Introduction & Research Methodology In the canon of world cinema, Satyajit Ray is a familiar name. Indeed, one could argue that the very articulation of a critical sphere called ‘world cinema’ has been historically shaped, in part, by Ray’s canonized status. However, at times one may fnd it difcult to ignore the suspicion that Ray is included in certain discussions, lists, syllabi, textbooks, et al., vis-à-vis flm and flm history, in a tokenistic manner. In other words, Satyajit Ray is sometimes treated as a common signifer or shorthand for South Asia’s participation in flm history at large. In a sharply written article by Girish Shambu, this point is underscored by the fact that “for decades prior [to an interest in Bollywood], Indian cinema in the minds of Western viewers was associated primarily with Satyajit Ray.”1 Shambu asks why “[Ray’s] flms stand in for the entire cinematic output of one of the most populous and diverse countries on the planet [and moreover,] how did it come to be this way?”2 While Shambu does not profer an answer or attempt to historicize Ray’s reception in the West, the questions he poses are at the heart of this paper. Herein, I ask: when in history does Satyajit Ray become the iconic fgure that we recognize him Satyajit Ray in Western Film Criticism, as today? How was he initially received in the West? How did Ray become inscribed into the canon of world cinema? In short, this research paper seeks 1957-1958 to understand the genesis and trajectory of Ray in Western flm criticism. My research will predominantly study English-language print media— MAHDI CHOWDHURY largely, from American and British sources—in the years of 1957 and 1958. One may ask: why these years? Pather Panchali partially premieres in 1955 at MoMA,3 is sent by the Indian government (with the personal approval of Nehru) to Cannes in 1956,4 and Aparajito is completed in 1956—so why then, does my research take 1957 as its starting year? This is due to the dearth of English-language sources written about Ray and these events in various news-repository archives. This archival gap is moreover evidenced by Proquest and Google Ngram searches, which only yield Lok Sabha conference papers or family genealogies for “Satyajit Ray,” his flms’ titles, and news articles from the aforementioned events. In other words, records of Ray and his flms are practically non-existent in English-language print before the year 1957. However, it is crucial to note that my methodology and argument is contingent upon what print is saved in big-data archives. Therefore, it is fair to say that, despite how vast these archives are, there may be outlier articles regarding Pather Panchali and Ray absent herein. Nevertheless, I use these two years—1957 and 1958—not simply out of limitation and necessity. They are critical years because, from 1957 to 1958: Ray’s flms begin to debut in domestic theatres in England and the United States; his flms screen at Mahdi Chowdhury is a Toronto-based Bangladeshi artist notable Western festivals; and lastly, Ray and his flms enter the circles and and student at the University of Toronto. He is also repertoires of Western newspaper flm commentators. Editor-in-Chief of the Undergraduate Journal of Near & I argue that studying texts produced between 1957 and 1958 challenge our Middle Eastern Civilizations. His favourite Satyajit Ray typical assumptions about the international reception of Ray and his flms. film is Apur Sansar.

