I WILL NOW describe what it is not possible for young Guyanese born since the late 70s, or recent foreigners to Guyana since the 80s, to see or experience in Guyana today…unless, of course, they research the articles and photos in the nation’s four leading daily newspapers from the 1950s to the 1970s, namely: The Daily Chronicle, The Argosy, The Graphic, and the Evening Post. My purpose in describing the hectic, exciting, and enormously pleasurable lifestyle in Georgetown during those decades, which I am sure those who experienced it will agree existed, has nothing to do with encouraging nostalgic sentiments as a refuge from local life today.
No! The life I am going to describe may be a ‘past’ for Guyanese  — especially young ones, who it seems are automatically prejudiced towards any period before they were born, as though such a time is ‘against’ them — but it is not past for hundreds of millions of people, young or elderly, who reside today in other  cities across the Americas (north and south), Western and Eastern Europe, and even some parts of Asia and Africa.
This lifestyle I am about to describe is not ‘the past’, but an intelligent and educationally developed present (precisely because it contains the wisdom of the past), built on various civilized byproducts or attributes of high quality film culture, which is an undisputed cultural catalyst for development in the world today.
Such film culture is defined at its best by the actors/actresses I listed in Part One of this essay, and the film directors I listed in Part Two. Citizens in cities in those areas of the world I have mentioned have access to such a broad section of high quality film culture on DVDs, as well as the actual big-screen films which are shown in numerous auditoriums attached to Universities and Colleges, other educational institutions, art museums, and also cinemas.
This is definitely not the case in Guyana today, where the films I have illustrated from past cinema listings were once quite common in at least six of Georgetown’s best cinemas. It is the constant presence of these films, not just school attendance, or academic studies (assisted by foolish irrelevant prohibitions against chewing gum in libraries!), officially touted ad nauseam, which influenced past Guyanese interest in both classic and contemporary literature,  bookstores, chic male and female fashion modeling for newspaper ads, swinging weekly house parties or dances, getting together at specific soda fountains/snack-bars/cafes, like the unique popular one in the Bookers Universal Book Department.
It is attending the cinemas and absorbing intelligent influential films with a group of friends which launched the lifestyle influenced by swinging film culture in Georgetown between the 50s and 70s.

Continuation abroad
Such a contemporary lifestyle once left little room for boredom, uneducated pursuits, drug abuse, or rampant crime in Georgetown, but mostly pleasures among young and older adults. To discuss and recall it is important, because by so doing, we can also slowly begin to reclaim it within the process of development.
Perhaps, even more important, we can see where its continuation abroad attracts, sooner or later, a large segment of Guyanese immigrants who begin to receive the benefits of such a lifestyle once they go abroad to cities in North & South America and Europe, from which they would find it difficult, or rather unbeneficial, to return permanently to a society without such publicly enjoyable, mentally stimulating everyday pleasures.
However, it is probable that Guyanese immigrants who respect and enjoy the efficiency and egalitarian services they receive in these foreign metropolises are so stubbornly accustomed to believing that such benefits are only  the result of foreign economic wealth and political fairness, that they do not realize that a liberal contemporary culture built by a large daily dosage of serious film culture via public television and auditoriums and cinemas, assisted by a popular focus on creative literature, have influenced the general ‘development’ they emigrate to enjoy over in such metropolitan societies.
Yet, perhaps, not even a majority of citizens in these metropolitan societies are avid film fans of serious film culture, but because a healthy educational system, respectful of the intellectual and social achievements of film culture, has influenced the mentality and attitude of the educated — who hold positions of leadership, authority and guidance, in the civil service, social institutions, law enforcement, media houses, Colleges, Universities etc, — it is the fair social and moral values absorbed from such films which re-emerge in such foreign public administrations with a modern cultural outlook and freedom, and which Guyanese immigrants unknowingly rush to enjoy.
Many of these Guyanese may not realize that their own country once had the same influential film culture in public cinemas between the 1930s and 70s, before it was aborted for reasons already mentioned.
Of further importance is to identify examples of such films which have the power, when absorbed, to seriously influence and socially educate the mentality and behaviour of those in administrative and exemplary positions in these metropolitan societies.

