Givantha Arthasad animates life

By Uditha Devapriya

On the way to Moratuwa from Piliyandala you cross the Bolgoda Bridge, where the path bifurcates between the road to Katubedda on your right and the road to Rawathawatta on your left. The road to Rawathawatta is smaller, and yet more crowded: you pass countless furniture shops, fruit and vegetable stalls, fishmongers, and grocery stores, as well as a church and a temple. After driving on for two kilometres, you wind into a suburb called Shramadhana Road, which forks into several small lanes.

This is where Givantha Arthasad lives.

I initially found it difficult to locate him, because of the maze-like lanes that lead to his house. Once I found it, however, all those other houses seemed to vanish before me; this one looked like it stood a world or two apart from them.

A series of steps lead to a lower elevation, with copious shrubs and bushes flanking either side. The veranda, where I sat down to meet the man I had come to talk to, was adorned with so much craftwork and so many designs, including paintings and clay figures, that I could only be awed. I felt like I had walked into a lair.

Givantha Arthasad likes to call himself an artist. What kind of artist? Diplomatically, he refrains from answering. For someone who led so many lives – graphic designing, painting, photography, drama, cinema, television, broadcasting, and journalism – calling him an artist hardly captures his versatility, since his contributions surpass anything a crass generalisation of that sort can lead us to assume. This is his story.

He was born Baminihennedige Givantha Arthasad Peiris in Katunayake to a religiously devout father and mother, both of whom were involved in education: his father, George A. Peiris, was the Scout Commissioner of Sri Lanka, while his mother, Dulcie Peiris, worked as a teacher. “I initially attended Methodist College in my hometown, where my father served as principal, before being sent to Wesley College Colombo from Grade Two.”

Givantha inherited his artistic touch from his parents. “My mother used to bring children in our neighbourhood to our home, where she taught them to make toys, sculpt, and paint for free. Naturally, she taught me too.” His father, on the other hand, taught him “to read newspapers upside down, and to read aloud, paying close attention to the dramatic nuances of a passage.”

With these early encounters, he moved on to Wesley. His first class teacher there had seen him paint, and, since he painted well for his age, had even once remarked, “You shouldn’t have been born in a country like this.” That classteacher was Cyril Wickramage.

He hadn’t been the only staff member who’d encouraged his talent. “My Grade Three class teacher, Mrs Ivy Marasinghe, used to conduct art classes after school which we helped her with. During weekends she took us to watch cartoons. That’s where I encountered the world of animation, from Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck.”

Surprisingly for someone who loved to draw, young Givantha opted for science at Wesley. This became a problem when his studies clashed with his desire to paint and to submit what he painted to various art competitions. The principal of Wesley back then, the renowned educationalist Shelton Wirasinha, had to sign his work before it could be despatched, “and almost every time I went to his office, he’d say something to the tune of ‘Putha, we can’t do this every day, it would be better if you chose art.’”

Not that he cut himself from science. In fact, physics had been one of his favourite subjects. “As I moved up, I graduated from geometry to mechanical drawing. I can’t say these didn’t influence my career. For instance, when we draw, the foundation for our work is the line and the circle. No matter what those who try to divide art and science try to say, there will always be a scientific aspect to drawing. I realised this very early on.”

Still, as he confesses, “Mr Wirasinha’s prodding caused me to wonder whether I ought to be studying science.” Fortunately for him, through the intervention of Wirasinha and Jayantha Premachandra, the head of the Arts Section, he shifted from the science stream to Arts. As for his elders, “my father had wanted me to become a parson due to a promise they’d made to God after the death of my elder brother.” But they gave into his wishes. “After my O Levels, they allowed me to do what I pleased.”

The problem for Givantha was that no institution taught the field he had chosen. “The only place I could go to was Heywood. But Heywood taught music. I realised soon that it wasn’t my cup of tea, so I decided to teach myself.” He reckoned that “an opportunity would come my way.”

The opportunity did come, much sooner than he’d reckoned.

Linus Dissanayake, a doctor turned film producer, had started a small but prominent studio called Dissanayake Studios. It had bankrolled Professor Siri Gunasinghe’s groundbreaking film Sath Samudura in 1967, which featured a breakthrough performance by Givantha’s first class teacher at Wesley, Cyril Wickramage. Three years later the studio financed another landmark production, Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Wes Gaththo, also starring Cyril.

By the time of Wes Gaththo’s release, Givantha had come into contact with Dissanayake, “from whom I borrowed a camera and went on to make a short animated sketch on Andare. The Film Critics’ and Journalists’ Association nominated it for their annual Short Film Festival in 1971, where I competed with Sunil Ariyaratne and Dharmasena Pathiraja.”

Givantha’s next destination was Ceylon Theatres, where, thanks to his friendship with the comedian and singer Freddie Silva, he made contact with “a man called Derrick Fernando, who worked as an official there,” and Titus Thotawatte, “who taught me filmmaking and introduced me to Andrew Jayamanne, who taught me cinematography.”

