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

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.