Mystery of the disappearing film audience

Public Enterprise in Film Development-Success and Failure in Sri Lanka by Dr. D.B.Nihalsingha. Reviewed by Wilfred Jayasuriya. Published by Trafford Publishing, Victoria, Canada.

Dr. D.B.Nihalsingha has written the story of the Film Corporation of which he was the founding CEO. Its title "Public Enterprise in Film Development" indicates the theme and its subtitle "Success and Failure in Sri Lanka" elaborates on it. It is more than a story of the Film Corporation, because it is the story of film development in Sri Lanka since 1972 as well.

He has written on the economy of public enterprise in a larger and more subject inclusive book, which originated as his Ph.D dissertation. I was fortunate to read it before it was published. It dealt with institutions better known to the public: the Bank of Ceylon, the Insurance Corporation and the Building Materials Corporation. The privatization of the Insurance Corporation which took place a couple of years ago is still being canvassed as a doubtful case while the Building Materials Corporation's demise has not provoked many tears of either anger or sorrow. The role of the Bank of Ceylon as an over-dominant player in the economy has been a many sided disputation.

The theme of public versus private enterprise does not arouse the passions it once did and a review of the book on the ups and downs of the Film Corporation, written some two decades after its virtual demise, can focus on themes which are incidental to the general. I intend to do that but I shall keep an eye on the main narrative line of the "rise and fall”.

What fascinated me in this book was its lesson in proper management of a film business, for that is the essential core of the matter of enterprise, whether private or public. Nihalsingha was fortunate in being seconded (from his main job as the Director of the Government Film Unit, film being as Robert Frost puts it in one of his poems, both his "vocation and his avocation"), as CEO of the newly formed Film Corporation in 1972. He was thereby able to mix business with pleasure or rather find pleasure in his business.

His narrative shows the great love he had for his job, how it empowered the Ceylon / Sri Lankan film world, which had been struggling to be born since the 1950s, into a "true national cinema”. In the course of the narrative he brings out the intricacies and ambiguities of film management, in production, distribution and exhibition, finance and quality control. For the manager of film as an enterprise it is a commodity in the market. But it is a commodity which has to be handled by an expert.

Anyone interested in management will be impressed at what was achieved and the meticulous way in which that achievement was wrought. And he quotes examples from France and a couple of other countries, which passionately wanted to resist the overwhelming attractions of American films, to show that neglect of distribution was the key to their failure. In France and even Europe, despite lavish funding of production, American films dominate 72% of the screen time. I feel that this is an insight which is original to this writer and therefore a good reason for the publication of this study.

This is an extremely well composed document, full of "wise saws and modern instances" as Shakespeare has it, which in today's language means, clear statistical tables and well placed quotations, a model research document if you will, which keeps the main line of argument well in mind while presenting plenty of telling details. A reviewer of the book, seeing the picture presented there as an event in the past, is also stimulated to ask a couple of questions about the assumptions on which the argument is based.
This was a time when foreign cinema dominated the Sri Lankan screens to the tune of 80% of the screen time, giving Sri Lankan films a minority status of 20%. Was this a result of market demand?

Nihalsingha argues that it was a case where the then film private sector either wittingly or unwittingly, muzzled a demand which existed. He points out that the result of the interventions of the Film Corporation unleashed a subverted demand for both domestically produced film and for a different type of Indian film. Nihalsingha admits this rise was at the cost of a fall of some three million in attendance for English films but argues that it was a very tiny minority, especially as audience for both Indian and domestically made Sinhala films grew to 74.4 million a year.

Nihalsingha contends that not only did the audience for Sinhala films double, even the audience for the Tamil films doubled as well. At the same time, the Corporation's focus on excellent imported and better Indian films contributed to the increasing attendance alongside the profits which grew as well. The intriguing factor is how the Film Corporation imported films which flopped in India for a pittance, which became massive box-office hits. 'Geet' and 'Abhiman' ran for three years continuously.

The result was that film attendance for both Indian and domestically produced films surged from 30 million in 1971 to 74.4 million in 1979 while the screen time for the Sri Lankan films more than doubled to 58%. Nihalsingha holds that there was no parallel in the world for this achievement and the publishers, Trafford Publishing, Victoria, Canada, say as much in their publicity handouts.
This was in just six years. That was the remarkable achievement, which the book documents.

