Film Making

We are pleased to publish “Film Making” by Satyajit Ray. Written in 1965, this text by the Bengali film director offers reflections on the challenges of his early productions, the understanding and application of film techniques, and the balancing of artistic ideas with material constraints.1

Of the many questions that I have been asked by inter­viewers over the last ten years or so, two have recurred more frequently than any others. The first is: “How and why did you come into films?” This has generally been asked in the knowledge that I had started my career in advertising, as a graphic designer. To the questioner, the transition probably seemed too abrupt, too arbitrary. How does one design soap wrappings one day and shape the contours of a celluloid saga the next?

In my answer, I have usually managed to sustain the mystery with a nodding smile that suggests a secret meta­morphosis, a sort of occult elevation to a higher status of creativity. As a matter of fact, my own conviction is that as a transition from one field of creative activity to another, this is not really such a rough one. After all, both films and advertising deal with consumable commodities and in both you have the spectacle of the conscientious artist striving to express himself in aesthetic terms; while the sponsor, hovering in the background and caring little for Art, concerns himself solely with profits. Somebody—I do not remember who—has defined the Cinema as the highest form of commercial art. After ten years in this profession, I have no quarrel with that definition.

Was I conscious of this aspect when I first made my transition from a safe desk job to the uncertainties of shooting a projected epic in the unglamorous backwoods of a Bengali village? I often put myself this question, trying to locate the mainsprings of an adventure that was, to say the least, hazardous.

I know one thing for certain; and that is, I had no intention of making an esoteric film. I knew what I was going to do was off-beat, but I never equated novelty with risk. If anything, I had the opposite conviction. I knew also that I had a basically good “property,” as they say, in Pather Panchali. It was a well-loved story and one that was widely read and praised. But the film industry in Bengal at that time was geared to the so-called “safe” conventional approach and nobody had ever heard of a film being made by somebody who had not spent at least six years mooching around in a film studio in some capacity or other.

The usual credentials for a director making a film for the first time would be either to have served a longish term as a first assistant to a director, or to have been a cameraman, or, at least, a writer of film scripts. I had been none of these things. What I did have was long years of looking at films—firstly, in my school days, as a film fan, and later as a serious student of the cinema, reading about techniques and taking hieroglyphic notes in the darkness of an auditorium. These notes concerned cutting methods of various directors—mostly American—such as Ford, Capra, Huston, Wyler and Wilder.

Coexisting with this admiration for the best of Hollywood was a growing despair with the uncinematic methods displayed in the home-grown product. This latter feeling, may I add, only helped to fan my enthusiasm. I could not believe that an amateur with the right ideas—if given the chance—could do worse than professionals who started out on the wrong foot. Lest I sound too critical of the Bengali cinema of the fifties, I should like to add that it had its admirable aspects too—some good acting, some imaginative photography, stretches of well-planned and well-cut scenes here and there, and, almost invariably, some good, believable dialogue. But never the feeling of satisfactory total achievement.

[ … ]

Although I was convinced that I was armed with a formidable array of theoretical knowledge, filmmaking seemed a terribly hard job in the beginning. On the very first day of the shooting of Pather Panchali remember I had a scene where the boy Apu went looking for his sister in a field of tall grass. In the very first shot all that the boy had to do was to walk a few steps, stop, look this way and that, and then walk again. Little did I know then that it was twice as hard to achieve impeccability in a shot like that than in a shot of, say, a charging cavalry. With the latter, all you need is a cavalry that charges. In Hollywood, such a shot, or even an entire scene of battle, would normally be entrusted to what is known as the second-unit director—a sturdy young fellow, generally, with not much brains but a lot of stamina. Wyler was away planning interiors in Hollywood while the second-unit director shot the entire chariot race somewhere in Italy. But if you are faced with a scene of a boy looking for his sister in a field of tall grass, you are faced with a particular state of mind that produces a special kind of walk, and a special kind of stopping and turning of the head. You also have to calculate the exact duration of the halt, the exact duration of each turn of head, the exact moment of the resumption of walk. Of course, all this is further complicated if you are dealing with someone who has never faced a camera before, and with whom it would be futile to discuss outer manifestations of inner feelings.

If this first shot pulled me up and taught me a lesson, it was also an eye-opener. It revealed to me the most challenging aspect of filmmaking, which is the exploration of the truth of human behavior and the revelation of that truth through the medium of actors. Experience tells us that the subtlest of emotional states affects a person’s speech and behavior and such revealing speech and behavior is at the very heart of cinema’s eloquence. I like to think that it was a shrewd move on my part to have selected for my first film a story where one had to put the emphasis on the human aspect. Not only was this wise from the box office point of view, but with the means at our disposal, any preoccupation with technique would have been disastrous. But balancing of means and ends is not an easy process, and a certain impatience sometimes makes a director plunge into a subject that is clearly beyond his scope. Such was the case with The Music Room, my third film.

I was by then a little tired of the rural scene, so I decided to film this story of decadent feudalism. For the exteriors for this story, we needed a crumbling nineteenth century nobleman’s palace, and found a magnificent one in Murshidabad, right on the bank of the river Padilla. But there were also a lot of studio interiors to do, and little did we realize that the place where we had committed ourselves to shoot them was also in a state of abject decay. As a result, we constantly found ourselves in the position of wanting to do things for which the means were just not there. The music room itself, where the nobleman held his soirees, was the largest set we had ever built, and having built it, we found that it called for overhead shots from a crane.

