The audience at the premiere of Geoffrey Dunn's newish calypso documentary, Glamour Boyz Again: Sparrow and Superior on the Hilton Rooftop, gave the movie what will be undoubtedly its most appreciative viewing on the night of January 18 at the Globe cinema in Port-of-Spain.
The film's premiere was courtesy the T&T Film Festival in conjunction with the American Embassy.
It was received with great pleasure by the audience, who knew the calypsonians, knew the songs and frequently sang along. And if they were happy with the film, the audience was ecstatic with the live performance by Sparrow and Superior on the Globe stage afterward.
But if you were a moviegoer, expecting a narrative arc, or a point, you would have been disappointed.
Glamour Boys is a tangent off Dunn's previous documentary, Calypso Dreams, which had been screened the night before at UWI's Film Centre on Carmody St, St Augustine.
Had I not seen that, the main text from which Glamour Boyz diverges, my grasp of Glamour Boyz would have been considerably weaker.
Calypso Dreams tells a story of calypso, through the voices of calypsonians, led off by a youthful looking David Rudder (it was shot around the turn of the century).
It is a meandering, shapeless narrative broken into sections, with titles, so at least you had a sense of what was being discussed, if not always why or to what end.
Dreams was quasi-historical, plotting the historical evolution of calypso and its social context. It examined the social and cultural personality of calypso via its iconic exponents' personalities–Sparrow, Kitchener, Superior, Rudder, Blakie, Melody, and Harry Belafonte, among many others.
It also proposed a cultural location of calypso, what it is, and means to the society and so forth.
The main problem with Calypso Dreams is that it is entirely self-referential.
It doesn't look at calypso with a piercing, critical eye; it merely records calypso's views and reflections on itself via its practitioners.
There's no sense of a wider location in a heterogenous society, and being one amidst multiple, simultaneous and intersecting historical narratives within the same space.
Calypso's claims, from the mouths of its exponents, are taken as axiomatic, and no attempt at critical examination or external corroboration is attempted.
If this is really proposed as history, it's solipsistic history: the point of view of a thin strand of Trini Afro-nationalism which began post-1956, and ended around 1996 (though its adherents don't seem to realise this).
To be sure, black cultural nationalism and its medium, calypso, is a great subject for a documentary, but what's offered seems to believe it's the authoritative history, and needs no context or further critical explication.
But Calypso Dreams is not history, it's soliloquy; its value is entirely nostalgic. I doubt it would make much sense to someone not already familiar with the society and its cultural politics. It would also help if this "someone" were over 50 as seemed to define much of the audience on Sunday.
This specific ethnic, temporal and political location of the story was evident in the two or three motifs common to both films: the ethnic dimension (it's a black thing); its location in local cultural/electoral politics (anti-colonial); and its cross cultural success–its respectability and status as part of the local and transnational Afrocentred cultural repertoire.
In Glamour Boyz the same style (the shapeless, meandering narrative, guided by the protagonists/ narrators, Sparrow and Superior) is essayed, and the same motifs, and much of the same footage, reappear from Dreams. In fact, I get the impression that most, if not all of Glamour Boyz was done using footage from more than a decade ago.
This might explain why the calypsonians remain focused on colonialism and independence, the artistry of the singers, the personalities of the music and singers, the ethnic dimension, and the hostility and apathy of the society and establishment.
If as history it was problematic in 2002, now, it's just absurd: the largest problem with Calypso Dreams and Glamour Boyz is that they speak the past in the present tense. Sparrow discussed Federation, colonialism, the Carnival Queen issue of the 1960s. Superior was fixated on the fact that you could get arrested decades ago for singing calypso on the street and in Lent and so forth. In a memorable moment, Sparrow likens colonialism to slavery, and uses this as a reason for the character of the music–its aggressiveness, its licentiousness, and its fundamental outlaw nature.
For someone not looking at the film with foreknowledge, and a considerable emotional investment in the survival of calypso's drivers (ethnicity, nationalism, and politics), it would be glaringly evident that the calypsonians, and calypso, were at a loss as to what to do, stylistically and thematically now that the music is "free," and has been for decades. This could be why they continue to act as if were still outlawed.
There is a newspaper clip reporting Superior's attempt to get a radio licence in 1978 to open a calypso radio station, and his receipt of it 20 years later. But the fact that a calypsonian (Gypsy) was and is now minister of culture, is not mentioned. Only as the credits roll do we see Gypsy in Glamour Boyz. (He appeared in Dreams, if still without a back story.)
A nostalgic, lingering look back at calypso is also a great topic/theme for a film, but I'm at a loss as to what Dunn's artistic and narrative agendas are. Could they be so indulgent and misguided as to present the opinions of the calypsonians as the authoritative history? Or is it just allowing calypso to speak for itself, in its own voice, language, and limited frame of reference? If so, then some signal that a suspension of disbelief is necessary.
In the end, Calypso Dreams, and Glamour Boyz are of archival value, and achieve little as documentary, history, or cultural exploration. What they achieve is nostalgia, and that's overdone. Both retell a story of oppression and a history of victimisation and resistance that everyone knows, but which fewer know is partially true at best, and which all seem unaware of the latent enormities that see the outside the borders of nostalgia.
For example, I wonder if any of the people singing along with Jean and Dinah understand just what it is you could get from them for "two shillings" if they're broke, what it means to earn from "the sweat of their brow," and what is being laughed at and celebrated here?
What the two films also meaningfully accomplish is to illustrate what the world looks like to calypso: a hostile, repressive place, where the attitudes of 1955 still predominate. With this premise, every song is a triumph; every act of defiance to authority is heroic; and every moral transgression is a virtue.
Of course, even the inattentive reader would notice that this very much resembles the lifeworld of our society. And ironically enough, neither of the Glamour Boyz, and many of their calypso brethren, and more importantly, offspring, choose to live in this society any more. A movie asking "Why,?" is one I'd like to see.