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Sugar Can Alley
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| 電影導演 / Euzhan Palcy 尤桑•巴爾琪 |
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Sugar Can Alley
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- Setting:
St. Martinique in the 1930s; Black Shack Alley, Port-de-France
- Characters:
- Major--Jose,
Amantine (Ma Tine)
Minor--Medouze (Jose's spiritual mentor), Leopold (the mulatto boy),
Carmen, Mme, Leonce,
the
two teachers (Mr. Roc and ?), Miss Flora (the ticket girl), Ti Coco,
Twelve-Toe, Mme Fusil,Madame Saint Louis
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 Plot |
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The setting
is Martinique in the early 1930s. Young Jose and his grandmother live
in a small village. The children's games are set in contrast
with the adults' hardwork, whose wages are very little. While
the other adults ask their kids to work in the sugar cane field too,
Jose's grandmother insists on his receiving education. Her
efforts include: keeping newspapers for him to read, sending him to
school, and moving to Fort-de-France to make Jose's studies easier
while she works even harder as a laundrywoman.
What Jose
learns is not just knowledge from school. Her learns from M.
Moudouz about the history of slavery, from his friend, Leopold(the
bastard son of the Creole plantation owner), about racial
inequality. Also, he learns to assert himself in and out of
school when the adults (including
the teachers) misunderstand him or mistreats him.
 In Fort-de-France, Jose also
witnesses different people's different cultural
identities.
The following
introduction is excerpted from
Cross-Cultural Film Guide/
Patricia Aufderheide Cross-Cultural
Film Guide Introduction and Overview
The American University/ ©1992
; boldface & pictures added by
Kate Liu
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| Style |
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The film has
high production values, despite a less-than-a-million-dollar budget,
and is executed with deceptive grace and simplicity. It comfortably
uses the conventions of psychological realism
in which traditional international fiction features are made. The
acting by child non-actors is of
particular note, an achievement not only of the children but of Palcy's
directing. The film maintains close focus on the psychological
experience of the boy hero, but packs the screen and the
scenes with illuminating and contextualizing material.
It carries a message without reducing the story to the message.
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| Director
& Production Background |
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Palcy, who is
black, began work in the French National Radio and Television station
FR3 in Martinique, and made three films working with children before
this. She won a grant for a third of the production funds from a French
government grant for young directors. She wrote the script, drawing it
from a well-known Martinican novel by Joseph Zobel, of the same
title. Martinican officials including the noted
poet of negritude Aime Cesaire, the mayor of Fort-de-France, backed the
production as well. (Cesaire's friendship with Seck had much to do with
his agreeing to play the role.) The film was made in
French, not the Martinican creole, in part to satisfy
the grant requirements; however the film was not, as is traditional
with such grants, first shown in France. It premiered in Martinique,
where it broke all box office records for any film ever shown there,
and as a result of a post-card campaign from Martinique to France also
became a hit in France.
Because the
film was controversial and because the white Creole elite continues
strong in Martinique (which continues to be an overseas
province of France), Palcy had wondered if there might
be local criticism. However, she told Pat Aufderheide when it came out,
in an interview in Chicago, there was no elite outrage. "Partly
it's because they have less power than they once did, because French
overseas investment now has more control over the economy. And partly
it's because they were relieved to see the final result. They had been
afraid that the film would be much harsher in its portrayal of whites,
in fact a racist film. I however had never wanted to make a racist
film. I wanted to make a film that could touch people, awaken their
consciences to a sense of change--a revolt in a positive sense--and
move hem to struggle peacefully for a better life, to come to see
themselves as people with dignity." . .
.
Film
production context: Film production throughout the
Antilles is very much an individual and personal affair. Small and
impoverished populations create no adequate mass base to finance
commercial production. French government grants both to its overseas
provinces and its ex-colonies (not just in the Antilles but in Africa)
have been critical in spurring film production.
