The subtle virtuosity of Somasiri Dehipitiya

He made you think that he wasn’t essential to a story when in fact he was. As a result of this perhaps, he remained a supporting player, who at most added to a point-of-view which was of another character but never really made up his own. He was there in the films of almost every director who had an impact on the cinema of this country – most noticeably perhaps, Dharmasena Pathiraja and Vasantha Obeyesekere. In the latter’s films he was likeable, in the former’s films he was not, and in both he showed us that one could be a side-player and at the same time create a mark for oneself.

Like some of his colleagues who took to the cinema in the 1970s, Somasiri Dehipitiya came from a largely working class background, as a civil servant. As an actor he had quite a number of attributes he could be justifiably proud of – he was gruff, he was almost always frowning, he rarely smiled, and perhaps more than anything else, he could appear sturdy and gentle at the same time. No doubt he used all these and more, so much so that it’s truly astonishing that a man of his range of talent and experience never, for one solid moment, became a leading man. He was more or less like Richard Widmark, the American actor who never got beyond half a dozen or so leading roles despite his gruff mould.

That “mould” came up quite discernibly for Dehipitiya in Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Diyamathi. The entire film is really made up of a series of coincidences, plot-twists, and dénouements, which is why it remains Obeyesekere’s most conventional story. Three misfits – an unemployed graduate, a pickpocket, and a criminal who’s just been released from prison – meet and for some reason decide to live their lives adventuring together. Vijaya Kumaratunga played the graduate, Wimal Kumar da Costa played the pickpocket, and Dehipitiya played the criminal. All aptly cast, but seeing Dehiptiya one can sense how he could understate his own strength and hardiness onscreen, which makes him stand apart from the other two.

It’s almost as though he’s realised his potential but is reluctant to impose it on anyone else. So when the other two characters – Vijaya and Wimal were almost always cast together as sidekicks – make fun of him and then befriend him, and when they in turn are befriended by a rich and single heiress (played by Malini Fonseka), you don’t see him exploding with rage or in other ways express anger like you’d expect of a violent criminal. Instead, he’s (purposefully) understated, opting to smile or grin or humour his friends (until of course that final dénouement where his strength comes back to him and he fights away the obligatory “bad guys”). We sense this the first time we see him, out of prison and visiting his wife. We of course get it that the wife (Mercy Edirisinghe) has “moved on”, but we don’t see anger in Dehipitiya’s character. Only acceptance and resentment. Like his wife then, he too moves on.

He used his looks – wizened and quite brusque – to his advantage, and they pay well in sequences where he’s expected to let out his anger but never quite does so. So in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Bambaru Avith he’s one of Anton Aiya’s henchmen, and in the first half of the story we immediately understand his ferocity and penchant for anger. “I never knew how dirty you’d become, woman,” he point-blank tells Malini Fonseka’s character Helen, who like her mythical namesake forms the centre of the tragedy on account of her seductiveness. When Dehipitiya’s character warns her, we cringe in fear, as if he’s hinted only part of his anger. We expect more as the scenes progress.

But no: in the second half, when Cyril (played by Cyril Wickramage), who’s engaged to marry Helen, is killed or commits suicide (we never really are sure what happens to him), he seems to back down. “What to do, aiye? That was God’s will,” he remarks to Anton (played by Joe Abeywickrama), only to get the enraged reply: “God’s will my foot, yako!” By this time Dehipitiya displays his true potential: as someone who played characters who flaunted their strength but always retreated when time was ripe for those to whom they played second fiddle to assert themselves. In Diyamanthi he reveals his prowess to aid his friends, while in Bambaru Avith he does the opposite to let room for the main player (only momentarily though: when Dehipitiya backs down and eventually leaves him, Anton is on his own, and a few sequences later, he is killed by the servant of his rival in just about the easiest way possible).

He did almost the same thing in Thun Man Handiya, where his role as an impoverished villager to whom Abilin, the protagonist (Abeywickrama), lends all his money is pivotal (in a simplistic way) in showing us the latter’s generosity, when in later sequences we see the same villager (now richer and less in need) demanding money lent to him over a trivial matter from his own previous benefactor. And when he could and did express his outrage or anger of his own will, like in Sumitra Peries’ Yahalu Yeheli, it was almost invariably followed by tragedy (he gets shot not long after he succumbs to anger against the village headman, played by Tony Ranasinghe).

