Retrospectiva Satyajit Ray

Sharmila Tagore e Soumitra Chatterjee em O Mundo de Apu, de Satyajit Ray

Aprendizado

Quando você sentiu pela primeira vez que você
iria fazer Canção da Estrada (Pather Panchali)

It had been growing, but about 1946 or '47 I felt that I had to make a film. Before that I had, of course, illustrated an edition of Pather Panchali and the book had attracted me as a possible film source. Then about 1947 1 started the Calcutta Film Society, and in 1948 1 developed a new hobby. I was writing scenarios of films, based on books which had been acquired already for filming. Suppose I read in the papers that such and such book had been bought and was being made into a film, I would write a scenario and later compare it with the treatment on the screen.

There were fewer films in those days than now. My general habits didn't include the local products, and it was mainly American films that I saw, before we started the Film Society in 1947. It was 90 per cent American films, with an occasional British one thrown in and sometimes a chance French or Italian picture. We did get to see some Russian films, because the Russians were allies and they sent out things like the Maxim Gorky trilogy, Eisenstein's films, some of Pudovkin's. In fact. oh yes, that is an important event...Pudovkin and Chtrkassov came to Calcutta in 1950 or so. Before that I had seen Ivan the Terrible, and I asked Cherkassov how he managed to get his eyes so wide open, because he had the normal kind of small eyes, not deep set. And he said that "Eisenstein made me do it." He was slightly critical of the way he was handled by Eisenstein, made to assume postures that were very difficult, so at the end of the day he would have muscle pains all over his body.

Renoir came in 1949. I had seen only American Renoirs, The Southerner, This Land is Mine. The Southerner seemed a remarkable film, very fresh, very unconventional, taking an American subject and giving it a kind of European colouring. The film was a very important experience for me, and the moment I discovered that Renoir was in town I went and looked him up. He had a feeling for nature; a deep humanism with a kind of a preference for the shades of grey, a sort of Chekovian quality;'and his lyricism and the avoidance of clichds. In one of his American films you have a scene of a fight, which is shot almost static, from one viewpoint. Whereas normally you have cuts; the blows go this way, that way, cuts, inter-cuts; here is one big fight scene in a single shot taken from a normal viewpoint, nothing low, nothing too high up, no wide-angle, nothing. So that it seemed like a remarkable thing, a perfect harmony of form and content.

I was full of admiration for him. Sometimes one is disappointed meeting an artist one admires, because as a person he tums out to be something you can't warm to, can't get close to. But Renoir was such a wonderful man, deep, gentle, humourous and full of wisdom...I went as many times as I could after my office, which would be around six o'clock in the evening. He would have worked the whole day on the scenario of The River, and I would pester him with questions about his French films, which I hadn't seen, and then I went location hunting with him. I knew the Calcutta suburbs and nearby villages, for I had already started going around on my own, taking train trips outside the city, because I had the making of Pather Panchali in mind. I told him about it: this is the kind of story, this is the kind of situation, this is the kind of family... and he said, "It sounds wonderful, make it, I think it will make a fine film."

He was shooting about ten miles away from Calcutta. Since I stiff had my job, I could only go on three or four Sundays. When I went, I stayed the whole day and watched the whole thing, but I actually saw more of him when he was here the first time and came to look for locations. I can't say The River was a film about the real India. The background was Indian and it was most marvellously used... riverside, the boats and the fishermen and the general landscape. But the story itself was a bit idealistic, not terribly interesting, about an English jute-mill manager and his family, adolescents mainly, and certainly not an Indian story, and even as a Western story in an Indian setting certainly not so near the truth, because it had been idealised. There are characteristic Renoir touches there. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't, of course, compare with his French films.

It was in 1950, 1 went to England to work in the head office of the Calcutta advertising agency. I was sent out for six months, and in the six months I was able to see IS or so films. The first film I saw there was Bicycle Thieves. It was in a double-bill at the Curzon with A Night at the Opera. It made a very, very interesting combination. I was terribly excited because I already had this idea of making Pather Panchali, but I wasn't sure whether one could really work with an entirely amateur cast.

