The bane of our teledramasENTERTAINMENT: So foul a sky clears not without a storm - Shakespeare What is the storm we contemplate to rid the current spate of puerile teledramas that pollute most of the TV channeels in our land, bringing disaster to our entire society, besides the hordes of telefilms that are being imported and dished out with a rare vengeance, through State as well as private TV channels?. I have a case in point. Peter Seller's production of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice performed by the Goodman Theatre Company in a number of countries giving that Sellar's touch a multicultural twist is certainly unique and ground-breaking.
In a recent interview Sellers said, "What amazes me is that Shakespeare wrote this at the exact moment of history when capitalism and colonial imperialism were growing their ugly head to suppress the emerging awareness of workers of the world to fight the bastians of capitalism". Shakespeare was dealing with a multicultural society to make a global political statement so as to show how that operates in individual people's lives. This basically historical materialist approach to the play is the essence of the production's uniqueness and greatness. But let's talk about ourselves and the teledrama syndrome that very rarely projects our cultural ethos; if at all only a handful of our telegrama directors have their feet planted in our own soil since most of them seem to project alien values. I would like to go back to the early twenties when that immortal documentary of Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon was produced. This was how a foreign artist of the calibre of Wright saw the indigenous culture of our own people. I still remember, first as a child and then as an adult seeing this masterpiece, with the glorious voice of the commentator the late Lionel Wendt, in the background. Incidentally, we have to be ever grateful to the Fort YMCA of the late thirties the harbinger to many cultural events to follow when such prestigious films like Rene Claires Italian Straw Hat, Sergei Eeinstein's Buttleship Potemkin Charles Spencer Chaplins The Tramp and The Great Dictator. But of all what behoves me is the niggardly disregard that most of our teledrama directors are being obsessed with the dare-devil concept that technological expertise is the be-all and end-all of a work of art. Herein I wish to recall a remarkable film Ingmar Berman's Seventh Seal. Most of our teledrama directors would have obviously seen it. However, Von Sydow himself seems a little perplexed by the film which he calls "that strange film about death, religion and philosophy. Nonetheless the circumstances under which Bergman and his troupe made it very idyllic. As Peter Cowie says, "The actors at Miamo were under contract to the theatre for eight months of the year and during the long summer vacation it became a tradition for them to join Bergman in making a film". In other words stage acting and screen acting went hand in hand and on a project as experimental as The Seventh Seal, there was licence to take risks and even to fail. This was in stark contrast to Hollywood where as Von Sydow once put it, there's always a tendency to judge the performance by the success or failure of the film. Despite his keyrole in this film Von Sydow was given only minor parts in Bergman's next two features 'Wild Straw Berries' (1957) and 'So Close to Life' (1957). Coming back to our own spate of teledramas a couple of decades ago how charming were the work like Dimuthu Muthu (Glistenning diamonds), Palingu Menike and much later Veda Hamine, Agni Daha (A Thousand Fires), Bogala Saundiris, Deketi Muwahata, Bol Pilima, Gal Pilima and so forth. We have dozens of tele-film directors who could stand in comparison with any worldwide tele-film directors whom I don't like to mention for fear of being placated as biased. To date 85 per cent of our teledramas have been little more than grab-bag rigmaroles superficially exploiting every avenue of debasing perversion. I am not talking of morals. In fact, one might even say that rarely has an invention so pregnant with promise being used with such a lack of imagination or courage. Consequently the beauty and eloquence inherent in the medium can be glimpsed even rarely in scenes from Andara Weta and teledramas I quoted at the beginning of this article. There's a wonderful Iranian children's film Turtles Can Fly. The setting is Kurdish Iraque in 2003 on the eve of the U.S. led invasion in a refugee camp near the Turkish border. A gang of children led by 13-year-old Soran known as "satellite" for her skill in linking up T.V. sets to outside news broadcasts making a living salvaging land mines to sell to the UN Peace Keeping troops. Newly arrived in the camp are a refugee girl called Agrin and her armless brother called Rega the product of Agrin's rape by Iraque soldiers. Initially resentful of Hengrove who seems to be setting up as a leader of a rival gang. Satellite comes to believe the boy may have powers of prediction. He also finds himself attracted to Agrin. Helped by his lieutenants the one-legged Pasheo and the Lachrymose Shirko, Satellite directs his gang to unload shell casings from a truck until warned by Hengraw he evacuates them all just before the truck explodes. When gas mask against chemical attack are handed he offers one to Agrin, then dives into a lake to catch fish for her, but she leaves before he surfaces. News comes of the imminent invasion of Iraq and American planes drop leaflets. Satellite visits a nearby bazaar to rent a couple of guns. By that time Pasheo brings him the news that Saddam has fallen. Later Satellite and Hengrove sit beside the Late and weep for the loss of Agrin while convoys of American trucks of soldiers rumble past. How could one compare our teledramas to such life-stirring works of art? |
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