Ricky Deen and absurd cinema

The preview of the short film Adventure of Ricky Deen by New York trained Sri Lankan filmmaker Boodee Keerthisena at the Goethe-Institute in Colombo, turned out to be a multi-coded short film with a fine mixture of diverse genres. At a superficial level and in terms of thematising, Ricky Deen can best be described as a short movie in the genre of absurd cinema which is not a very popular genre of filmmaking in Sri Lanka. Since it has some elements of postmodern cinema, the movie can also be analysed from postmodern cinematic perspectives.

The filmmaker was invited to come out with a movie or a montage for the selected pieces of music (Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op 11 in B flat and Robert Schumann’s Piano trio Op 88) by the filmmaker’s composer friend Lakshman Joseph de Saram. The outcome was the short film Adventure of Ricky Deen. It is obvious that the pieces of music had triggered random thoughts of the New York City where the filmmaker lived for eight years learning the craft. The cast includes Mahendra Perera, Dasun Pathirana, Senaka De Silva, Chula, Dharshan Dharmaraj, Palitha Silva, Derek Wikramanayeka and Sangeetha Weerarathne. The script of the film was by Boodee Keerthisena and Onome Ekeh and music was by Chamber Music Society of Colombo.

Absurd cinema

The incoherent series of montages in the movie shot with a couple of I-Phone 5’s invariably qualifies Ricky Deen to be classified as an absurd movie. However, what is significant is that the genre of absurd cinema prang out of the theatre of absurd based on Albert Camu’s philosophy of absurd.

Absurd cinema has been defined as “Films with perspectives on Camus and his philosophy of the absurd with its themes of eternal recurrence, amor fati, and the overall ‘confrontation between the human need (for meaning) and the unreasonable silence of the world’.” Throughout Rickey Deen the common thread that runs is the never-ending quest on the part of the protagonist Ricky Deen (brilliantly portrayed by Mahendra Perera) for meaning of life against the uncertain and rather chaotic urbanised existence. As Albert Camus describes in his philosophy of absurd, the human existence is compared to the never-ending struggle of Sisyphus.

Camus observes in his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ that ‘The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad ondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable.

For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. ”

The movie Ricky Deen differs from an all encompassing absurd movie such as The stranger (Luchino Visconti ), Sisyphus (Marcell Jankovics), Fate fate(Zeki Demirkubuz), Woman in the dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara), Taste of cherry (Abbas Kiarostami) and The passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni) as the filmmaker extensively and effectively employed techniques from modern and postmodern cinema such as hyper-reality, multiple coding and ‘un-representing the representabls’.

Postmodernist aspects

A salient postmodern technique that Boodee employs is ‘Presentation under Erasure’ as observed by Frank Bruke in his essay ‘Aesthetics and Postmodernism’.

Frank observes, “Perhaps the most distinctly postmodern strategy for unpresenting the presentable is offering the artwork/text/movie “under erasure,” to borrow a notion used extensively by Derrida. Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women is, as Peggy Phelan demonstrates, a film of “evacuation” - one which refuses to fill its narrative space with substantial presences (as conventional cinema tends to do), but instead continually empties itself out. Characterisation occurs almost entirely as unpresentation . Trisha, the female protagonist, remains visually absent . The identity of the main male character, Jack, is effaced by doubling: he is played by two different actors, he has a girl friend named Jack-ie, he speaks lines that are mere quotations from other sources (Raymond Chandler, Foucault), he has “visions” that are scenes from films.’ The most profound instance of presenting “under erasure” is contained in Trisha’s concluding thoughts as she seeks to redefine herself in relation/ opposition to gender: “Not a new woman, not non-woman, or misanthropist, or anti-woman, and not non-practicing lesbian. Maybe un-woman is also the wrong term . A-woman is closer. A-womanly. Awomanliness.”

Here, with the use of the letter “a” we have both an article that designates (“a woman”) and a prefix that negates (“a-woman”). Or, perhaps more accurately, the very act of defining is an act of erasing, the very mode of presentation defeats presentation.” Apart from postmodern cinematic techniques such as hyper-reality in ‘Ricky Deen’, a prominent technique the filmmaker effectively employs is multi-coding. Frank Bruke observes, “By this I mean all the ways in which a text is coded “beyond itself”: allusion, citation, collage, pastiche, etc. (The term “intertextuality” might be used, but its implications are much broader than the topic at hand.) This consummately modernist strategy, unpresents in a variety of ways. For one thing, it defeats the fetishism of unitary coding (collapsing all codes within a work into a master code: the “meaning of the work”) -fetishism which locks the consumer of the text into the presentation itself. Moreover, it gives and takes away at the same time.

Time itself is unpresented. The present isn’t present but a series of references to a past, which itself fails to materialize. Simultaneously, this a-present and a-past, by being juxtaposed, are in effect spatialised and denied both their temporal nature and their linear or “narrative” comprehensibility. Finally, referentiality (the very technique that multiple coding employs) is unpresented -at the same time used and denied because the referent(s) cannot be recovered. ”In ‘Ricky Deen’, time is uncertain and narrative is fractured in a way that sychronises with the rapidly changing moods of the protagonist. In a broader perspective, ‘Ricky Deen’ is a short movie with a distinction and outstands for its unconventionality and going against the norms of the conventional filmmaking.