Latest news with #Aces'
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Las Vegas Aces Deal A Winning Hand In Home Opener To A Full House Of Fans
The Las Vegas Aces kicked off their home season in style, delivering a winning game to a full house of excited fans decked out in Aces gear and pink A'One sneakers. Fans filled Michelob Ultra Arena inside Mandalay Bay on the world-famous Las Vegas Strip and brought their energy and excitement for the team's first home game of the 2025 WNBA season. Advertisement After a tough start against the Washington Mystics, the Aces got the win in the dramatic last few seconds of the game. Friday Night In Las Make It Aces-Style! The Blast | Melanie VanDerveer The first home game of the Aces season is in the books and a winning one at that! The Aces pulled off a thrilling 75-72 victory over the Mystics on Friday night, staging a late-game comeback with just seconds before the final buzzer. Down 72-66 with a minute left in the game, the Aces proved to their fans that nothing will hold them down. A clutch performance from Jackie Young tied the game and with just under 2 seconds left in the game, Jewell Loyd delivered a game-winning three-point shot with an assist by A'ja Wilson. Advertisement The sold-out crowd erupted in applause and excitement! And to make it more magical, it was the Aces 27th consecutive sold out crowd! Center Court Ceremony For Being Part Of Team USA 2024 The Blast | Melanie VanDerveer Before the game began, four Aces players were brought center court to receive recognition for being part of the 2024 Olympic Champions. Wilson, Young, Chelsea Gray, and Loyd each received a commemorative ring for contributing to Team USA's gold medal victory over France at the Paris Olympics in summer 2024. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the day before the ceremony, Wilson said, "Obviously the gold medal is (enough) for us. So, yeah, the ceremony is gonna be cool, but we know the biggest ceremony of them all is making sure that we get a win tomorrow." Advertisement Gray added, "'I had no idea. I'm happy. I mean, it's a lot of hard work that we dedicated to our craft to be able to even have a chance to get a ring. So I'm excited for that.' A'ja Wilson Hits Big Milestone During The Aces' Home Opener During the Aces' home opener, Wilson hit an exciting milestone - 500 career assists. Fans shared their excitement over the career milestone on the team's Instagram page. "A'JA WILSON IN TOP TOP TOP!" one fan wrote. Another added, "She can't be stopped - stopped - stopped." Another great milestone of the evening was selling out the arena for the first game of the season. A'ja Wilson's Signature Shoe Was Seen All Around The Arena! The Blast | Melanie VanDerveer Wilson's first signature shoe was officially released on May 6, 2025 and it didn't take long for fans to get a pair. That was proven just looking around the arena and seeing the hot pink shoes all around - on players and fans alike. Advertisement Of course, Wilson had a pair on, as well as some of her teammates. Fans of all ages were decked out in Nike A'One shoes and shirts from the A'One collection. Nike A'One, Wilson's first signature shoe, makes her the first-ever Las Vegas Aces player and only the 12th WNBA player in history to release a signature shoe, and fans are clearly loving it! The Blast Was In Attendance For The Aces Home Opener The Blast was at Friday night's game for all the excitement - from warmups to that last second winning basket. Vegas fans are high-energy, ready for wins and proudly decked out in team gear to show their love for their home team. Advertisement The arena was full, with all ages represented. In fact, there were so many children loving every second of the game, with many wearing Aces gear and A'One sneakers. After the game, Wilson took the time to sign some of the kids' shoes before leaving the court. From start to finish, this game experience was top tier entertainment like only Vegas knows how to do. An electrical halftime show from Photon Krew, a high-energy, tech-driven LED dance crew based in Vegas, as well as performances from the team's High Rollers and the Wild Card Crew dance team kept fans entertained. Next up for the Aces - Sunday, May 25, the Aces face the Seattle Storm in Seattle. Friday, May 31, the Aces go up against the LA Sparks at home, and Sunday, June 1, they'll play the Storm again in Seattle. See the full schedule on their website.
