by Nicholas Laughlin and Leon Wainwright
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| Interrupting
the Conversation: Trinidad's StudioFilmClub by Nicholas Laughlin and Leon Wainwright |
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| [This essay was originally published, in a
slightly different form, in StudioFilmClub, the catalogue of an exhibition of posters
by Peter Doig at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (23 April to 24 July,
2005) and the Kunsthalle in Zurich (27 August to 30 October, 2005). As a regular attendee of Peter and Che Lovelace’s film club at Caribbean Contemporary Arts, I was asked by the exhibition’s curator, Alice Koegel, to write about the atmosphere at the weekly screenings and the response from the audience, and to put this into the context of cinema’s impact on popular culture in Trinidad. My original deadline happened to fall in the middle of a three-week trip to Guyana, when I was in the interior; I missed it. Then in my last week in Georgetown I fell ill, and was even bedridden for a day or two; I was in danger of missing my second deadline and mucking up the production schedule. My friend Leon Wainwright, who was travelling with me, offered to help. One evening, as I lay in bed with a roasting fever, he sat with my laptop, listened to my incoherent ramblings, and turned them into actual prose, contributing ideas of his own. Over the next couple of days we worked on the text together; the finished product was really a joint effort, with much of the theoretical framework and many of the most acute phrases contributed by Leon. Unfortunately, because the text had been commissioned as a personal essay, the publishers decided against a joint byline, and “Interrupting the Conversation” appeared under my name alone, with Leon relegated to a footnote thanking him for his assistance. This online version makes a few corrections and changes to the style of the published essay, and restores Leon to the byline, where he belongs; never mind the narrative “I” of the opening section.]  It may shock readers of this catalogue to know that I almost stole one of Peter Doig’s StudioFilmClub posters one Thursday at Caribbean Contemporary Arts in Trinidad, as I was strolling out after that night’s screening. There were two films on, both music documentaries, the Sex Pistols classic The Filth and the Fury and James Spooner’s AfroPunk. The former happens to be one of the favourite movies of Gary Hector, the frontman of the now-disbanded Trini rock outfit jointpop. Peter and SFC co-founder Che Lovelace had talked Gary into bringing the band along that night to play a short but brilliant acoustic set of new songs in the interval between the films. Perhaps it was a combination of the stimulation of the films and the excitement of the music that made me consider pinching that night’s poster. And it didn’t occur to me then that Peter was actually keeping them—I suppose I figured that the posters got tossed away afterwards, like “real” movie posters. I was just getting ready to unpin it from the wall near CCA’s front entrance when I felt the eyes of another Gary, this time CCA’s security man, fixed on my back. I thought I could brazen it. “Gary, is OK if I thief this poster?” His reply was a glare and a slow shake of the head. There’s a second part to this story. A few months later, when I knew Peter slightly better, I told him about my proto-klepto incident, trying to expiate my lingering guilt. We were standing near his studio at CCA. He told me to hold on a minute, and disappeared into his back room. A moment later he returned with a rolled sheet of paper. It was the poster I’d tried to steal—or, rather, a copy of it. Knowing that jointpop would be playing that night, and thinking the band might like to have some posters as souvenirs, he’d made several versions, and that morning he gave me one of them. I tell this story because I think it makes an important point about the StudioFilmClub and the way it’s been appreciated by its Trinidadian audience. It would never cross my mind to remove a painting from the wall of a museum or gallery, roll it up, tuck it under my shirt, and smuggle it out. But that Thursday night at CCA I wasn’t thinking of Peter’s poster as a Peter Doig painting—a high-value commodity of interest to an international audience. I was thinking of it as an accessory to the experience of the SFC: not just the movies, but the atmosphere of the physical space, and its social interactions. That poster seemed a piece of ephemera, of value to probably no one but me, and then only of sentimental value, a reminder of a night of sound and image, the Sex Pistols’ maniac rush and Gary Hector’s fierce voice and lyrics. Maybe because I didn’t conceive of the poster as a work of art, I’d overlooked the ways in which art and cinema can interact, how two distinct media can converge at a common space. At the SFC, this happens in a climate of refreshing unpretentiousness. Despite its location in a contemporary arts centre, despite the predominance of art-house and foreign language films not intended to appeal to a wide public, despite the high proportion of artists in the audience, the film club has been from the beginning a resolutely un-arty phenomenon. The emphasis is on entertainment. You can drop in and take as much or as little as you like. Wander to the back of the room for a drink or a cigarette or a chat. Watching movies can be fun, seems to be the message. This informality has a lot to do with topography. The CCA building is a converted rum warehouse, in the grounds of a distillery. (Some nights the sweet, slightly putrid smell of fermenting molasses hangs in the