"I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing Pather Panchali," Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray,s first film, and it,s true : this movie, made for next to nothing, mostly with untrained actors, by a director who was learning (and making up) the rules as he went along, is a work of such lyrical and emotional force that it becomes, for its audiences, as potent as their own most deeply personal memories. To this day, the briefest snatch of Ravi Shankar,s wonderful theme music brings back a flood of feeling, and a crowd of images : the single eye of the little Apu, seen at the moment of waking, full of mischief and life; the insects dancing on the surface of the pond, prefiguring the coming monsoon rains; and above all the immortal scene, one of the most tragic in all cinema, in which Harihar the poor Brahmin comes home to the village from the city, bringing presents for his children, not knowing that his daughter has died in his absence. When he shows his wife, Sarbajaya, the sari he has brought for the dead girl, she begins to weep; and now he understands, and cries out too; but - and this is the stroke of genius - their voices are replaced by the high, high music of a single Tarshehnai, a sound like the scream of the soul.
Ray will complete many more movies, but his already-completed achievement is astonishing; you could say that the entire oeuvre is, like the very first film, "a song of the little road", because Ray has invariably preferred the intimate story to the grand epic, and is the poet par excellence of the human-scale, life-sized comedy and tragedy of ordinary men and women, journeying, as we all journey, down little, but unforgettable roads.
Salman Rushdie
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