Introduction: Back and Beyond—The Context

WHILE CARIBBEAN FILMMAKING HAS BEGUN TO FLOURISH, there is little published research. Ex-Isles: Essays in Caribbean Cinema, published in 1992,1 remains the seminal text. Nonetheless, Caribbean filmmakers have been insistent about the need to theorise their filmmaking and to depict the lived spaces and specific experiences of the Caribbean. Films such as Pim de la Parra's Wan Pipel (1976), and Hugh A. Robinson's Bim (1974) which fictionalises political developments of independence politics in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Euzhan Palcy's Rue Cases-Negres (1983), suggest that initially filmmakers focused on issues of race and identity in their attempts to create counterdiscourses and to localise filmmaking.The development of an indigenous industry in the Francophone Caribbean is usually attributed to Christian Lara because his film Lorque l'herbe (1968) provided the impetus for a wave of filmmaking by native-born filmmakers. These include Jean-Paul Cesaire, Gabriel Glissant and Willy Rambeau. This movement is marked in the first instance by Cesaire's negritude movement. At the Caribbean Tales Festival in Toronto in 2009, Euzhan Palcy spoke movingly about the influence of Cesaire and called him her father.Francophone filmmakers reflect on historic ills in different ways. Raoul Peck's Lumumba: La mort du prophete (1992) is about memory and the ghosting of the past and uses a ghost (Lumumba, voiced by the director himself ) to reconstruct a history of the assassination of the politician whose ascension to power lasted two months. Peck's revolutionary use of archival and home movie footage and the shooting of the film in Brussels give a peculiar quality to the work that Laura Marks has analysed in depth in her book, The Skin of the Film.2 Peck's analyses of power and terrorism in Moloch Tropical (2009) suggest the importance of the haunting of the past in the Caribbean. Hauntology, for example, is evident in Rue Cases-Negres in the shadowy shapes that hover at the back of Medouze's hut and the retained sounds and movements from an African ancestral presence. In her essay in this issue, focusing especially on Peck's 1994 L'homme sur les quais, Meredith Robinson dissects the ways in which Peck revolutionises traditional film techniques to interrogate memory's function in addressing historic trauma.The work of Guy Deslauriers from Martinique is also about the effect of a past in need of exorcism and uses a ghost to narrate the journey through the Middle Passage. Deslauriers, in the making of the film Passage du milieu (1999) and the filming of the political documentary based on the murder of the journalist Andre Aliker (Andre Aliker, 2008), uses filmic devices to probe the residues of history in specific ways. His use of montage techniques, for example, creates a profound sense of the presence of the past in Martiniquan and Caribbean history as a whole. Some of the most evocative scenes image the bodies of slaves as subhuman in their positioning within the cramped space of the ship's hull and juxtapose such atrocities with idyllic scenes of Africa. The narrator insists on the need for remembrance, thereby invoking the persistence of the effects of these traumas. Montage sequences also create conflictual lines that serve to refute imposed authority as in the frenzy of feet dancing to an inner spiritual music from Orisha rituals.Rachel Moseley-Wood also suggests that music and dance are integral to the representation of place and the experiences of the region. Her essay examines and problematises the ways in which Jamaican cinema has shaped reception to cultural products. For her, the exploitation of ghetto-based culture both constructs an often-stereotyped idea and image of Jamaican reality and, paradoxically perhaps, provides for a critique of class-based systems within the city space. Her enquiry plunges her into cultural debates about the ways in which films such as Dancehall Queen (Rick Elgood and Don Letts, 1997) engage with the female body and ideas of 'slackness'. …

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