Notes on theatre and cinema

In the writings of Pauline Kael, the greatest movie critic who ever lived, you infer a patent distrust of any dichotomy drawn by writers between art and entertainment. At a time when Alain Resnais and Ingmar Bergman were idealised as messiahs and patron saints of the medium, therefore, it’s refreshing, if not disconcerting, to come across essays written by her lambasting them as boring. The question we would have been conditioned by mainstream critics to ask would have been, “Is entertainment art?” We would have answered it in the negative, since even today the gulf between spectacle and contemplation is too obvious and overwhelming to be bridged by the movies. The question she would have asked, on the other hand, would have been, “Is art entertainment?” For her, the cinema had as its salvation its capacity to enthral, to fascinate, in other words, to entertain.

The rift between entertainment and art is the debate between movies and films: the one entertains and is an object for mass consumption, while the other forces you to contemplate and is an “objet” (note the difference) for an esoteric minority. Small wonder, then, that Kael refused to term what she reviewed as “films”, an archaic term for the medium if ever there was one, and instead wrote of “movies”, whether from the silent or the sound era. This ontological debate is at the same time an extrapolation from the debate, old as it is and spent as it is today, between cinema and theatre. “When movies, the only art which everyone felt free to enjoy and have opinions about, lose their connection with song and dance, drama, and the novel, when they become cinema, which people fear to criticise just as they fear to say what they think of a new piece of music or a new poem or painting, they will become another object of academic study and ‘appreciation’, and will soon be an object of excitement only to practitioners of the ‘art’,” she once wrote, and she was correct despite the mainstream critic’s insistence on drawing a barrier between cinema and every other objet d’art.

The attempts made by Resnais and, more significantly, Robert Bresson, to liberate the movies from their relationships with those art forms, were lauded by several writers and commentators who wanted to be purveyors of what they referred to as pure cinema. Purity in any art, however, tends to divest it of any life, any vitality, though to deny these films a place in cinematic history would be pushing things too far. Without getting into this tentative, contentious issue (i.e. whether pure cinema is cinema in the first place), I would instead like to suggest that no art can survive for long if its interrelationships with other works of art are questioned and put down. Let’s not forget, after all, that the cinema was derivative (the first films were all theatrical, and even a director like Méliès, with his A Trip to the Moon, was a proponent of the single camera angle which approximated to the eye-line at a typical theatre) and that while very few successful plays have been made of movies, very many successful movies have been made of plays.

It’s interesting to note that while the first few movies were adaptations of plays, and were often heralded for their fidelity to a medium which, though derivative in one sense, was the most industrial the world had ever conceived, the cinema’s later deterioration into sound (the 1920s and 1930s saw a debasement in the quality of films) were put down as a deterioration from the movies to photographed stage plays. Note the insinuation here: at its best, in those first few years, the movies approximated to theatre (and a literary conception of the theatre, which I will get to later); at its worst too, such an interrelationship was stark and clear. Formal, polished dialogues, static camera angles, inflexible characterisations with individuals demarcated as types and not fleshed out, ordinary everymen, were the staple of the play, and they would, right until the forties and the fifties, become a staple of the cinema before the new critics, the Cahiers du Cinema writers, tried to differentiate between the two mediums.

The confusion between the two, moreover, comes out starkly when considering the opinions of two renowned critics and academics from this era, Allardyce Nicoll and Erwin Panofsky. For Nicoll, stage plays thrived on stock types, the movies on individuals; for Panofsky, stage plays thrived on individuals, the movies on stock types. That no real consensus was reached even at that point in film history speaks volumes about the misconceptions which have been formed and sustained with respect to the differentiation between what’s staged and what’s screened. As Susan Sontag aptly points out in her essay “Theatre and Cinema”, “There is no reason to insist on a single model for films.” But such models are often prescribed and recommended. In the writings of Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, reality is supposed to be redeemed through the director’s fidelity to authentic characterisations and settings and a linear narrative. By that token, the work of the neo-realists in Italy, as opposed to the Hollywood moguls (Goldwyn, Mayer, Zanuck, Disney), validates the medium’s very existence, and by that token, the early directors (of Expressionist cinema, and the works of Murnau and Wiene) are to be lambasted as manipulative.

This is a common refrain among those who lament the invasion of the theatre into the cinema. It’s largely a misconception, since no film has redeemed reality. Even the examples that Kracauer brings up, particularly the films of Vittorio de Sica, don’t really pass the test that he devised for them. According to him, de Sica’s Miracle in Milan, which culminates in the poor and the wretched literally flying to heaven, is a failure that refuses to transcend its theatricality, while Umberto D, which used a real model and depicted a heartfelt relationship between that model’s character (a poor, unemployed professor) and his dog, is a success. I believe Pauline Kael supplied the most cogent argument against this line of thinking: that both were, and remained to the last sequence, staged: “How and why is the fantasy defying the medium, and how is it that Umberto D, which is just as staged as a movie set in medieval Japan or Gothic Ruritania, is supposed to have an ‘unfixable flow’?”

