Cover picture from IMDB
I am not a cinephile by any stretch of the imagination. That is not to say that I do not enjoy watching them- I am simply not an enthusiast. Everyday I appall and exasperate those among my friends who are cinephiles. They cannot fathom the extent of ‘classic- must watch’ films that I have simply not watched. It has grown to become amusing to me.
It does not mean I do not know of the legends of the world of cinema. And among them is Satyajit Ray. While my introduction the genius of Ray’s storytelling was through his stories in print, I cannot deny the sheer joy of watching his films.
“not to have seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”
- Akira Kurosawa
The Ray film I most recently watched was Sonar Kella- literally, ‘the golden fort’. I began writing this thinking I’ll talk about that, but it made me think of the very first Ray film I ever watched.
While Pather Panchali is probably Ray’s most well-known works, the first Ray film I watched was a children’s fantasy adventure- Gupi Gain Bagha Bain- the film adaptation of a story by Ray’s grandfather. My grandmother, a lover of Bengali film and literature, was staying with us one summer. She had decided that I have not had enough exposure to Bengali films, and made it her summer mission to rectify that. Buried somewhere in my father’s impressive collection of DVDs, we found the Gupi Bagha collection. One summer evening, armed with bowls of vanilla ice cream laden with cubes of golden Alphonso mangoes, we sat down and lost ourselves in the magical, shiny world of Gupi and Bagha’s shenanigans.
I remember the way evening melted into twilight as I watched, my grandma’s golden bangle a dull glisten in the screen light as she explained the Bengali I did not understand. I remember how we would fall into each other laughing as the characters on screen pranced about, and how we did not notice when my mother joined us. It was as golden as an evening could be.
Okay I had to
