Jans Rautenbach
Subtitle: Dromer Baanbreker en Auteur
Publisher: Genugtig! Publishers
Published: September 2006
Place of publication: Cape Town
Language: afr
Number of pages: 217
Subjects: Motion picture history - South Africa; Motion pictures - Directors
Description: This very generous tribute to one of only a handful of truly original South African filmmakers is in fact two books in one.  The first part of the book is an appreciative biographical essay by Martin Botha covering the period from Rautenbach’s impoverished childhood years in Boksburg, where his father (a miner) told him that going to the movies was a sin, all the way to his retirement at his beloved “Oulap”, the elegant home that he and his family themselves built in the Swartberg Mountains. This was done largely to get away from the hustle and bustle of Johannesburg, where he practised his craft with great enjoyment and dedication – after having resigned his position in 1963 as the first official criminologist in the SA prison services.  He owed his entry into the film industry to another Boksburg boy, Tommy Meyer, who was at the time head of Jamie Uys Films.  Rautenbach’s great respect for Uys’s work is evident, but it is clear and fortunate that his respect did not lead to blind emulation.

The bulk of the rest of this first section of the book then deals systematically, chapter by chapter, with each of Rautenbach’s films, with the key insight perhaps emerging that Rautenbach should be regarded as a “Sestiger” – a codeword for saying that his work was exploratory, innovative and provocative at this key moment of redefinition of what can loosely be called “Afrikaner identity”.  Martin Botha sketches briefly the context of the Afrikaans film industry at this time – this is essential background if one is to appreciate the truly astonishing scale of Rautenbach’s achievement.  But it is important also to register that he did not see himself as a “rebel” or an activist as a filmmaker – and certainly not as an iconoclast; the literary equivalent among the “Sestigers” is probably Bartho Smit rather than, say, Etienne LeRoux or Andrè Brink.  He was also fortunate to have been invited by Emil Nofal – who has the dubious distinction of having had his racial classification changed from “non-white” to “white” (he was Lebanese) under the racial laws of the time – to join his film production company in 1964, and together they tried initially to emulate (in the still amusing King Hendrik) Jamie Uys’s sharply observed satirical films about the relationships between English and Afrikaans speakers in the country.

But it was undoubtedly the massive, formidable talent of Cobus Rossouw that help to give Rautenbach’s first films as director their weight and their intense focus.  It may be difficult these days to appreciate what a truly pioneering film Die Kandaat was when it first appeared in 1968.  The whole chapter on this film makes for fascinating reading, not only because of what it reveals about Rautenbach’s working methods, but also because of its reminders about the difficulty of funding and making a film at a time when the industry was operating within a professionally dispiriting censorship system.  Rossouw had an important role in this film as well as in the next two, Katrina (1969) and Jannie Totsiens (1970), and it may be that these three films will come to be regarded as the outstanding achievements of Rautenbach’s career.

The chapters are uniformly informative and interesting – and are well illustrated with production stills, cast photographs, even with beautiful reproductions of torn old magazine covers displaying the director!  The chapter on Katrina – possibly the Rautenbach film that most people remember – is of particular interest because it touches on a wider range of South African issues than even Die Kandidaat did.  The controversies it aroused received extensive coverage in the English press too.  After Katrina Nofal and Rautenbach became increasingly estranged and Rautenbach soon set up his own production company, writing and producing seven more films until his retirement from filmmaking in 1984.  In the last ten years or so he has rightly been honoured in many ways and there have been several retrospectives of his films, most recently at the Africa Film Festival in Milan in 2004.

As is the case now, so also in the boom years of the 1960s (and later) prestige and therefore money gravitated towards those talented South African filmmakers who adopted mainstream American filmmaking models and strategies – at incalculable cost to the vitality of the local film industry.  It was true of Jamie Uys, it is true of Darrell Roodt and is becoming true of Gavin Hood.  It would be interesting to speculate why Rautenbach resisted this pull towards mainstream commercial filmmaking, but his decision to remain focused on the South African condition – with all its tensions, contradictions and paradoxes – has meant that he has left us an invaluable cultural legacy in the films themselves, as well as cultivating the ground for a number of serious, professional and committed filmmakers to practise their craft in a way that remains focused on South African realities, rather than creating cosmeticised melodramas catering for the (admittedly) profitable American market.  

The other half of the book, so to speak, is a personal memoir edited by Deborah Steinmair … and one should read it as such rather than as a critical or even evaluative essay.  Here a slightly different image of Rautenbach emerges – a man who is passionate, disgruntled even, and by his own admission a political animal; the Afrikaans word “bebliksemd” is used of him here to convey his sense of unshakeable commitment to his craft, no matter who was going to be upset by this!  He was absolutely determined to reflect the problematic realities of his time – not necessarily offer solutions – at a stage in our history when, according to Steinmair, Afrikaners were not encouraged to think for themselves.  Toes were going to be trodden on and feathers ruffled – even in high circles.  But certain things needed to be said and it took someone of Rautenbach’s temperament – and indeed integrity (it’s not surprising that he was sometimes referred to as the Ingmar Bergman of South Africa) – to say them, without the bombast, didacticism and pomposity of earlier ‘serious’ Afrikaans films, and without the frivolous escapism of typical Afrikaans comedies, which may certainly have been entertaining but were finally without any significance whatsoever.  This part of the book, too, is wonderfully illustrated with press clippings, and photographs of family and friends (the most poignant of them perhaps the shots with Emil Nofal).  Naturally there are detailed reminiscences about his career, including a section in which he expresses his deep regret at having made documentary films for the apartheid Defence Force.

The book has been handsomely produced by Genugtig! Publishers as a lavishly illustrated coffee-table volume – which may lead some potential purchasers to underestimate the richness of detail and insight to be found in it (or, I suppose, discover to their dismay that it is academically quite detailed!).  Martin Botha has spent much of his professional career advancing the interests of the South African film industry, and this volume will remain a key point of reference for historians and commentators. He has already written (in Movies, Moguls, Mavericks) a useful survey of the films another major Afrikaans filmmaker, Manie van Rensburg, but the subtitle of that piece, “Chronicles of the Afrikaner Psyche”, is certainly more appropriate here.