“Cinema is, in the final
analysis, cinema”. Those words were written by Akira Kurosawa. How true they
still sound today. Cinema, the most infantile of all the arts, is decidedly the
most vibrant as well. Its 100-plus years of evolution have equaled the entire
histories of literature and music. Does this mean that the other arts can never
come into the realm of cinema? By no means. But it also cannot be denied that
the film medium, in its most essential form, must be devoid of any other
influence.
This was what the French New
Wave championed as “pure cinema”. It is hard to imagine a film entirely free
from other artistic influences, but the New Wave thought they had found it, in
the works of contemporary American filmmakers. They disparaged the influence of
literature in filmmaking, and their critical reappraisal of Billy Wilder and
Henri-Georges Clouzot was shaped by their near-puritan insistence on the cinema
manifesting only in its purest form. Any director who laid emphasis on the
script, the plot, or the acting, at the expense of film-style itself, was sent to the gallows. And yet, 50 years after Godard, Truffaut and Resnais heralded the
New Wave, we are still seeing literature and drama asserting themselves in
cinema. Sinhala cinema has not escaped this.
Can men of letters be men of
cinema? A question not many will dare answer, lest they answer wrong. If
Descartes were alive today, wrote Alexandre Astruc in 1948 [1], “he would already have
shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be
writing his philosophy on film.” “With all due respect to Astruc, the cinema
has many charming possibilities but it cannot convey complex ideas through
words," came the stern reply from Gore Vidal [2], then one of Hollywood’s
foremost literary men.
It is difficult to resolve
this debate properly – purveyors of “pure cinema”, admittedly, never really
delve into the literary or dramatic aspects to their work, while a Billy Wilder
or a Fred Zinnemann develops a close working relationship with his
scriptwriters and actors. All too often, they were scriptwriters themselves
before having forayed into a directorial career. In Sri Lanka, too, this
relationship existed – as witness Lester James Peries’ ties with Tissa
Abeysekera, Regi Siriwardena, and A. J. Gunawardena. Indeed, it is in Peries’
case that such a close, career-long relationship between the director and
scriptwriter was first established in our film industry. Very rarely, however,
does a man of letters enter the film industry here and establish a
distinguishable personal style. There have been very few instances of this
happening here, and Sugathapala Senerath Yapa is a case in point.
Yapa is known today
primarily for his first film, Hanthane Kathawa (1969), and his short
feature Minisa saha Kaputa (1969). Though not a literary man in the
mould of Vidal or William Faulkner (in Hollywood), his cinema displays a subtle
preoccupation with its literary and dramatic elements. This surfaces most
eclectically in his first film. Regrettably, however, this was not to be for
the rest of his career – one which lasted only two more commercial features and
28 documentaries.
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| Billy Wilder |
By no means can Yapa be cast
in the Billy Wilder-type “scriptwriter’s filmmaker” mould, but in his wide
appreciation of both literature and the theatre, along with his eclectic
approach to realism, he may be unsurpassed in our modern film industry – something
that would have been reinforced had he been afforded the opportunity to make
more features. I cannot appreciate our film industry’s blatant marginalising of
him, and can only be forced to conclude that its treatment of him was not
unlike Hollywood’s of Griffith, Stroheim, and Welles. Even a cursory look at Hanthane
Kathawa will confirm this. It is his singular achievement alright, but in
it can be found the immense vitality of an entire film career.
Yapa was born in Akuressa. His childhood, as he describes it good-humouredly
to me, was largely “boisterous”. He had quite a mischievous and eventful time
at his school, until one of his more daring antics got him expelled. “A
classmate and I spread a rumour around school that the buns we got during
interval-time were filled with worms.” The incident got him into Pelmadulla
Central College later, under the auspices of the kind but strict A. V.
Gunapala. Yapa was serious in his schoolwork thenceforth – he even completed
his SSC Preparatory Examination – but by an ordinance of Fate he would never
get to complete the SSC Exams to the full.
By this time both his mother and
father were dead: his grandmother, a “kind-hearted, generous woman”, was
looking after him. Around then, he considered joining St. Anthony’s College,
near his hometown. But he was told he could join only after a year. “What could
I do for a whole year until school began?” he told me with a wry smile: he quit
his schooling then and there.
Listening to Yapa’s story, I
was reminded somewhat of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. As he
recounted to me his first experiences with the cinema – through the mobile
picture halls that would patronise his hometown – and how he managed to get its
manager to grant him free admission to the shows, I remembered the face of
Salvatore Cascio, that snub-nosed little tyke sitting in the projection booth
of the cinema hall, gazing wide-eyed at Philippe Noiret running film reels
through the projector. Yapa, I felt, though decidedly older at the time, may
have been similarly awed at what he was seeing during these years. “We saw
mostly films from India, with Tyrone Power as Zorro occasionally,” he recalls,
“I knew what we were seeing were commercial in nature – it would not be until
much later when I would view serious, artistic films.”
