The Song of Ceylon originated from an Empire Marketing Board (EMB) commission to produce four travelogues for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board.  Late in December 1933 John Grierson despatched Basil Wright and John Taylor to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to produce these four short films. Although expected to broadly cover the island’s life and industry, the Tea Board gave Wright a free hand as director – no scenario was written.With no clearly stated corporate or imperial policy dictating how he represented Ceylon, Wright set about recording his personal response to the island.  The sponsor provided a small crew of porters and Lionel Wendt to act as guide and translator. Although educated in England, Wendt was ethnically a Burgher (a descendent of islanders who intermarried with European settlers).

Immersed in a month-long search for inspiration, Wright toured Ceylon. The giant Buddha sculptures of Gal Vihare entranced himand in an attempt  to capture some essence of this transformative experience he began instinctively shooting sequences; the dusk shots of startled birds in flight are one such moment. Wright and Taylor shot all the footage but had no technology to record sound on the island.  Principal filming took place in villages surrounded by rice fields, in fisheries operated by sail-propelled catamarans and among the relics of the past, the buried cities of Anurajapura and Polonnaruwa, among their temples, gigantic sculptures and fabulous carvings. Fascinated by Ceylon, Wright sought to reveal its spiritual and traditional life, while simultaneously demonstrating its contemporary connections to Britain, Empire and the global marketplace.

After four months on location they returned to London in May 1934. The EMB had come to an end but their film unit had transferred to the Post Office (GPO). Although the Ceylon commission had nothing to do with postal services, the film was completed during autumn 1934 under contract to the sponsors; the GPO received a small fee for this arrangement.  In the studio Wright had his first opportunity to experiment with sound recording, introducing Walter Leigh as composer. There followed an innovative burst of activity, drawing on Soviet ideas of sound in counterpoint to the images (following Sergei Eisenstein’s idea that sound could be another part of the montage). With no recordings made in Ceylon, they produced a soundtrack of layered synthetic sounds and atmospheric music. Leigh included metal sheets struck with hammers and chromatic tubular bells. A church choir was taught to chant by Ukkuwa and Suramba (the film’s dancer and drummer) who came to London with Wendt to add authentic rhythm and dialogue. Wendt spoke the narration, adapted from Robert Knox’s seventeenth-century book An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon.

Interviewed in 1987, Wright told Ian Aitken that he had no real enthusiasm for promoting the British Empire in 1934, explaining:  ‘I wanted to make films, and to begin with I was mainly interested in film aesthetics’ (Aitken, 1998, 245). Wright’s filmmaking career had started at the EMB unit in 1930 as Grierson’s first recruit. Four years of experimenting with camerawork and editing had followed, directing films including Cargo From Jamaica (1933) and The Country Comes To Town (1933). Wright’s interest in montage editing revealed his engagement with Soviet and European avant-gardecinema – introduced to Britain by the Film Society (1925-1939). Films like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1926) and Eisenstein’s Old and New (1929) had presented the rhythms of the modern world through new editing techniques. In Song of Ceylon Wright’s inventive weaving of sound and image similarly used montage to convey movement, reveal connections and to offer a critical commentary. The film shifts between the ancient and the modern, the commercial and the spiritual, the global and the local, the coloniser and the colonised.

Following a premiere at the Film Society in November 1934 and commercial release, Song of Ceylon won first place in the documentary class, and the ‘Prix du Gouvernement’ for the best film in all classes, at the Brussels International Film Festival of 1935.

Graham Greene described it as ‘an example to all directors of perfect construction and the perfect application of montage’ (Greene, Spectator, 4 October 1935). Roger Manvell’s later claim that Song of Ceylon was: ‘possibly the greatest British-produced film in any category up to 1935’ (Manvell, 1946, 100) offers a clear indication of the status it acquired within a particular history of British cinema. Itwas embraced and celebrated for its significance as an art film, not for its contribution to Empire tea marketing.

In 1934 the sponsor had envisaged four educational travelogues produced as prestige advertising for their tea industry –Song of Ceylon was not at all what they wanted and they held Grierson to their original contract. Wright and Taylor completed the four travelogues with unused footage from Song of Ceylon. Titled: Dance of the Harvest, Negombo Coast, Villages of Lanka and Monsoon Island, these films were distributed non-theatrically to schools and societies across Britain. Lacking the experimental complexity and critical dimension of Wright’s longer film, the travelogues feature straightforward informative commentaries that deliver a series of economic, historical and cultural facts about Ceylon and its people. The travelogues were distributed non-theatrically by the state-funded Empire Film Library. Meanwhile as a celebrated art film Song of Ceylon was seen widely in film clubs and film societies across Britain. Joining a small canon of documentaries associated with John Grierson, it became one of the highest profile films produced by the British documentary movement.

On location and in the studio Wright had acted like an independent filmmaker and Grierson and Tallents had supported the completion of his creative experiment regardless of the sponsor or the GPO. In fact Song of Ceylon’s credits make no reference to the Tea Board or to the EMB or GPO’s involvement. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to distance the film from its Imperial sponsorship, drawing attention instead to its status as an award-winning (and seemingly independent) experimental work.