For a man who has sought to redefine our film industry, Chandran
Rutnam may well regard all he has done until now as “stepping stones to higher
things”. After all, no other serious filmmaker here has tried so hard to
connect Art and Commerce as he has. For such an enterprise a film education of
a very high order is needed. Needless to say, he has got it.
Connecting art and commerce is, I suspect, harder than doing with
one to the exclusion of the other. This is something that has already been done
in the other arts. The introduction of the sonata form in music and the freeing
from perspective in painting are the two best examples for this. There art and commerce mixed successfully.
But is it possible in the cinema? To answer that, we need to look
at the place where such a thing has been achieved, and where Chandran Rutnam
has not gone away from without an active schooling. If Hollywood were a textbook,
I suspect he would have been one of its most assiduous readers.
This is where we go back in time. Rutnam’s reminiscences begin in
1956, when he became the prop-master, to his delight, for the production of The
Bridge on the River Kwai. Working ardently in return for a weekly pay of
100 rupees, not only did he excel in his work, but he also won the admiration
and friendship of two personalities who would leave an impression on him for
the rest of his life. One was David Lean, who directed the film. The other was
William Holden, who played the American lead role in it.
Two things happened there. The production manager of the film
asked Rutnam to “look me up” if ever he forayed into England. As Rutnam put it,
“I went to England two weeks later, and I looked him up.” In England he met, of
all people, Holden again, and he wound up as his personal assistant for the
production of The Key, in which Holden co-starred with Sophia Loren.
Then the second coincident happened. On the eve of his departure, Holden
invited the up-and-coming artist to Hollywood, and, should he be there, to
“look me up.” Again, in Rutnam’s own words, “I went to Hollywood, and I looked
him up.”
If ever I were asked what the two most far-reaching things to
happen to filmmakers in my country were, one would be Lester James Peries being
tipped for the top prize at Cannes after the actress Maria Schell saw Rekava,
by then a local flop despite its daring style, while in Colombo. The other,
without any doubt, would be Chandran Rutnam’s foray into Hollywood through
David Lean and William Holden.
For the next decade or so, he would work, with painstaking
dedication, at Warner Bros., gaining innumerable experiences along the way.
Disregarding his salary, he would deliberately pass up promotional steps along
the career ladder for the sake of working in different departments, gaining
hands-on-experience which no other director in our country ever would. Upon his
return to Sri Lanka, however, his preoccupation was not to make films, but to
build our country’s first ever film studio. That was over a quarter-century
ago. We still haven’t got a film studio of our own. Rutnam is noticeably glum
at this point. “My biggest disappointment,” he says of it.
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So what exactly is it that binds his films together in common?
Certainly not their stories – as he himself has told me, he has no predilection
for any one theme in particular. To this end he differs very little from Lumet,
a director who refused to thread his films with one common, trademark theme.
Rutnam’s stories are all atonal. But one thing binds them: an inimitable blend
of Hollywood and the indigenous that, I suspect, few filmmakers in his country
can reckon with. If Janelaya (Witness to a Killing, 1990), his
homage to Cornell Woolrich and the classical Hollywood thriller, seems more
authentic, and genuine, than most other like-minded thrillers made here today,
it is mainly because of those years of training he gained in the US without
losing his footing in his home country.
Mere imitation of Hollywood is not what especially distinguishes Janelaya
today. No “on the surface” glitz and style can ever be validated in his films –
it is what lies beneath them, along with the influences imbibed by him, that
accounts for their boldness. In Janelaya, arguably his most explicit
homage to Hollywood filmmaking, a boy witnesses a murder outside his apartment
window. Like the proverbial “boy who cried wolf”, however, no-one believes his
story. The mute murderer (played in an award-winning performance by Ravindra
Randeniya) and his accomplice (Anoja Weerasinghe) try to kidnap and silence
him, with the result being a tense encounter atop a high-rise, uncompleted
building.
The story could have been embellished in a hundred different ways.