air.) The room is easily fifty by seventy feet, with a lofty, gently pitched roof—bare concrete floor, iron beams, and a platform for old machine fittings protruding from the floor. The screen itself is a high, white-painted wall; in both corners are stacks of big canvases with their backs to the room. The windows are open to the elements, so noises from the nearby Eastern Main Road and the hillside community of Laventille drift in continuously—cars revving and backfiring, dogs barking, music blaring. The acoustics are otherwise atrocious. In wet weather, the rain striking the bare galvanised metal roof makes an almighty roar. In a back corner there’s a bar, self-service—beer, water, juice in tubs of ice, and a box for donations. I’ve been at the film club on nights when there was an audience of five or six, including Peter and Che, and at times when there was not even standing room, so that people spilled out the door. I suppose this sounds distinctly makeshift, and no doubt purist cinephiles might grumble about insufficient respect being paid to the film club’s offerings. But the SFC can boast what ought to be the envy of any film society anywhere: a hardcore audience of the genuinely enthusiastic who return every week. There’s no formal structure or programme of screenings published well in advance: on Tuesday’s Peter and Che put the word around on what they fancy showing that Thursday night. They never charge a fee, and no one has much of a clue that by selling an entire series of posters Peter keeps the projector running. Any debate or discussion rises spontaneously out of the audience, viewers turning to one another to swap opinions and reactions. And, of course, there’s always the “lime”—a Trini word expressing enjoyment of the company of others and the occasion for conversation both high and low. It’s not unusual for the talk to run into the early hours, ranging from the cultural politics of art in the Caribbean to idle gossip. It may seem that Trinidad and its step-sister island of Tobago are too small and too out of the way to have held any significant role in the history of cinema. But Trinidad was an important enough film market in the 1930s for Humphrey Bogart to fly in for the red-carpet opening of the Deluxe cinema. And, starting in the 1940s, both islands were used by Hollywood studios as locations for movies like Affair in Trinidad (1952, with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957, with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, ostensibly set in the Pacific), Fire Down Below (1957, with both Mitchum and Hayworth), and Swiss Family Robinson (1960, when a West Indian island stood in for an East Indian one), as documented by Keith Q. Warner in his 2000 book On Location: Cinema and Film in the Anglophone Caribbean. But locals were always relegated to minor roles, or put to work on set as carpenters and gaffers. Earl Lovelace tells a story about aspiring Trini actors hoping to be cast as extras in war movie battle scenes, determined to die spectacularly theatrical, prolonged deaths and steal a few moments of celluloid fame, only to remain unnamed and peripheral. In the eyes of their American directors, local characters could only be portrayed as buffoons or layabouts, providing crucial comic relief. Long before this, ever since the first movie-house was set up in Port of Spain in 1911, Trinidadians had been keen cinemagoers. We seem to have a particular relish for role-playing, for inventing a character and embodying it as fully as possible in word and gesture. It’s not surprising that we feel a special affinity for those huge personalities projected on the silver screen, or that at our most confident we swagger and posture like movie stars. Certainly, Hollywood’s larger-than-life images have interacted fruitfully with our own creativities. In Reading & Writing, a book-length essay published in 2000, V.S. Naipaul—who swaggers and postures with the best of us—wrote about his childhood in Trinidad, his choice of vocation, and influences on his early intellectual development. In the book’s final paragraph he unexpectedly makes a revealing comment about his early fascination with the movies. “Nearly all my imaginative life was in the cinema…. I don’t think I overstate the case when I say that without the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s I would have been spiritually quite destitute.” An astonishing statement; it’s difficult to imagine Naipaul taking in a cowboy flick. Yet in The Middle Passage, describing a visit to Guyana in 1961, he imagines himself as a sort of lone ranger arriving in a Georgetown transformed into “a frontier town of the Wild West”, with the sugar company Bookers in the villain’s role: “I walked down the main street on spurs. Old Booker, bearded, gruff-voiced and tobacco-chewing, waited with the five Booker boys to shoot me down. The natives had fled from the streets and were cowering in barbershops and saloons.” In recent stages of his career it sometimes seems he’s revised his biography to conceal his debt to Trinidad. But in Reading & Writing’s careful recollection of afternoons spent in the lush darkness of Port of Spain’s cinemas, Naipaul appears to be engaged in some playful self-unmasking. Perhaps he has always been a Trini boy with a Western dream. Even Carnival, the cultural phenomenon that many Trinidadians consider essential to their understanding of themselves, has willingly embraced images and ideas from Hollywood cinema, welcoming them into an imaginative chaos of African, European, Asian, Amerindian, and synthetically creole elements. Though most traditional Carnival characters have their roots in the 19th century, for