Present at the genesis

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Pather Panchali. This should be as good as occasion as any to assess the reasons why this film, like the entire body of work of Satyajit Ray, continues to occupy a place of pride in the history of world cinema.
The experts will take care of that. But the anniversary will also allow us to pay tribute to those individuals who helped Ray succeed in his debut venture.One of them, who I was privileged to know, rarely, if ever, finds mention in the accounts of that period.
But for the persistence of four or five critics, the film would have been consigned to oblivion at the Cannes festival in 1956. The names of two of these critics, Lindsay Anderson and Andre Bazin, appear in articles and books on Ray. But there were two others who played a crucial role to ensure the film’s outstanding success. One was the film historian, Georges Sadoul, and the other, the chief curator of the Cinematheque Francaise, Lotte Eisner.
Sadoul was my teacher at the Film Institute in Paris and Lotte Eisner, then in her 60s, was a benefactor who became a friend. She allowed me free access to the Cinematheque. It is there, in the cavernous underground of the Palais de Chaillot, that I was exposed to cinema drawn from every part of the world, and it is in the cafes on the Place de Trocadero, that I listened to Lotte narrate stories about stars and directors she had frequented.
Her own story was remarkable. Born in a prominent Jewish family at the end of the 19th century, Lotte was the first woman film critic in Germany and, in that capacity, wrote authoritatively on Expressionist cinema and its practitioners, especially Murnau, Pabst and Fritz Lang. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she fled her homeland for France where she quickly befriended avid cinema lovers. The foremost among them was Henri Langlois who was later to establish the Cinematheque.
Lotte told me in detail what transpired at the Cannes festival. For one thing, the film was shown at an ungodly hour. There were less than half a dozen people at the screening. One of them left barely 10 minutes after the lights were dimmed complaining loudly that he couldn’t stand its slow pace. That was Francois Truffaut.
Many dozed their way through the film. But the ones who were awake could not believe their eyes. Pather Panchali’s freshness and purity, the absence in it of any kind of stylistic or technical flamboyance enthused Lotte no end. She clamoured for another screening and cajoled the sceptics to attend it.
The film went on to win the special jury prize for the ‘Best Human Document’ which, in turn, persuaded Ray to chuck up a career in advertising and devote all his time and energy to films.
Lotte and Ray remained life-long friends. I was privy to her admiration for the director in a curious sort of way. After watching Ray’s films, she had developed a fascination for the sari. I gifted her one in the full knowledge that she would never wear it. Several months later, she invited me for lunch at her small flat in Neuilly. And true enough, she had converted a portion of the sari into a curtain for her window.
She had presented the remaining portion to Mary Pickford who, to Lotte’s horror, had used it as a tablecloth in her Beverly Hills home. The way she blamed Pickford for vandalising the sari was a heady brew of angst, innocence and charm. That is the way Lotte reacted to films and film-makers too. But for Ray it was only infatuation.