Importance:
The film swept the
French Cesars (like the Oscars), and won two awards, including the
Silver Lion, at the Venice Film Festival. It was a smash hit at home,
and well-received in France. It had a successful commercial release in
the U.S., with Orion, and continues its life on commercial video
shelves. One of the reasons for its international success is its
winsome hero and the story that can be interpreted as a boy pulling
himself up by his bootstraps. However, that reading is belied by a more
careful look at the central dilemma of the film: that
colonial education provides no way for someone from the lower rungs of
the society to honor their own and their culture's experience of
struggle. The enduring success of the film is its
ability to allow the viewer to enter into the boy's central problem
without becoming didactic
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| Caribbean
Cinema and "Black Shack Alley" |
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Original
Site |
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1. Caribbean Cinema.
Film making in
the Caribbean by Caribbean people is a relatively recent
phenomenon--except (I read) for Cuba and maybe Puerto Rico. Like
African film, it has emerged mainly since the late 1970s and early
80s--as a local, indigenous, or distinct art .
Movies as
entertainment are not at all new to the West Indies. The Caribbean has
been a receiver and consumer of European and American films for a long
time. It is the activity of production and transmission--that is, film
by West Indians---which is so recent.
The emergence
of a Caribbean cinema parallels, in certain respects, political,
economic, and cultural developments in the 1960s and 70s. Not unlike
circumstances in Africa. And like Africa, the conditions for production
have been economically and sometimes politically difficult. (Film is a
very expensive art form. Some governments would oppose or even suppress
films that might be critical.)
The emergence
of a West Indian cinema also parallels innovative thinking about a
distinct Caribbean identity. Many writers identify Edouard Glissant as
instrumental in defining a sense of identity in terms of "Créolité."
(The notes on Glissant say more about this.)
The Caribbean
diaspora (West Indians emigrating to Britain, France, the Netherlands,
and the U.S.) raises not only questions about identity and belonging
but also about what qualifies as Caribbean cinema--films by West
Indians made in the Caribbean? films by West Indians made in Europe?
films about the Caribbean made by folks who aren't Caribbean in any
way? The first two categories usually count.
Questions of
identity, hybridity, movement, "unceasing transformation," and so on
lead directly to ideas and experiences of exile.
The topics
outlinedunder African Cinema of production, technology, aesthetics, and
thematics are also relevant to the Caribbean.
2. Euzhan Palcy, the director.
Palcy first
read the novel, Rue Case Negres by Joseph Zobel,
when she was 14 years old. She reportedly wrote her first script based
on it at 17 when she went to work for the Radio Télévision Francaise
office in Fort-de-France. She is Martinican but left the island for
Paris in 1975--which has been the base for her subsequent cinematic
career. She studied literature at the Sorbonne for her undergraduate
degree and then earned a Ph.D. there in cinema. She studied filmmaking
at the Rue Lumiere School. She made Sugar Cane
Alley when she was 28! Palcy is also the director of A
Dry White Season (1989), an anti-apartheid film about South
Africa, a Hollywood film, but made in Zimbabwe and "starring" Donald
Sutherland and Marlon Brando (and available at video stores all across
America). She madeSimeon in 1992, a film inspired
by Caribbean music and written and shot from the point of view of a 10
year old girl. It is "a film about the spirit of the music and a paean
to those who perform it" (Linda Lopez McAlister). Palcy has established
her own production company. Recently, she completed a three part
documentary about Aimé Cesaire, a poet and politician and the foremost
West Indian writer on Negritude: Aimé Cesaire: Une Voix Pour
L'histoire. She is also working on a feature film biography
of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot who learned
to fly in France in the 1920s and on a film about Toussaint
L'Ouverture.
3. Sugarcane Alley.
This is one of
the best known and most successful Caribbean films. It was received
well at the New York film Festival in 1984. It's been well reviewed by
non-West Indians but also seems to have been received well in the
Caribbean as a film which portrays recognizable experiences (and
problems) and avoids the usual Islands magazine
imagery.
This film is
more accessible than films like Yeelen or even Hyenas.
