Multi-faceted role that Joe Abeywickrema played in Sri Lankan cinema

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

“If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.” - Jack Lemon

“Joe Abeywickrema’s remarkable instinctive wisdom about acting for the medium of cinema made him possibly the finest character actor in the Asian region. With no formal training in acting, he yet had style which was essentially simple but had feeling and was always integrated with his sense of what had to be expressed. Even over the years, he did not acquire mannerisms that even the most talented artist acquires. As a result, his playing or his performances were always fresh and insightful. He is no more. But his celluloid shadows will be celebrated in the years to come. May he attain Nibbana.” -Sumithra Peries

The passing away of Joe Abeywickrema (1927-2011) marks the end of a seminal era in contemporary Sri Lankan cinema as it moves into post-conflict era. One of the important aspects of Joe Abyewickrama’s phenomenal career in Sri Lankan cinema is that his career was, in many ways, synonymous with the evolution of Sinhala cinema from its very formative years to the contemporary cinema.

He entered into cinema in 1957, a year after Dr. Lester James Peries made Rekawa (The Line of Destiny). The important fact is that by the time Joe entered the Sinhala cinema, it had moved from its purely entertaining mode and gradually assuming to play a much wider role in shaping and reflecting the imagination of the masses. Thematically it moved from the mere replication of melodrama stories modeled on popular South Indian movies to capturing the milieu albeit in a minuscule and rudimentary manner.

Joe Abeywickrema’s role in cinema

Joe Abeywickrema’s role in Sinhala cinema should analysis with the evolution of Sinhala cinema. The films such as Saradama and Saravita in which Joe played diverse roles marked the early phase of Sinhalala cinema. In 1972, Joe Abeywickrema had the opportunity to act in Dr. Lester James Peries’s Desa Nisa (The Eyes). The role Joe played in it as Nirukada was one of the memorable roles he portrayed during his career which among other things, proved that Joe was capable of portraying complex characters and he was successful in playing a role which was party comedian and partly complex.

An important concept that can be invoked in analysing Joe’s career in Sinhala cinema is the ‘third cinema’. Primarily the term Third Cinema refers to the Latina American cinema movement commenced in the 1970s. The movement was against the neocolonialism, capitalism and Hollywood model of cinema aimed at providing the masses with pure entertainment with vested financial interest.

Third Cinema

Before analysing how Joe Abyewickrema’s contribution to the growth of ‘third cinema’ in Sri Lanka, it is important, at least, briefly to describe spacious concept of Third Cinema. In simple terms, Third Cinema can be described as a descriptive and prescriptive concept which is linked to, but extends beyond the emergence of “Third world cinema”.

Although ‘Third world cinema’ is loosely linked to the process of decolonisation and nation-building, Third Cinema is a concept which advocates an independent view towards commercial genres and cinemas from the metropolitan and westernised capitalist world.

The fundamental aspects of ‘Third Cinema’ is that points out the innate power of cinema , as a modern medium of communication and it can influence social transformation within the nation state and across continents.

“ Optimally, spectators of Third Cinema are enlightened as they critically confront their own reality through an audiovisual (rather than written or academic) analysis and recognize, in the portrayal of others' struggles, circumstances and aspirations that relate to their own. For filmmakers and cultural policymakers,

Third Cinema involves the search for a sustainable and socially relevant means of artistic expression in under industrialized and politically unstable or repressive conditions, while striving to promote solidarity among all peoples that have experienced, or continue to grapple with, the yoke of (neo) colonialism, with its racist, ethnocentric, classist, and sexist underpinnings.

Third Cinema thus takes areas of national life often neglected by official discourse and industrial cinema and thrusts them into the international limelight. Broadly defined, Third Cinema can be produced with or without the support of the state, and directed by amateurs as well as seasoned professionals. It calls attention to para filmic activity as well as to textual content, exploring alternative modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, sources of aesthetic inspiration, and even the meaning of the terms "professional," "mass," and "art" as they relate to cinema.”

Journal

The term ‘Third Cinema’ , was introduced in an interview with the Argentine Cine Liberación group, published in the journal Cine Cubano (March 1969). It was subsequently developed into a manifesto “ "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World," written by Fernando Solanas (b. 1936) and Octavio Getino (b. 1935), members of that group. Since its publication in Tricontinenal (Havana, 1969).

“ Solanas and Getino's manifesto interpret 'First Cinema' as the Hollywood production model that promulgates bourgeois values to a passive audience through escapist spectacle and individual characters. 'Second Cinema' is the European art film, which rejects Hollywood conventions but is centred on the individual expression of the auteur director. Third Cinema rejects the view of cinema as a vehicle for personal expression, seeing the director instead as part of a collective; it appeals to the masses by presenting the truth and inspiring revolutionary activism. ”

However, the theory of ‘Third Cinema’ is contested for its validation in the globalised context. The intense contestation is manifested in a paper presented to ‘Third Cinema’ conference held in Edinburgh by Homi K Bhabha entitled “Commitment to theory”. Bhabha points out that still the Western influence even on thoerisation of cinema as opposed to ‘Third Cinema’ is pervasive.

Debates

“Through the concept of cultural difference I want to draw attention to the common ground and lost territory of contemporary critical debates. For they all recognize that the problem of the cultural emerges only at the significatory boundaries of cultures, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated.

Yet the reality of the limit or limit-text of culture is rarely theorized outside of well-intentioned moralist polemics against prejudice and stereotype, or the blanket assertion of individual or institutional racism – that describes the effect rather than the structure of the problem. The need to think the limit of culture as a problem of the nunciation of cultural difference is disavowed.