Reuters
15-05-2025
- Sport
- Reuters
GM survey: Napheesa Collier MVP, Lynx to win title
May 15 - Minnesota forward Napheesa Collier is favored to win MVP honors and lead her Lynx to the WNBA title, according to the results of the league's annual survey of general managers released Thursday. Collier was runner-up for the award last season, when she earned Defensive Player of the Year honors and made the All-WNBA and All-Defensive first teams while leading the Lynx to a franchise-record 30 wins and a trip to the Finals. Collier received 67 percent of the votes in the survey, with reigning MVP A'Ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces drawing 25 percent and Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark third with 8 percent. The Lynx, who fell to the New York Liberty in the 2024 WNBA Finals, got 60 percent of the votes to win it all in 2025. New York received 20 percent, followed by Las Vegas and Indiana with 10 percent apiece. Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve also was voted the best head coach with 83 percent of the GMs' support. The Aces' Becky Hammon received the other 17 percent. The regular season opens with three games on Friday night, including Collier and the Lynx visiting the Dallas Wings and No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers -- the GMs' pick for Rookie of the Year. Bueckers, coming off a national championship at UConn, received 73 percent of the votes from GMs. However, when asked which rookie would be the top player in the league in five years, 60 percent selected No. 2 pick Dominique Malonga of the Seattle Storm. Clark, who energized the league during her Rookie of the Year campaign in 2024, received 50 percent of the votes when GMs were asked which player they would most want to build a team around. Clark also tied the Aces' Chelsea Gray for first place as the best point guard and also finished first as the best shooting guard. Clark's team made the best overall moves in the offseason, according to the GMs. The Fever received 64 percent of the votes, with Dallas second at 18 percent. --Field Level Media
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Damian Lillard Reacts to Unexpected WNBA Announcement on Monday
The Las Vegas Aces will begin their 2025 WNBA regular-season schedule with a matchup against the reigning league-champion New York Liberty on May 17. Just a few days before that season-opening contest, the Aces made an unexpected announcement regarding rookie guard Deja Kelly. Advertisement The Aces waived Kelly on Monday, sparking controversy around the WNBA world. Just a few days after going undrafted through the 2025 WNBA selection process, Kelly signed a training camp contract with the Aces. The former North Carolina/Oregon guard recorded 15 points through 13 minutes off the bench in the Aces' May 6 preseason matchup against the Phoenix Mercury — including a game-winning jumpshot in the final seconds of the fourth quarter. "Roster Update: The Aces have waived Deja Kelly," the team wrote in an announcement on X. This decision came as a surprise to many around the basketball world, including Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damian Lillard. Advertisement Lillard reacted to the announcement with a post on his Instagram story. "Wthelly," Lillard wrote. Lillard, 34, suffered a torn Achilles during the Bucks' first-round playoff series loss to the Indiana Pacers. The veteran guard averaged 24.9 points and 7.1 assists per game in 2024-25, earning his ninth career All-Star selection. Milwaukee Bucks guard Damian Lillard reacts with forward Kyle Kuzma in the first quarter against the Indiana Pacers during Game 4 of first round for the 2025 NBA Playoffs at Fiserv Forum. Benny Sieu Kelly is now on the hunt for a new WNBA team before the 2025 season. 'As long as I'm myself, I will be content with whatever the future holds for me, whatever that looks like,' Kelly said at the Aces' media day earlier this offseason. 'That's something that I've really tried to keep at the forefront, and just being myself and knowing that it'll all work out. That's the best advice that they've given me.' Advertisement Related: Mavericks' Nico Harrison Decision Turns Heads Before NBA Draft Lottery Related: Pelicans Make Zion Williamson Announcement Before 2025 NBA Draft Lottery
India Today
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