Sontag, in that aforementioned essay, points out two ways through which the two mediums have been dichotomised: in formal terms (theatre is live, subjective; the cinema is mobile, objective) and in ontological terms (theatre deploys artifice; the cinema is committed to reality). Having demolished both, she instead contends for a differentiating factor that is more in touch with contemporary realities: that the theatre is confined to a logical and continuous use of space, while the cinema can open the audience up to a discontinuous series of spaces which are not logically ordered around in any particular way. Through editing, through the use of various techniques, the cinema has liberated itself from the same sequential and linear narratives the likes of Kracauer so heartily championed. The cinema has instead become a veritable collage, starting from the films of the Nouvelle Vague directors (prime among them, Godard) to the present-day Wes Andersons and, closer to home, Hitoshi Matsumotos. While the convention before Godard’s time was to approximate cinema to the theatre or literature, today the trend seems to be to approximate it to commercials, to advertising, to music videos: precisely what Godard’s films, especially his colour films, conceded ground to. Distinctions persist and abound, yes, but they are hardly ever sustained.

My own personal view is this, hence: Sontag’s view that cinema and theatre can only be differentiated with respect to their use of space is hardly the only factor we can account for when engaging in differentiating between the two. But it’s the most relevant, and probably the most valid, and it validates Pauline Kael’s view that no art form can be free of any other art form. The latter would of course have taken the former to task over the former’s view that no one set theory can help explain the dynamism of the cinema, since Kael was known for her negative views of Bresson (“Bresson is the only director who made a film [Diary of a Country Priest] that put me to sleep twice. I don't understand why, since I think it's a great movie; I admired it while I was dozing.”) and of Resnais (“Breathless and L'Avventura were to be either admired or disliked or ignored, but Hiroshima Mon Amour was described in hushed tones; it was some sort of ineffable deep experience. Why?”), both of whom were written on reverently by Sontag. But the essential quality that brings the two together over this contentious topic is, simply, that art can’t be compartmentalised, especially not, as the cinema aptly showed, when the birth of one art form was dependent on an already fermented art form (i.e. movies on the one hand, stage plays on the other).

However, the fact that they can’t really be differentiated does not in itself give a broad license to those here, in Sri Lanka, who seek to do away with theatricality and excess from the cinema while retaining the crucial base on which such theatricalities and excesses thrive: symbols, metaphors, and as I mentioned last week, mangled, unfinished sentences. The cinema of Sri Lanka has for the most been bifurcated, by audiences and critics, between such displays of excess (the commercial sector) and unfelt, overhyped, virtually castrated works of art that operate on a more literary conception of the theatre: flourishing on words, stock individuals and types, as opposed to visuals and fleshed out individuals. The former celebrates excess, the latter downgrades it and makes it an excuse to purge out any form of imagery. In both cases, we come across a deterioration in the industry, mainstream or off the beaten track.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, December 31 2017

Candid reflections on our art house films

Have our movies lost the power to entertain, to impress? Wherever I go and whoever I ask, the response is virtually the same: people don’t go to watch our films anymore, people go to sleep through them. There was laughter throughout the hall, I remember, when I sat down with my friends to see Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka two years ago. The ordinary man on the street who notices that he has time on his hands, and that the nearest hall is screening a promising film, is too busy, too wearied, to contemplate on the intricate workings of such films, and instead bothers himself with those points at which, for him, they fail spectacularly. I remember one such man, who unfortunately was seated right next to me, chortling when Sarathsiri and Selvi made love to each other; this scene, shot from behind, was supposed to make us aware of how debased, how animalistic, even the most basic instincts become at the hands of an unfeeling miser, but my neighbour didn’t care. He went on laughing and eating his popcorn.

In theatres and halls, every breath and blast of emotion, every nuance and gesture, is amplified and magnified to such an extent that what you hardly notice on the TV screen becomes too apparent and discernible for you to pass over. Golu Hadawatha, screened at the Tharangani at the National Film Corporation more than two months ago (the first in a series of screenings organised by the Premasiri Khemadasa Foundation) had me grinning at sequences which I thought I had not (but which I had) seen on television. When Dhammi tells Sugath, “Don’t be shy to ask a girl to help you out when you’re a boy”, the schoolboys seated next to me, who doubtless would have reflected on their own romances and memories of young love, grinned openly. These were not sequences they would have opened up to on the small screen. And why? Because movies have that power: they make you feel, they make you notice.

So when directors try as hard as possible to NOT make you feel, to NOT make you notice, you instead concentrate on and laugh at those scenes and sequences and the underlying tensions in them from which the director consciously tried to bring out a specific meaning. The sequence of Selvi and Sarathsiri making love was supposed to evoke a different response; by that token, so was the sequence of these two kissing each other the morning after, by the window overlooking the Bogawanthalawa hills. But what did audience members respond to? The fact that these two were kissing each other before washing themselves, before performing their ablutions. It’s roughly the same response they gave when they saw, in another film, the lead female character professing her love to a man by telling him that he has the same odour and fragrance around him that he did the previous night. “Sure ekata u aga hodala naha!” shouted an “ordinary” audience members. I couldn’t help it: the unintended humour was too much, so I grinned and laughed.

