article with Satyajit Ray and Roberge Gaston
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Author, critic, teacher and a pioneering figure in film studies, Gaston Roberge, passed away in Kolkata on August 26. The French-Canadian Jesuit priest was as well-known for his friendship with the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray as he was for his scholarship and contribution to the study of cinema. He was 85.
Roberge was a legend in his own right. A teacher of film and media communication, he established Chitrabani in 1970, which is the oldest media training institute in Eastern India, with Satyajit Ray as its adviser right from the inception. It was with Chitrabani that serious study of cinema was introduced in Kolkata, 23 years before the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University was established and 25 years before the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) came into being. For more than two decades, under Roberge’s leadership, Chitrabani was the only centre for reference and study for not only filmmakers, but also serious students of cinema and enthusiasts. Roberge’s contribution to Indian cinema, film theory and criticism through the books he had written was enormous. His books on Satyajit Ray also gave deep insight into the master’s craft and approach. He believed that Ray was the true inheritor of the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore. "It is as if all Bengal was in Manikda: the rich and the poor, the powerful and the humble, the peasants and the city persons, children, teenagers, adults and old people, men and women," he had once written.
Roberge’s love affair with Indian cinema began when he chanced upon Ray’s ‘Apu Trilogy’ in 1961 at a stopover in New York while coming to India. So mesmerised was he with the first of the three films – Pather Panchali – that he watched the entire trilogy in one sitting. “The Apu Trilogy was, in fact, my first portal to West Bengal and its people,” he had told Frontline in 2006, when his seminal book on Ray, Satyajit Ray, Essays: 1970-2005, was published.
Interestingly, it took him nine years after arriving in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and joining St. Xavier’s College, to finally meet Ray in person. “Although I wanted to meet him right away, I didn't want to just go and see him like he was a living museum piece. I wanted to prepare myself, get to know his works more, so that when we met, there could be a worthwhile dialogue,” he had told Frontline. Their meeting in 1970 was the beginning of a close friendship that would last till Ray’s death in April 1992. This friendship and their collaborations would have a tremendous impact on the academic aspect of cinema in India.
Throughout his life one of Roberge’s main interests lay in exploring the cultural roots of Indian cinema, which he presented through his writings. For this reason he never confined himself to studying only serious or alternative cinema, but gave equal importance to understanding mainstream movies as well. He was a prolific writer and authored around 25 books including The Subject of Cinema, To View Movies the Indian Way, Another Cinema for Another Society, Chitra Bani: A Book on Film Appreciation, and Communication, Cinema, Development: From Morosity to Hope. According to filmmaker and Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Madhuja Mukherjee, “any film enthusiast will have read Gaston Roberge’s books.”