"Speaking of Films" is a book by Gopa Majumdar which is basically an English translation of Satyajit Ray's "Bishay Chalachitra", a collection of articles/lectures over a period of time. I am simply amazed by Mr. Ray's vision, his thought process and his keen observation. It goes without saying that Mr. Ray brought "neorealism" in Indian movies and he is probably the founder of "Parallel Cinema".
For once, I really wish our country had just one language, so that I would have been able to enjoy Ray's writings in his native medium of thought ie, Bengali. Nevertheless Gopa has done an excellent job of translating and it is an excellent book. I always thought Ray was a more hands-on person than a theoretical person. Atleast Quentin Tarantino was. When someone asked him which film school he went to? He said he went to "films" and not "film schools" (He could say this and still make great films because he was simply brilliant). But Ray was not just brilliant, he also had sound theoretical knowledge to back it up. This book has about 16 chapters and each chapter analyses in depth about Art, Color, Background Music and Literature in Cinema. I could have grasped roughly about 10% of what Mr. Ray has tried to convey given that I am a slow and poor learner.
All these articles are intense and cover depth, so this is not exactly a Chetan Bhagat novel (which I am not denigrating by any means since I love his novels as well). It is simply amazing how well read Ray is and how much he knows about world cinema. He even gives a "workshop"ish exercise by taking a passage from a novel "Pather Panchali" by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and contrasting it with a scene in his movie. Extensive discussions on what kind of camera angles/positions used can also be seen.
When I read about his views on the Hollywood talkies and the New cinema wave in Hollywood I was just in awe of the amount of knowledge this person possessed. He simply seems to know the entire spectrum. For example, a simple read of his chapter on "The Language of cinema" gave me a notion of what Hollywood greats like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Ingmar Bergman (Swedish), Jean Renoir (French), Goddard, Truffaurd were all about. In the same breath he also contrasts Eisenstein, Pudovshki and about 20 different Russian film makers in a different chapter. He also gave glimpses on different styles of film making and the different shades of art found in these cinemas. For me it was more like an "Information Overload" since I had never heard about 90% of the names.
Finally he was quite critical of Bengali movies because they did not "ooze" artistic excellence and realism. According to him, Bengali Cinema was filled with stage actors who took all the principles of the theatre like "over acting, over emoting, loud/unrealistic dialogue deliveries" to Cinema. In software parlance, this can be contrasted to the code that got written when all Plsql/c++ developers migrated to Java in the 2000s. I worked on a code base in Java mostly written by PLSQL developers and had to put up with field names like m_personId in classes (with the m_ to indicate that it was a member variable) and local variable names like l_orgId (l_ indicating that the variable was local).
In the entire "Indian Cinema" circle, yours truly thinks that only "Bengali" and "Malayalam" movies reflected reality. Bollywood, Tamil (Balu Mahendra, Mahendran, Balachandar) and Telugu (K. Vishwanathan) supply realism in minor doses but it is largely "lifeless" art. Given these I was not sure why Ray was hyper-critical on Bengali contemporary movies (Contemporary here means the 50s-70s) but perhaps he has high standards.
Overall a very recommended read for people who want to understand the nuances of film making.
PS: The previous blog was a small excerpt from this book by Mr. Ray.
