Of restoration rejoicing

I have been waiting a long time for this: a Criterion edition of Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy. We’ve had to sit through frustrating prints of Ray’s trilogy all these years, be it on the screen via all those grungy film society screenings or on poor DVD transfers. Ray’s films have undergone many transfers and restorations over the years — most notably by Merchant Ivory a few decades ago, and more recently on video by Criterion, which has brought out as many as eight titles.

A Criterion edition, whether Blu-ray or DVD, is now the definitive home-video edition of a movie. On November 17, Criterion will release The Apu Trilogy with a host of extras.

Their website notes, “Two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray’s breathtaking milestone of world cinema rises from the ashes in a meticulously reconstructed new restoration. These delicate masterworks — Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar — were shot over the course of five years...”

Here is a sampling of the numerous extras in store for us: New 4K digital restorations of all three films; audio recordings from 1958 of director Satyajit Ray reading his essay A Long Time on the Little Road and in conversation with film historian Gideon Bachmann; new interviews with actors Soumitra Chatterjee, Shampa Srivastava and Sharmila Tagore, and camera assistant Soumendu Roy and scriptwriter Ujjal Chakraborty; Making The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray’s Epic Debut, a new video essay by Ray biographer Andrew Robinson; The Apu Trilogy: A Closer Look, a new programme featuring filmmaker, producer and teacher Mamoun Hassan; excerpts from the 2003 documentary The Song of the Little Road, featuring composer Ravi Shankar; The Creative Person: Satyajit Ray, a 1967 half-hour documentary by James Beveridge featuring interviews with Ray, several of his actors, members of his creative team and film critic Chidananda Das Gupta; a new English subtitle translations; a booklet featuring essays by critics Terrence Rafferty and Girish Shambu; a selection of Ray’s storyboards for Pather Panchali.

What more could you ask of a special edition of a film trilogy? This definitive edition of The Apu Trilogy will once again usher us into our first experience of Ray’s luminous debut and remind us again why film critic Pauline Kael once said, “Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director.”

Also, finally, we now have a Criterion edition of The Black Stallion, one of the unsung masterpieces of modern cinema. The Black Stallion, made in 1979, is the story of a horse and a boy — rather than the story of a boy and a horse — as the majestic animal is more central to the story.

Directed by Carroll Ballard and cinematographed by Caleb Deschanel, the film is one of the most beautiful things to behold on screen. There is one long passage early in the film between the horse and the boy that is unsurpassed for the poetic enchantment and beauty with which the relationship is depicted.

Pauline Kael once observed that Ballard’s compositions are peerless, and now you can finally catch all the magic in this new Criterion release.

The restoration is a “4K digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Caleb Deschanel, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray.” The extras feature “five short films by director Carroll Ballard, with new introductions by the filmmaker; a new conversation between Ballard and film critic Scott Foundas; a new interview with Deschanel; a piece featuring Mary Ellen Mark discussing her photographs from the film’s set; a trailer; an essay by film critic Michael Sragow.”

In this essay he notes, “The movie’s first 50 minutes are mesmerising cinema about a human-animal friendship... At the movie’s climax, Ballard, Deschanel and a third major collaborator, supervising sound editor Alan Splet, open viewers’ eyes and ears to the wonders of a horse going full tilt, his breath meshing with the pounding of his hooves and the air whooshing through his mane. We glide from emotion to epiphany instead of simply following a plot. Ballard has a genius for translating empathy into imagery. When Alec is at his peak of jubilation on the island beach, he lets go of the horse’s mane and raises his arms in celebration.”

Interestingly, when Kael reviewed the movie with high praise (bringing it to the attention of a wider audience), she said, “a simple boy-and-animal story transformed into something mythological. The boy’s sense of wonder recalls Pather Panchali.”