From the India Today archives (1983)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated February 15, 1983)"Now, say that line again without dropping your voice... like this. You see, that makes all the difference between theatre and the cinema. And you, Victor, walk up straight to your lady standing by the mirror in the next shot. Get the timing right, will you? Walking is walking, not sauntering. Well, will someone open that window please? We need a suggestion of the dark winter night cut that light there. Now, Victor, you must embrace her from behind and she then does a half-turn with her face. Quite coquettishly, if the point hasn't been taken already. And hum that line together. Nice voice you have, Victor, perfect tenor. Now, Silence. Camera ... hang on, Victor, as you kiss her, you're free to choose which cheek. Action..."advertisement—Satyajit Ray in conversation with his unit members on the sets of 'Ghare Baire'.At Calcutta's Indrapuri studio, grimy and quite unexciting, a chance visitor misses a breath at the sight of a period bedroom. The bed itself is authentic to the last motif carved on its legs. At one corner of the set stands a German sewing machine of the pre-Singer vintage. The packet of cigarettes lying on the shiny marble-top table carries a label which is rakishly Edwardian. The matchbox is decades behind the familiar 'Aces' or 'Horse'; it is made in Sweden, and called 'Seidensticker'. The candles flicker on curlicue stands, and the scattered 500-watt studio lights capture on the walls the soft, dappled texture of a pre-electricity rich-man's home in Bengal. It is circa the presence of knots of crew-members in the non-shooting zones, the glare of set-lights hung atop ceiling-less walls, the serpentine cables spread on the floor, and the confusion that punctuates the shooting of a film, the set simply makes a visitor rub his eyes in disbelief for its power of evocation of a milieu, its fidelity to details, its range and in the penumbra of the lit-up area, looms the man, hunched behind the Arriflex camera, one eye glued to the 'finder', the Dunhill pipe hanging contemplatively from his fingers, the faded grey jacket looking dusty in the a muscle twitches on his face when he gazes on, nor a leg moves. He turns into what seems like a sculpture, as though Rodin's Thinker had changed his stance. And then the word 'Action' rends the stillness of the pre-shooting moments, like an army AMBASSADOR: Satyajit Ray, gently greying at 62, with 24 feature films and six shorts in the cans, has almost imperceptibly come up in the 28 years since the release of his first film, Pather Panchali, as India's leading cultural ambassador to the rest of the medium is the cinema, the youngest of the Ten Muses, his language is one of lights, lenses and the rhythm of acting and cutting; his audience, though never as large as that of the makers of commercial films, is still large - at least much larger than of the connoisseurs of good poetry, good painting, good novels or good classical thousands of foreigners, the image of India comes off not through the efforts of the foreign office bureaucracy, nor so much through the assorted literature on the country, but from the films of Ray. And, unlike the success of the modern 'curry westerns', Ray has a market abroad which is predominantly its first release abroad in 1958, Pather Panchali ran in New York's Fifth Avenue Playhouse for eight months. Jalsaghar ran in Paris only recently for nine months. And the steady growth of his foreign audience has marked the successful propagation of a view of India which is far removed from the calendar-cover image of the fact it is one of the inscrutable quirks of fate that India, with a tradition of epic poetry, dance, sculpture and architecture that dates back three millenia, is now represented best by an artist working in a medium no more than 75 years old. No creator of the arts in India, living or dead, has ever attained that shadowy pinnacle of fame as Ray he has accomplished it in a sphere as fiercely competitive as the cinema, where works are pitted against each other every year at international festivals; fads and fashions change like patterns in a kaleidoscope; and only very few qualify to be treasured by ACCLAIM: Ray's niche in the hall of fame of international cinema is firmly secure. The arithmetic of awards apart, Ray now shares that dizzy perch where only a handful of film makers sit. As Lindsay Anderson, the British film maker and critic, recently said: "I'd compare Satyajit Ray to Eisenstein, Chaplin, Kurosawa, Bergman and Antonioni. He is among the greatest in world cinema."At no stage in his long career has his creativity flagged, or the edge of inventiveness blunted. His filmography is marked by unquestioned classics, such as Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Devi, Jalsaghar, Charulata and Jana Aranya, and now, as many in the Bengal film industry prophesy, Ghare Baire too is heading for