Building Film Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean: Film Education at the University of the West Indies

Abstract

Despite being home to world-renowned intellectual and artistic traditions, the nations of the Anglophone Caribbean remain woefully behind their peers within the region and in the wider world when it comes to cinema, whether one wants to measure the achievements in this area in industrial or in artistic terms. Despite producing such luminaries as C. L. R. James, Marcus Garvey, and Derek Walcott as well as having the musical traditions of reggae, dancehall, and calypso, among others, the region can claim little besides The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell, 1972) that has garnered the international acclaim repeatedly achieved on islands such as Cuba or the other Spanish-speaking islands. Indeed, even the francophone and Dutch-speaking islands, which have spawned such famous films as Sugar Cane Alley (dir. Euzhan Palcy, 1983) or Ava and Gabriel (dir. Felix de Rooy, 1990), which were made in Martinique and Curacao respectively, dwarf the achievements of the anglophone islands. From an industrial point of view, cinema on the English-speaking islands is also very underdeveloped with few filmmakers being able regularly to produce work from within the region, and few opportunities existing for filmmakers even to obtain stable employment in the audiovisual sector, let alone make their own films. The reasons for this lack of industrial infrastructure are multiple and detailing all of them is beyond the scope of this chapter, except for two problems that have long dogged the region: a lack of technical skills for making films and a general lack of knowledge about the medium itself.