Father Ernest Poruthota:

By Uditha Devapriya

Prasanna Vithanage remembers the afternoons of his adolescence quite clearly. “I’d take the train to Panadura from Bambalapitiya at 1.57 after school ended, and by 3 I’d be home.” A quick wash and a quick lunch would be followed by a tedious routine: studying, reading, perhaps some play, dinner, sleep. In some ways that came to be my routine also: a quick bath, a quick lunch, and evenings spent hitting the books and indulging in artistic flights of fancy. The only difference was that I didn’t take the train. I took the van.

On Mondays and Fridays, however, Prasanna would change that routine. “I’d spend an hour at home and take the train back to Colombo. By 5.45 I would get down at Fort.” From Fort he walked to a decrepit building in Malwatte Road, where “a group of film enthusiasts screened movies from Britain, the US, France, Germany, Russia, and beyond the Iron Curtain.” They called it Martin Piyathumage Punchi Cinema Hala, and it was officiated, as a church would, by a man of the cloth.

Prasanna made his contact with that man, Ernest Poruthota, at that theatre. It became the first in a long line of encounters, which, as he puts it, “just kept on coming.”

In other words those encounters never ended, and he didn’t have to wait until Monday and Friday for them. “On Poya days Father Poruthota organised discussions on Sinhala films yet to be shown to the public.” At one of these discussions he met H. D. Premaratne; at another he met Dharmasena Pathiraja. Sunil Mihindukula served as the moderator.

From that rendezvous he leapt to another, with a seminar “at Aquinas College where, over three days, we watched three Sinhala films, including Premaratne’s Apeksha and Pathiraja’s Para Dige, and picked up the basics of feature and documentary filmmaking.”

The seminar marked Prasanna’s initiation into films, and it would be followed by another, also organised by Poruthota: “Sri Lanka’s first ever practical film training course”, overseen by Andrew Jayamanne and informally called “the Super 8mm Workshop.” Prasanna made his debut Miniththu, based on a short story by the late Jayalath Manoratne, after the course ended. A decade later he would make his first feature film, Sisila Gini Gani, which like much of his subsequent work revolved around a real incident. He was by then around the same age Dharmasena Pathiraja had been when he’d made his debut, Ahas Gawwa, in 1974; like that landmark classic, Sisila Gini Gani unleashed a new wave in the local cinema, winning practically every award and accolade at every ceremony.

Among those accolades were eight awards at the OCIC Film Festival. There too Prasanna made contact with Father Poruthota; after all, the latter was the first director of the OCIC’s chapter in Sri Lanka. During his tenure he had changed the format of the Festival by turning it into an all category event. The most important such ceremony until then, the Sarasaviya Awards, had been halted after 1971; it wouldn’t be revived until 1980. The OCIC under Poruthota thus filled not only a gap, but also a need.

Meanwhile Prasanna’s encounters with the man continued, long after Sisila Gini Gani, and they proved to be more than coincidental. “An entire generation of directors, including me, Christy Shelton Fernando, and Udayakantha Warnasuriya, emerged from those encounters. In more ways than one, it was all Father Poruthota’s doing.”

The full scope of Poruthota’s contribution can’t really be laid out in a single conversation. Neither Prasanna’s summing up of it, nor Poruthota’s own assessment of it, can do so. And yet an attempt must be made, not least because Poruthota, who died on June 16 at the age of 88, made his contribution to the cinema of this country at a time when the institutions he represented were only just beginning to embrace such secular realms. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa paid tribute to that contribution in his condolence message, where he noted the Father’s “love for the Sinhala language, literature, and our unique identity.”

The man who was to change the way religious authorities looked at the cinema and the arts was very much a product of his time. He was born Raymond Ernest Alexander in 1931 in Marawila, Puttalam. His father, Jokinu Fernando, had worked as a lecturer at the Maggona Teachers’ College. Owing to some disagreements with authorities there, however, he had been dismissed and transferred to Marawila, where he became a head teacher; later, he fell in love with and married a woman from Dambaduraya, Seeduwa. Jokinu also gained a reputation as a publisher of scientific and literary books; among the more popular titles was one on Physical Science, unostentatiously called Kaayika Vidyawa.

Poruthota rebelled against his elders from early on. In an interview I had with him in 2016, he wondered whether he gained his militant streak from his father. “He was a stubborn man. So stubborn, in fact, that when they transferred him he didn’t make a single attempt to appeal it.” Unfortunately for Poruthota though, the old man didn’t take too well to his son taking after him. “I hated going to school. I told my parents I didn’t want to. Obviously they didn’t listen. So every day I’d be dragged from home, along the road, to St Xavier’s College in Marawila, where I obtained my primary education.”

Much of the education he received came from home; in addition to his father’s publishing interests, “he was also a painter of some repute in the locality.” The old man, in fact, stimulated an interest in the decorative arts in him.

By 1940 however, the exasperated parents had realised that, come what may, their headstrong son wasn’t going to finish school. So they decided on the priesthood. “Father and mother came to believe that my vocation lay in the church. With that in mind, in 1942 they admitted me to St Aloysius Seminary in Borella.”

