|
| Rays of light | | The Satyajit Ray Society is working to conserve the famous director?s sketches, handwritten scripts, films and more |
| Debaleena Sengupta / Kolkata Feb 12, 2012, 00:52 IST |
|
“Afilm maker, a storyteller, an artist, a musician and truly a renaissance man”: that is how veteran film director Shyam Benegal has described Satyajit Ray. The master, who died 20 years ago in 1992, has left behind a treasure-trove of archival material. These films, sketches and writings are being preserved and restored by the Satyajit Ray Society, an organisation that has taken up the task of saving and archiving the director’s legacy for posterity.
The society was constituted in 1992. It was enabled by a grant from the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (AMPAS), which conferred on Ray an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement a few weeks before he died. It followed a survey by film preservationist David Shepard of Ray’s surviving film negatives, after which Shepard had said that a preservation society was needed to conserve the precious belongings of one of the world’s finest directors. When the society was formed, Ray’s widow, Bijoya Ray, became its patron.
“The society collects and documents Ray’s existing works and preserves them,” says Arup Kumar De, the society’s CEO. “People who possessed some of Ray’s work or photographs have come forward and donated them to the society to help it enrich its archive.”
The original negatives of Ray’s films were collected from the films’ producers or other individuals, and shipped off to AMPAS, whose labs are working to conserve the negatives. Several of the films were in very poor condition, and have been clinically restored by experts. These films now find their place in the AMPAS archives.
The study at Ray’s home in Kolkata — where the director wrote screenplays, drew sketches of characters for his films, wrote short stories and prepared tunes at his piano for background scores — has been transformed into the site of the largest Ray archive. The material here include screenplays, sheets of music notation, designs and sketches for costumes, set production stills, written drafts of his short stories, advertising and book designs, personal correspondence as well as personal photographs, diaries and scrapbooks. A major portion of the preservation of these paper materials has been completed.
The most valuable items here are the Khero Khata or “Red Books” used by Ray for drafting film scripts in various stages of development. They detail each scene with Ray’s meticulous sketches, diagrams and designs.
Ray had creative and illustrious forebears, among them his grandfather Upendra Kishor RoyChowdhury, an established children’s author, and his father Sukumar Ray, pioneer of Bengali abol tabol or children’s “nonsense poems”. Ray’s upbringing in the liberal Brahmo culture of Bengal gave him a grounding in Western culture, including the Western music which he would use in his films. Ray even trained as an artist under Nandalal Bose, at Vishwabharati in Santiniketan. This is why his creative work is not confined to moviemaking alone, but is spread over several genres.
At a time when organisations like AMPAS, the Ford Foundation, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Tata Tea, Peerless General Finance & Investment Co. Ltd and others have come forward to support the Ray Society with grants, the government has not. “We have a proposed plan of building a Heritage Centre for which we need the support of the government,” says De.
For this heritage centre the Ray Society was approached by an NGO, The Society for the Preservation of Archival Materials and Monuments of Calcutta. This NGO proposed to use a plot of land donated to it by the outgoing Left Front government to set up a Satyajit Ray Heritage Centre in collaboration with the Ray society. “We have taken an appointment with Mamata Banerjee to discuss the project and finalise the grant,” says De. “Seed money” has already been collected, and hopes are high, given the new state government’s determined push and investments in the field of Bengali culture.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Read Business news in |  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Advertisements |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Content Guide
