CONCEPTUALIZING THE CARlBBEAN:
REEXPORTATION AND ANGLOPHONE CARlBBEAN CULTURAL PRODUCTS
by
ULRlCK CHARLES CASIMIR
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department ofEnglish
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
September 2008
11
University of Oregon Graduate School
Confirmation of Approval and Acceptance of Dissertation prepared by:
Ulrick Casimir
Title:
"Conceptualizing the Caribbean: Reexportation and Anglophone Caribbean Cultural Products"
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment ofthe requirements for
the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by:
Gordon Sayre, Chairperson, English
Michael Aronson, Member, English
Cynthia Tolentino, Member, English
Philip Scher, Outside Member, Anthropology
and Richard Linton, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies/Dean ofthe Graduate
School for the University of Oregon.
September 6, 2008
Original approval signatures are on file with the Graduate School and the University of Oregon
Libraries.
© 2008 Ulrick Charles Casimir
111
IV
An Abstract of the Dissertation of
Ulrick Charles Casimir for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy
in the Department of English to be taken September 2008
Title: CONCEPTUALIZING THE CARIBBEAN: REEXPORTATION AND
ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN CULTURAL PRODUCTS
Approved:
Dr. Gordon Sayre
This dissertation examines the relationship between British and American
conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean and the way that Anglophone Caribbean
fiction writers and filmmakers tend to represent the region. Central to my project is the
process of reexportation, whereby Caribbean artists attain success at home by first
achieving renown abroad. I argue that the primary implication of reexportation is that
British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean have had a
determining effect upon attempts by Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers and filmmakers
to represent the region. Chapter I introduces the dissertation. Chapter II, "The 'Double
Audience' of Samuel Selvon and The Lonely Londoners," concerns Trinidadian author
Samuel Selvon, who-along with George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and V.S. Naipaul-is
cited as being among the most important and influential of the West Indian authors who
began publishing in the 1950s. Although I consider all of Selvon's ten novels in that
chapter, my main concern is The Lonely Londoners (1956), Selvon's best known and
perhaps most pivotal and misread novel. Chapter III, "Contrapuntally Re-reading Perry
Henzell's The Harder They Come," features a reevaluation of the Jamaican filmmaker's
1972 motion picture, which in many complex ways remains the Caribbean film. Chapter
IV, "Pressure and the Caribbean," focuses on Trinidadian filmmaker Horace Ove's
Pressure (1975), which I deliberately treat as a Caribbean film although it is still best
known as Britain's first feature-length dramatic movie with a "black" director. Vital
secondary texts include selected works by Edward Said, Mikhail Bahktin, and Richard
Dyer, as well as Kenneth Ramchand, Keith Warner, and D. Elliott Parris. The three
existing book-length analyses of Selvon's fiction are the main voices with which the
Selvon chapter is in discourse. David Bordwell's work in cinematic narrative theory and
Marcia Landy's contribution to the study of British genres are essential to the frameworks
through which I read the cinematic primary texts.
v
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Ulrick Charles Casimir
PLACE OF BIRTH: Charlotteamalie, St. Thomas, U.S.V.I.
DATE OF BIRTH: 1973
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
North Carolina State University, Raleigh
DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy, English, August 2008, University of Oregon
Master of Arts, English, December 2005, University of Oregon
Master of Fine Arts, Fiction, May 2000, University ofNorth Carolina,
Greensboro
Bachelor of Arts, English, December 1995, North Carolina State University
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Film
Caribbean Studies
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Assistant Professor, Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View TX
August 2008-
Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, Eugene
March 2002-June 2007
VI
Vll
GRANTS, AWARDS AND HONORS:
Stoddard Malarkey Memorial Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2002
Target of Opportunity/Laurel Award, University of Oregon, 2002
Randall Jarrell Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, 2000
PUBLICATION:
Casimir, Ulrick. "Teaching the Rhetoric of Information." Componere: Policies,
Resources, Pedagogies, and Perspectives for Teachers ofComposition. U
of Oregon, 2006.
V111
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express sincere appreciation and gratitude to the members of my
committee for their assistance with this project. I would particularly like to thank the
committee chair, Dr. Gordon Sayre, for his patience and understanding during what
proved a difficult and extended gestation. Gratitude is also plainly due to Elizabeth
Peterson, literature reference librarian at the University of Oregon's Knight Library, who
has made me a more thorough and efficient researcher. I am also grateful for the prompt,
detailed assistance of Dr. Sushelia Nasta, Christophe Dupin at the British Film Institute,
Mimi Plauche at the Chicago International Film Festival, and John Dyer at the British
Board of Film Classification.
"Brown Owl" and Newey, as always.
IX
Chapter
TABLE OF CONTENTS
x
Page
I. INTRODUCTION..... 1
II. REEXPORTATION AND THE "DOUBLE AUDIENCE" OF SAMUEL
SELVON AND THE LONELYLONDONERS 16
Endnotes 46
III. WHITENESS, STRATEGIC OMISSION, AND A CONTRAPUNTAL
READING OF PERRY HENZELL'S THE HARDER THEY COME 48
Endnotes 95
IV. PRESSURE AND THE CARIBBEAN 99
Endnotes 168
BIBLIOGRAPHY 174
Xl
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Sequence A, Shot 1 68
2. Sequence A, Shot 2 69
3. Sequence A, Shot 3 70
4. Sequence A, Shots 4a and 4b 71
5. Sequence A, Shot 5 72
6. Sequence A, Shots 6a and 6b 72
.7. Sequence A, Shot 7 73
8. Sequence A, Shots 8 and 9 74
9. Sequence A, Shot 10 75
10. Sequence A, Shot 11 76
11. Sequence A, Shots 12a and 12b 77
12. Sequence A, Shot 13 .,. 77
13. Sequence A, Shot 14 79
14. Sequence A, Shots 15 and 16 "......................................................... 79
15. Sequence A, Shot 17 80
16. Sequence A, Shots 18a and 18b 80
17. Sequence A, Shot 19 81
18. Sequence A, Shot 20 82
19. Sequence A, Shots 21aand21b 83
20. Sequence A, Shot 22 83
21. Sequence A, Shot 23 84
22. Sequence A, Shot 24 85
23. Sequence A, Shot 25 86
24. Sequence A, Shot 26 87
25. Sequence A, Shot 27 87
26. Sequence A, Shot 28 88
27. Sequence A, Shots 29 and 30 89
28. Sequence A, Shots 31 and 32 89
29. Sequence B (Long Take/Single Shot) 92
1CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
"At what point," wonders Mimi Sheller, in Consuming the Caribbean: From
Arawaks to Zombies, "do transatlantic consuming publics take responsibility for the
effects of their consuming practices-including cultural consumption--on distant
others?" (13). Like Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others before her, Sheller
means to further destabilize the "easy conceptual separation" inherent to the examination
of relations between the Caribbean and its various metropoles in terms of "core" and
"periphery"; the stated goal of her contribution to that continuing push within the field of
postcolonial studies is to locate "persistent continuities-as well as crucial fields of
resistance and unintended consequences-in the complex flows of material, cultural, and
ethical relations between producer, consumer, and consumed in the transatlantic world."
Central to Consuming the Caribbean is a theory of "travel" that deliberately compresses
tourism, trade, cultural exchange (whether physical or electronic), and the
multiform/polyvalent matter of migration. It is through that theory oftravel that Sheller
"explores the myriad ways in which Western European and North American publics have
unceasingly consumed the natural environment commodities, human bodies, and cultures
of the Caribbean over the past five hundred years" (3).
2While not as sweeping as Sheller's study, this dissertation is also a contribution to
the study of the Caribbean, its metropoles, and the relationships between them, as "deeply
'interpellated'" (Sheller 3). "Conceptualizing the Caribbean: Reexportation and
Caribbean Cultural Products" focuses on three very different yet well-recognized,
"canonical," and perhaps even foundational Anglophone Caribbean texts: Samuel
Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), which was written and published in
London a few years after its Trinidadian author had moved to Britain; Perry Henzell's
internationally successful major motion picture The Harder They Come (1972), which
was made on location in the ghettoes of Jamaica by a native ofthe island; and Horace
Ove's Pressure (1975), an iconic "black" British film that was co-written by Selvon and
Ove, is set in London, and was first commercially exhibited in Britain in 1978. Focusing
on the complex and ambivalent relationship between these texts, their "makers," their
subject matter, and the audience(s) that their subject matter and stylistics intimate that
those texts create or imagine, "Conceptualizing the Caribbean" is the beginning of an
attempt to examine how British and American notions of the Anglophone Caribbean have
informed the international popular and scholarly reception of Anglophone Caribbean
fiction writing and filmmaking. Here I argue that this relationship, due in part to the
historical and continuing process of reexportation, has influenced attempts by
Anglophone Caribbean writers and filmmakers to represent the region, and has
consequently moderated/continues to moderate the region's artistic formation of its own
identity.
3Just as Sheller's theory of "travel" is central to Consuming the Caribbean,
reexportation is vital to this dissertation. As defined in D. Elliott Parris's "The
Reexportation of the Caribbean Literary Artist," reexportation occurs when creative
artists from a formerly colonized country, having difficulty achieving domestic success,
leave their home country or export their work and hence "make a name" for themselves
abroad, usually in the colonial power from which their country had gained its
independence. In the final phase, the artist's international renown translates into real
success at home. Basic to "Conceptualizing the Caribbean" is that at issue in these three
selected primary texts is the notion of the success of one's work abroad having a
measurable influence on the way those texts are perceived "at home." Also fundamental
to this dissertation is the applicability of reexportation to more than one kind of
Anglophone Caribbean cultural product. Parris's essay deliberately and somewhat
provocatively "illuminates the application of the idea of reexportation in the field of
culture" (Parris 95). That is, not unlike "travel," reexportation is fundamentally a
structural perspective on cultural imperialism, which indicates the model's potential to be
applied to cultural products that are as different in production and consumption as novel
and films.
Reexportation directly concerns cultural imperialism, a phenomenon so basic to
colonial domination that its tenets continue to appear almost without the strictures of
time. Parris's main examples are the careers of Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay, two
turn-of-the-century Anglophone Caribbean figures who achieved no real purchase in their
endeavors until they migrated to the United States. Both achieved success back home
4only after achieving success abroad. But their career paths were in no way isolated cases:
"Indeed, what was true of Garvey and McKay in the 1920s is also true of the Caribbean
literary movement as a whole that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century; it
was a product of migration." To illustrate how reexportation remains a useful model,
Parris refers to the sociological analysis that was his dissertation project in 1973, for
which he conducted interviews with "the majority of the established writers from the
region" The study matched that sample of established authors, the majority of whom
carne to prominence while living and writing abroad, with a selection of "emerging"
authors, most of whom were currently living in the region. According to that study,
"more than three quarters of the established writers were interviewed outside the
Caribbean where they were residing," and all of those said that they believed their
migration had been a necessary part of their success. This differed greatly for the
emerging writers, who did not tend "to say that they felt they had to leave the Caribbean
in order to succeed as writers" (103). Pulling the issue forward through time, Parris
concludes:
Ironically, if the interviews were conducted today, almost 30 years after
the original interviews, with the same sample, those that were "emerging"
writers then who remained in the Caribbean still would be predominantly
"emerging" writers. Time has hardly changed the conditions that require
Caribbean success in the literary world to be sought first abroad. (103-04)
While that study and its conclusions together address whether reexportation ought
to be described as "time bound," they also indicate how the model actually describes a
5situation that has long concerned Caribbean critics and cultural producers. Critical Issues
in West Indian Literature features papers from three conferences on West Indian
literature, held each year from 1981-83, on the islands of St. Thomas, Jamaica, and
Guyana respectively. In his introduction to the volume, Lloyd Brown very clearly
addresses the mechanics of reexportation (albeit while never mentioning the concept or
exploring its complexities in a detailed way). According to Brown, the conferences that
the volume covers came about because the region's literary critics saw the work ofthe
region's writers being overly determined by the way that it was being studied abroad;
those critics sought to short-circuit that process by organizing conferences whose purpose
was to put boundaries around the region, in order to have it more fully determine its own
representation. At the same time, however, Brown makes it clear that those boundaries
were always meant to be loose and permeable. Caribbean critics knew well the danger of
parochialism, and the "need to respond to both local experience and to those external
forces and influences which have always impinged upon or shaped local culture"; the
only sufficient critical apparatuses would be those that did not encourage "literary and
cultural perspectives which ignore the fundamentally synchretic nature of West Indian
life and letters" (Brown 3-4). One key essay in the volume, Jeannette B. Allis's "West
Indian Literature: A Case for Regional Criticism," is even more direct, asserting that "the
struggle to establish an authoritative regional criticism is the inevitable corollary to the
establishment of a regional literature" (8). For Allis, that the region's literary identity had
for some time been determined from the outside---often by "outside" critics who
remained curiously unaware oftheir own subject position-meant that the development
6of a stronger, more realized regional criticism was now crucial for the region's own
attempts at self- determination and representation.
The "Two Conferences Considered" section of Parris's essay features an evocative
illustration of the sensitivity of Anglophone Caribbean cultural producers to the tenets
and dynamics of reexportation. There Parris recounts the first official conference of the
Caribbean Artist Movement (CAM) which was held in Canterbury England in 1967, and
the inaugural CARIFESTA conference at Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972. According to
Parris, chiefly occasioning the 1967 conference was how aware the authors and artists in
attendance were of themselves as "Caribbean" cultural producers in a necessary exile,
since exile was precisely what allowed them to ply their craft for a living. They were
Caribbean by birth and allegiance, but to make a living meant leaving the region, or
putting themselves into exile.
The first CAM conference largely concerned issues of exile and the development
of a Caribbean audience upon which Caribbean artists could come to depend. That
conference, which was the product of many private and public CAM meetings before it,
closed with a resolution to "have a similar conference organized in the near future on
Caribbean soil" (Parris 105). The 1972 CARIFESTA was a product of that
resolution-the 1967 CAM conference's participants "floated [the idea] before various
political leaders until then Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham embraced it and
committed his government to making it possible" (l05-06). Hence the first
CARIFESTA, hosted by the Guyana government, was envisioned as "a cultural
7exposition of performing and fine arts bringing together representatives of thirty-one
Caribbean countries" (105).
The differences between the two conferences, and how those differences relate to
reexportation, is as clear as the message of CARIFESTA's opening address, during which
Prime Minister Burnham revealed that "he didn't want to hear about any overseas
achievements, for any achievements worthy of recognition had to be attained within the
Caribbean" (Parris 106). Of course the exiled writers and artists who had traveled to
Guyana to attend the conference-many of whose works are now part of the modem
"canon" of Caribbean literature-had expected something quite different of Prime
Minister Burnham:
To them, Caribbean society had stood in the way of their achievement
prior to their departure; they had succeeded abroad despite having
exchanged a nonsupportive environment for one that was openly hostile to
them as foreigners and nonwhites; they had expected to be embraced by
the Caribbean on the basis of the reputations they had earned abroad.
Instead, there was the prime minister saying the opposite of what they had
expected. (Parris 106)
The continuation ofthat "non-supportive environment," which includes practical
considerations such island nations too small to yield an audience large enough for most
artists to succeed, and that are just isolated enough from one another to prevent a writer
or artist from one island to speak from within that island to audiences on more than one
8island effectively, is vital for the continuation of reexportation-which continues, despite
the stern admonitions of a prime minister.
Reexportation is based upon the notion that cultural imperialism continues to
inform relations between dominant and weaker countries, or colonial powers and
formerly colonized, newly independent nations. According to reexportation, the "self-
worth" of formerly colonized, newly independent nations has been and is still very much
bound up in and a reflection of outside or "externally oriented" assessment. Much less
important than an indictment of imperial countries, however, is the identification of a
dynamic that, once recognized, has significant consequences for those interested in how
critical, scholarly, and lay audiences in imperial countries determine or influence the
creative output or cultural product of "peripheral" countries.
In the section called "The Development of a Negative National Identity," Parris
outlines the historical circumstances and developments that have led the Caribbean as a
region to be prone to reexportation. The European domination of the Caribbean, which
included slavery, also featured a marked, traceable attempt by those same Europeans to
devalue the African aspect of Caribbean heritage and to make it as difficult as possible
for the African slaves to form bonds and communicate effectively and efficiently with
one another, particularly in ways that Europeans would find difficult or impossible to
understand. Parris also observes how these efforts found legitimizing echoes in the world
of the European intellectual; writings of Georg Hegel and Arthur de Gobineau contained
references to the "inferiority" of Africa and Africans, and both "Enlightenment positivism
9and Darwinian evolutionary theories were all recruited in European thought to justify the
domination by colonial powers over their subject states" (96).
This dynamic is of course exploded in Frantz Fanon's classic The Wretched ofthe
Earth, which "describes this devaluation/dehumanization as a systematic, calculated,
institutional strategy used by the Europeans against the colonized, with debilitating
consequences to the psyches of the dominated peoples." While the native can achieve a
certain sense of self-worth within the colonial system, the process involves "denouncing
his heritage and assuming European values," and culminates in "the loss of his identity
and self-respect" (Parris 97). Furthermore, that loss often results in the native actually
living the stereotypes that the European colonizers have maintained throughout; Parris
describes this fundamentally impossible situation when he observes how those negative
stereotypes "are promoted by the colonial value system and inculcated through the
educational system," which also contributes to natives being "socialized into negative
self-esteem" (97).
"Conceptualizing the Caribbean" shares Parris's conviction that Fanon's analysis
in The Wretched ofthe Earth, which takes Algeria as its subject matter, also applies to the
Anglophone Caribbean. While he spends the bulk of his time on Garvey and McKay,
Parris lists several writers of the Anglophone Caribbean whose work "portray[s] this
internalization of a negative identity" (97): Orlando Patterson's An Absence ofRuins,
V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men, Neville Dawes's The Last Enchantment, Andrew Salkey's
Escape to an Autumn Pavement, George Lamming's The Emigrants, and Samuel Selvon's
The Lonely Londoners. More important that the works themselves, however, is how
10
Parris and others evaluate or assess a given work's expression of that problem of negative
identity:
What these various works have in common is an image of the Caribbean
person embodying nonidentification [sic] and facelessness. The society of
the Caribbean is seen as problematic, with a population possessing no true
identity, having been drawn from elsewhere, having been founded on
slavery (a source of shame), and being devoid of a glorious heritage. (97-
98)
The absence of reference to how the same problem of negative identity-which is at the
base of reexportation-might also influence the "how" of a given narrative, the stylistics
employed in the telling of it, or the "mode" through which the narrative is told, suggests
the work that remains to be done. By this I mean that Parris demonstrates the familiar
tendency to assess theme through the "what" of the story, the narrative and the people,
places, things, and situations that populate it. I mention this not to slight Parris or any
others who might study the literature and film of the Anglophone Caribbean and, in the
process, establish their understanding of the theme of a primary source through a close-
reading of setting, characterization, symbol, motif, and other primarily plot- or content-
level considerations-that kind of work is both difficult and important. Far less
prevalent, however, are analyses that attempt to account for the ways in which those
stories are being told, including elements of their narrative approach that mayor may not
have been completely within the author or filmmaker's conscious control. That is the
"space" in which this dissertation seeks to operate.
11
Focusing on Anglophone Caribbean fiction and film, "Conceptualizing the
Caribbean" engages film studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and mass
communication, and locates evidence of its thesis chiefly through analyses of the stylistic
and formal aspects of the selected canonical primary texts, as well as the material
conditions that went into producing them. The reasons for this strategy are twofold.
First, there is the fundamental advice of Kenneth Ramchand to avoid approaches to
Caribbean literature that are "implicitly committed to a view of literature as social
document" ("Song ofInnocence" 225). Second, there is the modern shift in film studies
away from analysis focused exclusively on images and content and toward close reading
strongly concerned with aesthetics and formal considerations.. This is particularly true
with criticism like that of James Snead, or most modern film scholars who aim to
discover the less obvious, more insidious examples of racial and ethnic messaging in
film. The primary texts were selected in part because they are canonical and in part
because existing scholarship tends to examine them mostly as "Caribbean" or ("black"),
and infrequently takes into consideration the role of "outside" audiences in determining
not just the content that those texts deliver, but the way/stylistics of that delivery. Also,
far from representing the simple application ofa model or theory to an arbitrarily selected
or "cherry-picked" set of primary sources, these chapters have been written and arranged
to illustrate the complexities that arise when the relatively simple model of reexportation
is kept at the front of the mind when close-reading Anglophone Caribbean fiction and
film.
12
Chapter one, "The 'Double Audience' of Samuel Selvon and The Lonely
Londoners," is conversant with the three existing book-length studies on the fiction of
Selvon, as well as several briefer analyses by such Selvon scholars as Ramchand, Sandra
Paquet, Michel Fabre, and Sushelia Nasta. I argue that close readings of the stylistics and
and formal considerations of the novel that foreground reexportation uncover new, more
comprehensive and intriguing ways to consider how that episodic and elliptical narrative
is being told. The third-person narrator of The Lonely Londoners speaks in a dialect that
repeatedly slips in register between a modified Trinidadian dialect and the literary version
of Standard English. I suggest that what is often described as a "Calypsonian" narrator in
this novel is rather a manifestation on the level of narrative of the exilic author's constant
and self-conscious awareness of his Caribbean and European audiences (i.e., what Fabre
terms Selvon's "double audience"). That highly unusual narrative decision remains the
most powerful illustration of Selvon's career-long engagement with the mechanics of
reexportation, and his best attempt to subvert the process. Although my analysis spans
the novel, a few specific moments receive closest attention. Among them are the novel's
famously imagistic opening, Galahad's apostrophe to the color of his skin, and the
stream-of-consciousness chapter in which the narrator "paints" a London summer. These
examples are among the most frequently cited and analyzed passages in The Lonely
Londoners. As such, they represent key moments through which to illustrate how taking
reexportation into deeper consideration reveals more comprehensive ways to understand
the relationship between the narrative and narrator of Selvon's novel.
13
"Contrapuntally Re-reading Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come," the second
chapter of this dissertation, moves the discussion to film and attempts to establish how
even texts far less "pyrotechnically" stylistic than The Lonely Londoners can nevertheless
demonstrate the dynamics of reexportation in both their content and their form. In that
chapter, I assert that a Bordwellian analysis of the film's formal strategy reveals it to be a
complex, ambivalent text whose success is due to its strategy of holding only part of the
interior of Jamaica up for cinematic display. This allows the film to promote a positive
viewing experience for its black Jamaican audience, who had never before seen
themselves in central or starring roles onscreen. But that strategy also allows a positive
viewing experience for the film's white, international audience. I argue that The Harder
They Come achieves this by literally omitting its white, international audience from the
text and obscuring the roles of race, international relations, and foreign economic policy
in determining the course of Jamaica's modem history. Central to my argument are close
readings oftwo sequences from the film. The first sequence begins at the moment Ivan
first arrives in Kingston and ends shortly after he is robbed of all his belongings. The
second sequence is a single, middling-length take that occurs shortly after Ivan avoids
capture at the motel by gunning down three police officers. I argue that both sequences
are representational because while both clearly indicate and exemplify the origin and
direction of the film's gaze, the completely different ways in which they re-present the
film's subject matter illustrate the ambivalence and complexity at the heart of the film.
"Pressure and the Caribbean," the third chapter, is this dissertation's broadest,
most thorough attempt to assess how reexportation has affected both the production and
I
14
reception(s) of a given Anglophone Caribbean text. Alluding to Paul Gilroy's concept of
"the black Atlantic," Vera M. Kutzinski, in her introduction to A History ofthe Literature
in the Caribbean, Volume 2: English- and Dutch-Speaking Regions, makes the oft-
echoed observation that "the Anglophone Caribbean (as an academic field) by now
reaches far beyond that actual region" and its current "global diasporic proportions"
include Britain and the United States" (10). "Pressure and the Caribbean" reflects that
observation, as it features a deliberate attempt to revisit Pressure, long recognized as
Britain's first "black" feature-length dramatic film, and establish it as a distinctively
Caribbean text.
Surveying the critical and scholarly discourse of black British film, "Pressure and
the Caribbean" posits that developments within the field have actually resulted in the
need for precisely this kind of re-evaluation of ave's first dramatic feature. I argue that
ave's biography and career trajectory, particularly up to the production of Pressure,
together support the claim that the film's themes, story, and form consistently
demonstrate an "in-between-ness" indicative of the postcolonial dynamics of
reexportation. Chiefamong the ways in which reexportation is evident in Pressure is the
telling of a distinctively Caribbean story through the generic conventions ofthe British
social problem film. That strategy exposes Pressure's orientation to two different
audiences-Caribbean and British-since it at once makes a Caribbean story "black
British" and allows the film to subvert and challenge some of the more troubling aspects
of the genre of the British social problem film, and in particular the subset of the British
"race-relations" drama. Pressure's unusual post-production difficulties, as well as the
15
film's contemporaneous critical and popular reception, also indicate other ways that the
film indeed embodies the dynamics of reexportation, as those difficulties and the
Pressure's reception were clearly functions ofthe film's use ofthe "Windrush" experience
to address British and Caribbean audiences simultaneously. Thus Pressure illustrates
how deeply reexportation has informed, and will likely continue to inform, the
production, content, stylistics, and aesthetics of Anglophone Caribbean cultural
products-and as such, Pressure is a vital example of why there continues to be a need to
address or include reexportation in scholarship concerning those products, quite possibly
regardless of the approach, or the theoretical frameworks used, to examine them.
16
CHAPTER II
REEXPORTATION AND THE "DOUBLE AUDIENCE"
OF SAMUEL SELVON
AND THE LONELYLONDONERS
Caribbean studies has long been concerned that success for the region's
Anglophone writers often involves emigrating to cities such as New York and London,
sometimes never to return. For Trinidadian Samuel Selvon, that reality meant leaving his
job as a journalist in 1950 and boarding a boat for London, where he built his
professional reputation over a thirty-year stay. Although a handful of Selvon's short
fiction appeared in print before he left Trinidad, all but the last of his novels, including
The Lonely Londoners, were published during his time in London. After London, Selvon
moved to Calgary; in terms of published work, his sixteen years there yielded one new
novel (Moses Migrating), a collection of prose spanning his career (Foreday Morning:
Selected Prose 1946-1986), reprints of previous work, and very little else. Austin Clarke,
in his personal reminiscence of Selvon, notes the silence, "thick as mud," that greeted the
re-issue of The Plains ofCaroni, and how that silence signified the Canadian literary
establishment's treatment ofSelvon "as if he was a beginning writer" (Clarke 130).
Selvon's long slide into virtual obscurity would end only with his death while visiting
Trinidad in 1994.
17
In The Literary History ofAlberta, George Melnyk describes Selvon's stay in
Calgary in tetms exilic and spectral: "Alberta was not a comfort zone for him. He was
fifty-five when he moved to Calgary-likely seeking a place to hide rather than a place to
resurrect himself. [... ] For Alberta writing, Selvon is a ghost who has yet to rattle his
chains" (31). Yet in the years since Selvon's death, there has been a renewed focus on
him as a critical, defining figure in Anglophone Caribbean literature. l Harold Barratt, in
a bio-bibliographical entry on Selvon, describes him as "one of the important writers who
contributed to the remarkable development of West Indian fiction in the 1950s and
1960s" (282). In his "Samuel Selvon" entry to Bruce King's West Indian Literature,
Michel Fabre cites the fundamentality of the author's career and his first novel, A
Brighter Sun, which was published in 1952 and which "introduced the great period of
Trinidadian novels which continues to this day" ("Samuel Selvon" 152). In his book-
length study of Selvon's use of language published three years before Selvon's death,
Clement Wyke notes Selvon's international significance, which "has been recognized
through a series of university appointments in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and in
North America" and through the translation of his novels into a number of languages
(Dialectical Style/Fictional Strategy ix). And Mark Looker, in Atlantic Passages:
History, Community, and Language in the Fiction ofSam Selvon, reminds us how
"writers from George Lamming to Earl Lovelace have acknowledged their debt to this
artist whom Sushelia Nasta, in her obituary for The Guardian, described as the 'key
figure' in the Caribbean literary renaissance" (ix).
