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1947, A Film Critic
The aftermath of the world war saw Calcutta filled with American GI's.
The cinemas were showing the latest Hollywood productions. It provided
Ray and his friends a feast of films.
In 1947, with a few friends like Bansi Chandra Gupta, Ray co-founded
Calcutta's first film society. Battleship Potemkin was the first film
they screened.
Soon, Ray started writing and publishing articles on cinema in newspapers
and magazines, both English and Bengali. A collection of such articles,
written during the period 1948 - 1971, was later published as 'Our
Films, Their Films'.
Meanwhile, Ray had developed an another interest - writing screenplays
for his own pleasure. He would take a story or novel for which a film
had been announced, and would write a screenplay. He would then compare
his screenplay with the finished film. Some times, he would even write
a second version after seeing the film.
His friend Harisadhan Das Gupta had acquired rights for Tagore's
Ghare Baire. Ray wrote the screenplay; Harisadhan Das Gupta was to
direct it. The film was not made because Ray refused to make changes
in the script as suggested by a doctor of venereal diseases who was
a friend of the producer. Thirty-five years later when Ray made a
film on the same novel, he thought it was a good fortune that film
was not made. He found his old screenplay "an amateurish effort
in Hollywood tradition".
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... What Indian cinema needs today is not more gloss (unlike Hollywood
films), but more imagination, more integrity, and more intelligent
appreciation of the limitations of the medium...
The raw material of cinema is life itself. It is incredible that
a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry
should fail to move the film maker. He has only to keep his eyes
open, and his ears. Let him do so.
-Satyajit Ray, 1948
What is wrong with the Indian films, published in the Statesman,
an English daily.
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