Of course he couldn’t go on for much longer playing characters like these, and in my opinion he got his place in the sun with Sunil Ariyaratne’s Siribo Aiya. But Siribo Aiya spelt out the Dehipitiya who could have been much more, had he lived. On April 27, 1982 he succumbed to alcoholism, leaving us with a veritable bunch of characters who spoke and did much more than what the script allowed. He was scripted in well in almost every film he was in – a feat which not many actors from here can claim – and that came out best in the latter part of his career.

A shame he didn’t and couldn’t live long enough.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, June 22 2016

D. R. Nanayakkara: From 49 to 94

D. R. Nanayakkara was probably the most enigmatic, mysterious actor we ever had, back at a time when a sense of enigma and mystery could have impeded on appeal. He never really spiced up whatever scene or sequence he was in. Nor did he have a prolific career: for someone who worked for over 40 years in the film industry he didn’t really have as many credits as he should have. A pity on one level, of course, but it was probably meant to be. For truth be told, Nanayakkara was an enigma himself, and there was a certain magic to him which, to my mind, not many directors tapped into.

He could appear both cruel and well-meaning. He could also appear both funny and heartless. The father from Rekava, to give an example, isn’t a complete villain: we feel as the story moves on that he’s the kind of thief or pilferer who means well but whose intentions are scoffed at by a protective mother. He’s the kind of person who’d push you into something new and unknown, but then would soon abandon you when what he pushed you into turns out into a mess, which is exactly what his son (played by Somapala Dharmapriya) lands in. This curious dualism – because of which his characters could appear good and bad at the same time – wasn’t a rare trait among our actors, but the thing with Nanayakkara that sense of enigma and mystery I wrote about earlier accentuated it remarkably.

The thing with him was his face and voice. With almost feline eyes, with a face that seemed to look through you, you never really could get at his motives for anything. When he appears for the first time in Baddegama and in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – no two films could have been more different – you get the impression that there’s something buried in him, which in turn makes it impossible for you to understand his intentions. In Baddegama that sense of enigma turns out to be a sign of his mysticism and wickedness – which lends credence to the fact that he and Joe Abeywickrama were the two most perfectly cast actors in that film – while in Steven Spielberg’s adventure, it adds to his kindly and long-suffering character.

But both these films were made towards the end of his career (and life). There was an earlier phase – the phase where he was less nuanced and more theatrical. That was inevitable, because Nanayakkara had started in the theatre. To see these earlier performances today, even those in Rekava and the films scripted by P. K. D. Seneviratne, is to appreciate someone who was taken into the cinema after having initiated him into stage plays. There’s a sense of explicitness in these films, even in one as seriously conceived as Lester James Peries’ Ran Salu (where his role as the talkative, almost gossipy, and traditionalist servant adds to the story’s mythical image of villagers as pristine and innocent), which quite doesn’t leave him. He brought out this sense of explicitness in the only film in the 1960s which had him as the central figure, Sikuru Tharuwa. As the lecherous, cold, and calculating vidane, he embodied the kind of sinfulness, crudity, and “badness” (for the lack of a better word) which typified the antagonists in P. K. D. Seneviratne’s scripts.

Don Ruter Nanayakkara was born in Kolonnawa in 1915. His debut in films came about in 1949, when Sirisena Wimalaweera, who’d taken him in after seeing him in onstage, adapted his own play Amma. But it wouldn’t be until Rekava (1956) that he’d get any proper attention, from which point directors were enamoured of him. Throughout the 1960s, while he didn’t get too many lucrative contracts, he was fortunate in being cast in films which deepened his image, until, in the latter part of the 1970s, his characters became more and more aggressive. In Ahasin Polawata (1979) he was the devoted servant to the protagonist (Tony Ranasinghe), the kind of servant who isn’t wary of passing insidious hints to visitors and hurting them because he feels that they should be.

