by Sivamohan Sumathy
1990. When Jeannne Moreau as Katherine jumps into the Seine after a quarrel with her lover Jules and would-be lover Jim, in a defining moment of Jules et Jim, one of those celebrated films that introduced the French Film wave, the narrator’s voice intervenes: "Her jump strikes Jim like lightning." It was lightning that struck me as I watched Jules et Jim at the Elphinstone that evening. It was perhaps one of the first films I was to watch alongside Pathi, sharing with him the excitement of encountering the New Wave. It would be the beginning of a long life bound together by watching and talking about film – a defining moment of my life-long collaboration with Pathi, a life-long endeavour to understand life as film. The daring contained in that one single scene in the film is what I carried away most significantly as memory and as a future possibility that evening. We would watch many more films in the days and years to come and Jules et Jim would be an underlying significance in our lives and experience.
It marks the beginning of a personal history of conversation on film, drama, the arts, society, and life with Pathi that is memorable just for itself, as well as for the indelible mark it has made on my life and work; but, there is something more. It is supremely memorable for the way a dialogue could spring from silence, a film be born out of a chance remark, and a politics forged from the experience of a train journey. There is much I can write about the journey and the journeys that we made, together and apart, but for me, how he made all of his journey interweave into a commitment to film and a commitment to people, a commitment to who sits next to you, that is what I want to underscore above all here. His commitment to film as life. He made film practice a political practice, not in the sense of making strong political films (though that too), but more in the sense of creating a practice of commitment to the person who sits next to you and tells her story.
We watched films together in silence, only occasionally making a remark of wonder. We would hardly discuss it later. He was always more charitable, me, more harsh in my critique. Never strident in his views, in the early years he helped me to break down a film, not through any didactic pronouncement, nor through an elaborately constructed exposition, but through carelessly said, almost incidental, remarks which, if one was not paying attention, one would easily miss. He would let me flounder in these chance remarks, often never revisiting them, unless pointedly asked, which was at times frustrating. With time, as years rolled by, I was astounded to find out how similar our thinking about a film became, me always thrilled by the conversation – thrilled to hear his affirmation of my opinion, for that provided a finality, a confirmation, of my own good judgement.
It was never about closure, but an opening on to another world, another film, another thought, another play or poem. And within this frustrating thesis of half-utterances and under-utterance, one finds the germ for a film, a play, a thesis, a refreshing new direction.
When Pathi was researching Ghatak, Sen, and Ray, I joined him briefly in Pune at the Film Institute to watch Bhuvan Shome, Ashani Sanketh, Akhaler Sandaney, and many more. I had not heard of Ghatak before; no one in Sri Lanka or in the west, where our knowledge is made, spoke of him, though in India itself, though not popular, he was a sacred cow of sorts in contemporary art house circles. We watched together almost all Ghatak’s films.
Pathi made me watch Meghe Dhaka Tara and explained the beauty of its almost crude yet haunting melodrama, for once in detail, in answer to my persistent query about the film. Later, when I started working on Ingirunthu, my debut feature, it was the structure and meaning of Meghe Dhaka Tara that I carried with me in my mind, as an influence, and not Ghatak’s other two partition films. I watched Subarnarekha too, entranced. Reading it while Pathi worked on his thesis, I was mesmerized not just by the film, but how Pathi could evoke a feeling for it in such strong visual terms. Yet, nothing prepared us for the unique experience we had together, at the Pune Film Institute one evening, when the then Director, Chabria, sent word to us in the motel to come watch the newly constituted print, perhaps the first complete print, of Titash Ek Nam Dir.
I sat there, together with a scatter of persons, astounded, watching the magic of Titash and its mythology unfold. Pathi had in a way prepared me for it earlier with his tutoring on Ghatak. Pathi was silent most of the evening, while I was trying to piece out its meanings, carrying home, or to the hotel, its larger-than-life mythological images, the land, and the river itself, more mythic than anything else. Later, he wrote on Titash, which he had not originally intended to, in his thesis. More tellingly, he wrote what I consider a personal tribute to Ghatak, in his Ghatak and I: Where there is no partition, in Incomplete Sentence.
