Basil Wright’s other songs of Ceylon

Those who have seen Basil Wright’s classic documentary The Song of Ceylon (1934) may well believe that this was the only film he made about the country. It wasn’t: four other short documentaries were produced with used and unused material from the 23,000 feet of black-and-white film shot for the 38-minute The Song of Ceylon. I was mistaken, even though I’m a film historian of sorts, until I stumbled upon these films while scrutinizing the website of an extensive film history project, Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire. The project, which spanned the period 2007-2010, united Birkbeck, University of London, and University College London, with the archives of the British Film Institute (BFI), Imperial War Museum, and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum; the aim being to catalogue films, predominantly documentaries, relating to the colonies.

Colonial Film staged a series of events intended “to enhance the understanding of the colonial film collections”, for the admirable project mission was “to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire”. These events included two major international conferences and eleven seminars. One seminar, held in November 2009, was titled “Ceylon”, with a discussion led by Prof. David Trotter of Cambridge University. Significantly, only two other countries, India and the West Indies, were examined individually. Was any ex-colonized Sri Lankan with documentary knowledge invited to this seminar by the ex-colonizers?

The Colonial Film catalogue lists 6,000 films. Over 350 of the most important are presented with extensive critical sections – titled Synopsis, Context, and Analysis – written in the distinctive language of film critique in which I became immersed as a film student - and 150 can be viewed online. Altogether, the catalogue lists 70 films of Empire made in Ceylon from around the turn of the 20th century to Independence in 1948.

However, some of them were shot in India as well as Ceylon. Eighteen of the 70 are accompanied by critical sections (some of them restricted to a synopsis) and eight of them can be viewed online, including The Song of Ceylon (much improved quality compared to what’s on offer at YouTube) and, thankfully, one of Wright’s other ‘songs of Ceylon’. Colonial Film is an invaluable resource base not only for film historians but sociologists and anthropologists. Together with the recent cataloguing and digitalization of Sri Lanka’s post-Independence Government Film Unit (GFU) documentaries, the history of this cinematic form in the country during the first seven decades of the 20th century is now well recorded, and likely to be enhanced by an associated project by the BFI, the very recently published (and therefore unread by myself) Empire and Film, and Film and the End of Empire, both volumes edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe.

To understand the evolution of Wright’s films, attention must be shifted to England and the creatively-autonomous Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film unit, headed by John Grierson, who coined the word “documentary” and was the pioneer of the British documentary movement. The EMB was created to promote the Empire’s produce within Britain “to help form an imperial economic bloc”. In 1933, the EMB was commissioned by the Empire Tea Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Board to produce four one-reeler promotional films on Ceylon, and Basil Wright, the first recruit of the EMB, was chosen to direct them, with John Taylor as cameraman.

However, during the four-month schedule in Ceylon in early 1933, Wright, having a free hand, decided to film other footage with a more elaborate project in mind, inspired by his experience of Buddhism, the beauty of the island, and his uneasiness with British colonial rule. “I started shooting the film with a logic I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t imagine why I was forcing myself or being forced by something inside me to shoot the material,” Sari Thomas reports in “Basil Wright on Art, Anthropology and the Documentary”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4/4 (Autumn 1979).

On returning to London, by which time the EMB had become the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, Grierson informed Wright regarding his proposed Ceylon film that he “wouldn’t accept anything except something special”. The result of course, was something more special than Grierson could have hoped for - The Song of Ceylon, considered one of the finest documentaries ever made, an experimental work that featured extraordinary modernist visual-sound collages. No surprise, then, that it won first place in the documentary class, and the “Prix du Gouvemement” for the best film in all classes, at the 1935 Brussels International Film Festival.

However, whatever its artistic brilliance, the sponsors were not impressed with The Song of Ceylon, expecting four educational travelogues that somehow advertised or at least promoted the tea industry. So they reminded Grierson of their contract (originally with the EMB, then with the GPO Film Unit), and as a result unused and even used footage shot by Wright was edited to create Negombo Coast (9 minutes), Dance of the Harvest (11 minutes), Monsoon Island (13 minutes) and Villages of Lanka (10 minutes). The four films, completed like The Song of Ceylon in 1934, were distributed mainly to schools across Britain by the Empire Film Library and are now in the BFI archives. Such distribution was ideal, for the films were not experimental like The Song of Ceylon, and the commentaries delivered facts about the economy, history and culture of the country in a straightforward manner. On the other hand The Song of Ceylon had been screened at a West End cinema in London and to discerning audiences in film clubs and societies.

