Song of Ceylon, The (1934) – dir. Basil Wright

39 min., b&w, English voice-over, music and other extra-diegetic effects

Production : GPO Film Unit for the Empire Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Marketing Board.

Source : BFI Player

Background : This is one of the very few major films of ethnographic interest to emerge from the British colonial period in South Asia. It was released in 1934 by the General Post Office film unit, then headed by John Grierson. He was also the producer and on the opening credits, his name comes first and is larger than that of the director, Basil Wright, who at that time was a relative newcomer to film-maker. Originally commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board as a four-part travelogue intended to promote the Ceylon Tea Marketing Board, in the course of post-production, it became instead a poetic meditation on the religious qualities that permeate traditional life on what is now the island of Sri Lanka.

Content: The film is subdivided into four parts, presented as if they were four movements in a symphonic composition: the first part follows Sinhalese pilgrims to the sacred mountain of Sri Pada (known to Europeans as Adam’s Peak), the second presents everyday subsistence activity on the island – fishing, pottery, house-building, rice cultivation – and a children’s dance class, contrasting the calm and measured nature of this traditional mode of life with that of the ‘voices of commerce’, shown in the third part. This consists of scenes of colonial economic activity, including the harvesting of tea, the laborious processing of copra and the dispatch of goods on international freighters, overlain with clipped telephone voices referring to stock prices and logistics. The final part returns to religious themes, juxtaposing some magnificently costumed dancers with images of the giant statues of Buddha carved in granite at Gal Vihara and a peasant farmer leaving an offering of flowers to them.

The film was mostly shot by Wright himself and in a manner that he would later explain had been very much influenced by the advice that he received from Robert Flaherty when the latter was briefly attached to the film unit of the Empire Marketing Board for a few months in 1931. However, notwithstanding the excellence of the cinematography and the often-daring visual transitions, arguably the most distinctive and impressive aspect of the film is the highly elaborate soundtrack entirely developed at post-production in London. In developing this soundtrack, Wright benefitted greatly from the influence of Alberto Calvacanti, the Franco-Brazilan film-maker then working with the GPO Unit, and also the avant-garde composer Walter Leigh.

Inspired by the contrapuntal theories of Sergei Eisenstein, this soundtrack combined a broad panoply of sounds, including Sinhalese music performed by musicians brought to London specifically for the purpose, Leigh’s own avant-garde compositions, a range of special effects as well as disembodied voices speaking both English and Sinhalese. In addition, it featured a series of texts offering ethnographic observations about Sinhalese life originally published by the sea captain Robert Knox in 1681 and based on his knowledge of the island having spent twenty-three years in captivity there. This text was read in a most entrancing manner by Lionel Wendt, who was a Burgher, that is, a person of mixed European and Sinhalese descent and by profession a photographer. Wendt had collaborated with Basil Wright and his assistant, John Taylor, throughout their lengthy shoot of several months, advising them on all aspects of traditional Sinhalese life.

Although The Song of Ceylon is widely acclaimed as one of the finest works of documentary cinema of the interwar years, the film has also been criticized, among other things, for presenting an idealised Orientalist vision of Sinhalese life in the 1930s (there is very little in the film about urban life) and for glossing over the exploitation of Sinhalese workers on the tea plantations and elsewhere. It has also been questioned on more specifically ethnographic grounds, including for implying that the dancers juxtaposed in the final section with the statue of the Buddha are engaged in a religious performance of some kind when in reality, they are secular performers who hire themselves out to provide entertainment at weddings and similar festivities.

But whatever the validity or otherwise of these criticisms – and there are certainly counterarguments that might be made against them – The Song of Ceylon remains a work of uncontestable ethnographicness in that it was based on extensive prior research and a relatively lengthy shoot, as well as being informed by the insights gleaned from Wendt and Knox. Above all, in this film, the poetic power of cinema is used in a virtuoso manner to communicate the experience of everyday customary Sinhalese life in a direct manner. It was surely for this reason that it would later be a source of inspiration to two of the leading ethnographic film-makers of the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Gardner and David MacDougall.

Texts : Seton 1935/1971, Starr 1996, Guynn 1998, Gitlin 2012. See also the notes by Jon Hoare on the Colonial Film website here.