By now he had made another animated short film, Muhuda Yatin Ira Payayi, which won for him a Jury Prize from the Film Critics’ and Journalists’ Association in 1972. His third attempt, seven years later, would leave behind a much larger imprint on cinema.

That third film, Dutugemunu, was not well received by officials at the time of its release in October 1979, though the few ordinary people who saw it had been thrilled by it. Based on an important episode from Sri Lankan history, its charm lay mainly in the dazzlingly novel way it presented an otherwise serious subject.

“I didn’t follow a conventional narrative,” Givantha tells me. “Instead of relating the story of the hero, I started with an unlikely beginning: a cat visiting the Ruwanwelisaya Dagaba with its kittens, which ask about the story behind its construction. From there the film relates the Mahavamsa version of events. The cat figures in those events because in one of its previous births, it had served as Dutugemunu’s purohita or chaplain.”

Boasting a prominent cast, including influential figures from Givantha’s own childhood (Cyril Wickramage voiced the eponymous hero, while Felix Premawardhana the thespian, who’d taught literature at Wesley, voiced his main soldier, Nandimitra), Dutugemunu concentrated on the hero’s search for the giants in his battle against Elara. With Henry Jayasena voicing Kavantissa and Givantha voicing various other characters, it was tipped to be a watershed. As things turned out though, “audiences barely noticed it.”

The issue hadn’t been with the audiences. It had instead been with political authorities. In 1977 the United National Party had come to power promising, on the one hand, a dharmista samajayak or a ‘righteous society’, and on the other, ethnic coexistence.

According to Givantha, “certain educationists thought the story of Dutugemunu was not amenable to coexistence, given the racialist overtones of his triumph over Elara. They made a complaint to the Education Ministry, which excised the story from textbooks and imposed a ban on any form of propagating it. That is why I was forced to take out my film right after I’d released it.” An avoidable tragedy, because the movie didn’t carry a racist message – “It was entertainment for kids based on Westerns like The Magnificent Seven!” as Givantha puts it – and also because the director had toiled hard to make its characters – including the sunglass-wearing cat that takes us through history – come alive onscreen.

How hard had he toiled, really? Consider that this was a time when digital cinema remained, even in the West, a distant dream. “I had to insert India ink on every frame. In each of my first two films I used more than a thousand such frames. Dutugemunu used more than that. You can imagine the concentration I had to put into these efforts.”

Mercifully, he didn’t have to suffer a loss due to the ban. Far from it, in fact: he tells me that “I bought this house with the compensation I got, for costs incurred on the production, from the authorities after they ordered theatres to stop screening my film.”

The controversy over Dutugemunu notwithstanding, Givantha proceeded to the next phase of his career. Six months before Dutugemunu’s release, television had made its entry to the country. The following year Givantha was sent to study television in Berlin. Upon his return he was posted to the Animation Division of the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation. Later, through a request by the then State Minister Anandatissa de Alwis and then Secretary at the Ministry Sarath Amunugama, he got to work in various other Divisions as well.

In 1987 he tendered his resignation from Rupavahini, two years after he had discovered his eyesight was failing. “Dr Upali Mendis, the head of the Eye Hospital, told me my retina had got damaged, and I’d lose my sight in a few years. He said I would have to live with God. Well, God has been merciful to me. I can see clearly even now,” he tells me.

He also discovered a new career: stamp designing. On the walls of his veranda is a huge poster displaying his most prominent designs, including the 150th anniversary stamp of Royal College and a stamp issued to celebrate the opening of the Victoria Dam. Once again, in a pre-digital era, “drawing these wasn’t the easiest thing to do, even for an artist like me.” For the Victoria Dam stamp, for instance, Givantha had to personally visit and survey the site, “just to come up with a miniature graphical representation.”

In 2001, 22 years after Dutugemunu, Givantha made Sri Lanka’s first digitally animated film: Mahadana Muththayi Golayo Roththayi. Due to the then ongoing war, however, it too passed by unnoticed, though on those who saw it (including an eight year old me), it made a favourable impression. It certainly made an impression on the OCIC. At the 28th OCIC and UNDA Awards Ceremony the following year, it won a Special Jury Prize.

Last year he screened his third feature film – after Dutugemunu and Mahadana Muththayi Golayo Roththayi – called Eureka, for dignitaries and journalists. Unfortunately, it still hasn’t been released. There’s little doubt it’ll pass by noticed this time; in fact there’s reason to believe Givantha will get his long sought after place in the sun that his first two films barely garnered, and his third feature length masterpiece did not, with this newest venture.

The writer Thilakarathna Kuruwita Bandara describes Eureka as an experimental work that may well become “a turning point in the cinema for young directors.” Only time will tell if the film, as a whole, stands up to such an estimation. Until then, we can only wait.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com