This Indian-Pune experience is important for me in many ways. It is here that one day, in his own characteristically unruffled and unassuming manner, he opined, declared, "I see Sri Lankan film as being one of the regional film movements of India." Recently, I reminded him of this and asked him, "You said this at that time, do you remember?" In my remarks at the seminar on Pathiraja’s film at Jaffna University during the Jaffna International Film Festival, where I was one of the speakers, I wanted to question the entire linearity of seeing Sinhala film as Sri Lankan film and seeing Sri Lankan film as Sinhala film; theoretically, it meant querying the monolithism of the first wave/second wave paradigm model, placing Pathiraja’s films within the second paradigm. Unwittingly, such a linearity plays into the nation- making mythology of our times. Nothing is unreservedly and wholly true or false. So, I do not want to offer my own pronouncements as a sealed-off truth. Sinhala/Sri Lankan film is as much Tamil and as much South Indian in its making, particularly in not wanting to be so, as it is about being Sinhala. Pathi raises this, independent of any of my own theorizing, in his Memorial Lecture for Professor Sivagnanasundaram which appears in this volume.
When we set off on this idea of a book on his films and other work, he insisted on the inclusion of the memorial lecture. He said that it was the most important piece for him. Jaffna, for some unexplainable reason, held a very special place for him. It was a special place, not in the sense of home, but as the place of a dear dear friend. He lived and worked in Jaffna, long before it had become a ‘project’ or ‘activism.’ Ponmani was not about war, displacement, women, Muslims, or empowerment. It was not even about loss, the loss of a place he felt keenly. It was about love, and that romance can be witnessed in the caressing camera tracks of Ponmani. When the Jaffna International Film Festival wanted to felicitate his achievements and contribution and award a lifetime prize to him in September 2017, I tried to dissuade him from going. It would be too much for him and his health would not bear it. He would not even hear of it. He made all his arrangements to go there by land without any input from me and merely informed me of his plans. He insisted on taking part in the seminar and speaking at it, even as he turned down other invitations. Jaffna was not an intimate part of his being, it was the other that he embraced. We see a demonstration of this in the moving docu-feature In Search of a Road.
He worked on it relentlessly, and drove us, his collaborators, hard. He had an immense amount of footage and began to whittle it down little by little over time, during multiple sessions of editing. At times, he drove me to tears. We first made a lineup, a story, and I wrote a narration, a descriptive historically explicit one. Later, he got me to write narration after narration, one following the other, and edited the film using the narration; it was a novel experience for me. We both work best on our own; each of us wrapped up in our own fantasy worlds. Yet, he was committed to making his meaning crystal clear to his audience, and he insisted on making me achieve that. Cooped up in the small editing studio watching the footage roll carried so much emotion for me.
The train journey across borders eerily reminded me of the journey Pathi and I undertook in 1990 to Jaffna, with the hope of making a documentary. It was the time of the ceasefire that was quickly disintegrating and, when we had to return, we were advised to travel by train and cancel our bus tickets.
We both travelled back by the night mail, which would be the last train to ply from Jaffna to Colombo for more than 25 years. We crossed borders and LTTE checkpoints. In Search of a Road brought back all those memories of travel, of danger, of death and loss in my own personal life, of that perilous journey from Jaffna that June night in that crowded third-class compartment.
When In Search of a Road was screened at Goethe Insitute, and a young man got up to question its politics, its purported disregard of Sinhala anxieties and sentiments, Pathi just stood there in front of the audience, unmoving, not necessarily unmoved, and merely said, "I have nothing to say in response." He sincerely had nothing to say at that point. He had moved on from that place, bored by the audience and their quarrelsome insistence on finding immediate meaning and answers in film. It was not his style at all! It was not because he did not care about the audience. He cared very deeply about his audience to feel frustrated and to give into despair over an outburst of that nature. He had faith in the people and in his audience and did not face challenges or criticism with fervor, but with equanimity.
He had faith in me too and in my abilities. In Australia, he introduced me to theatre personalities and wanted me to perform. The award winning one-woman performance, In the shadow of the Gun, with which I went international, was born in the small theatre of La Mama in Melbourne in 1996. The memories of that performance are many. It was a celebratory moment for me and for us, and I gained a dear friend in fellow-writer and activist, Channa Wickramasekara, who played the tabla for the performance and who was introduced to me by Pathi. There was also a tragi-comic side to this experience. When I went a few times to Melbourne, primarily to visit Pathi, we were caught in the middle of two ferociously nationalist camps of the Sri Lankan diaspora. While I was battling LTTE-minds, Pathi was on a campaign against Sinhala nationalist forces in Melbourne. On the morning of the performance, when Channa turned up with his tabla to make our way to the city centre and La Mama for a pre-show rehearsal, and I opened the door to his ringing, we found the front door and walls awash with human feces. It was a Sri Lankan political moment for me. The performance saved us from insanity, and we brushed the unpleasantness from our minds, without giving any further thought to the incident. Again, when I directed Girish Karnad’s Nagamandalam, Pathi was delighted. We both first watched the play at Washington State University. In our postmortem of the rather lackluster production, was born my resolve to produce and direct this really wonderful play of Karnad, and Pathi was delighted! It was one of my major productions, with a large and amateur cast and I put my heart and soul into it. For Pathi, it was like it was his own play and he was there, the sight of him at the back of the theatre always giving me confidence that nothing would go wrong. To his disappointment, I did not do many performances of the play and he always bitterly talked about how I was not committed enough to my art. A commitment to art was akin to being committed to the people for him. I was too fickle.
