All posts tagged: Film

“I ga’ gee’ you what you lookin’ for!”: Tamika Galanis gets to the heart of the Caribbean’s history of “looking”

By Natalie Willis, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Who gets to write history? And, better still, who gets to interpret it, present it, share it to the masses? It’s a slippery question for the Caribbean, and arguably for most post-colonial countries. Much of what makes it so difficult to grasp is how the gaze is problematised in this region. In art and history in particular, “the gaze” as a concept is the way that our history, experiences and dominant narratives shape the way we see – in short, it is how our conditioning as a society influences the way we view ourselves and others. In particular, film and cinema capitalise on this with the way they place certain visual cues. At its best, it can be a way to build suspense and intensity in film, at worst – and as so often happens with Caribbean history – it can drive in a singular narrative on what is a very nuanced experience. Tamika Galanis’ Returning the Gaze: I ga gee you what you lookin’ for (2018) explores just that: representations of Blackness outside of a dated, colonial gaze.

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“When The Lionfish Came”: Tamika Galanis chimes in for the people of the reef in dangerously rising tides.

By Natalie Willis. In Adelaide, there is a bell that has been ringing for at least a hundred years, but closer to two. Events, hurricanes, births and deaths, are all marked by the chime, and the proud denizens of this historic community for freed Blacks have, for generations, found themselves answering to its call. However, Tamika Galanis’ film, “When The Lionfish Came” (2015) is not a church bell…

It is an alarm.

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Sorry for What: I am not the sugar in your cup of tea

Dr Ian Bethell Bennett

Sorry, Not Sorry a short experimental film by Alberta Whittle juxtaposes tourism and post-enslavement-dispossession in the British Caribbean.  An intriguing mise-en-scène combined with sharp overlaying and interweaving text, image, audio and nuance that brings all sorts of feelings to the fore, from contradictions to harmonies.  The harmony in the background, though clashes with the discordant foreground that allows the moving image the salience it has to document, to articulate, to illustrate the unbecoming side of colonialism and independence. Again, the irony of postcolonial independence is that there is no real sovereignty as governments are only held in power by foreign direct investors who own the economy, by owning resorts where the Bacardi-sipping-frolicking-lithe bodies stay during their fantasy time in paradise.

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