“Not what you put in but what you take out is what matters,” Anne V. Coates, the great editor who had worked with David Lean and David Lynch, and continues to work, once asserted. If Sumitra Peries didn’t hold on to a particular dogmatic conception of editing when she began her career, she at least imbibed much of what the likes of Coates taught at the London School of Film Technique, where she was not just the only Sri Lankan but also the only woman in a class of mostly European or British filmmakers and critics. To pass judgments on her films is thus to first discuss her editing work, something that for some odd reason biographers have missed. It not only brought her into contact with Lester, it also widened her range and helped her achieve a technical mastery equalled by very few.
Sunil Mihinidukula’s thesis that the first women editors in Sri Lanka were hired by the GFU contests the view that filmmaking in the early years was forbidden territory for females. As in Europe and Hollywood, in Sri Lanka editing seemed to have been a woman’s preserve if at all because of the overwhelming stereotype of it being a more intuitive, instinctive job. Anne Coates herself makes the same observation. By the time Sumitra Peries arrived in the scene in the mid 60s, outlooks had changed and though women hadn’t shattered the glass ceiling and taken to directing, they had moved away from editing to other fields. Sumitra being the only woman in a crew of men for Sandeshaya strengthens the view that for someone of her calibre to have entered the industry was unprecedented, yet also uneventful: Sumitra told me that “as far as they were concerned, I was just another crew member. The world would have been not a little taken back, but the industry didn’t so much as frown on it.”
The industry, in other words, neither embraced nor shunned Sumitra’s entry; indeed, it almost seemed to have shrugged at it: “It certainly wasn’t the monumental earth shattering precedent one would have thought it to have been.” Her emergence as an editor who evolved her own identity and differed from the approach of others in her profession must therefore be credited, at one level, to how willingly the glass ceiling had opened for her in the industry. To discuss this, however, it is necessary to identify her approach to the craft and how this in itself was subject to changes over time. One can get an idea of how her style evolved by contrasting the first three films she edited – Gamperaliya, Delovak Athara, and Ran Salu – against those that followed, all but one of which had her husband as the director.
Sri Lankan filmmakers tend to prefer direct transitions to idiosyncratic wipes and flourishes, owing to aesthetic considerations and budgetary reasons. The cut, in other words, is always on point, concise, and direct, and the wipe is hardly if at all resorted to. The American cinema itself had done away with the wipe in the period between the world wars, since it was seen as crude and as breaking continuity by drawing attention to itself.
Considering that most Sri Lankan directors hardly made use of even the dissolve – a staple of Western movies – one can only ascertain that by the time Lester Peries and his troupe entered the scene the Sinhala film had come to privilege one form and style over all others. I mention this because, initially with idiosyncratic flashes and later on with a coherent oeuvre, Sumitra Peries tried to break away from the dullness of that form and style. We see this early on with Gamperaliya in a wipe “modified... to make it look like a cart wheel”, which transitions from Nanda and Anula wondering whether to make it to a pilgrimage to Paragoda with Piyal to the pilgrimage itself: “an unmistakable idiosyncrasy” as one critic saw it.
Formal and stylistic idiosyncrasies of that kind did not, of course, last for long, but in the two other films Sumitra Peries edited for Lester one discerns a frequent, almost restless attempt at establishing continuity in a direct though rather poetic way. Poetic, in fact, is the best word that sums it up, hackneyed as it may be. On the other hand Peries’s encounters with her peers during this period, while certainly not hostile or negative, did lead to arguments about which transitions to resort to and so on. The most important such encounter, given his standing in the field, was between her and Titus Thotawatte: Sumitra favoured direct cuts when moving from one scene to another, whereas Thotawatte was a partisan of more flamboyant transitions that disjointed audiences. Not surprisingly, Sumitra remains unequivocally opposed to editing which divorces audio from imagery, arguing that a movie with sound and visuals separated from one another tends to be distracting, noisy, and undisciplined no matter how avant-garde, experimental, or innovative it may be to critics and festival juries.
