I should confront the problem … of the accessibility of Ray's films for western audiences: can we feel any confidence that we are adequately understanding, intellectually and emotionally, works which are the product of a culture very different from our own? The problem has two aspects. One is content, our intermittent sense that certain passages or details in the films may mean something more, or something different, to Indian audiences. The other is tempo: the chief explicit grumble in the West about Ray's films is that they move slowly.

The 'content' problem can easily be stood on its head: what is remarkable is how seldom in Ray's films the spectator is pulled up by any specific obstacle arising from cultural differences. Partly, this can be attributed to the fact that Ray appears to have learnt his art mainly from the western cinema….

In terms of general subject-matter, Ray's films usually deal with human fundamentals that undercut all cultural distinctions. The subject-matter of the trilogy—family, the parentchild relationship, marriage, irreparable loss, reconciliation—is obviously universal in its accessibility. Even Ray's apparently more 'exotic' films like Devi—in which a young girl is mistaken by her father-in-law for a reincarnation of a goddess—can be reduced to conflicts (usually related to social change and the gulf between generations) that are certainly not restricted to one culture. When a specific cultural peculiarity does play a part in the narrative it often becomes evident that the attitude to it encouraged by the film as a whole is not all that far removed from our own. (pp. 6-7)

The 'tempo' problem presents more serious obstacles; it is also much more difficult to discuss or remove, depending as it does partly on subjective reaction, and on aspects of film it is impossible to cope with at all adequately in words. Even making allowances for possible national differences in expectation, there are passages in Ray which I feel to be 'stretched': within the trilogy, the later sequences of Aparajito; outside it, the later scenes of the second story of Two Daughters. In both these cases, we see where the film is moving long before it gets there, and feel we would accept a more elliptical treatment than Ray's painstaking analysis of each phase in the development of character and narrative.

Even here, however, we should be ready to allow for the fact that Ray is less interested in expressing ideas than in communicating emotional experience. In the West, we are conditioned primarily either by the classic American cinema with its taut narrative structures in which, when a scene has made its point, we are carried swiftly on to the next, or by the European 'art' cinema with its tendency to intellectual thematic structures. We may feel, with Ray, that we have already got the point when we are in fact continuing to miss it, for 'the point' may be not an extractable thematic or narrative issue but the total experience a character is undergoing.

More generally, the only answer to the complaint that Ray's films move 'slowly' is that this is surely their right. Rules cannot be applied externally to works of art, for each work defines its own rules. To ask Ray's films to move faster is like asking Brahms or Bruckner to be Stravinsky. This is not to say that either Brahms or Bruckner (or Ray) is necessarily beyond criticism, but the right to criticise is earned only by submitting to the work in question sufficiently to feel its movement, its rhythms, its breathing. Only then can we decide with any degree of authority whether or not a point is being laboured; the criterion is not the tempo adopted but our sense of the artist's success in realising his concepts, and, ultimately, the value of the concepts as realised. (pp. 7-8)

By aligning Ray, in my rough-and-ready analogy, with Brahms and Bruckner against Stravinsky, I may have seemed to concede the detractors' strongest point: Ray is, after all, a twentieth-century artist—isn't his cinema desperately old fashioned? To which one can imagine the hypothetical detractor adding, as an afterthought, the dread words 'literary' and 'academic'…. [To] call Pather Panchali old fashioned in relation to L'Avventura is as meaningless as to call Broken Blossoms old fashioned beside Breathless: of course it is, and the label does not reduce the film's value in the slightest. It is easy to guess that, in the context of the Bengali cinema, Pather Panchali was positively revolutionary. Ray's models were Renoir and the Italian neo-realists, but 'models' isn't really the right term because Ray's film does not in any real sense imitate them; rather, they gave Ray the kind of hints a great artist can take from others and use in his own way. It is true that Ray has not obviously extended the boundaries of cinematic expression, except perhaps in the context of Indian cinema; he is naturally conservative by temperament…. Ray hasn't been afraid to adopt the innovations of others when they suit his purposes (the use of the zoom lens and 'freeze' shots in Charulata, for example), but on the whole he has shown himself content with the film-maker's traditional means and methods, which he has turned to consistently personal use. The term 'academic' only has force if it implies a characterless following of rules, the safe reliance on repetition of what has been done before. Analysis will show, I think, that the decisions one can discern through Ray's mise-en-scène nearly always grow out of a personal response to the material. Nor is Ray in any real sense a 'primitive'…. The sensibility with which one makes contact through the films is notably refined and civilised, and the technique, within the limits of 'classical' mise-en-scène …, has a corresponding delicacy.

The charge of Ray's cinema being 'literary' might seem to carry rather more weight. Most of his films are adapted from novels and stories and most of the originals have the reputation of being respectable, distinguished works in their own right. His art clearly has affinities with that of the novelist, his most obvious concern being with the nuances of character-relationships and character development. Yet careful examination of almost any sequence in Ray's work will show that it has been conceived—or, when the literary original is closely followed, re-conceived—in terms that are essentially cinematic. This holds true even of simple dialogue-scenes taking place within a single set: camera-position, camera-movement and editing are not mere functional appendages but play a leading creative role, so that the overall effect is not only non-literary but non-theatrical. (pp. 9-10)

Ray's cinema is 'literary' only in the sense that it is firmly rooted in narrative. He thinks primarily in terms of plot and character, and the significance of the films grow naturally out of this, extractable ideas or themes being the product rather than the starting-point…. Ray's own statement (the specific reference is to Mahanagar, but the words can be taken to apply generally) is relevant here; indeed, several of the following remarks could be taken as texts for a dissertation on Ray's work.

