SEPTEMBER 2015 – UWI TODAY
15
OUR CAMPUS
Dr J. Vijay Maharaj is a cultural and literary analyst who works in the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies.
All thirty of VS
Naipau l’s books
and his hundreds
o f a r t i c l e s a n d
interviews would
take up considerable
space on a library
shelf. Add in some
of the critical work
on his oeuvre, then
a one-room-four-
wall shelved space
usually allocated to
a personal library
would be occupied
solely by VS Naipaul
along with work pertaining to his writing.
If, you consider “the writer is worth reading slowly,”
and you read like VS Naipaul, then you have been reading
for a long time, for he says: “I would like to read only 20
pages a day – to read more is to throw away lovely things”
(Interview with John Baker,
Publishers Weekly
6 June 1994,
44-46). Youwould, however, have certainly found the spatio-
temporal investment worth your while, especially if you read
his words – carefully crafted, as he tells us in the Foreword
to
A House for Mr Biswas
,
at the rate of approximately 400
words a day – like he does, and particularly if you obtain
the kind of enlightenment I have.
Illumination comes in a variety of ways. It inheres in the
models of precision and clarity the writing provides, quite
frequently on issues that reader as well as author harbour
ambiguous, ambivalent views and emotions, and for which
therefore only the most subtle techniques of caricature,
parody, irony and resultant humour are suitable. We can
think for example of the well-loved works of the youthful
writer:
Miguel Street
(1959 – written first; published later),
TheMysticMasseur
(1957)
,
(adapted for theMerchant-Ivory
film script by Caryl Phillips),
The Suffrage of Elvira
(1958)
and
A House for Mr Biswas
(1961). But the description
also applies to the portraits of the British working class
in
Mr Stone and the Knights Companion
(1963), the Black
Power movement captured in
Guerrillas
(1975)
,
and of
Willie Chandran’s ostensibly revolutionary endeavours in
his journeys across Africa, India and Europe in
Half a Life
(2001) and
Magic Seeds
(2004)
.
One also gains a special kind of socio-cultural and
historical awareness through VS Naipaul’s journalistic
techniques, from which many a journalist could learn.
This is most evident through the nine books comprising
the Latin American-Caribbean, Indian and Islamic-Middle
Eastern trilogies:
The Middle Passage
(1962),
The Loss of El
Dorado
(1969), and
The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings
in Trinidad
(1980);
An Area of Darkness
(1964),
India: A
Wounded Civilization
(1976) and
India: A Million Mutinies
Now
(1990);
The Overcrowded Barracoon
(1972),
Among
the Believers: An Islamic Journey
(1981)
and
Beyond Belief:
Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
(1998)
as
well as the three comprising reflections on Africa in one of
the narratives in
Finding the Centre: Two Narratives
(1984)
“Our greatest achievement
has been the output of students
who have brought an immensely diverse suite of narratives
to the storytelling table, through their productions”, says
Yao Ramesar, lecturer in and coordinator of The UWI Film
Programme and a singularly diversified and distinguished
filmic storyteller, with a note of well-deserved pride.
Notable feature film releases that have come from
students of the programme include S
antana: The Movie
(Roger Alexis)
and
Escape From Babylon
(Nicholas Attin).
Programme alumni have gone on to professional work in
all genres of cinema – sci-fi, animation, horror, urban, slice
of life, documentary and the world of video gaming – just
to name a few of the post-programme arenas. Graduates
of the programme “constitute a highly mobile workforce”,
remarks Ramesar.
There are two possible tracks in the film programme.
There is the major (B.A) in Film Production – an
interdisciplinary programme designed to teach potential
filmmakers the technical skills and of production at the
highest level, and ensure that these filmmakers understand
and apply the theoretical and aesthetic principles of film. It is
designed to ensure the balance between theory and practice
is maintained and that analytical and critical skills for the
practice of craft are also learnt.