But Rutnam limits it to the most essential details, sparing all frills and, in
the process, heightening the tense relationship between the boy, his skeptic parents (Tony Ranasinghe and Swineetha Weerasinghe), and the two murderous
neighbours. He has told me it was a remake of a Hollywood thriller (not,
incidentally, by Hitchcock) – on my first viewing, however, I felt no such
thing. It is distinctly Sri Lankan to the core, the sort of Hollywood homage
that could only be authenticated in our context by a director of Rutnam’s
capability.
What lies behind all this are two of the most straight-forward
assumptions of the cinema one can ever come across. For Rutnam, who can never
be called an “auteur” in the conventional sense of that term, and who has never
developed a predilection for any particular subject-matter, cinema is
entertainment. Usually, this would be an object of ridicule in a country where
“entertainment” has been mixed up with “frivolity”, but for Rutnam, the word is
the highest justification for cinema’s existence. “What I want to achieve is a
film that keeps you to your seat, no matter what urge you may have.” The solemn
Hitchcock would have made the same statement.
“You would have to design your films just as Shakespeare did – for an
audience,” he once remarked. For Rutnam, this statement is nothing short of the
truth.
This explains his fascination with American filmmakers, especially
Spielberg and Hitchcock, whom he met. It seems to have reinforced in his mind
two things – a flair for organisation, brought on by a near-decade spent
working in Hollywood, and assuredness with a sense of readiness in shooting a
film.
The latter is also a Hollywood trait, but Hitchcock seems
to have figured in a lot there also. “When I asked the Master, sitting behind a
desk in a room wallpapered from ear to ear with the storyboards for his next
film, as to when he would finish it, he facetiously replied, ‘I have already
finished it. All that’s left to do is shoot it.’ ”
It is difficult to imagine this Hitchcock elsewhere than in
Hollywood, just as it is difficult to imagine Chandran Rutnam subscribing to
any school of filmmaking other than Hollywood’s. His guiding principle in his
art? “Three words: a good story.” The response, I feel, of only a strictly and
truly professional filmmaker, perhaps the only example we can show from our country.
The second, and more radical, assumption he has made is not to
subscribe to any film-school labelled with what he contemptuously refers to as
“fancy names”. He holds equal derision for both neo-realism and avant-garde –
miles apart in their respective goals, but still held together by the
quirkiness of their names. Arguably, both neo-realism and the French New Wave
can be counted among the most far-reaching influences exerted on our film
industry ever since Lester James Peries made Rekava in 1957.
Rutnam’s suspicion over those “fancy names” is by no means
invalid. For him, nothing exceptional in filmmaking was preached by either
school. When I brought up the neorealist cinema’s championing of
non-professional actors, he guffaws – “Is that unique to them? I’ve been using
non-pros all my life, and you can hardly class me under their brand.”
When told that neo-realism sought to portray poverty as it was onscreen, he
guffaws again – “You can’t show the same thing again and again. That'd be
quite dreary.”
His biggest skepticism, however, is reserved for the avant-garde
movement. “What is the true meaning of that word?” he asks me. I mutter my own
definitions: “personal films”, “slipshod camera style”, “improvisation”. To
these he supplies his own rejoinder: “What use is a film that elicits
interest only from the director’s wife? Its appeal must be broad.”
Indeed, a valid film, he seems to be saying, is not one that makes
every concession imaginable to the box-office, but which extends its appeal to
the lowest common denominator without insulting the intelligence of the
audience. It can hardly be said, after all, that Shakespeare toned down the
poetry of his dialogues just so to kowtow to his audience. A reasonable
compromise between Art and Commerce – this is what, in Rutnam’s view, will
validate films as the most universal art-form in the world.
I can safely say one thing about Chandran Rutnam. With eight films
directed, 13 produced, and almost 40 with which he has had some association, he
is no dogmatist in the local film industry. Perhaps what our cinema is in need
of, more than any other thing, is a director who has no prejudice or
predilection, and who is eclectic enough to appreciate that being steadfast
over notions of “avant-gardism” will get filmmakers nowhere. Chandran Rutnam
may just be that person. In a country where cinema is increasingly, and
shockingly, becoming a source of aesthetic delight for a select, elite few,
Rutnam may well be our answer.
Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, January 17 2016
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