In 1933, the Empire Marketing Board sent Basil Wright – who had been John Grierson’s first recruit to the EMB Film Unit – to the West Indies. Paul Rotha claimed that Wright’s ‘mission was to make the first of a series of films for specialised use under the general title of The Eyes of Science’, which were ‘to be made mainly at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad’ and would cover subjects such as ‘Panama disease in bananas [and] Witchbroom disease in Cacao’. Rotha notes that what appeared instead were two short films – Cargo from Jamaica and Windmill in Barbados – that Wright shot, edited and directed ‘on the side’ (Rotha, 1973, 60). Along with these two films was Liner Cruising South, a silent film made for Ocean Liner, and footage shot during his brief visit to British Guiana, which in all probability featured in the 1933 GPO film British Guiana.

Basil Wright wrote about his ‘very rushed tour of the West Indies and British Guiana’ in Cinema Quarterly in the summer of 1933. He wrote in particular of the difficulties of shooting in the middle of the day – ‘the shadows are pitch black and kill all detail’ – and emphasised his reliance on reflectors, particularly ‘when negro types had to be shot’ (Cinema Quarterly, Summer 1933, 227). Wright also offered a brief insight into his trip in his 1974 book The Long View. ‘As late as 1933 I was shooting without access to sound’, he stated, ‘not that this meant we were not interested. Certainly when I went on a film-making tour to the West Indies in 1933 I had in mind various possibilities for soundtracks to be added to what I was shooting and was acutely aware of the Russian manifesto’ (Wright, 1974, 114). Indeed, Windmill in Barbados – unlike the silent Cargo from Jamaica – utilises the recently acquired sound equipment at the GPO studio in Blackheath. In particular, the film offers the first example of Alberto Cavalcanti’s work in England – as ‘sound supervisor’ – with Basil Wright claiming that ‘his ideas about sound were so liberating that they would liberate in you about a thousand other ideas’ (Sight and Sound, Autumn 1975, 207).

However, when Sight and Sound reviewed the film in 1933, it was listed as ‘silent’, with the sound subsequently added. Sight and Sound’s review praised Wright for bringing ‘a sense of poetic imagery to bear upon the inevitable tragedy of the old and new’ and noted the ‘undercurrent of sympathy for the negro worker, the sons of slaves, revealed in a sudden flash from the native labourers to half caste employer, grown rich on cheap labour and aping European customs and clothes’. The review concluded that ‘the picture is an object lesson in lyrical approach and marks down Wright as a camera-poet without equal in this country’ (Sight and Sound, Autumn 1933, 103). Rachael Low further praised Wright, in retrospect, for ‘making a small jewel of a film out of a commission to popularise Empire food products’ and recognised the film, as Paul Rotha also did, as a ‘forerunner of The Song of Ceylon’, which Wright filmed later in 1933 and released during 1934 (Low, 1979, 61).

Windmill in Barbados was released commercially as one of six films assembled within the ‘Weather Forecast’ series, which was distributed in 1934 by Associated Talking Pictures (Swann, 1989, 71). While there is no evidence of these films receiving widespread theatrical exhibition, John Mackenzie noted how Empire Marketing Board films were also often screened continuously at railway stations, as well as by its four mobile cinema vans. In particular the films could be hired from the Empire Film Library – Sir Harry Lindsay, the Director of the Imperial Institute claimed the library reached an audience of five million in 1936 – while Windmill in Barbados was also popular with film societies (The Times, 20 August 1936, 10). For example, it played with Cargo from Jamaica at the Oxford University Film Society in May 1934 (Cinema Quarterly, Summer 1934, 255).

By 1933 the impact of the Great Depression was felt throughout the West Indies. Sugar prices reached an all-time low, by 1934 falling to a fifth of its 1923 price, and wages dropped accordingly. Unemployment increased, while the cost of living soared amongst a rapidly increasing population. After jobless workers protested in Trinidad in 1933, there followed a series of riots and labour disturbances throughout 1934 and 1935. Similar events occurred in Barbados during 1937, and Mary Chamberlain argues that the Barbados riots ‘were the culmination of a century of frustration, and a watershed marking the transition from the struggle for emancipation to one for independence’ (Schwarz, 2003, 176).