Anoja Weerasinghe argued, decades ago, that despite a plethora of promising, serious directors our film industry cannot and will not be salvaged unless and until the base, the popular base that is, has matured. She was correct, I think: after all, India could afford a Satyajit Ray because of the Mehboob Khans and America could afford a Wes Anderson because of the Steven Spielbergs. And yet, our critics, and for that matter our painters and poets and purveyors of high culture, contend otherwise. For most of them, the cinema must remain cut off from its populist inclinations. It’s this line of thinking that compelled so many journalists to describe Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka as the greatest post-war film made here, what made our Marxist critics (who seem to have forgotten that class relations are more important to their discourse than the ethnic relations they gloss over, a point I will get to next week) praise Prasanna Vithanage using every epithet from their dictionary. When popular audiences feel alienated this way, they either shirk the serious cinema and patronise the popular cinema (Ranja, Wada Bari Tarzan, the comedies of Vijaya Nandasiri), or, more disturbingly, judge that serious cinema via the values they ascribe to the popular.

What do popular films have, that serious films do not? For one thing, a welter of formality. There is less carelessness, in editing or scripting or camerawork, in a movie like Suhada Koka or Sikuru Hathe than there is in more than half of those art house products that are end up winning awards at film festivals. That welter of formality, in these movies or even an awkwardly made product like Maya (Ranjan Ramanayake as an androgynous hero) or Sinhaya (Ranjan Ramanayake as a guardian at an orphanage) or Doctor Nawariyan (Ranjan Ramanayake as a purveyor of what he’s referred to in an interview as the “medical mafia”), redeems their lack of intelligence, their acts of condescension towards the audience, which happen to be their biggest limitation. In redeeming that failure, then, they eventually become self-referential: Vijaya Nandasiri is Vijaya Nandasiri and Ranjan Ramanayake is Ranjan Ramanayake, so what they do, the mishaps they cause, and the injustices they correct, follow a particular pattern.

Popular films also tend to become more visual as the stories progress, while serious films lose that visual flair towards the end. The former open you up, the latter constrict you, which isn’t saying much for the intentions of their directors. Age Asa Aga, to give just one example, compels you to remain in the Professor’s house: the entire drama revolves around the bedroom and the kitchen, and occasionally the bathroom, before the family visits a temple in a sequence which was supposed to depict the tension between the private and the public but which, in reality, deteriorated to a series of hysterics that undid its own seriousness. This new trend – of suddenly opening you up to an overwhelming visual festival – is apparent in our other art house movies too, and for better or worse, such sequences abort, rather than add to, the responses the director tried to glean from us with everything that preceded them. Unpredictability in the movies can be wonderful, as opposed to the boredom of linearity commercial films thrive on, but unpredictability can also subvert what it was supposed to bring about with respect to the intentions of the director, the auteur. Why did I laugh at half the scenes in Aksharaya, for instance, and why was I sincerely moved at Ini Avan and Thani Thatuwen Piyabanna and Channa Kinnari, in my humble opinion Asoka Handagama’s best works? Because there was no incongruity between intention and outcome even in the most unconventional, least linear plot-lines in the latter three.

A few directors face the opposite problem: their storylines are terrible but their visuals are redemptive. Many of Udayakantha Warnasuriya’s and Priyantha Colambage’s films leave much to be desired, artistically, but their visual finesse, their regard for meticulous editing and what not, often make up for that. Both Bahuboothayo and Ran Kevita 2 are at several points crudely conceived, but the visual effects, the carefully scripted conversations, the twists in the plots, often compensate for what would otherwise be considered as sequences made in bad taste. The intentions of the directors here, I feel, are at odds with the outcomes in quite a different way: these directors want to entertain, to do away with any need for artistic fulfilment, but inadvertently, because of their eye for imagery (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Warnasuriya and Colambage were and are involved in advertising), they trump their own lack of regard for aesthetic merit by their at times unconscious, meticulous, careful mise en scène. The problem of the art house director is manifestly different: he wants to intellectualise, but subverts his own objectives by providing the audience with reasons to laugh at and ridicule, rather than contemplate and be moved.

A few months ago, I contended in an article that the lack of discerning, cohesive critics should worry us in a context where theatres and film halls are rarely full, even on weekends, because when plays and films have ceased to be a part of common experiences (and instead become the occasional hobby or interest of that audience member who discovers that he has time to spare from an otherwise busy schedule), we need critics who can discern works of art for what they are without beating around the bush. Paraphrasing Pauline Kael, when movies, the only art that everyone can have an opinion about, lose their casualness, when they become an art to ponder on by resorting to brochures which reproduce Derrida (rationalising the obscurities of the director), they lose their potential to be a part of those common experiences.

To me, hence, as worrying as the lack of cohesive critics is, what’s even more worrying is the gulf between the popular and the serious, a gulf that operates on the following principle: disregard the popular and lavish attention on the serious. The end result of following that principle is this: audiences will be alienated, they will continue to ignore the art house cinema, and even if they do patronise that art house film, they will find reasons in it, not to contemplate or reflect, but to laugh and grin.