Although Wright edited The Song of Ceylon it is unclear to what extent he worked on the post-production of the four short films. Indeed there are some curious, unexplained inconsistencies in the minimal credits and film format. For instance, it would be logical to assume that the GPO Film Unit was responsible for the post-production. In the case of Mosquito Coast the production company is indeed credited as the GPO Film Unit, the commissioning company as the Empire Tea Marketing Expansion Board (note “Marketing Expansion Board” rather than “Marketing Board”), and Wright’s sole credit is as director. But the production company for Dance of the Harvest is credited as the Empire Tea Marketing Board, Monsoon Island the Empire Tea Marketing Expansion Board and Villages of Lanka the Empire Tea Marketing Board. For the last three films neither the GPO Film Unit nor Wright are credited, and in none of the films is an editor or scriptwriter acknowledged. Furthermore, Negombo Coast and Villages of Lanka were produced on 35mm, whereas Dance of the Harvest and Monsoon Island were produced on 16mm.

There are inevitable connections between Negombo Coast and The Song of Ceylon. For instance Negombo Coast starts with a title card of the same design as that used for the ‘mother film’, as is no doubt the case with the other three ‘offspring’. More significantly, the footage for both documentaries was filmed at the same time and often at the same location: Negombo Coast’s opening sequences of ships in Colombo harbour, street scenes in the city, and cargo being unloaded, are familiar. There follows a curious transition to the fishing village of Negombo as there seems to be no association between the international trade that takes place in Colombo and the localized fishing industry of Negombo.

The Colonial Film synopsis states: “fishermen mending and inspecting their nets,” “shots filmed from the sea of fishing boats passing by,” “a man fishing with a hand net in the lagoon,” and “fishing with large nets that are held between men on the shore and rowers in boats a little way out to sea”. In addition, there are “shots of men setting a bait and catching a fish called the seer”, “shots filmed from the shore showing the canoes [of course “outrigger canoes” would have been a better description] returning home in the evening,” “men leaving the canoes carrying large fish, which are placed in baskets on the shore,” “women carrying fish in baskets on their heads,” and finally “shots of a depopulated beach”.

Negombo Coast is also unavoidably reminiscent of the GFU’s Fishermen of Negombo (1952), directed by George Wickremasinghe - the pioneer of indigenous documentary-making - and scripted by Englishman Ralph Keene, head of the GFU at that time. Fishermen of Negombo is undoubtedly a more effective documentary having been better planned, not just cobbled together. One of the outstanding aspects of this film is the score by the country’s iconic Deva Surya Sena, which is superior to that of Negombo Coast as it is rich with the rhythm and the melodies of Sinhala folk music.

There are also basic differences between Negombo Coast and The Song of Ceylon. “The former is entirely concerned with labour,” as Colonial Film states. “However, whereas the longer film situates the men’s work within their social and cultural activities, Negombo Coast restricts itself to outlining their trade alone. For example, both films feature a multi-shot portrait of a net caster from Duwa. In Negombo Coast each aspect of his activity is carefully outlined in the commentary, but in The Song of Ceylon these images are instead accompanied by local dialect, and the film supplements the relationship between this man and his son.”

Because the remaining three films cannot be viewed online (but screenings can be requested from the BFI in London), I am disadvantaged. As far as Dance of the Harvest is concerned, Colonial Film only provides a brief synopsis that starts by stating that the documentary concerns rice cultivation, and continues by listing typical scenes such as buffaloes drawing ploughs and afterwards being splashed with water to keep them cool, terraced paddy and its irrigation, the sowing of seed “in the wet earth”, “the workers enjoy their leisure by gossiping together in the village”(a somewhat colonizer-viewpoint from an ex-colonizer), “dancers performing traditional dances” at harvest time, presumably referring to the folk dance kulu natuma, in which village girls celebrate a bounteous harvest on the threshing floor by portraying cultivation sequences.

