‘One Hand Don’t Clap’: Trip to the Roots of Calipso Music | Cinema: premieres and criticism

After seeing the documentary One Hand Don’t Clap It is better understood why a type as sly as Robert Mitchum found in Calipso music its particular star whim. The actor was rolling with John Huston in Trinidad and Tobago the romantic war drama Only God knows (1957) When a genre whose soft and danceable rhythms, with mocking and cheerful letters but glued to a difficult reality, seemed an extension of their own character, discovered in that corivers of the Caribbean. In 1957, in the wake of the success of Harry Belafonte, Mitchum published Calypso—Is Like So…a rarity that did not go down in history, although that was not the kind of thing that matches Mitchum too much.

One Hand Don’t Clap Does not talk about this substitute made in Hollywood but of his reverse, the authentic artists who were buried under the thrust of musical colonialism when in the fifties came the fashion of the Calipso to the United States. The Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund are in charge of the 4K restoration of this documentary of the documentary filmmaker Kavery Kaul. Rolled in the late 1980s, Kaul focused his work on two figures: Lord Kitchener, one of the main referents of the genre, who traveled in the forties to London with his rhythm under his arm, and Calypso Rose, one of the first female performers accepted by the Calipsonians. As Lord Kitchener recalls, the English with whom Harry Belafonte sang was not that of the true singers of Calipso, but they were already understood.

Kavery Kaul rolled in the streets of Puerto Spain a Pachanguero and festive documentary, full of bright colors, which has its best asset in its testimonies; First -hand stories about how that music was developed, from its folk and popular bases to its new commercial aspects.

Lord Kitchener dates back to his childhood, when he listened to his blacksmith hitting the forge with a rhythm that refers to the African roots of the calipso. It is one of those characters that fill the screen, as when he explains without walking through the branches why arrived a moment was sold to the fashion of the most danceable soca: Life continues and you have to eat. Minutes before, in one of the best moments of the film, his old adventure partner, Lord pretend, he reproaches him that no one sings the authentic calipso, much more focused on the care of the letters and their rhymes and less on the instrumental side. The incredible thing is that they maintain that dialogue about how to be a calipsonian improvising a song.

The documentary was shot during the Carnival of Trinidad and Tobago and the Monarch Calipso contest of the year. The numbers of soca They become long. The presence of Calypso Rose does not have Kitchener’s strength, but Kavery Kaul’s gender perspective is clear: it is a pioneer in a genre dominated by men and with it another type of letters come into play. Stories of abuse and abandonment that told at the pace of Calipso invite you to cure the pain dancing.