Wail of the road

If you're going crazy trying to lay your hands on a Ray DVD, there's not much hope.

In 1963, Time adjudged Satyajit Ray one of the 11 best directors in the world. At the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, he was ranked one of three all-time best. Pather Panchali, his path-breaking first film regularly made it to greatest-films-ever-made lists through the 1960s and 1970s.

Those were the days. Mention Ray to people in New York nowadays and watch faces go blank. Is it that the world is coming to think less of Ray's cinema? Or, more likely, that Ray's international reputation has been dealt a blow by the fact that few people "" directors, critics, general audience "" get to see his films these days in the West?

Today there's just one film, Abhijan (1962), that's available on DVD, other than Shatranj ke Khiladi, which was recently released by Kino International in the US.

The Abhijan DVD, part of the Master of Cinema (MoC) series by Eureka Films, UK, is also the only one made using a print restored by the Academy of Motion Pictures, LA.

Sure, Ray DVDs do sell at Indian film stores in the US. But no American store stocks them now. Nine of Ray's early films were once easily available, brought out by Sony Classics, which had acquired the distribution rights through the Merchant Ivory Foundation. But the rights lapsed in 2004, and Sony has not renewed them since.

The reason, according to Dilip Basu of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Centre at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the law: "There are no legitimate Ray DVDs in the US or EU "" what are available are awful quality pirated VCDs or DVDs from here."

Basu is referring to the fact that, barring the three "remastered" DVDs of Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne, Aranyer Din Ratri and Pratidwandi recently released by Piyali Pictures, none of his VCDs/DVDs available even in India is of watchable picture quality.

But that's not explanation enough. How come the rights to Ray films haven't been picked up by a reputed DVD-maker in the West? Another set of reasons. First, there is confusion about who exactly holds the video rights of Ray films.

Then, as Nick Wrigley of Masters of Cinema, says, "The problem with releasing Ray's films is that the elderly producers of his films are in India, and are not interested in the usual payment procedure adopted by European and American distributors. This normally consists of an advance and then a royalty payment over 5 or 10 years. The producers are not interested in the royalty payment but require a large one-off payment upfront. Many Western distributors, including Criterion Collection in New York, are not willing to pay this amount upfront."

Further, as Bose explains, "Classic films like Ray's do not have commercial value, they have perennial value. They will always be of interest to cinema aficionados "" once out on DVD, they will sell and continue to bring money to producers."

Ramlal Nandi of Chayabani, which has distribution rights to several Ray films, confirms that discussions had been held over DVD rights for foreign territories, but had fallen through.

"They are wary after what happened in the Henderson's laboratory in 1993, when negatives of a number of Ray films were lost in a fire," says another distributor.

So that's that.
Under the circumstances, Ray enthusiasts can only hope that the success of MoC's Abhijan will lead to similar such ventures in the future.