18
Part of the challenge of this renewed focus on Selvon is detennining how best to
"make sense" of the hybrid approach to language demonstrated in his oeuvre, particularly
in tenns of the peripatetic nature of his career. This particular problem will be more fully
explored and teased out below, but at the moment observe that a simple search of "Sam
Selvon" on The Oxford Reference Online turns up a number of entries, the most
significant of which occur in three distinct volumes: The Oxford Companion to
Canadian Literature, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and The Oxford
Companion to British Literature. The issue might be said to be less a matter of where
Se1von belongs than a matter of who can rightfully claim to be the audience that he
addresses. Looker, whose assessment of Selvon's ethnicity as "of East Indian parents"
(ix) is a slight misstatement,2 touches upon the problem:
If Caribbean literature is hybrid in its mixture of African and Indian
cultural traditions with elements of European and American culture, then
its place in national literary histories is problematic: for those who want
neat boundaries these writers don't fit into "English" literature, but for
many of the early generation (including Lamming and Selvon) neither do
they fit comfortably into a broad category called "American," still less to
that shadowy land called "Commmonwealth" literature. (18-19)
In the foreign cities where he spent the majority of his career, Selvon was
continually in the position of writing chiefly of Caribbean concerns while living and
producing abroad, among the strangers to those concerns who were his most immediate
readership. That complex position, which was also familiar to a number of Selvon's
19
peers, constitutes what has been and often still is termed "the West Indian problem of
audience." That "problem" was fundamental to both the origins of the Caribbean Artists
Movement (CAM), which was founded in 1966 in part to develop a West Indian audience
in London, and the movement's first conference, which was held in Canterbury in 1967
and was largely attended by writers who were Caribbean by birth and allegiance but to
whom writing for a living had meant leaving the Caribbean and producing for a foreign
audience (Parris 104-05). Also reflective ofthose concerns was an essay that appeared
the very same year, Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris's "Some West Indian Problems of
Audience," which begins with the observation that, "One of the curious facts about our
literature is that it is almost entirely by absentee West Indians" (127).
For Selvon, this engagement with "the West Indian problem of audience" was
mostly a matter of his readership in London, in part because he began and spent the bulk
of his career there, but also because his output slowed so greatly after moving to Calgary.
This chapter focuses on Selvon's London period; of chief interest is how the migratory
aspect of Selvon's career is connected to a palpable, measurable tension in his stories and
novels. Among those who have most consistently made this kind of observation before
are Looker and Fabre, who represent the tendency to comb the content of Selvon's
narratives for proof of their address to a double audience, one constituted of both British
and Caribbean readers.3 More aligned with the formalist approach to The Lonely
Londoners demonstrated in the work of James Kohn and Helene Buzelin, this chapter
will locate evidence of Selvon's double audience in the aesthetics of The Lonely
20
Londoners, including elements of it that may not have been entirely within the author's
conscious control.
Originally published in London in 1956, The Lonely Londoners is an episodic and
simple-seeming account of Caribbean emigration to London. Often cited for its
similarity to Claude McKay's 1929 novel Banjo, The Lonely Londoners has proven, over
time, to be Selvon's most successful, best-received publication. Prior to the appearance
of The Lonely Londoners, Selvon produced two novels, A Brighter Sun (1952) and An
Island Is a World (1955), and a number of short stories in which the narrative's location
in terms of its double audience is clearest in the tension between its material and those
recurrent passages whose purpose is to explain unfamiliar aspects of its material for the
benefit of a British reader. Fabre concisely refers to this dynamic and its manifestation in
the content of Selvon's narratives, avowing that from A Brighter Sun onward, Selvon was
writing "to a double audience," composed of both the European public as well as Selvon's
"fellow-Trinidadians." Fabre notes that Selvon "had to create a literary language suited
to cultural particulars while creating a bond of sympathetic immediacy with foreign
readers unconversant with West Indian culture who sometimes required nearly
anthropological information" ("Samuel Selvon" 153).
But with The Lonely Londoners, which includes few if any explanatory passages
(terms such as "watchekong," "dasheen," and "ease me up," for instance, appear often and
without explanation or context clues), that fundamental tension is wholly within the voice
of the novel's third-person omniscient narrator. Strictly speaking, that narrator is
ordinary; what "makes it strange" is that it narrates in what Selvon, on numerous
21
occasions, described as a Trinidadian Creole modified for the benefit of his British
reader. In a 1982 interview with Kenneth Ramchand, Selvon stated that he felt he had to
. modifY the dialect because he "had to consider being read by an audience outside of the
Caribbean to whom a presentation of the pure dialect would have been obscure and
difficult to understand" ("Sam Selvon Talking" 99). In an earlier interview, this one held
with Fabre sometime between November 1977 and October 1978, Selvon claimed that
his decision to make his modified Trinidadian dialect the novel's language of narration
was due to indeterminate difficulties that he encountered in composition. Describing the
problem only as feeling like he "could not really move," Selvon locates the seed of it in
his original (and conservative) choice to write the novel's narrative passages in "straight
English" and the dialogue in dialect. But then he "started both the narrative and dialogue
in dialect and the novel just shot along" ("Interviews and Conversations" 66).
Despite these direct statements concerning the author's hybrid approach to the use
of language, those who have written about The Lonely Londoners in the fifty years since
it originally appeared have often characterized the narrator's voice in very different terms.
Tendencies include designating it a "Caribbean dialect" or a "Trinidadian Creole
English," sometimes ignoring the undeniable presence of standard English in the novel's
narrative passages, at other times interpreting those stretches as evidence of
decreolization ... or simply regarding their appearance (sometimes derisively) as
stylistically insignificant inconsistencies in the narrative voice. Wyke's "literary analysis
of Selvon's use of Trinidad Creole English as an important component of his style and
method of fictional composition" (Dialectical Style/Fictional Strategy i) whose
22
"controlling focus [... is] that of the literary critic making selective and modified use of
the descriptive language and research of the linguist" (Dialectical Style/Fictional Strategy
viii), is perhaps the most significant and powerful attempt to theorize Selvon's use of
language across his corpus in terms of decreolization.4 In his recent Race Riots: Comedy
and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction, Michael L. Ross exemplifies the glibber, more
derisive method of accounting for the presence of more than one linguistic register in The
Lonely Londoners, when he chalks up the presence of standard English in the novel's
narrative voice to little more than disjointed "tonal acrobatics" (189).
Yet there most certainly are two registers, or two languages, often present in the
novel's narrative passages, and you can see that here, in the following passage, which
features the first two sentences of the first two paragraphs of the novel's final section
(separated by ellipses), and these are two contiguous paragraphs of pure narration:
"The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves,
sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular. Oh what it
is and where it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: "I walked
on Waterloo Bridge," "I rendezvoused at Charing Cross," "Piccadilly
Circus is my playground," to say these things, to have lived these things,
to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. [... ] What is
it that a city have, that any place in the world have, that you get so much
to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere else? What is it that would
keep men although by and large, in truth and in fact, they catching their
23
royal to make a living, staying in a cramp-up room, where you have to do
everything-sleep, eat, dress, wash, cook, live. (137)
Selvon's comments in the aforementioned interviews indicate that the two
registers evident in this passage are likely a product of the novel's address to a double
audience. Furthermore, that the back-and-forth between them is not consistent across the
novel but rather appears at very specific moments in the novel's purely narrative
passages suggests that the aesthetics of The Lonely Londoners, and not just its content,
ought to be processed and interpreted in terms of Selvon's double audience.
If the explanatory passages in Selvon's fiction prior to The Lonely Londoners are
there to help the British reader through a decidedly Caribbean milieu, then the back-and-
forth between registers in the purely narrative passages of The Lonely Londoners
performs a much more complex and interiorized version of that same function. And if
third-person omniscient narrators are understood as external yet possessing highly
privileged access into the thoughts and feelings of characters central or important to a
given narrative, then that back-and-forth between registers in the purely narrative
passages of The Lonely Londoners is an assertion, on the level of form and aesthetics,
that the unitary language of "standard literary English" may no longer be the sole suitable
register for third-person omniscient narrated Anglophone Caribbean stories and novels.
In this chapter, I argue that a dialogic reading of The Lonely Londoners
identifying the two registers predominant in novel's purely narrative passages and
accounting for the back-and-forth between them is vital because it helps set the novel's
aesthetics, its hybrid approach to language, in the social context in which the novel was
24
produced. This is particularly important considering reexportation, or more specifically,
Selvon's career-long engagement with "the West Indian problem of audience" and the
many difficult implications of such a problem. Furthermore, I assert that perhaps the
most efficient method of reading the aesthetics of The Lonely Londoners in terms of its
"double audience" would be to derive a practical method of identifying in the novel's
purely narrative passages the languages that imply such an audience, and to establish a
critical and theoretical framework sufficient to contend with the complex issues of
language and perspective, in order to assess the significance and importance of those
moments when that back-and-forth is particularly intense or seems most at issue.
At this point in the development of Caribbean studies, it has become widely
accepted to speak ofthe region in terms of plurality and hybridity, and to examine the
literature of the Caribbean for exhibitions or examinations ofthe same. For decades now,
studies from seemingly disparate fields, like Peter D. Fraser and Paul Hackett's The
Caribbean Economic Handbook, which as a case study historicizes globalization through
"an economic overview of [the Caribbean], its role in the world economy, [and] its
prospects for the future" (Foreword), and Ewart C. Skinner's more recent "Empirical
Research on Mass Communication and Cultural Domination in the Caribbean," which
examines the region's traditionally underdeveloped telecommunications sector and how
the recent push to develop it "has revealed substantial dependency relations between
metropolitan and local institutions" (38), have been fundamental to critical analyses of
the literature of the region. Part of the reason is doubtless that such studies consistently
offer the kind of analyses that allow scholars of Caribbean literature to ground their
25
studies of the region's literature in theories that assess the Caribbean as an extraordinarily
complex site of domination and exchange. Joyce Jonas's Anancy in the Great House:
Ways ofReading West Indian Fiction exemplifies this. Published in the Contributions in
Afro-American and African Studies series whose editor at the time was Henry Louis
Gates, Jonas's book is an analysis of the novels of Wilson Harris and George Lamming
that deliberately blends anthropology, feminist studies, and Bakhtinian discourse analysis
to "discuss 'imperialist' habits of perceiving and naming the world and analyze the
techniques employed by [Harris and Lamming] to demystify the imperialist 'text,' and
thus transform a landscape formerly colonized by the world" (1).
Tacit to these kinds of approaches is the notion that hybrid literatures may well
require hybrid critical apparatuses. Yet rare is the intense, extended discussion of
whether the examination of hybrid literature is ethical or even possible through hybrid
critical apparatuses that--through their constant and unmotivated reach into disparate
fields--may well account for many different parts of the work in question, yet struggle to
maintain the conceptual integrity necessary for the construction of a truly cogent,
cohesive argument.
Fundamental to this chapter are a few concepts that, despite their differences, are
just similar enough to "play well" together, particularly when unpacking Anglophone
Caribbean novels like The Lonely Londoners. The first is the notion of reexportation as
developed in D. Elliott Parris's "The Reexportation of the Caribbean Literary Artist."
There Parris explicates the historical and continuing process of reexportation, whereby
Caribbean writers and artists attain success at home by first achieving renown abroad.
26
More specifically, the process "involved the migration of talented persons from the
Caribb.ean to Europe and North America, their emergence as acclaimed artists [... ] and
the return of those artists or their reputations to the Caribbean, where they were received
with more recognition than before their departure" (95-96).
On one level, reexportation concerns the real or perceived need of Caribbean
writers, particularly of Selvon's generation but by no means specific to it, to leave the
region and write to (for instance) a British audience, and to succeed with that
, engagement, before achieving real success "at home." A corollary of the notion is that
some writers might--eonsciously or subconsciously-negotiate the issue by writing to
two audiences at once, a "double audience" that, in Selvon's case, would be composed of
both British and Caribbean readers.
But on another level, beyond the industry-related concerns of readership and
publication, the deeper, more disturbing implication of reexportation is that British- and
American-held notions ofthe Anglophone Caribbean have had, and continue to have, a
determining effect upon attempts by Anglophone Caribbean writers and artists to
represent the region. While its chief concern may be the difficulties that writers and
artists face when their home country is their smallest market, reexportation is much more
than just another convenient way of conceptualizing cultural exchange. It is also a
window into the elaborate machinery of cultural imperialism, which remains the most
insidious aspect of colonial domination.5 As such, reexportation is the rare idea that can
be locally felt while globally understood; it can simultaneously determine whether a
27
novelist defines "dasheen" and be studied at an American university as a structural
perspective on cultural domination and a model of intercultural conversation.
The second concept deeply informing this chapter is focalization, as developed by
Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. There Genette offers the
notion of focalization to address what he sees as a predominant confusion between
"mood" and "voice" in critical studies of "point of view"; Genette succinctly assesses the
matter as a confusion between "the question who sees? and the question who speaks?"
(186). Genette argues for three types of narratives, as far as focalization is concerned.
The first type is the nonfocalized narrative, in which the narrator is actually a character in
the story. The second is the internally focalized narrative, where the narrator is external
to the story but has access to the thoughts and feelings of one or more characters.
Internal focalization is broken down further, into "fixed internal focalization," where the
narrative is focalized through one character throughout; "variable internal focalization,"
where at different moments the narrative is focalized through a succession of different
characters; and "multiple internal focalization," "where the same events may be evoked
several times according to the point of view of several [characters]" (189-90). The third
type of focalization is external focalization, which is akin to the "objective point of view"
but for Genette can also include narratives or passages where the narrator is actually a
character but one who only observes, and who does not participate in the events being
recounted. Genette advises that "the commitment as to focalization is not necessarily
steady over the whole length of a novel" (191 ). Yet the overall perspective-or
28
"mode"--of The Lonely Londoners can, with reasonable certainty, be termed "variable
internal focalization."
Donald Ross Jr., in "Who's Talking Now? How Characters Become Narrators in
Fiction," offers an assessment of why determining with great precision and then
foregrounding the "mode" of a novel is important when attempting to account for
narrative style. "IdentifYing the mode," Ross states, "is [... ] a prior condition to our
discussing narrative styles." Citing Lubomir Dolezel's assertion, in Narrative Modes in
Czech Literature, that "the study of narrative styles [... ] will gain a firm theoretical base
only when the idiosyncratic styles are related to the underlying systems of narrative
modes," Ross notes the confusion (between authorial and narrator's intrusion, for
instance) that can arise when a narrative mode is imprecisely or incorrectly identified (D.
Ross, Jr. 1238). This is an especial danger with The Lonely Londoners, which like most
novels is a heteroglot narrative, but in a manner more pronouncedly so since it is written
in dialect. But The Lonely Londoners is also not the usual dialect novel; in fact,
especially when compared to the more conventional Anglophone dialect novels in which
the purely narrative passages are in something close to standard literary English while the
novel's characters speak in dialect (Selvon's first two novels are written precisely this
way), The Lonely Londoners is unique in that its narrator-who is not a character in the
story, and whose free-ranging episodic storytelling indicates that it is not an observer
narrating an event that it has observed-speaks with a voice that strategically vacillates
between the language of the novel's characters and something like standard literary
English. Hence, precisely assessing the novel's narrative mode is fundamental to
29
answering the chief, sweeping question that the novel's narrative strategy both generates
and complicates-namely, "Who is speaking, and when?"
The unusual perspective of The Lonely Londoners also requires elements of
discourse theory for its analysis. Those elements directly applicable here are best
developed and unpacked in Mikhail Bakhtin's "Discourse in the NoveL" Of broad
importance is heteroglossia, as the fundamental means through which to determine the
stylistics of a novel. But most germane are two notions best understood as dialogism
expressed on the level of foml, since each represents different ways that the languages in
a heteroglot novel tend to interact. While these ideas are inclusive enough to apply to the
narrative and dialogue passages of virtually any heteroglot text, given the emphasis here
on how the aesthetics of The Lonely Londoners speak to the novel's orientation toward a
double audience, I limit my application of these ideas solely to the purely narrative
passages of Selvon's noveL My hope is that borrowing these notions of Bakhtin will
permit a more structured analysis ofthe relationship and interaction between those
languages than might otherwise be possible.
The first notion is "double-voiced discourse." While in readings ofheteroglot
narratives entire novels could be argued to be in double-voiced discourse, the kind of
double-voiced discourse of interest here is what Bakhtin specifically describes as a
"special type of double-voiced discourse," namely speech that "serves two speakers at the
same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions," those of the author or
narrator and those of a character (Bakhtin and Holquist 324).
30
The second notion is "hybridization." In post-colonial studies, "hybridization," or
at least its usage, has evolved into a dense sprawl, with Homi Bhabha's invocation of "the
Third Space of enunciation" (Bhabha 37) marking what may ultimately prove to be the
highest point. In this chapter, hybridization refers solely to dynamic's occurrence on the
level of form. In "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin offers three deliberately/agonizingly
permeable headings through which we can understand the different means of creating an
image of language in a novel: "1) hybridization, 2) the dialogized interrelation of
languages, and 3) pure dialogues." While the last two are treated broadly, hybridization
he defines specifically, as "a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single
utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another
by an epoch, by social differentiation or some other factor" (Bakhtin and Holquist 358).
However a close reading of Discourse in the Novel reveals that the difference between
this definition and Bakhtin's notion of "the dialogized interrelation of languages" is not
always so clear. Partly as a result, my use of hybridization to describe one important part
of the aesthetics of The Lonely Londoners includes a sense of both headings.
Simon Dentith and Sue Vice are among the many Baktinians who have noted that
a chief difficulty of studying the theorist is that his use of important ideas often shifts
according to context. A further complication is how certain of his concepts also tend to
overlap (although whether that is due to Baktin or the complexities of "the novel" is open
to debate). While double-voiced discourse and hybridization are not entirely discrete
ideas, the distinctions between them are vital here. Because I am limiting the application
of these ideas to the novel's narrative passages, the most important difference is while
31
both can often occur on the level of narration, double-voiced discourse is more aligned
with focalization; one could say that double-voiced discourse, at least this "special type
of double-voiced discourse," refers to focalization as it is expressed on the page. While
both double-voiced discourse and hybridization can describe moments in narration where
more than one language is present and there is a dialogic relationship between them,
hybridization emphasizes not focalization but rather the broader matter of how the
languages in the narrative voice interrelate. Ultimately, that distinction is vital to my
account of Selvon's novel, since I assert that The Lonely Londoners tends, in its narrative
passages, to veer away from focalization and double-voiced discourse, and that most of
the back-and-forth between registers in those passages instead are examples of
hybridization.
Also vital to analyses of the unusual perspective of The Lonely Londoners is
arriving at a specific, suitable approach to the novel's idiosyncratic narrator. The purpose
ofthis would be to help check the "habeas corpus" hunt for a stable, easily identifiable
narrating subject that, historically speaking, tends to busy critical analyses of Selvon's
novel.
Sometimes, as in Ramchand's deeply influential "Song ofInnocence, Song of
Experience: Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners as a Literary Work," Selvon's free-
ranging, third-person omniscient narrator, "the voice [that] becomes a person" ("Song of
Innocence" 228), is linked most strongly to Moses Aloetta, the book's protagonist whose
name indicates his role as the man who helps new emigrants acclimate to life in the
"promised land" of London. For that approach, "It is [... ] in the relationship between
32
Moses the central character and this narrating person, their gradual coming together as
the book progresses, that the theme of The Lonely Londoners is elaborated" ("Song of
Innocence" 229). At other times, as in Roydon Salick's treatment of the novel, its
narrator is envisioned as a stand-in for either Selvon or Moses, ordinarily to facilitate a
particular point that the critic is trying to make (Salick 124-25). Another propensity,
exemplified in Fabre's early work on The Lonely Londoners, is to imagine its narrator as
a Calypsonian with one voice and two dialects ("From Trinidad to London" 215-19).6
Margaret Paul Joseph's treatment of the novel in Caliban in Exile also demonstrates the
possibilities (and limitations) of reading the narrator of The Londy Londoners as a
Calypsonian (88-93).
Each of these approaches can be productive to or even found an interpretation or
understanding the narrator of The Lonely Londoners. But considering heteroglossia as
the fundamental means through which to determine the stylistics of a novel, the
oscillation between linguistic registers evident in the novel's purely narrative passages,
and Bakhtin's declaration that the speech ofthe narrator constitutes one of the
"fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel"
(Bakhtin and Holquist 263), perhaps the most efficient way into the aesthetic strategy of
The Lonely Londoners might be to read in between these approaches. That is, it might do
well to think of the novel's narrator not as one stable body but instead as an ever-
changing body, one whose instability is foundational to the novel. Another way to work
through this would be to treat the narrator less in terms of a speaker whose body needs to
be identified, and more in terms of its speech. And since the speech of this narrator
33
features registers that differ so dramatically during passages of narration, we can push
this notion further, and conceive of this narrator in terms of a position, one at times
occupied by the speech of the author, who sometimes speaks in standard English out of
concern with the novel's intelligibility to the British reader. But the majority of the time
that position is instead occupied by the speech of the emigrant characters, who mostly
speak collectively, and always in Selvon's "Trinidadian" dialect.
When close-reading The Lonely Londoners, it can be less productive to think of
the narrative as coming from a stable, identifiable body than it is to conceive of it as
originating from a position. This notion is important because it lends itself to an
understanding of the back-and-forth between registers in the novel's narrative passages as
an expression ofthe dialogic and dialectical relationship between social
heteroglossia-which The Lonely Londoners argues is diversifying-and standard
literary English, which Bakhtin (and others) term a "unitary language." There is a
relationship between the aesthetics of The Lonely Londoners and the wave of West Indian
emigration to Great Britain cresting during the novel's composition and publication. And
while I do not suggest that The Lonely Londoners is a simple or precise "mirror" of its
social context, I do assert that the novel's aesthetics were in part determined by that
context, in ways both within and without Selvon's conscious control.
Assessing the unusual perspective of The Lonely Londoners also calls for a
practical, replicable method of distinguishing between the two registers in the novel's
passages of pure narration. The "Creoles and the Classroom in Britain" chapter in
linguist Loreto Todd's Modern Englishes: Pidgins and Creoles offers a solution. Todd's
34
book includes assessments of a host of pidgins and creoles, but that particular chapter
features an extensive account of the differences between "WIEB," or "West Indian
English as spoken in Britain," and "SE," or "standard English" (219-29). According to
Todd:
At the level of the sentence, there are eight main ways in which even
acrolectal WIEB differs from SE. [....] [In WIEB], questions are
distinguished from statements mainly by intonation [....] Double and
multiple negatives are common [....] There are [also] marked differences
between equative sentences in SE and WIEB. The 'be' verb is not required
in the latter [...] [n]or is 'be' required before an adjective complement [in
WIEB] [ ] Serial verbs are more common in WIEB than in other British
varieties [ ] Often [...] there is no concordial agreement between subject
and verb [ ] There is [also, in WIEB] a marked tendency to use few or
no transformations in the construction of complex sentences [....]
Foregrounding of the verb occurs for emphasis [....] WIEB [also] avoids
passive structures, although it can express passive meanings. (224-26)
Todd then breaks down the syntactical differences between WIEB and SE even further.
First, he points out the differences per noun phrase:
As far as the Noun Phrase is concerned [....] there is a strong tendency in
WIEB to overgeneralise the use ofthe unmarked noun [....] WIEB [also]
uses two methods of indicating possession, both of them different from SE
[....] WIEB has a smaller set of pronouns than SE and, often, especially in
35
colloquial speech, no distinction is made between subject, object and
possessive pronouns. (226-28)
Finally, Todd also clearly outlines the differences between WIEB and SE according to
their construction and usage of verb phrase:
The WIEB Verb Phrase differs in three main ways from itsSE
counterpart. There is a tendency to use the unmarked verb form to express
the past. This is particularly true of dynamic verbs [ ] Speakers of
WIEB often use da/di/a to mark continuous actions [ ] As in colloquial
English, adjective forms often occur in adverb slots. (228-29)
Although Modern Englishes also examines a number of the Caribbean's twenty-
eight different Creole Englishes (including Trinidad's) the focus in The Lonely Londoners
on the Caribbean emigrant to Britain makes Todd's analysis of the differences between
WIEB and standard English most pertinent. Selvon's own claims that he selected the
Trinidadian dialect in part because he thought it homogenous enough for a novel
emphasizing the connections among emigrant characters who come from many different
islands (Fabre "Interviews and Conversations" 67) highlights the usefulness of Todd's
account of the syntactical differences between WIEB and standard English.
There is a brief exchange one third through The Lonely Londoners, in the first few
pages of the Captain/"Cap" ballad, that illustrates how this novel destabilizes the reader's
sense of who is speaking, and when. By the novel's opening, Moses is already an
established emigrant, a "veteran" who has his own rented apartment and is wise enough
in the ways of London for his fellows to see him as a source of direction. Any narrative
36
accounts of his own adjustments to London are in flashback. One of these recounts his
arrival in London and initial residence at a hostel.
At that hostel, Moses meets "Cap," a Nigerian who came to London to study law
but instead blew the money that his family gave him on "woman and cigarette." Cap is
the novel's most womanizing, constantly broke, and peripatetic character; the narrator
ends its lengthy account of Cap's exploits with the first two sentences of this passage:
Week after week, as landlord and landlady catch up with him, the
Captain moving, the wandering Nigerian, man of mystery. Nobody could
contact Cap, is only by chance you bouncing him up here and there about
London.
"Where you living now Cap?"
A kind of baby smile and "Victoria." (51)
Notice immediately after those two sentences appears a half-attributed exchange,
with quotation marks around both question and answer isolating them from the voice of
the narrator. But the interrogative's lack of attribution, as well as the absence of clues in
the surrounding material, make it impossible to locate who Cap is responding to. In fact,
outside of the amount of specific detail in Cap's ballad (which suggests but does not
definitively indicate that Moses is not the point of view through which the ballad is being
recounted), the only clues we get as to who asks that question are the quotation marks
and the language in which the question is asked.
This moment of deliberate ambiguity in dialogue is especially suggestive because
it is so easy to spot. But similarly tricky moments abound in the novel's narrative
37
passages, where it can be much tougher to pick them out. And we can see this most
efficiently by going backward, to the beginning of the novel, and reviewing its opening
section.
When The Lonely Londoners opens, Moses is headed to Waterloo harbor to fulfill
a request from a friend to greet Henry Oliver, a new emigrant who Moses has never met
and who soon picks up the moniker of Sir Galahad. The novel's first paragraph is a
passage of pure narration that introduces that back-and-forth between registers. Here is
that paragraph, with "SE" for "standard English" and "WIEB" for "West Indian English
spoken in Britain," following the phrases and clauses to which those terms best apply:
One grim winter evening [SE], when it had a kind of unrealness [WIEB]
about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights
showing in the blur as if [SE] is not London at all but [WIEB] some
strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta [SE] hop on a number 46
bus at the comer of Chepstow Road and Westboume Grove to go to
Waterloo to meet a fellar [WIEB] who was coming from Trinidad on the
boat-train [SE]. (23)
While this passage introduces us to the novel's inclusion of dual registers in the
narrative voice, it is no simple task determining whether this is an example of double-
voiced discourse (i.e., Bakhtin's "special type of double-voiced discourse") or
hybridization. This is also the case a few pages later, where occurs yet another instance
of this back-and-forth between registers, although this time matters are considerably more
complex than before.
38
While waiting for Galahad to alight the "boat-train," Moses meets Tolroy, an
established emigrant from Jamaica, who is waiting for his mother to arrive from "back
home" and is shocked when she does so with many family members in tow. The
following sentence narrates Tolroy's reaction:
Tolroy pull all the family out of the way, and they stand up there arguing,
for Tolroy ain't catch himself yet, he can't realise that all these people on
his hands, in London [WIEB], in the grim winter [SE], and no place to go
stay [WIEB]. (30)
Shortly afterward, the British reporter who had been interviewing Moses decides
to interview Tolroy's newly arrived family instead. This sentence narrates that reporter's
decision, and note the absence here of any marks indicating a switch between registers:
The reporter fellar see this small crowd and he figure that it look like a
family and he might get a good story from them why so much Jamaican
coming to London, so he went up to Tanty and say: "Excuse me, lady, I'm
from the Echo. Is this your first trip to England?" (30)
It is clear that here the narrator has temporarily aligned itself with the reporter.
Yet the sentence remains WIEB throughout, up to the point that the reporter actually
speaks-no focalization, no double-voiced discourse occurs in the sentence's purely
narrative part (and this is the case whenever the narrator aligns itself with a non-emigrant
character). So if the narrator is like a position at times occupied by the speech of the
author, who tends toward standard English, but that is most often occupied by the speech
of the novel's emigrant characters, who often speak collectively and in WIEB, then this
39
sentence is attributable to those emigrant characters-it is their point of view or vantage
operant here. This means that the reporter's thoughts are being filtered through the
novel's emigrant characters, a deliberate reversal of his attempt to filter, for his British
readers, the thoughts and experiences of those emigrants to produce a news story that, in
the end, bears little resemblance to their lived experience. Such are the complex and
ambivalent ways that those two registers interrelate in the narrative passages of this short
novel.
At the point that Galahad finally disembarks and for the first time makes contact
with British soil, the back-and-forth between registers has made it difficult to align the
novel's narrator chiefly with Moses. Because by then this back-and-forth has occurred in
narrative passages where the narrator aligns itself with other emigrant characters as well.
But in the novel's first few pages it also clear that the narrator's base register is WIEB
(and this is the main reason that the phrases, clauses, and stretches of standard English
stick out so vividly). Given that the novel's characters are almost all Caribbean
emigrants, and that the register does not oscillate or shift from WIEB to standard English
when British characters are featured, that back-and-forth between registers in the novel's
passages of pure narration is then better described as mostly evidence of not double-
voiced discourse, but hybridization.
