The final cut

It has been an emotive week for the Sri Lankan film industry. On the same evening, at the same place, two major announcements were made by the doyen of the country’s film-makers, Lester James Peries, during the launch of the book Lester by Lester.

One announcement was that he had taken the decision to retire: all who appreciate his work must now come to terms with the fact that great artists need to recognise the moment to cease being creative. Besides, he was surely one of the oldest working directors in the world, although it would have taken him another decade or so to equal Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite, who made her last film aged 100 in 2002.

Lester’s retirement was fairly inevitable given his wonderful autumn of life. The second announcement, regarding a ‘death’ in Lester’s corpus of work, was also fairly inevitable given the long neglect of the country’s so-called film archives. The negative of Nidhanaya (1970), he informed those who attended the launch, had started to rot and emit dangerous gases, as happens when storage is below standard. It had therefore been burnt.

Now, surprisingly, Nidhanaya joins the same club as Citizen Kane (1941), for the original negative of that film was destroyed by fire at Orson Welles’ Spanish villa in the 1970s. So the film many consider the best in the history of world cinema, along with the film many consider the best in the history of Sri Lanka cinema – and indeed by some as one of the best in Asian cinema - share a similar fate. That said, Citizen Kane was digitally restored in 1991 but it’s not so simple with Nidhanaya.

In The Need for a National Film Archive, written in 1957 when such concerns were deemed premature, Lester cautioned, “We really cannot anticipate posterity” and urged that the preservation of the country’s features and documentaries be considered of paramount importance. (Documentaries and their significant social, cultural and other evidence must never be forgotten.)

This is a cause Lester has espoused for 50 years, yet little has been achieved due to bureaucratic indifference. With this article he anticipated the greatest shortcoming of the Sri Lankan film industry. For Lester it was a prediction with disastrous personal relevance today.

Apart from its national importance, it should be remembered that Nidhanaya or The Treasure is probably the favourite Lester James Peries film among overseas critics and audiences. As it happens the film was the first of Lester’s I had the privilege of seeing - at the National Film Theatre, London, during the 1972 London Film Festival. It was screened at the same cinema in the early 1980s at a Lester James Peries retrospective, described as “A marvellously accomplished work. This complex morality tale is a moving love story, interwoven with a characteristic examination of superstition, the caste system, and the frailty of human feelings.”

In early 1973, just a few months after my initial viewing of Nidhanaya in London, I first met Lester on a sun-baked escarpment in the North Central Province, where he was taking some pick-up shots for his film Desa Nisa. As I approached Lester over the scorching rock, his diminutive yet magnetic figure was instantly recognisable from the photographs of him I had seen in London a few weeks earlier.Although I was not aware of it then, my first impression of him typified the style and character of Lester James Peries the film director on location. There he was, a cool, calm, almost motionless figure among milling film technicians and production personnel, nattily attired in shirt, trouser and shoes, with his sleeves buttoned at the wrist, and the inevitable floppy sun hat protecting his head.

I mention this because with Lester’s retirement the Sri Lankan film industry not only loses his artistic genius but his gentlemanly approach. At the same time, ironically, the industry loses his unflinching determination, a characteristic I witnessed whilst working on The God King (1973), a film that provided Lester with ample opportunity to demonstrate that he is much tougher than is generally realised. “It came to a stage where I would have seen that film through on my knees for nothing,” he admitted. Indeed, without him the production may never have been completed, for as associate producer Manik Sandrasagara rightly said, “No other Sri Lankan could have stayed through that production.”

So the loss to the industry from Lester’s retirement is more profound than first imagined.