#Pather panchali blu ray series

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to get the subtitles burned-in, but the screening still went over gangbusters. He brought the reels to the airport and fell asleep, slumped over the desk at the terminal. To hear his son tell it, Ray didn’t sleep for 10 days while finishing the film for his deadline. John Huston, who was in India scouting for The Man Who Would Be King (a film he didn’t shoot for another two decades), checked in on Ray’s development and wired back to the MoMA that programming Pather Panchali was a wise decision. There would be textiles, ornamental displays, concerts (Ali Akbar Khan), dance (Shanta Rao), and Wheeler decided, after seeing some initial shots that young Calcutta ad man Satyajit Ray had tested, that he would save room on the programme if Ray could deliver his film on time.

#Pather panchali blu ray series

In 1954, curator Monroe Wheeler was planning a series for the following year called Living Arts of India. The Museum of Modern Art weighs heavily in Apu’s origin story. It’s quite in line with the bittersweet, neo-realistic story of its multi-generational Bengali family, always scraping by with some picked fruit from a neighbour’s garden or, in one scene, trading prized brass serving ware for pots of rice. Then, home releases via the Criterion Collection.įirst-time film-maker Ray, working with a mostly untested crew, had to partially self-finance the project, selling his collection of books while his wife pawned her jewellery. (I recall my one home viewing of Pather Panchali on a VHS so washed-out you could barely read the translated text.) Janus Films will distribute theatrical runs of all three movies at Film Forum in New York, followed by a national release at your finer art houses. The result: gorgeous 4K digital prints with new subtitles. But as Peter Becker, CEO of the Criterion Collection put it, “Sometimes not throwing something away is the most heroic thing you can do.” There has never been a decent DVD version, let alone Blu-ray, of the Apu trilogy. A fire destroyed the stock, and it looked like we would be left with nothing but those beat-up copies forever. Ray’s negatives were sent to a lab in London, and then, tragedy.

After he was given an honorary lifetime achievement award at the 1992 Academy Awards, a push toward restoration was made. For decades, much of Ray’s work was mostly seen on chewed-up prints. Yet this was more than just a typical remastering. On, Ray’s son Sandip, himself a film-maker, was on hand to present a new restoration of his late father’s most famous picture.

Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray’s debut film, one of the most important works of world cinema and the first chapter in the Apu trilogy, had its world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on.

Precisely 60 years and one day prior, at the same institution, the world first met Apu.