‘What cinema can be’

Roger Ebert is possibly the most influential film critic who surfaces on top of every film-related search ahead of IMDB or wikipedia. He is a truly sensitive person whose comments I look up after watching any film that I like. And so I was pleasantly surprised to see his insightful comments on Satyajit Ray, whom he considers on par with Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel.  In fact, Ray used to say that despite the vast cultural differences, his more perceptive critics were in the West. Film commentators and scholars like Penelope Houston, Eric Rhode, Jay Leyda and Robin Wood have helped to canonise Ray as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time (and his position seems to be improving with time).  Here are some of Roger Ebert’s brief but superlative, moving comments about Ray:

   

• "The Big City,"(Mahanagar) which has crept quietly into Chicago, is one of the most rewarding screen experiences of our time. …  The remarkable thing that Ray accomplishes is to make us really deeply care about the fortunes of this simple family. … That is why I have so much trouble approaching Ray's films as "foreign." They are not foreign. They are about Indians, and I am not an Indian but Ray's characters have more in common with me than I do the comic-strip characters of Hollywood.… Ray's people have genuine emotions and ambitions, like the people next door and the people in Peoria and the people in Kansas City. There is not a person reading this review who would not identify immediately and deeply with the characters in "The Big City"… By contrast, Hollywood films with exploding cigarette lighters and gasping starlets and idiot plots are the real "foreign" films. They have nothing at all in common with us, and Satyajit Ray of India understands us better than Jerry Lewis.

• Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" (Jalsaghar)  (1958) has one of the most evocative opening scenes ever filmed. …  Ray (1921-1992) was an unusually tall man, handsome as a movie star, the grandson of a landlord such as the protagonist’s  ancestors. …. Perhaps as a reaction to the hundreds of overwrought Indian musical melodramas churned out annually, Ray made an austere character study--also with music. His hero deserves the comparison with King Lear, because like Lear he arouses our sympathy even while indulging his vanity and stubbornly doing all of the wrong things. Like Lear, he thinks himself a man more sinned against than sinning. Like Lear, he is wrong.

• The great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. … Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture…. The relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood….  The way the film records his stay, his departure and his return says whatever can be said about lonely parents and heedless children….  It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray.

• Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)…  is a contemplative movie -- quiet, slow, a series of conversations punctuated by sudden bursts of activity….. Together, they form a small group of ideas and emotions, growing and shifting, mirroring in their secluded chambers the violent changes in India.

• While commenting on Luis Buñuel’s Tristana, he concludes: …  A few great directors have the ability to draw us into their dream world, into their personalities and obsessions and fascinate us with them for a short time. This is the highest level of escapism the movies can provide for us -- just as our elementary identification with a hero or a heroine was the lowest. As children, we went to Saturday matinees and for an afternoon we were cowboys and Indians. As adults, there are more intellectual routes to escapism. A powerful director like Buñuel (or Bergman, Fellini or Satyajit Ray) can open up his mind to us, the way an actress can open up her eyes. It is an experience worth having.