IN the summer of 2002, the National Film Theatre in London announced the first-ever complete retrospective of Satyajit Ray’s films. Some of the prints were coming from the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood, which had magnificently restored the image and sound; these had been seen only in the United States. Here was an opportunity too rare to miss, and I decided to see every film again on the big screen (and Ray’s long-lost documentary Sikkim for the first time).