its share of even his minor works radiate that inner glow of class which sets them apart from the breed of films that are only competent. Said M.S. Sathyu, the maker of Garm Hawa: "Show me a 10-second shot from a Ray film, and I can tell you it's his." "But how?" "By its class."His success is not to be measured at the cash register, because he has never quite been a part of the commercial film industry which has thrived by profitably entertaining the teeming millions, mainly by providing three-hour escapes from reality. But, within the confines of serious cinema, no other film maker in India has been able to gather around himself a strictly loyal fact that each Ray film so far has paid for itself knocks the bottom out of the conventional argument that the 'art film', per se, always needs to be subsidised. Since Pather Panchali, he never had to search for financiers: the financiers sought him. And he made his art so eminently viable without diluting its richness or making any concession to popular HONOURS: Very few film makers in the world (and none in India) have matched Ray's flair for bagging international awards with the regularity of a metronome. Altogether 35 international honours have come to him in 28 years, including top prizes at the three big-league festivals at Berlin, Cannes and 1978, the Berlin Film Festival committee adjudged him one of the three all-time masters of the cinema, a rare honour which he shared with Chaplin and Bergman. The same year Oxford University conferred on him doctorate honoris causa, a respect which the 600-year-old institution had shown to only one other film personality, autumn, Ray was specially honoured by both the Cannes and Venice festival committees for his total contribution to cinema. He travelled to Cannes for the first time in many years. At Hotel Martinez, where he put up during his stay at the beautiful town in the French Riviera, an entire new generation of young film makers feted him for his work. Said Costa-Gavras, the Greece-born maker of films like Z and Missing and a director of the prestigious Cinematheque Francaise: "Ray's films have an inner strength. They have got a classic quality. I think a revaluation of his films has begun in France right now."Earlier, wrote critic Alan Brien of The Sunday Times: "... let there be no doubt, Satyajit Ray is one of the master directors of today, not just in some regional ghetto class, but measured against world competition." Opined prominent film historian Penelope Houston in her The Contemporary Cinema: "Until somebody else comes along to change it. Satyajit Ray's Bengal will remain the cinema's India."Picking up Ray as the only Indian film personality worth a mention, summed up Encyclopaedia Britannica, the august tome of knowledge: "Of all the film directors of most famous is the Bengali Satyajit Ray."REGIONAL IDIOM: Except Sadgati, his 1982 six-reeler based on a Munshi Premchand story and Shatranj Ke Khiladi, also a Premchand story, all his films are in Bengali - not only in the language the characters speak but also in its idioms and nuances. Yet he has communicated with perfect ease to an audience outside his native milieu. In fact the Ray aficionado has no linguistic identity or nationality; his only generic trait is a certain degree of enlightened receptiveness. Once cued in, the sounds and images transcend all geographic through Rayland is like riding on a Wellsian time shuttle. It is a voyage through dark tunnels and sun-washed fields of human emotion, done at a speed at which centuries and attitudes blend and blur. Back in a gloomy, rain-soaked Bengal Village, the "Song of the Little Road" (English title for Pather Panchali) echoes to the rhythm of birth, death and Jalsaghar, tearing its way through surrealist marsh and fog, the feudal nobility rides to its grand death. In Charulata, amid brocaded walls, ornate banisters, and incessant talk of Bentham and Mill, a young and lonely nineteenth century housewife gives her heart away. In Shatranj, two men squabble over trivia and keep on shuffling their chess pieces as empires change journey continues. With Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen it veers into the land of fantasia where a village yokel with musical pretensions, and his companion, a percussionist of identical calibre, are suddenly blessed by a gaggle of ghosts. They don't have to look back after that. Then the world changes; with Pratidwandi (The Adversary) in 1970, it becomes harsher, gloomier and taut. At its end, an uncommitted youth finally comes to terms with reality at a whistle-stop town where he listens to a strange bird call that takes him back to his SCENARIOS: The journey