Lester at Ninety

EDWIN ARIYADASA

For several decades now, Director Lester James Peries, has decidedly been the ‘Cinema Establishment’ of Sri Lanka. In any field, people respond to an ‘Establishment’, in one of two ways. They may resent it, revolt against it or denounce it. Or else, they would adore it, admire it, emulate it or esteem it. Whatever may be the attitude adopted, a well-entrenched ‘Establishment’ generates the dynamism, that ensures progress.

No worthwhile dialogue on cinema is possible, without Lester’s name assuming centre-stage in that kind of colloquy.

Lester James Peries, ranks high in the global hierarchy of living greats in the world of cinema. Discriminating and dedicated aficionados pronounce the names of Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, India’s Satyajit Ray, Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman and Sri Lanka’s Lester James Peries, with awe and veneration. Of those stalwarts, Lester James Peries, is with us today, as a respected sage, who has elevated Sri Lankan cinema to an exalted stature in the global context.

Sri Lankan cinema

As a nation, we pay homage to Dr. Lester James Peries at ninety, fully aware that his presence and spirit continue to dominate the total landscape of Sri Lankan cinema. Lester James Peries’ residence perches by the side of a busy Colombo Street. This road-way has now been named after him.

The bustle of the city traffic, which increases in volume and tempo with each passing year, is muted into an undertone when it seeps into Lester’s house. The residence, although located in the centre of a turbulent urban context, manages to remain almost untouched by the city’s dust and din.

The physical detachment of the residence is very much an echo of Peries’ current mind-set. He has begun to assume a clear attitude of detachment vis-a-vis the world that yields subject matter for this creative exercises.

This hard-won objectivity, that characterizes most creative men of eminence in their maturity, is the outcome of an assiduous pilgrimage. In Peries, the urge for cinematic creation goes back to the late 1940s when he was very young and living in London.

For him and for a like-minded group of young men, the film camera became an absorbing toy that gave them an instrument to impose a semblance of visual discipline upon the disarray of diffuse experiences of their youthful days in a cosmopolitan city far away from home.

Peries’ initial cinematic efforts were exclusively in the documentary genre. But they were instructive. The erratic progress in the documentary medium was a fitting apprenticeship for a talent whose Line of Destiny was eventually to lead him to creative heights in the fiction film.

His return to Sri Lanka, which was to have a far-reaching effect on the course of the island’s cinema, was largely due, strangely enough, to an expatriate who headed Sri Lanka’s Government Film Unit at that time.

The person in question - Ralph Keene was so persuasive that Lester came back home and joined the unit. He plunged into documentary filmmaking with zest and zeal, and made a series of documentaries that still remain pioneering works in this genre in Sri Lanka.

The documentary period in Peries’ evolution made him appreciate how resource-rich Sri Lanka was for the filmmaker.

Future career

The locations impressed him, especially after his recent sojourn in the West. Since he was looking at his native land as an outsider because of his absence from home, the exotic in our culture, the fresh appeal of our way of life began to entice him.

When he travelled through Sri Lanka armed with the Government Film Unit cameras, he discerned details of the country’s landscapes with the keen perception nurtured by his documentary discipline.

The central event that was to determine his future career, took place in January 1947, when the first-ever Sinhala film was made, to the massive enthusiasm of Sri Lankan filmgoers. For the audiences of Sri Lanka, the novelty of a film speaking Sinhala - their own tongue - was an overwhelming experience. But soon the novelty wore off, partly because the country’s compact society tends to be much more critical than the amorphous audiences that have been the mainstay of the popular South Indian films for decades.

Sinhala films

The theatricality of the presentation and the artificiality of the storyline of the first Sinhala films began to jar the sensibilities of Sri Lankan filmgoers in the first few years of Sinhala cinema.

Peries took his filmmaking into a village and allowed a portion of it to happen in that rural setting, enlisting real villagers too, to play a role or two.

Still the outsider in the indigenous culture of Sri Lanka, Peries managed to capture at least a few authentic accents of the idiom and rhythm of the people who inhabited the traditional village.

To my mind, it is the sure eye of the documentarist who will discern with alacrity the telling detail that profiles a sentiment or individual. This is what enabled Peries in the first instance to come to some realistic terms with his village in Rekawa.

In retrospect, we see that Peries may have missed the finer nuances of the intricate relations that keep a traditional rural community ticking. But in Rekawa, he began his exploration which led him years later in Gamperaliya (Changing Village) to achieve a much more intimate entry into the ways of life of a village as it goes about its business of daily living.