'What I try to do in my films is to present certain situations. I try as far as possible not to comment—not to make didactic statements, not to be propagandist in any way. I merely show what it means for a family to have to change, what happens then; and certain problems are presented as clearly as possible showing all aspects, and then leave the public to draw their own conclusions. In a story like Mahanagar, I felt it was important to establish the fact that change was necessary, because in modern India certain ideas have to be put across. Important ideas, necessary ideas, you know. But nobody ever says in the film that you have to change or it's good to change. I merely present certain incidents, and through the incidents, and through the reaction of people to the incidents, certain facts emerge. Fairly complex facts, because there are always two sides to a thing…. And it makes for a kind of orderliness which helps an audience which is not used to intellectual subtleties. And yet it affords you to be subtle in other things.'

Such emphasis on plot and character, however, needs to be balanced and qualified by the 'pure cinema' aspects of Ray's art, those aspects that bring the cinema closer to music than to literature. From this point of view, Two Daughters marks an advance on the Apu trilogy, and Ray's subsequent films show further refinements. Charulata tells a story, certainly, but it can also be regarded as built on a complicated pattern of echoes and cross-references, both thematic and visual, with almost every incident finding an echo somewhere, down to details of camera-movement and set-up. Ray himself said of this:

'I'm very conscious at all times of the musical aspect of a film, of its rhythm, of its silences and of its general pattern. I'm a great lover of Mozart, and certainly I had Mozart in mind when I made Charulata, very much. It's consciously planned, but not worked out like a mathematical problem. I find it's more and more what emerges naturally. It's conscious and subconscious at the same time I think.'

The reference to Mozart is an important clue to the nature of Ray's art. It points up his affinities with Renoir. It also helps us to connect the emphasis on the 'musical' aspects of his films with the awareness that 'there are always two sides to a thing'—several sides in a film like Charulata or Days and Nights in the Forest. The simultaneous awareness of different, even incompatible, viewpoints is a characteristic that finds supreme expression in Mozart's operas.

This emotional complexity, the delicate balancing of responses, what one might call the Mozartian aspect of Ray's art, which links him with Renoir, is already characteristic of Pather Panchali. It reaches fullest expression in Days and Nights in the Forest, the most recent of his films to reach the West at the time of writing, and perhaps his masterpiece to date—certainly the most 'musical' of his films. (pp. 12-13)

Except in the vague sense in which all major art is 'religious' (a reaching out towards a significance beyond the individual human life lived simply for itself), Ray is not a religious director. One guesses, however, that Hinduism has its importance in the background to his work, rather as Christianity is likely to have its importance for even a non-religious Western artist, as a generalised source and influence. (p. 14)

The central unifying thematic preoccupation of all Ray's work to date is change or 'progress': again and again he returns to an investigation of people's attitudes to change, how they cope with it (or fail to cope), the gaps it produces between generations or between people from cultural backgrounds at different stages of development. And the overall attitude to 'progress' is consistently ambivalent: what is created is always balanced (though not negated) by what is destroyed….

Although a considerable time gap and two other films intervened between the shooting of Aparajito and the shooting of The World of Apu; although Apu himself is incarnated by three different actors in the course of the trilogy; and although each film makes sense if seen in isolation, it is nevertheless possible to trace a clear structure in the trilogy as a whole, and to view it as one long film in three parts.

Apu is the only character who appears in all three films, and (obviously enough) it is his development that provides the trilogy with its main unifying impulse. One striking overall structural feature is the way in which the focus is progressively narrowed, so that our attention is concentrated more and more exclusively on Apu himself. (p. 15)

This progressive concentration of focus on the trilogy's protagonist is accompanied by the removal through death of those nearest him. There are no less than five important deaths in the trilogy…. Each, at the time of her death, is the person emotionally closest to Apu. One special recurring circumstance in … three deaths heightens our sense of them as a leitmotiv running through the trilogy: each death takes place at a time of separation. It is true that we share intimately in the mother's experience of Durga's death, but the irrevocable fact of it is brought home most forcefully when Ray leads us sympathetically to share the father's shock when, returning home, he learns what has happened. Sarbojaya dies alone before Apu can get home to her. Aparna dies in childbirth several days' journey away from her husband. In each case the fact of absence greatly intensifies the sense of loss, of human helplessness in the face of death's abruptness and finality, and of life's terrible unpredictability.

But the deaths, felt as so terrible in themselves, are never merely negative in results. Throughout the trilogy loss is usually accompanied by gain, and each death leads, either immediately or indirectly, to progress. (p. 16)

The trilogy certainly encourages one to draw the inference that the progress from the primitive village of Pather Panchali to the city of The World of Apu constitutes an advance; but the point mustn't be allowed to stand unqualified. Ray is by no means a simple-minded believer in progress, and the sense of advance at the end of the trilogy will be modified for us, if we glance back over all that has led up to it, by, again, a sense of corresponding loss. If the life Apu has won through to is incomparably richer in potentialities than that into which he was born, it is also fraught with far greater problems and uncertainties….

The ambivalence of the trilogy's attitude to 'progress' is epitomised rather beautifully in the development of its most obvious unifying motif: the train. There is nothing forced or arbitrary about Ray's use of train images as a unifying device. There is no simple symbolism involved. The meaning of the images shifts and changes and accumulates complex emotional overtones as the trilogy progresses. From the magical moment in Pather Panchali when the sound of a distant train first impinges on the child Apu's consciousness as the family sit in their home at night, to the adult Apu's attempted suicide on the railway tracks amid the squalor of a Calcutta slum in The World of Apu, is a movement that should remove any suspicion that the concept of 'progress' in the trilogy—and in Ray's work generally—is simple or naive. (p. 17)

Robin Wood, in his The Apu Trilogy (© 1971 by Robin Wood; reprinted by permission of the author), Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1971, 96 p.