Page 170 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic
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From Calcutta to Cannes             157

                was ‘largely an illusion’. (Hence, probably, Crowther’s doubt in
                his review about whether the film was ‘performed’ or ‘pictured’
                by its cast.) But as rapidly became obvious, when the second
                and third parts of the trilogy appeared in the United States,
                the Flaherty tradition had little or nothing to do with Ray’s
                work. Indeed Ray wrote practically nothing about Flaherty, and
                hardly mentioned his documentaries during my many hours of
                conversations with him.
                   Some of those US critics who had waxed ecstatic about the
                first film, such as Croce, found its sequels to be more conven-
                tional and less exciting. Reviewing The World of Apu, she wrote:
                ‘he is still a poet, and an exceptionally sensitive one, but his best
                energies have gone into transcending the dramatic conceptions
                of his script rather than in embodying them.’ This feeling of
                disappointment with Ray’s gradual abandonment of lyricism
                would lose him many of his early admirers after the early 1960s.
                But the most perceptive American critical response came from
                Paul Beckley writing in the New York Herald Tribune in 1960
                about The World of Apu: ‘The connoisseur must feel a kind of
                glow of surprised enthusiasm at the endless rightness of Ray’s
                effects. If they seem in the beginning merely happy, the end-
                less aptness soon makes clear that chance could have little place
                in the making of a work so beautifully controlled. Yet it is not
                entirely adequate to speak of control, rather a sort of constancy
                of inspiration.’
                   The director Martin Scorsese, then a teenager, remarked
                of that hopeful period in the cinema when directors such as
                Ray, Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Godard,
                Truffaut and Andrzej Wajda were at the height of their creative
                powers:


                   One of the great cinematic experiences of my life was in the
                   very early sixties when I watched the complete Apu Trilogy in
                   a New York theatre ... I was as totally absorbed as one would
                   be reading a great epic novel. Satyajit Ray’s ability to turn the








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