Letter From Urbino 5. Piero and I in Room 66 at The National Gallery

'And as I set the heavy blooms in some water I noticed a copy of Piero's Nativity...'
So says the voice of my faceless ghost walking through an unknown spring dawn.

Piero's Nativity hangs in a small, windowless room in the National Gallery in London. If you do not know where it is Room 66 is easily missed. I did not find it the first time I visited, age ten. But to be fair I neither knew the name of the artist nor the painting. And my father was too dazzled by so many rich treasures to understand my repeated request. 
'I want to see 'Our Lady with the quiet face,' I nagged him. 
So that first visit disappointed me and it was only later that I made the discovery for myself.


When I did, possibly on a school trip, I was instantly transported back to an incident in that other life we had left behind in Sri Lanka. 


I must have been about five or six, sitting in a classroom raked, on every side by harsh, tropical sunlight. With birds cawing and screaming outside. The teacher in a white sari was talking to us in Singhalese. We were I suppose in the middle of an art lesson. The girl opposite me, a pretty dark, neat child whom I envied madly, was copying a picture from a biscuit tin lid. She was a girl from a wealthy family who often brought in strange enticing objects from England. The biscuit tin lid, was one such thing. She could draw well and there was a brand new box of crayons open on her desk in pristine condition. I remember I stared at her. My own bag of coloured pencils was broken, chewed and marked. Somehow I seemed to have more colour smudged on my uniform than on the piece of paper in front of me while that of the girl opposite remained perfectly clean. When the bell rang, signalling the end of the day, everyone crowded around her. The teacher was full of praise. I could now see that the picture on that biscuit tin showed a woman kneeling on the ground looking at a baby. On the roof of the shelter nearby was a lone magpie.

'One bird for one sorrow, we used to say...'


I cannot remember if the child's drawing was any good but what I do remember, to this day, was the stillness and concentration on her lovely face. In that instant the two images, that of the Madonna and the girl herself merged and fused in my mind. Later I heard that she had been born dumb.

It would be some years before I would hear the name of Piero delle Francesca and many more would pass before I would take the long road to Urbino to see him in situ. 

Having finished both my novel The Road To Urbino and the film Letter From Urbino, I long to return to the place to look at the paintings a fresh. The intense scrutiny required to make work around this most mysterious of artists has lent an intimacy to the images that are hard to define. For the process of looking is like no other, strangely seductive, imprinting emotion on the mind forever. 


'How does a ghost approach a painting?'

Perhaps only by reconnection with its ghostly past.  

'An image must be transformed by contact with other images, as is a color by contact with other color. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.'
Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson.


Letter From Urbino will be screened at The National Gallery on June 15th. For tickets please go to...

Letter From Urbino 4. 'Did you know I am in Italy now?'

'Did you know I am in Italy now?' the man in the film asks.

We are a third of the way into a private screening of Letter To Urbino and the small audience in this elegant house in Milan watch silently. The sounds coming from the speakers are echoed by those outside. Language that is melodious and exotic in England is merely commonplace here.

Like my character I, too, am in Italy at the moment where the torrential rain of the day before has given way to a clearing sky. And the scent of a jasmine hedge.

I am here to... well, do a little clothes shopping of course, but also test out the film on a willing audience. To see what my Italian friends make of it. After all it was filmed with an Italian audience in mind and it is important for me to have struck the right note.

Italy has its fair share of problems. By this I mean that, apart from the obvious economic ones, the country has a large immigrant population whose struggle to live with what they have lost, impacts on the people of the country itself. The voice of the man in my film is that of a refugee; an everyman, one who has left his home. A man who belongs to this destructive century, where violence and migration come roped together as a package.

Because I am Sri Lankan, because I have spoken out against Sri Lanka's never ending shame, it is assumed the voice in the film is Sri Lankan. I do not mind. What I am anxious to do is gauge the reaction of these educated Italians here in the heart of Italy. Of my depiction of their country. I am aware of the lazy stereotypes, of the casalinga putting on the water for the pasta, the strutting Italian male who sings opera, and the beautiful cypress strewn countryside. The Italians are tired of these old Chiantishire stories. They know there is something deeper and more enduring, harder to define within their lives that no tourist sees.

