ONE IMPORTANT reason why a swinging film culture flourished for decades in Georgetown , in a much more meaningful manner that went beyond simple ‘entertainment’, is that such film culture created a reasonable, civilized counter-culture distinct from the tendency to a petty one stressing ethnic, religious, and political loyalties locally.
Numerous intelligent Guyanese realised that such local culture tended to aid competing jealousies and favoritisms long before and long after the granting of Guyana’s Independence from Britain in 1966.
This tendency to a ‘petty’ local culture, exploited by competing social and political ideologies, also began to find expression in human violence, arson, and even terrorist acts between 1962 and 1964; traumatic events, the repercussions of which  Guyana has not as yet totally recovered from, both mentally and socially.
The objective of such ignorant behaviour was no doubt concerned with creating disruptions of public pleasures (of which cinema attendance was a major one), since blame and reprisal would now discredit one or the other of political parties, races, etc.
Such selfish attitudes, blind to national unity and growth, even remain embedded in thoughtless hasty opinions, where, for instance, this very article written for a State-controlled newspaper supplement could be callously condemned as part of the State apparatus rather than be seen as expressing a viewpoint of national non-partisan social values, which is what it really is.
Significantly, a number of outstanding controversial films which reflect accurately many of the social conflicts and problems which arose in Guyana from the mid-1950s onward, such as SPARTACUS of 1960, starring Kirk Douglas, or THE UGLY AMERICAN of 1963, starring Marlon Brando, or THE SEVENTH DAWN of 1967, starring William Holden, or THE COMEDIANS, also of 1967, starring Elizabeth Taylor, among others, formed an even more socially pertinent conscientious part of Georgetown’s swinging film culture scene.
Those who comprised this counter-cultural celebration by Georgetown film culture fans came from every race and diverse mixture living within the capital, and even outside it. Their interest in these films cannot be interpreted as a dismissal of their own local Guyanese culture, for a number of reasons:
(1)Guyanese culture is not unique in its conception, since it is born from Native Indian origins, European colonial expansion, forced labour, and willing immigration. These are the same ingredients for the modern extension of almost all nations in the Americas, North and South, except for a slightly lesser similarity in Canada’s history.
The popularity of the American Western in colonial and post colonial Guyana for example, is no mere coincidence, or colonial mimicry; Guyanese recognized their si9milar crude beginnings, ambitions, ethnic differences, bigotries, corruptions, heroic deeds, lawlessness ,and impositions of law over lawlessness, and material happiness in the themes of Westerns like: THE UNFORGIVEN of 1960, starring Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn and Audie Murphy; THE BIG COUNTRY of 1958, starring Gregory Peck, Charleston Heston, Jean Simmons and Carroll Baker; GIANT of 1956, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean; LAST TRAIN FROM GUNHILL of 1959, starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and the exceptional Earl Holliman, etc; a fraction of the amount of Westerns which even the average Guyanese recognized as reflecting and expressing experiences rooted in their evolving national identity .
(2) Georgetown film culture fans of the high quality films mentioned here were definitely educated, and interested in ongoing education, via the process of foreign cultural intake. They held jobs in the Civil Service, Banks and Department Stores; were government ministers, teachers, students, artists, journalists ,business people; and were sensible enough to be aware that any insular identification with local ethnic group cultures alone ran the risk of being contaminated with their petty loyalties, jealousies, competitions and prejudices based on ignorance.
They found mental security and progressive satisfaction from assuming a cultural identity based purely on the freedom nurtured by advanced foreign Hollywood/European cinematic cultural assimilation, as opposed to blindly spouting a ready-made exclusive mould of inherited ethnic social and cultural values. The process of absorbing film culture, like creative literature, by being based on imaginative fictive situations, even though influenced by real life, meant that such film culture was not limited by documentary fact, but soared beyond the confines of limited fact into the progressively influential realms of ambitious moral and constructive possibilities.
In other words, the swinging film culture of those Georgetown decades made a whole new modern Guyanese identity emerge, and most interesting of all, guided its projection and utilization into real social activities, lifestyles and values, which beautified the overall benefits of living in the Capital in a number of ways that was far more exciting, occupational, and pleasurable than Georgetown life is today.
The proliferation of such high-quality cinematic culture became an asset to Georgetown’s past civilized and pleasantly sophisticated development. This is because the learning process via such film culture is devoid of the real-life negative encounters one may experience in North America or Europe, or anywhere else.
Instead, the cinematic work of art is a critical format for conclusive ideal behavior. To change one’s attitude and behaviour under the influence of such a creative form is more practical and gratifying than surmising on the negatives that actually exist in real life North America, Europe, etc.
