Ray, the rajah of world cinema

Three is a mystical number, and cinephiles would concur thrice about the best in cinematic history: Francis Ford Copolla's iconic The Godfather series. Krzysztof Kieslowski's poetic reverie White, Blue, and Red. Peter Jackson's monumental Lord of the Rings saga. All have thunder and lightning all over them—the lush light of grand design, the flourish of an operatic aria.

And then there is The Apu Trilogy by Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Unerring and almost God-like in the way  the simplest scenes become luminous with lyricism, Ray's vision catches the world of his characters in the spider-web rhythm of the ordinary, rendering it no less epic as Ray unearths the sublime pathos out of the main character's rites of passage from his bucolic village to the city and back. No larger-than-life gestures here. No highlights of blinding virtuosity. No soaring musical score other than the simple but haunting strain of Ravi Shankar's sitar.

But listen how the great Akira Kurosawa raves along with a chorus of international directors: "Not to have seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon... It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river."

And so, taking Kurosawa's cue, it was with nearly erotic abandon that I went to the screening of Ray's The Apu Trilogy during a retrospective film festival at the cineplex in my hometown (Cebu City, Philippines) nearly a decade ago.

Thus it happened that there was no turning back for me from Ray's evocative rendition of a poor family's life in a small Bengali village in Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) and their migration to the holy city of Benares in Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and the protagonist’s return to his old village in Apu Sansar (The World of Apu), the trilogy's last installment. Haunted by the almost spiritual spell of Ray’s film, I got hold of the trilogy's DVD set in 2008. It has been a treat to return to its realm of wisdom with its narrative so nuanced with its evocations of innocence and wonder, heartbreak and healing.  

Nothing less than miraculous how Ray edifies everyday life in each of the three films, "refusing to divorce beauty from tragedy, rendering the ordinary majestic and discovering insight and ironies in the smallest of moments."

Truly, Ray’s trilogy more than holds a candle to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane as one of the most promethean debuts in the annals of filmmaking as Ray earned the unprecedented Best Human Document award at the Cannes International Film Festival for his debut film, Pather Panchali (1955).   The cinema of Ray, one of only a few directors who won awards at the top three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin),  has been huge influence of some of the most heralded filmmakers all over the world, including Martin Scorcese. Hear how Scorcese waxes ecstatic about Ray's impact on his own brand of filmmaking:

 
Ray received an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement weeks before his death in 1992. See video of Ray accepting his Oscar from his bed:

Behold the master filmmaker as talks about his evolution as an artist: his childhood, the influence of the Bengal renaissance, his fascination for design and typography, his attitude about politics and violence in cinema, his enthusiasm for period films as well as children's films, his view on Western films and critics, and his intimation his mortality.