Page 186 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in the East and West 173

But he was never under any illusions about the difficulties he
faced. When he began, in the early 1950s, his audience knew
‘tame, torpid versions of popular Bengali novels’; they had been
‘reduced to a state of unredeemable vacuity by years of cinematic
spoon-feeding’. By the 1980s, not much had changed. ‘You’ll
find directors here so backward, so stupid, and so trashy that
you’ll find it difficult to believe their works exist alongside my
films’, said Ray. Very often he and they were shooting in adja-
cent studios in Calcutta; it was eye-opening to leave his set and
sample the typical Bengali cinematic fare. From time to time
Ray had bouts of cynicism about his audience – he knew too well
that what most of them really wanted was ‘a good cry’ (which
Pather Panchali never ceased to deliver) – but he continued to
believe that he could educate them and that there had been a
slow improvement in their capacity to appreciate good work.
This belief, together with the appreciation of foreign audiences,
was what sustained him in his early years, and what he chose
to pass on in a tough convocation address to the Class of 1974
about to leave India’s Film and Television Institute at Pune: ‘No
matter how you make your film, if you are truly gifted, you will
sooner or later create your own market. If not, and you still want
to stay in business, then the only rules you would be obliged to
follow would be the rules of compromise.’
He was less sanguine about educating the critics in India,
‘which, in films, means anybody with access to print’. When he
was starting out, ‘what passed for film criticism in India usually
consisted of a tortuous recounting of a film’s plot, followed by a
random dispersal of praise or blame on the people concerned in
its making. Neither the film-makers nor the public took much
heed of it’, he wrote in 1982. Although he accepted that it had
improved, partly as a result of the film society movement and
its writings, Ray maintained that his critics – at least in Bengal
– did not affect his work in any way. Since most of them still
believed Pather Panchali to be his best film, he pointed out sar-
donically – how could they claim to have improved his films?

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