His unobtrusive and unassuming touch can be discerned even in my research. When I began my work with displaced Muslim (and Tamil) women in Puttalam in 2004, a work in which I innovated and collaborated with the women who participated in the writing of the paper, I went with Pathi to Puttalam to make the initial contact, accompanied by Vasuki Aathavan who would later be my research assistant. We went from place to place, visiting with my friend Juweriya various homes of the displaced, often knocking on doors of people unknown to us, Muslim and Tamil. The day drew to a close and we were all tired. We had not visited the saltern camps yet. I was ready to leave and go back to Colombo and ask Juweriya, to contact the persons in the camp for me until I returned. Pathi, who had been silently watching all this while, the entire day, suddenly said, "You cannot go back without visiting those camps. It is there the pulse of the displaced is." This brought me up short and I realized my own shortcoming. When I began working closely with the women later, the courage to innovate and take risks in my own work was informed by those marginal and incidental words to me that day. It was the critical eye and the filmmaker’s eye and the heart of commitment that gave me stamina and the determination to push my own self to its furthest. This critical eye would follow me, and I carried it in my own inner being, as I began work on Ingirunthu, which I call the people’s film, a film of commitment.
When it came to my own work, he would be utterly and totally merciless, ruthless in his criticism. Every play and every film script I would show him and wait with bated breath for his opinion, ready to throw down the gauntlet, stand my ground and argue. Our processes were very different, and we rarely agreed on modalities, me entering the world of film through my experience in theatre and performance. Yet, there was an understanding about a shot, a movement, that I can see only as having been an experience of learning from him and I hope him from me. To Pathi, I owe what I understand as the third space. He has always spoken of the third space, and by expounding on Ghatak and the partition trilogy in particular and films like Ajantrik, he let me experience the third space visually, imaginatively, and politically. His own films exemplify the use of the third space supremely. There is always a third space in our lives we can arrive at.
He pushed me hard, always querying. He was not the gentle unruffled teacher or critic then. He was there for every play, every film, every script, not as a guide or an inspiration, not even as support, though there was plenty of it, but supremely as a fellow creator, observing with a quizzical eye. Unlike him, I cared less about the audience. Yes, I wanted my films to be liked, loved, and praised. But praise or the lack of praise did not deter me from having immense faith in my own ability. Yet, failure or inadequacy in Pathi’s eyes would devastate me. I sought his approval even when I did not agree with him. One late night during post production of Ingirunthu in Chennai, after a long hard day’s work that went well into the night at Gemini Studio, where we were putting the finishing touches to the film, we returned to our lodgings in Kodambakkam, tired and hungry, longing for sleep. Just as we were settling down, he started off with, "Watching your film today," and then stopped. My heart sank; he is going to say something critical. I waited silently, half expectant, half afraid and he began again, "Watching your film today, I thought you had achieved what Brecht wanted to in Kuhle Wampe." I did not need any other word of praise, award or recognition after that. It is just a world of our own, just he and me, talking about film and, perhaps, the people.
Even as I write these words, I know something has irrevocably changed. I will not be able to hear that praise or criticism again. Nor that affirmation of what I might be doing. No editing advice, no more reading through scripts, no more quibbling over my poor taste in footwear or my careless ways with money. No more disagreements about films, plays, novels or even our personal conduct. As I watch him lying on the hospital bed in the room overlooking the lake in Kandy, and my conflicting emotions are in constant flux, I can think only of the concluding scene of Jules et Jim, where Jeanne Moreau crashes her car down into the Seine, taking herself and her lover Jim down with it. In the linear melodrama of our personal lives which has unfolded in front of our very eyes, film intervenes like a fantasy, the third space. It is what I learnt from Pathi about film and about life.