Furthermore, in light of reexportation as a phenomenon and Selvon's own struggle
with "the West Indian problem of audience," the main rationale for these instances of
hybridization appears to be to facilitate the novel's British reader's ability to identify with
the Caribbean emigrant characters who populate the novel. In an interview Selvon held
40
with Fabre, after an exchange concerning how Selvon modified aspects of The Lonely
Londoners on the behalf of his British reader, Fabre asks whether Selvon "wanted the
British reader to identify with Caribbean characters," to which Selvon answers, simply,
"yes." These moments of hybridization in The Lonely Londoners signify when the text
most clearly asks its British reader to identify with the novel's emigrant characters, and
most particularly with the way that they feel. And Selvon's account of his difficulties
initially drafting the novel, and his haste finishing it after changing compositional
strategies (his own estimate was six months), suggest that although Se1von always
displayed intense command of craft, this may have been one aspect of the aesthetics of
novel that was well beyond the author's conscious control.
The earliest example of this kind of hybridization occurs seven pages into The
Lonely Londoners, where Galahad, who has now moved in with Moses and spent a single
night in London, decides to strike out and explore the city on his own. Of course Moses
lets him make the error and learn from it. This passage narrates what Galahad
experiences in the moments after leaving the flat:
On top of that, is [WIEB] one of those winter mornings when a kind of fog
[SE] hovering around. The sun shining, but Galahad never see the sun
look like how it looking now [WIEB]. No heat from it [SE], it just there
in the sky like a force-ripe orange. When he look up [WIEB], the colour
of the sky [SE] so desolate it make him more frighten. It have a kind of
[WIEB] melancholy aspect about the morning [SE] that making him
shiver. He have a feeling is about seven o'clock in the evening: when he
41
look at a clock on top a building he see is only half-past ten in the morning
[WIEB]. (42)
Note that when the narrator aligns itself with Galahad, the back-and-forth between
registers intensifies, and it tends to correspond with what Galahad isfeeling.
Occurring just a few pages later is another example that provides an even stronger
sense of how hybridization in the novel's narration can signal moments when the British
reader's identification with the emotional consciousness of the emigrants is most at issue.
This passage narrates some of the early experiences Moses had in the city:
When Moses did arrive fresh in London, he look around [WIEB] for a
place where he wouldn't have to spend much money, where he could get
[SE] plenty food [WIEB], and where he could meet the boys [SE] and
coast a old talk [WIEB] to pass the time away [SE]-for this city
powerfully lonely when you on your own [WIEB]. (47)
A similar kind of sentence appears slightly further down the very same page. There,
although what is being described is the hostel where Moses first stayed, most central are
the poignant feelings of the "fellars" living in the hostel:
This place had some genuine fellars who really studying profession, but it
also had fellars who was only marking time [WIEB] and waiting to see
what tomorrow would bring [SE]. (47)
This pattern of an intensifYing back-and-forth between registers when the
emotional consciousness of the emigrant characters are central continues in a refracted
manner a few pages later. There, with the following two sentences, begins a
42
kaleidoscopic three-page passage of pure narration that mostly concerns and describes
"the working class," with which the novel's emigrant characters are clearly considered
aligned:
The place where Tolroy and the family living was off the Harrow Road,
and the people in that area call the Working Class. Wherever in London
that it have Working Class [WIEB], there you will find a lot of spades.
This is the real world, where men know what it is to hustle a pound to pay
the rent [SE] when Friday come [WIEB]. (73)
A great deal of that back-and-forth between those two linguistic registers occurs
in this section, all of it signifying neither focalization nor double-voiced discourse, but
rather hybridization. There is a relationship between this section, which uses
hybridization to draw connections between the struggles of the white British working
class and the novel's emigrants, and the hybridization in those sections where the British
reader's identification with how the emigrants characters feel is most at issue. Because
both are about making connections, about ensuring that the British reader understands
that the novel's emigrant population, and the region that they represent, are worth more
than touristic consideration. Hence in those instances, The Lonely Londoners argues, to
its British reader, for the validity of the novel's subject matter.
Roughly twenty-three pages after that "working-class" section of the novel occurs
another suggestive example of hybridization, the first instance of it in terms of summer,
which in this book has about the same pregnant significance that bodies of water often
hold in film noir. Again this back-and-forth between registers, and how it intensifies
43
here, appears strongly connected to an overall strategy of bringing the emotional
consciousness of the emigrant characters to the British reader:
On any Sunday in the summer, in the sweet, lazy summer [SE] when them
days like they would never done, when all the fog and snow gone, and
night stay long to come [WIEB], when you could put on a hot jitterbug
shirt [SE] and wear a light sharkskin pants, when them white girls have on
[WIEB] summer frocks and you could see legs and shapes that used to
hide under winter coats [SE], when the sun shining and the sky blue and a
warm wind blowing across the park [WlEB], on any such Sunday evening
[SE], all the boys dressing up and coasting lime by the Arch, listening to
all them reprobates and soapbox politicians [WIEB], looking around to see
if they could pick up something in the crowd [SE]. (98)
Thirteen pages later, we encounter Harris, the emigrant character whose job in
London is to organize parties and dances. Although Harris's name appears on the second
page of the novel, where he is briefly described as a friend of Moses, this late stage in the
narrative provides our first real sense of Harris as a character. His tendency to speak the
Queen's English, combined with his inability to maintain the affectation in periods of
stress, serves as the one of the novel's most vivid examples of the possibilities and
improbabilities of assimilation. Harris thus anticipates the seemingly sharp turn in
character development that Moses experiences between this novel and the second in the
"Moses trilogy," Moses Ascending.
The narrator's introduction of Harris explicitly mentions his tendency to switch
44
between linguistic registers. But that tendency is actually performed for the first time
some eleven pages later. There Harris loses his patience with the behavior of "the boys"
(mostly Big City and Five Past Midnight) at a party that Harris is throwing where there
are a few white British folks whom Harris wishes to impress. At that moment, Harris
slips quickly out of the Queen's English and into WIEB.
But more pertinent to my argument is how the shifts that occur in Harris's
language anticipate or parallel when the same occur in the voice of the novel's narrator.
Note, for instance, how Harris at his own party serves the British guests as cultural
translator; it is clear that at this particular fete where the emigrants are the majority in
attendance, the British are tourists in their own country, and Harris is their guide. There
is also the more general point that Harris usually speaks to his fellow emigrants in the
Queen's English. The connection between this and the back-and-forth between registers
in the novel's narrative passages is evident when one considers how strange it is that the
third-person omniscient narrator of a novel whose concern is the Anglophone Caribbean
(and which is more ofthan it is about the region, and more ofthan it is about its
emigrants) would ever be expected to speak solely in standard English.
While reexportation in many ways grounds my argument, I should note how it
actually assists with a Bakhtian formalist approach to Selvon's novel. First, the inclusion
of reexportation here is meant to suggest that when unpacking the aesthetics of certain
Anglophone Caribbean novels, it sometimes helps to read them from a position in
between Bakhtinian formalism and Marxism (though not the Soviet version which
Bakhtinian formalism most squarely opposes). While that may seem too bold, Ken
45
Hirschkop's observation that Bakhtin's own argument concerning heteroglossia relies on
philosophy and empirical cultural analysis, two methodologies that are in conflict,
indicates the room available to that kind of reading.
In "Baktin in African American Literary Theory," Dorothy Hale identifies an
issue attendant to the widening use of Bakhtin's ideas and theories, particularly "the move
to make Du Boisian 'double consciousness' synonymous with Bakhtinian 'double voice.'"
Hale criticizes the"attempt to theorize social identity by way of literary formalism-a
procedure" she terms "social formalism."
In this analysis of The Lonely Londoners, pairing reexportation with Bakhtinian
formalism helps avoid analogous charges of "social formalism." Because while
reexportation alone indicates the need to foreground the problem of audience when
dealing with Anglophone Caribbean stories and novels, pairing it with Bakhtin illustrates
how the social formulations and relations that reexportation describes are inscribed-that
they might be refracted in or through novelistic discourse, instead of the other way
around.
Reexportation matters, in a palpable way, to the aesthetics of The Lonely
Londoners. That novel's aesthetics signifY its double audience. But the tenets of cultural
imperialism indicate that while Selvon's Caribbean audience would have little trouble
with the novel's narration, his British readership would have a difficult time parsing those
purely narrative stretches in the less-familiar register. Yet while the former suggests a
primarily Caribbean readership, the latter, understood with the observation that
hybridization in this novel's narration occurs most often when at issue is the British
46
reader's identification with thefeelings of the novel's emigrant characters, illustrates the
ways that the aesthetics of the novel manages and attenuates the attentions of its British
reader, and argues to England for the validity of its subjects/subject matter.
I close with yet another, perhaps simpler way ofthinking through this problem, by
unpacking then abstracting the phrase "colonization in reverse." Perhaps best recognized
as the title of the 1966 Louise Bennet poem whose topic is emigration from Jamaica to
England, "colonization in reverse" is also descriptive enough of The Lonely Londoners
that the phrase arises frequently in analyses and reviews of the novel. If the narrator of
The Lonely Londoners is conceived of not as a body but as a position, then the oscillation
between languages in the novel's narrative passages might be understood as a sort of
"colonizing in reverse" of the third-person narrative position ofthe Anglophone
Caribbean novel written with a British readership, or a British and Caribbean readership,
in mind.
Endnotes
11 Noting the May 1994 review of the re-issue ofAn Island is a World that appeared in
Books in Canada, Clarke argues that tIthe neglect [Selvon] suffered at the hands of the
literary establishments of two continents, ended the same week he died" (Clarke 140).
2 Paquet, in "Samuel Dickson Selvon," states that "[Selvon's] mother was half-Indian and
half-Scottish." Barratt, in "Sam Selvon," corroborates Paquet's assessment ofSelvon's
ethnic and racial heritage. And both appear to have gotten their assessment from Selvon
himself, who at some point between 1977 and 1978 stated in an interview with Michel
Fabre that his father was Indian while his mother was half-Indian, half-Scottish. But
while the error appears to be Looker's, the problem is really less the error itself than how
it is compounded. Pages 5-6 of Looker's introduction features an analysis that
emphasizes the importance of the ethnic and racial plurality ofthe island and region of
Selvon's origin, yet that analysis does not take into holistic consideration Selvon's own
racial and ethnic plurality.
47
3 Worth noting is how the notion of a "double audience" runs counter to some writers and
critics of West Indian literature, some of whose sentiments are well summarized by Joyce
Jonas's assertion, in Anancy and the Great House: Ways ofReading West Indian Fiction,
that, "The intended readership of West Indian fiction is primarily the West Indian
himself' (8-9).
4 An earlier essay ofWyke's, essentially his presentation at a 1981 meeting of the
Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, argues that
decreolization "had a perceivable influence on Selvon's artistic handling of such fictional
elements as thematic vision, point of view and prose style" and cites the oscillation
between linguistic registers in The Lonely Londoners as an important example
("Evolution of Language" 109).
5 See Minabere Ibelema's "Perspectives on Mass Communication and Cultural
Domination" for an extended discussion of the complex relationship between colonial
domination and cultural imperialism. There Ibelema surveys the different currently
prevalent perspectives on cultural domination, observing that they are separable into three
"strains": the programmatic strain, the structural strain, and the synchronizational strain.
Though Ibelema never explicitly mentions this, it is worth noting that reexportation as a
concept best belongs to the structural strain; it is best described as a structural perspective
on cultural domination.
6 Worth noting, however, is that at some point between 1979 and 1995, Fabre appears to
have abandoned this approach significantly. His "Samuel Selvon" entry for King's West
Indian Literature (1995) anthology is very similar to 1979's "From Trinidad to London,"
except that absence of any attempt to read the narrator of The Lonely Londoners as a
Calypsonian.
48
CHAPTER III
WHITENESS, STRATEGIC OMISSION, AND A CONTRAPUNTAL READING
OF PERRY HENZELL'S THE HARDER THEY COME
Released in Jamaican theaters in 1972, a decade after the island gained full
independence within the British Commonwealth, The Harder They Come is a low-
budget, locally cast film based loosely on the life ofIvanhoe "Rhygin" Martin, a violent
I 950s-era Jamaican gunman turned folk hero. l Directed, produced, and co-written by
Jamaican native Perry Henzell, the movie starred reggae icon Jimmy Cliff, was set
mostly in the ghettoes/intentionally shunned the well-known resorts of Jamaica, and was
the first chance for the majority of Jamaicans2 to see characters like themselves onscreen
in central or starring roles. Stateside critics commonly attribute the film's international
success to the combination of a storyline whose main theme is rebellion and a soundtrack
that provided mainstream America with its first taste of reggae, the musical descendant of
ska and rock steady, respectively.3 For a host of reasons that arguably include the island's
presentation of itself to the outside world, particularly foreign investors,4 Jamaica, third
largest island (after Cuba and Hispaniola) in a dappled and polyphonic region, continues
to serve in the American popular imagination as a synecdoche for the Caribbean.5
Viewed in light of the film's lasting status as cultural touchstone for a generation of
Americans,6 this suggests that more than thirty years after its original, domestic release,
49
The Harder They Come remains an open door into the complicated, sometimes
convoluted relationship between Caribbean cultural products and the American reception
and use of them.
The film's dependence upon reggae is one ofa number of thematic elements
suggesting rebellion and an attempt at an "authentic" representation of Jamaica in The
Harder They Come. Reggae itself is shot through with rebellion, or resistance. In The
Rastafarians: The Dreadlocks ofJamaica, Leonard Barrett defines reggae as "a cultic
expression that is both entertaining, revolutionary, and filled with Rastafarian
symbolism"(x); it is the music of Jamaicans who have "rejected most of what is
considered Jamaican, even to the point of spurning Jamaican nationality"(xiii). The
nationalistic fervor that seized the island around 1962, the year it achieved full
independence within the Commonwealth, in part catalyzed the reactionary development
ofthe sect's musical form, which ironically reworked Jamaica's own version of Caribbean
resistance. Here I invoke "resistance" specifically according to Selwyn Cudjoe's use of
the term and his classification of its different types in Resistance and Caribbean
Literature.? Cudjoe identifies three categories ofresistance--cultural, socioeconomic, and
political--all of which are evident in The Harder They Come. Reggae itself is an ironic
form of cultural resistance; the film follows a character whose actions occasionally
qualifY as socioeconomic resistance and always as political resistance. If as Cudjoe,
Meeks, and others8 argue resistance is central to the historical and cultural development
of the Caribbean as a region (and, by extension, Jamaica as a country), then the
placement and expression of this type of story within and through this particular musical
50
context, understood in conjunction with the decision to use local people and almost no
professional actors in The Harder They Come, would seem to intimate an effort at an
"authentically" Caribbean motion picture, while supporting the idea that resistance itself
is perhaps the primary mark of the "authentically" Caribbean.
Yet there are elements of The Harder They Come that suggest the film may be
about but not necessarily of, or even for, Jamaica. That is, there are moments in the film
when it seems less ofthose it displays and more for those who would seek or desire a
feature-length snapshot of, but not necessarily pungent insight into, the laborious
struggles of a recently decolonized people. In short, while trafficking in images and
sounds of "Jamaica" that, through the film's success, came to comprise or at least inflect a
common perception ofthe country (and, by extension, the region), The Harder They
Come lays flat beneath the pressure ofthe essentialism Stephen Slemon9 and Jenny
Sharpe lO (among others) warn is the inevitable conclusion of the false binary basic to the
notion of "resistance" as a cultural marker of a colonized people.
Whatever the film's theoretical or critical difficulties, they do not belie that
Henzell as a Jamaican was aware that the lives of ordinary, poor, black Jamaicans had yet
to be made central onscreen. In an interview conducted for the commentary track of the
2000 Criterion DVD edition of The Harder They Come, Henzell describes the mixture of
release and delight he witnessed the night of the film's domestic premiere, at Jamaica's
1,SOO-seat Carib Theater:
There is no thrill in movie-dom like people seeing
themselves on the screen for the first time. Jamaicans had
51
never ever seen themselves on the screen, their lives
represented on the screen. The first time that it happens, it
produces this unbelievable audience reaction, like nothing
else ever could. You'd have to imagine that an American
had seen nothing but [... ] European movies, and had never
seen themselves on the screen for the first time. They'd go
mad, you know? (Henzell)
Clearly Henzell understood that his Jamaican audience yearned to see themselves
at the center of a major motion picture. My claim that The Harder They Come is more
about than it is ofor for Jamaica is not meant to slight Henzell's ability as a Jamaican or a
filmmaker to provide in his film artfully hewn avenues through which ordinary black
Jamaicans could identify with the events and characters displayed onscreen. The film,
after all; begins with an old bus careering down a coastal road, past blighted palm trees,
bound from country to Kingston. Halfway through the opening credits, the bus stops
hard on a bridge and nearly collides with a truck, a scenario that Henzell states, in the
Criterion interview, that he realized would be familiar to the capacity crowd at the Carib
Theater on opening night. In fact, he identifies this scene, which might be termed the
film's first instance of suture, as the moment the audience "relaxed" for the film and
started to "just enjoy it." "They just started screaming," he recounts. "And I never, tell
you the truth, heard another word of dialogue that night"(Henzell).
Yet when Henzell's nationality and familiarity with the ways and means of the
film's subject matter is put aside, it remains problematic, and perhaps even seductively
52
easy in light of even the colonial version of Jamaican history, to read the filmmaker's
determination to foreground the lives and bodies of black Jamaicans as chiefly
responsible for the nearly complete absence of whites from the diegesis of The Harder
They Come. It is also difficult in this film to interpret that absence separately from either
the presence of artifacts of the Metropole that suggest dominance without ascribing it or
those disruptive formal elements that in this motion picture tend to make objects of what
Henzell claims is his subject matter.
In this chapter, I argue that The Harder They Come is a complex, ambivalent text,
one that demands but does not usually receive what Edward Said once described as a
contrapuntal reading. II Such a reading would begin with the notion that the film itself
may be a colonial, not a postcolonial, text. Because despite the film's "authenticating"
trappings and "surface realness," The Harder They Come often supplies little more than
an objectifying glimpse of the people who were then (and remain today) the human
interior of Jamaica. In this sense, the film's "authentic" snapshot of Jamaica is not too
dissimilar to an "authentic" colonial guide to the "insides" of a postcolonial state--a guide
that surveys effects but not causes precisely because that is the pattern of observation best
suited to the interests of the imagined reader. The result is a motion picture that, given
the heightened attention paid in the Caribbean to Caribbean cultural product once it has
achieved international renown, quite possibly owes much of its stateside and lasting
domestic success to the film's strategy of holding only part of the interior of Jamaica--
effects but not their causes, the debilitating poverty of ordinary black Jamaicans but not
the reasons founding that poverty--up for cinematic display. So while the film permitted
53
a "positive" viewing experience for its black Jamaican audience, it also allowed a
"positive" viewing experience for its predominantly white international audience by
literally omitting them from the text and obscuring the roles of race, international
relations, and foreign economic policy in determining the course of Jamaica's modern
history, while situating the film's gaze so it clearly originates from a hidden position far
outside its subject matter. To express the problem in terms of cultural studies, a field
particularly useful here since it gracefully facilitates the alignment of the close reading of
a film specialist with the reception of a mass audience, while certain aesthetic elements of
the film permitted its poor, black Jamaican audience negotiated readings ofthe text,
aspects of the film's formal approach read contrapuntally, in conjunction with the
strategic omission of whites in the film's diegesis, reveal how The Harder They Corne
also promoted dominant readings by audiences outside Jamaica, particularly primarily
white audiences in Britain and the United States. This chapter will first attempt to
establish the non-inclusion of whites in this film as a strategic omission before moving on
to a close, formal analysis of two sequences selected because while both clearly indicate
and exemplify the origin and direction of the film's gaze, the very different ways in which
the two re-present the film's subject matter illustrate the ambivalence and complexity that
I argue form the heart of The Harder They Corne.
Although The Harder They Corne has historically garnered almost unanimous
praise,12 shades of my concern have appeared in both the popular press and scholarly
journals, starting shortly after the film's international debut. The July 14th, 1974 edition
of The New York Times includes Vincent Canby's "Those Films Which Refuse to Fade
54
Away," which surveys films (namely, Harold and Maude, A Thousand Clowns, King of
Hearts, and The Harder They Come) whose cult followings had led to prolonged or
second or third runs at theaters, despite those films sometimes having flopped badly
during an initial run. The following appears near the end of Canby's glowingly positive
recapitulation of Henzell's feature:
Although The Harder They Come takes place almost
entirely in the Jamaican's Jamaica (there is only one short
scene involving a resort hotel), and although it is very
careful not to portray whites as the oppressors (we see only
blacks ripping off blacks), it is a more revolutionary black
film than any number of American efforts, including Sweet
Sweetback's Baadassss Song. (235)
Published in a 1975 edition ofJump Cut, Julianne Burton's "The Harder They
Come: Cultural Colonialism and the American Dream" provides a largely positive
overview of the film, avowing that its criticism of postcolonial Jamaica lies in its
depiction of "Ivan's separation from traditional life" and his community, as well as the
role of American and European artifacts in his progression toward violence and
materialism(5). Burton's point is a great one; it is quite possible to read the billboards,
brands, and pricey objects that sometimes people the screen as signs and symbols of
capitalist imperialism, particularly when those signs and symbols are held against a chart
ofIvan's trajectory. Yet in her first footnote Burton is careful to point out that her
55
reading of the film is predicated upon Henzell's ability to speak or stand in for his subject
matter:
The history of the filming, the intentions and background of
the filmmakers, the sources of financial backing, the social
contexts within which the film has been viewed and the
audience response to it are all questions directly related to
my interpretation of the film. Such information is,
however, extremely difficult to find and may, in the short
run, tend to substantiate a much more pessimistic and
negative view of the film's content. Perry Henzell is after
all a son of Jamaica's white ruling class, though he
perceives himself as much more closely tied to the
marginal milieu portrayed in the film. (7)
Published two years earlier, Ernest Callenbach's brief review of the film, in the
"Short Notice" section of Film Quarterly, begins with an examination of how the motion
picture brings to the forefront "the black Caribbean, which has previously only figured as
a passive backdrop in James Bond pictures." Callenbach then matches attendant aspects
of The Harder They Come to a summary of the "post"-colonial state of the region, a
summary organized around the claim that Jamaica, "being a large island and more
directly in touch with American black culture"(Callenbach 59), can serve as a model for
the effects upon the region of both the replacement ofone monoculture (sugar) with
another (tourism) as well as the electronic importation (radio, television, etc.) of
56
American culture--especially the elements of American culture most closely
representative of the tenets of capitalism. 13 This passage appears near the end ofthe
reVIew:
Because [The Harder They Come's] style is ordinary
opaque naturalism [...] the film can hide behind its surface
realness: the shanty towns, the lovely West Indian dialect
[....] But it thus conceals the deeper realities of Jamaican
life: economic control by foreign white corporations and
managers, a classically neo-colonial pattern of extractive
industries. Perhaps as a consequence, it speaks
dramatically in terms that are fatalistic, romantic, and
defeatist. (Callenbach 60)
A valid critique of this review is Callenbach offers little specific support for his assertion
that the film is either short- or near-sighted in failing to include a narrative-based
indictment of the effects of colonialism upon the region. But this may be due to said
support being perhaps not too terribly difficult for the viewer to find. The Harder They
Come features not a single white major or minor character; the only whites in the diegesis
proper are the odd decorative tourists, who together populate conspicuously few frames. 14
The whites who last longest onscreen are notably (or perhaps ironically) filtered through
the medium of film itself--namely, the actors in Django, the "Spaghetti Western" playing
in the theater Ivan visits shortly after arriving in Kingston. Even more striking, despite
the then-recent independence of Jamaica and the effects of a renewed emphasis on
57
tourism, "which brings in its train the identical social dislocations ofthe old plantation
system"(59), not one conversation in this film--and for all its action, this is a dialogue-
rich film--is specifically of or directly concerns whites. Visually, aurally, ideologically:
Whites but not white artifacts, whiteness but not its signs, are strategically omitted from
The Harder They Come. In fact, the most significant references in this film to race or
colorist attitudes come through two characters: the lighter-skinned woman (played by
Beverly Manley, whose husband, Michael, became Prime Minister of Jamaica at roughly
the same time that the film opened domestically) who shoos Ivan from her upscale house
while he is wandering Kingston, penniless and hungry; and Hilton, the record producer of
light complexion who ultimately profits the most from Ivan's crime spree. But both are,
again, effects not causes; both suggest that skin color is a factor in Ivan's social mobility,
but neither indicates how skin color, in this particular (and particularly Jamaican)
situation, came to be such a determining factor. According to The Harder They Come,
which, with its "timeless beauty [...], early, powerful reggae score and grainy, flawed
authenticity, captures a snapshot of a moment in Jamaica's history"(Meeks 83), whiteness
has not and does not attenuate power and capital in Jamaican society, meaning that it is
irrelevant to the violence and penury represented onscreen. Such is the supportive
material that the film freely provides for Callenbach's assessment, as well as for my own.
That same evidence supports Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez's "Reggae, Ganja,
and Black Bodies: Power, Meaning, and the Markings of Postcolonial Jamaica in Perry
Henzell's The Harder They Come." Appearing in a 2002 volume of The Review of
Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Gaztambide-Fernandez's analysis establishes
58
the grounds on which the film could be called "subversive" (i.e., the white director who
describes the island's "white wealthy dominant class" as a "'pompous elite' who are
"restricted by their wealth,' [yet] it is only through his membership in this social class that
he gains access to the resources necessary to make this film, a medium that is in turn only
available to him through access to a British education"), before providing the following
assessment of Fernandez's main assertion:
"The narratives that constitute this supposedly subversive
representation of Jamaican society falls short of becoming
what [Pierre] Bourdieu describes as 'heretical subversion.'
Instead, I will argue that each of these narratives
contributes to the misrecognition ofthe white Jamaican
ruling class and its role in the relations of domination that
the film portrays by presenting blacks as the exploiters of
other blacks and by commodifying blackness as an object
for consumption by an exnominated white audience. (356)
But a membrane divides that main assertion and my own, yet significant
differences do exist between the arguments. Fernandez, who refers to Henzell as "the
author of The Harder They Come"(355), provides an image-based analysis ran through
the old, largely supplanted sieve of the auteur theory. The argument in this chapter relies
upon close formal readings of entire representative sequences, and leans heavily upon
film studies, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and theories and concepts specific to
the critical study of mass communication for its development. An overt value assessment
59
is probably not required to cite the difference between the approaches; in fact, that both
are possible and (this author hopes) fruitful may testify to the richness ofthe film.
It is important at this point to specify what I mean by "omission," "white," and
"whiteness" in this and any other chapter where the terms appear. "Omission" I use in
accordance with James Snead in White Screens/Black Images: Hollywoodfrom the Dark
Side, a posthumously assembled anthology of several of Snead's essays on race and film,
edited by Cornel West and Colin MacCabe and published shortly after Snead's untimely
death. In "Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look," Snead offers a
largely semiotic, formal analysis of Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper's 1933
motion picture to exemplify "the three most frequent devices whereby blacks have been
consigned to minor significance onscreen [ ... ]: mythification, marking, and
omission"(4). The latter Snead defines as "exclusion by reversal, distortion, or some
other form of censorship," before admitting that, "Omission and exclusion are perhaps the
most widespread tactics of racial stereotyping but are also the most difficult to prove
because their manifestation is precisely absence itself'(6). In both the introduction and
body ofthis essay, as well as in a later essay that dissects the star text of Shirley Temple,
Snead clarifies that omission or exclusion in his thinking refers to the absence of black
people or blackness from the screen; it also becomes evident, throughout the anthology,
that Snead's main concern is Hollywood, not foreign, "second," or "third" cinema. Yet if,
as Snead states, the hunt for omission and exclusion in film texts is meant to discover
"ideologically motivated distortions under the mask of artistic economy or exigency"(7),
then the skin color ofthose omitted or excluded is secondary to the distortions such
60
omissions or exclusions ultimately produce. In other words, omission and exclusion, as
Snead defines and mobilizes the terms, can indeed apply to films that feature
predominantly black casts and leave another race conspicuously absent; "omission" and
"exclusion" are ideologically but not race-specific terminology. Furthermore, although
Snead's area of study is Hollywood, the powerful and continuing influence of Hollywood
upon narrative cinema across the globe (from determining the "grammar" of narrative
film to setting in cement particular characters, styles, and stories) means Snead's ideas are
indeed extendable to narrative films produced great distances from Hollywood. Hence,
although the use of "omission" and "exclusion" here (and elsewhere) may seem a reversal
or inversion of Snead's invocation, my use of both terms begins and ends in accordance
with his own.