For example, during the misled mayhem of political and racial violence unleashed on Guyanese society between 1962 and 1964, that ideal local modern cultural identity possessed by a multi-ethnic nucleus of Guyanese nurtured on swinging film culture continued visibly in Georgetown, packing the nightclubs, dance floors, cinemas, house parties, and filling the newspaper advertisements with a stylish social and racial togetherness.
The evidence is all there in the newspaper archives. What influenced the various gorgeous Indo, Afro, Portuguese and other European and racially mixed female and male Guyanese, whose sharply mod hairstyles, finely-tailored local clothes, and uninhibited social intimacy which hundreds of weekly photos in the newspaper captured during those traumatic years and after, was the popularity of rerun films of touching anti-racial and anti-bigoted themes; films like: KINGS GO FORTH; BROKEN LANCE; TAKE A GIANT STEP; WEST SIDE STORY; RAINTREE COUNTY; ALL THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS; THE WORLD THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL;  A TASTE OF HONEY; TO SIR WITH LOVE; LA DOLCE VITA; LA NOTTE; BLOW UP; DARLING; THAT MAN FROM RIO, etc.
It should be added that in the 1960s, many French and Italian films recognized the similarity of their Mediterranean coastal lifestyle with a South American one, which began to influence films where Brazilian Bossa Nova was heard, Astrud Gilberto performed, and various black characters appeared as totally normal participants of social gatherings and intimacy.
Both the light, stylish fashion appearance and congenial attitudes of characters in those films became models, perhaps even unconsciously, for those Guyanese participating in Georgetown’s celebration of film culture. This is quite obvious if we look at the huge newspaper advertisements for the brilliant local fashion factory of Elite and Capriana products, Nescafe, Shell, Banks Milk Stout, Smirnoff Vodka, Gilbey’s and Booth’s Gin. No modeled advertisements in today’s Guyanese newspapers or billboards can compare with both the artistic and fashion quality, or the inter-racial social togetherness of these local photographic advertisements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70S.
The reason for this today is because the content and style of these high-quality films are no longer known and accessed by those of a new generation, whose naturally inclined civilized temperament would no doubt find much to be inspired by in such films. One of the emulated sentiments would probably be the value of genuine togetherness, much vaunted today, and which we see demonstrated in one of the large 1960s newspaper advertisements for Banks Milk Stout, with a beautiful polyglot collection of chicly fashionable young Guyanese males and females leaning on a piano played by a young male accompanied by a pretty Guyanese girl of European origin, in white shorts, shirt, hair-band (typical of the day) strumming a box guitar.
It is one of the best of many similar advertisements evidencing the multi-racial unity and swinging atmosphere of that Georgetown era which absorbing modern films of tolerance influenced. Another form of proof for such a lifestyle was demonstrated by the weekly photo and write-up column for TEENAGER OF THE WEEK, which appeared in the Daily Chronicle, where a local girl was chosen and photographed in a manner demonstrating her fashion, intellectual interests, and temperament.
Repeatedly we read their hobbies were cinema-going, reading, stamp-collecting, listening to pop and instrumental music; their favourite screen stars were Marcello Mastroianni, Sean Connery, Troy Donahue, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, etc.
New stars may have appeared today, but the films of these mentioned remain as excitingly modern as can be. What no doubt was appropriated beneficiently from these films, along with the practical boat-neck jerseys, Bossa Nova striped shirts, Banlon jerseys, Continental slacks, striped dresses, glittering hair-bands, Italian loafers, Spanish/Portuguese/Latin American espadrilles etc, was the individual self-confidence demonstrated by the overall style and content of these films, which made real the desideratum that each of us is ultimately responsible for our human qualities, by which we also individually judged.
Apart from the lessons of characters in these films, there are other exemplary everyday scenes of value to the proper maintenance of society. In the superbly acted and highly meaningful film, HUD of 1963, directed by Martin Ritt, it is not only the character, Hud, and his family members that are important, but the good clean simple values of their ranch, its architecture, the cleanliness of the small town, its sidewalks, its well kept stores, especially one where we glimpse a rack of paperbacks with Lawrence Durrell’s brilliant Alexandrian quartet of novels, and above all, the small cinema which young couples attend; this scene of a cosy cinema audience within the actual film, HUD, playing at a Georgetown cinema, represented the unquestionable meaningfulness of a local lifestyle defined by participation in a swinging film culture.
This case-study of the positive effects and negative repercussions of the present absence of local cinemas dedicated to offering the broadest possible history of developed film-making for Guyanese, as was available with public guidance from the 1970s back, is a fertile topic for serious consideration by those who currently profess to want to lead their society and nation towards a more educated, creative, and productive modern future.