Word: rayed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director Satyajit Ray is for movies that are not like movies; see CINEMA, The World...
...Edward Harrison) completes, in alternations of suffering and joy, one of the most vital and abundant movies ever made. Based on a bestselling Bengali novel by Bibhuti Bannerji, the picture was written, produced and directed as three separate pictures by a 39-year-old Calcutta film buff named Satyajit Ray (pronounced Sawt-yaw-jit Rye). Each of the three lasts about an hour and 45 minutes and stands as a separate and complete cinema experience in its own right. But the moviemaker intended his trilogy ultimately to be seen and judged as a single immense discursive epic in the Indian...
...piece of craftsmanship, The World of Apu is the finest film of the three. Director Ray, who had never turned a camera before he started shooting Father Panchali, began his trilogy with incredible strokes of beginner's luck, but he ends it with deliberate mastery of the medium. He has superb control of his camera. His images are continuously beautiful but never obtrusive; they rise out of the story as naturally as thoughts rise out of the pool of Vishnu-there is nothing arty in Ray's art. By the same token his actors act, not with...
...Director Ray reveals moreover an order of poetic insight and a gift of visual anecdote that combine to produce some astonishing effects. In one scene the tenderness and bliss of a whole honeymoon are pressed into a moment when the young husband wakes in the same bed he had used as a bachelor and, listening to his bride as she cheerfully makes breakfast, lifts in silent wonder from beside his pillow one of her fallen hairpins...
Taken as a whole, Ray's film has the generosity and the prodigal variety of genius. Nevertheless, to moviegoers accustomed to the visual shorthand of Hollywood's clichés, it will probably seem sometimes to maunder in Oriental obscurities, to go the long way round to nowhere. Ray might well reply that life itself usually takes the same route and reaches the same destination, and this movie is obviously intended to be like life-not like other movies...