The Song of Ceylon

• Lionel Wendt ( narrator)

The Song of Ceylon is a British documentary film by Basil Wright from the year 1934. It deals artistically ambitious and with the look of a European observer with the life of the Sinhalese in the British colony of Ceylon and is next to the Night Mail, developed later than aesthetically outstanding work the British documentary movement.

Content

The film is thematically divided into four sections. The first part - The Buddha - begins with the camera panning over palm leaves and treated Buddhism in Ceylon. Pilgrims travel to Adam 's Peak, there to worship the Buddha's footprint. The second part - The Virgin Iceland - considered the traditional life and work of the Sinhalese against the background and in accordance with the tropical landscape. Among the works on display are fishing, household chores, Pottering, construction, agriculture, and dance classes. In the third part - The Voices of Commerce - the influence of modernity and industrialization of Ceylon is presented. Train noise and views from a moving train on the landscape guide on the subject. Heavy work is carried out with the help of elephants and harvested coconuts for the production of copra by hand, but modern telecommunications has already reached Ceylon. Tea prices on the market are now traded in this way. Commercialized tea production, harvesting, processing and tea trade are the picture of the modern colonial Ceylon. With an offering of over life-size statues of Buddhist and a ritual dance of the locals in festive clothing comes the fourth part - The Apparel of a God - back to lived religion and culture of Ceylon. With camera pans over palm leaves, the film ends as it began.

Background

Planned Still under the EMB, was The Song of Ceylon produced after the acquisition of EMB Film Unit by the GPO Film Unit, with the support of the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, founded in 1932, for its Publicityzwecke the recordings should be made. Basil Wright turned to a camera assistant, three cameras and two tripods.

The descriptive narrative in the film comes from Robert Knox's travelogue A Historical Relation of Ceylon from 1680. The soundtrack was created separately in the studio, because the technical conditions did not allow for a simultaneous image and sound recording. The composer Leigh experimented with the support of Alberto Cavalcanti with exotic sounds and - especially in the third part - with dissonant industrial sound effects.

The author and film critic Graham Greene praised the film in 1935 in a review of the magazine The Spectator and lifted its " methodological and content security, and the visual imagery " out. One American criticism in the magazine Variety in 1937 he was " too done something to art."

Awards

At the Brussels International Film Festival in 1935 was awarded as the best film of all categories The Song of Ceylon for Best Documentary and the Prix du Gouvernement.