loops round the world of showbiz - its glamour and its pain - in Nayak. It returns to the brutality of city life, its cut-throat competition and the gambles that are played on perpetually high stakes, as in Jana Aranya. It immediately hits a bright spot, guiding viewers along the maze of Varanasi streets with a witty and plucky private eye to keep company, in the delightful whodunit. Joi Baba voyage enters its bumpiest trail in its more recent phase. Off go the soft soil and the banana groves of Bengal, together with the delicate crises and their subtle resolution. The landscape of Sadgati is harsh and bereft of all emotion. As Mohan Agashe, who plays the village priest, tugs away the body of Dukhi Chamar (played by Om Puri), the bonded Harijan labourer who died working for him, benedictions from the Gita come out of his mouth with a scalding Piku, his 1982 two-reel film made for the French television, the world turns only a shade grimmer, and the liberal humanism of his earlier films seems like a thing from the past. Piku is a six-year-old in a bourgeois home where the father is cynically aloof, the mother is exhausted and self-pitying even in her adultery, and the grandfather, who loves him, has a fatal stroke. These dead-end relationships are seen through the eyes of the boy, who goes on drawing flowers in his sketch-book almost as a gesture of AFFINITY: And now, with Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). Ray's art turns a full circle, veering back to the milieu with which he has an abiding emotional link-Bengal at the turn of the century. His most perfect film so far. Charulata, based on a Tagore story, explored the place of a woman in a changing Baire, also from a Tagore novel picks up the thread of his essay on womanhood. Here, Bimala, the housewife (played by newcomer Swatilekha Chatterjee), is torn between her cool, rational and politically moderate husband. Nikhilesh (Victor Bannerjee) and her lover Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee) a fire-eating revolutionary whose irresponsible terroristic acts lead to communal conflagration in a peaceful village. Nikhilesh dies in the arson, but after realising that his wife has seen through the sham. It is Tagore's consummate (and unpopular) interpretation of terrorism. Surprisingly. Ray has accepted the interpretation lock, stock and Charulata was an indictment of the excesses of liberalism, Ghare Baire is surely turning out to be an equally bitter rejection of the cult of violence, terrorism and the closed society. And in both, the political theses are encased in two almost musically-structured love stories. Says Chatterjee, whose assignment in Ghare Baire is his 11th in a Ray film: "Both the indictments are true, and eminently applicable to the Bengal society. Tagore was against excess of any kind. And so is Ray. Both are classicists in that sense."Ray shines in Bengali society as a piece of oddity, standing, at 6 feet 4 1/2 inches, at least eight inches taller than the average Indian. His friend David McCutchion once commented: "Satyajit is a bit like Alexander the Great to look at." His English diction and accents are something that one would associate with the British aristocracy between the scholarship, though staggering in its range, bears no trace of pomposity. His personal life - the fact that he is a rigid teetotaler and that he does not accept a rupee in black money over his normal fees that range from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1.5 lakh per film - only sets him apart in the TALENT: What makes Ray as a person so compelling? Ask an admirer, and odds are that he will point at his multi-facetedness. Ray is quite a few 'bests' rolled into one: the country's best film maker; the best book designer in Bengal; the best-selling author of fiction in Bengali: the best-known illustrator and graphic artist; and, as Adi Gazdar, the Calcutta pianist, said: "Ray is one of the best connoisseurs of Western classical music in the country."Ray had established himself as a graphic artist and designer long before his film career began. In fact the idea of filming Pather Panchali came to him while illustrating the novel's abridged edition. In the early '50s, his free-lance work for the Signet Press spawned a new range of concepts and his busy film schedules, Ray still finds time to practise calligraphy and as a rule illustrates his children's books. A few years ago he designed a new type-face, the Ray-Roman, which is a subtle variation on the Roman family of types. The type-face is a natural extension of his skill as a book designer, and has entered the printer's moorings in design and graphic arts are absolutely