JOIN USA telling film on the music of Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray would have turned 99 today. You would expect him to be much older, partly because he was considered one of Bengal’s renaissance men. The renaissance produced some of the biggest names in Bengal starting with Raja Ram Mohan Roy and included polymaths such as Rabindranath Tagore.
Yet Ray, the last of these men as well as a polymath, walked among us less than 30 years ago.
It was perhaps as a birthday gift to him that the OTT platform Mubi dropped a documentary called ‘Music of Satyajit Ray’ a couple of days ago. Released in 1984, the documentary moves between the studio where Ray and his orchestra are composing background score for his then-upcoming film ‘Ghare Baire’ (Home and the World), and his home, where he sits in front of a Roland piano, alternating trying out tunes and writing musical notations with a fountain pen.
The director of the documentary is showcasing an analog world. Even the camera that the director Utpalendu Chakrabarty has used is an analog device: daytime looks grainy; the night is practically impenetrable.
Ray, who was 6’ 4”, towers above everyone in every scene, and is seen firmly biting a smoking pipe that seems a bit big even for his large face.
“Music has been my first love, even before the cinema,” Ray says. And as Ray talks about the musical talent that spreads across the four generations before him, we move through photos of members from each of those generations. That a man born in 1921 should have portraits or photos of four previous generations of ancestors shows that as formidable as Ray’s talents were, there was a world of privilege and access that helped him nurture them.
Like most men of the renaissance, he was a product of both Western and Indian cultures in equal measure. This would become a huge criticism of Ray in his filmmaking years, but in a post-globalised present where American sitcoms dominate so much of the Indian Internet, that attack feels blunt.
Growing up, he had Ludwig van Beethoven records, of unknown ownership, waiting for him in his house. His family bought him a toy gramophone for a birthday and this way, he got his first taste of Western music. He would soon start going to the library to learn more about music.
But the documentary, while an uncritical and adoring look at someone you love, is not always a rosy picture: we glimpse moments of Ray being candid. Talking about how western filmmakers like the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman use music sparingly, Ray says, “But we (in India) still do use music partly out of consideration for the audience. (Otherwise) The less intelligent audience would not be able to comprehend the mood.” In the studio, when one of the musicians responds to an instruction with a non-committal "haan", he snaps back with “What haan?”.
Chakrabarty is careful not to ask Ray any questions that may set him off; he simply makes a point about the filmmaker’s musical genius through montage rather than through argument.
He intersperses the documentary with the scenes from the master’s films that have great music, and juxtaposes Ray’s own music with scenes of Ray at the studio and at home. An argument would have been less convincing than this; the brilliance of Ray’s music, set against shots of the genius at work, speaks for itself.