Wes Anderson by the way called the Calcutta trilogy as such not the Apu trilogy!

You are free to have whatever opinion you want. I provided these examples because this idea is hardly unique with me. Here you have Ray himself saying that his cinema was influenced by Godard!

By the way another avant-garde work of his is Nayak.

All this doesn’t mean he becomes a Godard, just that some films have those influences more than others.

Coming back to Wes, I hope you can now understand why he calls the Apu Trilogy(lol) Avante Garde,he finds something unusual, doesn’t connect.. or maybe he just doesn’t get it

“I don’t know about my ideas, but my technique — my film grammar — has changed, and the French New Wave was responsible for that. Godard especially opened up new ways of . . . making points, let us say.”

1)Apu Trilogy
2)Jalsaghar
3)Devi
4)Days and Nights in the Forest
5)Distant Thunder

Just below these (again in no order):

1)Calcutta trilogy
2)Charulata
3)Mahanagar
4)Nayak

His most overrated film in my view is Abhijaan (this is of course a popular favorite) while his most underrated is the Stranger. Mahanagar would make it to the first bracket but I think Ray mars it with a somewhat sentimental ending (rare for him).

Satyam–Devi is no easy to fathom? Really? Simply a tale of superstitions in the Hindu society.As for his treatment and vision; as I’ve said in my Saawariya review, about the climax of Apur Sansar. Ray’s cinema simply immerses one in it’s scheme of things, without evoking any feeling most of the time. Some may find it dificult to fathom, coz thee’s actually nothing to fathom there. And I disagree with your take on Devi being his greatest work. That’seither one of the Apu trilogy ones or Gopi Gyne Bagha Byne(lol, I love this one), and Shakha Proshakha is probably the most heart touching.

Coming on to Aranyer Din Raatri, it’s asimple tale of learning about and inculcating respect for something which you deem lesser. It’s funny,sad…full of romanticism too, I wouldn’t call it Avante Garde at all. Taking Simi as a tribal here was a masterstroke!

So, I still stand by what I said, Satyajit Ray’s cinema is the easiest to understand, given you are not trying to understand

Had it not been for the media, Film Industry would have died long back due to TV and Piracy.

I find your point questionable Sunny. Days and Nights in the forest is an avant-gardist work not easily understood. Devi, perhaps his greatest film in some ways, is again not easy to fathom. I could argue the same for some other works. It’s true that Ray is a Shakespearean filmmaker in some ways so that his films can be viewed on a superficial level more easily than the works of some other filmmakers (Kurosawa is also like this) but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the films are therefore easy to understand. In fact with such works (as in any other art form) it’s often harder to get to the complexity because the initial level of reading is rather easily available. But again not all Rays follow even this formula.

I would think Sunny that masala can be very easily defined even if there has been some slippage in meaning in recent history. Where masala was earlier quite literally a kind of filmmaking with all the ingredients (comedy, action, drama, ‘tears’, good guys/bad guys, mythological overtones and so on) it became later on a synonym for very commercial cinema. The latter weakly misreads the genre (or genres) as a conceptual matter and more cynically serves certain political ends. As opposed to apologizing for a poor film one can simply term it ‘masala’!

In any case I am puzzled by your idea that it cannot be defined. I think it can on the contrary very easily be defined. As I said earlier Shammi Kapoor or Rajendra Kumar were not practicing masala nor was Rajesh Khanna though there doing very commercial films. Bachchan certainly was in many of his films. SRK has never done masala. Farah Khan’s attempts are not inadequate masala but ‘impostors’ in this sense.

The reason I brought in OSO is because I think a lot of fans are celebrating OSO as perfect masala without an adequate understanding of what masala is in the first place!

Last but not the least…what is ‘authentic’? ‘Masala’ in it’s very essence a term that has nothing ‘authentic’ about it. Masala means, you could cook up a mild curry, a strong curry, add tej patta or badi ilaichi or whatever you wish. There’s nothing ‘authentic’ about masala films. You cook it up with whatever resources you have and leave the tasting to the audience. And yes SRK was in fact doing masala when he was doing DDLJ..I agree. So? What’s your point? Did I talk about SRK or OSO or DDLJ? Why is SRK and OSO again being dragged in your supposed ‘defence of SLB’? Sometimes I think everything you write is to somehow find a way to bring in the name SRK. Why bhai? Aisa kya gunaah kar diya usne?

