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LIMITED SERIES SATYAJIT RAY: 1970–1991 MAR 24–APR 8, 2023
The Adversary (Pratidwandi) Fri, Mar 24 | 7:30pm | TMT
The Academy Museum concludes its two-part centennial tribute to writer, director, and composer Satyajit Ray (1921–1992), which we launched in 2021. The second part of this tribute finds Ray boldly grappling with India’s caste system, India’s colonial legacy, and the tumult of everyday life. He also manages another magical musical plus a pair of delightful whodunnits. Ray was born in Calcutta on May 2, 1921, into a family steeped in art and literature. His grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray, wrote children’s books and founded the first Bengali children’s magazine, Sandesh , which his grandson would later edit and turn to for source material for several films in this series. Ray’s father died when he was 3, and Satyajit was raised in the home of a maternal uncle. While working as an advertising art director, Ray viewed Vittorio de Sica’s neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1948) and became determined to pursue filmmaking. Launching his cinematic career with the immortal Pather Panchali in 1955, Ray went on to make 36 films over three decades. These films span genres, periods, and styles, all while retaining their firm roots in the realities and histories of West Bengal. All films will screen on preserved 35mm prints from the Academy Film Archive, except where noted. Programmed and notes by Bernardo Rondeau.
The Adversary (Pratidwandi) with Company Limited (Seemabaddha) Fri, Mar 24 | 7:30pm | TMT The Adversary (Pratidwandi)
Company Limited continues Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy with a vibrantly modernist look at a fan factory sales manager whose big contract with an Iraqi client could secure him a promotion. Ray takes us on a tour of swinging Calcutta with its clubs, salons, horse races, posh restaurants, and cabarets. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Satyajit Ray. WITH: Barun Chanda, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Parumita Chowdhury, Sharmila Tagore. 1971. 112 min. India. B&W. Bengali. 35mm. Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project at the Academy Film Archive with funding from The Film Foundation. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. The Middleman (Jana Aranya) Sat, Mar 25 | 2pm | TMT Ray concludes the Calcutta Trilogy by tracing the downward spiral of a promising young man. After failing to enter the corporate workforce, Somnath (Pradip Mukherjee) strikes out on his own as a “middleman” and quickly discovers how much greasing is needed to turn the wheels of commerce. A panoramic underworld film, The Middleman starkly depicts the predatory snake pit of corrupt hustlers and traffickers who populate Calcutta’s crowded margins as
Ray’s first film of the 1970s starts boldly with a series of hallucinatory negative-printed sequences. The opening chapter in Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy, The Adversary depicts medical student Siddhartha’s travails in the bustling West Bengal capital as he tries and fails to find work. Explosions rock the streets as random, communist ideology is entering middle-class discourse. Ray evokes the camera-eye immediacy of Dziga Vertov in the textures of urban life. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Satyajit Ray. WITH: Dhritiman Chatterjee, Krishna Bose, Indira Devi, Kalyan Chowdhury. 1970. 110 min. India. B&W. Bengali. 4K DCP. New 4K restoration DCP, courtesy of National Film Archive of India. Company Limited (Seemabaddha) After making a film about the ups and downs of the young people of West Bengal in a desperate search for work and meaning— The Adversary— Ray turns his attention to the people who have managed to find employment.
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