cinemas of the south

Lester James Peries: A Pioneer of a Tradition

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In order to understand the true dimensions of national cinema, one has to relate it to, and anchor it in, the wider cultural discourse that shapes the lives and imaginations of people. Questions of history, tradition, cultural formation, social change and ideologies of nationhood figure very prominently in this endeavour. The way in which cinema inserts itself into the existing and interlocking cultural practices and the ways in which it draws on them are extremely important in this regard.

When Lester James Peries' The Changing Village was made, Sri Lankan society was undergoing a transformation that had deep and far-reaching implications for the lives of the generality of the people. The year 1956 marked an important milestone in the developmental trajectory of the Sri Lankan society. S.W.R-D. Banda-ranaike was swept into power in a populist wave that was determined to eliminate the residual elements of the colonial structure and apparatus. He put in place an administration that made Sinhalese the official language of the country and the language of higher education. The mainly English-speaking, westernised elite that had dominated Sri Lankan society had given way to an indigenous elite that was securely rooted in traditional culture. More and more people from rural areas and backwaters of society were securing important jobs in the upper echelons of administration and the institutes of higher learning. There was a discernible new-found interest and pride in what was native and indigenous. Moreover, no doubt, as a consequence of these changes and transformations, Sinhalese arts and letters began to flourish with a renewed vigour and sense of purpose. Thanks in large part to the efforts of writers such as Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Gunadasa Amarasekera, K. Jayatilake, and Siri Gunasinghe, Sinhalese fiction was making rapid headway as a modern medium of creative expression that sought to reconfigure significant aspects of contemporary reality, while Sinhalese poetry was entering into a new and uncharted territory with a great measure of self-confidence. With the production of Sarachchandra's operatic stage play Maname in 1956, modern Sinhalese drama had announced its entry into a period of unprecedented vitality and creative growth. Literary critics were exuberantly productive as they sought to combine the best theorisations and conceptualities of the East and the West. All these changes in cognition, consciousness and cultural practices, the extension of the representational boundaries and widening of symbolic spaces, served to create an ever-expanding and critically discriminating public for arts and letters. The Changing Village connected well with these changes, fortifying the then existing national resolve to bring about a cultural renaissance. We have sought to describe at length the film The Changing Village and its relationship to the then ruling cultural discourses, because of the intrinsic value of the film as well as its importance in understanding the growth of Sinhalese cinema. We also felt that it is important to underline the complex anchorage of a film in its social and cultural setting.

Silence of the Heart (Gollum Hadawatha, 1965)

Martin Wickramasinghe's novel Gamperaliya was the first of a trilogy that sought, in terms of conscious literary art, to chart the rise of the middle class in Sri Lanka and its possible decay and the inexorable influence of urbanisation. Peries made films out of the other two novels as well. They are Age of Kali (Kaliyugaya, 1983) and End of an Era (Yuganthaya, 1985). The former depicts a rural family caught in the clutches of urbanisation, and suffering a spiritual decline while the latter contextualises the conflict between the capitalist class and the young rebel that it inevitably gives rise to. Both these films underlined Peries' penchant for exploring social experience through carefully located inter-personal relationships. Both films were shown at several international film festivals.

Lester James Peries is, in many ways, a literary oriented filmmaker. This is not only because his sensibility has been inflected by literature but also because many of his works, which of course varied significantly in terms of achieved art, were based on literary works. Silence of the Heart (Gollum Hadawatha, 1965), Five Acres (Akkara Paha, 1969), The Treasure (Nidhanaya, 1970), Madol Duva (1976), Ahasin Polovata (1978), Pinhamy (1979), The Village in the Jungle (Baddegama, 1981), Age of Kali, End of an Era and Sunset (Avara Gira, 1995) are examples of this predilection. They were all based on novels and short stories, while Dasa Nisa (1975) was based on a stage play. He was also drawn towards history, and he made what one could describe as historical films, two in Sinhalese and one in English; The Message (Sandeshaya, 1960), God King (1974), and Brave Puran Appu (Veera Puranappu, 1978). None of these films were critical successes; they failed to carry complete conviction and fell far short of the standards displayed by him in his more accomplished work.

As a filmmaker, Peries' primary interest and his undoubted gifts were focused on portraying sensitively the complexities of personal relationships. He took great pains to tell in images the many-sided nature of human personalities and the diverse entanglements of human beings. This predilection of his was allied to an aesthetic of neo-realism and in many of his films this combination worked well for him. However, it could also be a limiting factor, constricting his social vision. Many of the younger contemporaries of his made the point that he had failed to engage fully and boldly with the complex social issues that were convulsing society and took refuge in a personal cinema that paid scant attention to the turbulent social currents of the time. He was chastised for failing to challenge the values that regulate the flow of power in society. Similar accusations were, of course, made against Satyajit Ray in India at roughly the same time. The younger filmmakers who levelled this charge had a point; had Peries confronted more courageously the social tensions of his time, his films would have established a greater resonance with the younger movie-going public. In films like White Flowers for the Dead (Ahasin Polovata, 1977) and Between Two Worlds (Delovak Atara, 1966) which displayed a craftsmanship of a high order and preoccupation with complex psychologies, one sensed this limitation of Peries, much to the detriment of his accomplishments.