I had the proof. And it was all shot on location, at least 90 per cent shot on location. I had the proof that one could shoot out there, in all kinds of light. I had been told by professional directors here that you had to have control over the light, which meant you had to have artificial light. "You can't control the sun," that's what they said. "And if you want rain, you have to create it artificially, because how could you control actual natural rain, it stops and goes and comes."i

Métodos

Chunibala Devi e Champa Banerjee em Canção da Estrada (Pather Panchali), de Satyajit Ray

Você gosta de fazer tudo no filme?

Yes. For example, I had a very good cameraman, but after each shot, he would say, "We must take another." I asked him why. He was never precise. He said "Well. . . ." That is very dangerous when one is shooting on a small budget. So I decided to take the camera myself. Sometimes in a tracking shot where there is a lot of action, a slight shake is not important if the action is good. But he thought only about the shake. He wanted smoothness at any price. I realise that when I work with new actors, they are more confident if they don't see me, they are less tense. I remain behind the camera, I see better, and I can get the exact frame. If one is sitting on the side, one is dependent on the cameraman. He frames the shot, he does the panning, the tilting, the tracking- he does everything. It's only when one sees the rushes that one knows exactly what one has. I am so used to doing the framing now that I couldn't work in any other way. Not that I have no trust in my cameraman's operational abilities, but the hest position to judge the acting is through the lens. I started with one cameraman, Subrata Mitra, who was a beginner. He was 21 when he shot the first film; never handled a movie camera in his life. But I had to have a new cameraman, because all the professionals said that you can't shoot in rain, and you can't shoot out of doors, that the light keeps changing, that the sun goes down too fast, and so forth. I got a new cameraman, and we decided on certain basic things. We believed in available light. We aimed at simulating available light in the studio by using bounced lights. It didn't happen with the first film but with the second film, when we had to shoot interiors in the studio, supposedly of houses in Benares where there was a central courtyard with no roof and the light all came from the sky.'It was a kind of top lighting, shadowless. We started using bounced lighting, with a cloth stretched over and the lights bounced back from it.

When the studios were built in the north of Calcutta 50 years ago, this part nf Calcutta was a village. It was during the silent period in any case. There was no traffic, no noise, but now the city has grown. This area is a part of the city and one hears cars, motor-cycles, scooters. One day one can have perfect sound, but the next day there is noise and we have to dub it, so we have to dub everything.

Yes, it's the general practice in Bombay also. They have very sophisticated machinery with computers. It is what one calls 'The Rock & Roll' system and they dub everything. In fact, I have realised that in dubbing one can improve the work of even a professional actor. Personally, I would like very much not to dub. I talked to James Ivory who was shooting here. He said there are marvellous sound engineers who can use all the sounds... In India, the young sound engineers have better equipment, very good directional mikes. But since they know everything will be dubbed, they are not specially careful.

Now colour is much better than it was 10-15 years ago when one didn't know how to control it. Colour tended to make everything look too beautiful, too pretty, but now I feel that the advantage of colour is that it can give more detail. It must be used very carefully and I don't allow the laboratory to change anything. If I choose the costumes for their colour, I want the film to show those colours. One can make changes by emphasising the blue, yellow, but I am most satisfied when the colour is closest to what I have used. It is very carefully chosen and I don't want the laboratory to do any colour corrections.

I like to think of my films like that. I like to plan my films, They are very, very carefully conceived. I leave room for improvisation when we are shooting, particularly on location. One finds new ideas, new angles etc. But everything is planned in the head as well as on paper. It's a very economical way of working. In that way, one ensures that the cost is not too high.

Everything is more expensive, so one has to be more careful and my films in general are edited in the camera. Except for scenes of dialogues with two-three characters which can be cut in several different ways-where the editor and I try different variations-the one who is speaking, the one who is listening. I never take a shot for safety's sake. If it is really good, I don't do a second take. Sometimes one is obliged to take it twice, the maximum is three times for reasons of co-ordination. For example, in Pather Panchali, the two children are looking at an old man.who sells sweets. The children decide to follow him, to run after him. This was the shot: the boy, the girl. The girl runs, the boy follows and there is a dog in the background who follows also.They have to be in the same shot, but it was not a trained dog. One chap said, "I'll call him." The dog didn’t even get up. I had to do II takes. But it was important because it was supposed to be their dog and had to follow them. In the end, the little girl had a piece of food in her hand and the dog followed the food... On the screen, it was perfect.