professional. For seven years before the release of Pather Panchali, he had been slogging away at the art department of D.J. Keymer, a British advertising agency and the forerunner of today's Clarion Advertising Service. Between drawing up "campaigns for tea and biscuits", and designing book covers for Signet Press, his two passions were films and music. Music came in PREDILECTION: It began in early childhood at the family choir where sombre Brahmo hymns were sung. Said he, while lecturing in Calcutta last autumn: "I had grown up in an atmosphere of Bengali songs... a Vedic hymn like Sangachhadhwam, or the song by Rabindranath with a rather similar tune. Anandalokay Mangalalokay, or the stately chorus, Pado-prantey rakho shebokey."But his dramatic predilections soon led him on to the symphonic music of the West. He goes on in the lecture: "As a small boy I had read about Beethoven in the Book of Knowledge... now I was listening enraptured to his sonatas and symphonies. At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry. I was listening to European classical music."Ray's gentle hubris is limited to underlining his difference from the surrounding culture, because he sincerely believes that his conscious Westernism has brought him rich dividends. "I am shaped in equal measure by the East and the West," he told INDIA apprenticeship in Western classical music began in boyhood, with horn gramophones, borrowed discs and a battered harmonium. The piano, which he plays today with professional ease, came in much later. At age 13. Ray and his school friend. Anil Gupta, now a retired Martin and Burn executive, began hunting for bargains in the music shops of recalls that the earliest exciting discovery of the twosome was the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Soon an avalanche of purchases followed, all resulting from skipped lunches and saved pocket money. Gupta introduced Ray to Beethoven's biography by Schindler and Donald Tovey's Essays on Rhythm."Soon after," muses Gupta, "we stumbled on Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik. Manik (Ray's pet name) lost his sleep that night." Gupta, himself a Mozart scholar, put his finger on the similarity. He said: "Nobody can improve one note of Mozart. His music is beautiful, logical, symmetrical and inevitable - like Manik's films at their best."RENAISSANCE ETHOS: Music taught Ray movement; the systematic training in art sharpened his eye for the expressive moment and the telling gesture: he inherited from his older generation and the Brahmo cultural ambience a relentlessly enquiring mind; and his strong physical structure, made him an indefatigable creative machine. Says Shyam Benegal the younger film maker who recently completed a long documentary on Ray: "To me, Satyajit Ray is the last mantle-bearer of the Bengal Renaissance and the first example of a true modernist."However, there is not an iota of the Renaissance-like "fine excess" in Ray's veins. He is a voracious reader, but is never desultory in his reading habits. When he takes a crash course in Egyptian art, it is implied that he will follow it up through most of the available texts, capping it all with a few pages of succinct summary punched out neatly on his trusty old portable Olivetti, which he can use he reads up popular science, he makes it a point to refer to the textbooks, "so that I don't get carried away by popular phrases". After listening to piece of new music, he reaches for the notation book to write down the is this orderliness of mind which enabled him to emerge as one of the best writers of children's literature in India. His 22 titles, mostly literature for adolescents, are chart-toppers in Bengal selling over one lakh copies every year. Says Arup Sarkar, whose Ananda Publishers has thrived on Ray's books: "You can safely print 20,000 copies of any book by Ray, which is about the most that can be said about any Bengali author."In his fiction, extra-terrestrials fly missions to the earth; Feluda, a courageous private eye, solves riddles that could have given the fabled occupant of the house on Baker Street some goose pimples; and Professor Shonku, the omnipresent scientist, whips out his laser gun, navigates around black holes in space and confronts some of the mysteries of creation. His children's fiction is Carl Sagan and Conan Doyle welded IMPRINT: In Bengal, the admiration for Ray borders on worship. Says Shakti Chattopadhyay, bohemian author, widely acknowledged to be the best living poet in Bengal: "To live in the same age as Satyajit Ray's, to walk and even to forget one's steps, are, to me, a great fortune. If some day someone lowered a time capsule, Bengal's