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| Tuesday, 16 March 2004 |
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Mission and a vision Second thoughts by Prof.Sunanda Mahendra Whenever I plan to see a Sinhala film, I ask myself whether it is going to be a waste of time or whether it is going to be a resourceful and meaningful passage of time. For most of the time when I come out of the cinema hall, I murmur to myself, 'Oh my god what a heap of muck and what a colossal waste of money on good for nothing trivialities'. But the other day when I came out of the cinema hall packed mostly with children after seeing 'Suriya Arana', I thought to myself, 'This is definitely something different from the normally extant form. Here is a creator with a vision and a mission on celluloid. A good lot of thinking and experience has gone into the very creation of a visual beauty, which is absent in most of the other Sinhala films,' I think I should express what I felt to share my experience. Various aspects of socio cultural traits have gone into the creation of the film. Among them the most important aspect revolves round the stability and the instability of the human mind. (The savage versus the civilized as in Joseph Conrad's novels). The filmmaker Somaratna Disanayake, makes and attempt to visualize how poverty and savagery plus aspects of cruelties like killing and plundering take place when one is exploited from the very ancestry. One good example is the character of Sediris (Jackson Anthony) who becomes a victim of this ancestral dispossession as a result of his lands being exploited by the village headman's father. These aspects are not portrayed as propagandist viewpoints but hinted enhancing a better narrative complexity. While the textual material that has gone into the creative process of Suriya Arana, resembles an ancient legend or a myth as found in a classic like Dhammapada, it is at the same time quite modern in spirit, as it surpasses the boundaries of the mere legend woven round a 'forest hermitage' (or vana arana) the elder monk (Manoratna) and the novice are symbolic of the great journey in Samsara or the cycle of birth where one aspires to lead a higher life, discarding all the impurities of existence. The entire splendour and serenity of the forest setting adds flavour to this concept, and transcending the boundaries of a mere hunting ground with animals being hunted and killed for food. The four characters in the narrative line of the film are interwoven and cannot be separated one from the other. The four characters are the elderly monk, the novice or the pupil, his friend Tikira of the same forest and his father the hunter cum victim of circumstances, also ultimately end up in a sort of a self realization punishing himself for his sins or demerits. This Buddhist concept in itself is a unique quality one could discuss at length in contemporary creative communication in all media. There is not a single scene that could be deemed as extraneous or superfluous, as characters, events, cine movements and the forest scenes are depicted as a unified entity. For me the Sinhala film 'Suriya Arana' is not a mere 'jungle story'. It transcends the limits of a 'jungle story' wherein one finds the serenity intertwined with not only humans in struggle and animals in their prey. There is an added flavour of a spiritualism anticipated by many who have wilfully become violent due to ignorance from the religious point of view (Moha) 'hatred will not cease through hatred in the world but with love alone will it cease'. May I express my thanks to Somaratne Disanayaka, for extending the opportunity to see 'Suriya Arana'. |
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