To be sure, the film wasn’t profound in any conceivable sense. But I am tired of the notion that the movies, in this country, need to be profound. If we are put off by avant-garde directors, it’s not because we are less intelligent than them, but because we aren’t supposed to be intelligent in such a facile sense when we flock to the theatres. If the people want something, and if that something isn’t predicated on serious themes, there’s no harm in delivering what they want. I think the critics are misconceived, consequently: it’s not that we don’t want serious themes onscreen, it’s that we go to the halls less to intellectualise than to be entertained, and more to have something happen to us than think on what is happening to us. The rift shouldn’t be between art and entertainment: it should be between good and bad, with respect to whether a film entertains its audience even if they disagree with the ideology articulated in it.
I’d rather have a good/bad binary playing out in our cinema this way as opposed to the art/entertainment dichotomy we’ve grown so used to. And why? Simply because the cinema, no matter how far the avant-gardists want it to go, hasn’t left behind its instinctive character. Movies play on our instincts, and once you let go of that and operate on the assumption that they no longer need to be felt, you let go of the only real principle that keeps the industry going. That industry, here, is one year older than our independence: this year marks 70 years of the latter, 71 years of the former. Perhaps now’s the time to seriously look back and reflect on our history in the medium, and how critics have, whatever the epoch they were and are in, been shielded from all these fundamental truisms when it comes to their assessments of the medium.
From 1947 to 1956, the conventional critical discourse in the film industry was that we should get out of the formulaic narrative: the narrative which copied and pandered to the Hindi and Tamil popular cinema. In those early days, as the authors of Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema aptly note, popular audiences came largely from an consumerist and urbanised lifestyle, particularly the Sinhala speaking bourgeoisie, and they thrived on the urban rich/village poor binaries that our first few directors churned out. These binaries, while derivative from the Indian melodrama, were also rooted in the Western cinema, which means that the leading critics at the time were against imitativeness on both counts: the leading voice at this juncture, of course, being Jayawilal Wilegoda. Wilegoda’s polemics against the Indian cinema proved to be successful when Lester James Peries made Rekava in 1956, but Lester was for him a Westernised filmmaker: he instead found the kind of movies he wanted in Sirisena Wimalaweera.
But his nationalist voice largely disappeared from the popular press when Lester was at his peak, to be replaced by the politically committed, symbol hunting critic who wanted to go beyond Lester, shirking not just the Indian melodrama, but also the foundations of tradition that the man depicted and affirmed in film after film. Their hero was Dharmasena Pathiraja: at the premiere of his Ahas Gawwa, these critics distributed copies of a leaflet titled Appochchige Cinemawa, which reflected the young French critic’s distrust of the old masters of the medium in his country. The French had a term for these masters and their movies: le cinema de papa. For their Sri Lankan counterparts, therefore, Lester was the papa who needed to be defied. In this era of political uncertainty, being a nationalist critical voice no longer made sense.
From the first wave unleashed by Lester to the second wave unleashed by Pathiraja, we come to the third, unleashed by Prasanna Vithanage and Asoka Handagama, and the fourth, which we are still seeing through the likes of Vimukthi Jayasundera and Sanjeewa Pushpakumara. Around them there were and are other filmmakers, but they pander to popular audiences, which these artists don’t. It’s interesting to note here that none of those who unleashed these waves in our film industry retained popular support: what they unleashed did not, and could not, receive the public in a spirit of camaraderie because what their films stood for was not what popular audiences clamoured after, and for that matter idealised. The critics who were with them were, inadvertently, pitted against such audiences, because of which the cinema dissolved into the art/entertainment binary we are witnessing today. The foundation of the industry appears to be nowhere today, a worrisome prospect because when an industry operates without a proper head or base, it tends to go confusingly haywire.
To me, hence, the solution is as simple as it is obvious. In Sri Lanka, those who are considered as veterans to be reckoned with in the field of criticism tend to privilege art house over popular entertainment. When there’s really nothing much to offer by way of such entertainment, and when all you have as entertainment is a self-referential figure (Ranjan Ramanayake, Vijaya Nandasiri, Bandu Samarasinghe, and Tennyson Cooray) performing the same antics and getting into the same mishaps, you can’t blame critics for ignoring their work. But to me, the worth of a film like Adareyi Mang lies in the fact that to ignore the likes of it altogether would be to shield audiences against what those aforementioned critics consider as bad and unwatchable. What happens in the end, because of this, is that audiences are mollycoddled by the writers, and form assumptions of good and bad art based on the criterion of values the writers arbitrarily come up with. How’s the industry going to progress with that?
We need audiences to go watch Prageeth’s film, just as need them to go watch a film by Pushpakumara that happens to have won every conceivable award from European film festivals. So what’s the solution? Un-shielding the audiences, of course. How? By un-shielding the critics. And with them, the directors.
Written for: Daily Mirror, January 19 2018
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