The other track is a major (B.A) in Film Studies,
designed to teach students how to evaluate, critique and
analyse film products and understand how film images
work. Future critics and aestheticians of film will therefore
be grounded in the basic technical skills of filmmaking.
Among numerous courses offered are Caribbean Cinema
I & II, Cinemas of Africa, Latin American Cinema and
Indian Cinema.
With numbers growing, and the requirement of studio
and editing spaces proportionally with this growth, the
country’s first film degree programme now has its own
building – a testament to the flow and growth of the
development path since its inception in 2006.The precursor
was the first tertiary level film courses offered in Trinidad
and Tobago, designed and deployed by Ramesar and
Kenwyn Crichlow at the then Creative Arts Centre(now
Department of Creative and Festival Arts/DCFA) UWI, as
a component of the B.A in Visual Arts degree in 1998. The
programme is located in the Office of the Dean, Faculty of
Humanities and Education.
Ramesar notes that cinema here ‘has a renaissance
capacity’. “Students”, he explains, “have the potential to and
have demonstrated their power to advance the narrative
structure of filmic storytelling, as the Hollywood formulaic
way has been trapped in a closed romantic realist structure
for much of its existence.”
That ‘renaissance capacity’ it appears, is a key success
factor of The UWI Film Programme. Students begin the
work of challenging the form and structure of storytelling in
film and, as graduates of the programme, continue to push
the proverbial envelope in the spaces where they pursue their
original productions – with a high degree of competence, if
audience feedback is the gauge. The programme’s students
routinely cop multiple awards at The Trinidad & Tobago
FilmFestival, usually their first port of call upon completion
of their films.
This ‘renaissance capacity’ is also the context for the
programme’s 10
th
anniversary showcase event – the first
staging of the
World Festival of Emerging Cinema
. The
inaugural festival takes place this November around the
theme,
Women in Cinema,
and will bring together the best
works of the students and their international peers while
facilitating opportunities for global collaborations and co-
productions. It recognizes that filmmakers throughout the
Caribbean region need to be provided with the expertise
and portable skill sets to ensure their competitiveness in
the burgeoning international film industry and this is the
direction in which they are moving.
From next month until the
World Festival of Emerging
Cinema
,
UWI Today
is pleased to make space to feature
the writings of some of the programme’s students on the
Film Studies track as they reflect on topics from Caribbean
Cinema, filmmaking in the region, critiques of form and
content and the theme of the Festival,
Women in Cinema
.
and the recent
Masque of Africa
(2010) and on the United
States in
A Turn in the South
(1989).
These books model not only a writing style but
an attitude to life of courage and detachment. Equally
importantly, the acumen the work yields has to do with the
development of a keen grasp of human psychology especially
with regard to lust for power and pleasure and the abyss
between desire and its object. For many ardent Naipaul fans,
this assertion will immediately bring to mind the political
Caribbean novels
The Mimic Men
(1967) and
A Flag on the
Island
(1967) as well as the earliest and most penetrating
analyses of the postcolonial condition in the collection of
stories
In a Free State
(1971) and the novel
A Bend in the
River
(1979). Finally, (only because to do otherwise is to
exceed my word limit), there is a philosophical education
from becoming immersed in the hybrid works
The Enigma
of Arrival
(1987) and
A Way in the World
(1994) and the
most recent collections of essays.
From the little said here, it should be possible to glimpse
why V. S. Naipaul echoes his father and brother to insist on
the nobility of the writer’s calling. As he said to Tarun Tejpal:
“It is the only noble calling. It’s noble because it deals with
the truth” (
Random Magazine
June 1998).
TheDepartment of Literary, Cultural andCommunication
Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the St
Augustine Campus joins with the Friends of Mr Biswas to
host a conference, Seepersad & Sons: Naipaulian Creative
Synergies, October 28-30.
The Plenitude of VS Naipaul
B y V i j a y M a h a r a j
UWI Film@ 10
A Renaissance Movement
B y R e b e c c a R o b i n s o n
