The Rhetoric of Reggae in Artful Cinema for the World :: Reggae Jamaican Music Film Essays

The Rhetoric of Reggae in Artful Cinema for the humanityPerry Henzels The Harder They Come is credited with a epochal and unique role in introducing American audiences to reggae. Whereas earlier cinematic crossmarketed films like A Hard days Night or Help were adjunct to and dependent on a groups previous commercial practice of medicineal success, Henzels film was for many an introduction to reggae and two precursor and impetus for its international impact and commercial popularity. The films status as a cult classic and phenomenon, to the extent a phenomenon can be explained, perhaps rests on its lack of commercial pretentions or promotional glitz, and indeed its authenticity. The rhetoric of this film -- its images, words, and music in complementary array -- is rhetoric in the best sense because it uses the power of language to reveal, not to disguise, the exorbitant constraints on the lives of poor Jamaicans. Principally its a film by a Jamaican artist about some music ally and culturally significant events happening in Jamaica at the time, and though it is formulaic as films race to be, it also encompasses all of the majors themes and conflicts that define and swirl around reggae music spirituality, sensuality, commercialism, social justice, the messiah, and even Armageddon, though its tenor is decidedly secular The sense datum of the film is that it synthesizes a multitude of cultural and musical elements and still manages to exit rhetorically on separate but parallel levels of communication. The fundamental heart for Jamaican audiences was to document, authenticate, and value the Jamaican reality. As Henzel notes in his running commentary, a special feature of the DVD, Jamaicans cheered the films opening scenes wildly, simply because they recognized themselves and their world in a powerful global medium that had paid them no look until then. There is no thrill in moviedom like community eyesight themselves on the screen for the first t ime. The experience and the legacy of colonialism accustoms people who set about it to literature and film that depicts the lives and perspectives of the colonizers, not the colonized. As Jamaica Kincaid explains in a narrative of a Carribean childhood, all of her reading was from books set in England. Her land and its people were not worthy of literary attention. While finally getting much(prenominal) cinematic attention is a joyful, liberating, and affirming interaction for the Jamaican audience, it has an ironic holding too in that the downpressed are joyous because at last they weigh themselves if not through the downpressors lens, at least on his screen.