Title: Marginal lives & painful pasts
Subtitle: South African cinema after apartheid
First published: 2007
Description: In an important new book on South African cinema, Marginal lives and painful pasts: South African cinema after apartheid (Genugtig! Uitgewers), 14 contributors document and analyse contemporary film in terms of the political, social and cultural influence of apartheid. 
Together the fourteen chapters address three main topics: the transformed industry, film and marginalisation, film and documentation, and film and representation. In Post-apartheid cinema: policy, structures, themes and new aesthetics, Martin Botha contextualises recent developments in the film industry. Botha, well-known for his previous meticulous descriptions and analyses of South African film history, its artists and the industry, gives a brief history of filmmaking during the apartheid years. He shows how, despite some landmark films of directors such as Ross Devenish, Manie van Rensburg and Jans Rautenbach, the structures and mechanisms of the industry discouraged serious filmmaking. 

New structures such as the Arts and Culture Task Group (ACTAG) leading to the establishment of the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) was needed to provide a voice to marginalised communities and impetus for the development of a new film culture. Botha concludes that at present we have a cinema which dares to confront the past and the present and which dares to ask serious questions. With references to South Africa’s presence at international film festivals, international awards, investor confidence, government support (or at least a sympathetic attitude), and the NFVF’s work, we are now experiencing a revival in the film industry, leading Botha to predict a potentially bright future for the industry.

In the second part of the book, the topic of marginalisation is addressed. Since the rise of feminism, feminist studies, racism studies and thereafter male and gay studies, a key topic in film studies is film’s potential to powerfully visualise (or ignore) and provide the outcast, the marginalised and the stereotyped with a voice. To illustrate this, and for the purpose of this book, Botha has chosen to focus the spotlight on gays as the marginalised group. The result is that for the first time in South African film-writing the representation of gays in South African film is dealt with seriously. 

Ricardo Peach’s chapter, Skeef Cinema Entja: A brief history of South African Queer cinematic cultures will probably go down as a masterpiece in the history of South Africa’s film writing. By “queering” South African cinema, he comes up with fascinating, if not intriguing, interpretations of early South African films. The following is an example. Sarie Marais (1931), he writes, contains one of the earliest homoerotic images in South African cinema. “As Chris Blignaut (the main character) and the musical group The Melodians sing the song Sarie Marais, two men begin to waltz with each other in the middle of the room.

The beauty of the melody and the sensual movement of the two men dancing create a very intimate atmosphere, conducive to a homoerotic reading”. When reading interpretations like these, one can almost hear the pioneers of South African (Afrikaans) film grasping for breath and shouting O My God! In the same vain and line with the tenets of Queer Theory, Peach confronts the reader with queer readings of classic South African (Afrikaans) films such as the Al Debbo and Frederik Burgers’ movies. Who would, for instance, ever have thought of Frederik Burgers as a cross-dresser?

In an in-depth analysis he shows how through the 60s and 70s queer political struggles have been documented despite severe censorship; how many of the army movies of the 80s lend themselves to homoerotic readings; how a film/video culture emerged amongst gays in the 80’s; how the first local queer films (Quest for love (1987) and The Soldier (1988)) were produced, etcetera. He ends with a detailed analysis of the post-apartheid queer feature film Proteus (2004).

In short, up to date, Peach’s contribution is probably the most comprehensive published overview of homoeroticism in South African film and of the development of a queer South African film and film culture. It is theoretically and analytically a captivating description and interpretation that impresses on the reader’s mind cinema’s (potential) power to contribute to the liberation of the marginalised.

Proteus is also the topic of Edwin Hees’ chapter (Proteus and the dialectics of History) on film and the dialectics of history. With his discussion, he illustrates the complexities related to film as historiography. He touches on key theoretical and analytical issues related to identity politics especially. See in this regard his references to representation of gender, the question of realism and expressionism with reference to Bazin, Godard, Eisenstein, and et cetera. His discussion and analysis of “the other” as dealt with in this film thus becomes a valuable exercise in applied film theory and aesthetics.

In the end, for Hees, Proteus is far more than a gay story, but a good filmic treatment of how various cultural paradigms construct identity.

The third part of the book is devoted to South African documentary filmmaking.

Francois Verster (Redefining the political: A short overview of personal documentary films from the new South Africa) writes about the documentary as exploration of matters related to identity in the new South Africa, the relationship between individual and community, and the “marriage” between first and third worlds. He concludes that through the recognition of the importance and value of the documentary genre, previous neglected and ignored people, groups and topics are now visualised and dealt with. 

Kristin Pichaske’s subject (Black stories, White voices: The challenge of transforming South Africa’s documentary film industry) is the transformation of the South African documentary film industry. Under headings such as “a cinema for whites only”, “the legacy of state propaganda”, “propaganda for the resistance”, “reclaiming history”, “building an industry”, and so on, she approaches the subject of transformation from a historical perspective and concludes with a new reading, an interpretation of the past and future of the documentary industry.

To her, a most worrying characteristic of not only the documentary industry and its filmmakers, but of South African filmmakers and the industry in general, is their impatience. “South Africans want it now”. They forget the complexities of the industry and the medium. They should learn to accept that filmmaking, and everything that goes along with it, is a slow process, especially to develop an own style. 

In the remaining three chapters of this section, Keyan Tomaselli (Communication for development in the new South African documentary) gives an overview of the work of South African Communications for Development (SACOD). 

