NEW YORK: So far as Western critics and film historians were concerned for most of the past half century, the writer-director Satyajit Ray
was that country's film industry, a personal artist whose working methods and concern placed him very much at odds with the Bollywood factory. And as Bollywood films have acquired an exotic cachet in the West in recent years, Ray has slipped into perhaps the greatest chasm of neglect of any long-canonized film artist, a man whose vast body of work is seldom seen in retrospectives and next to nonexistent in terms of representation on home video.
"First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy" (April 15-30) at Film Society of Lincoln Center provides a rare chance to catch up with the master's work through the early 1970s, starting with the films that make up the legendary "
Apu trilogy" (
Pather Panchali, Aparjito, and
The World of Apu) and concluding with the lesser-known "Calcutta trilogy", an attempt to portray an India changing not necessarily for the better,
The Adversary, Company Limited, and
The Middleman. Also included are such rarely screened but highly cherished films as
Three Daughters, Devi, and
Days andf Nights in the Forest, as well as Shyam Benegal's 1982 documentary
Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker.
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