In 2002, when the National Film Theatre in London screened the first complete retrospective of Satyajit Ray's films, there was a palpable buzz of excitement—both among audiences who had seen the films several times before and among those who were new to Ray. David Robinson, veteran critic and biographer of Chaplin, wrote aptly in his introduction to the season: ‘To discover or to revisit the world of Satyajit Ray is one of the supreme pleasures of the cinema. The ten years since his death give us the perspective to see more clearly that he was by any reckoning—not just for the cinema—one of the world's great artists.’Footnote ³

The director, Akira Kurosawa, agreed with this view of Ray. When I was writing a biography of Ray in the 1980s, Kurosawa wrote me the following letter: ‘The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. . . . They can be described as flowing composedly, like a big river. Mr Ray is a wonderful and respectful man. I feel that he is a “giant” of the movie industry.’

So did the writer V. S. Naipaul. In an interview, Naipaul told me that Ray's film The Chess Players was ‘like a Shakespeare scene. Only three hundred words are spoken but goodness!—terrific things happen.’

Many other leading artists from very different cultures and media, such as Lindsay Anderson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Henri Cartier-Bresson, R. K. Narayan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Salman Rushdie and Martin Scorsese also held this view. It was Scorsese who, in 1991, persuaded the American film world that Ray deserved an Oscar for his lifetime's work. Since then, Hollywood's Academy Film Archive has worked steadily to restore the prints of all Ray's films, most of which had been shockingly neglected by their Indian producers.

Given this exceptional international response to Ray's work, it is staggering that John W. Hood, in this lengthy new study of them, chooses to focus exclusively on his own view of Ray. No one else is quoted by him—not a single film-maker, film critic, film historian or Ray biographer, whether Indian or non-Indian. Not even Jean Renoir, who inspired the young Ray to become a film-maker when he visited Bengal in 1949. Indeed Ray himself, who was a famously articulate writer and interviewee, is quoted so rarely by Hood that his own views of his films are almost invisible. In an introduction, the author justifies his stance by describing his book as ‘simply a textual study, with minimal and incidental deference to the work of others in biography or film history’.

In this book the reader gets over 450 pages of scene-by-scene description of Ray's films. This verbosity will be tedious for those who do not already know the films well, and otiose for those who do. Moreover, by grouping the films in somewhat specious categories—for example a chapter entitled ‘The urban middle class’ (that analyses Kanchenjungha, The Big City, The Hero and Days and Nights in the Forest)—rather than treating them by year of production, it is difficult to discuss Ray's career meaningfully, from Pather Panchali in 1955 to The Stranger in 1991.

Conceivably Hood might have got away with his arrogant approach if he were a brilliant literary stylist offering original aperçus. But he plods far beneath the imaginative vocabulary required by the films’ range and subtlety, much as he undoubtedly admires Ray's finest achievements.

To take an all-too-typical example, here is the book's description of one of the most searing scenes in Ray's entire oeuvre: the return of Harihar to his ruined village house in Pather Panchali to greet his wife, bearing gifts, only to discover that his young daughter, Durga, has died during his long absence. ‘The exceptional facial acting and mood portrayal by both actors gives the scene an intense credibility, reaching its extraordinary climax when Harihar produces the sari he has brought for Durga.’ At the opposite critical extreme, the book curtly dismisses the memory game played during the picnic in Days and Nights in the Forest as being ‘one of the film's truly dull passages [with] nothing interesting or entertaining’. Considering that Ray repeatedly declared the memory game to be one of his best achievements as a film-maker, and that film critics and audiences have generally concurred with this judgement, the least we can expect from Hood is a sustained and intelligent justification for his contrary view. Yet he offers nothing.

There are also disabling errors of fact—inexcusable in these days of videos, DVDs and published screenplays. In the chapter on the Apu Trilogy, we are informed that ‘in the above scene in Pather Panchali, Ray underscores the couple's misery with the wail of a shehnai’ (a wind instrument like an oboe); in fact it is a tarshehnai (a piercing stringed instrument), making, as Rushdie wrote, ‘a sound like the scream of the soul’. The second film Aparajito is said to open with a title card saying ‘Benares, 1934’; the date is in fact 1920 (1327 in the Bengali calendar). In the third film The World of Apu, after the death of his young wife Aparna, a suicidal Apu is said to be chided by his mother-in-law; in fact the woman is a Calcutta neighbour—Apu cannot bear to visit his wife's family in rural East Bengal for years after Aparna's death, abandoning their child Kajal.

The book's one solid virtue is that it is not pretentious, unlike the recent academic collection Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray's Cinema.Footnote ⁴ Post-modernist jargon is thankfully absent from Hood's text. Yet the book surely begs a question, like several other published studies of Ray, why a film director of such transcendent gifts should attract such a mediocre level of critical analysis, both in and beyond Bengal?

The reasons are rather complicated, and include the lack of availability of many of Ray's films in high-quality, well-subtitled DVDs, including such masterpieces as The Goddess, Three Daughters, Charulata, The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, Days and Nights in the Forest and The Stranger. But in my view the main cause is that profound appreciation of Ray requires an immersion in both Bengali and western culture, which very few film writers enjoy. As Ray frankly recognized in a long article, ‘Under western eyes’, he wrote for Sight and Sound in 1982: ‘What is attempted [in most of my films] is, of course, a synthesis. But it can be seen as such only by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure. Someone who will see both the wood and the trees.’Footnote ⁵