This is dogmatic. Because you’re essentially saying that even if a Western critic has enough exposure to Indian cinema his or her opinion is nonetheless invalid. Of course there remains another issue. A certain cinematic training might leave one better disposed to critiquing films even when one is not very familiar with the traditions than would seem to be the case. When I read a review on a Senegalese film in the US I don’t ask for the reviewer’s credentials on Senegalese cinema and culture. Why the Indian exception?

But let’s take up a related question. The one I brought up. Let’s take a poll on this very forum. How many members here have seen films belonging to the masala tradition? If so how many? In other words how many members can really gauge whether the masala cinema represented in OSO is authentic or not? So when OSO is called a great masala film is there the right understanding of what masala really means? In my experience a number of contemporary viewers have the impression that SRK was doing masala when he was acting in DDLJ and the like!

were you asking my permission? i presume not. when you dont have logic to debate – you run away as you are now by using all kind of excuses. thats your prerogative.
but cmon this was never a serious discourse in the first place – a very biased article at best

Rks–”We can not expect our average audience to understand and appreciate Satyajit Ray in one Friday?”

This is the exact opposite thought of what Ray’s cinema was about. Each and every Ray film was simplistic to the core…seriously which Ray film is difficult to understand?

jeese:Partner is atleat not as pretentious like Saawariya.noone was expecting Partner to be an example of great cinema.everyone knew what were they gonna get from a film like Partner(sheer entertainment) which it delivered and so got some fairly good reviews.

problem with Saawariya is that critics expected a lot from it expecially after SLB’s Black but unfortunately it did not meet up their expectations.it is neither entertaining nor an example of good cinema.

In terms of the American reviews of Saawariya I don’t mind most of the negative ones either much as I don’t mind Bawaradwaj Rangan’s negative reviews for any given film that I might otherwise like. The whole question is this: how is the reviewer approaching a film.

I am not suggesting Western reviewers as a matter of being ‘colonized’, only because in the West major critics are almost always trained for their subject. And that makes a big difference.

>Beldevere, I am saying this quite sincerely and not sarcastically at all but I think you are really embarassing yourself with this sort of statement.
As for US reviewers not knowing Hindi movies you’d be surprised

how long have you been in the US. based on what credentials do you claim to be a US movie expert. like i said yday – just throwing names doesnt make you an expert. your knowledge of movies is at best laughable – so yes i do like your essays for the entertainement value – so please do keep writing them. NG wont be NG without them
as far as embarassing myself goes…LOLL. let other figure that out.

I don’t really think you have to point outside to show that are critics aren’t all too good. You know there is a problem when a film like Partner is outscoring Saawariya in these “reviews”.

Beldevere, I am saying this quite sincerely and not sarcastically at all but I think you are really embarassing yourself with this sort of statement.

As for US reviewers not knowing Hindi movies you’d be surprised..

Finally in terms of the media hyping Bhansali earlier that also proves my point. WIth the earlier films Bhansali was following a certain ‘expectation’ routine. HDDCS was pretty ordinary fare, Devdas was a remake of a classic, Black was a more unusual subject but quickly became part of a Bachchan narrative where the greatest Indian star-actor was taking on a Hollywood sort of grand role.

It’s rather unfortunate but the 90s in India also ushered in (along with other questionable economic ‘miracles’) a strong streak of anti-intellectualism among the bourgeois classes.

Your statement above is unfortunately indicative of it. As for US critics not knowing Indian cinema let’s decide whether Bombay critics know it first! I am not even talking about ‘understanding films’ here but about a plain exposure to films from different periods.

this perfectly symbolises the ‘holier than thou’ attitude. i would any day take a BR, Rajeev masand, Nikhat kazmi, anupama chopra, etc over than so-called ‘educated’ reviewers in US who dont know crap about Hindi movies and their history

>I am addressing the illiteracy of the film media in India, specially when it comes to critiquing films that are not regular commercial fare for one reason or another

this is the same ‘illiterate’ media who has made SLB a big name. so the first bad review his movies gets – poof – all the excuses come out. sour grapes anyone

I think some of you might be confusing Bhansali’s defensive statements with my piece!

