Our Films, Their Films From Booklist The late Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray veered from the oft-traveled route of his compatriots and eschewed the conventions of Indian movies, which are mostly two-and-a-half-hour melodramas featuring the latest star, pop songs, and dances. Ray's was a more serious, socially conscious cinema examining contemporary issues. His first features, the famous Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apu Sansar), introduced Indian film to the West and made Ray a cultural hero in India. These essays written over a period of 25 years reflect Ray's insights into Indian cinema, his own career, and such other great filmmakers as Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, the Italian neorealists, Akira Kurasawa, and John Ford. They resemble the work of the 1950s French intellectuals who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema before turning to filmmaking themselves, and in them Ray proves his adeptness as a writer and as an auteur. This collection is published in conjunction with the restoration and rerelease of some of Ray's major films. Benjamin Segedin