1 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: the redemption of physical reality (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 310-11, first publ. 1960. Kracauer is associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (although he was never formally affiliated with the Frankfurt Institute). His book is now ranked as a canonical, albeit somewhat neglected, work of film theory. It should be said that it is not Kracauer who illuminates Ray on the cinemareality-universality nexus as it is Ray's filmic practice on which Kracauer relies (along with others) for his theorisation of the medium. Likewise, it is not Ray's status as a 'Third World' director but his avantgarde sensibility that draws Kracauer to him. Ray and Kracauer were putting into practice their respective investments in a political conception of film in the context of the Cold War and the attempts by progressive thinkers and artists both in Europe and elsewhere to put in place a counterculture that attempted to refute the ideological style and substance of American realism and realpolitik. In this sense, Ray and Kracauer were equal participants in an international cineaste environment, in which ideas germinated across New Wave movements in France, Germany, Eastern Europe and India. This historical fact may today appear surprising because, in our haste to avow various temporisations of postmodernity, we are sometimes put in the false position of having to ignore realities that attest to the presence of a fully, and more wholesomely, internationalist culture in the '50s and '60s.
2.
2 Ibid.
3.
3 Ibid., p. 1.
4.
4 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray. the inner eye (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989), p. 99=99.
5.
5 Dilip K. Basu (quoting Ray), 'Films of Satyajit Ray', http://arts.ucsc.edu/rayFASC/%20rayfilms2.html
6.
6 Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (New York, Hyperion, 1994), pp. 33-34, first publ. 1976.
7.
7 Ibid., p. 71.
8.
8 Kracauer, op. cit., p. 31.
9.
9 Ibid., p. 304.
10.
10 Dwight MacDonald, 'A masterpiece and some others', Esquire (Vol. 53, no. 5, 1960), pp. 36-42.
11.
11 Kingsley Amis, 'Several splendid evenings: the reality is there, but not the stimulation', Esquire (Vol. 51, no. 5, 1959), pp. 43-44.
12.
12 John W. Hood, The Essential Mystery. the major filmmakers of Indian art cinema (New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2000), p. 60-60.
13.
13 Ibid., p. 61.
14.
14 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? Essays on contemporary cultural practice in India (New Delhi, Tulika, 2000).
15.
15 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
16.
16 I am thinking here of such films as the recent Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), a sentimental allegory of anticolonial resistance set in British India and told via a game of cricket played between a motley crew of Indian villagers and an English side of colonial officers from the local cantonment. The Indian team wins most improbably but heroically, giving viewers a combination in equal parts of populism, visual cliche, and the usual song and dance.
17.
17 Satyajit Ray, 'Under western eyes', Sight and Sound (autumn 1982), pp. 269-274.
