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

Indika Ferdinando's mission

Indika Ferdinando holds a scholarship at the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University.  He also lectures at the University of Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo. Yes, he is an academic, but that really isn’t all that he is. Going by all that he’s done so far, what he’s learnt abroad has given him an impetus to experiment here. He is, as he likes to call himself, a “theatre practitioner”, someone who wants to twist and turn the syntax of the theatre as a way of paying tribute to those he admires. The main focus of his experiment, which he discussed with me some time back, is to apply the traditional ritualistic experience of Sinhalese theatre to contemporary theatre. In other words, to bring about a fusion between the two.

Around the time when the Workshop Players were staging “Les Miserables”, Indika was staging what was promised to be a “fruition” of his experiment, in the form of “The Irresistible Rise of Mr Signno”. As Indika explained to me, the traditional boundaries of Sinhala theatre could be overcome if they could converge with modern theatre. “Signno” opened to rave reviews on this count, but owing perhaps to the allure of “Les Miserables”, it didn’t quite open to the audience that Indika (would have) wanted.

He likes to put out academic jargon in cogent, simple terms. “Signno” was in part his thesis for Monash, fittingly titled “Transposing the Tools and Techniques of Sinhalese Ritual Performance into Theatre Practice”, or, as he likes to put it, “identifying what constitutes the holistic sensorial experience in Sinhalese ritual and exploring ways of applying it into contemporary theatre practice”, all about bringing the two together. Big words, no doubt (I admit that I was taken aback by them), but when Indika began elaborating on them, they were made easier to relate to.

Indika’s main preoccupation with the stage is how traditional theatre revolves around ritual and dance and contemporary theatre revolves around dialogues and music. He argues that while the latter’s audience can be called “viewers”, the former’s audience is largely a bunch of “experiencers”. He differentiates between the two because, according to him, ritual theatre goes beyond the image-oriented thrust of modern theatre and is essentially reducible, at the end of the day, to an assortment of sight, sound, movement, and even taste. He brought an example up to illustrate this: the “gammaduwa”, a low country ritual dance, which according to Indika amounts to a series of acrobatics and pyrotechnics (fire figures in significantly in our rituals).

From what Indika said, this much can be gathered. Contemporary theatre is preoccupied with keeping a distance between audience and performer, but with our rituals and theatre, there’s no such distance. If at all, in a ritual what’s privileged is the audience, and because of this there’s a sustained interaction between the performer and the “experiencer” (borrowing Indika’s term). Again, he brings up an example, this time a traditional musical instrument, the “yak beraya”, and explains that it doesn’t just affect its listener’s hearing, but penetrates his or her mind as well. That arouses the viewer’s empathy for the performance, and Indika sums this up with another jargon-term from his trade: “kinaesthetic empathy.”

All these are words and theories, admittedly, but one can sense Indika’s intense dedication to them. It’s a sign of his love for his trade that he doesn’t inflate what he says or what he’s doing. In any case, “Signno”, which opened at the Asoka Vidyalaya Gymnasium last September, was a play to remember (despite its three-hour duration).

I missed the opportunity of watching “Les Miserables”, and admittedly “Signno” was, despite its bilingual dialogues (teetering between Sinhala, English, and “Singlish”) worlds away from the Workshop Players’ adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic. True to his theory, Indika purposely refrained from having his play staged in a comfy, air-conditioned, Colombo 7 venue. On the contrary, it was staged at a rather open and hot (not to mention sweaty) place, in keeping with the ritualistic, traditional ambiance of its story. I will not explain that story, because Indika hopes to stage it again and it’s best that you see it for yourself when he does. Yes, that’s because it was a roaring success and deserves to be seen again, with its enviable blend of masks, dances, drums, acrobatics, and dialogues (which include some very scatological innuendos).

Indika admittedly has no preferences when it comes to the stage. “You have to accommodate every form and method. You must however be mindful when handling each theatre practice and reinforcing what’s unique to and differentiates it.”

As a way of demonstrating his love for what he’s doing, he recounted an anecdote from his schooldays at St Aloysius’ College in Ratnapura. He had seen a play, one in which both female and male characters were played by boys. This was in Year Six, during the 1980s. The 1978 Constitution was still “new” and untainted, but being a passionate follower of politics he had remembered something J. R. Jayawardene had said: that the Executive Presidency could do everything except turn a man into a woman.

“Watching the play,” Indika went on, laughing, “and seeing the boys playing the female characters, I was convinced that the theatre could do what even the President couldn’t! Needless to say, I was impressed.”

Reflecting on the theatre in Sri Lanka, he lamented a lack of reading among up-and-coming playwrights, hardly compensated for by their sense of daring. “They love to experiment, and I admit they are eager to search for new paths. But without reading up and avoiding self-induced pitfalls in the theatre, how can you improve?”

Indika is opposed to academia and for good reason. Art without artifice needs honesty and outlook, entertaining little to no illusion about the superiority of one art-form over every other. “What Sinhala theatre needs is serious research, not gloss,” he confessed. What he disagrees with however is the notion that research should always mean academia.

“Ediriweera Sarachchandra was an academic, who believed in stylised theatre. Sugathapala de Silva, his biggest rival in his time and someone who believed in the power of dialogues, was also an academic. The man who brought what the two stood for together, who infused stylisation into dialogue-driven plays, was not. But we remember and applaud Henry Jayasena and his play ‘Janelaya’ today, as much as we celebrate the other two and their work.”