Lester James Peries once related the story of how Rekava became successful. It wasn’t easy, he contended, because the kind of audience that watched it in the country was detached from the social environment depicted in it. For this reason perhaps, “they laughed at the wrong places”, by which he meant that they laughed at the larger-than-life acting of the father, played by Nanayakkara. For better or worse then, and for the better part of his career, it was that larger-than-life simpleton-like character, who means well despite his lack of sophistication, which cropped up again and again in whatever role he played.

No one, for instance, would doubt today that the most empathetic character in Parasathumal is D. R. Nanayakkara’s, because not only does every other character indulges in wild outbursts of emotion (including the flawed Bonnie Mahaththaya, played by Gamini Fonseka) but Nanayakkara’s character, the servant, gives the impression of being a secondary character, at best ancillary to the larger story, when in fact it is he who knows and understands his master better than anyone else. In the first few sequences, which end in a party with everyone (including Bonnie Mahaththaya) drunk, Nanayakkara looks around with sorrow and shakes his head. It was when everyone was oblivious to his presence that he let the audience know how sorrowful and sympathetic his character was. When everyone was awake, no one really noticed him.

And for me, that was what embodied this strange, almost otherworldly man. Like I wrote before, he couldn’t spice things up the way stars could, but that didn’t matter in the least. He could churn out characters who were good, who were bad, and who were good and bad at the same time. That this continued throughout his career explains how well those characters of his are remembered today. And how well they will be remembered tomorrow.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, June 15 2016

The grand old lady

All things considered, Denawaka Hamine was one of the most formidable character actors we ever had. She was at her best when she was in a story, not merely a film. And why? Because she could salvage a story, which was why, even she was cast in a role that lasted for no more than 10 or 15 minutes, she still added meaning to the script. She was the mother the same way that Irangani Serasinghe and (to a lesser extent) Shanti Lekha were, but unlike them she was not restrained or graceful.

Emotional but not melodramatic, crude but not coarse, she was self-assured in the truest sense of that word. Which could be a bad thing for an actress of her range, of course, but the fact of the matter is, in those 300-odd films she was in, she fitted in whether or not she was scripted properly, and in the end, like Chaplin, Keaton, and Shirley Temple, the image she created crept up everywhere, to the extent of preceding even her.

She once claimed that she could play any character, “even if they want me to play a romantic role.” Perhaps as an afterthought, she added, “I wouldn’t know how the audiences (would) react”, which I suppose meant that she herself had, by the time she’d reached the peak of her career, realised the parameters within which she had to work. She could play out a gossip just as easily as she could a mother, and to me the more interesting of her performances came out when she combined the two, which was what we got in H. D. Premaratne’s Deveni Gamana (which coincidentally had Irangani Serasinghe also in one of her less empathetic roles, as the hostile mother-in-law to the heroine). For in her earlier roles, she embodied suffering (and love), with evil as an external force which she remained oblivious to or which she chose to ignore.

In Desa Nisa, for instance, she was Joe Abeywickrama’s mother – the woman who never understands why half the village are fearful of her son – and she showed us the kind of gracefulness which only someone from the village could. Abeywickrama’s portrayal of Nirudika gains fresh nuances of meaning when we see him in her light, for she is the only person who loves him for who he is (whereas Sriyani Amarasena, who marries him, is blind). When Joe makes sure of her blindness, in a sequence filled that she knows why he did it: all we see is a mother who’s so oblivious to her son’s physical deformities that she doesn’t once consider that when she warns her son to not “harm” his wife again. Desa Nisa remains one of Lester James Peries’ weakest films, but to me its human element comes out poignantly in Denawaka Hamine’s role, and for that reason, the story gains in strength what it loses due to an ending that was edited too quickly to arouse our sympathy.

And to me, that was Denawaka Hamine at her best. She automatically caught our sympathy when she played out the empathetic mother, who doesn’t know why or how the rest of the world is marginalising her child. In Dahasak Sithuvili, one of her first roles, she is more concerned about her daughter (Malini Fonseka) getting married quickly than the love triangle her son (Henry Jayasena) is caught in. When we see her chiding Jayasena, we get the feeling that she knows his dilemma, but all the same is more concerned with a more pressing family matter. It’s not that she isn’t concerned about the son, but that she’s confident that he’ll let go of it – like all mothers, of her time and of our time too, she thinks she knows more than him about him, and like all mothers, she is correct.