Cinematic influence
Here is a tiny fraction of such films as an introduction: MILDRED PIERCE (1945);  GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (1947);  FORCE OF EVIL (1948);  DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944);  HUMORESQUE (1946);  THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950);  THE BIG CARNIVAL (1951);  SCANDAL SHEET (1952);  THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1953);  INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1949);  IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946);  BAD DAY AT BLACKROCK (1955);  HOUSE OF BAMBOO (1955);  APACHE (1954);  THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS (1954);  A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951); HOUSEBOAT (1958);  BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE (1958); WEST SIDE STORY (1961); HUD (1963);  LILITH (1964);  IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967);  THE GRADUATE (1967);  LA NOTTE (1960);  LE MEPRIS (CONTEMPT);  ALPHAVILLE (1965);  BLOW UP (1967);  and LA DOLCE VITA (1960).
No one, even a badly educated person, seeing these films will fail to be affected, so we can imagine their effect on the educated conscience. It is to the credit of Western societies primarily that such films have achieved the status of vitally relevant social analytical cultural products, thanks to the thousands of film studies published, and the high visibility of such films, despite their age, constantly rerun on specific well managed TV programmes dedicated to film classics, and similar programmes presented on the big-screens attached to University, College, and Museum auditoriums.
All of these films, except ALPHAVILLE, appeared, often repeatedly, in Guyanese cinemas, from the 1970s back, when local film depots stored thousands of such films before they were closed in the 80s, and a new era of lower film standards began with the massive importation of trashy unimportant ‘spaghetti’ westerns, Kung-Fu or Kick-Boxing action films, and ghetto crime thrillers from the USA.
These sort of films to which the word ‘culture’ would be an exaggerated application, along with current ones of the same nature (however ethnic), have come to visibly dominate both the present commercial market and even the public communication networks, to the extent that film culture is no longer an asset, or supportive educational value today as it had been in Guyana from the 1970s back.
The bad effects of this regression are felt and bemoaned almost every day in contemporary Guyana, but no steps are taken to remedy it by publicly re-asserting the educational and civilized cultural values of serious film culture, perhaps because there is no particular interest or belief in essays like the very one you’re reading.
It may be important, therefore, to show how the films, actors/actresses, and directors I have mentioned in Parts One, Two and Three of this essay are regarded beyond or outside the secularity of today’s Guyana; in metropolitan societies where the absorption of such film culture by their educational, administrative, and cultural professional have led to the same high social standards which Guyanese and other nationals from developing countries, continue to flock to for their general advancement.

Toronto experience
It is ironic that Guyana, at least, once had the same high standards of film culture. In 1969 when I first arrived in Toronto, I was introduced to a number of senior Canadian students at the University of Toronto, when our conversation turned to high-quality contemporary film culture they were stunned to learn that films by permanently relevant continental European film directors, such as  Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Visconti, De Santis, Godard, Truffaut, Lelouch, Vadim, Costa-Gavras, and Polanski, had already been seen by me, a 19-year-old peer who had just stepped off the plane from a recently independent developing ‘Third World’ country for the first time.
Of course, a strong enjoyable friendship developed between me and these Canadians of both sexes, and in the early 70s when I made several trips back to Georgetown, at least three of these graduate students, one of whom became my wife, also followed, and even attended powerful high-quality film programmes at Georgetown’s cinemas.
Yet recently, when I told a young local reporter who was writing something on me, that I became captivated by cinematography while living in Georgetown as a child and teenager, it was reported in the press that I became captivated by cinematography while living in metropolitan countries.
Not at all! Before first leaving Guyana in 1969, I had seen films by all the leading continental film directors listed above, read numerous books on film studies, as well as the published illustrated film scripts of films by most of them, which once sold brand new in New York’s Grove Press editions at Fogarty’s huge ground floor bookstore, where a café now exists.
The beneficial social effects of this sort of intellectual yet pleasant and swinging film culture in pre-and-post-Independent Guyana existed as an exemplary standard carried by a large minority of cosmopolitan, peaceful and pleasure-oriented young and adult Guyanese made up of every race, ethnicity, and mixture, who subscribed to an unrestricted pursuit and expression of knowledge and culture via western democratic freedom.