AREAS OF the world today, such as North America, Canada, and both Western and Eastern Europe, achieved their development and importance not simply from imperialistic schemes, commerce, scientific or technological industries, but from the educational thrust of literacy and its transformation into classical and contemporary creative literature. Almost a century ago, films and cinema-going were added to this educational thrust, making it more popular and exciting. For those in nations susceptible to imbalanced press reports which define development as simply cultivating raw materials, acquiring technical know-how and administering civil services, the idea that rapid national development could be linked to a literary/cinematic education based on creative literature and film seems like a secondary, far-fetched idea for the back burner.

What I mean by literature here is not the broad accumulation of items commenting on social/historical events after they have occurred, or the published thoughts of those selected to support pre-determined viewpoints, since such ‘literature’ can shelter under ‘art’, which may not be the result of free inquiry and a rational conscience, but propagandistic rubbish that any barely literate nation can produce.

So when the chance for more imbalanced reports concerning the ‘extinction’ of books, reading, publishing, cinema going etc. arises, the mass media in easily misguided developing nations jump at this false opportunity to appear abreast these latest ‘trends’.

But in Western nations where some new anti-book and anti-cinema-going lifestyles are supposed to have emerged, such propaganda never becomes an accepted stereotype.

It might come as a shock to those who do not like to have their coat pulled, when they realise that this latest ‘hi-tech’ trend they believe in is exactly that; nothing but a ‘trend’. For example, just recently, one of Europe’s and the world’s most erudite and knowledgeable academic professors and creative writers, the Italian Umberto Eco, author of the brilliant novel, ‘THE NAME OF THE ROSE’, also a brilliant film of the same title, starring Sean Connery, gave an interview to ‘The Paris Review’ in its summer 2008 issue in which his interviewer asked: “What do you make of those who proclaim the death of the novel, the death of books, the death of reading?”

Eco replied: “To believe in the end of something is a typical cultural posture. I am always amused and interested by this kind of sport, which the mass media practice with increasing ferocity. Every season, there is an article on the end of the novel, the end of literature, the end of literacy in America. The fact of the matter is that all over the world, there are thousands of stores full of books, and full of young people. Never in the history have there been so many books, so many places selling books, so many young people visiting these places and buying books.”

Eco’s statement is true about those nations and societies whose young people or citizens have not been deprived of bookstores, or even worse, sold the idea that books and reading have now been superceded by computer screens and earphones replaying recorded texts.

A case in point
A more specific example close to such nations or societies would be today’s Guyana. Here was a nation and society across which, up to the middle of the 1970s, more than half a dozen of the finest up to date bookstores and book departments in large stores existed in the capital Georgetown alone, in conjunction with almost a dozen cinemas collectively showing about 150 different films from North American, European, and East Indian studios per week.

A jaded or cynical viewpoint might consider the end of such a cultural process as a release from American or European influences, and nothing to regret. But the average citizen, worker, or young person who naturally rely on rational social guidance will come to feel the negative effect of this loss, and eventually, the entire nation and society will reflect and feel this loss in their everyday life.

Up to the 1970s, a Guyanese generation who came-of-age in the 1960s knew that it is the visible presence of high-quality bookstores and cinemas providing high-quality literature and films that constitute both the history of cinema and the history of films. They also know that the social reasons for this national loss in artistic and intellectual material — whether the result of riots, arson, or political unrest in their pre-Independence period, or due to post-Independence insularity — is not some predetermined or inevitable part of local nationalism, but can be reversed by the interest and pursuit of wide intellectual and artistic knowledge, guided by unbiased progressive commonsense.

Why was the presence and use of bookstores, consular libraries, and international films in cinemas once so important and helpful to every interested Guyanese? Because their own society was, and still is, not capable of producing such a quantity of  experiences in literature and films which convey cause and effect, questions and answers on countless human problems.

