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Capturing “ Dark Night of the Soul”

Somewhere around the beginning of 1993 I got a telephone call from Prasanna Vithanage whom I had met only once or twice during a film festival and other functions. But I couldn’t remember talking to him at length.

This call from Prasanna was to invite me to work on his second film ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ to be shot within the next three months. By this time he had become an acclaimed director with a single film to his credit. Shot in B & W, that film was a box office success, while being hailed by the critics too.

At the time, I was a mere novice in the theatrical feature film world, although I had been involved in documentaries and television dramas for some time. Until then, I have shot only one theatrical feature, and that too was still to be screened to the public.

It was still not very clear why he chose me as his collaborator. When we met to discuss matters, I was further confused by his description of the particular ‘look” he wanted the film to have. The film evolved around a persons’ journey to his inner self. Prasanna wanted to tell the story in several time frames which the audience should identify clearly.

We decided that the protagonist’s childhood should be presented in a tone close to golden amber. The court room scenes and the part where Suvisal meets Piyumi in the prison was to be in light green. We settled on a bluish tone for the sequences depicting the journey into his inner self. The sequences of the protagonist’s youthful period were to come through in a pinkish brown. We reserved natural tones for the present. This was the most complicated photographic treatment I had come across in my career. That much variety of tones I had not seen in many films, certainly not in Sri Lankan films. So, it was a case of experimenting all the time. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the chance to do testing ahead of the principal shoot.

I thought it would be more workable to have colour tones in interiors, where I could use filters over lamps. But the same was not possible in exterior scenes. I did not like using any filters over the lenses which were almost my age. I didn’t want to ruin an image with more than one (correction) filter in front.

Prasanna agreed to make more changes in some of the sequences, so that I could play with the filter in front of my luminaries. This may have created further problems for him; in places, he may have had to change the script, and the story itself. Continue

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