Page 169 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic
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156                    The Apu Trilogy

                first review. He also now mentioned that the film had received
                the backing of John Huston in its rough-cut form, four years
                before its US release. But he could not wholly accept the fact
                that  Pather Panchali owed little or nothing to Hollywood,
                and so could not be judged by Hollywood’s criteria for suc-
                cess. Crowther therefore concluded his second review some-
                what lamely: ‘This is a picture of India of a sort we have not
                yet had – not even in Jean Renoir’s The River nor in Robert
                Flaherty’s Elephant Boy. This is a communication of human
                experience out of the heart and fibre of Bengal. It is a univer-
                sal experience, appropriate to the screens of the world.’ Even
                so, Crowther selected Pather Panchali as one of his best for-
                eign films of 1958, and repeated this recommendation in 1959
                and 1960, for Aparajito and The World of Apu, when they were
                released in New York. In the early 1960s, he became a com-
                mitted admirer of Ray’s films.
                   Several other US critics felt rather similarly to Crowther, but
                the majority American verdict was that Pather Panchali had, in
                Ray’s much later words, ‘irresistible human appeal’, whatever its
                cultural opacities for the West and its technical rough edges.
                Time magazine called it ‘perhaps the finest piece of filmed folk-
                lore since Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North’; the New Yorker
                spoke of ‘a demonstration of what a man can do with a camera
                and an idea if he really puts his mind to it’; whilst Arlene Croce
                in Film Culture observed: ‘I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen
                Pather Panchali. ... Whatever else [Ray] may achieve, he has given
                world cinema one of its monuments.’
                  The association of Ray with Flaherty by some critics – first
                stated by Lotte Eisner in her Cannes Festival diary – both
                helped the commercial success of Pather Panchali and hindered
                its artistic appreciation in the United States. In the opinion
                of the historian Chandak Sengoopta, ‘reviewer after reviewer
                imagined it to be a Flahertyesque chronicle of real life in rural
                India’ – with the parts presumably played by genuine villag-
                ers, rather than actors from the city – despite the fact that this








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