1990. When Jeannne Moreau as Katherine jumps into the Seine after a quarrel with her lover Jules and would-be lover Jim, in a defining moment of Jules et Jim, one of those celebrated films that introduced the French Film wave, the narrator’s voice intervenes: "Her jump strikes Jim like lightning." It was lightning that struck me as I watched Jules et Jim at the Elphinstone that evening. It was perhaps one of the first films I was to watch alongside Pathi, sharing with him the excitement of encountering the New Wave. It would be the beginning of a long life bound together by watching and talking about film – a defining moment of my life-long collaboration with Pathi, a life-long endeavour to understand life as film. The daring contained in that one single scene in the film is what I carried away most significantly as memory and as a future possibility that evening. We would watch many more films in the days and years to come and Jules et Jim would be an underlying significance in our lives and experience.
It marks the beginning of a personal history of conversation on film, drama, the arts, society, and life with Pathi that is memorable just for itself, as well as for the indelible mark it has made on my life and work; but, there is something more. It is supremely memorable for the way a dialogue could spring from silence, a film be born out of a chance remark, and a politics forged from the experience of a train journey. There is much I can write about the journey and the journeys that we made, together and apart, but for me, how he made all of his journey interweave into a commitment to film and a commitment to people, a commitment to who sits next to you, that is what I want to underscore above all here. His commitment to film as life. He made film practice a political practice, not in the sense of making strong political films (though that too), but more in the sense of creating a practice of commitment to the person who sits next to you and tells her story.
We watched films together in silence, only occasionally making a remark of wonder. We would hardly discuss it later. He was always more charitable, me, more harsh in my critique. Never strident in his views, in the early years he helped me to break down a film, not through any didactic pronouncement, nor through an elaborately constructed exposition, but through carelessly said, almost incidental, remarks which, if one was not paying attention, one would easily miss. He would let me flounder in these chance remarks, often never revisiting them, unless pointedly asked, which was at times frustrating. With time, as years rolled by, I was astounded to find out how similar our thinking about a film became, me always thrilled by the conversation – thrilled to hear his affirmation of my opinion, for that provided a finality, a confirmation, of my own good judgement.
It was never about closure, but an opening on to another world, another film, another thought, another play or poem. And within this frustrating thesis of half-utterances and under-utterance, one finds the germ for a film, a play, a thesis, a refreshing new direction.
When Pathi was researching Ghatak, Sen, and Ray, I joined him briefly in Pune at the Film Institute to watch Bhuvan Shome, Ashani Sanketh, Akhaler Sandaney, and many more. I had not heard of Ghatak before; no one in Sri Lanka or in the west, where our knowledge is made, spoke of him, though in India itself, though not popular, he was a sacred cow of sorts in contemporary art house circles. We watched together almost all Ghatak’s films.
Pathi made me watch Meghe Dhaka Tara and explained the beauty of its almost crude yet haunting melodrama, for once in detail, in answer to my persistent query about the film. Later, when I started working on Ingirunthu, my debut feature, it was the structure and meaning of Meghe Dhaka Tara that I carried with me in my mind, as an influence, and not Ghatak’s other two partition films. I watched Subarnarekha too, entranced. Reading it while Pathi worked on his thesis, I was mesmerized not just by the film, but how Pathi could evoke a feeling for it in such strong visual terms. Yet, nothing prepared us for the unique experience we had together, at the Pune Film Institute one evening, when the then Director, Chabria, sent word to us in the motel to come watch the newly constituted print, perhaps the first complete print, of Titash Ek Nam Dir.
I sat there, together with a scatter of persons, astounded, watching the magic of Titash and its mythology unfold. Pathi had in a way prepared me for it earlier with his tutoring on Ghatak. Pathi was silent most of the evening, while I was trying to piece out its meanings, carrying home, or to the hotel, its larger-than-life mythological images, the land, and the river itself, more mythic than anything else. Later, he wrote on Titash, which he had not originally intended to, in his thesis. More tellingly, he wrote what I consider a personal tribute to Ghatak, in his Ghatak and I: Where there is no partition, in Incomplete Sentence.
