Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray sold his wife's jewellery to finish his first film and it changed what Indian cinema was thought capable of. He came from a distinguished Bengali family of writers and printers, worked as a commercial artist in an advertising agency, and was converted by two things: assisting Jean Renoir when he shot in Bengal, and seeing De Sica's Bicycle Thieves in London. Pather Panchali, made at weekends over three years with an amateur cast, no script in the usual sense and money that ran out repeatedly, was finished with a loan from the West Bengal government and took the human document prize at Cannes in 1956. With Aparajito and Apur Sansar it forms the Apu trilogy, which follows one boy from a Bengali village to Calcutta. He wrote his own screenplays, composed his own scores from 1961, designed his own posters and lettering, and often operated the camera. The Chess Players is about the annexation of Awadh, with two noblemen playing while the kingdom is taken. He also wrote detective stories and science fiction for children that Bengal still reads. He received an honorary Academy Award weeks before he died. Kurosawa said that not to have seen Ray s cinema was to have lived in the world without ever having seen the moon. Charulata, which he considered his least flawed film, is from a Tagore novella; the Tagore connection ran through his family, and he had studied at Santiniketan. He made thirty-six films and won thirty-two Indian national awards. Feluda the detective and Professor Shonku the scientist are his own creations and among the most read children s books in Bengali. A screenplay he developed in Hollywood in the 1960s about an alien was never made, and he believed parts of it had been used without credit. Illness confined him to a few late films shot largely indoors.

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