cultural history in the past quarter-century would surely go down as the age of Satyajit."Even allowing for poetic licence in Chattopadhyay's rhapsody, Ray's position in the Bengali Pantheon is unchallenged. The magic seems to work even in the 'other' Bengal, across the international border. In 1981, the Bangladesh TV put out Hirok Rajar Deshey; within days, the walls of Dhaka were chock-a-block with scribblings of the film's main songs. Milling crowds outside the Indian High Commission demanded tickets for the screening of three Ray movies in a local the film industry, coffee house and film club circles, he is known by his affectionate code name, dhanga, which simply means 'the tall one'. On a quiet Sunday morning, when he stops his car to pick up a new book or a magazine, disbelieving crowds marvel at him in bemused THEMES: Ray reaches the heart of a receptive audience because of the sheer simplicity of his art. Never is a Ray film loaded with events. Viewing his Mahanagar (The Big City), wrote film critic Richard Schiekel in Life: "It is always a trifle embarrassing to set down, in an unadorned outline, the story of one of Satyajit Ray's films, for in that form they generally seem too small, too simple to support the critical enthusiasm they generate.... The real substance of his films lies between the plot lines, in the interaction of his almost Chekhovian characters."Ray meticulously follows the advice that Jean Renoir, the famous French film maker offered him in 1952. Renoir told him: "You don't have to have too many elements in a film, but whatever you use must be the right elements, the expressive elements."Earlier, at Shantiniketan, Nandalal Bose, the fabled art teacher, taught him the rudiments of Chinese calligraphy where "everything that comprises perceptible reality is observed, felt, analysed, and reduced to its basic form, basic texture, basic rhythm".The choice of elements looks so simple and inevitable on screen; yet it involves a rigorous drill to which all members of Ray's production unit testify. Says Anil Chowdhury, Ray's production manager since Pather Panchali: "At one stage, we had nearly given up the idea of making Charulata for a reason which you may not believe to be true. We had acquired all the required 'properties' except the lorgnette that Charulata would hold. It had to be an authentic period lorgnette, but nobody apparently had it. We were thinking of somehow getting it made when I found exactly what we had wanted at the flea market near Sealdah."PAINSTAKING EFFORT: The chessboard in Shatranj was found after a month long search from Bal Mundkar, an advertising executive in Bombay who is a collector of antiques. The white horse in Jalsaghar was secured at double the cost, by also buying the buggy which it drew on the streets of securing the tape of only a couple of minutes of authentic Rajasthani folk music to be used in Abhijan, his 1962 film. Ray moved heaven and earth and finally secured it from the Sangeet Natak Akademi by the intervention of Indira Gandhi, then her father's hostess. While writing a script, Ray keeps his eyes and ears open like a sleuth. The shooting script of Aparajito, written 27 years ago, has a striking marginal note scrawled out on the left-hand side of one of its pages. It asks: "Where the hell does Sarbajaya (Apu's mother) keep her money?"Recalls Shankar, the best-selling Bengali novelist on whose stories Ray's Seemabaddhwa (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya were based: "There is a sequence in Seemabaddhwa where the hero's firm faces penalty because the electric fans that it makes have revealed manufacturing defects. Ray summoned me while scripting. He was agitated. He wanted to know where precisely the defects lay. In the armature? With the blades? Where?"During the making of Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), the writer of the story, Sunil Gangopadhyay, was closely cross-examined on whether he could suggest from which part of Calcutta each of the four characters of the novel came. Says Ganguly: "I knew what Ray was getting at. Speech and social habits are widely divergent in Calcutta. But did I have it at the back of my mind while writing the story?"SENSITIVE FEEL: While scripting a story the first thing he would do is to sketch the layout of the set, because that "holds the key to the exposition of the characters". He believes that only the relevant external details could lead to the "inner weave of characters". So, he reads novels with a forensic zeal. While talking to people he seldom forgets to note an odd gesture or a telling turn of phrase. A friend recalls that after meeting a Congress minister in 