Dona Meraya Denawaka was born in 1906 in Imbulgoda, Gampaha. She encountered the theatre (and later the cinema) through G. D. L. Perera, who was so moved by her that he took her in for his play Kandulu. Perera’s next decision was to make her a member of the theatre group he’d founded, Kala Pela. With four plays which had her – Manamalayo, Sakkarawattang, Sama, and Thotupola – she marked herself out as an actress who could reckon with any young actor. Not surprisingly, she came out well when she took part in Perera’s film adaptation of “Sama”, and in her performance in Sath Samudura, she epitomised the long-suffering-and-yet-hopeful-mother image she’d bring out for the next few decades. Apparently the film critic Roger Manvell had been so moved by her acting that he’d taken the trouble of calling a taxi to bring her to meet him. The rest, they say, is history: she got contract after contract in films which varied in quality but which made use of her potential as a maternal figure well.

With Denawaka Hamine, as I pointed out before, you didn’t expect grace or reserve: you saw torrents of emotion, unrefined and remarkably genuine. Which was a good thing, naturally, because then you’d almost swear that this woman who could play the gossip and the mother with equal vigour hadn’t seen a film before, that she wasn’t really acting but playing out characters she’d known or embodied in her real life.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, because in every one of those roles she didn’t stick to the same image but varied it to make the film more interesting. We didn’t retreat in disgust and fear at her portrayal of a spiteful aunt in Deveni Gamana, for instance, but went as far as to chuckle at the way she connives throughout the film (when she learns that Sabeetha Perera’s character hadn’t proved her virginity to her husband, we see her walking around and whispering to almost everyone assembled, filling their ears with half-truths and gossip, and we couldn’t help but grin). True, that may not have been the greatest role she played but it certainly was one of her most atypical and thus enjoyable ones.

A pity we don’t get the likes of her anymore. Inevitable too, come to think of it. She was more than just a grand old lady. She was, like the best actors, someone who knew the image she’d created for herself and stuck to it till the end. That she succeeded, we know.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, June 8 2016

‘Let Her Cry’: Just Another Review

I know a teacher who offers comments about our cinema from time to time. Just the other day we were talking about Asoka Handagama. He hadn’t seen Let Her Cry, which was previewed to the media a month back and given a limited release at Regal some weeks ago, but based on what I told him about the film (without any spoilers, of course), he gave his two cents on the man. It all amounted to this: Handagama can’t be forced to conform. If you watch a film of his, you watch it the way he wants you to. And if there are any complaints about the way he’s directed it, too bad.

He also observed that Handagama likes to dabble in ellipsis. Every film of his contains elliptical narratives, which is another way of saying that they aren’t easy to figure out in advance. His characters do not act in a preconceived way. They exist and persist, they cry, break apart, and express outrage so unpredictably that you don’t know what’s coming next. On one level this works beautifully – that is why I enjoyed Chanda Kinnari, particularly the exchanges between Swarna Mallawarachchi’s character and her neighbours – but sometimes he overdoes it. I’m not belittling him, of course, because after all that’s the “Handagama touch”. Without it, none of his films would actually work.

Vageesha Sumanasekara’s take on Let Her Cry (published in Groundviews) lambasts the film for basically not being political enough. He indulges in postmodernism to explain his reaction to the film. Liyanage Amarakeerthi, on the other hand, has (in an article published in “The Island”) taken the opposite position and praised it as a “masterly crafted work of art” (to his credit he discusses the film as a film, which Sumanasekara doesn’t do). I don’t pretend to know a fraction of what these two people do, so I won’t take sides yet. This isn’t an analysis, hence, but just another review.

To start things off, I admit Let Her Cry isn’t a masterpiece. I’m not saying this because it’s crap, but because to pretend otherwise won’t do Handagama himself any justice. Those I’ve talked with about the film (not critics, but ordinary filmgoers) seem to have thought that it betrayed the director’s lack of patience. They pointed at the last few sequences which culminate in that drive to the protagonist’s house (which was where the film opened as well, incidentally), and claimed that they were too quickly edited to offer reflection. Normally I’d disagree with them, but this time I can’t. For the truth of the matter is, Let Her Cry ends up making a personal statement that would have worked if the director hadn’t conceived of it as a socio-political dissertation in that final sequence. I’ll come back to this later.

