SOMETIME during those years of growing up in Georgetown between the 1950s and 70s, a generation of Guyanese discovered participation in film culture  – mostly American Hollywood/European – which liberated them from any tainted generalized experience of such culture being simply the foreign subliminal medium of biased brainwashing. Such an opinion, which sometimes appears in the local news media of today, would not have appeared in the 50s, 60s, or 70s; not because it would have been censored, far from it, but because the Guyanese professionals involved with the local journalistic media back then would have been so acquainted with Hollywood/European film culture on a daily, practical, experiential basis, that no one could deceive them with opportunistic or reactionary ideas which denied, or ignored the bold self-critical individualistic assertions of idealistic thought and actions in most Hollywood/European films.
There is nothing like practical experience to bring enlightenment, rather than second-hand summaries of what one has only someone else’s opinions of. Indeed, local journalists attached to Georgetown newspapers were given complementaries for each batch of new films which appeared every fortnight weekend on the screens of the seven cinemas in downtown capital of Georgetown.
An entire page of the Daily Chronicle appeared every fortnight with reviews of six or eight new films opening at these cinemas, while another page was full of illustrated cinema programs. Lengthy feature articles on exciting new innovative and progressive, yet highly entertaining  developments in cinematic culture appeared.
I remember one (I found it recently while looking at the newspaper archives)  on the brilliant new innovative Italian Film productions of the 1960s which discussed the names of those uniquely engaging Italian actresses and actors who were making a name for themselves.
Names like Silvana Mangano, Gina Lollabrigida, Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Virna Lizi, Elsa Martinelli, Victorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and Gian Maria Volante. Of course their sub-titled films began to appear almost every week in at least six downtown cinemas. The evidence is all there in the local newspaper archives.
Now, a cynically nationalistic reader today, or even a foreign one,  might ask, what serious or important role can such foreign stars of film culture mean to mostly non-white citizens in a developing nation with a recent history of colonial exploitation, and a basic urgent social agenda to feed, house, educate and employ its citizens?
Such a question would be more concerned with judging the necessities of this developing nation only from the standpoint of the practical basic necessities for existence, while the more imaginative, but equally necessary influence and guidance on the character, behavior, and ambitions of local residents by such film culture would be disastrously dismissed as a minor value, and left to grow into a huge moral, behavioral and educational problem , which today many in Guyana would agree is the reality.
But particular attention should be paid to the names of these Italian screen stars I have mentioned here, and to which I will now add The French screen stars whose films also circulated in Georgetown cinemas, particularly in the 60s and 70s. Stars like Jean Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Bridgette Bardot, Francoise Dorleac, Capucine, AQnouk Aimee, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Yves  Montand.
Why Particular attention? Because it is films with these stars (who also sometimes appeared with Hollywood stars in combined European/Hollywood productions) which by their specifically thoughtful, sensitive gentility, their dialogue, their social situations, their often well cut light fashions, their films’ locations on sunny Mediterranean coasts and cities, attracted, satisfied, and subsequently influenced a sizable attentive number of young and elderly male and female members of an intelligent Guyanese generation between the 50s and 70s.
The survivors of this generation are now at least 60, either living abroad, where they can easily continue to enjoy such film culture, or still around as tiny nostalgic local groups engaged in frequent zesty discussions about such films and stars they would love to see today –a wish that can hardly be fulfilled, neither in cinemas (which no longer exist in Guyana), or TV film programs, one film club, or rented or bought DVDs.
Surrounded today by what their preserved common sense and daily experience tells them are often crude, violent, and hasty uneducated expressions and behavior patterns, perhaps even instigated by ‘films’ and ‘music’ of a similar unsavory nature, such quiet left-over human pockets of a beautiful era of cinematic participation and appreciation, merits a re-look in 2011, to perhaps  salvage  dormant lessons relevant to a pervasive malaise found in Guyanese society today, as a case study, despite this country’s strident economic and material progress over the past two decades.
One of the significant differences between the colonial and post-colonial eras of British Guiana and Guyana respectively, is that in 20th century colonial Br. Guiana, the active freedom to import and appreciate  Hollywood and European films of high quality via the public cinemas, was seen as part of the benefits of Anglo/European culture, and therefore unquestionably accepted as a display of European/American achievement.
