Page 165 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

152 The Apu Trilogy

take the prize.” “What prize?” “Leone d’Oro.” ’ According to
Ray, he kept his cool with some effort, but his Bengali com-
panion, Santi Choudhury, who had paid for Aparajito’s subti-
tling in Italian, sprang up and kissed the Italian girl smack on
the lips.
Again, it had been a British member of the jury, Penelope
Houston, editor of Sight and Sound, who wanted Ray’s film to
win. After much argument, the chairman, French director René
Clair, acquiesced with good grace; but on the boat back from the
jury’s meeting place to the awards ceremony, Houston remem-
bered Clair saying to her – without a trace of malice towards
Aparajito’s director: ‘But now I hope Ray will go away and learn
how to make films’!
Because of delays in subtitling, Pather Panchali did not open
in London until Christmas 1957, at the Academy Cinema, now
trailing its laurels from Cannes and Venice (for Aparajito, which
followed at the same theatre in February 1958). It ran well and
its reviews were almost uniformly outstanding, despite an ele-
ment of discomfort with the poverty of the family and especially
with the film’s slow pace, epitomised by one review carrying the
headline ‘So much beauty yet I had to yawn’. Dilys Powell, writ-
ing in the Sunday Times, was probably typical in her reaction.
She had seen Pather Panchali at Cannes (presumably at its sec-
ond screening) somewhat reluctantly but admitted immediately
afterwards: ‘Now that I look back on the festival it is of Pather
Panchali that I think: the forest, the lake, the children growing
up, the train whose whistle speaks to them of escape.’ Reviewing
it again 18 months later, Powell discovered that the film had
grown on her:

at a second look ... one realises better how subtly one’s atten-
tion is directed ahead. An old life shrivels and dies; the watch-
ing boy and girl by every action, every moment of observation,
are preparing for their own lives. ... [Pather Panchali] has the
time-sense of childhood, that period when tiny happenings

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