Where I do explicitly agree with his perspective is when he gets angry with the media and trade voices for always speaking for the ‘masses’ or the ‘common man’. This is a considerable issue. Since childhood I have heard members of the bourgeois class (to which I of course belong like everyone else on this forum) try to somehow ‘represent’ the ‘other’ by way of abstractions like the ‘masses’ and the ‘common man’ and the ‘front benchers’ and so on. Of course not we would ever know what those ‘others’ really thought of anything from cinema to politics. We just don’t have the experience. But we cheerfully continue to speak for them. And on this screen of the ‘other’ we project our own prejudices. When we find a film not to our taste we pretend that others won’t like or that it is too sophisticated for Indian audiences and what not.

I actually love Bhansali’s point that that the ‘masses’ (accepting this abstraction for a bit) are not as illiterate as the critics think they are. I suppose he might have used his own film Black as an example which did very well even in small town India.

i dont think it has got any better reviews in US.just gothrough the reviews at rottentomatoes and you will see most of the critics there too have not liked the movie.

even BBC has not given a favourable review.

Saawariya received far better reviews in the US. Doesn’t that suggest the perfect correlation between ‘educated’ critics and positive Saawariya reviews?!

In any case I have nowhere said here that the media can somehow control the box office. Of course the media can and does often spin what really happens.

No. its not about “artsistic” stuff that we are talking about, its the “politics” that the author here is interested in that was much more true for DON than any other movie.

Thats very true.

TheSkeptic: “Interstingly, this “politics” becomes a major debate only for UJ, Nishabd and now Saawariya… but not DON, which I think was a bigger victim than the other three.” This self-pitying logic is getting tiresome and annoying. What was so “different” or “artistic” about the Don remake that it needed to be approached with grave respect on its own terms? What were its terms but the bog-standard commercialism of a remake of an already popular subject rendered “cool” in the customary way, that is by borrowing it from “safe” Hollywood successes like Bourne Identity and Matrix that are quite familiar to the intended audience?

my point here is whatever the critics say, howmuch the media is against your movie, ultimately it comes down to the paying public who will decide the fate of the movie.

Interstingly, this “politics” becomes a major debate only for UJ, Nishabd and now Saawariya… but not DON, which I think was a bigger victim than the other three.

Akshay, you are too kind as always.. much appreciated as always..

The media loves exaggeration. In July JBJ was called the worst film ever, then Aag came and it was the biggest flop ever (in other words, real bad film), and then No Smoking took that spot. Take a look at Ardash, he must have titled his BO columns “business hits all time low” roughly 7 times this year alone. If one took this seriously, you would come to the conclusion that the Hindi film industry is dieing a very quick death.

LOL…that should happen between a Director and his audience…

Also, i do not like this idea of blaming the audience for not understanding a ‘master-piece’. If you are a great director irrespective of the theme, you should be able to connect with the audience.

My point is Expectation, If your past movies have been decent entertainers and then out of the Blue, with no warnings you make a so called different movie then ovviously the paying public WILL feel cheated.

If you in advance warn the viewers kee bhaiyya yeh picture thoda hatke hai, then all you said above may be true.
Eg. I will never go and watch a Satyajit Ray movie around Diwali because I know in advance what to expect.

Very true. The post is very readable. I do agree on broad terms. But some fault should be placed at Bhansali’s door also, in not fully understanding his audience. A change should be gradual instead of drastic. We can not expect our average audience to understand and appreciate Satyajit Ray in one Friday?

ps: I haven’t seen Saawriyaa.

“A specific medical knowhow is needed before one starts prescribing medication or opening up someone’s insides (assuming one is not in the business of torture).”

I would believe that a truly great torturer would have some anatomy down!