by Terence Roberts
It is common knowledge that certain creations, or inventions of man, function almost perfectly in environments far away from where they were originally created or invented. The cinema is one. When I say “cinema” I do not mean only the cinema building, but the films it shows within.

This combination is important because some inventions are changed over time by their original owners, often for reasons related to greater profits, and the introduction of new functional processes such as DVDs which act as small duplicates for larger original film reels, and do not need cinemas to be shown.
Everyone knows and accepts this today. The cinema building then may seem obsolete. I say “seem” because it is really not, not even in the metropolitan cities where the latest films are shown on the big screens of cineplexes.
However, the current films of today that are shown in metropolitan cineplexes abroad are 90% relevant to life there, quite unlike at least 50% of PAST Hollywood and continental European films made between the 1920s and 1980s.
How is this? Because drastic rapid changes occurred in metropolitan film industries after the 1980s, which affected film content (stories, characters, plots, locations, producers, directors, actors/actresses) previously creatively shaped, and promoted in cinemas in faraway places like British Guiana and independent Guyana up to the 1970s.

Drastic social changes and turmoil also occurred in 1960s Guyana which negatively affected the original local owners of cinemas who had previously thrived successfully in collaboration with overseas cinema studios and production companies, such as RKO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal International, United Artists, Allied Artists, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Cineritz, etc.
At a certain point, the Guyanese cinema industry became pressurized between the freedom of its Independent post-colonial parliament pursuing its own new social priorities, and the foreign film companies decisions to adjust to both ideology changes as well as their own intentions to install new technical viewing processes at their metropolitan end of the huge industry. The big loser was the Guyanese public who had no real say in both these changes affecting a public entertainment medium.
Yet for half a century that local public had experienced that medium’s benefits, without realizing exactly HOW it benefited them, because the experience of seeing films in cinemas had become taken for granted like the daily experience of life itself.
The changes which occurred in the metropolitan film industry’s headquarters perhaps had a far less drastic effect on their own societies (though this is debatable), as it did in a faraway society like Guyana’s.
The major reason for this is that Guyana’s social reality is not shaped or guided by the same multitude of simultaneous rapid technological, fantasy, crime inspired and militarized content which comprise the largest part of the subject matter of American films and TV today.
But if we concentrate on American/Hollywood films made between the 1920s and 80s, we discover that thousands of films (over five thousand between 1929 and 68 alone) whose subject matter or content about social aspirations, pioneer ambitions, rural lifestyles, materialistic or economic motivations for diverse crimes, conflicting class and race relations, artistic freedom, values, and lifestyles, fears about a nuclear age, territorial disputes, family problems and love affairs, etc., all remain quite relevant to Guyanese society today, despite these films being made 30 to 85 years ago.
The importance of the metropolitan movie industry for Guyanese society has little to do with automatically consuming most of whatever continues to be made in American studios today, but MUCH to do with the relevance of what was ALREADY made under different circumstances. The miracle and beauty of film culture is tied, like great literature, to the perennial human values it preserves and REPLAYS in what inevitably becomes “the future.”
In Guyana today, there is a growing interest among a number of architects, engineers, and various other professionals, about the history of local buildings and neighbourhoods in which they once stood, or still stand; and are also preserved in precious archival photographs.
Cinemas, in the capital particularly, comprised a special and important group of such architecture, which leads us to consider what social purpose they served, and in what ways the lifestyle and character of Guyanese citizens benefited from their existence.
The first point to consider is that the new art-form of cinema led to the creation of outstanding local buildings where citizens spent hours together absorbing and contemplating the problems and pleasures of living in endless examples.
Would they do that if they gained no benefit from sitting collectively in huge buildings before stories projected in life-like motion of screens? If that activity has changed, were citizens mislead, or uneducated to appreciate it in the past? Far from it.
In the past, films inspired the creation of special buildings to show them since the 1920s in BG. These special buildings called cinemas were chosen to be built in neighborhoods which acquired both public attractiveness, and relaxed, entertaining businesses feeding off the presence of these cinemas. Who built these beautiful cinemas in Georgetown, such as Plaza on Camp Street, Empire on Middle Street, Astor and Globe which faced each-other at Waterloo and Church, or Metropole at Robb and Waterloo, etc.?
Did local architects copy the way cinemas were built in metropolitan America and Europe? Largely, no.
Locally there were usually two rows of high windows which opened in such a way to prevent little outer exposure when dusk fell, and natural breeze was added to that of internal fans.
At day time 1 pm shows, only fans circulated breeze, but the exciting steamy midday indoor atmosphere of these 1 pm shows was expected, and was fueled by the swift Westerns, Film Noirs, Intrigue and drama films which dominated such midday matinees.
One of Georgetown’s best designed classic cinemas, the cream concrete Globe, solved the problem of daytime natural ventilation in a most unique way without the use of windows.
There were oblong openings in Globe’s two side walls which were blocked by two narrow unattached walls built parallel and closely on the outside; in the detached outside walls smaller openings existed to the side of the openings in the actual cinema walls, so light was blocked, but not air or breeze, which passed through and around the detached walls and entered via the larger openings in the actual walls of the cinema.
Globe had a semi-circular glamorous lobby and its entrance short curved steps; another short stairway led from the lobby circle to House straight ahead; beside it a longer stone stairway beside the cinema’s front wall led up to Balcony, where viewers could pause and look down through small chessboard perforations to Church Street and its clean serene canal. Globe had the steepest and best Balcony, like a Greek amphiteatre, looking down at its curved screen and stage.
The day and night social activity of Georgetown from the 1930s to the 70s radiated from a unique section of downtown sidewalks starting at Church Street and ending at Charlotte Street, a distance of three to four hundred yards over four corners. In this zone the Globe, Astor, Metropole, and Strand de Luxe (the city’s youngest cinema back then, built in 1958) brought to Guyanese 75% of the finest Hollywood and European films.
If the same strip of cinemas existed today, but showed only current films, the social relevance and importance of this unique urban zone to Guyanese intellectual and moral growth would not exist as it did before.