Meanwhile, here’s what I liked about the film. I liked the acting. And not just that of Swarna Mallawarachchi, whose return to the cinema after more than a decade (I’m told) warrants more than a customary clap. What Swarna does in this film, I assume, is extend the kind of performances she’s been churning out for the last 50 years and transform herself into a motherly figure. We see a photo of her by her bed, taken at the prime of her career no doubt, and this pops up as a reminder of how she’s finally gone away from depicting the tortured woman and embraced a matriarchal image.

That this works, and that she doesn’t disappoint (not even in those incongruous sequences I’ll talk about shortly), isn’t surprising. Case in point: she looks at the girl who’s flirting about with her husband, asks her candidly about her mother, and when she realises the father's "missing", she offers sympathy and hints at her "innocence". The girl is not put off though: she opens her body to her and tells her defiantly that she’s still very much nubile. Swarna’s reaction? She looks calmly at her and whispers “Wretched whore!” to her face. “Vintage Swarna,” I thought to myself.

Out of the other three actors I think I liked Rithika Kodithuwakku the best. As the student who falls for the Professor (Swarna’s husband), Rithika’s character is neither condemnable nor empathetic (which could be said of pretty much all the women resident in Handagama’s films). She jars at some points. As she should, one can add. The way she fantasises about her love for the Professor, the way she intrudes into his life, and the way she brings in meaning to his family, are all spelt out for the viewer. I’ve been told that this is her first performance. For the life of me, I didn’t or rather couldn’t notice that.

I liked Sandali Ash as the Professor’s daughter, if at all because she depicts the change in her character with effortless sensitivity. We’re supposed to realise that she’s alienated, spending time watching TV and occasionally raising conversation, but when she shifts gears (for no rhyme or reason, which is what makes it more appealing) and takes to religion, we are made to feel her change so swiftly that it doesn’t jar. Not one bit. I wish I could say the same of Dhritiman Chatterjee (as the Professor) though, who dishes out a solid, though not quite as complex, performance.

So yes, as far as acting goes, I liked the film. But good acting doesn’t translate into a great film. Not all the time.

And here we come to the film’s problems. Handagama tries out two things with his plots: make the audience aware of the political and social in them while making them as elliptical and non-linear as he can. This unusual combination – which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – is what comes out in Let Her Cry in almost every sequence, and for very obvious reasons, that takes away the audience’s interest. That interest isn’t going to be sustained by the use of another typical Handagama trademark: to pinpoint nearly everything in the plot as symbols and metaphors, defined at the outset and forced on us. These don't always appear contrived (which is a good thing), but that doesn’t mean they’re completely free from contrivance.

That beach sequence, for instance, in which Rithika’s character goes out of the Professor’s car, walks towards the sea, and phones the Professor (who’s still in the car behind her), works almost theatrically to convince us that there’s some metaphysical gulf between the two of them. The problem here isn’t that we fail to see any meaning, but that we’re somehow meant to embrace and affirm it for its face-value. In other words, it is that meaning which precedes content, and hence that preconceived meaning which contrives that particular sequence. Starkly.

This is theatrical because, like all symbols meant for the stage and not cinema, it’s so self-conscious and “out-there” that Handagama might as well have previewed it to audiences with subtitles. Incidentally, the same could be said of his depiction of religion (the shrine room by the stairway), the static exchange of words between father and daughter every evening (“Hi,” he tells her, as he drops something – a chocolate bar, for instance – on her lap as she’s watching TV: “Hi,” she replies, not even looking at him), and that visual motif of the camera moving back as Swarna walks towards her husband in his room every time he returns from work. All these play out like a ritual.

And not for no reason: at one level, Handagama is attributing to them a false sense of routine, of life playing out in order, before Rithika intrudes into the Professor’s life. Which isn’t to say that when she moves in, Handagama lets go of his urge to portray everything as symbols and motifs: on one occasion, for instance, that girl has trouble unlocking the front door of her lover’s house to leave it, which I suppose is meant to indicate how metaphysically bonded she has become to it. (I didn’t know it was that hard to open a door and I didn’t know how she could have found it hard to open the door when she came through it just a few seconds back.)