The concept of cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority; the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the moment of differentiation. And it is the very authority of culture as a knowledge of referential truth which is at issue in the concept and moment of enunciation. The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present, of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference - and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. The struggle is often between the teleological or mythical time and narrative of traditionalism - of the right or the left - and the shifting, strategically displaced time of the articulation of a historical politics of negotiation which I suggested above.

The time of liberation is, as Fanon powerfully evokes, a time of cultural uncertainty, and, most crucially, of significatory or representational undecidability:

But [native intellectuals] forget that the forms of thought and what [they] feed . . .on, together with modern techniques of information, language and dress have dialectically reorganised the people's intelligences and the constant principles (of national art) which acted as safeguards during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely radical changes. . . . [We] must join the people in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to . . . which will be the signal for everything to be called into question . . . it is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come. (My emphasis)15

Division

The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated, and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic. That iteration negates our sense of the origins of the struggle. It undermines our sense of the homogenizing effects of cultural symbols 3nd icons, by questioning our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general.

This demands that we rethink our perspective on the identity of culture. Here Fanon's passage - somewhat reinterpreted - may be helpful. What is implied by his juxtaposition of the constant national principles with his view of culture-aspolitical-struggle, which he so enigmatically and beautifully describes as 'the zone of occult instability where the people dwell'? These ideas not only help to explain the nature of colonial struggle.

They also suggest a possible critique of the positive aesthetic and political values we ascribe to the unity or totality of cultures, especially those that have known long and tyrannical histories of domination and misrecognition.

Dualistic

Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other. This is not because of some humanistic nostrum that beyond individual cultures we all belong to the human culture of mankind; nor is it because of an ethical relativism that suggests that in our cultural capacity to speak of and judge Others we necessarily 'place ourselves in their position', in a kind of relativism of distance of which Bernard Williams has written at length.

The reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation - the place of utterance - is crossed by the differance of writing or ecriture.

This has less to do with what anthropologists might describe as varying attitudes to symbolic systems within different cultures than with the structure of symbolic representation - not the content of the symbol or its 'social function', but the structure of symbolization. It is this 'difference' in language that is crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent.

The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enonce) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself be conscious.

What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation.

The pronominal I of the proposition cannot be made to address - in its own words - the subject of enunciation, for this is not 'personable', but remains a spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse.

Meaning

The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the Other. This ambivalence is emphasized when we realize that there is no way that the content of the proposition will reveal the structure of its positionality; no way that context can be mimetically read off from the content.

The implication of this enunciative split for cultural analysis that I especially want to emphasize is its temporal dimension. The splitting of the subject of enunciation destroys the logics of synchronicity and evolution which traditionally authorize the subject of cultural knowledge. It is taken for granted that the value of culture as an object of study and the value of any analytical activity that isconsidered cultural lie in a capacity to produce a cross-referential, generalizable unity that signifies a progression or evolution of ideas-in-time, as well as a cultured self-reflection on their premisses.

It would not be relevant to pursue the detail of this argument here except to demonstrate - via Marshall Sahlins's Culture and Practical Reason - the validity of my general characterization of the Western expectation of culture as a disciplinary practice of writing. I quote Sahlins at the point at which he attempts to define the difference of Western bourgeois culture:

We have to do not so much with functional dominance as with structural -with different structures of symbolic integration. And to this gross difference in design correspond differences in symbolic performance: between an open, expanding code, responsive by continuous permutation to events it has itself staged, and an apparently static one that seems to know not events, but only its own preconceptions. The gross distinction between 'hot' societies and 'cold', development and underdevelopment, societies with and without history - and so between large societies and small, expanding and selfcontained, colonizing and colonized. . . . (My emphasis)17

The intervention of the Third Space, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code.

Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time.

Systems

It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or 'purity' of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity. Fanon's vision of revolutionary cultural and political change as a 'fluctuating movement' of occult instability could not be articulated as cultural practice without an acknowledgement of this indeterminate space of the subject(s) of enunciation.

It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated,translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.

Fanon's moving metaphor - when reinterpreted for a theory of cultural signification - enables us to see not only the necessity of theory, but also the restrictive notions of cultural identity with which we burden our visions of political change. For Fanon, the liberatory 'people' who initiate the productive instability of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers of a hybrid identity.

They are caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation, in the sense in which I have been attempting to recast these words.

In the moment of liberatory struggle, the Algerian people destroy the continuities and constancies of the 'nationalist' tradition which provided a safeguard against colonial cultural imposition. They are now free to negotiate and translate their cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference. The native intellectual who identifies the people with the 'true national culture' will be disappointed.

The people are now the very principle of 'dialectical reorganization' and they construct their culture from the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language, dress.

Inheritance

The changed political and historical site of enunciation transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future.

I have been stressing a certain void or misgiving attending every assimilation of contraries - I have been stressing this in order to expose what seems to me a fantastic mythological congruence of elements. . . . And if indeed therefore any real sense is to be made of material change it can only occur with an acceptance of a concurrent void and with a willingness to descend into that void wherein, as it were, one may begin to come into confrontation with a spectre of invocation whose freedom to participate in an alien territory and wilderness has become a necessity for one's reason or salvation. ”

The importance and relevance of Joe Abeywickrema’s role played in the larger canvas of Sinhala cinema is felt more than ever before particularly in considering his singular contribution to the representation of ‘true’ Sri Lankan cultural identity in the medium of cinema.

Though he commenced his career by portraying ‘comedian’ type of characters, subsequently he graduated in portraying much more nuanced and complex characters such as Silindu in Lester James Peries’ Beddegama ( The Village in the Jungle), lead role in Mahagama Sekera’s Thunman Handiya and Pinhamy in Children’s film Pinhami.