The Caribbean is often seen as a string of exotic islands with palm-fringed beaches, populated by happy calypso-singing natives waiting to serve rum punches to the tourists. Many a feature film set in the Caribbean has helped to perpetuate this myth: Doctor No, The Comedians, The Mighty Quinn, Cocktail, Fire Down Below, Island in the Sun, Gold of the Amazons.
Mbye Cham in his book Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema argues that, while the Caribbean has a long acquaintance with cinema, it is only as a resource for foreign productions which use the region as a backdrop “to manufacture an image of the Caribbean radically at odds with the reality of the people.” The resulting films are then finished in Europe and America and are distributed internationally and in the Caribbean.
Thus while the Caribbean is soaked in imported film material reflecting metropolitan values, its own film-makers, drawing on Caribbean resources and expressing Caribbean experience, find themselves up against tremendous barriers. Short of regional facilities and capital, they still produce fine work; but most of it does not reach a mass audience even in the Caribbean, let alone internationally. The names of leading Caribbean film-makers and their work remain unknown to most Caribbean people.
What can be done to reverse this situation? Can the Caribbean have a film industry, or is that just a dream? Caribbean film-makers want to steer the region away from being a consumer, a mere resource for Euro-American productions, towards becoming a producer. As Cuba’s foremost film director, Tomás Guitiérrez Alea, says: “The cinema has a great influence on the people, and we have a great need to recognise ourselves on the screen, to reflect our own problems and to build our own identity. I think it is very important that people have a sense of ownership of the media and of their own identity . . . ”
The process began in the 1970s. There have been some significant steps along the way: the establishment of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry in 1959, Jamaica’s The Harder They Come in 1972, Euzhan Palcy’s international success with Rue Cases Nègres and A Dry White Season. Several Caribbean countries have already produced outstanding directors and films: not only Cuba, but Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Martinique, Jamaica. But this work is little known.
And reaching a mass audience in the Caribbean is not a simple matter. The region is still fragmented, and contacts between the English, Dutch, French and Spanish countries are still difficult. There is no regional distribution system. Because there is no common language, distribution requires effective dubbing or subtitling facilities. And above all it requires an assault on popular tastes which are now deeply attached to the ceaseless flow of entertainment from American television, film and video.
Dubbing and subtitling American feature films and televisions shows into Spanish is already a thriving industry in Miami, Venezuela and Colombia. Neutral Spanish accents are used to allow American material to be distributed in Latin America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Cuba has sophisticated facilities, which are used for producing English or French versions of major Cuban Productions.
But the English-speaking Caribbean has no facilities yet, and its audiences regard subtitled films with suspicion. People will go to see a subtitled Kung-Fu movie, and Indian audiences in Guyana and Trinidad will go to see a subtitled film from India, but a French or Spanish film subtitled into English will not find an audience. Many Caribbean film-makers have produced subtitled versions of their feature films, to encourage European distribution. But clearly the language barrier is a major obstacle.
Film festivals are one way of whipping up regional interest in film. The region arts festival Carifesta, held in Trinidad and Tobago in August 1992, included a film season, and there have been festivals in Jamaica, St. Lucia and Curaçao. The Images Caraïbes Film Festival in Martinique attracts large crowds in Fort-de-France each June, and subtitles as many films and videos as it can afford, using a complex system that projects synchronised titles onto the screen. But significantly the film attracting the largest crowd so far was Raoul Peck’s Haitian Corner, because the Martiniquan audience could easily relate to the French-based creole Peck used.
The Caribbean is yet to produce any major commercial hits to put it on the international map. Many of its directors have been operating outside the region: Raoul Peck in Berlin, Horace Ové in London; the president of the Black Film and Video Network in Toronto is the Trinidadian producer/director Claire Prieto. Films like The Harder They Come and Rue Cases Nègres achieved significant regional success and keen followings in cinemas catering to Caribbean and art audiences in America and Europe. The Martiniquan director Euzhan Palcy successfully raised funds in Hollywood for A Dry White Season, but says: “I am not interested in doing Hollywood stuff. When they give you more money, you get pressures from the studios and you lose control of your material.”
The film industry is still looking for its equivalent of Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae artist whose music crossed all regional and international boundaries with its universal appeal. The Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire feels the Caribbean must be patient. “I think that Antillean cinema is still in its infancy. It is not Brazilian cinema yet. Let us wait and give it a chance to grow.
But regional cinema has already developed its own lobby group. Last March in Curaçao, a group of Caribbean film and video-makers created a Caribbean Film and Video Federation to launch an attack on the problems. The President is Raoul Peck, the Haitian film director. June Givanni, originally from Guyana and now working at the British Film Institute in London, is the secretary, while the Secretary-General is Suzy Landau, Directrice of the Images Caraïbes Film Festival in Martinique.
The Federation’s members include television producers, film directors, actors and film archivists with a shared involvement in Caribbean film, meeting across all differences of language, culture and ideology. Their aim is to develop the production and distribution of film and video by and about Caribbean people, and all the back-up facilities which that requires.
The Federation aims to infuse new energy into the existing industry. “To be frank, it scares me,” says Raoul Peck, asked about his responsibility and the task ahead. “But we are nine board members and we are all going to work very closely together. I am looking forward to integrating all those people, so that we are really a team, so we can start the work; because there is a long way to go.”
| Cuba Tomás Guitiérrez Alea Born in 1928, Alea graduated in law and studied film-making in Rome. His most famous film is Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), the story of a middle-class intellectual who decides to stay in Cuba after the Revolution and begins to write his memories in search of a reason to live. Alea explains: “His contradiction, the source of what is eating away at him, lies in knowing that he is alienated within cultural patterns which are not those of his own environment, and that nevertheless he cannot assert his condition through a position of struggle.” Other films include This Land of Ours (1959), Histories of the Revolution (1960), Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), The Last Supper (1976) and Cards in the Park (1988).Santiago Alvarez Born in 1919. In 1961 he worked with Alea on a documentary on the Bay of Pigs invasion. In Now (1965) and LBJ (1968) the theme was racial discrimination in America and its involvement in the Vietnam war. Now must rank as one of the first music videos, for Alvarez used the music of Lena Horne and juxtaposed powerful images of the civil rights protests. Alvarez has made hundreds of newsreels and documentaries, filming in Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Far East.Other major directors Huberto Solas (Un Hombre de Exito, Lucia), Sergio Giral (The Other Francisco, Maria Antonia), Juan Carlos Tabio, Orlando Rojas, Gerardo Chijona, Daniel Diaz Torret.Diaz Torret’s recent film Alicia, a satire on the problems of the revolution, received international attention and was withdrawn after only four days, despite large crowds. However, the authorities had a change of heart and it was shown as part of the 1991 Latin American Film Festival in Havana. Curaçao Almacita is set in an Dominican Republic The film won twelve awards at film festivals in Guyana Raoul Peck Peck’s new film The Man Jamaica Post-Henzell The success of The Harder They Come Jamaica has established a Martinique Palcy went on to make “It is a very sexist, racist and Puerto Rico Marcos Zorinaga Trinidad and Tobago Horace Ové Hugh Robertson Venezuela Michael New Video Trinidad and Tobago has several active |
