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TOLLYGUNGE

REPORT

inhalese cinema has, somewhat, made a great stride in sphere of making good films with social relevance and aesthetic sensibilities. “Our films,” said Lester James Peries, the pioneer of Sinhalese cinema, “do count in many ways and meaningfully convey a system in which our society and people are placed.” The remark is significant because recently we came across two films from Sri Lanka, made by Lester James Peries and Prasanna Vithanage, shown in India, highlight an essence that films are cultural practices that grow out of specific materialities, historicities and temporalities. Two films are The Mansion By The Lake, directed by Lester James Peries and August Sun (Ira Madiyama), directed by Prasanna Vithanage. Both the films invite a discourse-mode leading to a faith that ‘inter-texuality is not’, as said Janet Staiger, “simply a moment in a text or some relation between two texts but rather a central continuing relational activity. It involves the remote determination of processing a filmic narrative by repeatedly referring to other texts. It can be best comprehended as an ongoing circulation of textuality”. It is surprising to note that nearly after 20 years, Lester James Peries could make his new film The Mansion By The Lake, a film of intense introspection and past, looming memories of inmates of The Mansion ... who by the lapse of time have gradually metamorphosed into some non-entity, a tragic tale filling the space of the film. Lester James Peries made himself famous by making films of time and change and its impact on the members of the family/society. Right from the maiden film, The Line Of Destiny (Rekawa), to Changes in the Village (Gamperaliya Amperalay), made in 1956 and 1963 respectively, he clung to the niche cinema tackling home of roots. It may be mentioned Gamperaliya won the first ever Golden Peacock award at IFFI, 1965, held in Delhi. Satyajit Ray was the Chairman of the Jury board consisting of eminent filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Andrzej Wajda and Georges Sadoul. Here again Lester James Peries, at the age of 84, was impelled by his vision to look back into the changing values of the present generation who are prone to growing and grafting education from foreign countries, while losing track of their own roots. Said the director: “An unknown pull and spell of Anglo-mania nearly help supplant the roots and lands of those who are in an escapade try to copycat and mimic outsiders at the cost of their losing ground in life. This is inevitable but quite tragic and there is no escape from this infatuation”.

In the film, Lester James Peries falls back upon a wee plot. After a long stay in London, Sujata Rajasuriya returns to Sri Lanka with her daughter Aruni. Her sister Sita, who sacrificed her life running the family mansion, is waiting for them. In the taxi which takes them back home, they dream of rediscovering the happiness they once had. But what once was, is no more. The Mansion, the splendour of bygone age, is doomed to disappear. And with it is shattered the last ‘illusions of a dying class’. The film has the same ‘elegiac touch’ of Ray’s great opus The Music Room (Jalsaghar), resonating with similar livid vibes. The film rips through vividly realised characters with the collapse of the feudal social order and the emergence of a new class. To understand the text and meaning of the experiment and treatment of the social theme, one needs to understand the significance of film and situate it in the wider cultural discourse and cultural narratives. This is particularly important in the case of countries like Sri Lanka which can lay claim to rich and vibrant traditions of art and literature extending over a period of nearly fifteen centuries. Said the expert critic Wimal Dissanayake, Senior Fellow of the East-West Centre, Honolulu: “The semioticised space occupied by cinema in such countries derives its meaning and definition in a large measure from the codes and conventions associated with other art forms”.

Lester James Peries who received the Life-time Achievement Award from the President, Government of India, for his ‘rich contribution’ to world cinema visited Kolkata thrice. He personally came to Delhi to receive the prestigious award a year back. While in the city this critic met this prodigy and his wife Sumitra Peries, an eminent filmmaker of Sri Lanka, and had discussions with them. Lester and Sumitra love talking about cinema and its social impact on human life. Said he, “I don’t think cinema has achieved its goal in the span of its 100 years. It gave us many things no doubt but I personally believe there is more to come from cinema. Its unending potentials are yet to be tapped by us. But with my age and weight of ill health, I don’t think I can do any more. Here lies the hope for the posterity to explore it and deliver it to the society, the true recipient of aesthetics of art and social questions”.

The other film that has found huge response in India and Fribourg International Film Festival, Switzerland is Prasanna Vithanage’s August Sun. This is Prasanna Vithanage’s fifth feature film, the previous film being Death On A Full Moon (Purahanda Kaluwara), produced by the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation. Though the film won the Grand Prix at Amiens Film Festival, France, it was banned by the Government in Sri Lanka for a certain span of time. It has since become the most successful film in the more than a century history of cinema in Sri Lanka.

It is a cathartic film in the sense that it tackles history of time related to ethnic strife that has rocked Sri Lanka for the last few decades. According to the director, the film deals with three stories in different locations during one long, hot August day in Sri Lanka, which is devastated by civil war. Strands of three tales move like this: Duminda, a soldier on leave, visits a brothel where he makes a surprising discovery. Chamari, a faithful and devoted wife, set out in search of her husband who has disappeared at the front. Eleven-year old Arafat travels on the roads of exodus with his family, trying to escape the advance of the rebel forces. It seems the director, like Theo Angelopoulos, is traumatised by the raging strife ripping through the whole of central Europe today.

Said he, “This is war, with its daily implication. Each of the three protagonists’ lives, as simple and trivial as they may be, is deeply perturbed by the events. Literally governed by the civil war, all three describe the repercussions it has on them.” One could discover in the film a human conscience, torn between duty and morals, and an original and unconventional way of presenting those, alas, too numerous anonymous wars which are kept away from the media circles. According to the director ‘ethnic strife’ needs to be looked in the light of historic roots and past referral antecedents responsible for this catastrophe. The film takes a rather hard post-modernist approach to the subject for its solution. The journey of the director follows a trajectory concerning all the protagonists, lacerated by scars of civil war in Sri Lanka. The way they get accustomed to the misfortunes of life often comes close to fatalism. However, the sense of topical, the historic and mythical perfect the narrative of a fragile happiness and of a both concerned and uneasy existence where politics and sociology meet.

Both the films in a way place post-modern theory and practice together and suggest how everything is cultural and always mediated by representations. They suggest that notion of truth, reference and the non-cultural real have not ceased to exist but that they are no longer unproblematic issues, assumed to be self-evident and self-justifying. If there is post-modern thought, embedded in the strife-torn ambience of the films, is not degeneration into ‘hyper-reality’ bit a questioning of what reality can mean and how we can come to know it. Finally, one can assume that both Lester James Peries and Prasanna Vithanage, the veteran-most and the middle-aged directors, have used the medium to enlighten and illuminate things like alienation, loneliness, rootlessness, lack of passion on hand and hatred, wrath, revenge, ethnic parochialism and human carnage on the other. They, like Antonioni, nearly confirm that the man who tells a story is a human being, with his own points of view, his own opinions, his own sincerity. Through the stories (realities!) he uncovers rather than imagines, the director brings forth his own experience as a human being and hands it over to us. Each viewer will see it and judge it according to what lies within him. The important things is that the stories open the debate by presenting the question/problems with sincerity.