Our Films, Their Films: Essays.

Anthony Korner

I first read these essays of the Indian film director (also writer, painter, musician, and cameraman) Satyajit Ray in an Indian edition in 1989, when I was preparing to interview him for Artforum. I had seen most of his films--some, like The Music Room, the "Apu Trilogy," and Distant Thunder several times, fascinated by their revelation both of instantly familiar human behavior and of the endlessly absorbing detail of Indian culture. Hoping for an understanding of how he achieved such work with little money and poor facilities in a country whose film industry was then known only for its escapist song-and-dance epics, I found much of the answer to my inquiry in this witty and self-deprecating book.

When I eventually met Ray--in Calcutta, during the monsoon season--he was unwell, and was reluctant to give me the promised interview. Nevertheless, he invited me to call--only to tell me that he would answer no questions he had responded to before. So I discarded my list of prepared questions and thought primarily about his interests as revealed in these essays, which concern the making of his own films, Indian films in general, the European film avant-garde, British cinema, Japanese cinema, silent films, Charles Chaplin, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, etc.

It certainly helps to know Ray's films before reading these essays, written over twenty-five years (1948-73) for unspecified publications. If you ever heard him speak, you can hear his sonorous, exquisitely English-accented voice in his writing--which is sometimes quaintly dated, but always immediate and personal. The range of topics, anecdotes, criticism, and insights shows clearly how intentional was the humor and pathos in his own films. Reading these essays is more like eavesdropping on a quiet, confidential conversation than reading film criticism or autobiography, though the book is filled with both.

Unfortunately, instead of improving on the original, this new edition of Our Films, Their Films suffers from an almost complete lack of editing. The reader gets mismatched typography, no illustrations (only three oddly chosen dust-jacket images), no translations of Bengali film titles into English, no explanations of obscure references ("2 1/2 lakhs of rupees?"), no bibliography, no list of Ray's films or chronological biographical detail (beyond a two-paragraph introduction by John Pym, former associate editor of Sight and Sound, and Ray's own introduction to the original, printed in Bombay in 1976). It seems a pity that Ray's U.S. publishers have been so perfunctory with this first collection of Ray's writings to be published in the U.S.

Ray's films used to be criticized within India as being too heavily influenced by the European avant-garde cinema of the '50s and '60s. That he followed foreign films closely is evident from his comments here about the Italian, French, and British avant-garde, and from the introduction, in which he describes his youthful filmgoing addiction in Calcutta, when he saw every Hollywood film to come to India. But a major part of Ray's international reputation comes not from any imitation of other cultures but from his ability to tell a story without lengthy dialogue (Chaplin's silent films were among his passions), together with the performances he obtained from his actors and the excellence of his film-making techniques. This ability to transcend the constraints of nationality in part explains why Ray's films have had such appeal to Western audiences, regularly winning film-festival awards.

Rereading these texts, I found the answer to a question I had put to Ray in 1989, which was whether he deliberately avoided words in favor of an expressive gesture. He didn't give me a conclusive answer. But in "Silent Films" he writes, "More often than not [moments of purely visual significance] prove to be the moments that stay in the mind the longest." And in "Little Man, Big Book" he writes of Chaplin in City Lights, "What need of speech when one could say so much with a lift of the eyebrow and shrug of the shoulder?"

Anthony Korner is the publisher of Artforum.