The importance of having daily access to such international creative literature and films is that it leaves the educational door of the nation open to fresh mental stimulation, rather than encourage the repeated circulation and recycling of an insular historical memorabilia, which can harden into racial and political group obsessions masquerading as omnipotent birthrights.

Not because one is handicapped in the production of something useful does it follow that one should not utilise such productions from others who are not so handicapped. And a solution to this situation is not necessarily served by dwelling endlessly in the press, on television, speeches etc., on why one is handicapped today, or who is to blame.

In consuming cultural products, whether local or foreign books, plays etc., all cultural consumers run the risk of responding to such cultural products which appear to be important or ‘good’, simply because they are seen everywhere, spoken and written about, listed and promoted  deliberately and endlessly in the mass media. Their apparent appreciation is largely the result of promotion, via the mass media, apart from the fact that readers and film buffs may respond wholeheartedly to cultural products that appear totally extraordinary, unusual, or of another world, such as the historical epic Science Fiction, fantasy literature and movies of today.

Positive influences
One good that can come out of this popular response, to popular movies in particular, is the diverse opinions on such cultural products; witness the recent differing interpretations and responses to the current Science Fiction film, ‘AVATAR’, that appeared in the Guyanese press.

This is healthy evidence of what cultural products should do, which is generate analysis and criticism among citizens with different points of view. This is an indication of what an interest in films and literature should provoke in various cultural consumers.

The importance of post-Colonial ‘Third World’ countries as case studies on the human effect — positive or negative — of imported films on such societies is still an unexplored topic in mostly virgin critical territory.

Obviously, a post-Colonial period can encourage zealous, stereotypical, and often silly and shallow ideas about
numerous simple and popular films quite similar in exaggerated spectacle, thrills etc. to today’s ‘AVATAR’.

In the 1940s and 50s, such films were numerous serials like ‘SPY 13’, ‘DR.  FU MANCHU’, and science fiction blockbusters like ‘THEM’, ‘TARANTULA’, ‘IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE’ etc., Tarzan and other films.
As a boy and young adult among others like myself who attended the Hollywood Cinema in Kitty and saw such films, no one was idiotic or asinine enough to take seriously the heroics and messianic dogmatism of characters like Tarzan or Hercules.

And as though to prove such characters were deliberately intended as make- believe by Hollywood studios, they were made to emerge, gun in hand, from behind jeeps that were blown up, perfectly groomed, hair parted, muffs intact, clothes still smoothly pressed… in short, spic and span. Or would wade, fully clothed up to their waists, through water in a creek, yet emerge with their clothes dry.
All this was noticed and became the brunt of jokes in the cinema; sometimes you could not hear the dialogue over our laughter, and no one could care less, because the whole adventure was taken as a joke. Such inaccuracies made everything else in the film suspect.

But what we liked were the tropical scenes, the colour, the fashion, the physical skills, the sumptuous meals, etc., which we would imitate in our pastures and back dams by swinging  on vines  like Tarzan over old plantation canals, or catching crabs and birds and cooking them outdoors like Steve Reeves does in ‘HERCULES’.

These influences are lost by much of today’s adventure films which had developed special effects to appear as ‘real and natural’ as possible, when they still remain not real, and not natural, whereas in the past, space was left for pleasurable, real- life influences to continue the cinematic illusion.

Today, looking ‘super-real’ has made films less ‘art’ and more ‘science’. But before the cinema and films arrived, it was literature that provided this stimulus to real- life experience and adventure. Yet literature still remains the vital life blood of cinematic art, and its value is both educational and entertaining, because it forces us to be literate in order to access its countless benefits.

As a preface to this series of essays, it is instructive to return to something else Umberto Eco said in response to a question in his recent interview: Asked “what benefits have knowledge and culture afforded you in your life?” Eco replied: “An illiterate person who dies, say at my age (over 70), has lived one life, whereas I have lived the life of Napoleon, Caesar, and D’Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it is an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life, you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege.” Films offer a more fleeting and less self-reliant experience of absorbing knowledge than literature, but it can also point the way back to vital literature.