Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's masterful Apu Trilogy digitally restored at last
'The hardest thing we've ever done,' says restoration company's head of work on Pather Panchali and its sequels; restored trilogy almost as big a hit as new Avengers movie with fans in New York
When graphic designer Satyajit Ray began shooting his first feature, a story of village life in his native India called Pather Panchali, his filmmaking experience was as a location scout. His 21-year-old cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, had never before used a movie camera.
The novices' collaboration produced not just an extraordinary directorial debut but a landmark of world cinema and an unforgettable protagonist, the wide-eyed and perceptive boy, Apu.
Acclaimed at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival and at home in India, Pather Panchali enjoyed an eight-month theatrical run in New York. Two sequels, Aparajito ( The Unvanquished) in 1957 and Apur Sansar ( The World of Apu) in 1959, would trace Apu's adolescence and young adulthood. The films won more than three dozen international awards, including the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, in 1957.
Inspired by the Italian neorealists and mentored by French master Jean Renoir, Ray became a leading figure of Parallel Cinema, a movement that rejected the song-and-dance escapism of Bollywood's mainstream Hindi fare. He worked prolifically for four decades, exploring a range of characters through rigorous craft and a singularly loving lens.
That combination of precision and compassion put Ray in the same realm as Renoir and Japanese auteurs Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.