236
PAULINE KAEL
have invented this eminent cntIc whose praise gives the show away–
"angled to be a rhapsodic song of innocence."
(One of the delights of life in San Francisco is observing the cultural
chauvinism of New York from a safe distance.
Variety
informs us that
improvement is expected in West Coast movie tastes now that the
Western edition of
The New York Times
brings us Bosley Crowther.
And Dwight Macdonald, who calls any place outside New York "the
provinces," has a solution for the problems of American movies: they
~hould
be made closer to the intellectual life of the nation-in New
York. But it's the Eastern banks, not the Western minds, that are
destroying our movies.)
. The concept of humanity is so strong in Ray's films that a man
who ·functioned as a villain could only be a limitation of vision, a defect,
an intrusion of melodrama into a work of art which seeks to illuminate
experience and help us feel. There is, for example, a defect of
this
kind in De Sica's
Umberto D:
the landlady is unsympathetically cari–
catured so that we do not understand and respond to her as we do to
the others in the film. I don't think Ray ever makes a mistake of
this kind: his films are so far from the world of melodrama that
such a mistake is almost unthinkable. We see his characters not in
terms of good or bad, but as we see ourselves-in terms of failures and
weaknesses and strength; and, above all, as part of a human continuum
-fulfilling, altering, and finally accepting ourselves as part of this
humanity, recognizing that no matter how much we want to burst the
bounds of experience, there is only so much we can do. This larger view
of human experience--the simplicity of De Sica at his best, of Renoir at
his greatest, is almost miraculously present in every detail of Satyajit
Ray's films. Ray's method is perhaps the most direct and least impaired
by commercial stratagems in the whole history of film. He does not even
invent dramatic devices, short cuts to feelings. He made no passes at
the commercial market; he didn't even reach out toward Western
conceptions of drama and construction, although as one of the founders
of the Calcutta film society, he must have been familiar with these
conceptions. He seems to have had, from the beginning, the intuitive
knowledge that this was not what he wanted.
There is a common misconception that R ay is a "primitive" artist
and although, initially, this probably worked to his advantage in this
country
(Pather Panchali
was taken to be autobiographical, and "true"
and important because it dealt with rural poverty), it now works to
his disadvantage, because his later films are taken to be corrupted
by
exposure to "art," and thus less "true."
The
Apu
Trilogy
expresses
