discuss yhe challenge face by satyajit ray as afilm maker in the light of essay?
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In 1951, recently returned from London where his employers had sent him to work at their UK office, Satyajit Ray wrote an article for the bulletin of the Calcutta Film Society (CFS), a film enthusiasts’ community Ray and his friends had founded some years previously. The article reviewed some Italian movies that Ray had seen while in London.
The directors covered included Renato Castellani, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and a few others, all of whom had made their name in the years immediately before or after the Second World War. Of De Sica’s work, Shoeshine and I Bambini are mentioned approvingly, but the film for which Ray reserves his highest praise is the 1948 masterpiece Bicycle Thieves.
This movie, says Ray, “creates a norm which few films aspire to, let alone attain”.”It is a triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of cinema”, he adds, and goes on to explain why Indian filmmakers needed to learn from De Sica’s example:
"The simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its production make it the ideal film for the Indian film maker to study. The present blind worship of technique emphasises the poverty of genuine inspiration among our directors. For a popular medium, the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and have its roots in it. No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of theme and dishonesty of treatment. The Indian film maker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica, and not De Mille, should be his ideal.”
These lines anticipate Ray’s own career in films, for it would be another four years before Pather Panchali made its appearance. (And there is no question that De Sica, and certainly not De Mille, was Ray’s inspiration in filmmaking.) But what this article also tells us is that Ray had started writing about films years before he began making them.