[Archivio] Ma com'è che mi era sfuggito questo incredibile articolo di Sankhayan Ghosh? Pubblicato il 9 maggio 2018 da Film Companion, rivela un aspetto segreto e sorprendente (almeno per me) di Satyajit Ray, maestro del neorealismo indiano: il suo amore per la fantascienza. The short-lived glory of Satyajit Ray's Sci-Fi Cine Club:
'The SF Cine Club in Calcutta began its journey with much fanfare. The kind of attention unimaginable for a film club in India, let alone one that called itself 'a club of devotees of Science-fiction and Fantasy films'. Walt Disney, from Disney Land, California, wrote a congratulatory letter; the Prime Minister and President sent encouraging messages; sci-fi literary legends like Arthur C. Clarke (...) and Ray Bradbury (...) sent their best wishes. The Press Trust of India carried a report, it was in the city's leading papers and the news segment in the radio the next morning. In the inauguration ceremony, on 26 January, 1966, people queued up in the portico of the Academy of Fine Arts, to collect their membership cards - at an annual membership of Rs 6. (...)
Brochures and souvenirs were handed out. All design-related work, from the hand-drawn insignia of the club, to conceptualising the cover design of the brochure, to selecting the type of font, was done by Satyajit Ray, whose feted masterpieces (...) had by then established him as one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, and who was a life-long fan of science-fiction and fantasy. Some of the first stories Ray ever wrote were science-fiction. (...) Ray (...) was the President of the SF Cine Club. "A science-fiction addict for close to thirty years," he wrote in the brochure, "the SF Cine Club may very well be one of the first of its kind - here or abroad". It was the same year that Ray went to Hollywood to pitch his sci-fi script, the ill-fated The Alien. But that's another story, a comprehensive account of which is given in Travails with the Alien by Satyajit Ray: The Film that was never made and other Adventures with Science Fiction, the new book by HarperCollins India - which also features previously unpublished memorabilia of the SF Cine Club. (...) Ray, not new to the workings of a film club (he had co-founded the first film society of independent India in 1947), curated the screenings. (...)
The film club was the product of the efforts of a group of sci-fi crusaders in Bengal in the '60s. It was led by Adrish Bardhan, its secretary, who had approached Ray with the idea. Bengali sci-fi writer Premendra Mitra was the Vice President. Bardhan (...) had been running Aschorjo, the little magazine dedicated to Bengali sci-fi by local authors, from a room in his ancestral house on 97/1 Serpentine Lane (which would also double as the office for the cine club) since 1963. Ray was the magazine's chief patron and contributor, and together they started producing sci-fi radio plays. (...) Bardhan, in the editorial of 1966 February issue of Aschorjo, wrote, "A Monthly magazine, radio and cinema: these 3 paths now will forge the victory of sci-fi." The issue carried an extensive coverage of the inaugural ceremony; a detailed synopsis of the SF Cine Club's next screening would appear in the last section of Aschorjo - which has been archived by the members of Kalpabiswa - a Bengali sci-fi/fantasy webzine. Many of the stories of the cine club are recounted by Ranen Ghosh, an acolyte of Bardhan, in a Norwegian journal about the sci-fi 'movement' in Bengal, that was published last year. He was an integral part of three bengali sci-fi magazines, which came one after the other, Aschorjo, Bishmoy and Fantastic. Ghosh often wrote stories with multiple aliases, taking names of family members. He is one of the few active members of the cine club who is alive.
How did the seemingly successful SF Cine Club lose its steam so abruptly, and shut down in 1969, 3 years after it had started? Ray got busier. (...) And Bardhan had his own battles to fight - Aschorjo was in financial trouble, and his wife fell sick. "I think Ray also lost interest in it after a point. Otherwise, he would have managed to keep it running," says Ghosh. The audience, he says, also started dwindling. Many members who weren't accustomed to watching English-language films, wouldn't be able to grasp the films. (...) The problems were identified, discussed in the meetings (which Ray didn't have the time to attend), but never addressed'.
A proposito del volume Travails with the Alien, nel sito di HarperCollins Publishers si legge:
'Satyajit Ray was a master of science fiction writing. Through his Professor Shonku stories and other fiction and non-fiction pieces, he explored the genre from various angles. In the 1960s, Ray wrote a screenplay for what would have been the first-of-its-kind sci-fi film to be made in India. It was called The Alien and was based on his own short story "Bonkubabur Bandhu". On being prompted by Arthur C. Clarke, who found the screenplay promising, Ray sent the script to Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, who agreed to back it, and Peter Sellers was approached to play a prominent role. Then started the "Ordeals of the Alien" as Ray calls it, as even after a series of trips to the US, UK and France, the film was never made, and more shockingly, some fifteen years later, Ray watched Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and later E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and realized these bore uncanny resemblances to his script The Alien, including the way the ET was designed! A slice of hitherto undocumented cinema history, Travails with the Alien includes Ray's detailed essay on the project with the full script of The Alien, as well as the original short story on which the screenplay was based. These, presented alongside correspondence between Ray and Peter Sellers, Arthur C. Clarke, Marlon Brando, Hollywood producers who showed interest, and a fascinating essay by the young student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism who broke the Spielberg story, make this book a rare and compelling read on science fiction, cinema and the art of adaptation'.