This was in the 1940s, a
decade when the cinema was engaged in a radical transformation. The war had
forced filmmakers to probe more, to gain more realism in what they were
filming. Even in Hollywood, the days of big-budget musicals and epics, though
bolstered by the evolution of the widescreen, would give way slightly to dark
and gripping films. Film-noir reached its peak with 1944’s Double Indemnity,
while William Wyler made The Best Years of Our Lives, an anti-romantic yet
sentimental look at soldiers returning to domestic life after the war, winner
of 1946’s Best Picture Oscar, dubbed “un-American” by right-wingers in
Hollywood.
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| Bicycle Thieves |
In continental Europe, the
War caused two things. The first was a resurging interest in cinema as an
art-form in France, which led to the Cahiers du Cinéma. The second, and
arguably more far-reaching, event was the establishment of the world’s
first-ever organised film movement, in Italy, under the name “neorealism”.
1946 saw De Sica’s Shoeshine, 1948 his more acclaimed Bicycle Thieves,
which the critic Regi Siriwardena would call “a film of unique greatness”. In
London that year, an erstwhile fan of the cinema by the name of Satyajit Ray
saw and would be compelled into filmmaking by it. He would usher in a grim, but
poetic, brand of realism in his country’s cinema a decade later.
Yapa saw it too, at the
British Council, where films were being screened for erstwhile film lovers in
Colombo. The effect on him was personal. “I saw how human beings kept their
intentions from each other: how they veiled their motives even from those
closest to them”. No-one who has seen Bicycle Thieves will deny that
this aspect forms a vital part of it. Bicycle Thieves did not merely prove
a film textbook for Yapa: it also gave him a lesson in human relationships that
would prove vital in his first attempt in the cinema.
This was reinforced by
another masterpiece he got to see. Kurosawa’s Rashomon opened the
Japanese cinema to the world, and Yapa admitted to me the indelible impression
it made on him. Here was a film that dwelt on one single incident – a murder in
the forest – with four witnesses to it each giving his or her version of what
really happened. If Bicycle Thieves’ classical, gentle format proved
edible for film lovers, Rashomon’s electrifying, poetic style struck
like a thunderbolt on all those who saw it. 15 years later, he would see Roman
Polanski’s Knife in the Water, a tenser, more contemporary thriller, and
in-between those years he would witness the Sinhala theatre’s resurgence with
Sarachchandra’s Maname in 1956. All three inspired him in the making of Hanthane
Kathawa, though the similarities are not easy to identify.
If one thinks of the main
storyline – a tense love triangle between three University students, played by
Swarna Mallawarachchi, Tony Ranasinghe and (in his first role) Vijaya Kumaratunge – one can recall the knife-edged atmosphere of suspicion and amour-fou
in Knife in the Water and the climatic finale in Maname.
It is a sign of Yapa’s mastery and eclecticism that he compounded all three
influences – including a theatrical one – without losing originality: a feat unmatched
in the history of our film industry, for, I would dare say this too, this was the
only instance of such a thing happening in a Sinhala film.
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| Tony Ranasinghe and Amarasiri Kalansuriya from Hanthane Kathawa |
Hanthane Kathawa, of course, is
more than merely a love triangle – its depiction of campus life was
extraordinary for its time. This is what makes any comparison with outside
sources difficult. No other filmmaker till then had delved into the University
as a film’s subject-matter with as much insight. One of Yapa’s crew members was
one unassuming, determined campus student who helped with the script-writing.
This
was Dharmasena Pathiraja, who, years later, would touch upon the anxieties of
politicised, unemployed youth. Kumaratunge, Mallawarachchi, Amarasiri
Kalansuriya, and Daya Tennekoon, all featured in the film, would form Pathiraja’s
repertoire of actors in his films later on. If there ever were an instance
elsewhere in our film history of such a thing happening, I am yet to hear of
it. Hanthane Kathawa was not merely a finely crafted realist drama – it
was also a precursor to the fierier, more politicised, and less romantic,
decade to come: the decade of riots, joblessness, and revolt.
Sugathapala Senerath Yapa
holds no set theories on filmmaking, but one major thread that seems to bind
his thoughts is the importance he places not on the story, but on how it is
conveyed. For Yapa, presentation is more important than, and indeed is to be
preferred to, representation. Occasionally, Hanthane Kathawa itself
violates this principle, particularly in certain jarring scenes where songs are
relayed, but even with some sequences that still have them – as with those with
the songs “Sara Sonduru” and “Diganthaye Ghana” – he lets gesture, feeling, and
movement dictate character and plot development. The intensity and the anguish
of the moment are conveyed through the sequence, an example of songs used
alongside cinema at its purest in our country. As an addendum, some of the
songs were penned by Yapa himself – the lyricist-cum-filmmaker, evidence of his
own wider interests, exploring other art-forms without being restricted to one
field.