He concludes that this is an organisation, which seriously contributes to the achievement of Thelma Gutsche’s call for a “national cinema ….reverted back to Africans”. Lauren van Vuuren (‘An act of preservation and a requiem’: The Great Dance: A hunter’s story and technological testimony in post-apartheid South Africa) investigates the filmic documentation of the Bushmen with specific reference to and an examination of the narrative strategies and the application of cutting-edge digital film technology. Adam Haupt (‘Forged are my fingerprints’: Music, social change and authorship in John Frederick’s Mr Devious the First: My life) illustrates how this film exposes the social ills of the Cape Flats in an original way through the adoption of a new style in the positioning of spoken and speaking subjects.

In general, the five authors agree that since the end of apartheid documentary filmmaking is experiencing a period of unprecedented growth in South Africa. A problem, that goes hand in hand with the decline of a public service broadcasting ethos and practice (worldwide) is that few people get to see most of the documentaries. 

In the final section of the book, Developments in Feature Filmmaking, the filmic representation of apartheid is in the spotlight. The authors question in different ways and apply to a range of films if, and to what extent, post-apartheid South African film has succeeded in visualising the ideology and practice of apartheid. The analyses deal with the impact of apartheid on the identity of a nation, its people, individual citizens, and with post-apartheid realities and the possibilities and/or impossibilities of reconciliation.

Luc Renders (Redemption movies) addresses the adoption of literary work into film - a topic that has been written about and researched extensively in film studies. His case study is South African films produced after 1994 based on literary works trying "to clear the debris from the apartheid era and focus on current social and political issues". The four films he discusses are Jason Xenopoulos' Promised Land (based on Karel Schoeman's Na die Geliefde Land), Darrell Roodt's Cry, the Beloved Country (based on Alan Paton's novel with the same name), Gavin Hood's Tsotsi (based on Athol Fugard's Tsotsi), and Ramadan Suleman's Fools (based on Njabulo S. Ndebele's novella Fools). The central themes in all four the literary texts (and films) are injustice, guilt, atonement, redemption, and reconciliation. Renders’ purpose then is to investigate with how much integrity the film version deal with these themes compared to the literary texts.

Closely related to this, Martha Evans (Amnesty and amnesia: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in film) is absorbed with the cinematic treatment of matters and topics related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). 

She deals with three films looking at South Africa through the prism of the TRC: Ian Gabriel's Forgiveness (2004), John Boorman's In My Country (2005) and Tom Hooper's Red Dust (2005). She concludes that all three films fail to appreciate the complexity of South Africa's past. "Apartheid's horror is not only found in a condom-covered baton, but in the warped ideology that allowed the minority of the population to consistently benefit from the socio-economic oppression of fellow human beings who tended their gardens and cleaned their homes.

It is found not only in the unspeakable deeds unearthed in the torture chambers, but in the divide-and-rule political tactics that allowed a sector of the oppressed to accept, even perpetuate, their oppressed status". For Evans the problem with the above-mentioned films is that their treatment of South Africa's history does not allow narratives to be told in many (different) voices, "nor do they display any self-awareness of the fragility of the truth they present". 

Like Renders and Evans, Lesley Marx (‘Cinema, Glamour, Atrocity’: Narratives of trauma) is concerned with cinema’s representation of apartheid, especially the representation of its victims. She analyses three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan about the student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, murdered by the security police. In her analysis, she addresses one of the cardinal themes in film theory and aesthetics, namely the relationship between realism and representation as interpretation.

She demonstrates how despite the iconic nature of film and thus its close resemblance of reality or a reality, film is always an abstraction of reality brought about by different articulations of meaning: selection and composition of images, the camera’s point of view, and editing. In the end, the only truth film can aspire to, is a psychological truth or the capacity to capture something of the feeling, emotion and meaning of something. 

In what seems to be an unlikely comparison, Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk (The White Man’s curse: Stander and the Last Samurai) approaches the question of truth through an investigation of how the main characters, Captain André Stander in the film Stander (2003) and Captain Nathan Algren in The Last Samurai (2003), deal with identity. Both seem to be disillusioned white heroes turning against the institutions that bred and raised them. The author concludes that both films confront us with film's power to depict history through event and biography, yet also with film's frequent failure to truly acknowledge historical context.

Janina Wozniak (The interpretation of old beliefs and modern lifestyles in a selection of recent South African films) focuses in her analysis of a wide range of South African films since 1985 (Chaka Zulu) up to 2005 (uCarmen eKhayelitsha) on film's capacity to depict lifestyles. She emphasises the nature of film as sociological documentation. She argues that right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate, the films she analyses provide the reader with some information (as all films, good or bad, do) on how and in which contexts and circumstances people dealt with colonial politics, Xhosa resistance, colonial exploitation of labour, the Angolan war, reconciliation practices, black economic empowerment, and et cetera.

In the final essay of this section, Sex, race and casting in South African cinema, Ian Glenn compares JM Coetzee's novel In the heart of the country with Marion Hansel's film adaptation thereof, Dust (1985) and Antjie Krog's the Country of my Skull with the film adaptation In my country (2004). Apart from considering the problems of these adaptations, he shows how any analysis of film, even if based on literary works, needs to take industry, commercial and market contexts into account. Glenn thus emphasises and shows how the political economy of film communication and the film industry co-determine aesthetic decisions, and as such always affects the outcome of a film. 

The question or theme that runs through all six the contributions is the integrity and honesty with which post-apartheid film has dealt with apartheid, its ideology and its victims. What is again emphasised and shown in these analyses is that despite films’ capacity to powerfully visualise, observe, express, portray and represent, it always remains a multi-layered structured interpretation bordering on the abstraction of time and space.
Subjects: Motion pictures, Motion picture industry, History, Motion pictures, south africa
Places: South Africa
LC classification: PN1993.5.S6 M375 2007