Commissioned to make travelogues publicizing the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, budding British documentarian Basil Wright made instead something else—just what precisely is debatable. Producer John Grierson thus defined the point of The Song of Ceylon: “Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western metropolitan civilization which, in spite of all our skills, has no art of life to offer.” Once a routine entry on lists of the all-time ten best films, Wright’s Song is rarely sung anymore for its perceived chauvinism, although Wright may be ironically undercutting chauvinistic notions voiced in the late seventeenth-century text (by Robert Knox) that the film’s narration draws upon. Everyone agrees that the film is lyrical.
The 40-minute film is divided into four parts: “The Buddha,” “The Virgin Island,” “Voices of commerce,” “The Apparel of the Gods.”
The opening tests the possibility of Wright’s irony. Ceylon’s “dark forest,” which the narrator (quoting Knox) says existed “since ancient times,” plants the land and its people in the symbolical “darkness” of ignorance, backwardness. But the accompanying tracking shot through forest is most striking for shafts of intense sunlight! The narrator proceeds to describe natives as making themselves “prostrate to the Devil” at night; but the accompanying image of grotesquely masked figures dancing in fire-lit darkness is sufficiently fantastic to suggest a dream, one perhaps lodged in the “civilized” Western mind that, we cannot help but note, presumes a literal belief in the Devil! In any case, the narration explains that Buddhism replaced such devil-worship as the film moves from night to day and from gaudy, pulsating closeups to orderly long-shots. We suddenly realize that the devil-dance is a performance, a reconstruction.
Wright’s beautiful film is ripe for revisiting.
Ceylon today is Sri Lanka.