Written for: Daily Mirror, January 5 2018

Anoja Weerasinghe: Between the one and the other

Keli Madala, D. B. Nihalsinghe’s fourth film, was arguably also his weakest. It teeters between anger and hope, between idealism and cynicism, rather unstably, and it concentrates that conflict of opposites within the terse, tragic love story between the politician and his teenage paramour. The two most memorable sequences depict the shift from reconciliation to malice in that story: the first of them has them meet, for the last time, by a river, declaring their affections for each other no matter what; the second has the politician, now hardened, in a close up that reveals his blind hatred towards her. The latter is followed by an arbitrary, less than satisfying, and predictable ending: the woman is gunned down at her doorstep, at his orders. Keli Madala has none of the fluidity, the unhurried pacing, that Maldeniye Simion and Ridi Nimnaya and Welikathara had, partly because of its vignette-like narrative (at one point you feel that the script barely parses, that the plot never properly coheres), but thankfully it is salvaged by its acting. As the politician, H. A. Perera proved his versatility in the cinema, and as his paramour, so did Anoja Weerasinghe.

I have seen Anoja Weerasinghe in a great many films, and from them four stick to my memory the most, for her ability to salvage the story that way: Keli Madala, Siri Medura, Janelaya, Seilama. (I have unfortunately not seen Maldeniye Simion.) The features of hers that entice one – that rough, unapologetic voice; those bulging, expressive eyes; that sensual, defiant figure – crop up in film after film, and for better or worse, that’s what has cut her out as a different actress. In this sense I think her biggest strength has been her ability to embody contradictory feelings, sometimes in the same sequence, a quality to be met very rarely among both her contemporaries. After smiling and talking with the boy for the first time in Janelaya, for instance, she turns around and faces the antagonist (Ravindra Randeniya): the smile is gone, and so is her radiance. It’s the same story in Keli Madala, where at one moment she’s exchanging pleasantries with her lover, and the very next she’s berating him for his callousness; where at one moment she is listening to his sympathetic daughter’s (Nilmini Tennakoon) suggestion that she join an organisation for hard-done-by women, and the very next she’s scorning that daughter’s shows of sympathy to the father himself.

In the seventies and eighties, right after Malini Fonseka claimed the right to be the queen of the local cinema, a horde of actresses destined to repudiate the populist, patriarchal base which Malini’s characters inadvertently stood for entered the industry. They came in a particular order, and Anoja, chronologically, was the third among them. The other two, Nadeeka Gunasekara and Swarna Mallawarachchi, came earlier (though while Swarna entered the industry long before her, her second phase, in which she played the defiant woman, commenced after Anoja’s first forays). The differences between these three couldn’t have been more apparent: Nadeeka was almost always the timid, introspective rebel, while Swarna, even at her most defiant, was urbane, calm, contained, controlled. With Anoja you come across a player who fit into neither category and yet was somehow at home with both: less urbane and by default less contained. She expresses her rage in gushes and torrents; at her most expressive, she virtually oozes out that rage.

If she appears to be almost never contained in these films it’s because that attitude, of being unforgivable and ruthless, make her embody the same predatory characteristics of the societies she is rebelling against. The transition in her from a naive, simple girl to a strong, defiant fighter was, I think, reflected in a childhood spent oscillating between the village and the metropolis. In Siri Medura, Keli Madala, and Seilama, her characters oscillate in that sense between these two opposite worlds, while in the first of those films she occupies a walawwa that is at home with neither the one nor the other. It’s an almost shell-shocked, schizophrenic house that she inhabits, that is bound to drive her against the established order. She rarely does fight back overtly, of course, but in Siri Medura she does, though her act of gunning down two people is followed, not by the exhilaration of release, but by a series of ambivalent hysterics. Fittingly, the film ends with her running away from the manor (where to, though?).

So what of her childhood? Anoja Weerasinghe was born in Kailagoda, in the Badulla district. She never received any formal training in her field, but she had an intimate bond with the temple and her parents, the latter of whom were very artistically inclined. She attended schools in both Badulla and Moneragala, in which she took part in concerts and plays. The first of those plays, staged when she was five or six, had her play out a Japanese princess, while her first performance came about when she was 13. That performance, in a play titled Anduren Eliyata, won the praise of the Chief Guest, a local politician, who not only commended her but went as far as to suggest that he could see a great actress in her, that she could turn into a film star one day. Reflecting on the compliment, Anoja had this to say: “Imagine a 13-year-old village girl being told all that by a politician who resided frequently in Colombo!”