24 25 Satyajit Ray in Western Film Criticism, 1957-1958 Mahdi Chowdhury

Since my research focuses on how Ray is represented, discussed, and framed frst-wave of print media regarding Ray’s Venice win, it is worthwhile to among flm critics, the majority of my historical research is vis-à-vis (i) flm note an exception. Robert F. Hawkins uncharacteristically defends Ray’s distribution and exhibition history, and (ii) comparative, discursive analysis win and writes lengthily about him in a retrospective two weeks after the of this body of print media. Toward the end of this article, I highlight the festival for the New York Times. Although Hawkins defends Ray’s win, he common themes and tropes employed in these texts, including a binary further testifes to the “controversial” nature of the festival and the “divided emphasis on either the exoticism of Ray’s flms or their universal or humane opinions”11 that intemperately defned it. While one of the most authoritative quality. English-language scholars of Ray, Andrew Robinson, opines that Venice solidifed Ray’s reputation, these articles paint a more complicated picture. Early 1957 Controversy, apathy, resentment, the politics of internationalizing festival The earliest records of mass Western print media that explicitly mention Ray spaces are subject to amnesia in Robinson’s account of Ray’s genesis. refer to his win at the Venice International Film Festival. The frst one appears Here, one may even question the idea of ‘genesis’—is there a single point on September 9, 1957. The Los Angeles Times prints a small, single column in history where the stature of Ray aligns with the stature of Ray today? Or article called “India Takes Gold Lion.”5 If these are the earliest records on Ray, is this simply a practice in teleologizing Ray? The task of pinpointing the then it seems tempting to think of him, since his inception, as a celebrated genesis of Ray is further complicated by the messy and ad hoc distribution director among Western critics. Indeed, Andrew Robinson cites Ray’s win at history of his frst two flms. It is telling that Ray’s debut flm in much of the Venice as the consolidation of his reputable status in world cinema. 6 West—and the flm, which went to Venice—was Aparajito, the second Apu However, this Los Angeles Times article, like many others, frame Ray’s win flm, and not Pather Panchali. Indeed, Pather Panchali’s release was further as a general upset. Ray’s win, reports the article, “was followed by mixed delayed until late 1957.12 That said, I nonetheless argue that one can see the applause and booing” and that the runner-up, Visconti’s Notti Bianche, was genesis of Ray begin to form from late 1957, the general moment in which given “thunderous applause” in contrast to Ray’s “cold reception.”7 One Ray’s flms enter into domestic, specialty theatres and Ray becomes a unique may speculate that the unexpected nature of Ray’s win, especially against a discourse among critics.13 respected Italian auteur in the homefeld of Venice, is a conducive setting for these kinds of reactions. Yet, in a more detailed Variety article written by the End of 1957 to 1958 senior flm critic, Gene Moskowitz, a general and apathetic attitude to Ray A shift occurs toward the end of 1957. Independently focused articles and appears noticeable. In this article, Moskowitz argues that Venice’s flm festival, reviews are written about Ray, and there is an increasing paratextual emphasis competing with Cannes, is attempting to re-brand itself as cosmopolitan; on the commercial release of his frst two Apu flms. For example, theatre to emphasize itself as an “international flm fest.”8 Yet Moskowitz does not listings and newspaper ads enter the record of Ray-related print media [Fig. have a celebratory tone about these reforms. He laments the poor quality of 1]. The language of marketability used to advertise Ray’s flms evokes their entries being accepted to meet Venice’s more inclusive and internationalized critical acclaim and their status as immediate classics of world cinema. This branding. That said, he does celebrates select international flms at the becomes an orthodox description of Ray’s flms, but it is evidently a new festival: some of Mizoguchi’s dramas, the Visconti flm which had won second identity for Ray in the context of English-language print media. There is prize, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. However, there is no mention of the something ironic about Sight and Sound—a British publication, whose staf winner, Ray’s Aparajito. One should note that Moskowitz was among the frst reporter passed over Ray’s flm in Venice—publishing a flm guide for the Western flm critics to have seen a Ray flm during the Cannes premiere the winter of 1957, wherein Pather Panchali is given the highest rating of any flm, year before.9 Yet Moskowitz continues to have nothing to say about Ray, even and described as “without question a classic of the cinema.”14 after his win at Venice. There are perhaps two ways of reading this absence: In this body of texts, there is an increasing standardization of the language the frst, is to consider the subtext in Moskowitz’s argument vis-à-vis Ray’s used by critics to describe Ray. By close-reading these texts, one may locate win; and the other is to say that Moskowitz is not spiteful, but rather, at this the genesis of Ray’s icon in Western flm criticism. However, his genesis is not moment in time, Ray was simply not a priority or critical node in discussions the by-product of a critical consideration of Ray as an artistic auteur. Instead, about cinema. In fact, furnishing the latter point, Penelope Houston—who Ray becomes the subject of a common body of thought, writing, vocabulary, reported from Venice for Sight and Sound—acknowledges that she did not and methodological thinking among Western flm critics. His flms are even see Ray’s winning flm while over there.10 Before concluding on this defned as ethnographic spectacles. Their appeal is characterized sometimes