The studio did not have a crane. I had just won an award at Cannes and felt justified in asking for a crane to be fetched from a bigger studio at the other end of the city. The enormous hunk of a contraption arrived on top of a truck. We were told we could keep it for a week. At the end of the week, having taken the shots I needed, I asked for the crane to be sent back.

The truck arrived in the evening. In the failing light I watched the crane being pushed along a couple of stout wooden planks onto the top of the truck. It seemed a risky operation. And then, before I realized what was happening. penning, halfway up the plank, the crane tottered for an instant and then crashed on the coolies, killing one instantly and crippling another for life. I stood rooted to the spot, barely ten feet away, stunned by the magnitude and suddenness of the tragedy. It took me some time to realize that all this would not have happened if I had not set my mind on those overhead shots.

The striving to find a balance between means and ends applies particularly to a place like Bengal where the smallness of the market and the circumstances of distribution provide an automatic check on technical expansion. For instance, when in 1962 I decided to make a film in color, I had to plan the whole thing in terms of shooting on location, because it is not worthwhile for studios here to employ the number of lights needed for shooting interiors. If I wanted to shoot a color film in a studio, I would probably have to do it in Bombay and Madras. The cost would be too high for a Bengali film, and one would have to think in terms of Hindi or Tamil. Since I believe it is impossible to make a good film in a language one is not fluent in, I see little chance of that happening. It is as simple as that, really.

Talking of means and ends, I think the primary reason why the New Wave films have that rough edge to them is that they cannot afford the polish. Polish is really a matter of time, and in films, as we all learn sooner or later, time equates perfectly with money. With true Gallic flair, the New Wave has turned this lack into a virtue. They have done away with both conventional story and conventional style. If Jules et Jim set out to tell a conventional story, one would be merely irritated by the jump-cuts and freeze-frames and hand-held shots that jagged its contours. Truffaut is far too sensible an artist to do that. We may not identify or sympathies with the droll waywardness of its characters, but there is no denying its stylistic consistency and therefore its validity as a work of art.

Of the other major European filmmakers, Antonioni displays a rare economy of means. At heart he is a classicist; the structure of his stories reveals that. On the surface his films are stark and devoid of frills. Feelings are muted, and there is a genuine attempt at a revelation of states of mind through action and behavior. Antonioni’s films stand or fall on the degree of conviction achieved in their human relationship.

Fellini from the same country is a romantic and at the other extreme from Antonioni. I am eclectic enough to be able to admire both, although I feel that with his wider sympathies, his wit and his greater vitality and optimism Fellini will have a longer creative life than Antonioni.

This brings me to the second question that the interviewers like to put to me, and that is: “Who has influenced you most in your work?”

Ten years ago, my stock answer to this was a series of three or four names that I felt the questioner was anticipating. Flaherty, and Renoir and Donskoi. Flaherty because he made films about rural folk, Renoir because he was a humanist, and had made The River in Calcutta two years before I started Pather Panchali, and Donskoi because he had made the Gorki films—so similar in their ingredients to Pather Panchali. After a time, I got a little tired of the knowing nod that greeted my answer. Of late, I have started to name classical Sanskrit dramatists and eighteenth-century German composers. Sometimes, for a change, I mention the author of the book on which the film under discussion is based as the dominant source.

Now all these answers are partially true. No filmmaker, working in the advanced stage of the cinema’s development, can deny that he has learned from past masters, or even present ones. But what one really absorbs from other filmmakers are the externals of technique. The lighting of a particular close-up that sticks in the mind, the placing of the camera for a particular grouping, cutting back and forth from face to face in a scene of dialogue—all these one may notice and store up at the back of one’s mind just as a writer would note a striking turn of phrase in another writer. But what one notes and admires particularly in a director is his attitude—the reflection of the man himself and his sympathies—which puts a distinctive stamp on his work, on his chosen theme as well as on the manner of its unfolding. Here let me digress and relate an incident.

In 1958, I was invited to attend a film seminar at the Flaherty’s place in Vermont in the United States. Mrs Flaherty had read somewhere of her husband’s influence on my work and was already an admirer of Pather Panchali. She told me that the film had the unmistakable ring of truth in it and then asked me how I had handled the people—the children, the old auntie and so forth, and whether I faced the same problems as her husband did. It was not easy to bring myself to break her illusion, but I did it. I told her that none of the main actors came from that village or from any village for that matter. The children were studying in a school in Calcutta, the mother had a Master of Arts degree and the old auntie had been on the professional stage.

It took me quite a while to convince Mrs Flaherty that in films it was the end result that mattered and the fact that the characters were faked implied no lack of sympathy for the people portrayed.

Ten years of filmmaking has taught me, above anything else, not to make a fetish of anything. I enjoy working with non-actors, but I also enjoy putting professionals and non-pros together and watch the non-pros acquire confidence from the professionals and professionals benefit from the artless simplicity of the non-pros.

I like working on locations—even interiors. But I know now that with an imaginative art director and an observant cameraman, it is possible to fake interiors so that the shrewdest professional eye is fooled.

Once in a while I feel like having a fling at a hand-held freeze-frame, jump-cut New Wave venture; but one thing stops me short here: I know I cannot have that bedroom scene that goes with it.

1965