So yes, in case you’re wondering, these all appear contrived. What’s worse is that sometimes they become unintentionally obfuscated as well, as with that sequence of the Professor’s daughter attempting suicide on the railway and being saved by Rithika. I know we’re meant to be taken in by that scene, but the result of it is that, with all that quick cutting and music, we look away on account of its (over the top) suddenness and lack of clarity.

That final sequence merits more than a passing glance. What he does in it is bring together both the social and the personal, which works at one level but then (as is typical of such sequences from his films) teeters off to histrionics and emotional outbursts which do not, to my mind, do justice to the message he’s encouraging us to interpret. He could have toned down, in other words.

I suppose Let Her Cry will leave much for those existentialist-critics to ponder on. As with all his other films based in the urban upper-class, here too he’s opted to concentrate his themes within one family. I doubt, however, that the ordinary cinema-goer will consider the message that Handagama’s bringing up. Not because they’re against that message, not because they’re puritans who’ll tag the “indecent” label on the film, but because he makes us believe that he can't move beyond the personal without recourse to symbol and metaphor.

I don’t think Let Her Cry isn’t political, and anyway, even if it wasn’t, I don’t think that calls for censure: after all, there’s enough in Handagama’s films that merit attention. On that basis I disagree with Vageesha Sumanasekara. But it’s not a masterpiece either, and so I disagree with Professor Amarakeerthi. Masterpieces are coherent and free from ideological obscurity. What I see in this film is nothing but incoherence and obscurity, redeemed only at some points but not enough to make us raise relevant questions about life, love, loss, and (yes) sex.

I guess we should note here that while the theme of sexuality has been examined again and again by nearly every "independent" filmmaker here, none can quite match the way Handagama does it. The best excuse anyone can give for not understanding his films, therefore, is that the audience is beneath their subtext.

The problem with Let Her Cry is that such an excuse isn’t plausible. When I see that film, I remember Pauline Kael’s review of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which she cautioned against films and stories which were so ideologically preconceived and metaphoric that to not comprehend them was supposed to show that you had philistine, unrefined tastes.

True, Handagama is no Antonioni and Antonioni’s film was overrated in many respects, but I believe Kael’s words ring true now for one reason: critics are raving over Let Her Cry. They’re using almost every adjective in the dictionary to call it a masterpiece. This unfortunate trend of praising films which expect much from the audience and give little to nothing back to them isn’t recent and will not go away anytime soon. Handagama’s film is stark evidence of that fact. Kael’s own words – “They feel they understand Blow-Up but when they can’t explain it, or why they feel as they do, they use that as the grounds for saying the movie is a work of art” – might as well be applied to certain serious films made here, on that count.

So I repeat what I wrote before. Let Her Cry isn’t for the ordinary filmgoer. But then, what serious film from here is nowadays? I detest the way some filmmakers prey on “higher” tastes and leave the common audience in the dark, and thankfully Handagama isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, Let Her Cry isn’t what I’d have expected from the man who gave us Ini Avan four years ago. Not that this is surprising. Handagama, after all, has a tendency to examine his themes brutally and frankly while filling them with abstractions which aren’t easy to align with the narrative. He overdid this many years ago (which is why Aksharaya remains his weakest film), and seeing his latest, I left the hall with an unanswered question: hasn’t he learnt his lesson yet?

Note: I don't think Handagama copied from Elegy. This practice of accusing local filmmakers and artistes of plagiarising from abroad shows how servile we are and how we refuse to recognise original talent. Nor do I think Handagama stands for a "dirty cinema" (as one errant writer observed in an article in Rivira). That shows the writer's critical inadequacies (and puritanism), not the artiste's.

Uditha Devapriya is a freelance writer who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

The boy with the Bolex camera

Yesterday I was thinking about actors and directors. From here. I was thinking about those I’d met and talked with, those who had coloured their reminiscences with anecdote as they opened their careers. Their journeys were both personal and professional, and yet even the most illustrious of them weren’t showy. And why? Because they all would have felt that what they’d achieved and gone through was but a speck of dust in this vast, sansaric universe of life, death, and destiny.