26 27 Satyajit Ray in Western Film Criticism, 1957-1958 Mahdi Chowdhury

for their universal quality or their exotic quality. This non-auteurist, binary is indirectly implied by the characterization of his work as ethnography representation of Ray’s work is a prevalent discursive trait among these texts, (which is a label unevenly applied to Ray and not, for example, Western be they conspicuous or indirect in their phrasing. neorealist flmmakers). That said, this is coterminous with more conspicuous Whichever side a critic may lean toward (the Apu flms as universal stories reafrmations about the exotic quality of Ray’s flms—a style of thought used vs. as exotic imports), they inevitably represent Ray as something other than to, at times, fourish Ray and, at times, dismiss Ray. Howard Thompson writes a full auteur or artistic agent. Rather, Ray is a director whose appeal for the a very generous and adorning portrait of Ray for The New York Times, but he sphere of commercial flm culture and flm criticism is his sensitive ability to does so by using exotifying and Orientalist language to fourish the fgure of capture ethnographic portraits of Bengali peasant life and “The Real India.”15 Ray. He introduces the Bengali peasants of Pather Panchali as a “forest family,” It is telling that Pather Panchali wins a bizarre award at Cannes: “Best Human is struck by Ray’s arrival in a handsome “occidental garb,” and describes Document.”16 Granted, the slow, observational style of flmmaking used by Ray, generally, as a spectacle, a “big, rangy Calcuttan.”23 By contrast, Bosley Ray—owed in part to his admiration for Italian neorealists—lends itself to Crowther makes conspicuous remarks about the exotic quality of Pather this interpretation of ethnography. Yet it would be strange to see a discursive Panchali to thereafter equate its exoticness with gimmick. Inevitably, for tradition among flm critics who defne De Sica or Rossellini, not as auteurs, Crowther, it is not a serious flm, but a “rare exotic item” wherein “the dialogue but as exotic ethnographers. To be fair, one may argue that this label is often sounds like a Gramophone record going at high speed.”24 He concludes not given to Ray as a means of intentionally devaluing his work. Rather, that due to its loose, listless structure it would have barely passed a “rough early champions of Ray, such as Hawkins, describe this in honorifc terms. cut” within Hollywood. This is a bizarre conclusion. Crowther’s assumption Hawkins writes, Ray’s “direct yet poetic observation of the human scene is that the exotic, underdeveloped, non-Western cinema is teleologically recall[s] the best work done […] by Flaherty.”17 This parallel with Flaherty is marching toward the apogee of Hollywood classicism. Nevertheless, that another prominent trope in the discursive construction of Ray: the author, Ray’s flm even makes it to Crowther’s attention testifes to Ray’s presence in John Updike, calls the fctional Pather Panchali “in the great tradition of the sphere of Western flm criticism. documentary carved out […] by our own Bob Flaherty”;18 and even a Vermont retrospective on Flaherty invited Ray to lecture.19 Conclusion The next trope is the characterization of Ray’s flms as universal or exotic. This paper has shown how print media from 1957 to 1958 show the genesis Certain texts—and particularly, commercial movie bulletins—praise Ray’s of Ray in Western flm criticism. Contrary to the assumption of his initial flms for their “striking quality [of] universality.”20 At other times, Ray’s flms eminence among critics with Pather Panchali, I show that it was neither are described as humanistic or humane. While this may certainly be a trait the flm Pather Panchali nor adoration that defned his frst representations of Ray’s flms, the proliferation of this framing warrants a closer look. As a within English-language print media. I locate Ray’s solidifed presence and marketing device for a non-Western flm, universality may imply that everyone genesis as a world cinema icon in print media from late 1957. Infuenced by can understand and connect with this flm. The trope of universality implies its domestic release, a popular discourse about Ray becomes discernable in the flm’s cultural specifcity is irrelevant; or as Robin Wood states: “what is newspapers. I have described a few themes typical of this body of texts: a non- remarkable is how seldom in Ray’s flms the spectator is pulled up by and auteurist characterization of Ray’s work; a comparison with ethnography specifc obstacle arising from cultural diferences.”21 While this may be true, and Robert Flaherty; an emphasis on the universality of Ray’s work; and the Ray’s universality has become a hegemonic lens through which to see his exoticism of the world of Apu. While Ray’s genesis is related to a problematic work—so much so that this marketable label is still used to frame his work discourse and style among Western flm critics—which, in many ways, today.22 Similar assertions about the universal or humane qualities of other persists to this day—my research can be interpreted as a topical insight into non-Western flmmakers by Western flm critics, from Ozu to Kiarostami, the complicated, scattered, and enfoldment of non-Western cinema into the continue to be normative paradigms for how we view and engage with their nexus of Western flm criticism. work—and one may lament that other qualities, culturally specifc to these flmmakers and the stories they tell, are lost in translation vis-à-vis this reductive trope. On the other end of the spectrum, antithetical to universalized accounts of Ray, is an emphasis on diference and exoticism. The exoticism of Ray

