“The greatest film ever made,” according to Salman Rushdie
Author of 13 expansive and pioneering works, Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most important contemporary novelists. Books like Grimus, Shame, and The Satanic Verses have been translated into over 30 languages and continue to incite fascination, reverence, and political and religious outrage to this day. The author was even fortunate enough to see his 1981 magical-realist novel Midnight’s Children adapted for the big screen in 2012. Here, Rushdie discusses the importance of a movie he once described as the greatest film ever made.
All true cinephiles eventually find their way to the films of Satyajit Ray. The Bengali director, born in 1921 in Calcutta, was a true auteur – requiring complete control over his projects. Scripting, casting, directing, editing, scoring, operating the camera, designing publicity material: Ray was involved in every single step of the filmmaking process. As such, his films have a degree of clarity, all too rare in the world of cinema.
Of all of Ray’s films, the one Rushdie has the most affection for is his simmering 1955 debut Pather Panchali. The drama established Ray as an important new cinematic voice and helped bring Indian cinema to the attention of film lovers the world over. While this poetic and tender meditation on family depicts the life of a rural Bengali family, it is deeply indebted to the Italian neorealist movement. The offering, which focuses on the lives of little Apu and the women who raise him, blends sumptuous camerawork with detailed characterisation, resulting in a work which expertly evokes the feeling of viewing the world through the eyes of a perpetually curious child.
In an article for The Strategist, Rushdie labelled Pather Panchali the one film he couldn’t live without. “When people talk about the greatest film ever made, it always comes back to Citizen Kane,” the author began, “But my view is that it’s Pather Panchali, which means ‘song of the little road.’ It’s the first film in a trilogy by Satyajit Ray and based on a beautiful novel about a poor Bengali village and this beautiful little boy, his sister, and his parents. That’s it, but it’s extraordinarily lyrical.”
Rushdie continued: “It was Ray’s first film, but before that he worked as an assistant director to Jean Renoir, and he said that he learned everything he knew from Jean Renoir, so if Renoir made an Indian movie, it would be this. In the film, the sister dies while the father has gone to make money, and there’s this horrendous scene when the mother has to tell him. I still can’t watch that scene without crying, and I don’t cry during movies.”