Nothing short of actual
experience, however, will validate films made this way. “Before applying the
eye to the camera, it would do well for young, up-and-coming filmmakers to
experience life itself,” he tells me earnestly. As Satyajit Ray, a director
Yapa admires, once wrote – “The raw material of the cinema is life itself”.
“Dreams, unfortunately, have become extensions of reality in certain modern
films,” he sadly notes. At a time when Sinhala cinema seems to be following either
an obscurantist path or populist reproductions of history, I could not have
agreed more. Between these two trends a void is created: who caters to the
audience in this? I suspect that this audience would comprise neither highbrow
nor lowbrow members, but people, not too intellectually sound, who would look
forward to a film that is rooted in its experience and subject-matter. I cannot
name a single film made here within the last five years that would fit this
definition. Perhaps this is what Yapa laments. I lament it too. I think we all
do.
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| Nikolai Cherkasov from Ivan the Terrible |
And yet, I know he is right.
National film industries cannot be saved by kowtowing to populism. In the few instances in film history where this did
happen, and was validated – such as with Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible
or Alexander Nevsky – any romanticisation in the portrayal of their
heroic characters was tempered by a faithful adherence to history. If, for
instance, Nikolai Cherkasov, the actor who portrayed Ivan in Eisenstein’s film,
seems exaggerated today in his role by his grand, heroic gestures, this was
primarily because of the film being slightly propagandist (it was made during
the War years), but also partly because Eisenstein himself had to balance
between the need for a valid sense of art and the demands made on him by
Stalinist Russia. Eisenstein subscribed to the Russian Revolution, and his
sympathies with it were quite evident in the films he made during this time, Ivan
the Terrible included.
If filmmakers today,
however, can afford to make similar revisions to history, especially in a
country such as Sri Lanka, this is usually owing to what the filmmaker thinks
the audience desire. Partly, however, this also has to do with what the authorities
desire. I am not for one moment suggesting that Yapa has a bone to pick with
all this: what he contends against, however, is the method these filmmakers use
while revising history. “It is what these directors have conceived of these
characters that we see in their films,” he informs me. How true that is! When
was the last time we got to see a religious parable, a historical epic, in the
mould of true drama? When was the last time we saw a film of this type relayed
to us, entirely free from the black-and-white/good-and-bad dichotomy that
placed its hero/heroine as an angel and the antagonists as absolute villains?
When was the last time such a film actually depicted human beings instead of
cardboard cut-outs? I am waiting for an answer.
It is a great pity that the
cinema lured Yapa at a time when socio-political concerns were asserting
themselves in the industry. Like the Cahiers du Cinéma tracts of the
1950s, Yapa felt his views on the cinema being invalidated, made passé, by “their
theories of what constituted their notion of ‘authentic cinema’”. Both Yapa and
Lester James Peries felt themselves isolated at a time when even the stage and
music fields in the country echoed the strains of a politically intense era. The
wave of critical tide that greeted Peries after Nidhanaya made itself
felt for Yapa too: overnight, their notions of filmmaking came under attack.
What was termed “bourgeois idealism” was being overturned by the so-called
“bourgeois realism” that swept during the following decade, when the last
vestiges of romanticism, lyricism, and poetry in the cinema, indeed when
humanism itself, would be crudely swept aside.
Forced into obscurity, Yapa
would survive as a filmmaker for only another two features, Pembara Madhu
and Induta Mal Mitak, which were despairingly “commercial” in their
outlook. 28 documentaries would fill the gap, especially his first, Minisa
saha Kaputa, which would win the Silver Peacock at the International Film Festival
in New Delhi that year. Compounding neorealism, the Sinhala stage, Polanski,
and Kurosawa, he made a film which, on the eve of a volatile decade, created
echoes that still resonate today. Being the chief, if not the only, instance of
such eclecticism manifesting itself in our film history, it is dampening, in
retrospect, to observe Yapa’s fading away later on.
Like the defiant Orson
Welles, forced into exile in Europe, and Stroheim, one of the first real
“auteurs” of the American cinema, whose relentless cynicism made the public
shun him for the better part of his life, Sugathapala Senerath Yapa’s career is
quite depressing for any film-lover to hear. Among the ruins of our film
industry, we spot out one name which might have brought it onto a different
path. It is not a very happy thing to note that this name was forced into obscurity
ere long.
[1] “The Birth of a New
Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” – Alexandre Astruc, 1948
[2] “Who Makes the Movies?” – Gore Vidal, 1976
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