Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray

Book excerpt: "This is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and organic study. Keya Ganguly's intellectual tour de force in this analysis of the great Indian film maker Satyajit Ray will provide a benchmark for future studies of the subject."--Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 "What distinguishes Ganguly's book from the more fashionable approaches to non-Western cinema is her willingness to assert the importance of European theory--specifically, writings on film by Eisenstein, Benjamin, Kracauer, Balázs, among others--as a way to elaborate Satyajit Ray's contributions in the larger postwar context of an international New Wave cinema movement. She does this with extraordinary intelligence and finesse, and the result is an illuminating statement on how a cinema that seems nostalgic for a disappearing cultural past can in fact be read, for the first time perhaps, for its intimations of an as-yet unrealized futurity."--Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films