And then, thinking about these giants still with us, I thought of those who had gone on. Those I’d never met and those I wish I met. Like D. B. Nihalsinghe. I wonder what they would have thought.

Films are built on directors, writers, actors, and technicians. The French turned the director into an author, and claimed (somewhat erroneously) that if he were given a substantial part to play in the shaping of the film in question, that film would be his product as far as ownership went. This theory, popular back in its day, ignored filmmaking as a collaborative art. The late Gore Vidal, in one of his essays on the cinema (“Who Makes the Movies?”), rejected it on the basis that scriptwriters, not directors, had a larger say in the making of a film. No wonder. Vidal was a scriptwriter himself.

The point is that the cinema is a dynamic art. The point is that if it could be reducible to one man’s vision, then that vision would “show” no matter what role that man took: as director, scriptwriter, or editor. This is true in the case of scriptwriters who took to directing, of directors who became scriptwriters, of editors who became directors, and of cameramen and cinematographers who became directors. Among the latter, Nihalsinghe figured in greatly. We lost him last month. In one sense only, of course: people like him aren’t easy to lose forever.

Diongu Badaturuge Nihalsingha was born in 1939. (He would have turned 77 last Friday.) He wasn’t born to a film background, though. His father, D. B. Dhanapala, was a newspaper mogul, founder of “Lankadeepa” and a nationalist who would instill sound values in his son. Nihalsinghe was educated at Ananda College, where he was a Cadet Sergeant and Head Prefect and where he gained an interest in a career in the Army. Both mother and father, however, had been against the idea, and he was instead admitted to the University of Ceylon.

The 1950s was clearly a pivotal decade for our cinema, for the simple reason that our film halls were being invaded by a plethora of films (from the West) which encouraged amateurs and cinephiles to become directors or actors. Like in continental Europe and especially in France, where students would spend their hours in front of the screen, watching, studying, and breathing the cinema.

Nihalsinghe was one such cinephile, who himself abandoned the idea of a military career thanks to what he’d later call the “film bug”. That was compounded by what his father gifted him when he’d completed his SSC Exams: a 16mm Bolex camera. Predictably then, this boy, who had dreamt of a place in the sun in the Army, switched loyalties.

From Sath Samudura

He then got an offer from an associate of his father, who was working at the Australia Broadcasting Corporation as a cameraman on a scholarship. Young Nihalsinghe eagerly accepted that offer. He ended up sending 16mm news clips. Another offer, this one from Hearst Metrotone News, got him into Vietnam, where he covered the war through newsreels. The boy with the camera, at the end of the day, got more than he bargained for. Naturally therefore, when he returned to his country, he’d engage in a career which would centre on the camera (in a manner of speaking, of course). His first real “local job”, if you could call it that, was aboard Siri Gunasinghe’s Sath Samudura.

Like much of his later work, Sath Samudura was shot using a handheld camera. For obvious reasons, that showed and more relevantly evoked a naturalistic style which at once turned it into a landmark. When I think of that film, what comes to my mind is the sun-baked faces of the characters (particularly of Denawaka Hamine) and that final, daunting sequence of the protagonist (blemished by an unrequited love) wading out defiantly into the sea. True, much of the “mise-en-scène” in such sequences was intensified by the music, the acting, and the dialogues, but for me, the real technical achievement of them all was the camerawork: at once clinical and reflective, like with the Italian neo-realists.

His next job was for another landmark: G. D. L. Perera’s Dahasak Sithuvili. Here, however, the technical achievement (it marked the first time that filtered camera lenses were used, in the flashback sequences) was at best outmoded by the real achievement of the film, which was in how the camera was able to relay every shade and nuance of emotion registered in the protagonist, another unfulfilled lover played by Henry Jayasena.

The way the camera adds meaning to his central conflict – as in that extended sequence where he pores over photos of his lover with one of his colleagues from work, intercut with his jealous imaginings of them making out with each other at the beach – can’t really be done justice to with either words or superficial technicalities, and to my mind Dahasak Sithuvili brought up what would become a motif in Nihalsinghe's subsequent work: introspective characters whose moods, emotions, and anguish became the focal point of the camera.

