Page 163 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

150 The Apu Trilogy

In his review of the Cannes Festival for the London Observer,
Anderson enthused most of all about Pather Panchali:

The festival finished with a week of big names, yet the out-

standing achievement came from an unknown. This is the best
kind of surprise. Cannes 1956 has discovered a new master-
piece of poetic cinema. ... With apparent formlessness, Pather
Panchali traces the great designs of life. ... You cannot make

films like this in a studio, nor for money. Satyajit Ray has
worked with humility and complete dedication; he has gone
down on his knees in the dust. And his picture has the quality
of intimate, unforgettable experience.

Eisner wrote in her diary for May 7:

Here is the discovery of the festival: Lament of the Road
(Pather Panchali) from India. A Bengali film by Satyajit Ray,

who, incidentally, worked with Jean Renoir on Th e River.
Here is great purity and a surprising cinematic lyricism. It is
one of those rare works in which nothing seems to happen,
but where we feel we are being given a piece of life itself,
unembellished, where we see before our eyes people living
their daily lives with their small joys and their great affl ic-
tion. All this without false exoticism, with honesty, and with-
out exaggerating the facts. ... Satyajit Ray [is] the Flaherty of
Bengal ...

Three days later, Eisner noted that the major awards had gone
mostly to French films, but that Pather Panchali had won a minor
prize. In her opinion, Ray’s film should have taken the top prize,
the Golden Palm.
Pather Panchali’s prize had come about as a result of pressure
from influential critics, who forced a rescreening of Ray’s film.
Then the British member of the festival jury, James Quinn (a
notably cultured director of the British Film Institute), along

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