Since the beginning of the 'talkies', a select group of feature films have had the power to express a vision of national identity that appeals to both the nation depicted in the film and to the rest of the world. Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) from France, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) from the United States, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) from Britain, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) from Japan, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) from Sweden and, more recently, Edgar Reitz's Heimat (1984) from Germany, are well-known examples.
So too does Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy – Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). These films appeared during the second half of the 1950s, yet they remain India's pivotal artistic works of the post-Independence period. Though not planned by Ray as a trilogy, his three films, about the childhood, adolescence and manhood of Apu in the first four decades of the century, seemed to many to capture the awakening of the Indian creative spirit from long years of fitful sleep. No doubt the new post-colonial mood of the period had something to do with this widespread view, both in the West and in India. However, a link between the Apu Trilogy and burgeoning Indian nationalist feeling was never more than oblique. After all, the films deeply affected even the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who saw Pather Panchali several times and thought it 'the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river.' Kurosawa became a lifelong admirer of Ray, and made the remarkable statement: 'Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.'
Whilst reviewing the entire 1956 Cannes Film Festival for the London Observer, the upcoming director Lindsay Anderson enthused most of all about Ray's maiden film. 'Cannes 1956 has discovered a new masterpiece of poetic cinema,' he wrote. 'With apparent formlessness, Pather Panchali traces the great designs of life … You cannot make films like this in a studio, nor for money. Satyajit Ray has worked with humility and complete dedication; he has gone down on his knees in the dust. And his picture has the quality of intimate, unforgettable experience.' Anderson's advocacy, along with that of some other influential European critics, ensured that the unheralded Indian film by an unknown director triumphed over its detractors and was awarded a special prize by the festival jury. The following year, its sequel, Aparajito, won the top prize, the Golden Lion, at the Venice Film Festival, though again not without a severe struggle inside the jury.
Another future director, the teenaged Martin Scorsese, saw the Apu Trilogy when all three films were first screened one after the other in New York in 1960. Three decades later, Scorsese recalled: