Ray subconsciously paid tribute throughout his career to French director Jean Renoir, who influenced him greatly. He also acknowledged Italian director Vittorio De Sica as an important influence, whom he thought represented Italian Neorealism best, and who taught him how to cram cinematic details into a single shot and how to use amateur actors and actresses. Ray professed to have learned the craft of cinema from Old Hollywood directors such as John Ford, Billy Wilder, and Ernst Lubitsch. He had deep respect and admiration for his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, whom he considered giants. Among others, he learned the use of freeze frame shots from François Truffaut, and jump cuts, fades, and dissolves from Jean-Luc Godard. Although he admired Godard's "revolutionary" early phase, he thought his later phase was "alien".[89] Ray adored his peer Michelangelo Antonioni but hated Blowup, which he considered as having "very little inner movement". He was also impressed with Stanley Kubrick's work. Although Ray claimed to have had very little influence from Sergei Eisenstein, films such as Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Charulata, and Sadgati contain scenes which show striking uses of montage, a technique Eisenstein helped pioneer. Ray also owned sketches of Eisenstein.