She discovered the theatre in the village, the movies in the city. At a time when going to the cinema was considered a ritual, Anoja and her friends would walk four miles patiently every time (because there weren’t any buses after 6.30 in the evening) to watch the latest shows. One of the movies that struck her at once was Welikathara: because many theatres couldn’t accommodate the CinemaScope format, they were forced to show it through the conventional projector and screen, distorting the image in the process. But that sense of daring, and the experience stamped on the film, exceeded its technical interest, so for a long time it entranced young Anoja. Resolved on entering the industry, she hence watched as many movies as she could, almost all of which, she remembered, had Malini Fonseka. Malini became a guide of sorts for her, and in her own words, “I would imitate her for days on end.” Eventually she landed in the industry with a 30-second appearance in Yasapalitha Nanayakkara’s Tak Tik Tuk, released one year after her debut in Monarathenna (also by Nanayakkara), opposite Malini, Vijaya Kumaratunga, and Rukmani Devi.

There were other roles, of course: opposite Swarna Mallawarachchi in Sinhabahu (Pathiraja S. Dayananda), opposite Malini in Aradhana (Vijaya Dharma Sri), opposite Sanath Gunathilake in Kaliyugaya (Lester James Peries), and opposite Swarna again in Muhudu Lihini (Sunil Ariyaratne). Muhudu Lihini was shot by D. B. Nihalsinghe, who saw her and was impressed enough by her performance to take her aboard Maldeniye Simion. But when her name was suggested by Nihalsinghe for one of the leading female characters, both Arawwala Nandimithra (who wrote the original novel) and the producers tried to back out. But the director held firm: if he couldn’t cast her, he wouldn’t direct the film. So they relented, and so she was in. Remembering Nihalsinghe for me, she had this to say: “I was like a ball of clay under him. I can’t understand how I played for him in Simion and Keli Madala. He’s so soft-spoken that when he instructs me, the actor beside me can’t hear him. In a very subtle manner, he drew the character I played into my soul.”

It’s interesting to note here that her first few performances had her as a rural woman, right down from Monarathenna. This was despite her adulation of Malini, who gradually in the seventies (the decade in which Anoja bloomed and matured) moved from the village to the city (barring the occasional film). It’s interesting also to note that Swarna’s first few performances, in the eighties and even before, had her depict more urbane women (think of Yahalu Yeheli, Ridi Nimnaya, Biththi Hathara, and Hansa Vilak) and this despite her past adulation of Punya Heendeniya, who was anything but urbane (barring her portrayals in Ran Salu and Kaliyugaya, where she nevertheless wasn’t completely cut off from the rural). In both cases it was, all in all, a subtle inversion of the mentors who had figured in their careers, and with that I think you can discern the difference between Anoja and Swarna: the one was destined to suffer, to be expressive about her rage, while the other, also destined to suffer, was doomed at the same time to suffer more for expressing that rage. When Anoja fights back (in Keli Madala, for instance), her death is planned and executed rather abruptly: her deterioration is never extended, never unbearably dragged on, while in Swarna’s case (Dadayama, Suddilage Kathawa, Ayoma), it usually is. The one is shut out and done away with at once, usually; the other is shut out only at the very end.

These were formative years, of course, since she hadn’t completely let go of her theatrical past. In Monarathenna she found it difficult to get used to the subtle nuances the cinema was capable of, while in Maldeniye Simion and Keli Madala she was, as with Siri Medura, overtly expressive but more in command of her characters. I particularly remember the last sequence in the latter film, in which she gives into an onslaught of hysterics which, she informed me, came out rather spontaneously. “Back then, I didn’t really know what film acting entailed. This bothered me particularly in when I had to give into my repressed feelings after shooting and killing Ravindra Randeniya’s and Malini Fonseka’s characters. This involved a lot of footage, which necessitated a series of rehearsals and a perfect final take. When Parakrama aiya asked me to do a rehearsal, however, I was lost. How could I act out when there was nothing in my mind? I told Parakrama aiya to go for the take, hoping that something would ‘come out’. What happened next? I don’t really know, but when the camera started rolling, I began asserting my natural self. This led in turn to a barrage of hysterics which continued until the very last shot. That first take was taken in. Right there.”

Photo by Dayan Vitharana

Written for: Daily Mirror, January 4 2018

Douglas Ranasinghe: Second to none

Sena, the protagonist of Madawala S. Ratnayake’s Akkara Paha, embodies for me the failure of the post-1956 youth to realise their social aspirations. Lester James Peries selected Milton Jayawardena, then an unknown player, for the role in his adaptation, while days after his choice was finalised he was visited by Vijaya Kumaratunga. I think it was a blessing, for both Milton and Vijaya, that the former got the character and the latter did not, because Vijaya would have been too brash, too assertive, to depict Sena’s failings and defeatism. In fact so defeatist and so much a failure was he that he gave the impression of being used, and guided, by every other character, especially the woman who ends up as his destroyer, Theresa, and his friend in the first half of the story, Samare. Theresa was played by Janaki Kurukulasuriya, who left the industry afterwards, while Samare was played by Douglas Ranasinghe, who stayed in the industry and remains there today. His performance was so frank, so unlike the more nuanced and gentle characters he would get later, that no less a person than Peries himself remarked that he had great difficulty saving the “hero” from him, a view shared and articulated by Philip Cooray in his book, The Lonely Artist.

