Reel One
“Documentaries are just not my favourite kind of movie watching. The fact is I don’t trust the little bastards. I don’t trust the nature of those who think they are superior to fiction films, I don’t trust their claim to have cornered the market on the truth, I don’t trust their inordinately high, and entirely underserved, status of bourgeois respectability.”
Strong words – and especially ironic as they form the opinion of Marcel Ophüls, one of the great masters of documentary film-making. Those who have seen his powerful The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the schizophrenic way the French responded to Nazi occupation – some becoming resistance fighters, some collaborators – will know what I mean.
Like Ophül, many film critics have reservations regarding documentaries. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remarked: “The line between the documentary and the fiction film is tenuous indeed. Both are artifacts: both are contrivances. Both are created by editing and selection. Both, wittingly or not, embody viewpoint.”
Another concern is the tendency of films to lull the critical powers of viewers. Nevertheless, it is apparent that documentaries have potential benefits – to inform, move, inspire, to promote positive social change, to strengthen group identities and to provide glimpses of the world beyond our knowledge. Presumably it was the belief in such benefits that inspired Ophüls to continue making documentaries despite his professional mistrust of the form.
Reel Two
It all started in 1926 with the following statement: “Of course, Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value.” Thus wrote John Grierson -the founder of the pioneering British documentary movement, who ran the artistically-free General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit - in a review of the sequel to the revolutionary Nanook of the North (1921). This ‘actuality’ film (i.e. made prior to Grierson’s coinage), the first example of what was later called docu-fiction, was directed by the American pioneer Robert Flaherty.
While this was the first use of “documentary” in connection with film, what we understand by the word precedes Grierson. In fact, documentary can be traced back to the very birth of cinema, for it began in 1895 with documentary material such as the films of the Lumière brothers – The Arrival of the Train, A Sea Bath, Demolition, and Leaving the Factory.
But audiences soon lost interest in watching trains arriving at stations (at first inexperience was such that audiences fled their seats with the screening of an oncoming train). As the theoretician Brian Winston remarked: “Audiences in the 1890s required what they expected of older media – stories, narratives with beginnings, middles, dénouements, ends. Only when Flaherty began to structure his actuality material so that it might satisfy those needs could Grierson detect a new form and name it ‘documentary.’”
As it happens, in the adventurous early documentary era, Ceylon inspired one of the finest examples ever made, an experimental work that featured extraordinary modernist visual-sound collages. In 1971, while I attended a British Film Institute course on Realist cinema, and before I had visited the island, there was a screening of Song of Ceylon (1935), produced by Grierson at the GPO for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board. It was directed by Basil Wright, who was among a number of talented film-makers working for Grierson. This screening remains the most significant cinematic experience of my life.
Wright started with the parochial The Country Comes to Town and O’er Hill and Dale (1932). He then travelled to the Caribbean, where he demonstrated a penchant for exotic locations and developed a symphonic style – an ideal preparation for Song of Ceylon - with Windmill in Barbados and Cargo from Jamaica (1933).
I viewed Song of Ceylon in Wright’s company. Afterwards I asked him about filming in Ceylon. He said the island was the most entrancing country he had worked in. (See “An Island on the Screen: The 70th Anniversary of Song of Ceylon”, The Sunday Times, October 31, 2004.) He later directed The Waters of Time (1950), World without End (1953), co-directed with Paul Rotha, and Immortal Land (1958).
Song of Ceylon wasn’t the first documentary about the island, for there are at least two much earlier actuality films, Charles Urban’s A Ramble through Ceylon (1910) and Curious Scenes in India (1912). On YouTube can be found James FitzPatrick’s travelogues Charming Ceylon (1931) and Tropical Ceylon (1932) - a far cry from the quality of Song of Ceylon - which have condescending, sometimes racist narrations employing words such as “primitive”, “child-like”, and “effeminacy”. Wright had the intelligence to choose passages from Robert Knox for his script.
Reel Three
During the Second World War British military film units shot much footage, some of which, concerning the British Eastern Fleet operating out of Trincomalee, has been gathered together. The indigenous documentary film industry began at Independence in 1948 when equipment from the disbanded film units was given to the government. Consequently the Government Film Unit (GFU) was born.
You would be forgiven for not realizing that September 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the GFU, established to produce documentary films on development, social and artistic aspects of the newly-independent nation. These documentaries were not only viewed in cinemas prior to the main feature, but also in impromptu fashion in villages, thanks to vehicles equipped with projectors and screens.