This Indian-Pune experience is important for me in many ways. It is here that one day, in his own characteristically unruffled and unassuming manner, he opined, declared, "I see Sri Lankan film as being one of the regional film movements of India." Recently, I reminded him of this and asked him, "You said this at that time, do you remember?" In my remarks at the seminar on Pathiraja’s film at Jaffna University during the Jaffna International Film Festival, where I was one of the speakers, I wanted to question the entire linearity of seeing Sinhala film as Sri Lankan film and seeing Sri Lankan film as Sinhala film; theoretically, it meant querying the monolithism of the first wave/second wave paradigm model, placing Pathiraja’s films within the second paradigm. Unwittingly, such a linearity plays into the nation- making mythology of our times. Nothing is unreservedly and wholly true or false. So, I do not want to offer my own pronouncements as a sealed-off truth. Sinhala/Sri Lankan film is as much Tamil and as much South Indian in its making, particularly in not wanting to be so, as it is about being Sinhala. Pathi raises this, independent of any of my own theorizing, in his Memorial Lecture for Professor Sivagnanasundaram which appears in this volume.
When we set off on this idea of a book on his films and other work, he insisted on the inclusion of the memorial lecture. He said that it was the most important piece for him. Jaffna, for some unexplainable reason, held a very special place for him. It was a special place, not in the sense of home, but as the place of a dear dear friend. He lived and worked in Jaffna, long before it had become a ‘project’ or ‘activism.’ Ponmani was not about war, displacement, women, Muslims, or empowerment. It was not even about loss, the loss of a place he felt keenly. It was about love, and that romance can be witnessed in the caressing camera tracks of Ponmani. When the Jaffna International Film Festival wanted to felicitate his achievements and contribution and award a lifetime prize to him in September 2017, I tried to dissuade him from going. It would be too much for him and his health would not bear it. He would not even hear of it. He made all his arrangements to go there by land without any input from me and merely informed me of his plans. He insisted on taking part in the seminar and speaking at it, even as he turned down other invitations. Jaffna was not an intimate part of his being, it was the other that he embraced. We see a demonstration of this in the moving docu-feature In Search of a Road.
He worked on it relentlessly, and drove us, his collaborators, hard. He had an immense amount of footage and began to whittle it down little by little over time, during multiple sessions of editing. At times, he drove me to tears. We first made a lineup, a story, and I wrote a narration, a descriptive historically explicit one. Later, he got me to write narration after narration, one following the other, and edited the film using the narration; it was a novel experience for me. We both work best on our own; each of us wrapped up in our own fantasy worlds. Yet, he was committed to making his meaning crystal clear to his audience, and he insisted on making me achieve that. Cooped up in the small editing studio watching the footage roll carried so much emotion for me.
The train journey across borders eerily reminded me of the journey Pathi and I undertook in 1990 to Jaffna, with the hope of making a documentary. It was the time of the ceasefire that was quickly disintegrating and, when we had to return, we were advised to travel by train and cancel our bus tickets.
We both travelled back by the night mail, which would be the last train to ply from Jaffna to Colombo for more than 25 years. We crossed borders and LTTE checkpoints. In Search of a Road brought back all those memories of travel, of danger, of death and loss in my own personal life, of that perilous journey from Jaffna that June night in that crowded third-class compartment.
When In Search of a Road was screened at Goethe Insitute, and a young man got up to question its politics, its purported disregard of Sinhala anxieties and sentiments, Pathi just stood there in front of the audience, unmoving, not necessarily unmoved, and merely said, "I have nothing to say in response." He sincerely had nothing to say at that point. He had moved on from that place, bored by the audience and their quarrelsome insistence on finding immediate meaning and answers in film. It was not his style at all! It was not because he did not care about the audience. He cared very deeply about his audience to feel frustrated and to give into despair over an outburst of that nature. He had faith in the people and in his audience and did not face challenges or criticism with fervor, but with equanimity.
He had faith in me too and in my abilities. In Australia, he introduced me to theatre personalities and wanted me to perform. The award winning one-woman performance, In the shadow of the Gun, with which I went international, was born in the small theatre of La Mama in Melbourne in 1996. The memories of that performance are many. It was a celebratory moment for me and for us, and I gained a dear friend in fellow-writer and activist, Channa Wickramasekara, who played the tabla for the performance and who was introduced to me by Pathi. There was also a tragi-comic side to this experience. When I went a few times to Melbourne, primarily to visit Pathi, we were caught in the middle of two ferociously nationalist camps of the Sri Lankan diaspora. While I was battling LTTE-minds, Pathi was on a campaign against Sinhala nationalist forces in Melbourne. On the morning of the performance, when Channa turned up with his tabla to make our way to the city centre and La Mama for a pre-show rehearsal, and I opened the door to his ringing, we found the front door and walls awash with human feces. It was a Sri Lankan political moment for me. The performance saved us from insanity, and we brushed the unpleasantness from our minds, without giving any further thought to the incident. Again, when I directed Girish Karnad’s Nagamandalam, Pathi was delighted. We both first watched the play at Washington State University. In our postmortem of the rather lackluster production, was born my resolve to produce and direct this really wonderful play of Karnad, and Pathi was delighted! It was one of my major productions, with a large and amateur cast and I put my heart and soul into it. For Pathi, it was like it was his own play and he was there, the sight of him at the back of the theatre always giving me confidence that nothing would go wrong. To his disappointment, I did not do many performances of the play and he always bitterly talked about how I was not committed enough to my art. A commitment to art was akin to being committed to the people for him. I was too fickle.
