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Visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and author of Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (2nd edition, 2004) and Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema (2005), with photographs by Nemai Ghosh.
In 2002, when the National Film Theatre in London screened the first complete retrospective of Satyajit Ray's films, there was a palpable buzz of excitement--both among audiences who had seen the films several times before and among those who were new to Ray. David Robinson, veteran critic and biographer of Chaplin, wrote aptly in his introduction to the season: 'To discover or to revisit the world of Satyajit Ray is one of the supreme pleasures of the cinema. The ten years since his death give us the perspective to see more clearly that he was by any reckoning--not just for the cinema--one of the world's great artists.'3
The director, Akira Kurosawa, agreed with this view of Ray. When I was writing a biography of Ray in the 1980s, Kurosawa wrote me the following letter: 'The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. . . . They can be described as flowing composedly, like a big river. Mr Ray is a wonderful and respectful man. I feel that he is a "giant" of the movie industry.'
So did the writer V. S. Naipaul. In an interview, Naipaul told me that Ray's film The Chess Players was 'like a Shakespeare scene. Only three hundred words are spoken but goodness!--terrific things happen.'
Many other leading artists from very different cultures and media, such as Lindsay Anderson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Henri Cartier-Bresson, R. K. Narayan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Salman Rushdie and Martin Scorsese also held this view. It was Scorsese who, in 1991, persuaded the American film world that Ray deserved an Oscar...