Nicholas Laughlin and leon wainwright in conversation
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| Talking
About StudioFilmClub Nicholas Laughlin and leon wainwright in conversation |
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| [Published
in Modern Painters, March 2006]
Tuesday afternoon: an email from studiofilm@wow.net. The familiar opening line: “All our screenings are FREE ones.” The time, the date, the name of the movie. Thursday evening, driving over Lady Young Road to a granny-knot of traffic at Morvant Junction. Through the big gate to what used to be a rum warehouse; a giant “7” blazoning the wall. Up the steep staircase, and follow the sign with the name in bright red letters: STUDIOFILMCLUB. Down a corridor lined with artists’ studios, through a dark space piled with canvases and furniture, a table-tennis board set up in the middle. Under an arbour of lightbulbs, and into a vast room, sixty feet by sixty, bare-concrete-floored, metal-roofed, buzzing with talk and music. Nod to acquaintances, wave to Che, kiss a few cheeks, but head straight to the back and the candlelit bar. The beer used to be hidden in tubs of ice, but a few months ago the set-up went professional: now there’s a stainless steel drinks cooler. You still have to help yourself, and remember to put a few dollars in the box labelled “drinks by donation”. It’s quarter past eight, and now the projector’s on. Most of us have sat down, and the lights go off and the speakers switch from Peter’s iTunes to the DVD audio. The electric fans whirr, the growl of cars on Eastern Main Road slips in through the big open windows, and on the white-painted wall ahead the first images flicker. In February 2003 — the week after Carnival — Peter Doig and Che Lovelace launched StudioFilmClub in Doig’s studio in the Caribbean Contemporary Arts centre on the outskirts of Port of Spain. Their first film: The Harder They Come, the 1973 Perry Henzell classic. StudioFilmClub began with a small audience of Doig and Lovelace’s friends and other artists, but gradually the word spread about the casual weekly screenings of Caribbean, foreign language, and independent films. Never a “club” in the conventional sense, the SFC has grown a small core of regulars who come every week for the movie and the “lime” (“liming” is Trinidadian slang for hanging out), but it also attracts the most unlikely visitors. With most of Port of Spain’s old art deco cinemas shutting down — victims of competition from slick Miami-box multiplexes — the SFC’s become your best bet for serious cinema in Trinidad — but with a decided aversion to cinephile snobbery. It’s actually the opposite of what you’d expect a film club to be. What the SFC really adds up to is something its Trini audience is still thrashing out, in an open-ended conversation. Sitting three rows from the back, we chat. ***
Nicholas Laughlin: So, you hear StudioFilmClub’s going to New York — to the Whitney Biennial? Leon Wainwright: Showing films that were screened at SFC, or looking at the bigger historical context of cinema here? NL: The former, most likely. How many people in NY know anything about Trinidad’s complicated, creative relationship with foreign cinema? LW: Some of the Hollywood movies shot here in the 1940s and 50s should be familiar — Affair in Trinidad with Rita Hayworth, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison with Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum in Fire Down Below…. NL: Trouble is, in those films Trinidad was just a backdrop, and local actors were only ever extras in crowd scenes. [Trinidad-born, Toronto-resident] Richard Fung made a short film a few years ago called Islands, about Chinese Trinidadians hired to play Japanese soldiers in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. LW: Like Earl Lovelace [Che’s father] and the episode in his current novel-in-progress about Trini actors cast in battle scenes, determined to “die” spectacularly prolonged deaths and steal a moment of celluloid fame, despite their Hollywood director’s best efforts. NL: Trinis have always loved the movies — maybe it’s a natural extension of our love for role-playing, inventing a character we think is closest to our truest or most ideal self, and embodying it as fully as possible in word, movement, attitude. Which of course comes to life every year during Carnival — the masquerade so many Trinidadians consider essential to their self-identity. LW: And Hollywood cinema’s long had a major influence on Carnival…. NL: Since the first movie houses opened in Port of Spain in the 1910s, Hollywood’s been a deep reservoir of images and narratives for Carnival designers and masqueraders. Our traditional midnight robber character draws on motifs from classic Westerns. LW: Old-time sailor mas is unthinkable without all those patriotic war movies of the 30s and 40s. NL: And [Carnival designers] Harold Saldenah and George Bailey absorbed big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas of the 50s and 60s — like Quo Vadis and Cleopatra — and borrowed not just “period” details, but a sense of epic scale — a tradition that hit its peak in the work of Peter Minshall. His opening ceremony at the Barcelona Olympics was a shadow of the spectacles he’s achieved here at home. LW: But it would be a mistake to think this was all imitation, right? It was more complex: those Carnival revellers, a real-life cast of thousands, weren’t pretending to be in a movie — they were playing out their own fantasies using images boldly borrowed from one of America’s biggest exports. They were staking out a space of their own. NL: The quintessential Trini expression “play yourself” explains it. Our concept of personality: a performance. LW: There’s also an unstoppable tradition of Trinidadians “talking back” to the screen, isn’t there? Cinema-going in Trinidad is — or used to be — a very active experience. Naipaul describes in The Middle Passage how “the audience continually shouts advice and comments; it grunts at every blow in a fight; it roars with delight when the once-spurned hero returns wealthy and impeccably dressed….” So when presented with a Hollywood version of the Caribbean, the audience would respond with derision or biting wit. Is it still like that? NL: In a handful of traditional cinemas, yes — the ones slowly being squeezed out of business. LW: But isn’t SFC preserving something of that spirit? A kind of dialogue between local audience and outsider presence? NL: Maybe. I think what’s distinctive about SFC is not the eclectic programme of films, but the spirit of — the closest word for it is irreverence, the audience’s refusal to take high-art cinema too seriously. For me, SFC isn’t so much about the movies, but about the social interactions taking place around the screenings. The conversations. LW: Film studies folk would call it the difference between “film” and “cinema” — a slim difference for most of us, but important when trying to understand the film’s reception. [Trinidadian artist] Christopher Cozier describes much of Trinidad’s cultural production as a conversation with the “outside”, negotiating, borrowing, often refusing to agree. NL: The kind of negotiation that goes on at the SFC — between audience and film, between audience and Peter and Che — isn’t as overt as, say, the negotiation between Hollywood movies and Carnival masqueraders back in the 50s and 60s, but it is real and it is vital — and who knows what the result will be. The “conversation” already extends beyond the Thursday night screenings. In the weblog, for instance [studiofilmclub.blogspot.com], its semi-official web presence. LW: Which adds participants to the “authorship” of the SFC, I suppose. Affirming the audience’s role, and taking the whole phenomenon beyond the confines of Peter’s studio. How should the SFC work at the Whitney? NL: Ideally, as more than just a selection of films from the SFC’s programme. If it’s so integral to the plot, the Trini voice should be somehow be audible. But what people may find at the Whitney is a half-reconstructed conversation…. LW: …With one of the interlocuters missing, or hushed to a whisper. NL: And the accent slightly wrong. Meanwhile, here at CCA, the real conversation — the backchat — goes on. |
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