Page 161 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

148 The Apu Trilogy

to Pather Panchali, redeemed only by the personal admiration of
Prime Minister Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and a few
enlightened civil servants and diplomats able to see beyond its
depiction of poverty.
The world premiere of Pather Panchali took place, as we know,
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in May 1955. Very
few Indians were in the audience, but there was one, a Bengali
acquaintance of Ray from Calcutta Film Society days, Bidyut
Sarkar, who wrote to him from the United States immediately
after the screening. ‘My emotions after seeing Pather Panchali
were mixed’, recalled Sarkar in 1992, in his small book on Ray’s
films. ‘I felt elated myself, but it did not seem to have stirred the
audience as a whole, which disappointed me. The fresh print
we saw was yet to be subtitled; nor was a synopsis presented to
the viewers.’ A worried Ray – who was yet to hear back from
his sponsors at the MoMA – promptly replied, agreeing with
Sarkar that Pather Panchali needed a short but well-informed
introduction, ‘preferably by myself’, to prepare a western audi-
ence. ‘Without this, the film was bound to fall flat – especially
on an American audience.’ However, he continued, ‘when all is
said and done, I cannot believe that the really sensitive among
the audience could have entirely failed to respond to the many
touches and details which I have attempted in the film. I was glad
to note that you have mentioned some of these in your letter.’
This reaction was certainly true of Monroe Wheeler, the
curator at MoMA who had originally invited Ray to send his film,
and also of Wheeler’s colleague Richard Griffith, the curator in
charge of the museum’s film library, who was so impressed he
volunteered to screen the film for potential US distributors. Only
one distributor, Edward Harrison, who was already a promoter
of Japanese cinema (Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi) in
America, fell for Pather Panchali; he subsequently became a com-
plete devotee of Ray, visiting his shooting in India in 1961 and
releasing all his films in the United States until his premature
death in 1967. (‘I think Ed was one of those rare human beings

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