[Perhaps] the most remarkable aspect of Ray's body of work is its range and versatility. Even within the trilogy, each of the films is strikingly different from the others: Pather Panchali, a Dovzhenko-like poem of the earth and of human lives coming to definition against the anonymity of nature's cycles; Aparajito, owing less perhaps to De Sica than to Zavattini in the latter's call for an open form; and The World of Apu, in which a narrative of spiritual questing that reminds one of Hesse in its largeness of gesture is given an embodiment whose critical detachment and admittance of a natural world are as different from the emotional posturing of Hesse as they are again from any of the stereotypes of a film by Ray. Before completing the trilogy, Ray made two other works, The Philosopher's Stone (1957), a comic fantasy and the only one of Ray's films I would characterize as slight, and The Music Room (1958), a gothic study in obsession and decay that more nearly evokes the fateful cosmos of a Kleist (and of his "St. Cecilia, or The Power of Music," in particular) than it does any world of a perfectable human nature. Despite its backdrop of societal transformation, the essential force of The Music Room resides in the extent to which we are drawn into its protagonist's proud madness; the extent to which we are brought even to admire the declining aristocrat's compulsive sacrifice of all else to the thrall of a more perfect music. (p. 71)

[Mahanagar is] one of the least typical of Ray films in being one of the most visibly plotted. Like those farces it resembles, the action develops with a kind of independently propellent comic logic; when the wife is forced by family economics to go out into the world and get a job, we know her husband will eventually lose his; the logic of the situation demands it. But, even as this comedy of situation is allowed to run its traditional course, the characters in it are so fully fleshed out as to create of their relations a comedy of character that is both remarkably interactive with the farcical action and yet developmentally independent of its motoric drive. (pp. 71-2)

Whatever qualities talk of "humanism" may actually refer to in Ray, it seems to me that the salient quality of his work is its almost intoxicating sensuousness, its all but overwhelming apprehension of a physical world of flesh and fabrics, textures, tangible surfaces, material presences, odors, sexual vibrations, body heat; probably no other films convey to one as do Ray's the sense of an actual temperature emanated from the screen. What one can say critically of such an accomplishment, I do not know; perhaps one can only attempt to appreciate it. Ray's films defy analysis in the literal sense of being entities which it seems virtually impossible to separate into their component parts—that is to say, theme, style, etc.—even for purposes of discussion. They are narratives of such lucid simplicity that even art itself seems to disappear into their general transparency.

Ray's films are perhaps the supreme instance in film of a purely narrative art; one—like Chekhov's, in his stories—in which all abstract meaning is merged into a narrative whose reality seems to be confluent with our own; whose characters seem as fully alive, and whose events seem as wholly independent of artistic arrangement. Possibly one can say that much in Ray's films is touched by a sense of the primacy of life's natural rhythms over any plans which individuals may try to impose on them; but, if this sense does enter into the films, it is not as an abstract idea, or theme whose working out may be explicated by the action, but rather as something which the action is exactly equivalent to and which it celebrates. (p. 72)