Young Poruthota had his first brush with the cinema at the Borella Seminary, perhaps the unlikeliest of all places where one could see films, given that relations between the Catholic Church and the cinema were, at best, tenuous. Fortunately for Poruthota though, the Rector of the Seminary had an unlikely friend: the Chairman and Managing Director of Ceylon Theatres, Albert Page. “Page had a habit of watching foreign movies, predominantly English movies, at the now defunct Empire Theatre in Colombo before giving the green light for their release. He sent some of them to our Rector and we watched them from time to time.” Forget the usual box office hits though: Poruthota and his friends got to see “only religious parables and epics”, like The Song of Bernadette. Westerns were out of the question, as were screwball comedies and detective thrillers.

If the cinema came to Poruthota through the Seminary, the Seminary at the same time sustained his interest in the decorative arts. Apparently he and his colleagues had been taken on compulsory walks every Thursday. One such walk, in 1948, had taken them around Torrington Junction, near Independence Square, where they had come across the unveiling of the National Flag at what he recalled as “a rehearsal for the independence ceremony.” Young Poruthota had been awed by the whole thing: “More than the historical significance, what appealed to me were the decorations, the colour, and the liveliness. I was so awed by it that when we returned, I set about replicating the decorations on crepe paper.” I asked him whether this fascination crept up through the artist in him trying to defy the strictures of the Seminary. “Perhaps,” he replied, with a telling smile.

In 1957 Thomas Benjamin Cooray, then Archbishop of Colombo, ordained Poruthota at St Lucia’s Cathedral in Kotahena. Even at that point the attitude of Church authorities to the cinema remained tenuous, if not strained. Two years later, for instance, Roger Vadim’s controversial film And God Created Woman went to the Public Performance Board, which banned it from local theatres. The Catholic Messenger in an editorial on the issue (dated February 1959) hailed the decision, praising the Board over “the high principles formulated by them according to which films must be judged.”

Consider here that the Board was now in the hands of officials appointed by a populist, leftwing government the Church opposed, and you can discern the irony of the congratulatory missive: the Messenger was, in effect, commending an administration it opposed for taking a decision based on religious morals that happened to coincide with their views on the cinema. This becomes even more relevant when we realise the Church departed from such a hostile approach to the arts later on.

The tide began to turn with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), at which a key decree, Inter mirifica, urged officials to make use of all forms of social communication, including the cinema. Until then the Church had considered the performing arts as a temporal activity; with the decree, they were anointed a place among spiritual affairs. When the Archbishop returned to Sri Lanka from the Council, he hence took action to enact the letter and spirit of the document. That culminated in the founding of a national office for the OCIC in 1971. In my interview, Father Poruthota told me the OCIC appointed him as director in 1977, but this is an error; according to official accounts, he was appointed in 1972.

Poruthota’s involvement in the theatre predated his work in the cinema. As Sarath Amunugama recalled in an article to The Island, thanks to his friendship with Cyril B. Perera, the ideologue of Sugathapala de Silva’s “Ape Kattiya”, Poruthota allowed the latter troupe to rehearse their plays “in his parish premises.” “Ape Kattiya” staged translations of contemporary Western plays, many of which delved into taboo subjects like homosexuality which the Church frowned upon. And yet, committed as he was to his love for the theatre, Poruthota continued to associate with them. Through them he rekindled his friendship with two other Catholic artists: Tony Ranasinghe and his brother, Ralex.

When he changed the OCIC Awards to an all category ceremony in 1977, Father Poruthota achieved two things. Firstly, he brought in a group of radical critics to the jury, a precedent given that most film juries until then, even at the Sarasaviya Awards, included old civil servants. The 1977 OCIC jury, for instance, had Edwin Ariyadasa, Cyril B. Perera, Professor Chandrasiri Palliyaguru, Ashley Ratnabivushana, Neil I. Perera, Lakshman Welikala, and Ralex Ranasinghe. Secondly, by bringing in these radical critics, he ensured recognition for the emerging left cinema. It’s not a coincidence, after all, that most major winners at the OCIC Awards in this period were articulators of the new cinema; the most coveted and feted among them, of course, being Dharmasena Pathiraja.

That ran into its own share of controversies – in certain years more than one contender had to share the top prize, highlighting the growing rift between the old giants and the new rebels in the industry – but the net result of it was that the OCIC, despite what may have been the resistance of more conservative sections of the Church, gave precedence to a leftwing if not left-of-centre cinematic and cultural discourse. For better or worse, this new wave in the cinema and in film criticism became the doing of the OCIC, and of the man behind the OCIC. It may have not been to everyone’s liking, yet that is what it was and that is what it eventually became.

Where do all these reflections leave Father Poruthota? He didn’t want to be a divisive figure, and in the end, despite his outspokenness, or rather because of it – in particular, his opposition to censorship “of any form” – he prevailed. This wasn’t limited to the cinema of course, though we can contend that it was where his biggest contribution lay; as Prasanna Vithanage put it, “he brought so many newcomers to the industry.” Vithanage, in fact, compared what he did to the opening of a door: “Church fathers, from their pulpits, appeal to the gatekeepers of heaven to let us in. I feel Father Poruthota opened many doors and windows for budding filmmakers like me to enter, right here on earth.”

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com