Bhubaneswar: The Hollywood legend is one of the greatest fans and admirers of his films, be it “Pather Panchali”, “Jalsaghar”, “Satranj ke Khiladi” or his other greats. He was the one who pushed for Satyajit Ray’s Academy Award in 1992.
He described him as one of the “four greats” (the others being Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini).
Over the years, he has made efforts to restore many of Ray’s films. He was also one of the few to speak publicly about how Ray influenced Steven Spielberg’s “E.T”.
It’s only fitting that the Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Hollywood legend Martin Scorsese this year.
Scorsese and Hungarian director Istvan Szabo were awarded with the Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award at the 52nd annual International Film Festival of India (IFFI), which began in Goa, on Saturday.
If Ray was alive, he would have been delighted.
Though they were not present at the ceremony, Scorsese and Szabo sent their video messages which were played for the live audience.
In his message, Scorsese hailed Ray as a “truly magnificent” artiste, who has been “one of my masters”.
“He is one of the filmmakers whose work I’ve returned to over and over again over the years throughout my life. Every time I see his films again, like ‘Apu Trilogy’ or ‘Charulata’, it is a whole new experience for me. They are the same films but somehow they deepen, become enriched within the feelings over the years,” the 79-year-old filmmaker said.
In an older video, which is available on YouTube, speaking to an interviewer, Scorsese says on Ray, “I find that whenever I need to be energised or reinspired, I go back to his films along with other great directors… But what is special to me about Ray was that… I come from a working-class family that was not educated. So there were no books in my house and I think there was no other way for me to be introduced to Indian culture… the Indian people aside from watching his films. We had so many films… we had television.”
“I became a fanatic watching his films. In fact, the first Ray film I saw on television in New York on a Sunday night caught up with commercials in it and dubbed in English was the ‘Pather Panchali’. I was amazed because this was a film where… I’m a Sicilian American and we have our own little village where we lived in. So you can’t imagine anything more different and yet we identified immediately as human beings, as people, as family. This was amazing… the ‘Apu Trilogy’.”
Ray’s “Abhijan” influenced the character of Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s 1976 cult classic “Taxi Driver”.
Henri Cartier Bresson had described Ray as “undoubtedly a giant in the film world”.
Kurosawa once wrote to Ray’s biographer, Andrew Robinson, declaring that “not to have seen Ray’s films is like living without seeing the sun or the moon.”
On Ray, Pauline Kael wrote, “Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director… No artist has ever done more than Satyajit Ray to make us re-evaluate the commonplace.”