When it comes to defining his version of the theatre, the last word should naturally be his: “There’s poetry in theatre and theatre in cinema. But theatre is not the cinema. Nor is it poetry. How do we differentiate? How do we sift? That is my question, one that may never be answered. In the meantime, we can only experiment. It works sometimes and fails as well. We can’t help that. So we can only go ahead, research, and in the end, if what we wanted comes out through our effort, we can only be happy.”

Written for: Night Owls, May 26 2016

‘Delovak Athara’: One film, 50 years

Gamperaliya was of course Lester James Peries’ first real masterpiece (on a higher level), but it is another film of his that evokes my interest here: Delovak Athara, Lester’s fourth film, which created another landmark, as the first serious Sinhala film to examine, not village life, but urban life. Delovak Athara, which was released in 1966, celebrates half a century this year. A brief analysis can hardly do justice to its merits, but I can try.

When it was first released in 1966, Delovak Athara was castigated here and proved to be less than a success abroad. In Lester’s own words, this was because of two factors: the film had no proper story which could make concessions to the box-office, and it was made at a time when serious directors here went for and depicted the village. The serious film, in other words, was already preconceived in the minds of both audiences and critics, and when Delovak Athara came out, that blinded them to its aesthetic achievement.

And what exactly was this achievement? The fact that it didn’t really have a story and the fact that it wasn’t set in the village, of course! By the time Lester got around directing it, he had communicated to his audience the standard he expected them to conform to, and was slowly creating the standard he would be judged on in his work. In it, unlike his earlier work, he almost achieves a distancing effect. Gone are the emotional histrionics which made up much of the Sinhala cinema at the time. Gone are the hero and the villain: we are left instead with flawed, everyday characters. To evoke sympathy for them without revealing their emotions, and to dissect their lives, motives, and thoughts clinically, was Lester’s goal. That he achieved it despite the film’s wafer-thin plot speaks volumes about the man’s ability at narrating stories.

Philip Cooray called it an “intellectual film”, no doubt owing to the emotionless framework of the story, but also perhaps because of the way it was edited. Delovak Athara marked the second time Lester got in Sumitra Gunawardena as his editor, and her prowess shows. In how she cut the film to the music (a feat, considering that we didn’t have film composers at the time), and how this in turn cut to the emotional intensity of a sequence, speaks volumes not just about her skill but that of everyone involved in it, including (without a doubt) the actors. Much of the cast, after all, had been stage-actors before, including Tony Ranasinghe, Irangani Serasinghe, and Jeewarani Kurukulasooriya. That they kept restraint despite their past fidelity to the theatre is remarkable.

Tony, in particular, was a category unto himself in it. There’s a sequence, towards the end, where he’s afforded a close-up onscreen. By that time, he’s at tenterhooks as to whether he should go to the police and confess his crime (the film centres on a car accident) or not. His character, Nissanka Wijesinghe, stares at the camera, lips parted slightly, confused. He cries. He stares down. End of sequence.

And yet, we sense a tremendous grace under pressure in Nissanka. He is crying, yes, but even when he is, the film doesn’t afford us to empathise with him completely. “The scene does not move us. The objectivity is all. We admire and appreciate, from afar,” is what Philip Cooray would write some years later, in his book on Lester, The Lonely Artist. To me, that sums up the clinical, distancing effect the film achieved, almost effortlessly.

That particularly sequence is all the more intense because it gives us a hint as to what Nissanka is thinking. The way the director (and cameraman, for the late Willie Blake’s work in this film deserves more than a footnote) caught Tony in that sequence was virtually insurmountable: the lack of proper emotion registered in his face, and the obvious feeling of anguish we know he is caught in, makes his close-up comparable to an Impressionist painting.

No wonder Cooray called it the “most Western” of his films, a title which stands true even today, if at all because in no other film of his did Lester become so unwilling to depict on the surface his characters’ inner feelings. To watch Tony’s character, even in his most poignant moment (in that sequence where he has a row with his mother, who insists that they frame their servant-boy for his crime), refuse to give up completely to emotion, is to marvel at an actor who would become the very embodiment of masculine fragility in our cinema for the following decade. Lester’s craftsmanship shows, not just in the narrative, but in his actors as well.

That was 50 years back. Since then we’ve seen filmmakers and films come and go here, some winning awards but (not once) winning hearts, and others winning dividends at the box-office without as much as moving a critic. We’ve divided our cinema. But to think of this as a contemporary problem is wrong.

For if we look at our past, take note of those masterpieces castigated by both audience and critic, we will appreciate that the truest filmmakers were those who refused to give in to the box-office, who stuck by their vision and vindicated it in the end. We had a rift between what was serious and what was popular even then, after all.

Lester was such a filmmaker. I mentioned this in my earlier article on Rekava and I will do so again. He loved his audiences and his audiences grew to love him over the years. He was a lonely artist, yes, but as I pointed out in an earlier article, that was true insofar as his people considered him an “outsider”. The extraordinary success of Golu Hadawatha, and the critical and commercial success of the two other films he made for Ceylon Theatres – Akkara Paha and Nidhanaya – proved, as with Delovak Athara and even Rekava, that he could weave stories which were both timeless and common (with the thinnest plot-lines). He remains the father of every film made here. As always, one might add.

And in the end, he wasn’t an outsider anymore. He was “one of us”. Has been ever since.