I begin my clarification of the use of "white" and "whiteness" in this chapter with
a passage from Rastafarian leader Samuel Brown's 1965 "Treatise on the Rastafarian
Movement," included in chapter 4 of Barrett's The Rastafarians:
Because of the stand we have taken against white
oppression, and the enforcement of their way of life on
black people, we have become the target of abuse and
murder, perpetuated by the black mercenary policeman,
white officered. Contrary to the opinion formed abroad
that Jamaica is a black man's land, it is not true where
power of rule is concerned, even though we outnumber all
races combined. A mulatto bourgeois class holds the
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balance of power under remote control, while the blacks are
held as virtual slaves. (Barrett 116)
An interesting example of "guerilla logic," a rhetorical strategy Barrett notes is central to
Rastafarianism as a (then) put-upon subculture, this passage is instructive because it
skillfully plays the frequently nomadic boundary between the denotative and connotative
values of both "white" and "whiteness." Here, "white" signifies both skin color and a
certain connection to or expression of a system of dominance. The dependence of one
upon the other is, however, deliberately left indeterminate. The "black mercenary
officer," while black, is "white officered"; like the "mulatto bourgeois middle class," he
derives his authority from his belief in and affiliation with a particular power structure,
and it is against this officer and the mulatto middle class that Rastafarians are most
materially engaged. Brown's point here is what Rastafarians fight against is
simultaneously specific and neutral in terms ofrace--for Brown, "white" and "whiteness"
operate in a shifting conflation of the literal and figurative.
Similarly, if! call attention to Henzell's "whiteness," I refer not to his eggshell
complexion but to his status as a member of Jamaica's historically financially privileged
class. 15 I use "white" and "whiteness" in this essay in line with their invocation in White,
Richard Dyer's "study of images of white people"(l), or, more specifically, his
determinedly white study of whiteness and its often nearly invisible, insidious effects
upon white perceptions of the people and products of "non-white" cultures and
ultimately, by extension, of whites themselves. Although Dyer's book-length self-trained
gaze is an admittedly internal study of whiteness, and although his stated subject matter is
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"how white people are represented--how we represent ourselves--images of white people,
or the cultural construction of white people"(Dyer xiii), the far-flung and insidious reach
of whiteness requires Dyer to formulate an argument and develop a theoretical
framework for his project that leaves White often of unusual value to the examination of
texts and phenomena that at least initially appear to fall outside the realm of whiteness
proper.
Dyer's study of whiteness is significant to examinations of Caribbean cultural
product because much of the Caribbean remains a postcolonial region, one whose history
reflects efforts to either resist or negotiate the intercourse between constructs endemic to
and instituted by European colonizers (language and systems of education, religion, and
government) and the culture and beliefs more specific and relevant to the colonized. In
his seminal The Development ofCreole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, Edward Kamau
Brathwaite invokes "creolization" partly in reference to the history of this interplay.
Brathwaite defines creolization as a process that began at the moment of Caribbean
colonization with the "stimulus/response of individuals to their environment and--as
white/black, culturally discrete groups--to each other"(296) and continues through "the
formation of a society which developed, or was developing, its own distinctive character
or culture which, insofar as it was neither purely British nor West African, is called
'creole.''' He then argues "that this creole culture was part of a wider New World or
American culture complex, itself the result of European settlement and exploitation of a
new environment" (xii). If the state of the Caribbean region, as Brathwaite's argument
indicates, is the result of creolization, then Dyer's study of whiteness is useful to the
63
examination of Caribbean cultural product because that study systematizes the way in
which the dominant class perceives (and has perceived) itself and, through comparison,
the members of the subordinate class. Dyer's study also helps clarifY how these two
considerations continue to meet to inform the self-conceptualization of members of the
subordinate class. In this way, White is invaluable to a detailed, fleshed-out
understanding of the process of creolization and the development of the Caribbean as a
whole.
Another reason that Dyer's study is important here concerns reexportation, the
dialogue (or echoing monologue) that has developed between the external and domestic
receptions of Caribbean cultural product. Reexportation as a concept is vital to a number
of the essays that form the chapters of Culture and Mass Communication in the
Caribbean: Domination, Dialogue, Dispersion, the anthology assembled and edited by
Humphrey A. Regis. "Culture" the editor defines (in a final, summary chapter) by
gathering the treatment of the term across the anthologized essays, distilling those
treatments to five common ideas, then locating all five within Ruth Mead's notion "that
culture is personality writ large--the culture of a collective may be seen as its personality
when its members are taken as a group"(216). In a similar manner, Regis arrives at the
following definition of "mass communication":
[... ] the process in which originators disseminate messages
to audiences who receive these messages if they make the
necessary investment in time, means, and effort. This mass
communication may be realized through such media as
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publicly displayed inscriptions or images, contemporary
print media, traditional terrestrial broadcast media, satellite-
assisted broadcast media, and computer-assisted media
such as Web sites. (232)
Finally, while Regis in his final chapter points out the graphic and undeniable
similarities between modern-day "reexportation" (which is cultural) and Europe's colonial
economic domination ofthe region (the pattern of which could be easily termed
"economic reexportation") (227), "reexportation" itself is perhaps most cleanly outlined
in D. Elliott Parris's contribution, "The Reexportation ofthe Caribbean Literary Artist."
There Parris explains that the process typically involves "the migration of talented
persons from the Caribbean to Europe and North America, their emergence as acclaimed
artists through being published abroad and positively reviewed by foreign critics, and the
return of those artists or their reputations to the Caribbean, where they were received with
more recognition than before their departure"(95-96). Parris focuses on literature, but the
anthology's working definition of "mass communication," combined with the concept's
importance to other of the anthology's essays that use visual and aural mass media as
examples, establishes the potential for a wider application of the term.
In this process of reexportation, which Leroy L. Lashley, 16 Hollis Liverpool, 17
John A. Lent,18 Parris, and others argue remains at the core of the region's attempts at
cultural liberation in the wake of political independence, "whiteness" as defined in and
explicated through the theoretical underpinnings of White is at issue in both the external
reception of Caribbean cultural product and its eventual reception back home; a
65
systematic understanding of whiteness is integral to determining what America and
Europe find appealing about Caribbean cultural product as well as how the Caribbean
determines what it recognizes and celebrates about itself. I argue here for the
applicability of the reexportation model to Henzell's The Harder They Come not because
Henzell himself left the island to achieve success, but because his film "left" the island
and achieved international renown--which consequently amplified the exuberance of its
domestic reception. So although this chapter concerns whiteness in one instance of one
type of Caribbean cultural product, my argument here depends upon a theoretical model
fruitful for examinations of Caribbean cultural product as a whole, particularly
concerning the relationship between its external and domestic receptions.
Dyer's introductory chapter, "The Matter of Whiteness," operates as a type of
blueprint of whiteness and its effects as I see them on The Harder They Come, in terms of
both what Dyer says and how he says it. One of the most striking aspects of that chapter
is how quickly Dyer acknowledges his rather privileged position, a position somewhat
analogous to Henzell's as a white man born and raised in a predominantly non-white
island: that of a white person who, at a young age, felt a sort of affinity with non-whites,
an affinity Dyer explains as bound up in his case with an early understanding of himself
as a white homosexual, in light of his adolescent infatuation with a Jewish boy. While
that personalizing rhetorical strategy is standard in cultural criticism, Dyer goes to fairly
unusual lengths to show that he very early on identified himself with non-whites because
he understood himself as different and hence, later in life, was capable of seeing
whiteness at the required critical remove. This, Dyer suggests, means that he is able to
66
discuss and vivisect whiteness from a white point of view; put another way, early in this
book, Dyer establishes a critical position that allows an "objective" observation of the
effects of the self-imaging of his own, dominant race. This, which is the "how" in "how
he says it," is useful to an analysis of The Harder They Come because the film's inability
to establish the same remove seems directly connected to the absence of commentary on
the effects of whiteness upon the Jamaicans depicted onscreen, as well as the
objectification that occurs in the content and form of the film.
To return for a moment to White: What it turns out Dyer is after is a turning of
the white gaze upon specific aspects of white ethnicity, those aspects that inform its
perceptions of itself, those that whiteness then turns around and uses in an externally
directed comparison whose purpose is to support and reinforce white supremacy--which
is a turning inward then outward of the white gaze. But as illustrated in The Harder They
Come, the white gaze can be just as easily turned out and then back in again. 19 The
objectification of the non-white suggested in Dyer's chapter, that process which begins by
establishing the reader or viewer in a privileged position, is basic to those formal
decisions that appear most racially and ethnically problematic in The Harder They Come.
Part of the process of constructing narrative in film, regardless of whether that
process occurs in production or reception, involves a matching of formal elements to
content. Here I put forth that the orientation of The Harder They Come is evident in both
the film's content and its form: that it is possible (and necessary) to examine the film for
its racial messaging in both aspects. The current focus upon form in film's critical canon,
particularly its role in the construction of film narrative, is at the center of David
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Bordwell's constructivist account of film viewing, which Bordwell provides in his
Narration in the Fiction Film. While other film scholars have outlined other, often
radically different yet equally valid approaches to formal analysis, Bordwell's approach
to narrative in film appears here because it is geared toward producing close readings
based primarily upon the interaction of formal elements to produce meaning. Key to
Bordwell's notion of what occurs when we view films are the different methods and
patterns by which motion pictures cue, affirm, and deny spectator hypotheses.2o These
methods include the manipulation of gaps or disjunctions between the syzuhet (the story
as it is told) and the fabula (the story as it is understood) as well as the affirmation or
denial of causal relationships the viewer tends to establish usually due to both narrative
arrangement and formal elements (such as sightline matches and the order of shots as
they are presented). The analyses below, Bordwellian readings of the two selected
sequences, are meant to help separate those formal elements that work solely to construct
the film's narrative from those that more clearly indicate the racial messaging implicit in
the form of The Harder They Come. While both sequences indicate the external
orientation of this film (i.e., that the film may be about but not necessarily of, or even for,
Jamaica), the first demonstrates how that orientation often serves the type of
differentiation central to racial messaging, while the second demonstrates that an external
orientation does not, by definition or necessity, lead to that particular kind of
differentiation.
The first sequence (sequence A) begins immediately after the film's opening
sequence, in which Ivan takes a bus from the country to Kingston. Here, Ivan arrives in
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Kingston and is almost instantly the victim of a young, male thief, who gets away with all
thatIvan has brought with him. Sequence A ends just as Ivan crosses a busy street in
pursuit of his possessions. The following is a more specific account of the shots, actions,
dialogue, formal patterns, and spectator hypotheses contained within sequence A.
Sequence A begins with a hard cut to a shot [shot 1 (figure 1)] of part of the front
of a bus with red, white, and blue horizontal stripes. Overburdened with bags and
packages, wearing clothing that immediately codes him as being from the country, Ivan
walks around the front of the bus and the camera pans with him, past the figures of
several male bystanders who stand in the foreground.
Figure 1: Sequence A, Shot 1
As the camera sweeps by the last of the men, Ivan looks around at his new
surroundings but does not stop walking until one of his packages slips from his arms. At
this point, he is in front of another bus with similar-colored horizontal stripes. The only
sound in this shot is diegetic street noise, continued from the previous shot and lasting
through the sequence.
Another hard cut takes us to a close up [shot 2 (figure 2)] of the fallen package.
As Ivan grabs the package and lifts it, we hear the sound of a bicycle horn, and the
camera tilts up and pulls back to present a young man behind a multicolored pushcart,
waving his arms at Ivan. Behind the young man are buses; further in the background
stretch structures, trees, and sky.
Figure 2: Sequence A, Shot 2
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YoungMan: Hey country boy, get out of the way.
We then cut to a medium shot [shot 3 (figure 3)] ofIvan, who takes up the left
side of the frame. The bus behind Ivan at the beginning of the sequence is also behind
him here.
70
Figure 3: Sequence A, Shot 3
Ivan: You know the way to Milk Lane?
Yet another hard cut, this time to a shot [shot 4 (figure 4)] that both features a
good deal of activity and is the reverse of its immediate predecessor. It begins with a
close up, in which the young man, seen clearer here than before, is decidedly more
sharply dressed and groomed than Ivan. Comparing the two figures cements Ivan's
unsure, naIve fit in his new surroundings. The young man takes up most of the frame,
and the shallow depth of field leaves the background largely out of focus.
Young Man: If you have money you go anywhere. If you don't have money you
fart, is better you stay home.
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The shot continues with the camera drifting back, revealing the platform of the bus
station, the people waiting beneath the roof of it, and eventually Ivan at the right side of
the frame.
Figure 4: Sequence A, Shot 4a and 4b
Ivan:
YoungMan:
All right then, how much?
Give me fifty cents and help me push.
Ivan lifts his packages and places them on the cart; as he does so, the street noise is
interrupted by a blast of non-diegetic Dub Reggae that fades in and out through the rest of
the sequence (rising and falling opposite the dialogue) and continues as a sound bridge
just beyond the final shot ofthe sequence.
We then cut hard to a close up [shot 5 (figure 5)] of the front of the cart; car horns
punctuate the non-diegetic music. The camera pulls back as the cart goes across the
frame.
72
Figure 5: Sequence A, Shot 5
Cut again [shot 6 (figure 6)], this time to a medium, shallow shot of a man in a
black shirt with a white and black decorative front, standing against a set of vertical steel
bars.
Figure 6: Sequence A, Shots 6a and 6b
Behind him (and barely in focus) stretches a row of green hedges. The preceding
shot combined with this figure's sightline suggest that he is watching Ivan and the young
73
man from across the busy street Further evidence for this occurs when he reaches up
with a level palm and shades his eyes against the sun.
We cut again, this time to a long shot [shot 7 (figure 7)] ofIvan and the young
man pushing the heavy cart down the street and toward the camera. The two are
surrounded by traffic, and the young man looks about, furtively. The camera pans to
follow the pair as they near the lens and veer left.
Figure 7: Sequence A, Shot 7
Cut to a canted, extreme close up [shot 8 (figure 8)] of a traffic signal turning red,
then again [shot 9 (figure 8)] to a medium shot ofIvan and the young man straining as
they push the cart toward the camera.
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Figure 8: Sequence A, Shots 8 and 9
The young man, who is to the right, suddenly pulls back while Ivan, who is to the left and
steering the cart, does not.
YoungMan: That means stop you know.
And here [shot 10 (figure 9)] we cut to precisely the same image and canted angle
present in shot 8, only now we begin with a close up that zooms in rapidly to an extreme
close up just as the signal turns from yellow to red.
75
Figure 9: Sequence A, Shot 10
Now, while this may initially appear to be an innocuous, narrative-driven or formally
required repetition of a previous image or shot (for foreshadowing, to establish
shot/reverse shot, etc.), a stronger explanation in light of the rest of the sequence (and that
the traffic light was already red in shot 8, which means that this shot marks the film's first
significant disruption in the syzuhet of fabula time) is that this shot signifies the
beginning of an identifiable but not necessarily narrative-driven or formally required
pattern in this sequence. As will be apparent soon, while the initial occurrence of this
pattern concerns an object, the later one concerns a person. And that this pattern begins
with an object and ends with a person is perhaps as significant as that the pattern's initial
image is, by definition, a warning light.
We cut hard here [shot 11 (figure 10)] back to roughly the same content, setup,
and framing of shot 9 (suggesting that shot 11 is simply the continuation of shot 9).
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Figure 10: Sequence A, Shot 11
This rather standard or classical example of shot/reverse shot, which relies on the sort of
shot repetition just described, serves "to make even stranger" the relationship between
shots 8 and 10.
Young Man: That is why you country boy always come to town and get dead.
The young man looks off to the right of the frame, yells, and waves an arm.
Cut here to a shot [shot 12 (figure 11)] where the camera is positioned to the left
and behind the young man, which allows us to see across the street that he is facing. The
camera then pans quickly to the left and shows us that he is waving at the man in shot 6,
who spreads his arms wide apart in a gesture indicating that he has no idea what the
young man wants with him.
77
Figure 11: Sequence A, Shots 12a and 12b
With this begins ·an extensive, pronounced, nearly chaotic use of shot/reverse shot and
reaction shots that continues until shot 25, which is the first shot of the second occurrence
of the unusual pattern of repetition first observed with shots 8 and 10.
We cut again, this time to a shallow close up [shot 13 (figure 12)] of the young
man's profile. The position of the camera is nearly the same as in shot 9, but the framing
is now much tighter.
Figure 12: Sequence A, Shot 13
YoungMan: You know how long that bitch owe me money?
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The young man looks to the left ofthe frame; his sightline suggests that he looks at Ivan
while he speaks.
Young Man: He won't dodge me today.
The young man then changes his sightline, which now suggests that he has gone back to
looking at the man across the street.
YoungMan: Hey, give the man the money!
We then cut to a reverse shot [shot 14 (figure 13)], a close up ofIvan's face, his
sightline indicating that he is looking at the young man; he then shortly looks off to the
left of the frame, matching the sightline of the young man, who was just looking at the
man across the street.
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Figure 13: Sequence A, Shot 14
Cut again [shot 15 (figure 14)] to the continuation of shot 12; the man across the
street continues to make the same gesture indicating that he cannot hear anything above
the traffic And we cut again [shot 16 (figure 14)] to the continuation of shot 14, as Ivan
switches his sightline back to the young man.
Figure 14: Sequence A, Shots 15 and 16
We then cut to a reverse shot [shot 17 (figure 15)]--a continuation of shot 13--as
the young man waves, indicating he wants Ivan to cross the street and retrieve the money.
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Figure 15: Sequence A, Shot 17
Cut again [shot 18 (figure 16)], this time to the continuation of shot 15, as Ivan
walks away from the camera and heads across the street. As Ivan nears the other side, the
young man pushes his cart and goes past the left of the frame .. A group of uniformed
schoolchildren cross the frame from left to right as the camera zooms slightly and shrinks
the frame, tightening on Ivan and the man across the street.
Figure 16: Sequence A, Shots 18a and 18b
Ivan: The guy there send me for his money.
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The man waves his arms suggesting he has no idea what is going on; his mouth moves as
if he is saying something, but what he says is either unrecorded or recorded too low to be
intelligible. A bus (now with white and green horizontal stripes) zooms between the
subjects and the camera.
Cut to a close up [shot 19 (figure 17)] ofIvan and the man from roughly the same
angle as but a closer position than shot 18.
Figure 17: Sequence A, Shot 19
Ivan: Say you have the money, man.
This cut, the first jump cut of the sequence, is to a brief shot [shot 20 (figure 18)]
taken from the same position as shot 19 but focused through the windows of bus as it
speeds down the street. Here we see Ivan tum and look back across the street, attempting
to scan the opposite side. The shot lasts only as long as the bus is in the frame.
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Figure 18: Sequence A, Shot 20
This shot disrupts the timeline of the film perhaps even more than the repetition in shots 8
and 10, since it literally anticipates Ivan's reaction at the end ofthe following shot.
We then cut [shot 21 (figure 19)] to the continuation of shot 19.
Ivan: Where's the guy, now?
As the man points back across the street, three things happen: another man crosses the
frame between the camera and its main subjects; Ivan begins to turn around; and another
green-and-white stripped bus zooms across the frame, from left to right. The bus leaves
the frame, revealing Ivan, who is looking left, then looks just to the right of the position
of the camera. His sightline here suggests that he is actually looking back near the
position from which he originally crossed the street.
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Figure 19: Sequence A, Shots 21a and 21b
We then cut to a long point-of-view shot [shot 22 (figure 20)] of the young man
off in the distance, pushing his cart hurriedly up the street.
Figure 20: Sequence A, Shot 22
The position of the camera compared to Ivan's sightline in the previous shot suggests this
is a P.O.V. shot, although the sightlines, positions, and actions of all shots prior to shot 21
indicates that this is a debatable conclusion. Put another way, while Ivan's sightline
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works with this shot to indicate that it is indeed from Ivan's point of view, the rest of the
material in the sequence thus far would appear to argue otherwise.
We then cut [shot 23 (figure 21)] to the continuation of shot 21. Ivan waves
frantically across the street.
Figure 21: Sequence A, Shot 23
Ivan: Hey, come back here, man.
While the man in the stripped shirt observes from the left of the frame, and an unnamed
figure behind and to the right of Ivan points directly at the camera, Ivan steps forward
into the busy street then looks off to the right of the frame.
Cut here to an extreme close up [shot 24 (figure 22)] of the top half of a yet
another warning sign, this time a pedestrian signal, with "Don't Walk" that in this shot
erupts in red lettering.
----_._-------
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Figure 22: Sequence A, Shot 24
Cut again, this time to a close up [shot 25 (figure 23)] of an old, half-toothless
man, who is apparently mouthing words to someone--or something--offto the left of the
frame as Ivan speaks off-screen. What this man says is either unrecorded or recorded too
low to be intelligible, making him the second character in this sequence who (quite
literally) speaks without the benefit of a voice. In fact, when his mouth moves, it is
Ivan's exhortation for the return of his material possessions that we hear. The old man's
sightline is also notably left without reference, which makes him appear to be looking at
both everything and nothing in particular.
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Figure 23: Sequence A, Shot 25
Ivan: Hey, come back here, man!
Cut here [shot 26 (figure 24)] to the continuation of shot 23, as Ivan steps back
onto the curb and a bus zooms in front of him. As the bus leaves the frame, Ivan checks
the street and starts to jog across it. All of this occurs while the man in the stripped shirt
observes from the left of the frame.
Ivan:
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Figure 24: Sequence A, Shot 26
Come back here, man!
Cut [shot 27 (figure 25)] to the continuation of shot 22, as the young man moves
even further up the street, suddenly veers right, and vanishes.
Figure 25: Sequence A, Shot 27
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We cut again [shot 28 (figure 26)], and this takes us back to the old, toothless man
first revealed in shot 25; here, he moves left to right across the frame and again mouths
something that we cannot hear. His sightline is once again without anchor. A car horn
like the ones in shot 5 sounds as the old man's face jerks across the frame.
Figure 26: Sequence A, Shot 28
We cut again [shot 29 (figure 27)] to the continuation of shot 26, as Ivan jumps
back again to avoid oncoming traffic. We then cut to a very brief close up [shot 30
(figure 27)] of the old, toothless man; this time he mouths something to someone (or
something) at the right of the frame.
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Figure 27: Sequence A, Shots 29 and 30
We cut to a very brief shot [shot 31 (figure 28)] with a camera position similar to
that of shot 29; Ivan is still on the other side of the street looking for a gap through which
to cross. The sequence then ends with ajump cut [shot 32 (figure 28)] to as Ivan finally
starts to make it across the street, jogging toward the camera; this edit very clearly
violates the timeline of the film.
Figure 28: Sequence A, Shots 31 and 32
The heavy use of shot/reverse shot and reaction shots in Sequence A, strategies
used repeatedly in the most sequences in this film, is certainly evidence of The Harder
They Come's basis in the Hollywood paradigm, but this pattern alters significantly by shot
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ten, which in tenns of raw footage is likely just an uncut or extended version of shot 8.
Shot 10 begins a barrage of formal elements that make it increasingly difficult to
assemble the story the shots are presenting--a hallmark, according to Bordwell, of Art-
Cinema film. The tllm's content makes these fonnal elements justifiable, since the
central motivation of this particular sequence appears to be to illustrate the hectic
atmosphere of Kingston and to establish the ease with which Ivan can get taken
advantage of early in his character development. In fact, most of the fonnal elements that
call attention to themselves in this sequence (like the complex sightline matching that
must occur beginning with shot 12 and lasting the entire sequence) and/or violate the
timeline of the film (like shots 8 and 10, where what is made out to be two
chronologically consecutive shots are presented in backward order, against continuous
diegetic sound) would seem most immediately attributable to Kingston's chaos and Ivan's
nai'vete and bewildennent.
This tactic starts to breakdown most noticeably with shot 25, which features an
unidentitled character whose appearance could be argued as essentially incidental were it
not for his reappearance in shots 28 and 30. These last two shots call attention to this
character in a specitlc fashion, suggesting by their very inclusion--and the fact that they
show the man speaking to someone we do not see, and looking at someone or something
that we cannot identify--that he either will reappear later or currently figures into the
narrative or theme of either the sequence or the entire film. Neither, however, is the case.
Considered within the context of the sequence or the entire film, this man's appearance in
these three shots is baseline for display. He is in this sequence, in other words, simply to
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be looked at and nothing else. Furthermore, and perhaps most strangely, the formal
"grammar" of this sequence makes it clear that this man who is here to be looked at is not
here to be observed by those around him; it is clear by the end of the sequence that the
old, black, toothless man in shots 25, 28, and 30 is included solely for the benefit of
observers located outside of the diegesis. This is one ofthe most immediately locatable,
visible, and striking examples of objectification through form in The Harder They Come;
it is this use of this kind of formal element to which I hold the film's external orientation
primarily accountable, and it is precisely the sort of occurrence that indicates the racial
messaging in this film may be more complex and embedded than most criticism of The
Harder They Come tends to suggest.
The second sequence (sequence B), which is in a way a counterpoint to the first,
encompasses one middling length take and begins shortly after Ivan avoids capture at the
motel by gunning down three police officers. As Ivan leaves the motel in that scene, he
encounters a drunk on his way home. The drunk verbally expresses surprise at seeing
Ivan running from the motel with a gun and no pants (so even before sequence B, the film
provides the drunk with a voice). Two scenes later, we return for the second and last
time to the drunk, who, in sequence B, is now home and in his underwear at the bottom
of what is revealed to be a staircase.
We cut to close up [shot 1 (figure 29)] of the drunk wearing a hat and no shirt, his
head propped on one arm. The drunk appears weary and dejected. He moves his mouth
occasionally but says nothing audible; the impression is of a man too inebriated to say
anything and too familiar with the words he hears to do aught but mock the abuse. A
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woman's voice opens the sequence and is the only audible, non-ambient sound it features;
she is never onscreen, but the first line she speaks, along with the camera's slow zoom out
to reveal that the man sits at the bottom of a staircase, anchors her position as being
somewhere upstairs.
Figure 29: Sequence B (Long Take/Single Shot)
Woman: What you doing down there so long, you thinking? You mean you
can't think of a story to fool me with tonight? You go and make up
your story, man.
The man nods slowly, as if in silent agreement with the woman upstairs.
Woman: What a day when I catch you out and no story to help you.
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As the man rises, the camera zooms out and shows he is sitting at the bottom of a
staircase. He turns away from us, and as the woman delivers the following line, he walks
upstairs.
Woman: That is the day I'm waiting for.
At first glance, sequence B, a single shot lasting roughly forty-five seconds,
seems to support the assertion at the end of my analysis of sequence A. Sequence B
shows a man in a hat and situation closely matching those of cartoonist Reg Smythe's
"lovable" lush Andy Capp; this is a drunk corning horne to a wife who has long since
tired of him returning to her in such a state. The drunk's function within the film's
narrative is similar to the function of that of the old, toothless man in sequence A: Both
men are minor characters who appear more than once, a pattern suggesting to the viewer
that they ought to be considered more than "passive backdrop." But sequence B features
a scene that, though seemingly outside the narrative and themes ofthe film as a whole,
works without objectifying the character onscreen because it presents a situation that does
not necessarily depend upon cultural difference for its import; in fact, the scene's import
relies upon the trans-cultural phenomenon of men returning horne drunk to wives who
are disgusted with their behavior. In other words, sequence B depends upon the viewer
identifying in some way with the drunk onscreen, while sequence A presents little if
anything at all that would catalyze or foster audience identification with the old, black,
toothless man onscreen. So although both scenes feature extra-narrative characters who
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function primarily as artifacts, the man in Sequence B is there to remind us all of what we
are, while the man in Sequence A is there to remind some of us precisely of what we are
not.
Perhaps the twentieth time I screened The Harder They Come, I did so with my
mother, who swears she saw it as a kid, though she was twenty and teaching grammar
school in the Commonwealth of Dominica when the film was first released in the
Caribbean. For a good long while, I watched her watch the film, and I listened to her
sing its soundtrack as if she had heard it only yesterday ... and it occurred to me how
incredible it must have been to be in a theater in the Caribbean, watching this film in
1972. What a massive release it would have been, to see ordinary, black Caribbean
characters featured as central in a major motion picture. How incredible it would have
felt, to participate in the construction of a Caribbean narrative that seemingly did not
require overt effort to form a negotiated reading. What Henzell did was extraordinary,
and The Harder They Come is still the defining film of the Caribbean because of him.
But the years that have passed since the film's release have brought with them more ways
of seeing that what counts as "romantic" in the film's content translates to "voyeuristic"
and "objectifying" in its formal aspects. Now, more than three decades after its release,
The Harder They Come is an instructive film in more ways than one because it provides a
partial glimpse of the Caribbean beyond the boundaries of the resorts, a glimpse whose
very incompleteness illustrates the difficulties filmmakers face when their subject matter
is another race. And that, at the least, is a lesson to the rest of the world for which
Caribbean people can continue to thank both Henzell and The Harder They Come.
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Endnotes
1 Brian Meeks, in Narratives ofResistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean, identifies
Rhygin as "the first of the notorious modern Jamaican gunmen"(83).
2 Five years after the release of The Harder They Come, Leonard Barrett, in The
Rastafarians: The Dreadlocks ofJamaica (1977), extrapolated from Jamaica's Annual
Abstract ofStatistics (1965) and arrived at a figure of two million for the population of
the country, with roughly 90% ofAfrican origin.