By the time of Ran Salu, a film Lester had little to no control over the shaping of – a fact that Philip Cooray in The Lonely Artist contends is reflected in the theme and mood of the movie itself – the idiosyncratic streak in the editor has begun to give way to a more conservative though still out-of-the-ordinary approach to the craft. Editing could not have been an easy job at the time, even for Western filmmakers, and in Sri Lanka the weather and the climate, the primitiveness of the equipment, and budgetary constraints all conspired to prevent, or try to prevent, a perfect final cut. And yet, when one sees Lester’s movies from this period today, in particular the Ceylon Theatres trilogy where Sumitra had to share credit with or take off her name for the studio cutters, one is entranced by the immediacy, the directness, the rightness of the transitions, when compared with the abruptness of movie cuts today. These sequences stick indelibly to our consciousness in a way that most contemporary films don’t: the carousel episode in Golu Hadawatha and the waltz in Nidhanaya, to give just two examples.
If in Sri Lanka editing is relegated to the background, it’s because the directors themselves – especially the best ones – take over that job. In Lester’s case, he was, as Sumitra herself told me, “the best editor this country’s ever hard”, no doubt compounded by his own wife being, if not second to him, then a first among equals. To conform to the director’s conception of the story and medium while working within his own creative framework: this has been the editor’s challenge, and Sumitra, even when working on the one movie not directed by Lester, Dayananda Gunawardena’s Bakmaha Deege, has risen to it.
On the other hand, this did not – fortunately for us, I can add – keep Sumitra tied to a leash in the editor’s room. Like David Lean and Nicholas Roeg, and unlike Anne V. Coates, she made the transition to the director’s chair, while taking with her that meticulous regard for subtlety and nuance which distinguishes the truly creative from the merely competent. Indeed, as she herself commented in an interview, “We have our lion’s share of competent technicians in the industry, including editors.” Competence, however, can never equal creative brilliance, and in film after film that’s what Sumitra has exuded. With the possible exception of the only detour in her long, fertile filmography – the highly ambitious but hostilely received Yahaluwo – her career has been thus one devoted to the intricate possibilities of the medium.
No doubt one discerns this in her two best films, Sagara Jalaya and Loku Duwa, especially in Sagara Jalaya where movement and music, speech and action, conflict and resolution cohere so well that one simply wonders how a team of technicians and actors could have brought the whole thing off in such a harsh setting as the North Central Province, but to me it comes out fully in her in many ways most neglected film Maya. The late A. J. Gunawardena once told Peries that its style seemed reminiscent of both Hitchcock and William Friedkin, and while I think the analogy was a little extreme it does, at one point, resonate: it’s actually reminiscent of late Hitchcock, the Hitchcock who preferred direct transitions to the more flamboyant transitions that adorned his earlier work. As for Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist and the remake of The Wages of Fear seems an unlikely point of comparison for a film about rebirth, adultery, and murder, but there also the analogy holds. In Maya, we see Sumitra shedding away her tendency to pontificate, one that mars sincere essays like Ganga Addara and Yahalu Yeheli. One of Sumitra’s shortest, at 90 minutes, it’s no doubt her most terse: technically it’s her most accomplished work, a point she reinforced for me more than once.
And then in Sakman Maluwa – the most graceful thing she’s ever done since not only Sagara Jalaya but also Gehenu Lamayi – she weaves tension out of nothingness, unsettling us almost effortlessly and succeeding spectacularly where the more violent, drawn out Duwata Makawa Misa failed. I have seen Sakman Maluwa only twice, and the first time I thought I had passed over an important plot point which could explain the tensions that erupt at the end. Resolving to follow every sequence and dialogue, I waded through it a second time, eyebrows furrowed and pen and paper in my hands.
That second viewing was probably more harrowing than the first: you literally have to read between the shots to spot the tension. It’s clearly the work of a master craftsman, not merely a competent technician, and it’s the sort which makes clear the boundless potential of a work of art to not only entertain, but also, as Lester Peries once told Philip Cooray, compel the dramatic from the otherwise banal and ordinary.
(The previous part of this article was carried last week)
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