Until now, most of us who have been lucky enough to see the Apu Trilogy have had to peer at its extraordinary and delicate black-and-white imagery through scratches and murky shadows. In 1993, as part of an initiative to restore the films, original negatives were shipped to a film lab in London - only to be severely damaged, seemingly beyond repair, in a fire at the lab later that year. In 1992, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was preparing to give the ailing Ray a lifetime achievement Oscar (he would die less than a month after receiving the award, at age 70), researchers gathering prints of Ray’s movies were alarmed at their poor condition. The Apu Trilogy has survived against all odds. But there’s even more to the story than that, a narrative that pits the permanence of great film artistry against the fragility of celluloid. He decided to follow Apu’s journey further only after Pather Panchali was so warmly received. Ray, who drew inspiration from the Italian neorealists and Jean Renoir (the latter a friend and adviser), hadn’t even planned to make a sequel. The trilogy seems to be held dear by nearly everyone who sees the films, beginning with the first audiences for Pather Panchali, Ray’s debut, in Cannes in 1955 - it won a then-newly introduced prize there, for Best Human Document. These three pictures, Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1957), and Apur Sansar (1959), follow a boy named Apu as he becomes a teenager, a promising student, and then a grown-up with a wife and son.
Maybe that’s why the experience of watching Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy - movies adapted from two works by Indian novelist Bibhutibhushan Banerjee and set in a country many of us will never even visit - can be both a source of great joy and the catalyst for a deep wistfulness that can take hours, maybe days, to shake. You begin saying goodbye to where you’re from the moment you’re born you may come back for a visit, but you’re never coming back to E ven if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down landmarked buildings may stay approximately the same, but even then, new dust settles on them every day, to be swept or washed away and replaced by yet more dust.
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