Week #7--Black British Cinema

Last week’s examples of Caribbean cinema were documentaries that focused on two prominent writers of the Caribbean and postcolonial theory: Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, both of whom are from Martinique. In her documentary Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History, Euzhan Palcy devotes the first of a three-part series on how her subject came to emergence, first as a poet, then as a teacher, and ultimately as mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city of Martinique. Palcy’s documentary captures the tension that Césaire faced in his attempts to transition from being a surrealist poet and a member of the French Communist Party to deciding as mayor what Martinique’s ties should be to France. A lucid observation that Césaire makes is that countries who had become independent had adopted its own brand of totalitarianism (Haiti and the Duvalier regimes), while Communist countries were adopting the same identity. Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Mask considers how Fanon psychoanalyzed of colonial relations, particularly the complex presence of desire in the colonist gaze that demands the colonized subject to be condemned. Fanon’s experience in psychoanalysis was crucial to his experience in Algeria, in which he examined the state of de-personalization his patients had undergone, where all notions of agency had been diminished. He would identify violence as the only strategy through which a sense of agency could be attained. Julien’s unconventional structure, in which he combines found footage, talking head interviews, and a dramatization of Fanon’s writings, also grants him some space to interrogate his subject’s blind spots. Julien points to areas in the book Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon looks condescendingly on Black women and homosexuals, which raises questions about whether or not Fanon had deeply internalized the notion of privilege upon which he had criticized the European colonizers.

Returning to Palcy for a moment, her documentary, plus her feature-length debut, Sugar Cane Alley (1983), are both examples of how film is used to instill a pan-Caribbean contemporary identity that is determined by its engagement with history. The historical presence of both Martinique’s early history (through the adaptation of the novel Rue Cases-Négres) and the recognition of ancestral African identity points to a lack of centrality in both Caribbean identity and Caribbean cinema. Both Keith Warner and June Givanni’s interview with Palcy point to the reality that Caribbean-based filmmakers have to work outside of their home country in order to obtain resources to make their film. Palcy talks specifically about the fact that in spite of a film festival in the Caribbean, there still remains no Caribbean film industry that preserves the production, distribution, and exhibition resources for Caribbean filmmakers. These artists, similar to African filmmakers, have to both compete with movies from U.S. and Western Europe that dominate the theaters, plus combat the stigma that their films are inferior simply because they are from a Caribbean country.

For Black British filmmakers during the 1980s, what they found most at stake was the interrogation of history specific to England and the African diaspora, and new ways to make their films and distribute them. The Black filmmaking workshop movement consisted of two collectives: Sankofa and Black Audio. Both of these collectives marked at the point the most significant presence of media-makers who were of African descent. While their films were an immediate response to the climate of tension and political unrest during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, they also interrogate the cultural memory of Black Britons to assert a more inclusive space for women and the LGBT community. These filmmakers were part of the first generation to be born in England, as their parents emigrated from West Africa and the Caribbean. In The Passion of Remembrance (1986) by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, think of how the different storylines throughout the film reflect the attempts to challenge the masculinization of Black consciousness, the increasing neo-fascist sentiment growing throughout the country, and the inclusion of sexuality within the Black Briton collective identity. What is the relationship between the film’s narrative and meta-narrative, in terms of the questions being raised and what the central characters face?

The Passion of Remembrance (1986)
Dirs. Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien

Cast:
Anni Domingo Female Speaker
Joseph Charles Male Speaker
Antonia Thomas Maggie Baptiste
Carlton Chance Gary
Jim Findlay Tony Baptiste
Ram John Holder Benjy Baptiste
Shiela Mitchell Glory Baptiste
Tania Morgan Tonia
Gary McDonald Michael
Janet Palmer Louise

Questions to consider while watching The Passion of Remembrance:
1. Identify the three different storylines that occur concurrently in this film. How do they all relate to one another?

2. How would you characterize the relationship between the male speaker and the female speaker? What do you notice when they share a space, and when they are in their separate spaces?

3. What do you notice about the images in Maggie’s films in terms of the relationship between image and sound? Based on the readings from Fusco and Mercer, what events do they reference, and how do the viewers of her work respond to her content?

4. What are some of the topics by which Maggie and Tony argue about? How would you describe Tony’s position, and how does Maggie challenge his arguments?