I suppose my generation – I am a late millennialist – was the last that really encountered Lester, Sumitra, and the cultural community they created in Sri Lanka. Today’s generation are not so fortunate. Perhaps I err in thinking that they lived through the peak of our country’s art and culture. Perhaps our times aren’t so bad after all. But Lester and Sumitra did more than just direct, edit, or produce films. Even if you discount the significance of those films – and the fact that they are among the best made in this country – their contribution remains pivotal in other respects too.
There are so many words one can use in describing the Perieses and their colleagues and contemporaries, and of them the most fitting would have to be “eclectic.” When I talked with the late Sugathapala Senarath Yapa in 2014 – a decade ago – I was struck by how diverse his interests were, even from an early age. Today, with the mass commodification of knowledge, with instant access to information, with the rise of an iPhone film culture, it is easy to overlook how difficult it was for someone like Yapa, who hailed from a lower middle-class Sinhalese rural background, to become a critically lauded director.
Colonial bourgeoisie
The Perieses occupied a different social terrain. They were not exactly scions of the colonial bourgeoisie, but by the standards of a majority of their countrymen, they were well off. This enabled them to tide over the difficulties of making 
films in Sri Lanka: they did not have to suffer the privations that the likes of Senarath Yapa did. They made good use of what they had and saw through a revolution in the arts. One could say the same of Lionel Wendt, Justin Deraniyagala, Miriam Pieris – that their background made it possible for them to question norms and carry forward the work of their predecessors, even if, as Ian Goonetilleke wrote, their lack of awareness of the local culture handicapped them.
In an essay on the Sinhala theatre, Regi Siriwardena critically pondered on the trend towards political protest in local plays,and questioned whether their insulation from the society around them, and their lack of active involvement in politics itself, had crippled artists in the country. He pointed to Bertolt Brecht, who had taken part in several political movements – and been censured f not imprisoned for it. Siriwardena himself had been involved in politics – if not as a politician, then as an activist, working for the LSSP during the Second World War, a time when the LSSP had been proscribed.
His point is relevant, I think, because it encapsulates many of the criticisms that were made of the Sri Lankan filmmakers of the 1960s – of whom Lester and Sumitra were the most representative. Not many, particularly from the present generation, recall that Lester Peries was as lauded abroad as he was eviscerated at home: H. L. D. Mahindapala, for instance, tore Ran Salu to shreds in a review, while a number of critics begged to differ with Lester’s interpretation of ‘Gamperaliya’, though Martin Wickramasinghe himself praised it as a faithful rendition of his novel. The sole film which did not attract criticisms of any kind was, of course, ‘Nidhanaya’ – simply because Lester mobilised the resources of the cinema in that film in a way that has never been paralleled since.
Choice of stories
It was against this backdrop that a new, more politically minded generation of filmmakers, led by the indefatigable Dharmasena Pathiraja, emerged and started questioning the style, the choice of stories, the political orientation, of their predecessors. Lester never tired of telling me, in many of our conversations, how a group of radical critics distributed pamphlets titled “Appochchige Cinemawa” at the inaugural screening of Pathiraja’s ‘Ahas Gawwa’. The “appochchi” of the title was, of course, a snide and uncomplimentary reference to him. The pamphlet derided him for representing what those critics felt to be the worst aspects of the Sinhala cinema – in particular, its bourgeois tendencies.
On the face of it, this was quite an Oedipal confrontation – the radical sons pitted against the conservative father. The sons were questioning why the father was so indifferent to the social and political pressures of their time, an allegation to which the father could only reply that he was less interested in political slogans than in human beings.This disconnect – between the political and the personal – came out strongly in Lester’s interpretation of ‘Yuganthaya’, where he focuses less on the conflict between labour and capital than on the relationship between the father and son. Yet even though no less than Pathiraja himself, in a conversation with me, argued that it failed to capture the political aspects of the novel, ‘Yuganthaya’ showed how even familial ties fail cannot blunt the inevitability of revolution – as rendered sharply in the last, haunting scene.
The truth is that we are all the better for what Lester did. Even if he did not go down well with the political filmmakers of the 1970s, those directors ultimately owed much to him. The Cahiers du Cinema critics began by attacking the saints of the French cinema – including Henri-Georges Clouzot. They derided them in the same way their counterparts here derided Lester –invoking phrases like “le cinéma de papa.”
I am no bourgeois humanist, and I am only too aware of how bourgeois humanism can be placed in the service of the most conservative politics and social mores. Yet it would be a mistake to eviscerate Lester’s films on the grounds that he focused only on the elite, or that, if he did focus on the underclass, the peasantry (often) or working class (hardly ever), he failed to locate them fully in their milieu – that they seemed divorced from their social and historical circumstances: a charge levelled most damnably at Baddegama. But as Pauline Kael said of the great Jean Renoir, he was perhaps this country’s greatest elegist for the old aristocracy – a tribute that can be applied equally to Martin Wickramasinghe, and one which shows how accepting he was of the passing of the old order.
Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at [email protected]. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.