Douglas Ranasinghe got to be the secondary player, the supporting actor, in whatever film (commercial or serious) he was in. This has been his biggest strength and limitation, though within his confines he gives out the best he could. You feel that some of his performances – think of Siridasa from Viragaya – are so calculated that they rise above the main actor. Then you feel that his other performances – think of Kulageya – have him as a side player, whose main function is to accentuate the conflict at the heart of the story, or – think here of Aravinda from Yuganthaya – to speak on behalf of the established order, of reason over emotion. Most of our supporting actors from the early days graduated into their own stars, especially Joe Abeywickrama, though some of them remained behind, especially because that’s where they were meant to be until the end (like D. R. Nanayakkara). Ranasinghe, strictly speaking, doesn’t belong to either category, because he transcends himself. And in transcending himself, he transcends his character.

He was born in Kurunegala and was sent, initially and in keeping with the family tradition, to the game iskole, the hodiya panthiya (comparable to the kindergarten today). From the hodiya panthiya he was despatched to St Anne’s College, where he grew to dote on athletics and other sports activities. He obviously remembers his days well even now: “St Anne’s was a missionary school, but unlike today missionary schools took in quite a number of non-Christians. In fact one of my schoolmates was Wijeratne Warakagoda, who was my senior, and who later left to Ananda College.” Apparently his first love, which he encountered while at St Anne’s, had been the military, owing primarily to the sports activities he took part in. Compounding this was the fact that he had been a prefect, which later made him try out the police and which emboldened him to apply for the post of Sub Inspector. Failing twice, he succeeded on the third attempt, and was drafted for a training course at Kalutara.

He also aspired to be a lawyer and to this end, immediately after leaving school, had decided to join Law College. “Acting never really figured in my scheme of things. That’s not to say that I shirked the performing arts, but in my day, films and plays were at best leisure activities, and never career options. By default, as professions, we had either the government service or those other fields which we could prosper in, including the law, medicine, and of course engineering.” Given this it comes to no surprise then that Ranasinghe’s forays into those performing arts was, as he himself admitted, accidental. Onstage, he found his niche through Sathischandra Edirisinghe, who suggested that Ranasinghe play his role (a Corporal) in Henry Jayasena’s Hunuwataye Kathawa. “That training course in Kalutara had at the time been delayed by three months. Sathis aiya had done me a favour, years ago. I was only too happy, consequently, to help him out.” It was a largely propitious debut, since after seeing his performance, Lester James Peries asked after him, took him in, and cast him opposite Milton Jayawardena in Akkara Paha. Jayasena had, naturally enough, been suspicious: “He told Lester, laughing, ‘Now, now, you are taking all my good actors away!’”

His performance as Samare had actually been his second, after G. D. L. Perera’s Romeo Juliet Kathawak (released one year before, in 1968, but filmed after Akkara Paha), which probably more than anything else is remembered for the Sunil Shantha classic that he croons with a guitar, “My Dreams Are Roses.” As for Akkara Paha, Ranasinghe remembers his experiences under Peries with understandable nostalgia. “It was frankly an eye-opener for me. With ‘Maestro’, you’ve always got to be sure of what you do and where you are. He never bosses you around, but that doesn’t mean you can be complacent or that you can forget your cues. In other words, he expects something substantive from you, and to this end opts for three takes: one for him, one for the camera, and one for the lighting. When all three are done, you go for the final take. Because nothing escapes his eyes, incidentally, you need to remember all three.”

What of his career after these two debuts? After taking part in a short film titled Bhavana, directed by the legendary Paul Zils and entered into the Berlin Film Festival of 1970/1971, he decided to leave for England for a three year course at the London Film School. The decision, he tells me, was both conscious and spontaneous: “I left behind a career in law just so I could learn more about the mechanics of filmmaking and acting. At the end of those three years, I was asked to stay back and take part in Shakespearean productions, perhaps to get involved with the Royal Shakespearean Company. But I was homesick. Perhaps a little too homesick. In any case, had I stayed behind, I would have been a different man. Who can tell?” Who can indeed, for even with the supporting characters he got to play after his return, Ranasinghe has retained a welter of conviction which empowers him to be more than who he is. It is in this second phase of his career that he becomes controlled, contained. He has weeded out the emotional hysterics which marked out Romeo Juliet Kathawak and Akkara Paha. Those three years in London helped, clearly.

Opposite both experienced and younger players, he has triumphed: Richard de Zoysa, Chitra Vakishta, and Somi Ratnayake in Yuganthaya; Sanath Gunathilake and Sriyani Amarasena in Viragaya; Vasanthi Chathurani, Sriyani, Lucky Dias, and Tony Ranasinghe in Kulageya. We see him occasionally in glimpses now (Siddhartha Gautama, Aloko Udapadi, Dharma Yuddhaya) and in all his recent performances he has mellowed gracefully. His most distinctive features, particularly his square, firm jaw, lend him both credibility and force. I’d like to think that’s where he triumphs.

