More than just a movie

First of all, like film, Carnival entails the work of several artists and participants working together.

Again like film, Carnival is an audio-visual production in that intense sound and spectacular images are combined in movement.

Movement is key. All come together through rhythm. There is also the fact that film and Carnival are capable of bringing the past into the present. We see this at Carnival time where traditionally various events that are from a long gone era as well as events from recent history throughout the world are re-enacted, either in Carnival bands or in ole mas.

Carnival is also an art that stimulates the body and releases both energy and euphoria. As an aesthetic it triggers multiple responses in viewer and participant through what is called “affect.” In other words, the orchestration of visual and sound stimuli at Carnival time acts on the body and the mind and generates a response.

Classical montage theorists have also seen montage in film as leading to what has been called a “leap to a new dimension.” In other words, film takes the viewer to a new level of consciousness because it can act on the body and the emotion of the spectator/auditor. This is the reason that it is such a useful tool for propaganda. It creates this leap by bringing together images that stimulate the various senses — visual, gestural and sonic. These also create “affect.” Small wonder then that the crafters of a new Caribbean aesthetic have brought together film and Carnival throughout their work.

Film for many writers such as Earl Lovelace is a form that projects directly into the mind and heart of the viewer and as such it provides a vehicle for engaging the populace in a direct and affective manner. In fact the word “affect” is for me one of the most important in film theory. It is that capacity for “affect” or for creating a direct emotional response that gives film form its potency.

Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie combines both cinematic vision and the form of film. Its structure is a little like a film narrative, in that it uses multiple stories and in its climax releases a film-like vision where the traumatic past, as for example the invasion of Grenada by American armed forces, surfaces in a moment that is similar to that of a mirage.

This vision is combined with a sequence that shows people jumping up in a Carnival band, with Peter Minshall prominent in this action. Film is here equated with Carnival in a particular way. The use of film suggests that the exuberance and dynamism of Carnival are the result of a history of conflict, pain, atrocity and trauma, and that these have moved the peoples of the Caribbean (and the novel’s protagonists) to a new way of seeing reality.

Carnival we have been told is a product of a history of colonial oppression, in that those in authority put on masks and mimicked their subjects, and it is also a festival that commemorates the resistance of the enslaved and the oppressed to their oppressors. It therefore combines satire and mockery as well as mimicry. The very dual nature of Carnival is significant in that its combined energy represents a process of mixing and merging where various opposing forces hit off each other and this conflict has led to the creation of something new.

This new aesthetic has become both a metaphor and an idea of the potential of the Caribbean. It is not only that Carnival embodies the myth of “all ah we is one,” and that for two days in the year we put on the masks of integration and togetherness, but that this ideal somehow both energises and provides release to our creative imagination.

In other words, despite the dominance of bikini mas, Carnival remains a sign of the power and the potential of the Caribbean imaginary.

The fact that in Carnival we can reinvent ourselves and do, while also remembering the past in an act of creative imagination, signifies what writers suggest is our most vital characteristic.

This is our a b i l i t y to take the past and continually t r a n s - form it.