One Single Blend: Interrelatedness in the Work of Satyajit Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Virginia Woolf

Suranjan Ganguly, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on interrelatedness in the work of a filmmaker, a photographer, and a novelist. Satyajit Ray is an Indian filmmaker whose first film, Pather Panchali (1955) made him internationally famous. His subsequent films confirmed his reputation as a major figure in humanist cinema. Henri Cartier-Bresson is a French photographer who studied painting and was influenced by the European art movements of the 1920s and 1930s. An exponent of straight photography, he created the concept of "the decisive moment." Virginia Woolf was a British novelist, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, known for her experiments with narrative and associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction. By focusing on interrelatedness, this study identifies a concern common to all three. Interrelatedness is a belief in the interconnectedness of things. It envisions a universe that is organically unified, its different components held together by a system of integration, interchange, and interdependence. As Paul Weiss writes, "The universe is built and operates as a hierarchy of dynamic systems and subsystems extending from stellar bodies through populations, organisms, organs, cells, genes, molecules, atoms, down to subatomic particles." It is this notion of unity that attracts Ray, Cartier-Bresson, and Woolf. For them, life is a complex interrelated whole, its pluralities juxtaposed in an all-inclusive unity. While they acknowledge the separateness of things, they also affirm their cohesiveness in the context of the larger design. In fact, their work celebrates this paradox: unity in diversity, order in chaos.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Palmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Film studies|Fine arts|Comparative literature|European Studies|South Asian Studies

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