Perhaps that’s why, as Aravinda in Yuganthaya, he doesn’t retain the sort of conviction he echoes in Viragaya. In Martin Wickramasinghe’s novel Aravinda is a flawed antihero, an aspirant who wishes to join the upper echelons of a society that he has from birth been alienated from. Lester Peries finds an equivalent, somehow, for Ranasinghe through several sequences which have him wondering through his village, silently, introspectively, and advising his friend Malin (Richard de Zoysa) against being a political rebel. But we are never used to this Ranasinghe, because in his other performances he doesn’t caution against rebellion but becomes more understanding of the reasons behind that rebellion. He does nurture a conservative streak (as Siridasa in Viragaya, for instance, he trivialises Aravinda’s selflessness as foolishness), but that never crops up to the extent whereby he represents, and affirms, the Establishment.

It’s a tragedy at one level, but I believe that we have ignored Ranasinghe’s versatility. For one thing, he has in addition to the cinema also operated in theatre, television, and radio broadcasting. Not every actor has taken part in, much less aspired for, all those fields, which is why the fact that the man has been involved in them deserves more scrutiny. That’s also a reason why his views on contemporary cinema, here, deserve more than a cursory sketch. Since I can at best offer such a sketch, though, here goes:

“To be honest, now the cinema teeters between crass commercialism and anti-war ideologies. The latter wins awards, the former wins hearts. I am not saying that we don't see a middle way between these two, but they are hard to come by. As a filmmaker myself, I prefer the lives, emotions, and sentiments of my people to what any outsider thinks they ought to be. Sadly enough, few ‘serious’ directors today realise this.” And he comments on how different the characters portrayed onscreen were in his day. “Back then we had a kind of character called the ‘parajithayo’. They lost out on life. They lost out on love. But through their defeat, they became heroic figures. I can think of two characters here, now: Sena in Akkara Paha and Sugath in Golu Hadawatha. But with the advent of time, they changed and went out of fashion. That's why we see polar opposites in mainstream films now: they are either angels or villains. Such characters do not exist, and reality isn't so stark, but I suspect filmmakers are playing into audience sentiments.”

Written for: Daily Mirror, January 2 2017

It’s great art, but is it a good movie?

The complacency of the idealist, the smugness of the young, and the convictions of the activist all tend to drive me a little crazy at times. I don’t wish to demean what they believe in, but the truth is that their beliefs, when not miles away from the reality as they often are, don’t necessarily translate to actions, particularly when they are artists. This curious rift, between what they believe in and what they actually do, continues to confuse me, because the idealist, the assured, and the activist all come together by their ability to confuse their experiences (however limited they are) for their greatness, their individuality. These people, and artists, market themselves to the educated, the critics, the writers, and the editors of newspapers, who see in that conflation an absolute truth. That’s why the art house cinema of this country drives me nuts: because it’s a conflation which can’t be sustained, which doesn’t hold up. Its relevance, in other words, is questionable.

I’ve always felt that the milieu which patronises the Lionel Wendt, particularly those English plays (lavish musicals and comedies, social dramas, family entertainment), tend to idealise the middle class liberalism that those plays reflect. It’s an act of fawning on an ideology which empowers them to congratulate themselves over their attitudes and convictions. Our cinema, on the other hand, has historically never thrived on this kind of middle class liberalism, because that liberalism is part and parcel of an esoteric social subset: the English-speaking bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie. The attitudes and convictions of those who patronise our art house cinema, therefore, are manifestly different, less uprooted, but (I daresay) just as confused and muddled up. It targets the educated as well, but in a different way.

The Wendites (as I like to call those who flock in droves to the Wendt) are inhibited by a curious paradox that goes right into the heart of their milieu. They laugh at and are moved to anger by what they see, but when the curtains come down they reflect on what they saw and move back to their comfortable lawns. “5000 disappearances?” the lady next to me asked her friend, explicitly shocked, after Ruwanthi de Chickera’s Dear Children Sincerely (staged last July) ended: it was an allusion to an observation made by one of Ruwanthi’s cast members about the Menik Farm tragedy towards and after the end of the Civil War here. It was a question born from the “oohs” and “aahs” that Wendites usually let out once they see a serious idea being debated on in a serious way by the actors and the crew, and was also born out from the attitude of self-indulgent indifference which most of the Wendites wallow in. In other words, the educated Wendite wants to get through a serious drama with a serious idea in as linear a way possible, so that the shocks that the producer delivers to them are effectively transposed and conveyed. In still other words, the conventional Wendite is ailed with a conservative streak that subsists on an old conception of the theatre.

The movies of Asoka Handagama, Prasanna Vithanage, Sanjeewa Pushpakumara, Malaka Dewapriya, and now Boodee Keerthisena target a different sensibility, and hence a different inhibition. With the sole exception of Vithanage, whose first few films are manifestly different from the films he makes now, those other directors have more or less followed a conception of the cinema that is both literary and theatrical, that flourishes not through the moving image but through a veritable series of symbols, metaphors, and deliberately mangled and unfinished sentences. The similarities between these individuals, whatever their personal ideologies may be, are too discernible and apparent to be coincidental, which is why it’s safe to say that they are the purveyors of a specific form of the medium they operate in. The Wendites and the English speaking liberals prefer linear narratives and symbols and metaphors that unravel naturally; the likes of Handagama and Keerthisena go about it the other way, with elliptical narratives and arbitrarily defined symbols. The one seeks to open you up gradually; the other seeks to force you down quickly.

