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Jacques COURSIL

CINEMA’S DEMISE AND CHANGING SOCIAL SPACES

by D. Atticus deCaires Narain
CINEMA’S DEMISE AND CHANGING SOCIAL SPACES

{ {{Synopsis :

Les cinémas, autrefois nombreux en Guyana (ex Guyane Britannique), sont fermés, dilapidés, mis en vente ou à sac, ou disparaissent dans les flammes, comme ce fut le cas du Metropole en 2004, emportant des tonnes de souvenirs et alimentant la nostalgie ambiante. Les analyses du rôle de l’impact du cinéma dans les West Indies ont laissé de côté le cinéma indien. Les films indiens ont pourtant été projetés sur les écrans guyaniens depuis 1935… A l’heure où les night-clubs prennent le relais, on ne peut passer sous silence l’impact du cinéma indien sur la psychê collective en Guyana dans l’étude socio-anthropologique du cinéma. J.S. S.}} }

Guyana's coastline is dotted with the remnants of the golden age of cinema. Theatres are closed, squatted-in, dilapidated, converted, or for sale. The few that remain open require a keen eye or you might well pass them by. Their unpainted crumbling façades blend in with the rest of Guyana's neglected architecture.


Stand in a foyer and one can feel the life they once oozed. Old posters lie torn, frayed and barely hang, rows of seats wait to be filled and a layer of dust and odour prevail. Floors creak and reek of many a footstep, an eerie silence hugs the cinema and you are left to imagine the spectacle of going to the movies. Instantly the senses are attacked, but not as cinema intended through visual bombardment; its past and present existence are collapsed and beg the question, what happened?

In September 2004 the Metropole cinema went out in a magnificent blaze, taking with it a host of social memories. Despite the reality of poor attendance at cinemas in urban areas, its destruction generated a surprising degree of concern and nostalgia for what it once signified.

National papers reminisced and unveiled a long historical relationship between cinema and fire: be it for insurance scams; targets during race riots; for showing x-rated films; or simply because these huge old wooden structures were prone to fire. In the past, once burnt, refurbishment offered the chance to introduce the latest technological developments and cinema designs. Today, their prime locations attract other forms of business for different social purposes and slowly cinemas are erased from urban landscapes.

The role of cinema in the West Indies has been given considerable attention in relation to Hollywood, but there is an almost complete absence of information about Indian films. Charting the introduction of Indian movies to Guyana raises an immediate difficulty because of the dearth of historical material. This limits the level of analysis around the social impact of Indian films' arrival, unlike that of other places, India, Nigeria and Trinidad.

The first Indian film to make it to a big screen in Guyana was Bala Bajan in 1935; by the late 1940s Indian films were being shown regularly and they presented an India not seen before. Located in India with an all-Indian cast, these films provoked visceral and nostalgic identifications through a visual grammar made accessible for an 'illiterate' population.


An entire spectrum of Indian life styles and struggles was projected on screen, littered with mythical and religious symbols and values. Unlike other minority audiences such as African-Americans or Native Americans whose representations in Hollywood at that time were always confined to marginalized derogatory roles, Indo-Guyanese could see 'themselves' in confident and powerful portrayals. Indo-Guyanese could look, recognise and appropriate cultural and religious material that fostered a shared visual arena of social interaction.

The abolition of indenture in 1917 saw the end of cultural renewal by 'fresh' Indians who had been the main agents of replenishing memories of 'the homeland'. Now Indian movies became key sources for sustaining links to India and they took over the responsibility of constructing an empty, many-coloured space through its never-ending web of images, songs, dialogues and film stars.

To attend the cinema was to participate in a new public space, one linked with an emerging post-indenture Indian identity in British Guiana that coincided with adult suffrage, unionization, and political representation. The financial outlay involved in purchasing a ticket represented the choice of an individual to participate in a 'modern' process and was symbolic of one's participation in a changing public, cultural and social sphere.

Indian films became a part of their cultural diet, so much so that Guyanese today overwhelmingly associate and make Indian films synonymous with Indo-Guyanese. Thus visiting the cinema was never just a trip to another world; it was one in which all that was Indian was justified, celebrated and normalized. This was in stark contrast to their actual political and social marginality, imposed through years of colonial positioning as second-class subjects (this highly contested and complicated statement cannot be addressed here).

Generations of viewing Indian films have produced a set of local understandings and have helped sustain an idea of 'authenticity' no longer ensured by immigration. A nominal/real attachment to India is constructed despite India's own enormous internal shifts, and continues to provide culturally valued material.


Indian films afford a space where local cultural values of Indianness are legitimated, contested and continually change and often exist outside of mainstream national politics (although one could argue that post 1992 we are witnessing the increasing use of 'culture' as a vehicle for cohesion). At the same time, it must be recognised that non Indo-Guyanese also attended the cinemas to see these Indian films, and it would be interesting and important to reflect on what kinds of social interactions and mixing occurred and how these audiences received the images they saw represented on screen.

Who is to blame for cinemas' death does not concern us here. What does is that the social environment that cinema generated is now replaced by the sitting room politics of viewing television. The home provides an entertainment space linked to social status, progress and modernity gained through technological competence. Home viewing produces an inward looking context that promotes an individualized gaze and challenges conceptions of social interaction within and outside the home.

This may resonate as sentimentalism for the cinema; therefore let me end by adding to the print, cinema, and television continuum by offering a new public space : Nightclubs. The moral panic that sought to police the young as they entered the dark spaces of cinema has returned in the rhetoric of those attending nightclubs.

The concerns are similar but the space and interactions are not confined to seating and looking. This space is designed for dynamic and heterogeneous interactions encouraged in part by loud infectious music and dance for a growing liberal class of Indo-Guyanese.

{ {{Atticus deCaires Narain has just completed his doctorate and is a researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology, Gold-smiths College, University of London.}} }

{{Special thanks to Deosaran Bisnath.}}

{ {{Cliquez sur les images pour agrandir.}} }

[{{PORTAIL DU CINEMA INDIEN}}->http://www.bollywood-sisine.com/categorie-689846.html]

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