, sexual and other Chatterjee, is a young college graduate was suppressed by an over-sensitive ‘Blindness is a new feeling, a new adventures, while staying in a remote with a conscience desperately Indian government. Sikkim contains experience, a new state of being.’ forest bungalow. In the course of searching for a job in ‘a nightmare lovely, poetic scenes. a few days, each man experiences city’, as Ray described Calcutta in + Bala an epiphany at the hands of various 1970. His younger brother, chillingly India 1976. 31min women in a scintillating comedy convincing, chooses to follow the Bala shows off Balasaraswati, a great of manners. path of violence. exponent of Bharata Natyam dance, * Introduced by Sharmila Tagore which originated in , with skill and reverence.

Mon 2 Sept 20:45 NFT1 Thu 5 Sept 20:45 NFT1 Fri 6 Sept 20:40 NFT2 Mon 16 Sept 18:00 NFT1* Sun 8 Sept 20:45 NFT1 Sat 7 Sept 18:40 NFT3

book online at bfi.org.uk WHAT’S ON 25 Film Season | Satyajit RaySatyajit | Season Film

INTRO

Distant Thunder Company Limited The Golden Fortress The Middleman Ashani Sanket India 1973. With Soumitra Chatterjee, India 1971. With Barun Chanda, India 1974. With Soumitra Chatterjee, India 1975. With Pradip Mukherjee, Babita, Ramesh Mukherjee. 101min. Sharmila Tagore, Parumita Chowdhury. Santosh Dutta, Siddhartha Chatterjee. Satya Banerjee, . 131min. EST EST. PG 112min. EST. U 115min. EST In the last of Ray’s political trilogy, The famine of 1943 impinged on Ray Following the official clamp-down In the first film about his detective a sinister tragi-comedy that somehow through corpses in Calcutta’s streets. on the Naxalite movement, Calcutta , Ray avoided the whodunit escaped Emergency censorship, Afterwards he felt guilt that he had entered a period of relative calm, structure of his novel, Sonar Kella. corruption has infected Calcutta’s done nothing to help the victims. in which many kinds of corruption Instead, the audience come to know marrow. Again, a young man struggles Distant Thunder, from a novel by flourished. Company Limited depicts the villains early on, while the to find work in business, but now he Bibhutibhusan Banerjee, was his the well-heeled, anglicised business detective is kept guessing – as in a gradually persuades himself to do response. But it contains only one community in Calcutta known as Hitchcock film. The plot involves the virtually anything necessary for corpse, and instead focuses on a the boxwallahs, familiar to Ray from kidnapping of a boy, who claims to success, encouraged by a Dickensian starving rural Brahmin couple whose his job in advertising. An ambitious have known in a previous life an cast of shady characters, such as a ancient caste restrictions are finally executive willing to sacrifice his ancient ‘golden fortress’ in ; dapper PRO played by the fascinating overturned by compassion. Gorgeous integrity for promotion finds his the villains hope he will lead them Rabi Ghosh. ‘The story demanded colours underline the coexistence of conscience pricked by an attractive to buried treasure. black and white,’ Ray emphasised. natural beauty with human cruelty. sister-in-law he wishes to impress, played by Sharmila Tagore. * Introduced by Sharmila Tagore Sat 7 Sept 20:40 NFT2 Sun 8 Sept 16:15 NFT1 Sun 8 Sept 18:20 NFT2 Sat 14 Sept 20:30 NFT2 Tue 10 Sept 20:40 NFT2 Mon 16 Sept 20:45 NFT1* Wed 11 Sept 20:30 NFT3 Tue 24 Sept 20:30 NFT2

Follow us 26 WHAT’S ON Film Season | Satyajit Ray

The Chess Players The Elephant God The Kingdom of Diamonds The Home and the World Shatranj Ke Khilari Joi Baba Felunath Ghare Baire India 1977. With Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed India 1977. With Soumitra Chatterjee, India 1980. With Soumitra Chatterjee, 1984. With Soumitra Chatterjee, Jaffrey, Amjad Khan. 120min. EST. PG Santosh Dutta, Siddhartha Chatterjee. Utpal Dutt, Tapen Chatterjee. Victor Banerjee, Swatilekha Chatterjee. In his first Hindi feature, Ray recreated 112min. EST. PG 118min. EST 140min. EST. U the period just before the Indian The second detective film about The fantasy characters, Goopy and Tagore’s best-known novel, The Home Mutiny/Uprising of 1857. Two minor Feluda, more sombre than the first, Bagha, return in this musical, but the and the World, appeared in the aftermath Lucknow noblemen are obsessed with takes him to the crooked lanes of mood is less carefree than in the first of Bengal’s abortive Swadeshi (‘Our playing chess, ignoring the political (Benaras). The Ganges ghats film. They confront a king who is Country’) movement of the early chess game of the British preparing to on which Apu gazed in wide-eyed clearly a ruthless tyrant, willing to use 20th century – the first stirrings of annex their princely state. A superb curiosity in become the a technique of brainwashing invented India’s later freedom movement under cast including the actor shop-front of thieves and swindlers in by a magician-cum-scientist at court. Mahatma Gandhi. Ray’s adaptation Amjad Khan and Richard Attenborough, The Elephant God. A fake holy man is The colour is sumptuous, and Ray’s does not underplay the patriotic exquisite dialogue, music and dance, in league with one of his ‘devotees’, songs are witty and openly political, issues, but weaves them into the and magnificent sets, bring to life the a vicious businessman plying stolen if impossible to translate fully. behaviour of three key individuals: decadent court of King Wajid Ali Shah. antiquities. The Graham Greene-like He had the 1975-77 Emergency in a liberal landowner, his sheltered wife contrast between appearances and mind while directing. and his college friend who is both reality excited Ray. political leader and seducer.

