By 1905, Pathé-Frères was the largest film company in France and was emerging as the ‘first acknowledged global empire in cinema history (Abel, ‘Pathé-Frères’, emphasis in original). The company’s success rested on the mass production of films and on distributing its releases via a worldwide network (Abel, 1994, 22). Pathé had established an agency in Britain in 1902, and by 1906 had opened further agencies in Russia, America, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Holland, Spain and Italy (McKernan; Abel, 1994, 23). By 1905 the company was selling 12,000 metres of positive film stock per day (Abel, ‘Pathé-Frères’)

Although the majority of Pathé’s films were fiction titles, the company also produced a large number of travelogues. Tom Gunning describes the travelogue as being ‘the genre of early film that is most clearly prepared for by pre-cinematic practice’ (Gunning, 1995, 21). The genre developed from preceding media representations of travel, such as magic lantern shows, illustrated lectures, postcards and pictorial magazines, and thus had a readymade and cognisant audience. There were also other reasons for the travelogues’ success: these films were inexpensive to produce, and they provided exhibitors with film material that they could easily edit together into their own compilations (Musser, 1990, 123; Abel 1994, 91).

Jennifer Lynn Peterson proposes that it was around 1905-06 that ‘travelogues solidified into a distinct film genre’ (Peterson, ‘Travelogues’). Films were usually comprised of a series of discreet sequences; they featured a large number of long shots; and there would be movement in almost every scene (either created by camera movement or by the action on screen) (Peterson, ‘Travelogues’). Many would begin with views of landscapes, taken from the point-of-view of a ship or train (Rony, 1996, 83). It was also during this period that the French companies, Eclipse, Gaumont and ‘especially’ Pathé-Frères, established themselves as the most renowned makers of travel films (Peterson, ‘Travelogues’).

Travelogues served to promote tourism (hence several of them were sponsored by railroad companies), but also provided glimpses of foreign lands to those who could not visit them themselves (Rony, 1996, 82). Nominally educational, the films were fixated upon the picturesque, ‘scenic’ originally being the most common term used to describe them (Peterson, ‘Travelogues’). They also regularly featured ethnographic studies of people, providing the viewer with what Rony describes as an ‘“archive” of human variation’ (Rony, 1996, 85). Although shown in a variety of contexts, including lectures, fairground shows and movie theatres, travelogues were aimed primarily at an educated audience, and erred towards the point of view of a ‘bourgeois tourist’ (Peterson, ‘Travelogues’; Rony, 1996, 83). Travelogues also often served as imperial propaganda. Peterson states that ‘Colonial lands appear as tranquil as parks; any explicit sense of social conflict is banished from the travelogue world-view’ (Peterson, ‘Travelogues’).

This travelogue is, however, a French film about Ceylon, which from 1802 to 1948 was a British colony. Chandra Richard de Silva has written that at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘British power in the island seemed more secure than ever’ (de Silva, 1987, 185). Nevertheless, there were stirrings of popular agitation in Ceylon (notably from the Buddhist temperance movement) as well as some outbreaks of labour unrest (de Silva, 1987, 186-87). Moreover, the plantation economy, in particular the tea trade, prompted the arrival of increasing numbers of Indian Tamil workers to the island. Roy Moxham notes that by 1900 there were 300,000 Indian Tamils working on the tea estates and that their presence was ‘resented by the native Sinhalese’ (Moxham, 2003, 183-84).