3 Reggae was rising to prominence in Jamaica at the end of the 1960s and the beginning
of the 1970s; by many accounts, the geme's continuing hold on international audiences
appears to have begun with the international reception of the film. Ruben A.
Gaztambide-Fernandez, in "Reggae, Ganja, and Black Bodies: Power, Meaning, and the
Markings of Postcolonial Jamaica in Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come," posts in a
footnote that, "Most reviews ofthe film after 1980 and almost all reviews of the recently
released DVD credit the movie and its soundtrack with launching the international
success of reggae" (370). Fernandez then provides the bibliographic information for a
host of those reviews, most of which ran in major American newspapers and magazines.
Whether the minimum eight-year gap between the film's initial release and the
publication date of the reviews afforded the reviewers the required critical remove, or an
uncritical kind of nostalgia, is perhaps the subject of another paper. Most relevant here is
how three decades does not seem to have mitigated or blunted the acknowledgement of
the film's importance to the global popularity of reggae.
4 The second chapter of Peter D. Fraser and Paul Hackett's Caribbean Economic
Handbook provides an economic overview of the region that begins with the grouping of
the countries within the archipelago according to "their main foreign exchange earner"
(19), where it is not what the islands mean to one another but rather what they mean to
the outside world that determines how they get categorized. The three groups or
categories are agriculture, industry, and services (including tourism), with Jamaica
mostly considered primarily in terms of industry but also in terms of tourism. Fraser and
Hackett include fairly detailed discussions of each "group," paying particular attention to
how the countries within the groups engage the extra-regional market and/or invite
foreign investment. See Honor Ford-Smith's "Come to Jamaica and Feel All Right:
Tourism, Colonial Discourse and Cultural Resistance" for a more recent and Jamaica-
specific analysis of how "representational practices within tourism adapt and transmit old
images of colonial domination and heterosexual relations to reproduce new forms of
institutional and cultural racism" (379).
5 Cf. footnote 11.
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. 6 An October 22,2003 broadcast ofNational Public Radio's "Morning Edition," hosted
by Ashley Kahn, offers insight into the basis of the lasting effect of Henzell's film upon
many Americans: "For a generation of Americans raised on rock yet hungry for new
sounds, The Harder They Come was the primer for reggae music and the Jamaican
experience. The movie exposed life in the ghettoes of Trenchtown and in the dancehalls
of Kingston"(NPR).
7 Arguing that resistance is basic to the development of the Caribbean as a region, Cudjoe
defines resistance "as any act or complex of acts designed to rid a people of its
oppressors, be they slave masters or multinational corporations." For Cudjoe, "cultural
resistance" includes moments when "the motive of resistance emanates from the beliefs,
mores, or indigenous ways of life and is expressed in religion or the arts";
"socioeconomic resistance" occurs when "resistance is expressed by suicide, abortion,
work sabotage, withholding labor, poisoning masters, etc." "Political resistance" occurs
when "the motive of resistance emanates from an ideological framework in which the
goal of the enslaved people is to control their destiny-be it full independence or some
other form of government-and may be expressed in revolts, rebellions or
revolutions"(l9).
8 See Ford-Smith's "Come to Jamaica and Feel All Right: Tourism, Colonial Discourse
and Cultural Resistance"; also see Roman De La Campa's "Resistance and Globalization
in Caribbean Discourse: Antonio Benitez-Rojo and Edouard Glissant," which features a
streamlined account of Benitez-Rojo and Glissant's sense of how resistance informs the
practices and discourses of the region.
9 In SIemon's "Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Third World."
10 In Sharpe's "Figures of Colonial Discourse."
11 See Said's Culture and Imperialism (59).
12 A difficult form of praise paid Henzell and his film came eight years after its release,
with the publication of Michael Thelwell's novel The Harder They Come. Thelwell
claims his book, based upon the film's screenplay, is "the novel from which the film
might have been derived were the process reversed"(8); Meeks, in Narratives of
Resistance, summarizes the thrust of Thelwell's book, stating it "creates a past for the
leading characters that is only hinted at in the screen version"(83). Both statements
reflect Thelwell's objective of "blessing" the film's narrative with a literary origin, but the
book itself (which, for instance, provides 108 pages of material before it reaches the point
at which the film begins) also attempts to express the story of Rhygin within a far more
detailed cultural context. In other words, the novel attempts to provide something that
both Thelwell and Meeks seem to realize is missing from the film ... which is
particularly ironic when read in conjunction with what appears to be an allusion in the
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film's soundtrack to Orlando Patterson's 1964 novel, The Children ofSisyphus. Early in
that canonical Jamaican text, Cyrus, angered and troubled by his discovery that Dinah,
his common-law wife, has left him and their son behind on "the Dungle," receives these
"words of wisdom" from Brother Solomon, on how a Black Jamaican can persevere in an
inequitable, materialistic world: "And it hard, me Brother, it hard. You have to be a man
of will, you have to read all the books of the great mystics of the East and if you try, if
you try an' try an' try, you might succeed some day, some night"(35). While Patterson's
passage and the isolated lyrics of Cliffs "You Can Get It rfYou Really Want" seem
identical in meaning, the images accompanying Cliffs song in the film (specifically, Ivan
smiling and waving at a well-to-do couple in the white convertible that passes him on his
way to Kingston, then Ivan zooming through a field in a similar white convertible that he
has just stolen) elicits a reading ofthe song that sets it in opposition with the passage that
may be its origin.
13 Thankfully, this claim of Jamaica's ability to stand in for the rest of the region would
probably not make it past a modern editor. Portrait ofthe Caribbean offers insight into
the historical development of the different islands of the region, based primarily on the
impact of the colonizing countries, only one of which is America. Other than that, the
reviewer's summary of the state ofthe region to this day remains accurate and useful.
14 The Black Bodies/White Sexualities section of Gaztambide-Fernandez's "Reggae,
Ganja, and Black Bodies" provides an image-based analysis ofthe jail sequence that
relies upon the identification of the disembodied voice in the vocal track as belonging to
"Henzell himself' and representing white legal authority. Fernandez also notes that,
"Although it is the white legal authority that determines the punishment, it is a black man
who carries out the sentence, giving the impression that the white judge is responsible for
the pardon and the black correction officer is responsible for the whipping"(362). Even if
the disembodied voice actually belongs to the film's white director, Fernandez's analysis,
in the end, supports my statement about the absence of white characters in the film's
diegesis.
15 The sections exploring Jamaica in the seven-hour 1992 video series Portrait ofthe
Caribbean, narrated by Stuart Hall, make clear that even after the island achieved
independence, many of the few whites either remaining in Jamaica or maintaining
financial ties with the island continued to occupy positions of financial privilege.
16 In "Decades of Change in Calypso Culture."
1
7 In "Reexportation and Musical Traditions Surrounding the African Masquerade."
18 In "Communication Technology in the Caribbean: The Ever-Increasing Dependency.
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19 Though Dyer never explicitly uses the phrase in his chapter, this turning out then in of
the white gaze is what he alludes to when he says, "We are often told we are living now
in a world of multiple identities, ofhybridity, of decentredness and fragmentation. The
old illusory unified identities of class, gender, race, sexuality are breaking up [....] Yet we
have not yet reached a situation in which white people and white cultural agendas are no
longer in the ascendant. The media, politics, education are still in the hands of white
people, still speak for whites while claiming-and sometimes sincerely aiming-to speak -
for humanity [....] Postmodern multiculturalism may have genuinely opened up a space
for the voices of the other, challenging the authority of the white West (cf. Owens 1983),
but it may also simultaneously function as a sideshow for white people who look on with
delight at all the differences that surround them" (3-4).
20 Two things: First, while Bordwell has certainly drawn heat for this approach to
reading film, clear echoes of it occur elsewhere. One example is cognitive theorist James
Peterson's Dreams ofChaos, Visions ofOrder, in which Peterson relies upon heuristics to
account for strategies viewers use while "making sense" of American avant-garde
cinema. Second, a central part of Bordwell's strategy in Narration in the Fiction Film
includes the categorization of films based upon method or mode of narration. Bordwell
would likely see The Harder They Come as an Art-Cinema film, the genre in which "the
viewer must [...] tolerate more permanent causal gaps than would be normal in a classical
film"(206).
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CHAPTER IV
PRESSURE AND THE CARIBBEAN
Well-recognized and documented as Britain's first feature-length dramatic film
with a black director, Trinidad-born British filmmaker's Horace Ove's Pressure was shot
. in 1974, premiered at the London Film Festival in 1975, and was first commercially
exhibited at the Coronet, Notting Hill Gate in February of 1978. Set in Ladbroke Grove,
London, Pressure is on one level a character study meant to serve as a "corrective" entry
in the long tradition of the British "social problem" film: Tony, the film's protagonist, is
a black "school-Ieaver" experiencing much more difficulty than his white classmates
finding work, despite his graduating near the top of his class. The film mostly charts
Tony's development as he attempts to cope with the racism basic to his troubles by
gravitating toward the black nationalist movement as it existed in London at the time.
While the film's deliberate revision of the generic attributes and expectations attendant to
the British genre of the social problem film arguably establishes Pressure's place within
the pantheon of British national cinema, the tendency of film made in Britain by "black"
filmmakers from the 1960s through the 1980s to re-present or re-cast Britain through a
"realistic" reexamination ofthe country run through a different set of "eyes" makes it
fairly easy to see why Pressure is still considered the iconic black British film.
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On another level, however, Ove's first dramatic feature is more ambivalent and
complex. For when the "black" in "black British film" is unpacked, the film becomes less
a character study meant to represent a broad "black" British experience than an
examination of a Trinidadian family's troubled attempts to acculturate to Britain, where
they live in what might be termed "economic exile." This reading ofPressure, predicated
on the notion that the themes, narrative, and "form" ofPressure identify it as a
distinctively Caribbean film, might originate with the observation that Pressure's main
"pressure points" exist within the tangled tensions that both compel and repel the
Watsons, the Trinidadian family around which the movie revolves. "Bopsie" Watson,
played by Lucita Lijertwood, is the screeching, commanding, wig-wearing, ever-
suffering matriarch who originally pushed the family to emigrate to London. Bopsie's
husband Lucas, played by Frank Singuineau, is the mostly stolid patriarch who quit a
lucrative job in Trinidad for the move to London, and now the disappointed shopkeeper
simmers silently. Colin, played by Oscar James, is the eldest of the two children; he was
born in Trinidad and--equating acculturation in a white, racist country with the
debilitating, dead-end trap of a black man "acting white"--engages with the black
nationalist movement then developing in London. And his British-born brother Tony,
played by Herbert Norville, is positioned between the worldview of his mother, who fully
believes in the potential and possibilities of assimilation, and Colin, who equates that
process with "becoming white" and hence considers it both a betrayal and an
impossibility. Hence Pressure's themes and narrative thrust simultaneously inform the
film's subversive relationship with the long tradition of the British "social problem"
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film-in particular, the "totalizing" strategies of the "race-relations" drama subset of that
genre. At the same time, Pressure challenges the similarly totalizing notion of a broadly
"black" British experience, since it charts Tony's development as a movement within his
own family-within a specifically Caribbean context-away from his mother and toward
his brother, but then problematizes that coping strategy through its deliberately
indeterminate final scene, in which Tony partakes in a black nationalist protest of Colin's
arrest-a protest whose utter hopelessness is emphasized by its silent occurrence in the
ram.
This chapter represents a deliberate attempt to revisit Pressure and establish it as
a distinctively Caribbean text. Noting the history of and recent developments in the
critical and scholarly discourse of black British film, I posit that developments within the
field have opened and cleared the space required for precisely this kind of re-evaluation
of Pressure, which at the moment occupies an unchallenged-yet-unstable pride of place
in black British cinema. I argue that Ove's biography and his career arc, particularly up
to the production of Pressure, together support the notion that Pressure's themes,
narrative, and form consistently evince an "in-between-ness" indicative of the
postcolonial dynamics of reexportation. Chief among the ways in which reexportation is
manifest in Ove's film is the telling of a distinctively Caribbean story through the generic
conventions of the British social problem film. That strategy reveals Pressure's
orientation to two different audiences-Caribbean and British-since it at once makes a
Caribbean story "black British" and allows Pressure to subvert the totalizing aspects of
the British social problem film, and more specifically the "race-relations" drama. But
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Pressure's unique post-production difficulties, as well as the film's contemporaneous
popular reception and critical treatment, also indicate other ways that Pressure
exemplifies reexportation, as those difficulties and the film's reception were functions of
the film's attempt to use "the immigrant experience" to speak to British and Caribbean
audiences simultaneously. Hence while Pressure is an excellent illustration of how
reexportation has informed, and will likely continue to inform, the production, content,
stylistics, and aesthetics of Anglophone Caribbean cultural products, it is also a great
example of why there continues to be a need to address or include reexportation in
scholarship concerning those products.
In the chapter of this dissertation titled "Whiteness, Strategic Omission, and a
Contrapuntal Reading of Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come," I argue that The
Harder They Come (1972), which features a predominantly black cast and is set in the
slums and ghettoes of Jamaica, is a complicated, ambivalent text that demands but rarely
receives a contrapuntal reading. Among the difficulties of that argument is arriving a
reasonably stable, critically useful definitions of the terms "whiteness" and "white." That
the terms "blackness" and "black" require unpacking for this chapter's discussion of
Pressure is as symptomatic of the scope of this dissertation as it is indicative of the wide-
ranging, polyvalent concerns of Anglophone Caribbean fiction and film.
In "(Re)constructing Multiracial Blackness: Women's Activism, Difference, and
Collective Identity in Britain," Julia Sudbury examines "the construction and negotiation
of multiracial blackness as the basis for organizing by African, Asian and Caribbean
women in Britain from the 1970s to the 1990s" (29). Observing the paucity of
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"systematic attempts to analyse identity construction as a political project in the context
of social movements for social justice" (29), Sudbury, a British woman of Afro-
Caribbean descent, argues that "a collective identity approach can assist our
understanding of the meanings and distinctive policies of 'blackness' in the British
context and help us to move beyond the static debate about black versus ethnic identities"
(30).
Sudbury's fairly recent study is certainly relevant for its clear signal that this
particular debate has yet to be resolved. But even more vital is Sudbury's presentation of
an historical overview of "the construction of blackness as an inclusive political
category," as well as an assessment of "the attack on this usage of blackness by some
activists and social scientists" (30). Sudbury observes that the British use of "black" as a
"multiracial political category" that includes all immigrants of diverse Caribbean,
African, and Asian origin began with "the post-war migration of colonial and former
colonial subjects" (33). The term's deepest roots are in the tendency of "the popular
white imagination" of the time to conceive of these immigrants as of a set: "They" were
considered less in terms of their backgrounds or countries of origin and more as a
"homogenous group of 'coloured commonwealth citizens'''; "they" were also "uniformly
considered to be a potential threat to the British way of life and harmonious 'race
relations'" (33).
Sudbury describes how that antipathy toward "colored immigration" resulted in
the Commonwealth Immigrant Acts of 1962, 1968, and 1971, "which redefined black
British passport holders as non-citizens and black women as dependants."
104
Unsurprisingly, shortly after "their" arrival, the great differences that existed between
these immigrants-linguistic, religious, cultural-began to pale in comparison with their
"common history of colonial oppression, common designation as 'Commonwealth
immigrants' and similar discriminatory treatment as the victims of race hatred, housing
discrimination and social and political exclusion" (33).
Visits to England by "leading African-American activists, including Stokely
Cannichael, Malcolm X and Angela Davis provided an 'identity narrative' with which to
express these commonalities." This, Sudbury argues, worked in tandem with the
appearance of images of "revolution and change" on inner-city television screens to lead
"settler communities" to adopt "blackness" as well as "the oppositional consciousness of
the Black Power movement." She also notes how the "openness of the signifier 'black,'"
which African-Americans had newly been employing to replace "Negro" and "Colored,"
in part enabled Britain's "coloured commonwealth citizens" to reinvent the term "to fit a
particularly British context where African, Caribbean and Asian communities had a
history ofjoint struggles. It was in this context that South Asian, Chinese and Middle
Eastern young people were able to rally with those of African descent to form the 'black
struggle'" (33).
Sudbury observes that, "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, 'black' was deployed as
a forceful unifying term which projected an uncompromising demand for rights and an
end to discrimination" (33-34). But by the end of the 1980s, the broad use "black" to
describe Britain's diverse African, Caribbean, and Asian populations was clearly being
contested, as if the category itself had begun to destabilize from within. Perhaps the
105
biggest surprise is that this destabilization does not appear to have been predicated by a
review of the relationship between this particular British use of the term "black" and the
totalizing, "they're-all-the-same" attribute of British racial discourse, as demonstrated by
the reference to all non-white African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants as "coloured
commonwealth citizens." Instead, there is the sense that this destabilization proceeded
from the notion that the use of "black," which reflected but did not disable that totalizing
tendency, had been forced and reactionary.
Sudbury describes how "some community activists and social scientists"
challenged the notion of "black" as a "multiracial political category"; they considered it
"little more than a 'coercive ideological fantasy' imposed on Asian communities by
zealous anti-racist bureaucrats and leaders." One powerful example is Tariq Modood,
who "argues that the term 'black' is centred on the African experience, from its origins in
the Black Power movement to the current imposition of an African Caribbean political
leadership." Modood and others, Sudbury points out, have also disagreed with the
inclusion of Asians in the term "'black'" on the grounds that it "sits uneasily with the
more 'natural' association of blackness with Africanity, which is in turn reinforced by the
predominance of African-American cultural production equating black identity with
African descent." For a telling manifestation of this, Sudbury recounts Modood's
observation of those moments when "writers and politicians slip from 'black and Asian' to
'black' without acknowledging the inherent erasure of an Asian presence. For Modood,"
Sudbury observes, "the black political project cannot help but position Asians as
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'secondary or ambiguous blacks,' thus creating a new hierarchy even as it seeks to depose
the existing racist offering" (Sudbury 34).
Sudbury's explication of "black" and the evolution of its use in Britain as a
"multiracial political category" simultaneously underscores the need to reevaluate
Pressure and suggests that the "fundamental" relationship between that film and "black"
British cinema may be more complicated than is often acknowledged. For the tension
that exists between understanding Pressure as a "black" British or a Caribbean film is a
product of Pressure's lasting, politically loaded importance to black British cinema. But
the need for that reevaluation, and the tension that it exposes, is also indicative of
important and continuing changes in the production and criticism of black British film,
which given the predominant tendency to cite Jamaican actor-turned-director Lionel
Reckford's short film Ten Bob in Winter (1963) as the first black British movie, is-at the
moment--only about four-and-a-half decades old.
Dominated in its early years by short films like Reckford's Ten Bob and South
African emigrant Lionel Ngakane's (Le Balloon Rouge-inspired) Jemima and Johnny
(1966), black British film was still in its infancy when Ove made his first film, Baldwin's
Nigger (1968), a 46-minute documentary of James Baldwin's sprawling lecture at West
Indian Students' Centre in London's Earl Court and the "Q&A" session that followed.
Almost from its inception, Ove figured heavily in "black" British cinema. In the
roughly ten years between Baldwin's Nigger and Pressure, Ove produced three
documentaries, Reggae (1970), Coleherne Jazz and Keskidee Blues (1972), and King
Carnival (1973). Together these undoubtedly contributed to the developing sense that
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what "made" a "black" British film was its ability to "tell it like it is." But that these
"black" films were also "British" meant that the assessment of this quality was a function
of the film's relationship to the British tradition of cinematic realism, as originated in the
work of John Grierson but most prominently and consistently dramatized through the
popular, long-running genre ofthe British "social problem" film,l
By the mid- to late-1980s, black British film was changing, and its critics and
scholars were working hard to keep up. The "age" of black British cinema, combined
with the "mid-life crisis" that it went through during this period, make Kobena Mercer's
Black Film British Cinema (1988) a wonderfully positioned volume for those wishing to
study black British cinema; it has been described as "the most influential essay collection
[on black British cinema] of the 1980s" (Korte and Sternberg 26). One great strength of
the volume is the pronounced diversity of its entries, and the frequent collision ofthe
arguments, approaches, and observations represented collide; this is evidence, it turns
out, of stylistic practices in a state of flux, and an "aesthetic" and critical apparatus
attempting to formulate or adjust themselves accordingly.
Many ofthe changes that black British film saw in the 1980s were a function of
recent developments in production practices. The founding of Channel 4 in 1982, for
example, was clearly a watershed for both independent and black British film.2 But the
1980s also saw the development of "black" filmmaking collectives such as Sankofa,
Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, Black Audio Film Collective, and ReTake. And
while these collectives sometimes financed their projects through such "authorizing"
bodies as the Greater London Council and Channel 4, their collaborative approach to
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production, as well as a general tendency toward narrative and visual experimentation,
also signify deeply political changes in the way that black British films were being made.
The stylistic tension between what had been considered "black" British cinema
and the films of these collectives primarily informed the critical and popular reception of
the latter. But it also spoke, in complex ways, to the expectations attendant to the
relationship between the British cinematic tradition of realism and black British film.
One striking example is Handsworth Songs (1987), an experimental documentary
produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by Ghana-born John
Akomfrah, which "reworks documentary conventions to explore the history of the
contemporary British black experience" (Kuhn). Handsworth Songs won seven
international prizes, including the BFI's own prestigious John Grierson Award. Yet
Mercer recounts how "one reviewer in a black community newspaper, The Voice,
received the film with the dismissive remark, 'Oh no, not another riot documentary' and
in The Guardian the film was subject to a serious and fierce intellectual polemic from
novelist Salman Rushdie," who found the filmmaker's unconventional approach lacking
in its attempt to "'deconstruct the hegemonic voices of British news reels'" (Mercer 4).
While the reception of Handsworth Songs demonstrates how the shifting aesthetic
of black British film presented unique challenges to both filmmaker and film viewer,
Black Film British Cinema confirms that the decade's changes in production practices
pushed more than that single debate to the fore. An analysis of the conflict between two
of the volume's essays reveals how the concurrent destabilization of "black" as a
"multiracial political category" informed many of those debates, and clarifies how that
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destabilization, along with the changing aesthetic of "black" British film, suggests that 33
years after its commercial exhibition debut, Pressure is indeed due for further critical
evaluation.
The first essay, Mercer's "Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation," is, broadly
speaking, a survey of the history of the black British cinematic aesthetic up to the point of
the essay's publication. Mercer presents "the institutional shifts that have contributed to
the de-marginalisation of black film; the widening range of aesthetic strategies which has
made this possible; and the reconstitution of audiences in relation to the increasingly
local and global (rather than 'national') diversification of audiovisual culture" (5). In the
course of that analysis, Mercer historicizes the aesthetic of black British film (charting its
eventual movement away from the tradition of British cinematic realism), and unpacking
the use of "black," particularly as it applies in the descriptor "black British film." In the
section titled "DIsplacing the Burden of Representation," Mercer observes
[... the] problematic area of definition concerning the use of the term
"black" as a political, rather than racial category. Throughout the 70's and
80's, the re-articulation of this term as an inclusive political identity based
on alliances between Asian, African and Caribbean people in a shared
struggle against racism, has helped to challenge and displace
commonsense assumptions about blackness as a fixed or essential identity.
(8)
Pages later appears "Realism and the New Language," where black British
filmmaker, film producer, and lecturer Julian Henriques calls for changes in the critical
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assessment of black British film so its reception might more fully account for what
Henriques avers are recent movements away from the uncritical engagement with the.
aesthetics of British cinematic realism in black British film. 3 His most prominent
example is Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which was critically lauded
as a piece of "ethnic comedy" but was unpopular among blacks and Asians in Britain
chiefly "because they refused to look at the film in any other way than as a piece of
realism, that is to say, a film that has attempted an accurate representation of its subject"
(19).
Henriques finds that the push to develop an aesthetic unique to black British film
was being stymied by the tendency to evaluate those films based on how tightly they hold
to the British cinematic realist tradition.4 But more revealing is what Henriques proposed
to spur the development of a more responsive and productive critical apparatus for
"black" creative works (especially film) in Britain, and the conflict oetween that proposal
and Mercer's description of the problematic yet political vital nature of the category
"black." Note the careful couching/"double-hedge" of the leading phrase, indicative of
the "radical" nature of what follows:
As an initial move to start the ball rolling, I think we should drop the term
"black" when we are talking about art amongst ourselves. This might
appear a shocking suggestion as the term has been hard fought for and has
had, and will continue to have a tremendous polemic value when arguing
against the racism of individuals and institutions that refuse to recognise
the existences, never mind the value, of black artistic activity. [...] In my
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view, the immediate effect of abandoning the label black is emancipatory.
Instantly it raises the question: if what we are doing is not black art what
is it? As soon as this point comes up we have to begin to make our own
definitions. If we don't make this move the black arts Britain are likely to
become as frozen in their saying-it-like-it-is realism as traditional art
forms are in their own exoticism. That is exactly what the establishment
would like. (20)
Thus roughly ten years after the commercial exhibition debut of Pressure, we see
exhortations for the active, self-aware development of the approaches and apparatuses
necessary to the criticism of black British film independent without simply judging films
based on whether they "tells it like it is"-shorthand for whether a given film tells British
stories from a "black" vantage, while faithfully employing the language of British
cinematic "realism. ,,5 But at the same time, we see a developing resistance to the
"totalizing" tendency to describe as "black" all British cinema produced or directed by
non-white members of the Asian, African, or Caribbean diaspora.
This is evidence of a two-pronged debate then in its nascent stages; only later
would it become clear just how fundamentally connected are the destabilization of the
category/descriptor "black" and the continuing development of a "black" British
cinematic aesthetic. In her retrospective analysis "Black British Cinema in the 90s:
Going Going Gone," Karen Alexander describes how that very debate, now more
compressed, continued to inform the production and study of later "black" British film.
Alexander's survey includes a review of Onyekachi Wambu's A Fuller Picture: The
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Commercial Impact o/Six British Films with Black Themes in the 1990s (1999), a study
"commissioned by the Film Policy Review Group to be presented at the New Futures/or
Black British Film conference held at the National Film Theatre in 1998" (Korte and
Sternberg 29). Alexander criticizes Wambu's book as a deeply misguided attempt to
study "black" British film by looking at "black-themed" works-meaning that the
selections Wambu features (Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies (1996) and Neil Jordan's The
Crying Game (1992), for example) are not all the product of black filmmakers, and
sometimes only tangentially concern the black British experience. Observing that
Wambu's volume considers its disparate selection "a reflection of the diversity of product
around that is called black," Alexander claims that "this points to a problem in how race
is looked at in Britain. To quote [Isaac] Julien, 'being black isn't really good enough for
me: I want to know what your cultural politics are'" (110). Thus while the conclusion of
"Black British Cinema in the 90s" is undeniably nationalistic,6 it also works with
Alexander's assessment of the problems ofA Fuller Picture to demonstrate how the
destabilization of the category "-black" continued to inform debates at the base of "black"
British cinema.
Joel Karamath's 2007 article "Shooting Black Britain" advances the issue to the
present day. Pointing to the British film industry's tendency to pursue U.S. audiences by
occluding the cultural specificity of its own films, and how that approach is the main
reason why foreign critics often "look down" on British cinema, Karamath asks what
would those same critics "have made of the term Black-British cinema?" (143). The heft
of "Shooting Black Britain" is essentially an extended answer to that question.
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Positing Pressure, white director Franco Rosso's Babylon (1980) and Shabazz's
Burning an Illusion as the fundamental black British dramatic feature-length films,
Karamath reads the genre forward to current times, charting its development against the
changing sociopolitical context of Britain as well as the ascendant drive for British films
to appeal to American audiences. While "the evolution of a Black British screen voice
has mirrored the fluctuating fortunes of the British industry at large, currently on
something of an upturn" (145), the current drive in the British film industry to seize that
lucrative American audience has also deeply changed the common notion of what
"makes" a "black" British film. Karamath notes how the domestic critical and
commercial success of Saul Dibbs's feature Bullet Boy (2004) "confirms that the
undercurrent of Caribbean culture that defined Black Britain has'slowly but surely given
way to the pervasive aspects ofUS popular culture." He identifies two reasons for this
change, which together indicate the "tied-together" fortunes of British cinema and black
British film: First, "The impaCt of globalisation has, in recent years, tended to obscure
the legacy of an indigenous black film production in Britain in favour of a more universal
notion of 'Black Cinema' dictated by the US industry" (147)-an important and relevant
observation since it attests to the current state of the destabilization of category "black,"
particularly as it is used to describe British film. But more vital in a way is Karamath's
second reason, which briefly analyzes a long-present and lasting condition of the British
film industry and directly identifies one practical reason why Pressure should be
understood as simultaneously oriented toward two very different and separate audiences:
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Audience demographics is a crucial issue when considering the 'crossover'
appeal of any indigenous product. Unlike the situation in the US, any film
released in the UK must appeal to a much broader audience than its
immediate demographic group. [...] The 2 per cent Black British
population of Caribbean descent does not have the financial clout or
critical mass to turn the tide of the mainstream. (147)
These "shifts" and historical developments in the production and study of black
British film have cleared the space required for the consideration ofPressure as a
distinctively Caribbean text. But while they suggest the need for it, they provide neither
the criteria nor the framework necessary for the thorough execution of that kind of
reevaluation. Nor is it enough to simply note the material ofPressure's narrative and,
based on that observation, term it a "Caribbean" film.