I also shoot in a studio, but I am very careful about the art direction and the light and it does not show. One can't tell whether it is a studio or not. It's much easier. Location shooting in Calcutta is extremely difficult. There are always crowds and noise all around you. Sometimes, of course, one has to go outdoors. in The Middleman, there are plenty of street scenes in Calcutta, but we work very fast and with hand-held cameras. We arrive, we shoot, we go away. There can be problems if one has a long sequence to shoot. We can't even use the police who don't have a good image in India. The police attract an even bigger crowd because people come and ask what is happening. So we do our own policing. Everybody in the crowd wants to be in the shot; they don't want to be there just to watch. I made a film in '6&'67 for which we were shooting 80 kms from Calcutta in the heart of the country-side. We had constructed a set with a garden and a chicken coop. For a day or two, there wasn't a soul, it was like in a studio. The nearest station was five kms away. On the third day we heard a train stopping in the afternoon and half an hour later, we heard a terrific noise. It was a crowd of'young people who had come from Calcutta. They were brandishing sticks of sugar cane and shouting, "We want to see the shooting." They climbed on the trees all around, as if on balconies. We couldn't tilt the camera upwards. The whole shooting plan had to be changed to tilt the camera down. One branch on which six people were sitting, broke. Fortunately, one of our actors was a doctor.

Yes, perfectly so. Naturalism which amounts to dwelling on inessentials may differ from realism but a lyrical method can be quite in tune with it. Generally speaking, however, I may be accused of nurturing a classical trend of mind. In rhythm, form and content, I like to follow a simple classical structure. And moreover, there is no point in being excessively avant garde at this stage of development of the Indian audience.

I merely present certain incidents, and through the incidents and through the reaction of people to the incidents, certain facts emerge. Fairly complex facts, because there are always two sides to a thing. It's certainly not desirable that two old persons, the parents of the boy, should suffer inwardly. They suffer because they have not been able to change. But they do suffer and you do sympathise with their agony, their grief. That's how I like to present my stories, without making any kind of bombastic propaganda statements. They're stories first and foremost, they're tales, shall we say. I believe in plot. Because India has a great tradition of stories. And it makes for a kind of orderliness which helps an audience which is not used to intellectual subtleties. And yet it affords you to be subtle in other things.

Yes, but with the kind of film that he makes he doesn't need a prepared, regular scenario, because one of his main purposes is to show the disjointedness of modern life, the lack of order, the lack of definite form, and you can only do that by breaking it up.

I think so. Sometimes the form is dictated by a character. When Truffaut made Jules at Jim, for instance, lots of people talked about it as a very free style of editing. I think it all derived from the fact of the girl.

Jeanne Moreau, and the character of Catherine. Unless Truffaut adopted that style, I don't think the film could express the form so well. It couldn't have been told in a conventional form.

But it's not neo-realism that he is doing, where you want to see new faces. Cary Grant was at one point supposed to play the leading part in Bicycle Thieves. Well, anyway, De Sica couldn't get him. I would hate to see Cary Grant in Bicycle Thieves, but I would love to see all the known faces in the next Bergman film.

I don't mind slow films. Sometimes I'm irritated by slowness, but I don't think slowness, per se, is a fault. There is, for example slow music, there is fast music.... It's much more difficult to make a successful slow film.

In fact, I shall go even further and say that the cinema's characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate such intimacies of the mind. This can be revealed through some movement, some slight gesture, some inflexion of the voice, some change in the light or surrounding objects. But there may not be any physical movenlent at all in a succession of shots. All the same the character grows and is unfolded. To describe the most important characteristic of the film medium I would even use the word growth rather than movement. The cinema is superbly equipped to reveal and trace the growth of a person or a situation.

I am great admirer of Japanese cinema. They are really the great masters. I don't know Ozu's early films, but at the end of his career, he was totally Japanese- not at all influenced by Hollywood. He transgressed all conventions - even the 180° law. Here we cheat a little by changing the position of the actors, Ozu is very particular about that. He never changes the geography. For us it is often a shock- slightly disorienting. I have repeatedly seen some of his films and I thought, "My God, he does not follow the Hollywood model or the grammar. He has another approach, that of actors in their setting."