His unobtrusive and unassuming touch can be discerned even in my research. When I began my work with displaced Muslim (and Tamil) women in Puttalam in 2004, a work in which I innovated and collaborated with the women who participated in the writing of the paper, I went with Pathi to Puttalam to make the initial contact, accompanied by Vasuki Aathavan who would later be my research assistant. We went from place to place, visiting with my friend Juweriya various homes of the displaced, often knocking on doors of people unknown to us, Muslim and Tamil. The day drew to a close and we were all tired. We had not visited the saltern camps yet. I was ready to leave and go back to Colombo and ask Juweriya, to contact the persons in the camp for me until I returned. Pathi, who had been silently watching all this while, the entire day, suddenly said, "You cannot go back without visiting those camps. It is there the pulse of the displaced is." This brought me up short and I realized my own shortcoming. When I began working closely with the women later, the courage to innovate and take risks in my own work was informed by those marginal and incidental words to me that day. It was the critical eye and the filmmaker’s eye and the heart of commitment that gave me stamina and the determination to push my own self to its furthest. This critical eye would follow me, and I carried it in my own inner being, as I began work on Ingirunthu, which I call the people’s film, a film of commitment.
When it came to my own work, he would be utterly and totally merciless, ruthless in his criticism. Every play and every film script I would show him and wait with bated breath for his opinion, ready to throw down the gauntlet, stand my ground and argue. Our processes were very different, and we rarely agreed on modalities, me entering the world of film through my experience in theatre and performance. Yet, there was an understanding about a shot, a movement, that I can see only as having been an experience of learning from him and I hope him from me. To Pathi, I owe what I understand as the third space. He has always spoken of the third space, and by expounding on Ghatak and the partition trilogy in particular and films like Ajantrik, he let me experience the third space visually, imaginatively, and politically. His own films exemplify the use of the third space supremely. There is always a third space in our lives we can arrive at.
He pushed me hard, always querying. He was not the gentle unruffled teacher or critic then. He was there for every play, every film, every script, not as a guide or an inspiration, not even as support, though there was plenty of it, but supremely as a fellow creator, observing with a quizzical eye. Unlike him, I cared less about the audience. Yes, I wanted my films to be liked, loved, and praised. But praise or the lack of praise did not deter me from having immense faith in my own ability. Yet, failure or inadequacy in Pathi’s eyes would devastate me. I sought his approval even when I did not agree with him. One late night during post production of Ingirunthu in Chennai, after a long hard day’s work that went well into the night at Gemini Studio, where we were putting the finishing touches to the film, we returned to our lodgings in Kodambakkam, tired and hungry, longing for sleep. Just as we were settling down, he started off with, "Watching your film today," and then stopped. My heart sank; he is going to say something critical. I waited silently, half expectant, half afraid and he began again, "Watching your film today, I thought you had achieved what Brecht wanted to in Kuhle Wampe." I did not need any other word of praise, award or recognition after that. It is just a world of our own, just he and me, talking about film and, perhaps, the people.
Even as I write these words, I know something has irrevocably changed. I will not be able to hear that praise or criticism again. Nor that affirmation of what I might be doing. No editing advice, no more reading through scripts, no more quibbling over my poor taste in footwear or my careless ways with money. No more disagreements about films, plays, novels or even our personal conduct. As I watch him lying on the hospital bed in the room overlooking the lake in Kandy, and my conflicting emotions are in constant flux, I can think only of the concluding scene of Jules et Jim, where Jeanne Moreau crashes her car down into the Seine, taking herself and her lover Jim down with it. In the linear melodrama of our personal lives which has unfolded in front of our very eyes, film intervenes like a fantasy, the third space. It is what I learnt from Pathi about film and about life.
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