Basic to "Conceptualizing the Caribbean" is the process of reexportation, whereby
Caribbean artists attain success at home by first achieving renown abroad. This
dissertation argues that one of the most important implications of reexportation is that
British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean have had, and will
continue to have, a deeply determining effect upon attempts by Anglophone Caribbean
writers and filmmakers to represent the region. This, combined with the potential for
those writers or filmmakers, or the material that they produce, to be "reexported" back to
the region, means reexportation has been, and in all likelihood will continue to be, an
essential,Jormative dynamic to those who study Anglophone Caribbean cultural products
and how they are produced and consumed.
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Among the most significant effects of reexportation is a predictable and
measurable ambivalence in the way that a given producer or text envisions or constructs
its audience. The narrative content and stylistics of domestically produced reexported
texts like The Harder They Come, or even those produced abroad like Samuel Selvon's
novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), often demonstrate an "in-between-ness" evincing
that text's orientation to a "double audience," one composed of both Caribbean and
American/British/European audiences. But while that "in-between-ness" is often present
in both the narrative content and stylistics of these texts, the number of ways in which it
can manifest itself likely matches the number of Anglophone cultural products that have
been and can be produced. In the case of Pressure, perhaps the most efficient to begin
determining how it might envision or construct its "double audience" would be to read
the film through its maker; Ove's biography and career arc, especially up to the point of
Pressure's commercial debut, strongly support the notion that Pressure's narrative and
form consistently evince that "in-between-ness" indicative of the postcolonial dynamics
of reexportation.
Despite international recognition as Britain's first black director of a feature film,
Ove is currently absent from the International Dictionary ofFilms and Filmmakers (4th
edition), David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary ofFilm (2002), and James
Robert Parish and Kingsley Canham's Film Directors Guide: Western Europe
(l976)---each of which are otherwise useful references to the film scholar. Short
mentions and broad recapitulations of the director's life and professional
accomplishments in film, television, and photography are available in scattered reference
116
works, such as the Encyclopedia ofContemporary Latin American and Caribbean
Cultures (2000). But the lack of a single in-depth assessment means that comprehensive
secondary accounts of the filmmaker's biography and achievements continue to be the
product of meeting material from various sources,7 including but not limited to direct
interviews such as the one included in the BFI's 2005 DVD edition of the film. 8
Born in Trinidad in 1939, Ove spent the first twenty-one years of his life there.
He was born and grew up in the diverse area of Belmont, where he found his love of
cinema in raucous exhibition houses like the Olympic Theater, where he consumed a
steady diet of British, American, and continental film. 9 In "Belmont Olympic," a
transcription of a talk that he gave at the Screening Identities conference in 2002, Ove
describes his parents, Belmont, and Carnival:
[Belmont] was a very mixed-race area when I was growing up there in the
1950s. [...] I grew up in a mixed-race, crazy, mad, bohemian family. [...]
My parents were free-lance traders, selling and buying all the time. They
never respected colonialism and did not take racism on-although it was
there. (Korte and Sternberg 219)
While Ove outlines the pronounced linguistic, ethnic, racial, and religious
diversity of Trinidad and the conflicts such difference could sometimes engender, he also
bows to Carnival and its broadly mitigating effect, stating that, "It comes every year, and
everybody in society crosses those lines. People hang out, have a good time and people
get to know each other" (Korte and Sternberg 220). But even more important is how
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those "lines"-and what it took to cross them-likely inflected Ove's earliest experiences
with cinema.
"Going to the movies" in Trinidad was clearly a formative experience for Ove,
who has observed that "we had no television in Trinidad in the 1950s, but we had a lot of
cinemas" (Korte and Sternberg 219), due chiefly to the American construction of several
military bases in Trinidad at roughly the beginning of the Second World War. Trinidad's
theaters at the time reflected both the divisions and interactions between the many types
that composed its population. Ove recalls the classed-based "seating" arrangement of
those movie houses:
You had balcony, house, and pit. Pit was for the guy on the block, house
was for those who could not afford the balcony which means that you had
richer whites and browns up there. But pit was great because that was
where everybody reacted to the movie. [...JFrom that stage on, I have
always wanted to get involved in filmmaking. (Korte and Sternberg 219-
20)
The filmmaker fondly remembers the passion that Trinidadians had for the cinema. For
him and for them, the Olympic Theater was where you "could discover the world outside.
.And not only America because in those days you got world news in the cinemas and
continental films" (Korte and Sternberg 219). But within those pleasurable memories
exists an ambivalence that is extremely important to observe.
In a 1996 interview with June Givanni, Ove observes, "From the age of nine I
wanted to be a filmmaker, something that I never told anybody in Trinidad about because
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they would have laughed at me" (16). A similar statement occurs in "Belmont Olympic,"
where Ove recalls that "wanting to be a filmmaker was a kind of dream I could not even
speak about to my friends" (Korte and Sternberg 219). Thus while those many hours and
plenitude of foreign film at the Olympic Theater were undeniably foundational to Ove's
desire to be a filmmaker, they also informed his early, unspoken understanding that in
order to achieve that dream of prompting and provoking moviegoers with images and
stories of his own, it would be necessary for him to leave the region.
Ove describes the Trinidad of his youth as an energetic place where "although
there was racism, there was also somehow a disrespect for its limitations" (Korte and
Sternberg 221). Ultimately, those twenty-one consecutive years in the melange of
Trinidad would help propel the director through often trying early experiences in Europe
and with filmmaking. That same background, however, would also combine with his
"mixed-race" ethnic background to lend an occasional "racially transgressive" quality to
the filmmaker's career path.
Ove left Trinidad for England at some point between 1959 and 1960. In
"Belmont Olympic," he observes that in while he "never took racism on" in Trinidad,
"when I went to England in 1959 with the intention to study film and art because I was a
painter and I was also doing photography, I got into a lot of trouble for that" (Korte and
Sternberg 220-21). That brief, initial stint in England was a succession of "several odd
jobs like working in a trawler in the North Sea in winter with 17' waves coming over the
boat while you had to gut fish." But then one day, "the opportunity came: They were
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shooting Cleopatra in England with Elizabeth Taylor and were hiring lots of extras to be
in the movie" (Korte and Sternberg 221).
Ove and his actor cousin were cast as extras playing Roman soldiers. Ove
describes that bit of fortune as a function of complexion: Whoever was responsible for
the extras decided that Ove and his cousin were a shade of brown that would resemble
"bronzed Italians" onscreen. It would be interesting to note the frequency with which this
particular anecdote appears,1O since the observation that Ove began his career in the film
industry by being cast as an Italian soldier, but was then "demoted to a slave" when
Cleopatra moved to Rome, has yet to ironize the description of Ove as Britain's first
"black" feature filmmaker.
So Cleopatra moved from London to Rome and Ove went with it, but while that
significantly degraded Ove's onscreen status, Rome would prove an essential introduction
for Ove into the film industry. His years there yielded a "hands-on" experience with
Italian cinema at an especially vibrant time in its history. There he worked for and had
informal exchanges with "Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini. I discovered the realist cinema
and then Bufiuel and the surrealist cinema, and living there and becoming part of it was
quite interesting" (Korte and Sternberg 221). But just as formative and important was
Ove's observation of the raucous, enthusiastically responsive patrons that he encountered
at Italian theaters. In fact, Ove directly connects those experiences and those times at the
Olympic Theater in Trinidad, stating that "Italy also gave me something else that I never
saw anywhere else but in my own country: going to the cinema and find[ing] everybody
reacting, shouting and screaming" (Korte and Sternberg 222). II
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While Rome was a positive experience, Ove did not know Italian well enough to
attend film school there, and thus he returned to London to begin his formal education in
cinema. Givanni's interview with Ove, in which the director recalls that this trip occurred
in either 1965 or 1966, overlaps his account in "Belmont Olympic" of returning to
London, where"a film school had just opened, the London School of Film Technique
[now known as the London International Film School], and a few black guys, including
Yemi Adebade, who is a Nigerian actor, and myself, ended up in this school" (Korte and
Sternberg 222). While Ove saw this as a great opportunity, the experience was not
without its difficulties. In "Belmont Olympic," he describes the raw condescension that
he encountered when he would reveal his "surprising" knowledge of film or refer to
exchanges he had had with such internationally renowned filmmakers as Antonioni,
Pasolini, and Fellini.
That presaged the trouble that Ove had completing Man Out, the first movie that
he tried to make. Man Out was a short film about "a West Indian novelist having a
mental breakdown, the world around him and in his head, and the images he sees, coming
to live in England and trying to be a novelist." Despite the connection between its subject
matter and the surge of West Indian novels that had contributed to and revitalized British
letters in the 1950s, Man Out was never completed. This, according to Ove, was the
result of difficulties securing the funding he needed to finish it, and those difficulties he
continues to attribute to the film's surrealist approach as well as its subject matter. "We
started to shoot a lot of it," Ove remembers, "but nobody wanted to give me the money to
finish the film. They thought: 'what are you trying to say, you should go off and make a
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film in the Caribbean!'" (Korte and Sternberg 222).12 Thus Ove's first completed movie
is The Art ofthe Needle. Not a picture that Ove "went off and made" in the Caribbean,
The Art ofthe Needle is rather an industrial film commissioned by Britain's Acupuncture
Association, intended for students of the practice. 13 Ove's next film was self-financed:
Baldwin's Nigger (1968), a documentary which he both produced and directed.
With Baldwin's Nigger, Ove's first "proper" film, begins a specific and
measurable tension (an "in-between-ness") in his films, as it is here that Ove's complex,
ambivalent notion of "audience"-long gestating since those experiences at the Olympic
Theater-suddenly begins to take shape. Shot at the West Indian Students' Centre in
London's Earl Court, Baldwin's Nigger features expatriate American author James
Baldwin accompanied by author and comedian Dick Gregory. The film's first half
consists of Baldwin's lecture, in which he presents a broad assessment of the planet's
"race problem" and connects that problem to colonialist impulse as represented by the
war in Viet Nam. The second half consists of the discussion that the lecture generates;
chiefly at issue in that "Q&A" are the differences between the situation for blacks in
America and that of West Indians in Britain. Thus while Baldwin's lecture emphasizes
the connections between American blacks and West Indians in Britain, the Q&A is
dominated by questions from the West Indians in attendance, who often emphasize the
uniqueness of their own experience, and often prompt Baldwin to admit the same.
Baldwin's visit occasioned the film; it was not the other way around. In the
interview with Givanni, Ove describes meeting Baldwin beforehand and convincing him
to agree to the documentary (17). Yet the climate in which Baldwin's Nigger arose,
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understood in conjunction with the situation in which it was produced, indicate the
extraordinary challenges that ave faced determining the composition of his audience and
establishing his authority to put anything onscreen. In Black and White in Colour: Black
People in British Television since 1936, ave recounts how the "race problem" as it
appeared on British television in the 1960s "was looked at mainly from the British point
of view. Black people themselves had a lot to say, but nobody was listening and
everybody was making up their own minds. [...] At the same time, the black struggle in
America was having a great impact on black people in England." But while Britain's
racial discourse at the time seemed particularly needful of precisely this kind of entry,
ave vividly remembers "arriving at the Centre with my camera crew to shoot the film,
and even West Indians were laughing-'What are you doing with that camera, boy? He's
a film-maker!' It was obviously strange to them, at that time, to see a black man making
films" (Pines Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936
122).
Baldwin's Nigger was followed by another documentary, Reggae (1970), which
attempted to politically and historically contextualize the genre of music just as it was
gaining in popularity outside the Caribbean. But Reggae, which by two years preceded
its Jamaican, dramatic cousin The Harder They Come, also serves as yet another early
indication of how Ove's films signify a double audience and carefully manage the often
difficult, nomadic line that exists between them. In fact, Reggae could easily be read
alongside Baldwin's Nigger to illustrate how ave gradually refined his management of
that very dynamic.
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In Black and White in Colour, Ove recalls how in late-1960s London, shubeens,
or "blues dances as they were called at the time, where West Indians who were
unemployed or who were working hard all day doing terrible dirty jobs would go at night
to relax," were the primary places where reggae music was publicly played. But the
musical form was also slowly making it to British radio; Reggae was actually the direct
result of a derogatory comment about the genre that Ove heard while listening to reggae
on British radio: "I remember at the time a famous disc jockey (Tony Blackburn) saying
on the radio 'We have a new record from Jamaica and I don't know what to make of it. I
think it was recorded in a toilet somewhere in the Caribbean.' That made me very, very
angry" (Pines Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936
122).
Ove describes Reggae, which is his second film but his first primarily about the
Caribbean, as an attempt "to actually educate the British public about the music and about
where it was coming from." Ove also states that "Reggae was really an independent
West Indian film because another friend of mine-Junior Lincoln, who had just started
producing reggae music here through his company, Bamboo Records-actually put up all
the money for me to do the film" (Pines Black and White in Colour: Black People in
British Television since 1936 122). Consequently, the film's production as a whole, as
well as its content, attests to the "in-between-ness" of Reggae, a distinctively Caribbean
text meant for British consumption, set deliberately against the ethnographic impulse
embodied by such programs as the BBC's The World About Us, for which Ove would
soon produce an intentionally "corrective" entry.
124
In Black and White in Colour, Ove notes that Reggae was shown in theaters and
then was picked up by the BBC, shown on BBC2; "It really took off from there and
traveled all over the world" (Pines Black and White in Colour: Black People in British
Television since 1936 122). -Shortly afterward began Ove's lengthy period making
documentaries for the BBC. The first was Coleherne Jazz and Keskidee Blues (1972),
which Jim Pines, in Black and White in Colour, describes as "about two generations of
West Indians and their music" (Black and White in Colour: Black People in British
Television since 1936 120). The second was King Carnival (1973), which was directly
inspired by Reggae but instead made Trinidad's Carnival its study. King Carnival also
represents the first of Ove's two contributions to The World About Us, the BBC's "nature"
series that has been running since 1967 and is now known as Natural World. In
"Belmont Olympic," Ove makes a slightly confusing reference to his "first job"
(apparently meaning his first television job) in an otherwise revealing account of his
collaboration with the program that, like his casting in Cleopatra, indicates the "racially
transgressive" declination of his career trajectory:
I remember going to the BBC programme The World About Us for my
first job. I had written to the producer, and with a name like Ove he did
not think it was going to be somebody like me coming to see him, and
when I pushed his door open he was shocked. He did not know what to
say. I told him my name was Horace Ove, and he got very embarrassed. I
said: "Relax, don't worry about it. Next summer, if you go out in the sun,
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you'll look as good as me!" He cracked up, and we made three films
together eventually. (Korte and Sternberg 223-24)
While ave states that King Carnival was made "simply because I had made
Reggae before that," observing the connection between these two documentaries, on two
different internationally celebrated forms of Caribbean music, is hardly simple. On the
level of funding, the films plainly differ; while the BFI's Screenonline describes Reggae
as "the first feature-length film financed by Black people in Britain" (Ward), King
Carnival was finalized only after its sale to The World About Us. But the two films are
similar in that they are very clearly positioned to serve as a kind of intermediary between
British and Caribbean concerns-to speak, as it were, to two separate audiences
simultaneously.
Regarding the responses that his film Reggae generated in the Caribbean
community, Ove describes how "a lot of Trinidadians said how could I go off and make a
film about Jamaican culture and music, and not deal with Carnival? And they were quite
right. So I went back to Trinidad and looked at the Carnival." He then shot King
Carnival in Trinidad on 8mm film, then returned to Britain and, on the basis of that
footage, sold the idea to The World About Us, even while fully intending to "break away
from the usual World About Us format [....] that sort of ethnographic film-making which,
strangely enough, they seem to be going back to again" (Pines Black and White in
Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936 123). In the end, the relationship
between the conditions of production for both Reggae and King Carnival suggest a
complex, developing tension in Ove's work, one foreshadowed by his early sense of the
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migration necessary to his dream of becoming a filmmaker. And that "in between-ness,"
that tension foundational to so many of Ove's films, is most strikingly evident in
Pressure, whose status as Britain's "first black feature film" is precisely the result of its
being delicately positioned in between Caribbean and British audiences.
With a production date of 1974, a festival debut date of 1975, and a commercial
exhibition debut date of 1978, Pressure and its production and distribution problems
would occupy much of Ove's time and energy for that four-year span. While Pressure is
the focus of this chapter, establishing the context of its director's biography and career arc
is the emphasis of this particular section. A detailed analysis of Pressure, including the
conditions of its production, immediately follows this biography.
Ove's first project after Pressure was Skateboard Kings (1978). Arguably the
earliest detailed film documentary of the skateboarding culture in California, Skateboard
Kings was Ove's second production for the BBC's The World About Us. In the
(unfortunately titled) article "Ove Offers an Edge of Black Humour," Australian
journalist Paul Byrnes observes that one result of Pressure was that it "established [Ove]
firmly in people's minds as a 'black film-maker,' a responsibility he finds uncomfortable"
(18). Then, in a passage suggestive of the British use ofthe term "black" as a
"multiracial political category," Ove addresses his response to that added sense of
responsibility:
I wanted to break away. A film-maker like me gets typecast as a black
film-maker. People seem to think you are not qualified to do anything else,
but a director is a director, regardless of colour. Some regarded me as a
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kind of father of black film-making in England, but that is a terrible load.
Just being a black film-maker is a heavy load anyway because somehow
you have to answer to everybody every time you make a film. People
meet you in the street or ring you up and say "Why didn't you do this, or
that?" Sometimes it can be a drag. People want you to make films for
them, but you can't. (18)
Skateboard Kings represents Ove's immediate reaction to Pressure and the
response that it had generated. But Skateboard Kings also signifies an extremely
complex moment in Ove's career, since while the film demonstrates a similar kind of "in-
between-ness" as his previous non-industrial films, its focus on the Californian
skateboarding craze indicates a deliberate, temporary attempt to set aside the political
dimension of his status as Britain's first black director of a feature-length film through the
selection and exploration of "lighter" subject matter.
The temporariness of that is clear considering that the year after Skateboard
Kings, Ove co-wrote and directed A Hole in Babylon, a "docu-drama" based on the 1975
Spaghetti House siege in London. In National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies
and Eighties, the late Alexander Walker presents an account of the Spaghetti House siege
that helps contextualize the mixture of documentary and drama present in A Hole in
Babylon. According to Walker, racial fears
[long] latent in the community and growing more and more visible in the
harassment of "coloureds" and black by gangs ofneo-Fascist whites, [... ]
became dramatically sharp-focused in the autumn of 1975, when three
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black criminals, interrupted in an armed raid on a Knightsbridge pasta
restaurant, took hostages and defied the police for several days. Blacks
with guns: this was the alarming aspect of the Spaghetti House siege.
(240)
For Walker, the Spaghetti House siege signifies the racial climate of London in the
1970s. But he also observes that "no major [British film] company devoted a film to the
subject [of race] in the Seventies," which left the exploration in British national cinema of
"the growing tensions between the races" to the country's independent filmmakers (240).
Thus, while Walker never mentions it, A Hole in Babylon qualifies as one of Ove's
contributions to that particular strain.
At the same time, however, A Hole in Babylon represents an active, purposeful
extension of a dynamic that Ove had already motioned toward, beginning with Man Out,
whose surrealism kept it from being completed, and continuing through Pressure, which
includes a heavily debated dream sequence in which an unclothed Tony wanders through
a country mansion, creeps up to a bed, and stabs a pig. In "Belmont Olympic," after
singling out the surreal narrative approach of Man Out as the main reason that he could
not fund the film to its conclusion, Ove connects Man Out to the dream sequence in
Pressure and offers this interpretation ofthat scene's relevance and inclusion:
Because this is what I wanted to say: Life is not just about what is
happening here at the moment, life is about what is going on in your head
and the images that are going through your head. That is what I was
interested in, and that is what from a very early stage on I wanted to put in
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my films. What was sad about those early films I made is that the critics
just dealt with the politics based on the black struggle or the racism. They
never really wrote about my approach, or the style, as they write about
other European film-makers. They avoided this entirely. (Korte and
Sternberg 222)
A Hole in Babylon-which weaves archival footage of the siege with a fictional,
dramatic re-imagining and exploration of the motives of the "three black
criminals"--deeply complicates the then-developing, soon-to-be common, currently
challenged practice of assessing black British films based on their "telling it like it is," or
their ability to recast elements of or moments in British public discourse through a "black
lens" while adhering to the British tradition of cinematic realism, Hence, while Man Out
and Pressure had begun the process, AHole in Babylon is the moment in Ove's career
where he most clearly makes the case that while his films had tended toward stories that
examined characters and events clearly grounded in black British culture and life, the
way(s) in which those stories were told suggest a hybrid approach elided by the
understanding of Ove's films as nothing more than "black" contributions to tradition of
British films with "race relations" as their primary thematic concern. If there is a
"corrective" impulse to this chapter's reevaluation of Pressure, it would be to demonstrate
how that method of interpreting Ove's films ultimately occludes the complex way in
which much of his work--Pressure in particular-are almost always oriented toward
different audiences with sometimes overlapping, often radically different concerns.
130
Over the next seven years, Ove would produce many documentaries and direct a
number of dramas, all for television. His next feature-length dramatic picture was
Playing Away (1986), written by Caryl Phillips and featuring Channel4's "Desmond" star
Norman Beaton (with whom Ove had worked before, during his 1978-1979 stint
directing episodes for the BBC's television series Empire Road). The same year that
Playing Away appeared, Ove received the BFI's Independent Film and Television Award
and was nominated for the Grierson award "for documentary work which is innovative
and socially relevant-for Who Shall We Tell?, his television documentary about the
people of Bhopal" (Pines Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television
since 1936121) and the Union Carbide Plant gas leak that occurred there in December
1984.
In her interview with Ove, Givanni points to Dabbawallahs (1985) and Who Shall
We Tell? and asks Ove to address his occasional tendency to focus on concerns specific
to India and its citizens, or to the nation's emigrants to the U.K. 14 Recounting how
regional and national changes in India's government combined with shake-ups at Channel
4 to put a temporary halt to the project, Ove notes how that development resulted in his
involvement with The Orchid House, a 1991 adaptation of the novel by Dominican
novelist Phyllis Shand Allfrey. That project marked the beginning of Ove's staggered,
physical return to the Caribbean (Givanni 19).
In a Caribbean360.com article dated October 5th , 2007, Josanne Leonard reviews
Ove's most recent project, The Ghost ofHing King Estate (2006); Leonard also
interviews the director and in the process confirms his personal and professional
131
commitment to remaining in the region. Still, the most complete assessment of ave's
journey back to the Caribbean and what it means to him occurs in his 1992 interview for
Black and White in Colour. While Leonard's interview indicates that ave now lives in
Trinindad (Leonard), his interview in Black and White in Colour establishes that his
return to the Caribbean began with a move to Jamaica, not Trinidad. In that interview,
ave describes his decision as a function of Jamaica's "budding film and television
industry" and the seriousness ofthose involved. The following passage, in which ave
compresses wistful memories of his early days making movies in England with more
hopeful observations about the potential for a fertile film industry in the Caribbean,
seems a fitting way to conclude this biography:
I remember when I started making films in the 60s in Britain, I could
always talk about films, discuss new ideas with other film-makers, black
and white, and play around with all kinds of ideas. But that atmosphere
has gone. It is not anywhere in Britain now. You're more likely to find it
in America, in Europe and especially in the Caribbean, where people are
excited about film and television. (Pines Black and White in Colour: Black
People in British Television since 1936131)
Pressure: In-Depth
A self-avowed "highly personal," "partisan" account of British film and the
British film in the 1970s and 1980s (10), Alexander Walker's National Heroes selects
Pressure to begin its discussion ofthe state of black British film in the 1970s. Noting
132
that Pressure was "perhaps the earliest film to reflect the dangerous identity crisis of
British-born blacks," Walker summarizes the film rather easily, as "about a well-educated
black boy who fails to find ajob and, disillusioned further by what he sees as the abject
subservience of his parents to white values, drifts into militant politics" (241 ).15 Yet
Walker, like Pines, Mercer, and others, has difficulty managing the film's decidedly
ambiguous ending. In fact, Walker's interpretation of that scene does little more than
provide historical context for David Wilson's review of Pressure that originally appeared
in a 1978 volume of the Monthly Film Review:
At the end, though, he [Tony] is undecided whether his plight is a specific
black one or a symptom of general economic decay in Britain. As David
Wilson wrote: "It is the measure of Pressure's originality that, for all its
rough edges, it foreshadows what has actually happened." This referred to
the black leaders' welcome rejection of organized militancy in Britain
during 1977. (241-42)16
Walker concludes by observing the nearly three years that elapsed between
festival and commercial exhibition debuts; he finds it not "unduly cynical to suggest that
the Notting Hill race riots on August Bank Holiday 1978 helped [the film] 'surface'"
(242). But while this account of the problems that Pressure encountered corresponds in
spirit with Dve's oft-cited statement that his film was for a time "banned," I? a more
holistic assessment of that delay between festival and commercial exhibition debuts
exposes Walker's reading as surprisingly myopic, given that it occurs in an assessment of
British cinema that is as enveloped in historical and industrial concerns as National
133
Heroes. Because the debates that swirl through and around the different accounts of that
delay suggest how even the industrial history of Pressure is a function of reexportation,
since at the base ofthose debates are questions concerning the composition of the film's
audience, as well as the film's potential to speak to more than one audience at a time. In
the end, radically different conceptions ofPressure's audience combined with the flow of
funding to repeatedly intensify the very public battle between Ove (and Pressure-
producer Rob Buckler) and Pressure's main financier, the British Film's Institute's
Production Board.
Of the numerous reviews and analyses of Pressure that ran in the British press
between the film's production and commercial exhibition, Paul Taylor's "Ultimate
Pressures," which appeared in a late-February 1978 edition of Time Out, offers perhaps
the most neutral, useful overview, particularly to an attempt to revisit the conditions of
the film's production, the way in which the film was received, and the problems that led
to the four-year gap between its production and commercial exhibition debut. Taylor's
primary focus is the industrial history of the film, including and especially its post-
production and distribution problems. In the process of describing those problems,
"Ultimate Pressures" presents what might be the most evenhanded account of the much-
disputed chronology of the film's production and the difficulties that Ove and Buckler
faced between the film's festival and commercial exhibition debuts.
Among the more compelling elements of Taylor's piece is his presentation of the
film's blow-up and distribution problems as a conflation, one precipitated by Dve's going
over budget, mostly "to secure copyrights on the carefully selected soundtrack music."
134
But Taylor finds that in the end, the real reason for the long delay was an amalgam of
inopportune business decisions and contractual wrangling on the part of the British Film
Institute, and the broader problem of what he calls "a crucial shift in the [BFI's]
Production Board's perspective on its role in British 'film culture.'" While not
discounting a reading of events that cites Pressure's subject matter and the ethnicity of its
filmmaker as contributory factors, Taylor's main point here is that it was the
aforementioned "shift," and not "the 'incompetence' with which the BPI has been
charged," that was most responsible for the distribution and blow-up difficulties that led
to that long, unfortunate span between festival and commercial debuts (10).
Taylor's evenhandedness is partly the result of his inclusion of and reliance upon
some of the least debated aspects of Pressure's industrial history. His analysis of the film
and its problems proceeds from a succinct account of Pressure's pre-production,
production, and path to distribution. According to "Ultimate Pressures," Pressure started
in 1974, as script co-written by Ove and Samuel Selvon that was "submitted to the
Production Board, then headed by Barrie Gavin. Accepted, and budgeted at
approximately £18,000, the film was shot on 16mm by a professional crew in October
1974, with Rob Buckler acting as producer" (10). Taylor also indicates that the
principals were almost immediately aware of Pressure's commercial potential and knew
that it would need to be blown-up to 35mm for that potential to be realized. At this point,
Taylor wades into the muddy disputes and contrasting interpretations of the motivations
and setbacks concerning Pressure's industrial history that even now have not been
resolved. But while "Ultimate Pressures" includes claims that contribute to that
135
irresolution, it remains neutral enough throughout to be a framework for an analysis of
the debates concerning Pressure's production and distribution related problems.