While they were making up their minds, Rekawa failed in the first round. This set Peries on the path of building the taste by which his filmmaking would be popularly appreciated.

Four years later in 1960, Peries returned to the screen, determined to give the audiences what they wanted, but on his own terms: “Sandesaya (The Message) had the elements of a minor epic in it. War, intrigue, love, action and above all a captivating story woven around the exploitable sentiment of patriotism.”

This established Lester as a force to be reckoned with. From then on he had a name and place in cinema, and an identifiable ‘imprint’. He could no longer fail, but only fluctuate. It was in 1964 that his ‘childhood’ was at last over. When he won the Golden Peacock Award for his Gamperaliya in 1965, at the International Film Festival of India, Peries took Sri Lankan cinema to the international cinema scene.

In the 62-year-span of Sri Lankan cinema, Gamperaliya is still a climatic work. It represents the fusing of cinema with the quintessential in the Sri Lankan way of life, rural innocence and the disintegrating touch of urban dynamics.

Gamperaliya is totally cinematic in concept and execution. The script is derived from Martin Wickremasinghe’s novel which, without any doubt, is the best known work of fiction in Sinhala. Peries’ remarkable personal achievement as a filmmaker in Gamperaliya is that he could visualise the story material entirely in terms of sight and sound metaphor, as a stark counterpoint to its literary version.

Gamperaliya forms the first part of Peries’ trilogy. The other two segments, Kaliyugaya (The Age of Kali) and Yuganthaya (End of an Era) complete the work. As the maker of a trilogy, he had a piece of rare luck on his side.

In the interval between the making of the first two parts, the actors and actresses had advanced in years, in their real lives, exactly in proportion to the time gap recorded by the two works of fiction that were being converted into film. As the players had aged exactly as the film required, the passage of time itself had made them fit neatly into their roles.

Very early in his career, Peries came to be recognised as ‘establishment.’ In consequence a major area of the evolution of Sinhala cinema, during its first 30 years or so, could very well be described as the result of the reaction against this. Whether the filmmakers who came in his wake admired him or denounced him, Peries remained the central force propelling Sinhala cinema forward.

Peries’ film philosophy is characterized by a cautious, non-confrontational stance. He may deal with vital, socially relevant issues at times, but those issues are viewed with such detachment and objectivity that not even a trace of partisanship can be detected. His cinematic style is essentially reflective and is almost totally bereft of comment or polemics.

It is in this that his Asian flavour makes itself felt. He is patient and undisturbed. Calmness bordering upon tranquillity, akin to a spiritual state, is the attitude he adopts towards the challenges of his career. He exudes this quality of mind when he works with his actors and crew.

For over thirty-five-years Lester James Peries has influenced and transformed musty areas of filmmaking and film culture in Sri Lanka. And this, mostly imperceptibly and impersonally. Peries elevated Sri Lankan Cinema to International Stature guiding its fortunes towards new heights.

Sri Lankan culture

As a Nation, we pay homage to Dr. Lester James Peries at Ninety, fully aware that his presence and spirit continue to dominate the total landscape of Sri Lankan Cinema.

If we pause to ponder deeply on his oeuvre in sustained hind-sight, a significant fact invariably emerges.

His career - long effort has been to build a cinematic conduit to the heart of Sri Lankan culture.

Lester would have felt that his absence from his home-base during his formative and creatively energetic early years, alienated him from the quintessence of his indigenous culture. He, to my mind, felt a sense of inadequacy which he yearned to put right. Perhaps many would not have been able to discern this inner State of the sensitive genius.

Dr. Lester James Peries had the blessed good fortune to have a plentitude of disciples, fans, admirers, collaborators, intimates, co-residents (anthevasikas) and followers. But, the excruciating pity of the matter is that no one out of this coterie, even attempted to persuade Lester to produce his memories.

Nor did they assiduously record his musings and reflections. If such a work appears, it will register a riveting impact on cinema and associated issues.

Hegel (1770-1831) the German philosopher - the great originator of the Dialectical Method, once, in a mood of philosophic resignation, mused: “Of all my pupils only one understood me. And, he too did not understand me.”

Lester James Peries too, on some occasions of deep thought, may very well say to himself. “I had many who understood me. But then, they too did not understand me.”

As a national responsibility, it is for someone in authority to see to it, that the world profits from Lester James Peries’ vast wisdom. Meantime, Lester is our perpetual Cinema Establishment.