Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

�2 Con­clu­sion

Yao Rame­sar's Haiti Bride is what might be termed an of­fer­ing from the "Rough" cin­e­ma, akin to what Pe­ter Brook called the Rough The­atre. It is rich in tech­nique, in­no­va­tion and ex­per­i­men­ta­tion, but its rough­ness, its un­fin­ished, even un­re­solved qual­i­ty, could over­whelm the art. But as art goes, Rame­sar's cin­e­mat­ic vi­sion of­fers the most con­vinc­ing an­swer to the naivete in­fect­ing Caribbean art–he em­braces naivete, trans­form­ing it in­to a vi­su­al style.

Haiti Bride is set in the af­ter­math of the earth­quake that dev­as­tat­ed the is­land in 2010. It fol­lows three peo­ple, a man and two women. The man and the first woman met in the US, fell in love and de­cid­ed to get mar­ried in Haiti. They re­turn to Haiti and the earth­quake in­ter­rupts the wed­ding. There­after they are sep­a­rat­ed, and the man, left in Haiti, be­gins to woo an­oth­er woman, as his first in­tend­ed re­turns to looks for him.

This is a sketch of the nar­ra­tive. There's much more am­bi­gu­i­ty in the film, start­ing with chronol­o­gy (time has passed since the earth­quake, and the ac­tion ap­par­ent­ly moves back and for­ward in time, with­out sig­nal or clar­i­ty). There's al­so the the­mat­ic tus­sle of re­turn and ex­ile, as the first bride's fam­i­ly fled the coun­try in the Aris­tide era. Be­yond that, the nar­ra­tive is frac­tured at points al­most to in­co­her­ence.

Rame­sar said the prob­lems arise from the ex­treme lim­i­ta­tions un­der which the film was made–by a crew of two peo­ple work­ing on the slimmest, and at times, no bud­get at all.

So the film has an un­fin­ished qual­i­ty, in that all the pho­tog­ra­phy was not done, and there are el­e­ments the di­rec­tor could not add be­cause of the con­straints, but Haiti Bride works pret­ty well in its rough state. It could even be viewed as a com­plete, if na�ve text (which makes in­com­plete-ness a cre­ative el­e­ment), like a Gau­guin paint­ing.

Haiti Bride's most sig­nif­i­cant el­e­ment is the up­end­ing of the per­spec­tive. Many films be­gin with an es­tab­lish­ing pe­ri­od, where en­vi­ron­ment, rules, and log­ic are laid out. For lo­cales we know and are fa­mil­iar with, the es­tab­lish­ing scenes are brief, as­sum­ing fa­mil­iar­i­ty.

Haiti is not fa­mil­iar out­side scenes of ri­ot and suf­fer­ing, but Rame­sar makes no at­tempt to in­tro­duce the oth­er Haiti; his cam­era races over the land­scape and peo­ple, look­ing at them as a na­tive would. This is a huge ac­com­plish­ment–no vi­su­al clich�s, no ar­ti­fice to re­as­sure the for­eign view­er that what he or she is see­ing is com­fort­ing, or if not, at least fa­mil­iar.

The land­scape and colours are pre­sent­ed in a raw, al­most over-ex­posed palette. You feel the film has been ma­nip­u­lat­ed, but, Rame­sar as­sures, it hasn't. What you're see­ing on screen is what you'd see on the ground, in nat­ur­al light.

A fair bit of de-fa­mil­iari­sa­tion and re-con­di­tion­ing fol­lows from this. In their light, and at home in their en­vi­ron­ment, you re­alise quick­ly that the aes­thet­ic ideas you bring are in­ad­e­quate.

You look at the peo­ple up close, and (for me at least) you re­alise there's a lo­cal, in­ti­mate way of look­ing at them, ab­sorb­ing their fea­tures and ex­pres­sions which ac­ti­vate an­oth­er aes­thet­ic, an­oth­er way of con­scious­ly and un­con­scious­ly eval­u­at­ing them. And with a shock, you re­alise the hero­ine, and the oth­er girl, are beau­ti­ful in a way that you've nev­er re­al­ly con­sid­ered.

The same lack of ar­ti­fice ap­plies to the per­for­ma­tive as­pect of the movie. The ma­jor­i­ty of the cast are peo­ple, not ac­tors. The cam­era works in a man­ner that trans­mutes their lack of ar­ti­fice in­to a style. The shots of or­di­nary peo­ple do­ing or­di­nary things, like braid­ing hair, cook­ing, and walk­ing amidst the ru­ins of their coun­try are trans­mut­ed by the move­ment of the cam­era.

A fair bit of voiceover is em­ployed, but when the char­ac­ters speak, the di­rect, nat­u­ral­is­tic qual­i­ty of their voic­es fits in­to the way their im­ages are shot.

For all this, Haiti Bride is not an easy movie to look at or make sense of, but then–even though Rame­sar calls it a nar­ra­tive fea­ture, and there­fore sets up that ex­pec­ta­tion–it doesn't have to be. In oth­er words, if you've been fed a steady di­et of Michael Bay and who­ev­er di­rects the Kar­dashi­ans and those numb­ing rom-coms, this might not be the film for you. How­ev­er, it would be a mis­take to dis­miss it as some­thing one must suf­fer through for art's sake.

Af­ter watch­ing Haiti Bride once, I re­alised why I was anx­ious for it to end: I want­ed res­o­lu­tion, but the movie didn't of­fer it. So I had to see it again, look­ing at it dif­fer­ent­ly, ac­ti­vat­ing a dif­fer­ent set of aes­thet­ic and emo­tion­al ex­pec­ta­tions. Like all view­ers, I had to work to thread or re­assem­ble the nar­ra­tive frag­ments in­to co­her­ence. This is not a bad thing.

And this leads di­rect­ly back to the theme of naivete. The na�ve as a style, as I've de­scribed it, is the in­ven­tion of a Eu­ro­pean way of or­gan­is­ing and defin­ing our world. There's noth­ing wrong with Eu­ro­pean epis­te­mol­o­gy or aes­thet­ics. But in teach­ing us to see our­selves as na�ve, or prim­i­tive, and worse, in­ter­nal­is­ing it with­out ques­tion, is a de­fi­cien­cy on our part.

Us­ing naivete as a start­ing, rather than end point, is one of the things a Caribbean aes­thet­ic must do, and it's what Rame­sar has done in Haiti Bride. It of­fers a way of look­ing at Caribbean re­al­i­ty in its own terms, mak­ing use of the tech­ni­cal so­phis­ti­ca­tion of west­ern cin­e­ma.

I'd orig­i­nal­ly thought Rame­sar could be likened to the Im­pres­sion­ists, for his ex­trav­a­gant use of light and colour, but by the end, I re­alised his achieve­ment is more sim­i­lar to Ce­saire's Cahi­er. I hope more peo­ple can see it, and it and film and the film­mak­er get the ex­po­sure they de­serve.