The Day Is Done, Take Me Across: The Satyajit Ray Thread

Ditto. No idea if I can clear an evening, but I do have the screener links.

That's great...Consecutive screenings, six or seven hours straight, is even better, but I just got lucky. Seeing them in any kind of close proximity adds to all of them, I think.

Aparijito my favorite at the moment.

if you don't have time to see them in a theater -- and you do -- might as well wait for the CCs.

Gonna (re)watch tonight in a theater actually.

The screener links are via CC. No watermarks or anything.

Watched The Elephant God the other day - doubt if it's anyone idea of peak Ray but it has a kinda nice 70s-Disney-live-action vibe and some great location material in Varanasi, including a scene at the awesome Jantar Mantar observatory.

Robin Wood’s appreciation of director Satyajit Ray’s most famous work, the Apu Trilogy, has been long out of print. Wood’s groundbreaking study, first published in 1972 in the UK, was one of the first serious critical readings of the Apu Trilogy. It is almost impossible to find a copy of Wood’s book today or overstate its worth. More baffling is the fact it has never been reprinted since 1972. Robin Wood has always been one of my favourite film writers and the Apu Trilogy features some of his sharpest writing. Since 1972 the Apu Trilogy has been written about in many different ways. A rich critical discourse has appeared around Ray’s most popular films. Robin Wood like Marie Seton and Andrew Robinson were some of the first writers to bring the work of Ray to the attention of film academia: ‘Ray has himself stated unequivocally that the best critical writings on his films have appeared in the West’ (p. 8). I’ve read a lot of books and articles on Ray, and have also published some writings on Ray. Having finally read Wood’s book I feel somewhat horrified that I have written about Ray without using Wood’s work as a point of reference. Wood’s analysis of The Apu trilogy is still one of the best, if not the most profound I have come across. There is no doubt that Wood’s study is a key and definitive text on not just the Apu Trilogy but also on director Satyajit Ray.

http://moviemahal.net/2015/08/14/the-apu-trilogy-robin-wood-1972-movie-magazine/

Quick search of Abe Books in the UK finds ten copies for sale, so the writer overstates the book's rarity - tho I bet it's a goodun, love that Movie Paperback series

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?an=ROBIN+WOOD&sortby=20&sts=t&tn=APU&x=39&y=12

https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/release_boxshots/4440-5c2252742bd0ab57593f893071be86f9/782_box_348x490_original.jpg

https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1145-the-apu-trilogy

http://thewire.in/2015/09/11/what-satyajit-ray-left-us-is-an-inheritance-of-endless-possibilities-10476/

That was good. I only know her from Apur Sansar. I didn't know she was such a huge Bollywood star.

So I am in the middle of Ray binge, I might just go with the ten that are on Criterion, good idea/bad idea? Already saw The Music Room and Charulata, enjoyed the former, loved the later.

Charulata might be best ever Ray: a Renoir-esque feel for trees, silence, and interior spaces. Teared up a couple times.

I saw Charulata again at the BFI a couple of months ago. V painful film.

recently saw The Music Room and The Big City, really liked them both. Charulata is next on my list

The Big CIty seemed way more polished than anything that came before

Pather Panchali and Devi are on TCM tonight. Whether I watch the second is up to the Raptors.

Anyone seen The Hero, recently released by Criterion? Clearly a Ray response to 8-1/2 in 1966, with a movie star feeling retrospective on a train journey. I liked the two central performances but felt I was missing something.

I had the same response; it struck me as an uncharacteristic experiment in modishness.

For the last few years, I’ve been checking periodically for Expo ‘67 postcards being sold online. First I want to find a checklist of the complete set, though, so a couple of weeks ago, I e-mailed the Montreal tourism board to see if they could help. (They did, a little.) After I sent the e-mail off, I started thinking that it was just the kind of bizarre thing you could spend all your time in retirement doing. (Kind of like when my dad called me up one night 30 years ago to see if I knew the address where you write to become a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. Hang on, dad, I’ve got it right here with me.) Which in turn reminded of Moses Herzog madly scribbling off letters in Saul Bellow’s novel, which I started and abandoned back in university. I’m currently giving it another go...lots of needless background to this passage:

Recently I saw Pather Panchali. I assume you know it since the subject is rural India. Two things affected me greatly - the old crone scooping the mush with her fingers and later going into the weeds to die; and the death of the young girl in the rains...It was raining also in New York, as in rural India. His heart was aching. He too had a daughter, and his mother too had been a poor woman.

Just watched his last film, this is the song from it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6BFn8RnQWQ

Ugh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/soumitra-chatterjee-dead/2020/11/22

You just found out?

An Enemy of the State, one of his last films, is a well-acted but plodding, literal adaptation of the Ibsen play.

Guessing you got that off TCM the other night? They played about 10 hours worth of films Sunday night/Monday morning--same ones that Criterion is highlighting this month.

ooh I didn't know. I watched it last night on Criterion (also hosting a dozen Ray flicks).

2021 is going to be the year that I finally watch some Ray.

PVR'd that (Enemy of the People) and The Stranger--it'll take me forever to catch up on the films I've been saving.

Surprised to find Pather Panchali and Aparajito have both just turned up on prime uk, free streaming

He is so good.

Anyone read his detective novels?

They are popular enough that you can find them in airports in India, or you could about five years ago? The volume of them is staggering – the two-volume edition of Feluda in English that Penguin put out is maybe 1500 pages. They're explicitly for children & very Sherlock Holmes-y but still still pleasant. What surprised me most about them is that there are almost no female characters in any of them? Maybe this was some sort of Bengali children's writing convention at the time?

Worth picking up if you can find a copy is this – not only was Ray doing his own graphic design and posters, he was also making his own typefaces, in Roman and Bengali.

Criterion has The Coward, a brief (69 minutes!) examination of thwarted desire. Shot with compassion and precision; he has an instinct for knowing how long to hold moments.

Apu Trilogy getting Criterioned

https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1145-the-apu-trilogy

Weird. They got the Criterion treatment a few years ago. Our library has the set.

This is a 4K upgrade.

Yeah, I just realized my mistake.