Editor’s Pick

On 30 march 1992, at Hollywood’s sixty-fourth Academy Awards, the British actor Audrey Hepburn presents the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray with an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in filmmaking. Ray’s health had deteriorated due to heart disease, so he could not attend the ceremony in Los Angeles. Instead, he acknowledged the award, via a pre-taped video statement, from a hospital bed in his native Calcutta.

Over a 40-year career, Ray directed 36 films across varied genres. He made three of his most acclaimed movies in the 1950s: Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar. Known collectively as the Apu Trilogy, these films focus on the coming-of-age of one man in rural Bengal.

In his acceptance speech, Ray said, “I have learned everything I’ve learned about the craft of cinema from the making of American films.” During the Second World War, when many American soldiers were stationed in Calcutta to counter a potential Japanese invasion, local cinema halls often played Hollywood films. Ray devoured these movies, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers became two of his favourite actors. Ray’s appreciation for American films evolved from there. He said in his speech, “I loved them for what they entertain, and then later loved them for what they taught.”

Hollywood reciprocated Ray’s love. The American director Martin Scorsese has counted Ray as one of the “four greats” of filmmaking, alongside the directors Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. Scorsese also once claimed that the path-breaking film ET, directed by Steven Spielberg, was actually based on a film that Ray tried, unsuccessfully, to produce in Hollywood. Wes Anderson, another American director, dedicated his 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited to the Bengali director, and in it made copious allusions to Ray’s films—especially Pather Panchali. Ray is still the only Indian to have received an honorary Oscar.

But perhaps the deepest compliment Ray ever received was paid not by an American, but by one of his fellow greats from Scorsese’s list. “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray,” said Akira Kurosawa, the towering Japanese auteur, “means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”