D. B. S. Jeyaraj, writing on the meeting between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena held around three weeks ago, suggests that in the coming weeks, G. L. Peiris, the de jure leader of the Joint Opposition, will hand over power to Rajapaksa, the de facto leader. This will, he further opines, give the man enough clout to negotiate and, presumably, ...

H. D. Premaratne directed films. Masterpieces. All of them captured heart. Mine and yours. But this is not an assessment of his career. This is something of a personal tribute.For the connoisseur in us, brought up to believe in an (unbridgeable) gap between arty and commercial films, he was a rebel. An unforgivable one. He was born 71 years ago. ...

In the writings of Pauline Kael, the greatest movie critic who ever lived, you infer a patent distrust of any dichotomy drawn by writers between art and entertainment. At a time when Alain Resnais and Ingmar Bergman were idealised as messiahs and patron saints of the medium, therefore, it’s refreshing, if not disconcerting, to come across essays written by her ...

In his landmark essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg discusses the evolution of art in terms of its separation into two broad cultures: the highbrow and the popular. The progression or regression (depending on how you see it) from the one to the other was facilitated by the transition from feudalism, with its repressive structures enabling a separation of art ...

Irangani Serasinghe, the mother of all mothers in our cinema, turned 90 last week. What better time to examine how those performances of hers have had an impact on our movies and us?Irangani Serasinghe is the only actress I can think of from here who has never tapdanced, cha-chaed, or freestyled to a song in a commercial movie. Nearly everyone ...

Not a review. Not a retelling. Rather, a memory.The movies have inspired. They have taught us how to cry and how to laugh. They have lifted, saddened, reassured, and humbled. They have also chastened, confused, and angered. Speaking for myself, they have made my life easier to bear. They have lit dark corners, given me hope when there was anything ...

I still remember that day I entered that house. It was somewhere in mid-2013, back when I had given up on my father’s and mother’s dreams and decided I wasn’t going to be an accountant. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, much less what I wanted to be. Though I wasn’t a big fan of Sinhala movies, I ...

Regi Siriwardena, in his memoir "Working Underground", recounts a conversation he had with Philip Gunawardena. This was in 1942. The conversation was about the (ideological) rift between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin over the latter's support for a centralised party. Siriwardena stated that this could be explained by the social contexts both were placed in: Rosa's being German democracy and Lenin's ...

“It must be seen today, by the young of today,” Ranjith Rubasinghe told me over lunch. He was talking about Sagara Jalaya, Sumitra Peries’s fifth film, which I think is one of the three or four most perfectly constructed films ever made here, and which I believe is Sumitra’s masterpiece. Those who watch it today are often overwhelmed by the ...

“I can't make movies for any purpose other than entertainment.” (Chandran Rutnam)In Janelaya, which has just about the finest performances that a cast including Tony Ranasinghe and Swineetha Weerasinghe on one hand and Ravindra Randeniya and Anoja Weerasinghe on the other could have had, the director, Chandran Rutnam, doesn’t try to hide his inspirations: he practically shows them off for ...

I remember a conversation I had with Professor Carlo Fonseka about four years ago. We were talking about how the arts, in the long run at least, could help explain the social and political in ways that the social sciences could not. Inevitably, he brought up Shakespeare. I am not an unconditional fan of the Bard, but I alluded to ...

Processes are rarely perfect. They have their champions. They have their critics. Very rarely do mechanisms and structures created to address reconciliation achieve everything and anything they want to achieve. Those who commend one mechanism over another, then, are either myopic or silent to this truth. This is the case whatever the context and the aims of such structures are.The ...

The Blue and Gold Quiz, organised by the General Knowledge Club of Royal College, will be held on Tuesday, November the 7th at the College Hall for the 27th consecutive time.Angelo Rozairo, who taught French at my school, was the wittiest teacher I ever encountered. He had that rare ability to turn the most banal sayings downside up, to disrupt ...

He was born 96 years ago. He turns 96 today. There probably are a good many words one can use in describing him. Probably only one or two of them can describe him well. In any case, the worth of the man goes beyond words. Icons are like that. Words, sentences, even essays or books, can't do justice. There is ...

Pen-portraits are not easy to draw. What they sum up hardly goes by way of encapsulating a person's life and character in their entirety, and all too often the writer loses in substance what he tries to sketch as summary. The true worth or essence of a man, therefore, can only be caught through the eyes of the biographer.Ethel Mannin, ...

Like every other work of art, movies tend to come and go. They are advertised and in other ways promoted. They are targeted at certain audiences. We have family films and those made for children, even though some are clearly aimed at adults. Other genres crop up too, but at the end of the day these distinctions are forgotten and ...

Tomorrow is Election Day. Here. In Sri Lanka. For the first time in a decade, the incumbent is facing an opposition he has to reckon with. The opposition is more organised. The fight, therefore, will be tough. All the way. It is still too early to predict and to champion, too early to back and to jeer at. But we ...

Anagarika Dharmapala is the worst thing that happened to Sri Lankan history. He was a racist, a political pamphleteer, a propagandist who, at the end of the day, served the interests of the bourgeoisie by providing an antidote to the proletariat. He was a betrayer, a peddler of myths, and a demagogue. He was hence the definitive ancestor to S. ...

Dr Dayan Jayatilleka in his article "The Rising: Nugegoda Feb 18th" makes two points clear. Firstly, Mahinda Rajapaksa is wanted. Secondly, those who want him do not resent President Maithripala Sirisena: they just want the SLFP to get the UNP out. While the first point is debatable, I agree with the second.President Sirisena's campaign was for good governance. Even his ...

One never really gets to a sensibility, particularly when it comes to a person who makes a profession out of his or her voice. Vocalists are sometimes too good to hate, at other times too bad to love, and frequently too mediocre, too average, to care about. Most of them, you love to hate, while others, you grow to love. ...