I would like to suggest here that what is to an extent a disturbing gulf between two art forms is really an extension of the political beliefs which underlie each of them. The Wendite is largely a creature of liberal politics, and the most serious productions he or she purveys – from the past two years, Dear Children Sincerely, Walking Path, Picket Republic – reflect a theatrical form that, despite its acrobatics, despite its daring techniques (with respect to lighting, sound, backstage work, shifts between scenes, etc), is always conventional: in other words, a conventional play about a conventional idea. It’s more or less class-oriented, in favour of those who wield English (in Dear Children Sincerely the audience, a fairly good microcosm of the milieu that was being depicted onstage, laughed at an observation made by an actor that schoolteachers who were freshly recruited after 1956 taught their students that eggs were hatched with the aid of thunder and lightning: they were laughing, not at the observation, but at the milieu which they have been conditioned to laugh at) and discard the vernacular.

Our art house cinema began with Handagama. He is its primary purveyor, its guiding star. We could never claim to an independent cinema before him, barring the early work of Boodee Keerthisena (the man’s Sihina Deshaya, which I liked, was a preparatory exercise for Mille Soya, which I liked even more), so the standards he created, which everyone later followed in some way or the other, were almost always his. We see Handagama, at his best (Chanda Kinnari, Thani Thatuwen Piyabanna, Ini Avan) and even at his worst (Aksharaya, Vidu, Age Asa Aga), as an extension of the man who sided with Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, Deepthi Kumara Gunarathne, and the other members of the short-lived X-Group, which sought to translate if not transliterate (one could never tell the difference) the postmodernists to Sri Lanka. The Wendites were complacent with a kind of verisimilitude that in effect took us back to the 19th and the early 20th centuries; these rebels, on the other hand, were never satisfied with that verisimilitude. They wanted more, so they shifted from modernism (with its emphasis on a subjective, individualist psychology), to postmodernism (with its profusion of individual voices and unreliable narrators and plot devices).

Their failure to disseminate postmodernism among their audiences the way they intended to, which Dhanuka Bandara commented wryly on when he once told me, “I understood the original Derrida, with all his obfuscations, more than I understood Deepthi Kumara’s attempt at making those obfuscations clearer to us”, found its way to the cinema they later conceived. Is it any cause for wonderment that Handagama’s most successful films, which reached both critics and popular audiences, were not derivative in this sense than the films which were less successful? Channa Kinnari is an almost contemporary retelling of the Mrs Dalloway narrative (a day in the life of an ordinary woman beset by extraordinary experiences and perceptions), while Ini Avan may well have been, after his more clumsily but as honestly directed Me Mage Sandayi – the greatest post-war film made here (the critics were wrong when they described Vithanage’s Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka with that epithet). Compare and contrast these two with Aksharaya (hilariously unwatchable, hindered by its own convictions) and Age Asa Aga (with manifestly better performances, but still hindered by those convictions). It’s easy to put these discrepancies down to the low budgets that these directors have to work with, but then Sihina Deshaya was also lowly budgeted, and so, to a considerable extent, was Mille Soya, and yet these are films I can go to and enjoy, again and again, as opposed to Boodi’s own Nimnayaka Hudakalawa, through which (I am sad to say) he has joined Handagama.

Those early films sustained both the audience and the critics, but the deterioration of their directors to what they have become today indicates that, for all their sense of daring, of courage (however facile), of rebellion against self-indulgent liberalism (at one level, one can contend that both Aksharaya and Age Asa Aga lampoon this liberalism), the likes of Handagama and Malaka Dewapriya are destined to be cut off from popular audiences. A friend of mine recently told me that the true function of art, as opposed to advertising (which typically operates on the principle of the lowest common denominator, of debasing yourself with vulgar tastes), was and is to empower your audiences to graduate to your level, your way of seeing the world. People may dislike Handagama’s films the same way the Wendites like what they see at the Wendt, but I don’t really think that this reason, this rationale, is enough to vindicate those films, because the typical English play, for some reason, plays around with the same devices while marketing a facilely new take on the themes it’s already explored so many times before. It’s a facilely new way of exploring the old, simply put. Our directors, long crippled by the intellectualism that destroyed the X-Group (who reads their magazine, London, anymore?), aren’t bothered enough to think of new ways. They resort to the same tricks, the same beliefs, the same belief systems.

The Wendites were always inhibited by their conservative streak. That has been their weakness, but also their strength. Watching Dewapriya’s Bahuchithawadiya, released recently, and reading him justify his decision to film an otherwise conventional overhead shot of the city by deliberately shaking the camera with his overriding belief that the metropolis is never static, never stable, I wonder whether the Handagamians, as I will now call them, were always inhibited by their inability to see the world through anything other than the symbols, the metaphors, the mangled sentences they churn out in the name of Art every year. I am still wondering, by the way.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, December 31 2017