In the still, early summer evening air, through the rising scent of cigar smoke, as the film plays itself out, I wonder if I have managed to capture a sense of this in some small way. And then, as the last image fades to black and the credits flash up there is a sigh and it is my friend, Anna, who turns to me.
'But this is a hymn to Italy,' she says, at last.
 In the ensuing discussion Sciana, who has struggled with the English words, tells me that she too has loved it.
'Yes, yes,' she says, re-lighting her cigar, 'of course I understood it! It is not so difficult, after all. The feeling is there. In the images, the voice, the music. Of course!'

I breathe a little easier for I have been having a love affair with Italy, on and off, for as long as I can remember. From the time when, age four, my mother allowed me to drink orange juice out of one of her precious Venetian glasses I have loved the country.
And always, as an adult, I have wanted to go beyond the cypress trees and the glorious Renaissance art, to touch Italia's secret, hidden heart.

Unification came late to this country but still, the Italians have their own particular attachment to their home. So that for me, coming from the poisoned paradise where I was born, where sunlight masks the evil that men do, where dog eats dog, this place affords an astonishing contrast. Perhaps that is why I love it and why I want this film to capture a little of that feeling.
Without sentimentality.
Without gush.
With the longing of someone looking in.

And now it seems they like my film.
Someone asks if she can show it to a friend who works with migrants in a detention centre.
Someone else tells me that, of course the 'voice' in the film really belongs to me. Well, it was made by me, so of course I am in it.
'When can we read the novel?' they ask.
'Is it anything to do with the film?'
The book is another story. But yes there is a connection.
We talk late into the night of other things.
'Why is your country ruled by such terrible people?' they ask.
I shake my head. I do not have any answers but once again I see how art releases emotions, crossing the boundaries of language, nationality and prejudice.
In this century of violence and unimaginable stupidity perhaps we need to pay more attention to this fact.

Letter from Urbino  will be screened in London at The National Gallery on June 15th at 6pm.  For tickets please go here....

Sri Lanka's Frontline Denial

The room was packed. The panel, consisting of journalists, activists and relatives of the victims, were speaking to an audience made up mainly of Sri Lankans. I was there too, partly because I admire the work of the film maker Callum Macrae and partly because this kind of bunfight is worth watching, however painful.

The representative of the Government of Sri Lanka, Rajiva Wijesinha, in fine pudding-basin style haircut, was fighting the corner for the ruling party. In a long and rambling discourse, part stream of consciousness, part shaggy-dog story, he unravelled the contents of his mind. Well some of it, at least.
Sitting next to him was a Sri Lankan victim of the LTTE whose testament of horror from the reign of Tiger terror (he was abducted and tortured at the age of thirteen before his parents were killed) was being shamelessly mis-used by Our Man From Sri Lanka for its own ends.
There was also Jan Jananayagam, spokesperson for Tamils Against Genocide, Callum Macrae of course, Yolander Foster, Amnesty International's excellent Sri Lankan researcher and the Chair, Stephen Sackur from the BBC's programme Hardtalk.
Pudding Basin had brought a few books for which he wanted one pound. The reason for this nominal sum, he informed the audience, was because he knew British fellows respected anything they paid for.  The title of one of them.
The Road to Reconciliation & its Enemies [Documented Evidence & Logical Arguments against Emotional Exaggeration & Soundbites.]  
Huh?
What with his slender grasp of anything much, his denial of the authenticity of Callum Macrea's Sri Lanka's Killing Field and his generally vague logorrhea, Pudding Basin was giving the Chair a hard time of it. I thought he did rather well, considering. The Chair, I mean, not PB, whose deathless oratory lulled me into gentle slumber only to find myself woken up with a start when the gushing, 1940's pre-Empire prose, finally stopped. This man was a member of the Sri Lankan government?

The audience, those one removed from the sorrow and the pity of Sri Lanka's genocide, tittered. What else could they do in the face of such stupidity? At one point I marvelled at the way in which the other panelist, victim of the Tamil terrorist group, was being so shamelessly used for government propaganda. Why was it that this man's terrible loss could not be treated with objective understanding? And then, because there was nothing else I could do, because the discussion had reached its most formless stage, I opened my sketchbook and began to draw instead.