In that sense, contrary to what Gore Vidal would have written, Welikathara was well and truly his. When asked as to what he considered outstanding in that feature-length debut of his, he pointed out that it could be evaluated in more ways than one. To consider them all – Joe Abeywickrama’s career-defining role as Goring Mudalali, which practically made us forget the relevance of its real protagonist (played by Gamini Fonseka); the music by Somadasa Elvitigala, which at once brought up comparisons with the American thriller of the 1950s; and of course those brutal, salty dialogues by Tissa Abeysekara – would be to say that the film’s achievement was collective, not individualised.

From Welikathara

But if we take what Nihalsinghe himself would admit as his criterion for a good film – a blend of the commercial and the arty, targeted at the common audience without insulting their intelligence – we can see in Welikathara his personal signature. That it got a slot among the 10 best films made here in the past 50 years (in a poll conducted in 1997) is no cause for wonderment.

In fact, it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that when compared with the nine other titles featured in that list, Welikathara was a fish out of water, which bore affinities (in more ways than one) to the popular American cinema. That in itself was an achievement, which surpassed the fact of its being the first film shot in CinemaScope, particularly since (in later years) critics and filmmakers alike would deride the kind of cinema it emulated as “bourgeois” and “escapist”.

There’s a reason why, along with Vasantha Obeyesekere, Nihalsinghe remained an auteur in the most adamant sense of that word. True, unlike Obeyesekere Nihalsinghe didn’t always script his films. But like Obeyesekere, he exerted control over the shaping of his films to an extent where his individualist attitude to the cinema spilt was affirmed and reflected in almost every aspect to his work.

With other filmmakers from here, this wasn’t the case, because they sacrificed their individuality in favour of collaboration and compromise. Nihalsinghe, on the other hand, was an unyielding individualist. In the end this showed remarkably in the films he made, all atonal in terms of subject-matter but brought together by how meticulously they depicted their characters. His devotion to Hollywood also came up: there are sequences in Ridi Nimnaya, for instance, which would have done David Lean proud.

I don’t think his tenure at the National Film Corporation needs to be explicated on in full here, if at all because that would be superfluous. Suffice it to say that under his command, film audiences ballooned from 30 million to 74 million by 1979. He managed to break our film industry from the profiteers, he diverted funds to amateurs and students who ended up being filmmakers themselves (in an interview, for instance, he claimed credit for having birthed Dharmasena Pathiraja, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Sunil Ariyaratne), and he authorised the biggest overhaul of the local cinema in history, which remains unparalleled today (we’re, I suppose, reaping the fruits of his labour today, when much of what we can claim as ours in our films can be traced to those policies, however restrictive they might have been, which he authored).

From Maldeniye Simion

He was also instrumental in bringing the television drama to Sri Lanka, when he managed to set up what would become South Asia’s pioneer professional TV production company, Tele-Cine, in 1979. That this preceded both Rupavahini and ITN, and that it went on to make the first tele-series in our country, Dimuthu Muthu (directed by him and starring Amarasiri Kalansuriya), need no recounting. They’ve all been recorded by the compiler and historian. All we can do is acknowledge the man’s contribution. The fact that he was showered with accolade from here and abroad – he was made a Fellow by both the British Kinematograph Society and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers of America – doesn't belie or undervalue simple acknowledgment.

Today we talk of icons and stars. We’re more concerned with praising them without examining what they truly achieved. I don’t think we can ever get at what D. B. Nihalsinghe achieved, not because his achievements were small but because they can’t really be summed up in words. To watch Sath Samudura is to appreciate the man’s intense, almost zealous, regard for faces, moods, and lives, not of extraordinary people but ordinary folk. That it was the ordinary folk he went for, even in Welikathara (his most sensational work), and that he used the camera as the index by which we measured their lives, emotions, and anguish, we know.

Yes, he has his critics, those who considered his policies at the Film Corporation too restrictive and those who may have found him unapproachable for reasons best known to themselves. Doesn’t matter. For this boy with the Bolex camera, who had been a Cadet Sergeant at Ananda and had wanted to go to the Army, ended up being one of our most unyielding and individualistic filmmakers. Of course he could be strict. He often was. Of course that showed in his films. All of them remain landmarks in their own special way. And of course he left us too soon. An inconsolable pity, no doubt.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, June 1 2016