CEYLON WAITS FOR THE IDES OF MARCH

While the people of Ceylon are preparing for the general election scheduled for March 19, the Prime Minister, Mr. Dahanayake, is preparing for what seems suspiciously like a coup d'etat. ' Like the proverbial thief Daha (as he is commonly known) accuses his opponents of the very things he is attempting to do: subverting democracy by violence and intrigue. This is only a cover for his own machinations to instal dictatorial rule and they include the following measures :

1. The creation of a Ministry of Internal Security after the dissolution of Parliament and in violation of the constitution.

2. The appointment of Sidney de Zoysa, cashiered from the police force after the Bandaranaike assassination—and an aspirant ‘strong man’—as permanent secretary to the new Ministry.

3. The conversion of the government radio into what The .

Economist calls ‘a ventriloquist’s dummy’.

4. The propagation of rumours and half-truths designed to provide a pretext for the suspension of the constitution a proposal by the Ministry of Internal Security to create special police JPs with power to disperse ‘unlawful assemblies’.

On January 25, a conference of seven of the opposition parties unanimously condémned the creation of the new ministry and called upon the armed forces not to carry out any illegal orders of the caretaker government. This was followed by a statement from the Lanka Sama Samaja (Trotskyist) Party headquarters calling upon the trade unions and youth leagues to be prepared for immediate and direct action against any attempt to impose a dictatorship upon the people.

The LSSP has put forward 101 candidates (there are 151 seats).. It is the only opposition party which is contesting seats, both in the predominantly Tamil north and the Singhalese south. In a direct appeal to the people the LSSP has outlined its major objectives; (a) the maintenance of national unity; and (b) the planned economic development of Ceylon.

If returned to power it promises to bring down the price of rice, abolish the taxes on essential foods and other necessities; give every man a job within three years, provide every family with a house within three years and provide education for every single child in the country.

_ All Quiet on the Western Front (Cameo-Poly)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (International Film Theatre)

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ is a re-issue of the film made in the 30s, based on Remarque’s anti-war novel of the same name. Despite occasional lapses of gaucherie in directing and acting, the film stands out as a protest against the squalor, the brutality and the waste of war. This is a film with a purpose, nobly conceived and, on the whole, artistically executed. The fighting is depicted by magnificent shots of the planned chaos—waves of men dashing against men in stormy murder. In war, life is held cheap, and yet remains dear to the soldiers.

Balanced against the school-room scene early in the film, when the patriotic teacher urges his boys to go and fight for the Fatherland, is the picture months, even years later, when we watch the soldiers questioning war. Perhaps here the dialogue is-a trifle naive, yet one is moved to applaud. These are not only German soldiers speaking bitterness in 1917, but all men forced out to fight, and asking: why?

Remembering and forgetting There is a temptation to compare this film with another, in rather different genre: ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’—a combined Franco-Japanese production. Whereas ‘All Quiet’ as a film is a product of the American ‘realism’ of the 30s, ‘Hiroshima’ is an intricately poetic work. The characters, a French actress, engaged in an anti-war film being made in Hiroshima, . and a Japanese architect, symbolise the unceasing struggle between the memory and the forgetting of the Hiroshima nightmare. Herein lies part of its artistic strength, for the infinite richness of the theme is expressed in the complex relationship between these two people. If the theme is ‘forgetting’, around it is spun and interwoven time present and time past—the girl’s past in Nevers, France, her reawakening to love in the present, and the holocaust of Hiroshima. Just as the girl is forgetting her German soldier lover, killed by the Resistance; just as the humiliation of her shaven head and the bleeding agony of her loss are becoming dulled, so the world is forgetting Hiroshima. Just as war destroyed her love with a Bavarian peasant, so it destroyed a city and a population. And just as her Japanese lover pursues her inexorably, forcing her to experience her own past and through this, her present, so the memory of Hiroshima, and with it the awareness of all war, penetrates to the viewer, probing and hurtfully reopening remembrance of destruction. What was it like in Paris on the day the bomb was dropped?—he asks. The sun shone, and the people rejoiced because the war was ending.

The military ‘art? of World War I, when men in mass were used to bombard the enemy line, was replaced by the clinical ‘science’ of World War II, when one neat bomb devastated a city. Both films plead for remembrance; but were this sufficient, there would have been no ‘Hiroshima’ to compare with ‘All Quiet’.

BENITA TEPER.

OUT FEBRUARY 25th