I noticed one or two murderous looks, coming from the Singhala side of the audience, present undoubtedly to defend their assets in their homeland.
I noticed too for the first time how some younger, middle class Singhala and Tamil were uniting now in their desire (at least) for a kind of peace. Don't talk about the war, seemed to be the slogan. Move on, use the word peace, rebuild. Fine words, great sentiments. I agree.

But what of those who cannot move on, who do not have closure for their grief, whose loved ones are dead, disappeared, without a grave or in one with masses?
A lone woman stood up; beautiful, elderly, small. I had heard her say earlier that she would not cry tonight as she had spent the whole day crying. In a voice that rose like the waters of a tsunami she talked about the underlying causes of the civil war, the discrimination, the loss of life that had gone on for years. Since British Crown Rule had ended in fact. Brava, I wanted to shout. For hadn't I myself, in 1958 aged only four, seen a Tamil man burnt to death?
Finally the woman lost it and began to shout. And had to be told to sit down. Grief, it was. Her voice was that of Grief held in check for years and years.
So what of this voice? Who will treat her grief as a sacred thing, give it dignity, rock it to sleep? Pudding Head closed his eyes and tilted his head back. The audience rumbled, agreeing and disagreeing, If grief and denial and greed and violence could coexist so seamlessly in an upstairs room in London imagine what it must be like, unchecked, in Sri Lanka itself.
It doesn't take rocket science to see that the country needs outside monitoring and that both victims and perpetrators need help in order to stop this terrible cycle.

The comedian Eddie Izzard once joked that the international community was happy to turn a blind eye on those countries engaged in killing their own people. It is only when they go next door, as Hitler did with Poland, do they intervene. If that is indeed still the case, Pudding Head and his henchmen will be just fine for the foreseeable future. Helped by those young middle class Sri Lankans who simply want to move on, whatever that means.

A people does not carry the memory of its humiliation as an individual does.
Andre Chamson. 1940


Roma Tearne's film & latest novel The Road To Urbino will be launched at the National Gallery on June 15th.

Team Cameron & His No Health Service Policies

Team Cameron and his BIG society are at it again. They don't want us to know about the NHS Risk To Services, assessment. It will not be made public.
Why?
Why do we the British public not have the right to know what risks are being posed to our health service or how it is being placed in danger? Why can we, the very people who elected Team Cameron not have any say about that which affects our lives? What is the Team's thin excuse this time?

Take the pregnant mothers in Britain for instance, they'd like to know what's happening, wouldn't they?

Parents with small families, wouldn't they want to know what Risky cuts are ahead?

Student living away from home. They might not, but their parents surely will want to know whether their children, at universities around the country, have good access to medical care. Or dodgy ones.

And what about the elderly? Or perhaps they don't matter? Ah yes! It's the grave for them, I guess.

Make no mistake of it, this government does not care about any of the above. Obviously.
Obviously they are only interested in their Big Society. By that they mean, the Society for the Big, well paid, elite, non-pasty eaters, cushioned, pampered well-heeled, etc: those in fact who can and do use the private sector ranging from schools to medical care.
Compassion and Cameron are not two words that go together.
What is happening to our schools and our universities is a disgrace; what is happening to the transport system is a shambles. But what is happening to this country's Health Service could be a matter of life and death. For some.
Still why should Team Cameron bother? They know that we will have forgotten all about this by the time the next General Election comes around. By then we will have been distracted by all sorts of things from the Olympics to celebrity gossip. Won't we?

We the electorate are not idiots. But we do need to wake up to what is being done in the name of austerity.We should refuse to be distracted by Mr Hype and his sister Trivia and instead, develop that old fashioned sense that is our collective memory.

Otherwise Team Cameron and all the other Teams that follow in his wake will slowly and surely return us once more to the poverty and deprivation of the 19th century. Lets keep the NHS in the News.

Discuss. 'Return of Fear' about the current NHS crisis is being screened at OXDOX on 22nd May at 6.45 pm at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Jeune Street, Oxford, with Q & A with the director and NHS spokespeople. 


Roma Tearne will be launching her film and latest novel The Road To Urbino at the National Gallery on June 15th.  The trailer for her film is here.