over eighty years the cinema has served as a reservoir of stories and motifs for these characters’ ongoing evolution. The midnight robber, with his tombstone hat, flaring pistols, bandit’s mask, and vitriolic soliloquies working in references to Death Valley, owes too much to Hollywood Westerns for us to overlook. The scrupulously accurate gradations in rank of traditional sailor mas—ensigns, captains, admirals, engineers, firemen—are based partly on observation of actual naval officers stationed in Trinidad, and partly on the patriotic, propagandist war movies screened here in the 1930s and 40s. What more direct or hilarious way to embody a subversion of that propaganda than to depict those heroes swaggering in faux-drunkenness on Carnival Monday and Tuesday? But cinema’s most obvious influence on Carnival resulted in the big historical pageant bands that emerged in the 1950s, after the end of wartime austerities and restrictions. Carnival designers and craftsmen had always relied on printed sources for subject matter. Then in the 1930s bandleader Mansie Lai started working with themes suggested by the movies playing in the capital. In 1952, when Lai’s protégé Harold Saldenah designed his first band, he drew directly on the 1951 film extravaganza Quo Vadis, set in New Testament times. By some accounts, this was the beginning of large-scale “pretty mas”, the masquerade of glitz, colour, and narrative that has since then dominated the festival. Concerned for historical fidelity, Saldenah rounded up still pictures and other promotional materials from the local picturehouses, Errol Hill tells us in The Trinidad Carnival, and even wrote to the Hollywood studios for more photos. Epic blockbusters like Ben Hur and Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra were teeming sources of images, shapes, and plotlines for golden-age Carnival designers like Saldenah, George Bailey, Irwin McWilliams, and Edmond and Lil Hart. (There’s a nice irony, perhaps, in their turning, in the name of accuracy and authenticity, to versions of the past that were actually invented by Hollywood set and costume designers.) Crucially, they also picked up a sense of scale, backing up with massive numbers of revellers the new iconography of bands like Saldenahs’s Imperial Rome and Mexico 1519 to 1521 and Bailey’s Relics of Egypt and Ye Saga of Merrie England. These Carnival designers and their masqueraders were taking what was foreign, all those xeno-shapes of one of America’s biggest exports, and making them local, borrowing without permission to mark out a space of their own. Playing themselves, masses of costumed revellers held the close-up on the competition stage at the Queen’s Park Savannah, and filled the Carnival screen. “All Port of Spain was a twelve-thirty show,” as Derek Walcott put it in his poem “The Spoiler’s Return”. There is a long tradition in our cinemas of the audience irreverently chatting back to the screen, meting out advice to favoured characters and deriding others with picong, our unique, often cruel, form of banter. Each cinema had its regular renegade commentators, supplying lines to take possession of a plot, in an active, participatory dialogue with this flickering outsider presence. When confronted with distorted images of themselves in Hollywood’s versions of the Caribbean, audiences took their revenge with that sharp wit that Trinis so prize in everyday life as much as in calypso and politics. When Peter Doig and Che Lovelace started the StudioFilmClub in early 2003, the last of Trinidad’s old-time cinemas were being slowly driven out of business by new American-style multiplexes—Miami-boxes out on the Port of Spain foreshore and in suburban Trincity. Perhaps the SFC preserves something of the essence of the old, ornate, Art Deco movie palaces: the Deluxe, the Astor, the Globe, the Strand. In those twentieth-century forerunners, we didn’t just watch movies—we played ourselves. We used film as a storehouse of plotlines, a dressing-room for the wider stage of our lives, personal and national. We used the cinema as an opportunity to talk back to a world that thought it had a monopoly on the conversation. So what Peter and Che are doing now can’t, in a place like ours, be cinema for cinema’s sake. They like movies, and maybe that’s the simple reason they started the whole thing: to create an opportunity to see the films they enjoy with a like-minded audience. There will always be an element of suspicion about the motives of an artist from abroad, willing to share his cultural bounty, “refining” our cinematic tastes. True enough, Trinis like things from “foreign”. But we also like to tinker with those things, re-fashion them to our own ends, and the contraptions we come up with often bear scant resemblance to their sources. This isn’t about entertaining grateful, passive locals. It’s just another case of Trinis making new meanings with fresh raw material. Given the kinds of connections and conversations already going on at the SFC—before, during, and after the screenings—we are engaging this phenomenon, as and when we please, improvising and ad-libbing. Who knows what the final story will be? For the time being we can only steal glances at the rough footage. Peter’s posters, knocked out on Thursday afternoons, and often hung while still wet, are a backdrop to this uncut scene. Make art objects of them, by all means, but remember who has the starring role. [StudioFilmClub, by Peter Doig, with a foreword by Kaspar König and essays by Nicholas Laughlin and Alice Koegel. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, ISBN 3-883-7594-1-4, 142 pp] |
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