Seeing ‘Song of Ceylon’ again
Kala Korner
A friend recently alerted me with an internet link to view the award-winning documentary ‘Song of Ceylon’ made in the mid-1930s. What a satisfying experience! I remember seeing the film several decades ago but had only faint recollections of the highly acclaimed documentary.
Directed by Basil Wright, the 40-minute documentary was produced by John Grierson. Made during the colonial administration, it had been commissioned by the Empire Tea Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Board and was obviously intended to promote tea – the major export product. Basil Wright and John Taylor handled the cinematography.
Not many may remember that Lionel Wendt did the narration which was mainly extracts from Robert Knox’s ‘An Historical Relation of Ceylon’.
The film described as one of the most critically acclaimed products of the documentary film movement,won first place in the documentary class, and the ‘Prix du Gouvernement’ for the best film in all classes, at the Brussels International Film Festival of 1935.
Author and film critic Graham Greene hailed it as a cinematic masterpiece.
When director Wright toured Ceylon in a month-long search for inspiration, he was enthralled with the Buddhist sculptures of Gal Vihara in Polonnaruwa and the massive dagobas in Anuradhapura.
Wright and Taylor spent four months on location in Sri Lanka in the early part of 1934. Most of the filming took place in villages surrounded by rice fields, in coastal areas where fishermen operated sail-propelled catamarans and among the relics of the past, in the ruined cities among their temples, gigantic sculptures and fabulous carvings.
Fascinated by Ceylon, Wright sought to reveal Ceylon’s spiritual and traditional life, while simultaneously demonstrating its contemporary connections to Britain, Empire and the global marketplace, it was noted.
Though all the footage was shot there was no technology in the country to record sound. It had to be done in the studio where Wright had his first opportunity to experiment with sound recording. Walter Leigh as composer,experimented in the studio to create a number of sound effects.
A note on the studio work states: There followed an innovative burst of activity, drawing on Soviet ideas of sound in counterpoint to the images (following Sergei Eisenstein’s idea that sound could be another part of the montage). With no recordings made in Ceylon, they produced a soundtrack of layered synthetic sounds and atmospheric music. Leigh included metal sheets struck with hammers and chromatic tubular bells.
Well-known Kandyan dancer Ukkuwa and drummer Suramba who appeared in the film went to London with Lionel Wendt and taught a church choir to sing the ‘vannams’ which were a prominent feature. Wendt recorded the narration.
“In ‘Song of Ceylon’ Wright’s inventive weaving of sound and image similarly used montage to convey movement, reveal connections and to offer a critical commentary. The film shifts between the ancient and the modern, the commercial and the spiritual, the global and the local, the coloniser and the colonised,” a critic wrote.
Producer Graham Greene described it as ‘an example to all directors of perfect construction and the perfect application of montage’. Renowned film writer Roger Manvell claimed that Song of Ceylon was “possibly the greatest British-produced film in any category up to 1935″- a clear indication of the status it acquired within a particular history of British cinema. It was commented that the film was embraced and celebrated for its significance as an art film, not for its contribution to Empire tea marketing.
Using the unused footage of ‘Song of Ceylon’, Wright made four travelogues. They were titled ‘Dance of the Harvest’, ‘ Negombo Coast’, Villages of Lanka’, and ‘Monsoon Island’.
For those interested the link is http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/486
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