"The whole Malle affair is deplorable. Personally, I don’t think any director has any right to go to a foreign country and make a documentary film about it unless a) he is absolutely thorough in his groundwork on all aspects of the country—historical, social, religious etc. and b) he does it with genuine love. Working in a dazed state—whether of admiration or disgust can produce nothing of any value."

Satyajit Ray in a letter to his biographer Marie Seton on director Louis Malle’s approach to the filming of the documentary Calcutta (via Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History by Krishna Dutta).

But Malle’s film, with its preoccupation with the exotic and the bizarre, fails to capture Calcutta’s genuine aspiration toward art and culture as a response to harsh realities. Malle was explicitly distrustful of “westernized” Bengalis, and deliberately excluded Bengali artists and thinkers from his film; not even Mrinal Sen (who joined Malle in at least one of his shoots) is permitted a voice. Hence the fact that the film accounts to “nothing of any value,” as Ray perceived, despite western acclaim for the documentary’s “truthfulness”. Once again, as with [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, history and perspective are signally absent. Indeed, it is very much as if Malle had taken Lévi-Strauss’ fascination with Calcutta’s filth and grotesquerie and set out to illustrate them on film.

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Monday 24th September at 4:44pm

Tagged with: Satyajit Ray yeah man ugh i watched phantom india a month ago n it was v bad Malle is p overrated anyway but not more reasons to use more aggressive words than mediocre to describe him Louis Malle Calcutta