The Film Corporation under Nihalsingha created a superbly well articulated system of distribution islandwide, which was the key to the success of the "national cinema" in his time. This ensured that each film was shown in every cinema in an allotted circuit- something which was unprecedented and has no equal in the world. The Presidential Committee Report of 1985 which Nihalsingha quotes acknowledged as much.

I was sometimes intrigued, when a film, I wanted to see, suddenly disappeared to another town, as to how a film is moved from one cinema to another and this book explains the brilliant consumer responsive scheme, based on "an order of precedence" or a protocol, which Nihalsingha and his colleagues invented to satisfy producer, exhibitor and filmgoer all together. As he says, the key to the success of a national cinema is not only production, importation, exhibition but above all, distribution.

Part of the book is about art films and formula films. Nihalsingha shows that the formula films are the staple - for good reason: they satisfy an audience need as the fact that 80% of the 3500 feature films produced the world over demonstrates.

Art films like Satyajit Ray's "Apu Sansar" series apparently could not find room for exhibition in normal film circuits in India. Nihalsingha's claim is that by increasing the audience for formula films so spectacularly he made it possible for artists like Lester James Peries, Titus Thotawatte and Vasantha Obeysekera to produce art films and make a commercial success of them. Formula films in the early days like in the 1950s were following Indian formulas or film masala because the only persons skilled in directing and producing films were Indians. Thus the first Sinhala film "Broken Promise" with Eddie Jayamanne and Rukmani Devi was directed by an Indian but the script was a transcript from the stage drama which B.A.W. Jayamanne had written and produced. It was not slavishly formulaic Indian therefore. The weaning of the Sinhala film from the Indian wet nurse is part of the story that is told in this book.

As I read this book, I could not help but wonder whether the story of the success and failure of the film as mass entertainment in Sri Lanka, whether the story of the success and failure of the "national cinema" was also the story of the success and failure of nationalist policies in the Sri Lankan polity as a whole? Even a cowboy story with its basic morality, its discrimination between good and evil, its symbolism of the white horse and black horse taught a basic morality which seemed not limited to a particular religion or culture.

The audience in the 1950s and 60s who may have understood only a couple of words of English got the message and responded with cheers when the hero appeared wearing his white hat on his white charger. Isn't it fair to say that the success of the Film Corporation and the "national cinema" was achieved at the cost of losing access to that wider world of freedom of the mind, which we lost with the abolition of English and the enthroning of Sinhala Only and Tamil also? The freedom of the mind which India managed to retain by allowing freedom for English and all fourteen of the regional languages to play their role in the development of Indian culture.

Still, the great achievement of Nihalsingha and the Film Corporation is an indisputable fact: the doubling of the film audience between 1971 and 1979 when it rose from 30 to 74.4 million. It was the golden age where everyone, the exhibitor, the producer, and above all the audience for Sinhala and Indian films benefited.

But this achievement was not sustained. Over the years since 1979, the attendance declined uncontrollably, to 12 million in 2004, despite lavishing of state funds for production (especially in recent years).

How did this disaster of a lost 62 million audience happen?

That is the mystery, which this book attempts to document and explain. The doubling of the audience took place in the time when the Film Corporation was founded and rose to its zenith. It was also the time when the Film Corporation was headed by Nihalsingha as CEO. He was only 30 years old when he took up his post, having worked as Director of the Government Film Unit (GFU) at the age of 28. Nihalsingha's youth and his passion for the job may have been a contributory factor in the remarkable success of the Film Corporation.

Youth does not care for politicians as much as the elder and it was fortunate that Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike intervened when Nihalsingha clashed with the then Minister of Information and took the Film Corporation and Nihalsingha under her motherly wing. After that Nihalsingha had a free hand and youth and expertise had its say.

Nihalsingha's tale of the subsequent downfall of the cinema since 1979 befits a cinematic tragedy. He is devastating in his estimate of Anton Wickremasinghe as the primary architect of the downfall of the Sri Lankan cinema and of the Film Corporation, devoting an entire chapter to justify that judgment.

He is equally critical of the part played by the film private sector: He sees them as genetically devoid of the vaunted private sector innovation. That deficiency brought about their downfall in 1971. Since the re-privatization in 2001, the film private sector has been enveloped with the same lethargy as the pre-1971 private sector displayed.Nihalsingha's book is an important contribution to the study of the Sri Lankan cinema. It is also a significant contribution to the study of public organizations.