Ceylon: Native Films Are Catching On
Sydney H. Schanberg
The New York Times, September 7, 1970
nytimes.com/1970/09/07/archives/ceylon-native-films-are-catching-on.html
The New York Times, September 7, 1970
nytimes.com/1970/09/07/archives/ceylon-native-films-are-catching-on.html
COLOMBO, Ceylon—Lester James Peries, Ceylon's finest film director, whom Satyajit Ray has called “my only relation east of Suez,” has to make documentaries in between feature films in order, as he puts it, “to bring in the rice and curry.” Although his simple, realistic films have finally become “safe” at the Ceylonese box office in the last three or four years (his early films were financial flops), they are by no means big money makers.
This is a country where the masses—relatively poor people who go to the movies to escape their own depressing existence, not to see it depicted in depressing black and white—still prefer tinselly, Technicolor song‐dance fight fantasies copied from the cinema of neighboring India.
Nevertheless, a new audience of young and well educated Sinhalese (the name of the majority community and language here) is developing in this small tropical island nation. And Mr. Peries, the first director to risk a serious film in the Sinhalese cinema, has had a great deal to do with it.
“I wouldn't say my pictures are commercial successes, but they're finding an audience,” he said, sipping tea in his softly lit living room after a day of shooting on location near Colombo. Mr. Peries is a small, alert man with a receding forehead and long hair on the sides and back of his head. His features remind one of an American Indian and he conveys an aura of great curiosity and intelligence.
Notwithstanding a week long retrospective of his works by the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year, and subsequent festivals planned or held in Canada, England and Brazil, Mr. Peries's films have never been shown to regular audiences in the Western Hemisphere and he remains virtually unknown outside Asia, even to film buffs.
He started as a journalist, went to London for The Times of Ceylon, where he wrote pieces on the arts, began making experimental films there in his free hours and won some amateur awards.
He returned home to make documentaries for the Ceylon Government, and then, in 1955, he “chucked it” and started making his own feature films.
Fifteen years later, he is working on only his eighth film, an output that reflects his care and nurturing of every film.
Mr. Peries, who is 50 years old, pioneered not only in subject matter and style but also in taking the Sinhalese film out of the studio and onto location, using Ceylon's lush natural beauty (“Bridge on the River Kwai” was filmed here) instead of painted backdrops.
Most of his pictures deal with Ceylonese family life, often rural families, and the common pressures and conflicts that seethe therein. To summarize plots is often to sound corny, and the stories would be banal in the hands of a less gifted and sensitive director.
An example: A girl meets a boy, they fall in love. Unknown to him, she has been promised to another by her family, in the Ceylonese tradition. She bows to her family and sends her real love away with a lie, telling him her affection for him is only sisterly. He later learns the truth, but they both pain fully reconcile themselves to their permanent separation.
Mr. Peries's films move slowly, which is the way he sees real life. Even his camera movements are slow. There is little “action” in the traditional sense. He attempts to have the camera “eavesdrop on life,” establishing mood and psychology by catching the subtlest of facial expressions and gestures. He calls it “the cinema of contemplation.”
“Seemingly, on the surface, nothing happens,” he says, “and yet by the quietest of means, scene by scene, incident by incident, one hopes that the interior drama is revealed.”
New winds are also blowing in Sinhalese theater and dance, which until the turn of the century had been confined almost totally to Buddhist religious rituals and had no place as popular entertainment.
In fact, until 14 years ago there was no indigenous Sinhalese theater. All drama was staged in English either by the foreign community—the British, the Dutch and Portuguese burghers — or by highly Westernized Sinhalese. Farce and comedy dominated. Molière was the favorite. The only plays in Sinhalese were translations and adaptations from Gogol, Tennessee Williams or Brecht.
The turning point came in 1956 with the staging of “Maname” by a University of Ceylon professor. It was an ancient legend with a “Rashomon”‐like plot that had been played in the villages for centuries as Ceylonese folk theater.
The professor, E. P. Sarachandra, adapted it for the popular theater while retaining many of the old stylistic effects—mime, music, songs, chants, chorus and narrator.
From this beginning grew an original, modern Sinhalese theater, treating current social problems and using naturalistic dialogue, though often employing some of the old stylistic devices. Perhaps the best of the new Sinhalese playwrights is Henry Jayasena, a former school teacher and film star who now produces, directs and acts in his own dramas. At 39, his side burns going slightly gray, Mr. Jayasena looks like a handsome office worker trying to make ends meet. And from 9 to 5, that's what he is—the records clerk for the Department of Highways.
