Retrospective: Decoding the amazing world of Satyajit Ray’s film posters

Satyajit Ray transformed the face of Indian cinema with classics such as ‘Pather Panchali’ and ‘Aranyer Din Raatri’ to name a few. But before that, he was a graphic designer, and created his own groundbreaking posters, with which he distilled the themes and moods of his films into a single image – in effect, a paper trailer that was posted all over the streets. On his birth centenary, we pay a small tribute to Ray with a selection of his best film posters.

Created from drawings and notes rather than a script, Ray’s debut film offered a child’s-eye portrait of impoverished rural life. The antithesis of extravagant Bollywood, the poster for this realist, lyrical and humane film incorporates folk-art-tinged design and hand-drawn motifs – as if Apu, the film’s six-year-old protagonist, had scribbled them himself.

Ray often turned his camera on the dilemmas of women and their position in society. Here, a hallucinatory design illustrates a pivotal scene in his 19th-century period study of religious superstition, when an elderly man dreams his daughter-in-law is the embodiment of the Hindu goddess Kali. Here, the division of the young girl’s face represents her split identity.

Ray’s command of portraiture can be observed throughout his graphic work, from the faces of characters he sketched for children’s stories to his charming depictions of directors he met or admired, such as John Ford and Akira Kurosawa. Here his fragile, minimal brushstrokes bring alive the longing of the film’s lonely housewife for her husband’s cousin. Ray borrowed the ornate style of the title’s calligraphy from his hero, Rabindranath Tagore, whose short story the film was based on.

This surreal image showcases Ray’s unusual treatment of photography at a time when most Indian film posters were hand-painted. Perhaps influenced by the contemporary pop art photomontages, these floating, cut-out heads are a recurring motif in Ray’s designs, and here introduce a comical note that hints at the film’s satirical tone.

In this mysterious nocturnal image, Ray shows the film’s true protagonist: the forest that transforms the four rich and arrogant Kolkata bachelors who stay there during a weekend road trip in this still-timely fable about India’s urban-rural divide.

Ray was often accused of ignoring politics; The Adversary – set amid the upheaval and violence of 1970s Kolkata, then in the grip of Naxalite radicalism – was his retort. He draws attention to this with the hand-drawn figure of a gunman at the centre of the film’s fractured title block. Ray would often design a number of different posters for each film. One version for The Adversary sees Ray experimenting further with the logo, splintering it as a bullet would.

In addition to his beautiful woodcut illustrations for children’s stories, Ray also wrote and sketched his own detective and sci-fi tales. This adaptation of one of his own novels is told through the eyes of a six-year-old boy, and, continuing the idea he originated with his Pather Panchali poster, Ray made sure the loud, playful lettering and drawings on the poster could have been his character’s creations.

In the poster for Ray's penultimate film, the fingers pointing at the doctor protagonist symbolise the crowds of people and big businesses denouncing the character as a heretic after he discovers that the "holy water" of the temple is, in fact, polluted and killing local people. Based on an Ibsen play of the same name, the film had to be shot in studios due to the director’s deteriorating health.