A slide lecture on the life and work of Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray (1921-92) is widely regarded as one of the world's finest filmakers. He made some thirty-seven features, documentaries, and shorts, including the Apu Trilogy. A graphic artist, calligrapher, musician, and writer, he sketched out each scene before he shot it, scored his films' music, and wrote the screenplays - some based on his own stories. He received many great honors, including the special Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, the French Legion of Honor medal, and the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Ray's first film, Pather Panchali, which was first screened in 1955 at MOMA in New York, without subtitles, to rave reviews.

Dilip K. Basu, Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, is the founder and a trustee of the Ray Society in Calcutta, founder and director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection at UC Santa Cruz, and coordinator of Ray film restoration at the Academy of Motion Pictures. In 1992, Basu hand-carried the Lifetime Special Acheivement Oscar to Ray's hospital room in Calcutta and helped produce his acceptance speece during the past decade to establish a world-class archive and study center on Ray, and an innovative, culturally focused South Asia Studies Center at UC Santa Cruz.

The Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center was established in 1992 to help restore and preserve damaged Ray film negatives with coordinated effort in collaboration with the Academy vcof Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Archives in Los Angeles. To date, fourteen of Ray's thirty-seven films have been beautifully restored. They have been screened at major Ray retrospectives in Europe, Canada and the USA during the past four years. Ray FASC has a large collection encompassing many aspects of Ray's art, including film sketchbooks, stills, postersbooks, journals, and articles on Ray and b Ray in ten languages. The collection's more than ten thousand items constitute the most comprehensive archive on Satyajiy Ray in the world, and it is the only collection of its kind on a single auteur in a university library.