28 29 Satyajit Ray in Western Film Criticism, 1957-1958 Mahdi Chowdhury

Appendix Notes

1 Girish Shambu, “The Apu Trilogy: Behind the Universal,” The Criterion Collection, November 19, 2015. 2 Ibid. 3 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 87. 4 Ibid., 103. 5 “India Takes Gold Lion,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1957. 6 Robinson, Satyajit Ray, 104. 7 “India Takes Gold Lion,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1957. 8 Gene Moshkowitz. “The Paradox of Venice: Everyone Running Right in Wrong Direction,” Variety, September 11, 1957, 5. Again, my latent argument that Ray had a formative impact on the articulation of “world cinema” is evidenced by how internationalizing festivals typically invited and awarded his flms in the process of rebranding into sites of “world cinema” culture. 9 Robinson, Satyajit Ray, 105. In the style of Professor Keil’s Fun Facts, it is interesting to note that André Bazin was a part of the minor audience that saw Ray’s flm alongside Moskowitz. Figure 1 – Newspaper articles about Ray with commercial paratextual and visual 10 Penelope Houston, “The Festivals: Edinburgh, Venice, Karlovy Vary” Sight supplements from New York Herald Tribune (September 21, 1958), p. 4 and Sound, 1957, 67. 11 Robert F. Hawkins, “Venice Festival in Retrospect,” The New York Times, September 15, 1957. 12 Robinson, Satyajit Ray, 107. 13 Ibid. 14 “A Guide to Current Films,” Sight and Sound, 1957, 160. 15 “The Real India,” The Spectator, January 3, 1958, 20. 16 This award appears to have been improvised: it was never given to a flm before or after Pather Panchali. Therefore, what made Pather Panchali a quintessential “human document”? What is a “human document”? 17 Hawkins, “Venice Festival in Retrospect.” 18 John Updike, “After Hours,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1, 1958, 77. 19 Robert A Wilkin, “Seminar to Review ‘Flaherty Touch,’” The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, July 21, 1958. 20 “Pather Panchali,” Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1, 1958. 21 Robin Wood, The Apu Trilogy: New Edition. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 6. 22 For example, on the Criterion Collection’s description of The Apu Trilogy, the tropes of these flms as “richly humane” persists. It is worthwhile to state, perhaps on slightly reactionary tone, that Ray’s flms are indeed quite culturally specifc. What is forgotten, in the longue durée of this way Figure 1 – Advertisement for Pather Panchali (Ibid.) of thinking, is: how Ray’s flms are adaptations of seminal works of Bangla

30 31 Satyajit Ray in Western Film Criticism, 1957-1958 Mahdi Chowdhury Bibliography literature; Ray’s social and familial afliations with bhadrolok Bengali culture; the spectre and association of Nehruvian or Third Worldist politics “Pather Panchali” Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1, 1958. in Ray; or Ravi Shankar’s music and a raga structure of the flm; et al. 23 Howard Thompson, “‘Little Road’ Into the Big World,” The New York Times, “The Real India” The Spectator, January 3, 1958. September 7, 1958, 9. “India Takes Gold Lion” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1957. 24 Bosley Crowther, “Exotic Import; Pather Panchali’ from India Opens Here,” “A Guide to Current Films” Sight and Sound, 1957. The New York Times, September 23, 1958. “Indian Amateurs Did It: There is No Mystery To Making A Movie,” New York Herald Tribune, September 21, 1958. Crowther, Bosley. “Exotic Import; Pather Panchali’ from India Opens Here,” The New York Times, September 23, 1958. Hawkins, Robert F. “Venice Festival in Retrospect,” The New York Times, September 15, 1957. Houston, Penelope. “The Festivals: Edinburgh, Venice, Karlovy Vary,” Sight and Sound, 1957. Moshkowitz, Gene. “The Paradox of Venice: Everyone Running Right in Wrong Direction,” Variety, September 11, 1957. Nowell-Smith, Geofrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Shambu, Girish. “The Apu Trilogy: Behind the Universal,” The Criterion Collection, November 19, 2015, www.criterion.com/current/posts/3804- the-apu-trilogy-behind-the-universal (accessed March 27, 2017). Thompson, Howard. “‘Little Road’ Into the Big World,” The New York Times, September 7, 1958. Updike, John. “After Hours,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1, 1958. Wilkin, Robert A. “Seminar to Review ‘Flaherty Touch,’” The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, July 21, 1958. Wood, Robin. The Apu Trilogy: New Edition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.

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