Perry Henzell
Film director who took a Jamaican crime story to put the realities of island life on celluloidJamaican film-maker Perry Henzell, who has died of cancer aged 70, was one of the most noteworthy figures of Caribbean cinema. His masterpiece, The Harder They Come (1972), starring the reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, remains the most outstanding film to emerge from the region and has continually served as a reference point for film-makers in the Caribbean and Latin America. It brought the sights and sounds of Jamaica to overseas audiences for the first time; in particular, it made plain the jarring reality of the Kingston slums and gave some indication of the Rastafari way of life, sparking an interest for many in the island's culture, particularly through its reggae soundtrack.
The film has remained in constant circulation, both in the developed and developing worlds, and earlier this year was adapted as a musical at London's Stratford East theatre, with Henzell's involvement.
An unorthodox, intuitive and intensely creative person, Henzell was born in Port Maria, a quiet town on Jamaica's north coast, and raised about 12 miles outside Kingston on the Caymanas sugarcane estate, one of the last bastions of the ruling plantocracy that has held significant economic power in Jamaica since the days of slavery.
Henzell's background, like that of many prominent Jamaicans, was complex: his paternal grandfather, descended from Huguenot glassblowers, married into an old Antiguan family, while his mother hailed from an equally established family in Trinidad.
But ever the rebel, Henzell rejected his privileged status early on: sent at 14 to Shrewsbury, the English boarding school, he decided to hitchhike around Europe instead. After briefly attending McGill University, Montreal, in 1956, he presented himself at the BBC drama department in London with the intention of becoming a director; he was saved from outright rejection by gaining work experience as a stagehand.
On returning to Jamaica in 1959, Henzell formed Vista Productions and began directing commercials, initially on celluloid for screenings in cinemas, and later on local television; after making more than 200 such commercials, some of which, featuring street people, were highly experimental, he set out to create The Harder They Come, co-written with the leading Jamaican dramatist Trevor Rhone.
The film was a milestone - the first full-length feature shot in Jamaica by a Jamaican director with a fully Jamaican cast, centring on the realities of Jamaican island life. It adapted the story of Ivanhoe Martin, a notorious, real-life Jamaican criminal killed by police in 1948, to make broader points about the harsh realities facing migrants from the countryside in the island's dehumanising capital, taking in the exploitation of the music industry and the illicit lure of the marijuana trade along the way. Jimmy Cliff's sympathetic portrayal of the lead character - renamed Ivan O Martin - showed a determined character whose pride would not allow him to be beaten down, but whose desperation led to an inevitably gory demise. Through it, Henzell illuminated the widespread social injustice commonplace in the developing world.
Filming was halted on several occasions when money ran out, but the eventual opening of The Harder They Come, at the Carib theatre, Kingston, was a crazed affair that nearly resulted in a riot, and the film swiftly broke the island's box office records. In contrast, its London debut at what was then the ABC cinema in Brixton saw such poor attendance that Henzell was forced to hand out leaflets at the local tube station in an effort to raise its profile among London's expatriate Jamaican community. Fortunately, a more receptive audience at the 1972 Venice film festival brought an award for Best Young Cinema, and after years of Henzell's efforts the film eventually came to be regarded a cult classic.
In 1973, Henzell began work on another film, No Place Like Home, which centred on a love affair between a Jamaican country woman and a New York television director visiting the island to shoot a commercial. But the project quickly ran into funding problems.
Retreating to Itopia, an isolated stone villa on the north coast of Jamaica, where he and his family lived for many years without electricity, Henzell campaigned for prison reform, worked sporadically on No Place Like Home and began writing novels, two of which were completed: Power Game, published in 1982, was a vivid portrayal of corrupt island politics that made reference to the failures of the democratic socialist regime established by Henzell's formerly close friend, Michael Manley, in the 1970s. The second novel, Cane (2003), was a complex exploration of 18th-century plantation life.
Henzell also staged a musical about Marcus Garvey in 1988 with assistance from veteran performers Toots Hibbert and Ernie Smith, worked on dozens of screenplays for other producers and wrote the foreword to Yes Rasta (2000), a book of photographs by Patrick Cariou, as well as running a dramatic arts studio in the Jamaican capital.
In later years, he divided his time between Itopia and Jake's, the small but exclusive hotel opened in Treasure Beach by his wife Sally during the 1990s, which is also home to the annual Calabash literary festival.
Henzell was diagnosed with cancer in 2000, but continued to work diligently. After a long-lost print of No Place Like Home was discovered in New York, he completed work on it by augmenting the original footage with additional material from 1981 and other scenes completed more recently; its debut at the Toronto international film festival this year was well received and it was shown in Jamaica on December 1, the day after Henzell died peacefully at a relative's home.
He is survived by Sally, his wife of 41 years, son Jason, daughters Justine and Toni Ann, sisters Judy and Susan and four grandchildren.
ยท Perry Henzell, film-maker, writer and political activist, born March 7 1936; died November 30 2006
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