1973 he could vividly mimic "the table-thumping, the head-shaking, the mispronunciations, and the tedious references to 'the leader' ".Such exposure no doubt came in handy for the brilliant portrayal of a Congress MLA in Jana Aranya who, with a satisfied grin, advised the job-seeking youth to "make sacrifices". It seemed particularly galling to Siddhartha Shankar Ray, then the West Bengal chief minister, who huffily left the theatre at the film's premiere. The two Rays are cousins and family such direct contacts with life are getting increasingly rare for Satyajit Ray, who is essentially a private person. He begins the day at 5 a.m. and, after a morning bath, plunges headlong into work, never leaving the study room (where he meets guests) till noon on the non-shooting days. His circle of friends is limited and are mostly upper class. His true companions are his son Sandip, wife Bijoya and sister-in-law Jaya, some 500 records and 4,000 LIFE: Apart from members of his unit (35 in all), he has innumerable acquaintances who call on him regularly. Without exception they are overawed by his personality and generally shrink into their shells in his presence. He often withdraws into himself. Says Goutam Ghosh, 30, whose film, Dakhal, got the President's Gold Medal last year: "I respect Manikda, but rarely do I enjoy a conversation with him. While talking, he goes on doing his own work, and gives a feeling that the visitor is perhaps encroaching on his time."Many people believe that the lack of "real contact" with life shows in Ray's later works. Explains Ghosh: "In Pratidwandi, the Naxalite wears a predictable beard and displays, predictably, a copy of Che Guevara's diary. Why? Because he (Ray) has only heard about the Naxalites but never met many of them. Nowadays he only tries to know the reality but seldom experiences it."Victor Bannerjee, who plays one of the two main characters in Ghare Baire and had the lead role in Piku, is equally forthright. Says Bannerjee: "In Piku, my role was entirely extraneous. I think Ray did not visualise the character in terms of flesh and blood." Making the same point, Chidananda Dasgupta, film-maker and Ray's friend, said that "some of his recent films seem mannered because of his suffocating self-sufficiency".Dasgupta maintained that the two "real talents" in his unit, cameraman Subrata Mitra (who photographed Pather Panchali) and the late art director Bansi Chandragupta, left him at different stages because Ray preferred to "do everything himself ". Added Pritish Nandy, the Anglo-Indian poet, that Ray "has been smothered with affection as with the scientist Satyen Bose", and added that "Bengal does not know how to respect its artist and yet allow him to retain his creative edge".SUBSUMING ROLES: Ray's production unit today is a one-way street with a clear line of command. The cameraman, Soumendu Roy, does not even have to compose a shot: Ray not only composes it for him but chooses the lens, the lights, and finally moves the camera himself. The editor, Dulal Datta, has his role limited to keeping the scissors and the film cement handy while Ray sits at the art director, Ashok Bose, merely ensures that the planes are joined according to designs drawn by Ray to the last centimetre. He writes the film's score, and often plays the piano while a song is recorded, as he did this time when Kishore Kumar sang the songs for Ghare the process, Ray might have lost spontaneity, but his gains are not inconsequential. By grabbing all roles to himself, he has brought the art of cinema as close as possible to the individualism of poetry, painting or music. Reminisces Madhabi Mukherjee: "It's so simple to work in a Ray film that you don't feel you're acting. You don't even have to think while acting." "Is it a good thing?" "It's good for the director. I don't know if it's good for the film."But never do Ray's characters appear ordinary, humdrum or familiar. The Apu of Apur Sansar is not an introvert poet one would have met at the next table in a coffee house; Charulata is not the rich and beautiful housewife one would have accidentally encountered at the jeweller's shop. The uncommitted Siddhartha in Pratidwandi is unlikely to have a local habitation and a name, even though he etches a deep impression on the are all extraordinary men and women strewn on the celluloid strips, dissimilar in their milieus and local context, but blood-relations in their generic trait. As Mrinal Sen, Ray's eminent contemporary, said: "When people asked Gustav Flaubert who had served as the model for Emma Bovary, he replied: 'Emma? C'est moi'. Ray too can say: Charulata? That's I."Subscribe to India Today MagazineMust Watch