Although the country was seeking a post-Independence identity, the lack of Ceylonese technical personnel necessitated the recruitment of outsiders – in the first instance two Italians, Gulio Petroni and Federico Serra. Restricted to one room in the Department of Irrigation, the fledgling GFU began by producing short news films such as Ceylon’s Farewell to the Sanchi Relics (1949), and Air Ceylon’s New Wings (1949), regarding the delivery of two Skymaster planes.
Within a year the GFU was shifted to an ex-British armed services cinema on a Moratuwa coconut estate that had a dubbing theatre and film processing laboratory. There the first documentaries of significance, Hill Capital (1950) and New Horizons (1951), were produced, both directed by Petroni. The latter explained the government’s colonization programme, but Prime Minister DS Senanayake didn’t appreciate it and Petroni departed in 1952.
The Film Producers’ Guild in London sent Ralph Keene, a leading light of the second wave of British documentary-makers, who had directed New Britain (1940), Crofters (1944), and Cyprus is an Island (1946). Keene had travelled to Ceylon before to make String of Beads (1947) for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, but he lacked Wright’s feeling for the culture. His first GFU film, which he wrote rather than directed, was Fishermen of Negombo (1952). The director was George Wickremasinghe, consequently the pioneer of indigenous documentary-making.
Keene then directed Heritage of Lanka (1952), about Mihintale, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Sri Pada, and Nelungama (1953), the story of a village and its people. He left for Malaysia soon afterwards and Wickremasinghe became head of the GFU.
Reel Four
In 1954, the GFU was shifted to its present site in Polhengoda, equipped with an especially-built studio, editing suite, laboratory and film library. Now was the time for Ceylonese directors to cut their teeth. Amid the scores of films made during the halcyon years of the 1950s, Lester James Peries’ Conquest of the Dry Zone (1954), on the measures adopted to combat malaria, received a special mention at the Venice Film Festival.
George Wickremasinghe’s The Kandy Esala Perahera (1958) won awards at three international film festivals. Pragnasoma Hettiarachchi’s Makers, Motives and Materials (1958), concerning the making of traditional handicrafts, was awarded the Golden Mercury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Irwin Dassanaike’s The Living Wild (1959), on Ceylon’s wildlife, and incorporating unique footage of Veddahs, received an honourable mention at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Pragnasoma Hettiarachchi’s Rhythms of the People (1959), about southern folk songs and dances, received an honourable mention at the Karlovy Vary International Festival.
There was a notable non-GFU production during this period, Englishman Mike Wilson’s Beneath the Seas of Ceylon (1957), the first underwater film concerning the island, sponsored like Song of Ceylon and String of Beads by the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board.
By the mid-1960s the GFU had reached a state of creative stagnation, partly due to the uninspiring films commissioned - Ceylon Toys (1961), Ceylon Asbestos (1963), and Poultry (1966). Basil Wright expressed willingness to help out, as the following letter he wrote to George Wickremasinghe indicates:
“The length of my stay in Ceylon would depend on the size and scope of the film or films to be made . . . As regards technical assistance, I have the impression that you have a well-equipped and experienced Unit, members of which I would be glad to work with.” But Wright never made his return to the island. Bureaucratic indifference resulted in a consummate opportunity being squandered.
However, the renowned German director Paul Zils joined the GFU during 1968-69. A favourite of Goebbel, he had fled Nazism but was arrested in Bali by the British in the Second World War and made a POW. But his film-making was appreciated and on release he was appointed head of Information Films of India, similar to the GFU, and directed many excellent films on the country, pioneering the Indian documentary movement. He also made Buddhism in Ceylon (1963). On his second visit he directed Meditation (1968), a beautiful, reflective docu-fiction about a middle-aged doctor who, after reviewing his life, decides to become a Buddhist monk.
My thumbnail documentation of the documentary in Sri Lanka ceases at this point. After 1970 the GFU never regained its former glory: besides, the ‘pure’ form of documentary epitomized by Song of Ceylon was over. A new age of non-fiction film had dawned. And a decade later the advent of television in Sri Lanka was inevitably deleterious. Nevertheless, the GFU remains to celebrate its 60th birthday.
With thanks to Tissa Abeysekara, Noel Cruz, and ‘Jayadeva’ for some specific information |
E-mail