Cineastes could be forgiven assuming that the centenary of Satyajit Ray’s birth would certainly bring a waterfall of this vital Indian filmmaker’s films to DVD and also Blu-ray. But that hasn’t happened, most likely as a result of rights issues and the abject physical state of a lot of his movies. Rather, 16 of his 29 features, in addition to a few other product, are now streaming indefinitely under the banner “Satyajit Ray at 100” on the subscription-based Standard Channel.
Ray (whose surname might be pronounced RAY or, in an effort to resemble his native Bengali, RYE) concerned prestige in the late 1950s, when his initial film, the long-gestating “Pather Panchali” (1955 ), stunned the motion picture world. Its documentary-like concentrate on the lives of an inadequate family in rural Bengal proclaimed a various kind of Indian filmmaking– one drawn to the real world instead of to myths and phenomenon.
The continuation of the young lead character’s tale in 2 succeeding pictures, “Aparajito” (1956) and also “Apur Sansar” (1959 ), resulted in what’s come to be referred to as the Apu trilogy. And also they, along with “The Music Area” (1958 )– in which transforming times reverse a feckless noble– and a string of successes from the early to mid-1960s, sealed Ray’s reputation as a filmmaker of uncommon vision, ranking with such contemporaries as Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman and also Italy’s Federico Fellini. Yet Ray, that passed away in 1992 at age 70, did more than simply compose and direct his films; he likewise composed the music for a lot of them.