Thu 12 Sept 20:40 NFT1 Sat 14 Sept 15:30 NFT2 Sun 15 Sept 18:20 NFT2 Sat 21 Sept 17:50 NFT2 Sat 14 Sept 18:20 NFT1 Fri 20 Sept 18:10 NFT2 Tue 17 Sept 20:40 NFT2 Wed 25 Sept 20:15 NFT2

book online at bfi.org.uk WHAT’S ON 27 Film Season | Satyajit RaySatyajit | Season Film

Deliverance + Pikoo An Enemy of the People Branches of the Tree India-France 1981. With Arjun Guha Shakha Prasakha India 1988. With Om , , Thakurta, , Soven Lahiri. India 1989. With Soumitra Chatterjee, France 1990. With Ajit Banerjee, Richa Mishra. 118min. EST. PG 26min. EST Ruma Guha Thakurta, . Haradhan Banerjee, Soumitra Chatterjee. 100min. EST. U 130min. EST Deliverance, made in Hindi for national Pikoo, a masterly short made for Ray suffered a major heart attack in Funded by Gérard Depardieu and television from a Prem Chand story, French television, derives from Ray’s 1983, which restricted him to shooting another French producer, who gave Ray is, devoid of poetry: ‘a deeply angry short story about a young boy’s diary. mainly in a studio. His first film after carte blanche, Branches of the Tree is an film,’ said Ray, ‘but it is not the Pikoo lives in a prosperous Calcutta recovery was deliberately based on a original screenplay about a family at anger of an exploding bomb, but of household where he observes the theatre play, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy war around their father – a bedridden a bow stretched taut and quivering.’ tension between his mother, father, of the People. Thoroughly transposed heart patient with a somewhat spooky Smita Patil and play a poor grandfather, elder brother and from 1880s Norway to 1980s Bengal, resemblance to Ray. The patriarch is Untouchable village couple hoping for servants without comprehending its so that it concerns the pollution of a self-made industrialist with a clean a blessing on their child by a Brahmin cause: his mother’s affair with an ‘holy water’ in a Hindu temple, it deals record, unlike two of his four sons. priest. In keeping with religious ‘uncle’. The film’s finest moments, with fundamentalism, and powerfully Their incendiary clash over corruption sanction, the priest callously exploits such as Pikoo’s attempt to draw a dramatises the friction between at dinner is among the most dramatic his caste inferior. flower in the garden, are wordless. politics, religion and science. scenes in Ray’s oeuvre.

Sat 21 Sept 20:10 NFT3 Sun 22 Sept 16:00 NFT2 Fri 27 Sept 20:30 NFT2 Tue 24 Sept 17:40 NFT2 Sun 29 Sept 21:00 NFT1 Tue 1 Oct 20:30 NFT2

Follow us 28 WHAT’S ON EXTENDED RUN 10 Screenings

The Big City Wonderfully enjoyable, with the scope and density of a great novel, Satyajit Ray’s tale of family and city life is set in mid-50s Calcutta, a society still adjusting to Independence. Subrata Mazumdar (), a young bank clerk

Film Season | Satyajit Ray struggling to support his family on a meagre salary, is horrified when his wife Arati (a ravishing performance from The Stranger ) dares to challenge his cherished belief that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’. She not only takes a France-India 1991. With Utpal Dutt, job but proves a huge success, relishing her independence Dipankar Dey, Mamata Shankar. and thoroughly upsetting the family dynamic. Bengali star 120min. EST. U Mukherjee, working with Ray for the first time, confessed In his swansong film, Ray lightened herself ‘stunned’ by his extraordinary ‘woman-centred’ the basic mood, after the bleakness screenplay, so different from anything she had previously of Branches of the Tree. The Stranger is encountered. Yet, for all his focus on Arati, Ray – who is partly a comedy, as noted by western renowned for his breadth of sympathy – also deploys reviewers, but for Bengalis it has warmth, humour and acute psychological insight in his many moods, as it dissects a family’s depiction of Arati’s conservative father-in-law, her studious reaction to the return of a long-lost teenage sister-in-law and her benevolently despotic boss. relative. It recalls Jean Renoir’s classic La Règle du Jeu, of which Ray remarked: Newly restored and re-released to mark its fiftieth ‘Humanist? Classical? Avant-garde? anniversary, The Big City with its emphasis on conflicting Contemporary? I defy anyone to give social values – and most particularly the role of women – it a label.’ still feels sharply relevant. – Margaret Deriaz India 1963. Dir Satyajit Ray. With Anil Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee. 135min. Digital. EST. PG. A BFI release.

Tue 1 Oct 18:00 NFT1 Continued from August NEW Sun 1 – Thu 12 Sept PRINT Sat 5 Oct 20:40 NFT1 ‘Xxxxxxxxxx’

Browse our calendar for times and screens