In post-colonial Independent Guyana however, beginning in 1966, Hollywood/European films gradually began to be perceived and lumped under the same condemned colonial umbrella by a hackneyed and predictable anti-colonial local rhetoric and aesthetic, which perhaps realized the power of such films to encourage independent individual thought, in contrast to Independent Nationalistic thought, and therefore challenge the necessity of commanding the masses attention in a one-dimensional political manner, which ambitious local political parties competing for national governmental power knew had to be harnessed to their competing ideologies and solutions if they were to be taken seriously.
Yet actually, neither the initial British Colonial regime or the three leading political parties who ruled the country between the 1950s and today, can take credit for tolerating the proliferation of out-spoken Hollywood/European films during those decades, since the films themselves and the entertainment/economic/employment structure they produced achieved its own enormous popular importance and benefits locally, and could not be touched.
That is  – unfortunately for Guyana and Guyanese – until the same political nationalism of the 70s eventually led to a drastic devaluation of local currency, and combined with the coincidental foreign film industry’s retrieval of its films abroad for transformation into home videos/DVDs, provided  the perfect excuse to gradually abolish local cinemas, replacing them with solely the neutralized unmonitored private process of anti-public/collective TV film viewing, which no doubt an unsuspecting population did not realize had later drastic negative repercussive effects on the entire nation’s social cultivation of moral guidance of human character and civilized behavior patterns.
What exactly are the benefits of this prior period when Hollywood/European film culture dominated Georgetown’s social life? The benefits came in two basic ways: (1) Personal growth. (2) The daily social excitement of diverse intelligent film programs, and the development of attractive genteel dispositions, attitudes, and interactions.
But before these two values are illustrated here, a vital point that no doubt went unrealized, though subconsciously felt by Guyanese film enthusiasts, is that looking and learning from the best film culture is an ideal way of developing attractive personalities, because the art of screen acting places a strong emphasis on specific character presentation, fashion, environment, behavior and intelligence in a precise focused manner, which for the local viewer had little or nothing to do with the actual reality of life in any of the countries in which the films were made.
The swinging upbeat lifestyle of Guyanese film culture fans between the 1950s and 70s is therefore definitely related to the obvious benefits it gave to themselves; the opportunity for personal growth and attractiveness they extracted from consistently pursuing such films, especially with certain actresses and actors mentioned here. What accounts for this now only remembered popular social culture of older Guyanese for which cinema attendance programs were central, where to be well dressed, amiable, intellectually curious gentlemen, or fashionable, even wild, but also intellectually curious and well educated cultured women, is the example of screen roles with such behavior and modes of appearance.
Even the famous beauty and cleanliness of the white-washed and verdant Garden City of Georgetown, its alleyways whose gutter-sides were like flat mowed green lawns one could picnic on (and indeed children often sat there eating fruits, reading comic books, or simply gaffing and playing) and which were enclosed by small white picket-fences and gates, were not only the result of British colonial orders, but the shared and agreed civic participation of civil servants and humble town council laborers, who also religiously frequented the cinema stalls and constantly saw, like everyone else on the floors above them, fabricated precisely designed clean and inviting Hollywood and European movie studio sets, where such films were largely acted out.
It made no sense to see such sights everyday in the popular lifestyle of film culture, and not have its adoption to one’s real local life in Georgetown and the countryside. So Guyanese everyday life in those decades, and the swinging film culture that influenced it,  was partly based on the perfection of Film Studio art as a real model; where local real life followed an attractive imaginative mode of art; not art following the various imperfections of real life. Obviously there were patrons who according to their upbringing (or lack of it), their level of education etc, were interested only in those inevitable physically antagonistic roles and confrontations etc, they saw on the screen. 
Such people will always exist, and we usually recognize them by the ‘heroes’ of the ‘music’ or ‘films’ they surround themselves with, or even emulate. But what interests us here are those who, grasping the benefits of selected film culture towards themselves, and thereby avoiding sole dependence on political recommendations for accepting others, or proving their worth to others, instead absorbed the suave, attractive, gregarious, even sophisticated behavior of stars as a shared value, which led to the development of a pleasant character, which in turn helped such Guyanese to get along with each-other, and with foreigners if they went abroad.
Such a humane, civilized, sophisticated model of behavior a similar film culture ideally intended for everyone. Therefore when these films through constant exhibition in public Guyanese cinemas reached individuals of every race and class, a shared intellectually exciting social lifestyle was achieved, within the larger generalized definition of nationality.  But if such film culture is taken away, replaced mostly by shallow, violent, crime oriented films, then such products can become the dominant examples of behavioral attitudes today’s average local film viewer receives.