Mr. Jayasena is typical of the new breed of theater people here. By necessity, almost all of them have outside jobs and most work for the Government. Mr. Jayasena's job, for example, pays 430 rupees a month, which is just over $70. The plays make little or no money. The longest consecutive run is about a week, although the well‐received ones are continually restaged.
There is only one fully equipped theater in the country, the Lionel Wendt in Colombo. The rest are converted school assembly halls or worse.
“We give people theater, but we don't have the time or money to make it all good theater,” Mr. Jayasena said. Yet at the same time he feels that the accepted poverty of the new theater—and therefore the lack of dependence on the box office—gives it more freedom to experiment, particularly with controversial political and social themes, such as homosexuality.
While these treatments are undaring by Western standards and too bland for some Ceylonese intellectuals, they are subjects that the Sinhalese films, even those of Mr. Peries, have not dared to treat, largely because film producers have much more to lose financially from the censors’ axe.
“I'm not scared of the fact that I'm a government servant,” Mr. Jayasena said, “although I must say that I'm quite conscious of censorship. But if the playwright has a good cause and is not just rabble rousing and if he is subtle and clever enough and has public opinion behind him, then he can get it by the censors.”
Dance in Ceylon means only one person—Chitrasena. About 25 years ago, he started a dance school with four students and the idea of saving the centuries‐old religious dance forms and musical rhythms from extinction. Today the school has nearly 200 students, and, through Chitrasena's ingenuity, the traditional dance couldn't be more alive.
“The traditional dances weren't meant for entertainment, solely for religious rituals,” the 49‐year‐old dancer explained to a visitor over highballs made with arrack, the local coconut whisky.
To make the old dance a popular form, he turned it into theater. The ancient forms, consisting of pure dance and rhythm with no plot, performed in the round, were put on the proscenium stage, the music and movements were highly dramatized and a story was added to give it shape and social comment.
After about 20 tight years of scraping’ by with the help of a patron and a small government grant, Chitrasena is now turning a profit for the first time.
Chitrasena hardly looks like the classical notion of a dancer. He is not tall and his body is thick and muscular and radiates power. A guard on the Green Bay Packers, perhaps, but not a dance master.
He and his willowy wife, Vajira (she too has only one name), both dance solo parts in the company, and, he has composed 14 dance productions, often combining Western ballet techniques with the older Ceylonese forms.
“In the old times,” said Nihal Ratnaike, a friend of Chitrasena who reports on cultural affairs for a Colombo paper, “if there was drought, the peasants performed a special dance to the gods for rain. Now they go to the Government irrigation officer. Or if someone was very sick, they'd call the devil dancer. Now they take the patient to the nearest dispensary.
“If Chitrasena hadn't brought these dances to the stage, they would have died.”
This is a country where the masses—relatively poor people who go to the movies to escape their own depressing existence, not to see it depicted in depressing black and white—still prefer tinselly, Technicolor song‐dance fight fantasies copied from the cinema of neighboring India.
Nevertheless, a new audience of young and well educated Sinhalese (the name of the majority community and language here) is developing in this small tropical island nation. And Mr. Peries, the first director to risk a serious film in the Sinhalese cinema, has had a great deal to do with it.
“I wouldn't say my pictures are commercial successes, but they're finding an audience,” he said, sipping tea in his softly lit living room after a day of shooting on location near Colombo. Mr. Peries is a small, alert man with a receding forehead and long hair on the sides and back of his head. His features remind one of an American Indian and he conveys an aura of great curiosity and intelligence.
Notwithstanding a week long retrospective of his works by the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year, and subsequent festivals planned or held in Canada, England and Brazil, Mr. Peries's films have never been shown to regular audiences in the Western Hemisphere and he remains virtually unknown outside Asia, even to film buffs.
He started as a journalist, went to London for The Times of Ceylon, where he wrote pieces on the arts, began making experimental films there in his free hours and won some amateur awards.
He returned home to make documentaries for the Ceylon Government, and then, in 1955, he “chucked it” and started making his own feature films.
Fifteen years later, he is working on only his eighth film, an output that reflects his care and nurturing of every film.
Mr. Peries, who is 50 years old, pioneered not only in subject matter and style but also in taking the Sinhalese film out of the studio and onto location, using Ceylon's lush natural beauty (“Bridge on the River Kwai” was filmed here) instead of painted backdrops.
Most of his pictures deal with Ceylonese family life, often rural families, and the common pressures and conflicts that seethe therein. To summarize plots is often to sound corny, and the stories would be banal in the hands of a less gifted and sensitive director.
An example: A girl meets a boy, they fall in love. Unknown to him, she has been promised to another by her family, in the Ceylonese tradition. She bows to her family and sends her real love away with a lie, telling him her affection for him is only sisterly. He later learns the truth, but they both pain fully reconcile themselves to their permanent separation.
