![]() Becker says: “The Apu Trilogy was in a sort of special place not only in career, because it was the start of his career and launched him on the international scene, but also because the films themselves were in such lamentable condition.” ![]() The Academy has made a short tribute film, An Act of Faith: Saving “The Apu Trilogy,” in which Criterion president Peter Becker and technical director Lee Kline describe the restoration. Among many extras are a 1958 audio recording of Ray reading his essay “A Long Time on the Little Road,” a video essay by Ray biographer Andrew Robinson, and excerpts “Apur Saa 2003 documentary film, The Song of the Little Road, which features composer Ravi Shankar, who created the musical accompaniment for the trilogy. They are also available online, through Criterion. The three films are available individually or in a collector’s set that includes the 4K digital restorations of the three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays. The process is illustrated in a stunning trailer for a Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray release, which has come a few months after the presentation of the trilogy on the international film-festival circuit. His vision and ambition also owed much to his education at Santiniketan, the rural university founded by the great Indian polymath, Rabindranath Tagore. Their completion was testimony not only to the ingenuity of Ray, and his broad skills in design, art direction, and dramatic range, but also to his love of the cinema of De Sica, Renoir, and their contemporaries, and of earlier Soviet cinema by the likes of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. ![]() Ray’s films took art-house cinemas and festivals in New York and other Western capitals by storm, winning many awards. Like De Sica, he filmed his masterwork with nonprofessional actors, in outdoor locations, and with very little money. He had been particularly taken with Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and the works of Jean Renoir, and those inspired him to write a treatment for Pather Panchali, and set about planning to film it. In 1950, he had moved to London with his wife to work at an advertising agency, and there immersed himself in Western film. Pather Panchali ( Song of the Little Road, the first of his 28 feature films, completed in 1955 after three years of work), Aparajito ( The Unvanquished, 1956), and Apur Sansar ( The World of Apu, 1959) depicted the life of an initially young boy in a rural Bengali family who was, by the end of the trilogy, a worldly student aspiring to a life in writing. Ray, inspired by the poetic, naturalistic films of Italian neorealism, made his three-film masterpiece in the 1950s, based on two novels by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee. Satyajit Ray in 1955 during the recording of Ravi Shankar’s score for Pather Panchali
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