After pointing out how securing copyrights for Pressure's soundtrack had put the
film over budget, Taylor notes that "the Production Board's chronically limited resources
could not be stretched further without sabotaging someone else's film." But this impasse,
he notes, most certainly did not keep Pressure out of art-houses or festivals. The film
premiered at the BFI's very own London Film Festival in 1975 even before the blOW-Up
problems had been resolved. According to "Ultimate Pressures," around the time of that
festival, BFI was approached by two separate parties who saw commercial potential in
Pressure and were interested in distributing it. One was Cinegate's David Stone, who
"owns one of London's few first-run houses equipped with 16mm equipment, but [...]
would only negotiate for the rights to Pressure if the BFI themselves would pay for the
blow-up for subsequent release-which they could not afford to do." The other was
Brian Samms of Crawford Films, who "was quite prepared to bear the blow-up costs
provided he could take world rights to the film," a caveat made problematic by the BFI's
previous decision to renew "a long-standing contract with Films Incorporated, signing
away all US rights to all their films to a distributor almost exclusively engaged in non-
theatrical distribution." But eventually, Buckler and BFI were able to free Pressure's US
. theatrical rights to renegotiation, and Crawford Films then signed contracts for 35mm
distribution. It took a year to secure that agreement with Crawford; Taylor notes that yet
another year elapsed between the agreement and the film's commercial debut: "The 12
month delay since [the deal with Crawford Films] has been accounted for by the eventual
136
blow-up of the prints, and the negotiations for a first-run cinema and subsequent selected
circuit release" (10).
It is chiefly the issues foundational to this "narrative" that have preoccupied most
of the lasting disputes and debates concerning Pressure's industrial history. What follows
is an assessment ofthe disagreed-upon aspects of that very history, one that tries to
account for, or include a strong sense of, those critical disputes and debates. My hope is
that by the end of this assessment, it will be clear that the politics of representation-from
"who is represented onscreen and how?" to "which audience has the biggest claim to that
priceless vertical piece of real estate, and why?"-were fundamental to the problems in
Pressure's industrial history.
. Founded in 1933 by the British Board of Trade, the BPI has long had a broad,
underlying mission of promoting, studying, and helping educate the public about British
film. Throughout its lifetime, BPI has for the most part been publicly funded; combined
with the institute's long tenure, this has helped shape the BFI's history as a series of
achievements, challenges, crises, and criticisms. Among the institute's historical
developments most relevant here are the 1952 establishment of the Experimental Film
Fund, which was set up "to help launch new film-makers"; the revival of the
Experimental Film Fund in 1966, as the BPI Production Board; the naming of Mamoun
Hassan as the new Head of Production and his initiation of the production of low-budget
feature film at the BFI; and the formation of advisory committees for each main area of
the BFI's concerns, which occurred in 1973 and coincided with the institute's 40th
anniversary ("A Brief History of the BPI").
137
That the BFI Production Board funded Pressure suggests that a fairest way to
begin an assessment of Pressure's funding difficulties is with the "official" narrative of
that funding, as provided by the BFI. A recent e-mailed query to the BFI yielded a
response from Christophe Dupin, a researcher for the BFI to whom that e-mail was
forwarded due to his decade spent conducting research for a dissertation whose topic was
the BFI Production Board. Dupin's dissertation includes a discussion ofthe Production
Board's attempts in the mid-Seventies to manage both the production and distribution of
its films, in which Pressure features as a prominent example. According to Dupin, the
first agreement between Ove and the BFI Production Board occurred in December of
1973, when the Board, who "[found] Ove's script interesting but flawed," gave Ove £150
to improve it. In June of 1974, the Board provided Ove "£11,000 for the production of
Pressure despite their reservations on the script." By November of 1974, "the budget for
Pressure [had] increased to £14,909" and the Board agreed to cover the increase. The
film premiered at the London Film Festival a year later, in November of 1975; Dupin
states that at that point, "the film [had] again run over budget because of unforeseen costs
of music copyright," and that "the Board agree[d] in principle to make a further
allowance for completion of the film" (Dupin).
A Films and Filming review of Pressure that appeared in early 1978 states that
Pressure was shot in 1974, had been screened at the 1975 London Film Festival "and is
now having its initial commercial showing, following its premiere at the Coronet, Notting
Hill Gate" ("Pressure (Films and Filming)" 49). Roy Blatchford's "Painting it Black in
Babylon," which appeared in The Times Educational Supplement in 1977, also provides a
138
sense of the post-production, distribution-related problems but fills in the three-year gap
that gets no mention at all in that later Films and Filming assessment. Underlying
Blatchford's critique of a lead is the sense that while the occasion of the review is a recent
screening ofPressure, the rarity of public exhibitions of the film attests to the challenges
Ove and Buckler faced getting Pressure to a fair number of screens:
The British Film Institute's policy of supporting challenging and
provocative films from new directors has met with problems from
distributors and much speculative criticism from the press. One such
victim, Pressure, recently received a rare screening at the National Film
Theatre" (79).
"Painting it Black in Babylon" concludes by observing that Pressure still had yet to be
blown up to 35mm, then citing political, self-censoring impulses as chiefly responsible
for the blow-up and distribution problems that the film had encountered. Hence while
"Ultimate Pressures" cites contractual problems and poor business decisions on the part
of the BFI in its assessment of Pressure's difficulty finding a distributor, Blatchford's
analysis represents an alternative and justifiable tendency to read those problems as a
function of the film's "overt polemic," since "the pressure on a white audience is as
unrelenting as the prejudice Tony has to combat" (79).
Like "Painting it Black in Babylon," "Blow-Up Blow for Black Feature," a Screen
International article that ran in 1976, is emblematic of the negative press that the BFI
encountered due to the delay in Pressure's commercial exhibition. Just as its title
suggests, "Blow-Up" provides an overview of Pressure's blow-up problems, one in line
139
with the version of events stating that the film ran over budget while being shot to l6mm,
and that Dve and Pressure's producer Rob Buckler saw the commercial potential of the
film and determined, during production, that Pressure should be blown up to 35mm for
commercial exhibition.
"Blow-Up" opens with an accusatOly summary: "Pressure, the film which has
been described as 'Britain's first black feature' looks like [it is] being assigned to oblivion
because its makers cannot afford the cost ofa 35mm blow-up." The article's assessment
proper, however, begins with the observation that Pressure had "aroused a good deal of
interest from distributors, both in Britain and abroad," which "Blow-Up" states was
unusual for a BFI film. Yet despite this unusual interest and "the BFI's recently avowed
determination to improve the distribution of its product, the [Production] Board feels it is
unable-in view of its limited budget-to come up with the extra £6,000 necessary to
blow up the film from its present l6mm." Thus "Blow-Up" warns that since neither Dve
nor Buckler had the money to pay for the process, and that by the time the article
appeared, no individual distributor had proved willing to absorb the cost, "Pressure's
. future may lie in the l6mm circuit. 'And if that happens,' says Ove"-in a statement that
.directly attests to Pressure's "in-between-ness"-"'it will be branded an "arty-crafty"
film---even though the white and black people it would help can only be reached through
the Ranks, ABCs and Classics'" (S.S. 14).
While Pressure may nominally be "Britain's first black feature," it is also
ironically Britain's first black feature, since the conditions of its production clearly
suggest a range of reasons why another "British black feature" had not yet been made.
140
"Blow-Up" provides a figure of £19,000 as the sum of the BFI's investment in Pressure.
It also recounts Ove and Buckler's indignation at the BFI's decision not to pay for the
blow-up-both men were certain that a commercial release would result in a profit.
Furthermore, Ove also alludes here to an oral agreement, made pre-production, for BFI to
absorb blow-up costs for his feature: "The film, says Ove, was made after former
Production Board head Barrie Gavin, assured them that it would be blown up to 35mm at
a later date. But when Gavin was replaced by Peter Sainsbury, Sainsbury shrugged off
this commitment on the grounds that it had never been put on paper" (S.S. 14).18
Sometime prior to the publication of "Blow-Up," the relationship between
Ove/Buckler and the BFI, at least as represented in the press, had dissolved into distrust
and suspicion. In "Blow-Up," Ove and Buckler emphasize that their wish to blow up
Pressure and release it commercially is chiefly so that they can return the Production
Board's investment and wrest the film from its control. For its part, the Production Board
downplays the notion that the issue was anything more than a simple matter of finances.
After stating that "Peter Sainsbury, head of the production board denied this week that
there was any hostility toward the film" (S.S. 14), "Blow-Up" quotes Sainsbury on his
own "official" position:
"All our films are made on l6mm and they are made essentially;for a non-
theatrical market [....J While one might well get one's money back if
Pressure is distributed, the BFI's accounting system means we wouldn't
get it for some time. If we'd paid for a blow-up it would have meant
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taking the money away from this year's applicants-and we could only
fund a tiny percentage of them anyway" (S.S. 14).
Sainsbury's statement is echoed in Dupin's (much) later assessment of the
situation. Dupin's research into the BFI was the basis of his Ph.D. thesis, written for the
Birkbeck College of the University of London in 2005. 19 In the passage from his thesis
that he pasted into his e-mailed reply, Dupin observes that, "As soon as he was appointed
Head of Production, Sainsbury made the improvement of the distribution system one of
his highest priorities. In his interview with Time Out in February 1976, he openly
accused the Production Board of having in the past focused on the production activity to
the detriment of distribution." According to Dupin, the very example that Sainsbury
provided to illustrate the problem was Pressure, "which in his opinion was made on
16mm despite its obvious commercial potential because this was never properly
discussed or considered by the Board" (Dupin).
Unsurprisingly, Sainsbury's account-and that of the BFI-runs counter to many
of ave and Buckler statements and claims. In "Blow-Up" the pair recount maddening,
frustrating difficulties that they claim to have faced with the BFI while attempting to send
Pressure abroad to festivals. In one instance, the BFI's decision to screen the film in
Bombay and their inability to "lay their hands on the second copy" kept ave and Buckler
from submitting Pressure to the February 1976 Filmex festival in Los Angeles.
According to ave and Buckler, "it was only after something of a battle that they are able
to take the film to Carifesta in Jamaica next month-despite the fact that the Caribbean is
clearly an important market for it" (S.S. 14), an observation that calls into question the
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BFI's earlier decision to enter Pressure at a festival in Bombay. But it also suggests that
beneath the relatively rudimentary matters of funding, deeply informing these particular
problems between the Production Board and Pressure's maker and producer was a
conflicting sense of the film's international appeal.
It was, in other words, a matter of audience: while the BFI's Production Board
imagined for Pressure one kind of audience, Pressure itself-whose script was written
by two Trinidadian emigrants, whose primary concern is the assimilation of a Trinidadian
family emigrated to London, and whose narrative and final scene together challenge the
notion that Pan-Africanism as represented by the black nationalist movement could
resolve the uniquely schizophrenic identity crisis faced by both members and children of
the Windrush generation-makes the argument for an audience with a much more
complex composition. And that issue of audience is basic to the amalgam of distrust and
reassurance, desire and dampened expectations, potential and stagnation, represented by
the discussions of Pressure that occurred in the British press in the period between the
film's festival and commercial exhibition debuts.
In his thesis, Dupin describes the "long press campaign, led in particular by The
Sunday Times' journalist Pilip Oakes and other occasional contributors such as Lindsay
Anderson, [who] condemned the BFI's incompetence over the distribution of Pressure"
(Dupin). While Pressure's blow-up and distribution problems were still a suppurating
wound in the British press, a review of the film appeared "across the pond," in
Hollywood's Daily Variety. Among other things, that review, written by "Hege,"
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suggests how an understanding of the film's production and distribution-related problems
might complicate the assessment of its international reception.
One of the first issues that Variety review exposes is the current absence ofa
comprehensive history of Pressure's exhibition. Dated November 26th , Hege's article
describes the film it examines as "reviewed at Uptown Theatre, Chicago, Nov. 15 1976."
While the review notes that Pressure is "Great Britain's first black feature film," it also
criticizes the film as "about 10 years too late and 25 minutes too long," and finds that
"heavy trimming of the film's dated rhetoric and throwaway scenes could have turned this
item into a credible, and possibly important, document about racism in Great Britain"
(38).
Mentions ofPressure's initial screening at the 1975 London Film Festival are
manifold, but there are far fewer accounts of festival and small-screen exhibitions that
occurred between Pressure's festival and commercial exhibition debuts. In On Location:
Cinema and Film in the Anglophone Caribbean (2000), Keith Warner notes (without
citation) that, "Pressure was shown at film festivals--notably the London Film Festival
of 1975, and the Toronto [International] Film [Festival] of 1976-and in communities
with a heavy Caribbean population" (126). "Ultimate Pressures" and Dupin's lengthy e-
mailed response on the behalf of the BFI are just two of a great number of sources clearly
establishing that when Hege's Variety review appeared, Pressure had yet to be
commercially exhibited, and the financing of the film's blow-up was still enmeshed with
a renegotiation of its stateside distribution rights. Hence, Hege's review must have been
144
for a screening of a 16mm print of Pressure at a festival that was taking place in
Chicago?O
Ove's first feature film was roughly four years old when made its commercial
exhibition debut. The most recent edition of Denis Gifford's The British Film Catalogue
helps confirm this important detail in Pressure's history.21 Marjorie Bilbow's short
review ofPressure appeared in the "New Films" section of the March 4th , 1978 issue of
Screen International, just after that commercial debut. Describing Pressure as a "labour
oflove and dedication that makes its points with objectivity and considerable humour,"
Bilbow's review exposes its allegiance in the countervailing narratives of Pressure's
industrial history, particularly through this and similar "editorializing" assessments:
"Shot in five weeks as an all-out team effort, Pressure is a totally professional production
with many remarkable and moving performances" (21).
The real relevance of Bilbow's review is her pairing ofa recapitulation and
analysis ofPressure's themes with an assessment of what kind of theaters the film should
run well in, and why. Pointing to the four years between production and commercial
exhibition, Bilbow argues that the change in times since then may actually have widened
the film's audience:
"Although the pressure on Tony is all the greater because he is black, the
scene has so changed since Horace Ove and Robert Buckler made the film
in 1974 that many white school-Ieavers will be able to identify with the
young hero as his hopes fade and he is forced into the life of a layabout on
the fringes of crime and violent protest" (21).
145
Note the pronounced difference between this assessment of how the delay between
Pressure's production and commercial exhibition would affect viewing audiences---or
how the film would be consumed-and Hege's description in Variety, two years earlier,
of the film's "dated" quality. While a direct, extended contrast would be unfair,
examining the reason for that unfairness is both important and fair: The difference in
cultural and industrial specificity between the analyses is a clear indication of the
importance of grounding any discussion of Pressure-perhaps even particularly one
whose intention is to establish Pressure as a Caribbean film, through an examination of
the film's ability to address two very different and separate audiences
simultaneously-within the industrial and socio-cultural contexts of British cinema.
Pressure: Caribbean in the British Frame
Focusing on independent and non-commercial British cinema of the 1970s and
1980s, "Bad Days in Babylon," the penultimate chapter of Walker's National Heroes,
opens with the following epigram, pulled from a 1979 National Film Finance Corporation
(NFFC) report:
Appetite grows by what it feeds on: American films create the audience
for other American films, but there are so few British films dealing with
British life and manners that they are a largely unknown quantity to
British audiences. Every British film has to create its own audience
unaided. (Walker 216)
146
The initial clause of that first sentence is difficult to disagree with; the rest of it is
as defensible an assessment as I have seen of how British cinema "endures" the
hegemony of Hollywood. But that closing assertion-its appearance in a historical
account of two decades of British national cinema suggests an irony that surprisingly, by
the end of "Bad Days in Babylon," does not play out: No film can be said to create its
own audience unaided. And if, as that sentence suggests, British national cinema is not
composed of films that "communicate" with other films in its tradition, then it seem
unlikely that it would be possible to speak, even back then, of "British film."
For though "Bad Days in Babylon" never states this, the epigram from the NFFC
report actually addresses the raison d'etre for National Heroes: In order to address
questions concerning how a given British film might have addressed British audiences, it
is necessary to examine how those audiences might have understood that movie in light
of similar ones that came before it in British cinema. It is also necessary to establish how
that same audience response might have been inflected by historical developments, as
well as changes specifically attendant to the contemporaneous state of the British film
industry. Those same basic principles-the former largely concerning genre, the latter
chiefly a matter of historicizing-are at the base of this chapter's attempt to assess how
Pressure, Britain's first black feature-length dramatic film, might have managed the
needs, desires, and expectations of actual British audiences, and not just members of the
British press.
Early in Charlotte Brunsdon's "Not Having It All: Women and Film in the 1990s"
occurs a comparison of Meera Syal's Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Ove's Playing Away
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(1986), which identifies how both films"address" themselves "to [a] strand of British
cinema heritage, Ealing Studios" (168). In that moment, Brunsdon reminds us of the
continual need to observe the relationship that "black" British films often bear to films in
other British cinematic traditions, and motions toward the productive possibilities
available to studies open to such observations.
Among existing scholarship in British cinema, Marcia Landy's British Genres:
Cinema and Society, 1930-1960 offers one efficient manner of determining, through an
in-depth consideration ofthe relationships that exist between Pressure and previously
established British cinematic genres, how Pressure's British audiences might have
interpreted the film in light of its similarities to the British movies that had come before
it, as well as how Ove might have played to and subverted that method of interpretation
in order to produce a distinctively Caribbean film. British Genres,.according to its
introduction, "is a study of British cinema and its relationship to British society through
an examination of feature films produced between 1930 and 1960" (3); the book is
"predicated on the assumption that a study of British genres offers a rich and diverse view
of British cinema and society" (14). Proceeding from the notion that British cinema is
"an important part of cinema history that has been overlooked and misrepresented" (4),
Landy focuses on that neglect as it specifically pertains to British genre film and finds
that the neglect of British genre film "on the grounds of its formulaic quality, its
unwillingness to challenge the spectator, and its encouragement of spurious pleasures
must be ascribed to the refusal to confront the ways in which mass cultural texts harbor
knowledge of unresolved conflicts and desires" (8).
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Landy's introduction cites one fundamental reason why genre studies, perhaps the
most dialectical approach available to those studying the production and consumption of
popular film, remains so important:
The values exemplified in the cinema of genres are not mere reproductions
of a single dominant ideology but the result of many cultural and
economic factors, not the least of which is the commercial cinema's
capacity to address the aspirations of their audiences, even if only in the
interest of commerce. (5)
Carefully positioning her study in terms of Thomas Schatz's influential definition of
genre, in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, as a
"'coherent, value-laden system,'" in which "the system and its values are not ahistorical
and unchanging but rather sensitive to social change," Landy establishes connections
between the attributes of British film genres and the attitudes of the British audiences that
consume them. This is what leads Landy to, throughout British Genres, "assume the
films to be speaking in a language of conflicting attitudes and values that provide insights
into British culture and ideologies" (5). But it is also what makes British Genres useful
to understanding how Pressure's British audiences might have int~rpretedPressure by
assessing it in terms of the British films that had come before it, as well as how Ove's
film might have played to or against that particular strategy of "understanding" it.
Summarizing the development of British cinema during the four decades that she
studies, Landy asserts that "British commercial cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s can
be characterized as working within the genre system" (l0). She then presents a brief
149
chronology of the development of popular films in Britain in terms of their genre; most
relevant here is the description of the rise of the British "social problem" film in the
1930s and 1940s to the genre's prominence in the 1950s and continuation through the
1960s, where it would be represented by such starkly neorealist pictures as Ken Loach's
Cathy Come Home (1966).
Landy observes how World War II "was not only advantageous to the expansion
of government services, but stimulated the growth of science, technology, and the social
sciences and the extension of mass culture." The post-war period saw the continuation of
the "Americanization ofBritish culture" as well as the increasing integration of
journalism, broadcasting, and cinema into British lives. But the war and its disastrous
effect upon the male population of Britain also resulted in "challenges to family life as
women moved into the workforce and assumed greater economic and social
responsibilities in the public sphere" (12). Later, citing Arthur Marwick's The Explosion
ofBritish Society, 1914-1970 (1971), Landy slides from an emphasis on the effects of the
war on domestic concerns into an analysis of its effects on colonial affairs:
The war years also witnessed movements for independence on the part of
"overseas territories acquired over the centuries by a fine mixture of naked
aggression, commercial ambition, evangelical zeal, common-sense,
hypocrisy, and sheer absence of mind," movements which were to acquire
a sense of urgency during the 1950s and 1960s. (12)
Among the genres that Landy's study covers, the British "social problem" film, a subset
of which is the "race-relations" drama, is the one most directly and consistently attuned to
150
these particular concerns. It is little surprise, then, that the social problem film is also the
British geme with which Pressure is most conversant.
The introduction of British Genres features a summary of the British social
problem geme, including an assessment of the characterization, plot lines, and strategies
of narrative development typical of its films, through which it is almost immediately clear
how Pressure both "speaks" to the geme and comments upon or reworks its tendencies
and conventions. For instance, while a familiar narrative strategy of social problem films
is to "present marginalized figures as objects of inspection, interrogation, and correction"
(20), Pressure is a self-aware inversion ofthat approach, since it is the system itself,
rather than the marginalized figure of Tony, that is in need of correction. Consider, too,
what aspects of or influences upon the protagonist of the social problem film are usually
held most culpable for his/her "deviant" comportment:
The offender's behavior is attributable to generalized sources: bad
influences, an impoverished environment, poor family relations. But the
real "offender" appears to be umuly desire, most often expressed in sexual
terms, and the narrative trajectory moves in the direction of "civilizing"
the offender, assimilating him or her into respectable society. (20-21)
Yet Pressure presents precisely that dynamic in its narrative trajectory and attempts to
resolve it, by reorienting Tony's "umuly desire" so that it directed not toward
respectability as represented by his early association with white friends and his mother's
"white" wishes for his future, but rather toward cultural alienation, as represented by
Tony's relationship with his brother as well as his later association with black friends and
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the problematic consummation of his relationship with the black militant movement,
symbolized by his ambiguous sexual liaison with Sister Louise (played by Sheila Scott-
Wilkinson). This reading of Pressure's narrative trajectory actually squares with Landy's
observation that while social problem films initially appear to be engaged in a middle-
class discourse where deliberately emphasized positives include "the wholesomeness of
family life, the respectability of work, and the need for mature guidance into these
channels,"
[...] screening these films in the 1980s, the viewer can identify the now-
stylized elements that are structured around the dramas of conversion.
What the films now make clear is that the identification of a "social
problem" is a dead giveaway of the presence of a disciplinary discourse.
And, as John Hill suggests [in Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema,
1956-1963], the texts reveal the power and threat of sexuality which they
seek to contain. The representations of disruptive sexuality as embodied
in the figures of socially marginalized figures [sic] unintentionally
subverts the narrative itself, now eliciting more empathy for the offender
than for the agents of correction. (21)
Thus Pressure could have been understood, and perhaps should be read now, as both a
social problem film and a self-conscious attempt to challenge, reinvigorate, or redirect
the strategies and attributes of the genre, and in particular the British race-relations
drama.
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"The Social Problem Film," the chapter of British Genres which most extensively
examines the genre, also analyzes some of its most prominent filmmakers and films, and
in the process provides tantalizing points of comparison for Ove's Pressure.
Unsurprisingly, the chapter opens with a definition ofthe genre;22 observing that "the
post-World War II era saw the development and popularity of the British social problem
film," Landy avers that the genre "was directed toward the dramatization of topical social
issues---.:.......capital punishment, prison life, juvenile delinquency, poverty, marital conflict,
family tension, and, to a lesser degree, racism" (432). She then motions toward the
genre's historical specificity and, citing Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy's The Hollywood
Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties,
thickens her assessment of the conventions of the genre:
Unlike the prewar genres [...] these films were eclectic in nature, fusing
melodrama, docudrama, and social realism. According to [Roffman and
Purdy], "The problem film combines social analysis and dramatic conflict
within a coherent narrative structure. Social content is transformed into
dramatic events and movie narrative adapted to accommodate social issues
as story material through a particular set of movie conventions. These
conventions distinguish the social problem film as a genre." (432)
British Genres sees the eclecticism ofthe British social problem film as it existed
during the era under investigation as "a response to a variety of social and economic
conditions that reveal the sensitivity of genre productions to change" (432). Following a
brief review of the development of British documentary film and its importance to the
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British social problem film-in particular the former's tacit ratification of the notion that
certain conventions signify a film's engagement with "reality"-Landy mentions Italian
neorealism as "among the many lines of influence that intersect in the rise of the social
problem film" (436). She then historicizes the development of the preoccupations and
"style" of the social problem film ... and here "style" is chiefly a matter of narrative
tendency. Observing that British public discourse after the war changed from wartime-
related concerns to methods of transforming the country to a peacetime society, Landy
finds that
[t]he films' preoccupation with disrupted family life, law enforcement,
generational relationships, juvenile delinquency, and poor "social
adjustment" is consonant with concerns expressed by lawmakers,
sociologists, and popular journalists. The style of these films bears the
marks of the wartime documentary and of the feature films that strove to
create a sense of common purpose and of attention to the problems of
everyday existence. (436)
Landy then points out how often social problem films tended toward certain production
practices, such as "location shooting and the foregrounding of ordinary protagonists" that
were clearly oriented toward "locating [the film's] action in a 'real' context" (436).
Then-in a statement that could double as a description ofPressure's indeterminate final
scene-Landy presents what she believes truly makes these social problems films unique:
What makes these texts different from their precursors is not only their
overt sociological orientation, their striving for topicality, but the ways in
154
which their quest for realism only exacerbates tensions in the texts,
revealing a disjunction between the ostensible sociological concerns of the
films and the contradictory meanings generated. What is memorable
about the films is not their dissection of a particular social problem so
much as their exposure, mainly unconscious, of their failure to resolve the
problems they pose. (437)
Observing that "the Hollywood social problem film of the 1940 and 1950s [...]
provided models for the development of the British social problem film" (437), Landy
then briefly compares and contrasts the forms. While both mix "melodrama, film noir,
social topicality, and a concern with rehabilitation," Hollywood social films "place
greater emphasis on melodrama and psychic malaise"; British social problems films
Landy notes, "are more preoccupied with social rehabilitation," though she finds even
that assessment too restrictive and clarifies it in a way that further harkens to Dve's
Pressure:
[T]hough the films purport to examine the social landscape, the position of
characters in various institutional structures, economic and class issues are
submerged as the films concentrate on questions of adjustment. In their
treatment of social issues, these social problem films display a tendency,
direct in some instances, covert in others, to adopt a psychological
,
treatment of the characters, linking their marginality and aggressive
behavior to unresolved oedipal conflicts and to repressed sexuality. As in
the family melodramas, the narratives see the causes of conflict in family
155
. relationships, in disturbed relations to authority figures, and in conflicts
over identity. (437-38)
This is followed by an exhaustive analysis of British social problem films,
particularly those of the 1950s. There Landy identifies several thematic categories within
the genre and examines each individually; among them, only "Youthful Rebellion: The
Young Male" is relevant to this chapter's main concern. Landy's discussion of that
category begins by making connections between youth-oriented 1960s British film and
the social problem films that had so frequently populated British screens for the previous
two decades. Criminality and crime detection, "in particular with young offenders," was
a chief concern of those social problem films. Thus the emphasis on youth and "social
deviance" prevalent in 1960s British cinema films "did not arise in a vacuum but had
been preceded by a number of films that addressed the problems of youth and especially
of working-class young people" (442).23
"High points" of Landy's "Youthful Rebellion: The Young Male" category
include Brighton Rock (1947), The Guinea Pig (1948), The Boys in Brown (1949), A Boy,
a Girl and a Bike (1949), and J. Lee Thompson's The Yellow Balloon (1952), the latter
noteworthy as a near mirror-image of Ove's first feature-length dramatic film. Landy
describes the protagonist of The Yellow Balloon as "a young child trapped between a
mother who has upwardly mobile aspirations for her son, a father who is ineffectual in
countering her strong will, and a criminal who exploits the boy for his own ends" (450).
But her account of the film's narrative produces even more striking points of comparison
between Pressure and this emblematic social problem film:
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By making a young boy rather than a girl the protagonist, by presenting
the male characters as either completely subordinated or completely
rebellious, the film appears to be ascribing criminality to female
repressiveness. In particular, Frankie's mother, obsessed as she is with
respectability, seems to be the dominant agent of repression within the
claustrophobic environment of the home, ruling her husband and son with
an iron hand. (451)
The assessment ofPressure's complex relationship with the British social
problem film certainly suggests how regular British filmgoers might have responded to
Pressure, as well as how the film or its maker might have managed or played against
those expectations. But historicizing that same response, or establishing how it might
have been inflected by historical developments as well as changes specific to the
contemporaneous state of the British film industry, provides a more detailed, nuanced
picture.
The value of this approach is evident in Walker's National Heroes, a classic
examination of the British film industry in the 1970s and 1980s. While the book's
introduction readily admits the study's drawbacks and limitations-"personal" and
"partisan" are two descriptors that it offers-it also gestures toward the strengths of
Walker's approach. National Heroes is simultaneously forward and backward looking;
according to Walker, the structure of National Heroes is "roughly but not scrupulously
chronological" and "use[s] the privilege of hindsight [... ] to advance and retreat in time"
157
(10). Combined with the frequent appearance in the preface ofterms like "story," "cast,"
and "characters," as well as their frequent use throughout, signifies a "history" in the
modern narrative form.
