Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) was one of the world's greatest filmmakers and a complete auteur."Not to have seen a Ray film, " Akira Kurosawa said, "is like living on earth and not seeing the Sun and the Moon."
Satyajit Ray left a "luminous legacy" of some 39 features, documentaries and shorts. These are noted for "his complete mastery of the art of motion pictures and his profound humanism which made an indelible impact on audiences throughout the world," said Audrey Hepburn at the 64th Academy Awards on March 30, 1992 where Ray was honored with a Life-time Achievement Special Oscar.
He passed away three weeks later.
While preparing the Oscar honor for Ray, Ms Hepburn found much to her dismay that no good viewable elements of Ray films were available that could be presented at the Oscar night. She persuaded Professor Dilip Basu, who was asked by the Academy to take the Oscar to a critically ill Ray to his hospital room and help produce his acceptance speech, to coordinate the restoration of the Satyajit Ray films.
Since 1993, Basu has helped coordinate the restoration project undertaken at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Archives (AMPASA) in Los Angeles. To date twenty one of Ray's 39 films have been restored and preserved at AMPASA.
The vision of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center (the Ray Center) has been dissemination, not just restoration and preservation which are of course the first and foremost importance. As an auteur, Ray used to write the screenplays often based on his own stories but mostly based on classics of modern Bengali literature, sketch each frame before shooting it, handled the camera score the music, edit the film, and post-production do the posters. In addition, Ray was an immensely popular detective and science fiction writer, book cover designer, illustrator and a world class graphic artist and calligrapher. There is a treasure trove of some 75,000 manuscript pages of Ray's story boards, screenplays, music notations, some 5000 stills, production stills, posters, books and magazine articles on Ray and by Ray in several world languages including Chinese and Japanese. These have been assembled, archived and digitized at the Ray Center.
The Center's vision is to make these accessible to film students, scholars, critics and the public.
To a significant extent, the Ray Center has accomplished aspects of this VISION. It has curated screenings of Ray films at major festivals including complete retrospectives at the National Public Theatre in London, The Smithsonian, MOMA in NYC, the Lincoln Center, NYC, Cannes Film Festival, at Nantes, at the Louvre in France, the Stanford Theatre, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the LA County Museum among many others.
It is the mission of the Ray Center to curate and host similar Ray Festivals and Retrospectives in Asia. The Singapore Museum has taken the initiative to host a 21-film Ray Festival in September 2010. Hopefully, it will be a trend-setter.
The Center's mission is to help organize festivals and retrospectives of Ray films with duly translated and subtitled in Asian languages, along with enrichment events comprising seminars, conferences and exhibitions of Ray's film art.
The Ray Center welcomes students, scholars and the curious public to visit its Collection to study and write on how Ray made wonderful motion pictures with small budgets and without the props and trappings of big studios.
The Center has been publicized in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, in major Indian newspapers in Kolkata, in India and around the world.
To see the list of Ray movies which have won awards, go to this link: http://satyajitray.ucsc.edu/awards.html
To read some of the past news coverage since 1992, go to this link: http://satyajitray.ucsc.edu/articles.html
anna fang public relations is pleased to be assisting the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center in their endeavours to help preserve the films of Satyajit Ray.
Information on the Ray Film and Study Center - English version
Information on the Ray Film and Study Center - Chinese version (Cantonese) |
