Ray Classics Return, Restored for the World
by Shankar Chaudhuri
People lining up to get tickets for the Apu Trilogy
It could not be more fitting that that New York was the venue for the recent premiere and art house release of the restored Satyajit Ray classics the Apu Trilogy. It was in May 1955 that Pather Panchali (The Song of the Little Road) had its world premiere at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that catapulted the film to the world stage, leading to the first prize for best human document at the Cannes Film Festival the following year. Exactly 60 years on, in May 2015, MOMA hosted the premiere of the entire Apu Trilogy recently rescued from the brink of oblivion by a mix of super-human endeavor and the best of modern technology.
That the Apu Trilogy has been preserved and restored is no less than a miracle. The original negatives of the trilogy, housed in a London Lab were severely damaged in fire in 1993. Whatever was left of the original negatives – in various cases they amounted to ash fragments – was fortunately salvaged by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Science’s Film Archive. Unfortunately no technology existed at that time that could fully restore such severely damaged film. It wasn't until the technology improved over the years that a digital restoration was attempted. The Criterion Collection, a well-known U.S. company film specializing in publishing films in their highest technical state, partnered with L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, Italy, one of the world's premiere restoration facilities, to bring the film back to life. All in all the entire enterprise took over two decades to complete and involved nearly 1,000 hours of intensive labor and reliance on the most sophisticated technology.
And what a risen-from-the ashes restoration it has been! My memory of Ray’s earliest films has always been one of grainy pictures, blurry images with lines running across the screen, and fading sound quality. Going forward, cinema lovers would be able to fully appreciate the trilogy, especially its most delicate imageries – whether a close-up of Apu’s facial expression or a rain drop on a lotus leaf - in ultra-definition or digitized versions that bring out the beauty of the films to their fullest.
I spent almost an entire day last week to see the entire trilogy back-to-back in Film Forum, the well-known art-house theatre in New York that first publicly released of all three films as a prelude to thier national release. Each show was sold out with an audience that consisted of people of all ages. There were many young people including children who had come with their parents for the first time. Listening to some of the conversations in between the showings was insightful. One person claimed that she had been waiting for this moment for a long time. Another person mentioned that although he had seen Pather Panchali almost 40 years ago the movie stayed with him and he couldn’t miss the opportunity to see it again in its pristine form. At the end of the screening of Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), I could also hear a well-known film actor, who had been sitting in the row in front of me, urging a group of youngsters to make sure that they were able to see all three films, if they hadn’t done it already.
At the end of the screening that concluded with Apur Sansar, the audience burst into applause. I asked the lady sitting next to me if she liked the trilogy. She replied that she liked it very much. She went on to add: “It’s great to see the celebration of such time honored values of love, pain, loss and human resilience. It’s a great antidote to our present-day obsession with money, power, fame and other trappings. I will highly recommend these films to my friends and relatives!”
I was thinking of the lady’s reaction on my out of the theater when I came across a long line of people waiting to get to the box office. The crowd had been waiting for the next showing of Pather Panchali and had filed into a long line that spilled over into sidewalk. Looking at the crowd and still thinking of the lady’s words, it became obvious to me that it’s the universality of the trilogy that makes it both transcendent and timeless.
Another solid example of the relevance and sustainability of Ray’s Trilogy has been the warm reception it has received from the film press. The new generation of film critics in the United States had been relatively less familiar with Ray’s works unlike their predecessors such as Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. The release seems to have an overwhelmingly positive impact on this newer breed of film critics. Stephanie Zacharek, the film critic of the Village Voice, the nation's premier alternative newsweekly, wrote: “…the Apu Trilogy is inseparable from life. If these aren't the most beautiful movies ever made, they're the most beautiful ones I know. They're comedy and tragedy, joy and grief, old age and premature death. They're hello and goodbye, so artfully conjoined that you can't tell where one leaves off and the other begins. You can go home again. Just not back to your own.”
Likewise, Dana Stevens of Slate, the well-known daily web magazine, subtitled her review of the Trilogy to read: “See Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy in its wondrous new restoration before you accept your death.” Taking Akira’s Kurosawa’s 1975 speech in which the director famously said that “not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun and the moon” one step further, Stevens asked rhetorically: “Do you really want to exist in the world without ever seeing the sun or the moon?”
Film Forum had originally scheduled to screen the trilogy until May 28. They have now extended it until June 16 due to popular demand. Meanwhile, as part of the national release, the trilogy has opened in art house film houses across the US including Los Angeles and various cities.
At the post-premiere reception event at MOMA, Peter Becker, head of Criterion, mentioned that he always regretted that Ray is the least known and least respected icon of the golden age of art house cinema, but predicted that the restored trilogy will lead to re-assessment of his works and earn him the rightful place he deserves. If the initial response to the trio of films is any indication, Peter’s prediction is likely to be spot on.
Satyajit Ray himself was reported to have said, “I would like my films to last.” The newly restored Apu Trilogy has made it sure that his most acclaimed body of work is here to stay for posterity.
Featured in The Statesman
June 3, 2015