Palcy understands western film techniques and the importance of
narrative to appeal to different audiences. This film seems more
familiar --even though thecharacters speak French, and it is set among
impoverished people on a distant island, in the 1930s. Palcy also
infuses her films with political and cultural content. Simple and
direct in A Dry White Season..
Somewhat less pointed in Sugar Cane Alley.
The following
notes are rather cryptic but perhaps sufficient to give you several
ways of seeing and thinking about the film.
[Imagine that
you are a movie reviewer at the New York Film Festival--or anywhere.
How would you review this? What particulars would you cover--the
characters, setting, contrasts, themes, politics, technique? What would
you SAY?]
a. Colonial Martinique--1930s.
Slavery
has ended decades before. Blacks are presumably "free."
Nothing
has changed, however. Most Blacks are still poor, dependent laborers.
The
economy is still exploitive and extractive.
b. Characters. They all
function significantly in relation to Jose.
Ma
Tine
Medouze
How would you characterize these people?
Leopold
What do you learn about Jose through each?
Carmen How
do the relationships advance the story?
Children
Teachers
c. Conflicts--contrasts:
oppositions (codes)
(We defined
several oppositions or dichotomies during the discussion of "Yeelen."
These may help organize your thinking about "Sugar Cane Alley.")
There is a
rather obvious hierarchy of value and prestige in these opposites.
- White/
Black (mulatto, mixed race in between)
- Europe/West
Indies
- City/country
- Owners/labor
- Affluence/poverty
- Homes/
shacks
d. Education: informing and enabling
Medouze and
Amantine seem to convey values, wisdom, direction, history, culture.
School
provides a more formal education--the second door to freedom.
e. Politics and culture.
These issues
may be somewhat subdued in the film--people and relationships are
portrayed very strongly--but the political and cultural content seems
undeniable. The film is set at a time, remember, of considerable unrest
and resistance in the Caribbean--the 1930s.
Economic
and class structure.
Protest
and complaints. No serious resistance among workers is portrayed. (They
mock and ridicule their 'superiors.' They sing to witness their
opposition to the treatment of Leopold. One the men pees on the job.)
Nevertheless, The way the people are mistreated seems pretty clear.
There is a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction and anger.
People's
movement. It's mostly implicit but there.
Leopold
and the protest singing at the end.
Does Jose's 'success'
suggest that things are changing? There will be justice? Does his
promise mean anything? Is he simply an exception?
How do you
read this line at the end? "Take my Black Shack Alley with me."
f. Techniques.
It's
especially important to think about film technique because so many of
our images of the West Indies are tourist, vacation, playground
images--sun, sea, sand, and sex. Club Med. By contrast, this film is
made in a rather spare style. There is an apparent economy of technique
at work. The sepia tones are simpy the most obvious.
Observe
carefully these specific aesthetic and technical features.
Opening
credit images--the postcard views. We seem to be seeing a
1930s tourist vision or version of Martinique. We see quite separate
worlds for Black and White. These are most of the images.
The
alley. Boulevard. People disembarking. Church-ox team. City. Country.
White upper class. Labor. Government buildings. Rich homes. The alley.
A church. A team of oxen.
Sequence
of events. Identify expressive moments or turning points in
the film. Medouze dies, e.g., almost exactly halfway through. Ma Tine
dies at the end. There is very little waste.
Stories
within the narrative. Medouze talks, e.g., about Africa,
about capture, transport, slavery,and about nature or creation.
Setting.
Examine the contrasts, e.g., between Ma Tine's home and her village and
, explain the effects, think about the expressive function of setting.
Color.
What is the effect of thesubdued, sepia tones?
Framing
and images. Think about the tight framing and the absence of
any typical scenery shots. This film does not look like Island
magazine. There is little sense of shore, sea, and sun.
Note
how each of these 'subjects' are shot. There seems to be a strong focus
on relationships/conditions
- Interiors
- Close-ups
- Groups
- Exteriors--relatively
tight, as well, limited--few long or horizon shots.
- Jose
and Medouze
- Town
scenes
- River
Music and
sound. How is the film "scored"?
What are
the practical and expressive effects of this economy of technique?
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