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

The Rhetoric of Reggae in Artful Cinema for the instaurationPerry Henzels The Harder They Come is credited with a operative and unique role in introducing American audiences to reggae. Whereas earlier cinematic crossmarketed films like A Hard geezerhood Night or Help were adjunct to and dependent on a groups previous commercial medicational success, Henzels film was for many an introduction to reggae and both(prenominal) 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 grandiosity 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 hideous constraints on the lives of poor Jamaicans. Principally its a film by a Jamaican artist a bout some musically and culturally significant events happening in Jamaica at the time, and though it is formulaic as films hunt down 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 wit of the film is that it synthesizes a multitude of cultural and musical elements and still manages to break away rhetorically on separate but parallel levels of communication. The fundamental cognitive content 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 sense until then. There is no thrill in moviedom like mass perceive themselves on the screen for the first time. The experience and the legacy of colonialism accustoms people who bring it to literature and film that depicts the lives and perspectives of the colonizers, not the colonized. As Jamaica Kincaid explains in a muniment 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 symmetry too in that the downpressed are joyous because at last they get together themselves if not through the downpressors lens, at least on his screen.