Ray of light
Nemai Ghosh captures Satyajit Ray at work, and in the process the magic of filmmaking too
THE PRIDE Of being Ray’s photographerPhoto: Murali Kumar k.
N emai Ghosh’s photographs of Satyajit Ray are a tribute that not only record the intensity and thoroughness of the master film-maker, but also to the nitty-gritty of his craft.
Ghosh’s canvas is large: he recorded the Bengali film-maker at work for 25 years and has a whopping 90,000 photographs of Ray, some of which are now on exhibition in Bangalore.
From a frame of Ray deeply engrossed in illustrating the shots of his last film “Agantuk” (1991), the photographs reel back to Ray briefing actors such as Utpal Dutt, Soumitra Chatterjee, Shabana Azmi, Swatilekha Sengupta, and Sir Richard Attenborough through movies such as “Shatranj ke Khiladi”, “Ghare-Bhaire” and “Charulata”.
The exhibition also hearkens to the range of Ray’s genius: he composes music in one frame, conducts the orchestra for the background score in the next, enacts Utpal Dutt’s action for him and draws the costumes after that.
The exhibition, “Satyajit Ray: From Script to Screen, A Suite of Photographs by Nemai Ghosh” also has some rare glimpses into Ray’s sketchpad in which he masterfully stroked his visualisation of shot sequences especially for epic scenes such as the British army’s march into the Oudh in “Shatranj ke Khiladi”.
Ghosh, who originally started out as a theatre artiste in the Little Theatre Group, later moved and began a separate group called Chalachol with actor-friend Robi Ghosh. His obsession with photography began when he received a camera as a gift from a friend. He took it along on his visit to the sets of Ray’s “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne”, and took some photographs of the actors rehearsing. Later, the pictures were shown to Manik da (Ray), who asked him to keep clicking, and he did, almost till Ray’s death on April 23, 1992.
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