"State of Change," the book's first chapter, begins with an overview of British
cinema at the end of the 1960s. Walker observes that the first few years of the 1970s
were portentous for the entire industry; while the 1960s had been an energized time for
British cinema, "British cinema now, in contrast, looked like the country itself: it had a
residual energy, but in the main was feeling dull, drained, debilitated, infected by a run-
down feeling becoming characteristic of British life" (15).
By the beginning of the 1970s, Hollywood had sharply curtailed its production
schedule for films made in Britain. There was also an increase in violence in British
films, which Walker argues was precipitated by the Kray trial, which "lasted from 7
January to 5 March 1969 [and] worked its way deeply into public consciousness by
saturating the media before and during it and for years afterwards" (23). The salacious
case involved three brothers, Reggie, Ronnie, and Charles- Kray, who with seven others
"had been variously charged with murder or complicity to murder" Jack McVitie, "who
was used as an 'errand boy' in the Kray twins' extortion racket" (22). There was a general
feeling of "revulsion for the times" (23); according to Walker, the trial anticipated and
symbolized this, just as it presaged the rise in crime that Britain faced in the 1970s.
Walker observes how the aesthetics of the "New Hollywood" films being
exhibited in England combined with the Kray trial and the public interest that it generated
to spur the production of films that featured a measurable increase in the amount of crime
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and violence represented. An early, prominent example of this is Get Carter (1971),
which was produced by Michael Klinger, whom Walker terms "a most capable and
unsqueamish film-maker, well-equipped to emulate the realism that American films were
now flaunting with the disappearance of the old 'Morality Code'" (25). Written and
directed by Mike Hodges, Get Carter featured Michael Caine in the role of Jack Carter.
Walker finds the roots of Caine's portrayal in Nicol Williamson's performance in Jack
Gold's The Reckoning (1970). There Williamson is Michael Marler, "a back-street yob
from Liverpool" who moves with remarkable speed up the ranks of a big London
business. He is Caine's Carter's precursor as "a hard man compelled to return and seek
his destiny back where his origins lie." More directly relevant, however, is the thematic
connection that Walker draws between the two films: "Like Get Carter, [The Reckoning]
took a breath-takingly cynical view of an entrepreneur acting out his imperatives in
response to the tribal law of the fittest man's survival," which Walker states introduces
the era's onscreen melding of criminal dynamics and business concerns. But it is also
indicative of something more, as the public's desire or appetite for such narratives or
narrative patterns in commercial cinema could just as easily suggest a general sense of
feeling excluded from economic progress through legitimate means. This is what
prompts Walker to follow his comparison of Get Carter and The Reckoning with the
observation that, "Once again, the cinema was in tune with the predominant mood of
British society" (26).
Focusing on independent and non-commercial British cinema during the period
under consideration, Walker's ninth chapter, "Bad Days in Babylon," establishes that the
159
financial state of the British film industry in the 1970s meant that the industry as a whole
was an unrewarding field to first-time filmmakers:
The absolute beginners were the truly poor of the Seventies: the film-
makers possessing more aspirations than years of experience and next to
no "credits." Their hopes of finding finance were piteously small. The
National Film School which opened its doors in late 1970 (with twenty-
five students) had neither the ambition nor means to launch its graduates
into production. (216)
There was nothing like Channel 4 to "act as 'publisher' of the works of
independent film-makers and give them exposure in the cinemas before transmitting them
on the box." In fact, primarily because they were strapped and investment in films would
not have qualified as chargeable against tax, "None of the major TV networks financed
theatrical films to any extent in the Seventies" (216). Even the NFFC was facing difficult
times. Walker describes the 1970s as the "harshest, leanest years" for the NFFC since its
establishment in 1949 as a "State bank for independents." This was the result of the
NFFC spending the decade "being financially harassed by a series of contradictory
Government policies: one minute they seemed to assure its future, the next they
indicated that film funding had no right to State subsidy at all" (217).
Of the more relevant sections of "Bad Days in Babylon" is a section composed of
discussions, recaps, and analyses of specific British independent or non-commercial
filmmakers and films ofthe 1970s and 1980s. There Walker observes that despite a
difficult financial environment, there did appear some non-commercial films,
160
occasionally the product of established filmmakers but more often of "relative
newcomers." But these films were clearly "made against the odds: some were 'one-
offs'-and some were 'write-offs'" (220). Such "lack of continuity" greatly contributed to
the crisis of identity that marked British national cinema from the 1970s through the
resurgence of that tradition marked by the worldwide success of such films as Chariots of
Fire (1981), solely British production, and Gandhi (1982), co-produced by British and
Indian concerns.
Among these "one-off'/"write-off' filmmakers is Barney Platts-Mills, worth
mentioning here for the relevance ofBronco Bullfrog (1970), the director's neo-realist
feature-length debut that introduced east-end London's "suedehead" subculture to the
British screen. Made in 1969 but first commercially exhibited in 1970, "shot for £17,000
over six weeks in London's East End using locals and young professionals" and
distributed by the Boulting Brothers and writer-director team Frank Launder and Sidney
Gilliat, Bronco Bullfrog, which shares its name with one of its main characters, "is a film
by which we can precisely date the onset of youthful disenchantment in the cinema once
it was seen that the affluence of the Sixties wasn't going to stay around and let Bronco's
generation share in it." Ultimately, Walker's assessment ofBronco Bullfrog in National
Heroes finds that "from this film on, whenever the young are featured in British films it is
with growing resentment against society and deepening individual despondency" (220),
which suggests that Bronco Bullfrog can be read as either prefacing the development of
that same theme in Pressure, or simply opening the space required for the cinematic
explication of that theme in British public discourse.
161
According to "Bad Days in Bablyon," the BFI Production Board, led at the time
by Mamoun Hassan, funded "one of the of the earliest-perhaps the first-ofthe films
dedicated to the plight of Britain's displaced Asians." The film, A Private Enterprise
(1974), "was directed by Peter K. Smith and co-authored by him and Dilip IEro" (221).
Walker's analysis of the film emphasizes its anti-polemical approach and, pursuant to that
observation, includes statements that the director made during a 1975 interview with The
Guardian: "In no way was the film a polemic on race relations. "My purpose is to
speculate, not to impose my own view, which is where again I differ from someone
working in Ken Loach's area." According to Walker, the film's director "consulted no
community groups" when he came to the film, which Walker cites as responsible for the
"refreshing freedom from any sense of vicitimization: the Indians in it saw themselves as
movie stars, not representative casualties of a reluctantly multi-racial Britain. [...]
Humanity rather than dialectic marked the film: a rarity in the BFI context" (222), which
is a debatable moment in Walker's analysis, since there he appears to equate "humanity"
with the absence of a palpable sense of anger or resistance, or even the desire for redress.
But beyond this, and beyond the observation that the approach ofA Private Enterprise is
in many ways antithetical to that of Pressure, is the more suggestive "problem" that if
black British film includes both Asian-oriented film and films (like Rosso's Babylon)
with white directors but with mostly black cast and "black" concerns, then A Private
Enterprise would clearly predate Pressure as Britain's first "black" feature-length
dramatic film, and hence would offer a prior "black" film against which British audiences
might have read and understood Ove's contribution.
162
In a short review of Pressure that appeared in the "New Films" section ofthe
March 4th, 1978 issue of Screen International, just after the film's commercial debut,
Marjorie Bi1bow argues for the film's appeal to a diverse audience, finding that the
country's current economic state means that "many white school-Ieavers will be able to
identitY with the young hero as his hopes fade and he is forced into the life of a layabout
on the fringes of crime and violent protest" (21). Walker's discussion ofthe work of
Derek Jarman, and in particular Jubilee (1978), clarifies how that particular audience
might have responded to Pressure in the way that Bilbow anticipated.
"Bad Days in Babylon" describes Jubilee as "the first full-length film to draw its
looks and threats from the phenomenon of British punks." The film, which "did very
well in Britain and on the continent" (238), "was a violent collage of everything Punk that
was then around," eventually became a kind of"glossary of many even more violent
phenomenon that were on the way as British society changed its nature and things got
harder and more hopeless for the unwaged" (233). Jubilee imagines a stark, anarchic
state of England, one marked by excessive violence and the wholesale application of the
punk aesthetic. While the occasion of the film the 1977 Silver Jubilee celebration of
Queen Elizabeth II, the frame of its narrative is 17th century England. Jubilee begins
with Queen Elizabeth I asking her magician to summon an "angel" to entertain her with
visions of the future, then presents Elizabeth and her court touring a chaotic, wildly
damaged England. Teenagers roam the streets of London in marauding gangs, armed
with semiautomatic weapons and a willingness to kill on a whim. And while Amyl
Nitrate, the most prominent female character in the film, introduces herself to the viewer
163
through a speech on how this "current," anarchic state of England was achieved by those
who finally learned how to make their desires reality ("Our school motto," she says, "is,
'Faites vos desirs realite.' 'Make your desires reality"'), Jubilee itself demonstrates
concern with everything except for the maintenance of the current state of affairs.
The ways in which Jarman's Jubilee clearly differs from Ove's Pressure are
almost too many to count. Yet there is a connection between these films that runs deeper
and is more suggestive than the simple observations that Jubilee began its commercial
run only a month before Pressure, and that the two films exhibit a pungent sort of disgust
for the current state of affairs. For both Jubilee and Pressure appeared within and were
occasioned by the same economic environment and public dissatisfaction with the way
things were; the two films taken together suggest how the tastes of British filmgoers
across a broad spectrum might have been affected by or a function of the general
downturn in the country's state of affairs. As "Bad Days in Babylon" observes:
"The Discreet Plight of the Bourgeoisie" was how The Guardian labeled a
series on middle-class "hardship" in November 1976; while that same
month Newsweek featured a cover story on "Britain's Battered Middle
Class," squeezed by high double-figure inflation and a devalued pound
sterling now worth $1.65 as against $2.32 two years earlier. [... I]n the first
six months of 1967 there had been 71,060 unemployed youngsters under
the age oftwenty; in 1977 there were 252,328-no wonder the prevailing
style of Pop was dubbed "Dole Queue Rock." (234)
164
Simultaneously surveying the youth-oriented and "black" films of the two decades
under consideration in National Heroes, the "Rude Boys, Black Boys" section of the
chapter "Bad Days in Babylon" further thickens the context in which British audiences,
particularly the young, white British filmgoer, might have interpreted Ove's Pressure .
. Expressing a lack of surprise "that British mainstream cinema returned to the theme of
youth at the end of the Seventies," Walker begins his study ofthose films with Franc
Roddam's Quadrophenia (1979), which "felt as if it had been made not in a time-slip, but
a ghetto." "Much superior" to Quadrophenia was Rude Boy (1980), financed by Michael
White and produced by Clive Parsons and Davina Belling. Though the film starred
seminal punk rock band The Clash, Walker finds its members the film's "nominal stars,"
as the film's real theme "was a Britain that was falling apart. [Rude Boy] opened with a
white boy spitting at a Royal limousine and closed with a black boy in a prison cell being
forced to sign a 'confession'" and a depiction of Margaret Thatcher's acceptance of the
post of Prime Minister. "In between abrasive start and cynical finish," states Walker, "lay
a frightening and squalid vision ofthe 'Two Englands'" (239).
Walker's reading of Rude Boy is emblematic of the strategy of the section of the
chapter in which it appears: Through a comparison of independently produced youth-
oriented and "black" films, "Rude Boys, Black Boys" in part argues that Britain's
economic problems in the 1970s contributed to an uneasy compression of racial and class
concerns, and tracks how that compression was felt and interpreted by the young, white
British filmgoers of the time. Thus the historian shifts smoothly from his reading of Rude
Boy into a more race-specific assessment of the decade's independent/non-commercial
165
-film. Identifying the 1975 Spaghetti House siege as a watershed or synecdoche for the
state of "black/white" relations in England at the time, he contrasts the relatively peaceful
resolution of the siege with the lasting effects the siege had on "black" Britain:
The outcome was happy in the sense of lives saved [....] Otherwise, things
were not so clear cut. Though the Law managed to prevent a political
twist being given to a criminal act, the exhaustive investigation of black
culture in Britain which took place as a result [...] ensured that black
consciousness in Britain was effectively heightened. (241)
While Walker's assessment ofPressure is certainly not at odds with the
overwhelming tendency to identify it as Britain's first black dramatic feature, National
Heroes cites not Pressure but Anthony Simmons's Black Joy (1977) as "the first 'race'
film to get fairly wide circulation." Independently produced by Elliott Kastner, Black Joy
was based on playwright Jamal Ali's Dark Days and Dark Nights. Bringing the play to
the screen involved transposing it "into seething Notting Hill"; Walker finds that
Simmons "provided [the film] with the energy and salty dialogue of a Joan Littlewood
production at Stratford East in the 1950s. [...] The characters were as Dickens might have
drawn them, had he lived to see the New Commonwealth carrying its cardboard suitcases
to Old London" (242).24
The second film that National Heroes sets Pressure in the context of is Franco
Rosso's Babylon (1980). Despite Pressure's commercial debut occurring in February of
1978, National Heroes argues that "the presentiment that a racial underclass was in the
making had to wait a couple more years before finding its more frightening form in a
166
film." For Walker, Babylon was that film; in it, "no compromises were allowed to tone
down the hue of black or the cry of despairing anger among a gang of Debtford
youngsters who sometimes lapsed into such thick Jamaican patois that sub-titles were
used to interpret what they said" (242), a clear indication that its combination of realism
and exoticism may have been what made Babylon so appealing. In fact, Walker refers to
that combination and how it produces an "integrity" that he finds "all the more
commendable (and surprising) since the film was technically the work of
whites---directors Franco Rosso and Martin Stellman, producer Gavrik Losey and
photographer Chris Menges, with finance from the NFFC and a records company
interested in exploiting the reggae soundtrack" (242-43).25
The underlying problem with this reading-what makes especially poignant its
position here, at the conclusion of this long examination of Dve's best-recognized but
perhaps most misread film-is one of deixis: Walker's interpretation of Babylon falters
fundamentally because it is based on the be1iefthat both he and the film itself occupy
roughly the same position in terms of the discourse in which his assessment ofBabylon
participates and to which it contributes. That is, Walker's reading of Babylon is set
squarely and irrevocably within a unilaterally "British" understanding of the context of
British cinema; it does not interrogate the many ways in which Rosso's film may well be
challenging or subverting the expectations that govern how the British audience
consumes that very cinema.
Terming Babylon "not a meditation movie, but a red alert," Walker points to the
whites in the film's diegesis, who
167
[... ] were either threats or were themselves victims. For once, a film
made no bones about how difficult it was for whites to enter this world:
the white misfit caught in the undertow of the black gang's exoticism
draws the recoil of anti-white prejudice on himself. (243)
Yet somehow these observations are not extended as a potential comment on the white
British viewer, to whom films like Babylon and Pressure would had to have been
oriented were they to make a profit. The film's depiction of whites "caught in the
undertow of the black gang's exoticism" in a very real way mirrors the exoticism in which
a white British viewer of Babylon or Pressure would likely engage.
To understand how important this is to an attempt to historicize the British
audience's response to Pressure, one can consider what might have happened had
National Heroes "thickened" its examination ofthat film by looking without British
national cinema while remaining within the boundaries of the country-to, say, Perry
Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972), which preceded Pressure in terms of
commercial exhibition in England.26 Henzell's film was a readily available example to
the British filmgoer of a "white" director who had made a filmconceming the Caribbean,
and who had proved perfectly capable of featuring "the exotic"-and at times even
emphasizing it-in order to make a profit.
The Harder They Come departed from previous major, mainstream cinematic
treatments of the Caribbean in that it actively attempted to relieve the region from its
usual role as "passive backdrop"; the film made Jamaica and its poor, black people its
subject matter. But in terms of execution and reception, that transposition would yield
168
something much more complex, as in the end the subject matter of The Harder They
Come is as much Jamaica and its people as it is the relationship between the perceptions
of the Caribbean and its people as held by the American and/or British viewers (who
constituted the film's biggest potential viewing audience) and the self-perceptions of the
people who were being represented onscreen. Thus The Harder They Come is recognized
as Jamaica's first feature film in part because it is the first feature film from Jamaica that
successfully situated itself "in between" Caribbean and American/British concerns.
And there is Pressure alongside it, waiting for its status as Britain's first black
dramatic feature-length film to challenged or unpacked in a similar style.
Endnotes
1 Prominent scholars of black British cinema, Mercer and Jim Pines among them, have
observed that a direct influence on the "realist" leanings of early "black" British film was
that Britain's "race problem," on the infrequent occasion when it was the chief focus of
British mainstream movies, tended to be "ghettoized" to British "race relations" drama,
that subset of the social problem film that featured narratives where "blacks" were
portrayed either as "victim" or "problem." In both "British Cinema and Black
Representation" and "The Cultural Context of Black British Cinema," Pines describes
Pressure and Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981) (the latter groundbreaking
for its focus on the experiences of a young black British woman) as "transitional" black
British films in terms of how they both advance and critique the dominance of the realist
aesthetic in early "black" British film.
2 Mercer notes that while the channel "contributed significantly to the expansion ofthe
independent film production sector [... it] was also mandated to provide for the unmet
needs of various 'minority' audiences, and as a new model of public service broadcasting
which explicitly recognised the diversity of audiences in a plural society" ("Recoding" 6).
3 His main wish is for that criticism to more directly challenge "some of the realist
assumptions we tend to take for granted in black art" (Henriques 19).
169
4 According to "Realism and the New Language," "the major stumbling block for the
development of any black aesthetic or artistic perspective is a general unspoken reliance
on a realist tradition" (18).
5 A chronological examination of the critical response to Pressure up to then
demonstrates the complexities of that development. Early treatments of the film simply
assume a purely realist approach and, as such, evince a broad determination to establish
Pressure as-to borrow a phrase from famed Caribbean literary critic Kenneth
Ramchand-"social document" ("Song ofInnocence" 225). Ove himself has often
pointed directly to Pressure's controversial penultimate scene, a dream sequence in which
a nude Tony enters the bedroom of a country mansion and stabs a pig, and noted that
despite how such surrealistic elements challenge the easy assumption of a realist
approach, the critical reception of Pressure tended to focus on "the black struggle or the
racism" and not on the film's style (Korte 222). In "The Cultural Context of Black British
Cinema," which was published in 1988, Jim Pines notes the film's "documentary-like
fictional narrative," but despite the sensitive observation that the film "highlighted from
the Black perspective-perhaps for the first time in any British film-the contradictions
and impossibilities inherent in the idea of 'Black British'" ("The Cultural Context of
Black British Cinema" 31), Pines never addresses how the film's style might be
connected to that understanding.
6 Alexander concludes "Black British Cinema in the 90s" with the claim that "what
differentiates black British culture from what goes on in the United States under the
banner of black culture is the 'post-colonial hybridisation' of British culture [... which]
makes Britain, and particularly London, the cultural capital of the world" (113).
7 Foundational to the biography of Ove presented here are two separate works. The first
is "Belmont Olympic," an autobiographical retrospective that Ove delivered for the
Tiibingen symposium at the Screening Identities conference in 2002; that talk was
transcribed for Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg's Bidding/or the Mainstream? Black
and Asian British Film since the 1990s, which was published in 2004. The second is a
biography/interview with Ove that appeared in the 1992 edited volume Black and White
in Colour: Black People in British Television Since 1936. Edited by black British film
scholar Jim Pines, Black and White in Colour, which is "based on interviews and other
material which went into the making of the [1992] BFI documentaries Black and White in
Colour for the BBC" (7), includes a short biography and an extended interview with Ove
that, in concert with "Belmont Olympic," produce the necessary framework for an
holistic, critically useful account of the filmmaker's life and accomplishments. That this
is even possible is a testament to the sensitivity and comprehensiveness of Black and
White in Colour's "treatment" ofOve, as well as Ove's tendency, in "Belmont Olympic,"
to lend clarity to the many claims about his background and experiences that so
frequently appear without citation. Other sources also inform the discussion of Ove's
biography that appears below; most prominent among those is "Horace Ove: Reflections
170
on a Thirty-Year Experience," June Givanni's 1995 interview that Ward paired with
Black and White in Colour's treatment of ave to generate the BFI's account of the
director's background and accomplishments.
8 It is worth noting that despite the access to ave that the DVD suggests-and despite
ave's lengthy, complex involvement with the BFI-the institute's biography of
filmmaker, as written by Paul Ward and available through Screenonline, never refers to
the interview included on the DVD but instead cites two others, one with June Givanni
and the other with Jim Pines.
9 Both ave's environment and heritage were racially and ethnically complex and
inclusive, a fact that does not frequent accounts of his background and assessments of his
importance to black British cinema. In fact, ave's interview with Givanni is particularly
striking in that it includes a moment where the director-still almost universally and
simplistically labeled a "black filmmaker"-self-identifies as part-Indian and points
directly to his "mixed-race" heritage as fundamental to the diversity of his subject matter
("Thirty-Year" 19).
10 My research found two newspaper articles/reviews (Christian Patterson's 1987 article
"Life is a Carnival (Sometimes)" that ran in The Independent, and Paul Byrnes' 2004
review "ave Offers an Edge of Black Humour" that ran in Australia's Sydney Morning
Herald) which open with that story.
11 Apparently, this is what led him to claim-in 2002, at a symposium for a film scholar's
conference in Germany-that "the greatest place to see a film is either Italy or the
Caribbean" (Korte 222).
12 That funding difficulty led Ove to shelve the project indefinitely; in his interview with
Givanni, Ove states that he is "still trying to finish it with the same actors who have aged
nearly thirty years" (17).
13 In his interview with Givanni, Ove describes the film as the result of bumping into then
persuading the head of the association at a party; "I convinced him that I could make the
film for him and he gave me the money to do it" (17).
14 The director's response includes details of his early involvement with a film on Indian
folk heroine Phoolan Devi; Ove describes how that project, which included 3 years worth
of research before Channel 4 shelved it, would eventually become Shekar Kapur's 1994
film Bandit Queen.
15 Walker's interpretation of Pressure is certainly defensible, but it also elides many of the
film's most important elements. These include that Tony's mother is the parent who most
clearly ascribes to "white values" (his father nearly eviscerates her for this toward the end
of the film), and that Colin-Tony's Trinidad-born brother who identifies with black
171
nationalism in what the film, through its ending, appears to aver is a misguided and
doomed attempt to hold on to his sense of who he is-is the pole that pulls Tony toward
black militancy; Tony does not simply "drift" into those "politics."
16 Again, while this is not an unjust reading, it simply does not take into consideration
that the film presents its black militancy as on loan from America, and that it may be
precisely this application of an American movement to a British concern-as if "black" is
"black" regardless of context-that the film may be pointedly critiquing. Furthermore, it
is not altogether coincidental that this particular theme would likely be easiest to detect
for those who have read Pressure co-writer Samuel Selvon's novels, in particular Moses
Ascending (1975), which lampoons the transposition of American-style black nationalism
to Britain in a similar way.
17 ave's statements about that ban are probably best considered alongside the observation
that were Pressure ever officially banned, it likely would have been reflected in
Pressure's official classification by the British Board of Film Censors, which in 1984
changed its name to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). An e-mailed query
to the BBFC yielded a response by BBFC Education Officer John Dyer, who found the
original BBFC "paper file" concerning the BBFC's classification of Pressure in 1976;
according to that file, the film "was awarded an 'AA' certificate which is roughly
equivalent to [the BBFC's] modem day 'IS' certificate or a low-end US 'R'
rating"-hardly indicative of a film too controversial to be exhibited. Yet Dyer also
states that the available information does not indicate whether the film suffered an actual
ban before its classification by the BBFC. Also "muddying" those waters is that in
Britain, despite a given film's classification, local authorities have the final legal right to
decide whether it can be exhibited (and to whom) in their cinemas.
18 "Blow-Up" is also notable for its claim that "Pressure would not even have been shown
at the London Film Festival-as it was last year to considerable acclaim-if ave had not
organised it himself. The Production Board, he says, told him it was too late and too
long" (14). This despite that the BFI having actually run the LFF since its inception in
1956.
19 Dupin's thesis is titled The British Film Institute as a Sponsor and Producer ofNon-
Commercial Film: A Contextualised Analysis ofthe Origins, Administration, Policy and
Achievements ofthe BFI Experimental Film Fund (1952-1965) and Production Board
(1966-1979).
20 Hege never mentions a festival, Mimi Plauche, who is currently serving as the feature
film programmer for the Chicago International Film Festival, verified in a recent e-
mailed response that ave's Pressure was indeed an entry at the 12th Chicago
International Film Festival in 1976, which was screening films that November at the
city's Uptown and Biograph Theaters. While certainly cannot expect details beyond a
172
certain point from a Variety review, the absence of these particular details in this
particular review are telling-Hege's review of Pressure is actually surrounded by other
reviews that more precisely indicate screening conditions. The inattention this evinces
attests to the relative invisibility or inconsequence of British film-industry concerns to the
way that those films are interpreted or consumed in the U.S. Underlying Hege's
predominantly negative review is a lack of either concern with or awareness of the film's
blow-up and distribution problems; Hege's unwillingness or inability to consider those
particular issues and debates are foundational to his criticism of the film's "dated" feeling.
21 Yet Gifford's comprehensive volume, which has become fundamental the study of
British film, employs various methods to determine the first date of commercial
exhibition of the films that it includes, and this speaks to the notorious vagaries and
complexities ofthe British film industry. Gifford actually opens The British Film
Catalogue by advising his readers that while the "films are listed chronologically by year
and then by month in order of their initial exhibition (xi), precisely assessing the date of
initial exhibition for British films is often no easy affair. Gifford groups his entries
according to the month and date of exhibition, but those dates of exhibition are
ascertained by mentions of the films in the press, first listings with trade shows, initial
screenings to the British Board of Film Classification (formerly known as the British
Board of Film Censors), date of registration with the Board of Trade, and "date of
completion in the case of films unshown at the time this third edition of the catalogue was
initially compiled (1995)." Furthermore, Gifford warns, "where several alternative dates
exist, the earliest is used" (xi). He also notes that while it is fairly common to date films
according to when they were released, that strategy is inappropriate when dating British
film "as in the British cinema a release date can follow a first-show date by one, five, or,
in one case, 14 years" (xi). Hence Gifford's careful warning to those attempting to "date"
British film is a vivid illustration of how even the seemingly simple matter of "dating" of
Pressure reveals the importance of considering the film's production and post-production
problems. That warning also helps to explain the relationship between the film's difficult
path to commercial exhibition and the tendency of treatments and reviews of
Pressure---even scholarly analyses, and even the more recent assessments precipitated by
the film's 2005 premiere on DVD-to provide a "year" for the film that falls between the
range of 1974 and 1978.
22 What is a bit surprising, especially at first, is that despite Landy's insistence of the
cultural and historical specificity of the genres that she investigates, she employs the
work of two theorists of Hollywood social problem films to flesh out her definition of the
British version social problem films. Of course that move is in line with her observation,
a few pages later on, that "The Hollywood social problem film of the 1940s and 1950s
also provided models for the development of the British social problem film" (437).
23 As Landy observes: "The representation of youthful discontents is a significant
indication of changes in British postwar society, revealing a range of social concerns
173
involving issues of authority, community, family, class, and gender. As one critic has
described it, '''Youth was ... a powerful but concealed metaphor for social change'" (442).
24 One of the more interesting aspects of Walker's interpretation of Black Joy is his
statement that "race relations didn't come into the picture-much. For one thing, it was
not about black and white, but black and black: not at all as inflammatory as the news
stories" (242). That assessment is direct conflict with the observations of film critics and
scholars in the vein of James Sriead, whoin White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood
from the Dark Side argues that it is quite possible to read "race relations" in films even
when one or the other race is absent, particularly if that absence is clearly a "structuring
absence" or deliberate omission. Indeed, that may be what led Walker to paradoxically
conclude his assessment of Black Joy, Britain's "first 'race' film to get fairly wide
circulation," by asserting that in the film, "Racial tensions were played down in favour of
showing how many ethnic elements were being stirred in the cracked old mixing-bowl of
working-class (once white) London. Black Joy settled for saying that it takes all kinds to
make a world. It cost under £300,000-with the NFFC coming in for about half of
that-but it failed to find an audience. Its attempt to mediate between the communities
was not reflected in a Gallup Poll taken in February 1978, which indicated that 49 percent
ofthose Britons questioned thought that non-whites should be offered financial 'aid' to
return home" (242). While the NFFC, the source of this film's "institutional" funding,
clearly differs from the BFI Production Board, it is nevertheless deeply suggestive that
Black Joy, a more "integrative," resolution-oriented film, qualified for a loan from the
NFFC that was in size roughly ten times the entire budget of Pressure, which, according
to Christophe Dupin, received a total of £17409 from the BFI (Dupin).
25 Yet Walker does not draw a connection between the eagerness of a record company to
finance Babylon and the world-wide success, earlier in the decade, of both the film and
soundtrack of The Harder They Come.
26 International Films distributed The Harder They Come in England in 1972.
174
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