Mr. Peries's films move slowly, which is the way he sees real life. Even his camera movements are slow. There is little “action” in the traditional sense. He attempts to have the camera “eavesdrop on life,” establishing mood and psychology by catching the subtlest of facial expressions and gestures. He calls it “the cinema of contemplation.”
“Seemingly, on the surface, nothing happens,” he says, “and yet by the quietest of means, scene by scene, incident by incident, one hopes that the interior drama is revealed.”
New winds are also blowing in Sinhalese theater and dance, which until the turn of the century had been confined almost totally to Buddhist religious rituals and had no place as popular entertainment.
In fact, until 14 years ago there was no indigenous Sinhalese theater. All drama was staged in English either by the foreign community—the British, the Dutch and Portuguese burghers — or by highly Westernized Sinhalese. Farce and comedy dominated. Molière was the favorite. The only plays in Sinhalese were translations and adaptations from Gogol, Tennessee Williams or Brecht.
The turning point came in 1956 with the staging of “Maname” by a University of Ceylon professor. It was an ancient legend with a “Rashomon”‐like plot that had been played in the villages for centuries as Ceylonese folk theater.
The professor, E. P. Sarachandra, adapted it for the popular theater while retaining many of the old stylistic effects—mime, music, songs, chants, chorus and narrator.
From this beginning grew an original, modern Sinhalese theater, treating current social problems and using naturalistic dialogue, though often employing some of the old stylistic devices. Perhaps the best of the new Sinhalese playwrights is Henry Jayasena, a former school teacher and film star who now produces, directs and acts in his own dramas. At 39, his side burns going slightly gray, Mr. Jayasena looks like a handsome office worker trying to make ends meet. And from 9 to 5, that's what he is—the records clerk for the Department of Highways.
Mr. Jayasena is typical of the new breed of theater people here. By necessity, almost all of them have outside jobs and most work for the Government. Mr. Jayasena's job, for example, pays 430 rupees a month, which is just over $70. The plays make little or no money. The longest consecutive run is about a week, although the well‐received ones are continually restaged.
There is only one fully equipped theater in the country, the Lionel Wendt in Colombo. The rest are converted school assembly halls or worse.
“We give people theater, but we don't have the time or money to make it all good theater,” Mr. Jayasena said. Yet at the same time he feels that the accepted poverty of the new theater—and therefore the lack of dependence on the box office—gives it more freedom to experiment, particularly with controversial political and social themes, such as homosexuality.
While these treatments are undaring by Western standards and too bland for some Ceylonese intellectuals, they are subjects that the Sinhalese films, even those of Mr. Peries, have not dared to treat, largely because film producers have much more to lose financially from the censors’ axe.
“I'm not scared of the fact that I'm a government servant,” Mr. Jayasena said, “although I must say that I'm quite conscious of censorship. But if the playwright has a good cause and is not just rabble rousing and if he is subtle and clever enough and has public opinion behind him, then he can get it by the censors.”
Dance in Ceylon means only one person—Chitrasena. About 25 years ago, he started a dance school with four students and the idea of saving the centuries‐old religious dance forms and musical rhythms from extinction. Today the school has nearly 200 students, and, through Chitrasena's ingenuity, the traditional dance couldn't be more alive.
“The traditional dances weren't meant for entertainment, solely for religious rituals,” the 49‐year‐old dancer explained to a visitor over highballs made with arrack, the local coconut whisky.
To make the old dance a popular form, he turned it into theater. The ancient forms, consisting of pure dance and rhythm with no plot, performed in the round, were put on the proscenium stage, the music and movements were highly dramatized and a story was added to give it shape and social comment.
After about 20 tight years of scraping’ by with the help of a patron and a small government grant, Chitrasena is now turning a profit for the first time.
Chitrasena hardly looks like the classical notion of a dancer. He is not tall and his body is thick and muscular and radiates power. A guard on the Green Bay Packers, perhaps, but not a dance master.
He and his willowy wife, Vajira (she too has only one name), both dance solo parts in the company, and, he has composed 14 dance productions, often combining Western ballet techniques with the older Ceylonese forms.
“In the old times,” said Nihal Ratnaike, a friend of Chitrasena who reports on cultural affairs for a Colombo paper, “if there was drought, the peasants performed a special dance to the gods for rain. Now they go to the Government irrigation officer. Or if someone was very sick, they'd call the devil dancer. Now they take the patient to the nearest dispensary.
“If Chitrasena hadn't brought these dances to the stage, they would have died.”
