Serious Tribute to Satyajit Ray- Birth Centenary

[komaalrani]

Q 3 -
What connects Umrao Jaan by Muzaffar Ali, 36 Chowringhee Lane by Aparna Sen, Jangal Mein Mangal by Rajendra Bhatia and Balika Badhu by Tarun Majumdar?

A 3

Bansi Chandragupta, who collaborated with Ray from Pather Panchali to Shatranj Ke Khiladi, was the art director in all these 4 movies. Bansi Chandragupta was born in 1924, in the town of Sialkot, now in Pakistan

 

[u.sir.name]

 

[u.sir.name]

Satyajit Ray getting Oscar

 

[komaalrani]

Thanks so much

 

[komaalrani]

Number of Ray movies are on OTT like Prime Video, like Sonar Kela and Hirek Rajer Desh.

some of them are on you tube too with subtitles. please do watch.

 

[u.sir.name]

Number of Ray movies are on OTT like Prime Video, like Sonar Kela and Hirek Rajer Desh.

some of them are on you tube too with subtitles. please do watch.

Definitely goona watch them. Added them on my watch list

 

[komaalrani]

BARAH KAHANIYAN - HINDI : SATYAJIT RAY : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

HINDI, STORIES, SATYAJIT RAY, BARAH KAHANIYAN

archive.org

Hindi translation of Satyajit Ray stories are available on archive.org ( Internet archive) from where one can download it as pdf or kindle or ebook. Its free.

 

[komaalrani]

In ‘Jalsaghar’, a stubborn landlord, a chandelier with its own story, and haunting musical soirees

Ahead of Satyajit Ray’s birth centenary, a reminder of the master director’s period drama, starring Chhabi Biswas in an unsurpassed performance.


Astonishingly, folded in between the films that comprise the celebrated Apu Trilogy, are two movies inspired by Bengali literature and Satyajit Ray’s association with two outstanding Bengali character actors: Tulsi Chakraborty in Parash Pathar and Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar. The first is perhaps minor (in spite of Chakraborty’s phenomenal performance) and is now mostly forgotten. However the latter is among the three or four greatest films in Ray’s oeuvre, and Chhabi Biswas’s performance is unsurpassed in his own illustrious career.

Elegiac in tone, Jalsaghar (The Music Room) is, to quote John Russell Taylor, “an atmospheric piece”. It occasionally reminds one of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which was about the decline of a wealthy American Midwestern family in the late nineteenth century. The swansong of a stubborn and self-absorbed zamindar, Jalsaghar depicts the passing of the old feudal social order in early twentieth-century rural Bengal giving way to another that is bourgeois and perhaps coarser but more in tune with the future.

Chhabi Biswas plays the zamindar Biswambhar Roy who, at the beginning of the film, is already out of touch with reality and sunk in sorrow for his dead wife and only son. Rivalry with his nouveau riche neighbour Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Bose) spurs him to reopen his music room and host a lavish and showy jalsa, or musical soiree, to indulge his passion for music, which has already ruined him along with his refusal to adapt to the changed social and economic realities. At the end of the concert, Biswambhar upstages his rival with a grand gesture, restraining Mahim’s attempt to reward the kathak dancer with his last bag of gold coins.

After that, he spends the rest of the night drinking in the music room beneath the portraits of ancestors and his own recently added one. He raises a toast to his ancestors whose blood (“Rakto! Rakto!” The blood in my veins, he exults) and lineage he is so immensely proud of. He then mounts his white stallion Toofan and rides to his death against the prow of a boat moored by the dry river bank.

Ray’s attitude towards Biswambhar Roy’s madness has been aptly compared to that of Shakespeare towards King Lear – a combination of pity and compassion that is nevertheless a censure of his folly.

 

[komaalrani]

Some posters of Ray movies

Gopi Gayen Bagha Bayen

Ghare Bahire

 

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Nayak

Devi