Monsoon Island, regarding the tea industry, is analyzed in much greater detail. The documentary begins with shots of jungle and the Buddhist statuary that Wright had devotedly filmed at Polonnaruwa for the critical and most spiritual sequence of The Song of Ceylon. “There are certain small patches of the earth’s surface,” Wright wrote of Gal Vihara in connection with the centenary of Ceylon Tea in 1967, “which have a character and influence so powerful that anyone who stands within their bounds is deeply and intimately affected. One of these – for me at least – is Gal Vihara. Up from the wiry grey-green grass in a treeless precinct juts, like a whale, an enormous outcrop of granite. From this living rock was carved, centuries ago and on a cyclopean scale, a fourfold image of the Buddha.”
The commentary of Monsoon Island states that the climate of the dry zone is responsible for the preservation of the ruins, and then, as shots of tea plantations in the hill country from a moving vehicle are shown, “it is the cool damp upland climate which makes possible the large-scale cultivation of tea”. Film historians have commented that this climatic link appears false: the Monthly Film Bulletin even suggested the film would be more satisfactory if divided into two parts.

There follows a conventional method of describing the workings of a tea plantation: “Tea-clippers [sic] filing out of the factory,” (they are described as being Tamils from South India, but the fact that they are Hindus, which jars with the Buddhist orientation, is not mentioned), “footage of the clipping process as it is described,” “the weighing of the women’s tea clipping,” and then the process of withering, rolling, fermentation, drying, sorting, packaging. Transportation of tea ‘crates’ (sic: tea terminology is not one of Colonial Film’s greatest assets) to ships in Colombo harbour is shown, as is their arrival at the London docks, which means that Wright or the GPO Film Unit went to the trouble of a special shoot.

“There is nothing in the way in which the footage of plantation workers is shot that would help to undermine its use for tea propaganda. Brian Winston, [in Claiming the Real: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond (2008)], claims that the footage was shot half-heartedly ‘one morning’, and that the process of filming this material gave Wright a headache. The workers aren’t focused upon in any great detail (instead the concentration is on the processes). As such Monsoon Island gives a positive, if fairly pedestrian, account of the industry.

“The relationship between Monsoon Island and The Song of Ceylon is of interest. On the one hand, while much of the material witnessed in Monsoon Island can also be seen in Wright’s longer film, the way that this film compiles and comments upon the material leads to a more straightforward and supportive account of colonial trade than is given in The Song of Ceylon. On the other hand, because Monsoon Island is largely reliant on Wright’s footage, the film also retains some of his biases. This is most notable in his discordant and disproportionate focus on Buddhism.”

Monsoon Island places its portrait of Buddhism at the beginning of its film, and then moves on to the only information given concerning Villages in Lanka is an ultra-brief synopsis - “Villages, homes and workshops in Sri Lanka” - which demonstrates an inconsistency in the Colonial Film project’s approach to the cataloguing of this close-knit series of documentaries.

So that’s the story of Basil Wright’s other songs of Ceylon; of lesser importance than The Song of Ceylon but nevertheless of significance in the context of the history of foreign documentaries made in the country. It’s unfortunate they exist virtually unnoticed in the enormous ‘brilliant shadow’ of The Song of Ceylon. It seems as if they ultimately suffered from Wright’s obsession with the creation of The Song of Ceylon.

In later life, Wright became a distinguished film teacher, which was how I met him in August 1971 at a BFI workshop and had the privilege of viewing The Song of Ceylon in his company. I wish I had known then about these other songs so that I could have discovered his precise involvement in their post-production.

I wonder whether they were ever shown here in the distant past. Lester James Peries might know. But I’m not going to call him and inquire. If he has any other information, it is he who should reveal it separately in his inimitable manner, as he did after my 1998 mini-series on the making of The God King.

Certainly it would be excellent if the BFI could provide a DVD of the series for special screenings, together with The Song of Ceylon. Perhaps the British Council could facilitate such an important cinematic event.