The audience included Ray admirers Ken Burns, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson as well as Ray's son, filmmaker Sandip Ray. The restored Apu Trilogy premiered at the Museum of Modern Art on May 4, 2015, almost exactly to the day Pather Pachali debuted there 60 years ago.
We all sort of understand that because we've all left home at some point or the other." it's the same story about children growing up and then leaving home and leaving the parents behind. "Whether you see a film like Boyhood from 2014, to the Apu Trilogy from the 1950s. But Indian film critic Aseem Chhabra adds that timeless themes are what gives Ray's films their staying power. To this day, Ray is the role model for filmmakers working outside the Bollywood studio system, creating films beyond the song and dance melodramas that define commercial Indian cinema. "That is an image of the film that passed through the camera that Satyajit Ray was standing by when he said 'action' and 'cut,' and to me there's something really sacred about that." Looking at a wide shot of Varanasi from the second film, Aparajito, Becker pauses reverently.
Those scans were then sent to Criterion's digital restoration lab, where small tears, dust and scratches were painstakingly removed from each frame, to return the films to their original glory. It had been through a fire."īut Becker says he knew those cans were a gold mine, and the film was shipped to a film lab in Bologna, Italy, to be rehydrated, cleaned and eventually digitally scanned. "They opened the cans and it was clear immediately that you couldn't really handle it without being afraid it would break apart. that this really was a forum for discovering the world." The world Ray depicted was Bengal - both rural and urban - a world in which Apu grows from a poor childhood to become a young man.īecker was already piecing together material for the restoration when he learned about the academy archive's collection of burned negatives. and we're talking about often Fellini, Antonioni, Bunuel and all the European filmmakers that we've come to associate with art house cinema, we should remember that some of the forerunners of that movement, some of the earliest filmmakers of the golden age were not European at all. "Now when we talk about the golden age of art house cinema. In an office lined with posters and Blu-rays for film classics, Becker tells me he wants to return Ray to his rightful place in cinema history. It needs active intervention in order not to disappear." "It's very important that people understand that film is a perishable art form.
Peter Becker, who leads the art house distribution company The Criterion Collection, has dedicated almost a decade to bringing the Apu Trilogy back to life for the digital generation.
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