The strength of Peries resides in his deep engagement with the complexities of personal relationships and the probing into the inner recesses of the human mind. He sought to accomplish this through an unobtrusive cinema which honoured narrative closure, character identification, sequential editing, non-reflexive camera, frame balance and image continuity. He was meticulous as a craftsman most of the time, without ever yielding to the temptations of stylistic fancy-work. White Flowers for the Dead and Between Two Worlds bear this out. Between Two Worlds is set in the city and is an exploration of the inner convolutions generated by human guilt. His decision to focus on urban life was a significant departure in that there seems to have evolved the belief among many filmmakers that it is only rural life that lends itself to serious cinematic treatment. This film appeared to have stirred the interest of many young film directors. Similarly, White Flowers for the Dead reflects his desire to represent cinematically the complicated workings of the human mind. Based on a novel that sought to call attention to questions of marital tensions, patriarchy, the subjectivity and agency of women, Lester James Peries once again aimed to dissect the protean shape of guilt and repentance, and foreground the moral coordinates that define human life.

Bred in the westernised upper middle-class, and a Roman Catholic by birth in a predominantly Buddhist country where the majority of the people lived in villages, at times he bent over backwards to infuse a Buddhist ethos into his work, as is clearly evidenced in films like Yellow Robes (Ransalu, 1967) and The Message. His films, by and large, were not stupendous commercial successes, although they were not box-office failures either. A film that did win for him commercial success was Silence of the Heart (Golu Hadavatha, 1969). Based on an extremely popular love story by one of the most popular novelists at the time, Karunasena Jayalath, this film explored the agonies and ecstasies of young love bringing out both the universal and local shapes of human emotion.

The Village in the Jungle (Baddegama, 1981)

In 1980, Peries made The Village in the Jungle, based on the well-known work of the same name by Leonard Woolf. Commenting on his novel, Woolf observed that, "The jungles and the people who lived in the Sinhalese jungle villages fascinated, almost obsessed me in Ceylon. They continued to obsess me in London , in Putney or Bloomsbury, and in Cambridge." He added, "The Village in the Jungle" was a novel in which I tried to somehow or other vicariously to live their lives. It was also, in some curious way, the symbol of the anti-imperialism which had been growing upon me more and more in my last years in Ceylon."

The story of The Village in the Jungle is set in an isolated village in the south of Sri Lanka some one hundred years ago. It chronicles the trials and tribulations of a group of villagers living in a tiny, isolated community. Surrounded by the ferociously hostile jungle, they have to contend with a colonial administration and legal system which is as corrupt as it is irrelevant to their daily concerns. The Village in the Jungle is, then, as much about the hardships and misery of a group of peasants trying to eke out a living in inhospitable conditions as it is about the insensitivity and callousness of the colonial administrative machinery. Their lives are shaped by the environment, the climate, the overpowering presence of the jungle as well as by their raw emotions and cultural practices.

Lester James Peries has succeeded, by and large, in capturing the mood and informing vision of the original novel. In the original novel, the jungle stands as a formidable and pervasive symbol, dominating the pages, and adding a depth of meaning and perspective to all that takes place in the village of Baddegama. This aspect of the novel fails to find an adequate articulation, mainly due to the weaknesses of the script. This film was selected for showing on the Channel Four TV network in London .

Apart from making films for adults, Peries, like Satyajit Ray, was interested in making pictures for juveniles and children. His Madol Duva, based on a popular novel for teenagers by Martin Wickramasinghe, was largely intended for a juvenile audience; Pinhamy was addressed to children. He made this film with the intention of promoting a children's cinema in Sri Lanka . It deals with a story that focuses on the tender relations between a group of children and animals.

Lester James Peries is the author of a significant body of work. Apart from a few failures like Dasa Nisa and Sunset, his films have generally won wide national and international critical acclaim. Indeed, he, if anyone, can be described as the originator of an artistic cinema in Sri Lanka. In our judgment, the film that best captures his indubitable talents as a filmmaker of the first rank is The Treasure. This is a stylish, absorbing and well-integrated film based on a short story by a leading Sinhalese writer, G. B. Senanayake. A stern aesthetic guides the flow of images in this film. Its accurate eyes and ears externalise the inner conflict of a mind battling with itself. The film persuasively and cinematically probes into the tangled emotions of a man who was led by sinister forces he could not conquer, to the brutal murder of his wife. It is a film that provides us with a complex pleasure and insight.

Lester James Peries, then, will be honoured as the filmmaker who inspired a whole generation of young and gifted directors, who laid the foundation for a serious national cinema and who was instrumental in shaping a vigorous film culture in the island.

Ashley Ratnavibhushana
© FIPRESCI 2006

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