www.criticalsecret.com n°6/ cinématographies

Towards Post-Apartheid
South African Cinema
Keyan G Tomaselli

In 1995, cinema in South Africa was exactly 100 years old.Early projection devices were frequented around the Johannesburg goldfields from 1895 on. The first cinema newsreels ever were filmed at the front during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) by the British Warwickshire company. Others simply fabricated the war scenes in England itself (see Gutsche, 1972). The world's longest running weekly newsreel, African Mirror (1913-1984), was in the mid-1980s broadcast as history on national TV, introduced only in 1976. The first ever South African narrative film was The Kimberley Diamond Robbery, made in 1910.

Between 1916 and 1922, IW Schlesinger produced 43 big budget technically high quality features. Schlesinger had arrived penniless on South African shores from the USA at the turn of the Century, and proceeded to build an international insurance empire from Johannesburg. In 1913, he consolidated total control over the South African entertainment industry - both theatre and cinema, and later radio. The film themes chosen by Schlesinger were rooted in the ideological outlook of the period. Haggard's novels were a recurring source. In his historical epics, boer and Briton stood together under the flame of unity and civilization against barbaric black hordes (e.g. De Voortrekkers / Winning a Continent - 1916, and Symbol of Sacrifice - 1918). Though De Voortrekkers was the model for the later American epic, The Covered Wagon (1923), it was the sheer magnitude of Symbol, with its 25 000 Zulu warrior extras, that set early technical standards for this genre (Tomaselli, 1986 ; Gutsche, 1972). Symbol was recently reconstructed from off-cuts by archivist Mark Coglan, who works at the Pietermaritzburg Museum. De Voortrekkers is still available in its original form. Foreign productions such as Zulu (1966) and Zulu Dawn (1980), docu-dramas based on the British-Zulu Wars of 1879 followed Symbol of Sacrifice... These films continued the West's fascination with the Zulu, mythified in the South African TV series and US cable hit, Shaka Zulu (1981) (see Mersham, 1993 ; Tomaselli 1992).

Emergent Anti-Apartheid Cinema

White South Africa, observes Cameron (1994), tends to see itself as a reflection of white American values. Breaking with these values indicates to Cameron a maturing of South African cinema as seen particularly in the post-1986 anti-apartheid films directed by Darrell Roodt like Place of Weeping (1986), Jobman (1989), City of Blood, Sarafina (1993) and the Cry the Beloved Country (1996) remake with James Earl Jones. Anant Singh, a South African of Indian extraction, produced these films, and many others since. His activities extend to the USA, his most technically sophisticated film being The Mangler (1994), based on a Stephen King novel.

In this paper I will discuss a number of South African films which for one reason of another constituted important interventions at different times in South African history. My concern is less with their form and narratives than it is with what they signified in terms of society and politics in general. Place of Weeping (1986), produced by Anant Singh(1), for example, deals with a true incident where a white Afrikaans-speaking farmer beats to death a farm labourer after he complains about poor wages. The killing goes unreported. An English-speaking city news reporter takes notice when a house maid on the farm tries to report the murder. This film was a ‘first’ for a number of reasons:

* it is political ;

* though the film was politically contentious Singh was able to obtain exhibition through UIP-Warner ;

* though anti-apartheid, the film did well at the box office even as the successive states of emergency (1986-1990) were beginning to bite ;

* Singh, of Indian extraction, is what the apartheid government labelled a ‘non white’. As such, he was the first ‘black’ South African to unequivocally succeed in the South African film industry ;

* Place of Weeping was the only film to have opened simultaneously in both cinemas catering for black viewers in the townships and the newly proclaimed multiracial theatres in the ‘white’ areas ;

* unlike Terrorist (1976), the censors did not demand that the producer invert the ending to change the emphasis from « a successful terrorist attack to an unsuccessful terrorist attack. »

* Finally, where other, more sophisticated anti-apartheid films were denied distribution or international recognition, Place of Weeping mobilised anti-apartheid activists in the United States who worked to facilitate its release in that country. This contrasted with the more usual demands by activists for a boycott of South African product.

No other contentious South African film (with the possible exception of Katrina, 1969) was ever treated so fairly by either of the two major distribution-exhibition chains. Singh blazed a trail through the normally timid South African producers who were wedded to formula and repetition. Though Singh also started his film making career by financing some forgettable films like the very soft sexploitation Deadly Passion (1984), his acute business acumen very quickly cut through every impediment normally put up by the film industry and the state in this, his third film.

Prior to the 1980s, ‘political’ films had it much harder, partly because the Directorate of Publications was far stricter in what it deemed was acceptable. Jans Rautenbach's Die Kandidaat (1969) weathered massive political and cultural aggression from Afrikanerdom ; Gibsen Kente's How Long [shall we suffe...?] (1974) was banned and Kente detained during production ; Sven Persson's Land Apart (1974), a documentary dialogue about apartheid between a white liberal and a white reactionary was banned. Released in a modified form as The South Africans two years later, the film's South African distribution contract was revoked by MGM Film Trust after the South African government intimidated the United States head office of MGM. Gordon Vorster's Sarah (1975), about a mystical relationship which developed between an Afrikaner on the run and a San male, played mainly to its crew and actors in the week it was shown in Johannesburg. Despite a concerted campaign by press critics to publicise the film, no-one came to see it.

The trilogy of Fugard/Devenish films (1972-1977) vanished because of `whites only' and inconsistent distribution and apathetic audiences, while David Bensusan's My County My Hat (1981) seemed to run foul of every contradiction through which anti-apartheid South African film makers had to tread. A taut thriller with political undertones, the film was refused distribution by both Ster-Kinekor - the company that normally handled SA product(2) and CIC-Warner. Because of this, the film was classified ‘black’ by the Department of Industries in terms of subsidy payments. A lower scale of subsidy was allocated to films `made for ‘blacks’' (Bensusan, 1986 ; also see Tomaselli, 1988:53-82). This categorisation was made despite the fact that the film revolves around the paranoic fears of a white working class couple and their relationship with an ‘illegal’ gardener who steals a passbook off a black man killed by her husband in a motor car accident. This film was eventually distributed by the `black' mobile cinema arm developed by white Afrikaner film makers who make films ‘for blacks’, even though the treatment is in total conflict with their own political positions (see Bensusan 1986). Only Jans Rautenbach's sycophantic Die Sestig Jaar van John Vorster (1976), labelled a ‘political’ film by Ster-Kinekor, was picked up ; it did badly at the box office. Subsequent ‘political’ films were financially successful. Broer Matie (1984), a resurrection of Rautenbach's critically intercultural and interracial themes of the late 1960s, is set in the unstable political context of the early 1960s when massacres at Sharpeville and Langa coincided of church struggles over the legitimacy of apartheid. Boer Matie (My Brother, My Mate), causes a furore amongst his white family and community by requesting in his last will and testament that a coloured minister should conduct the sermon at his burial. However, the film comes across in 1984 as little more than propaganda for the Tricameral Parliament set up in the same year that the film was made. This Parliament incorporated Indiana and coloured South Africans into government, albeit on a separate and unequal basis. In Die Groen Faktor (The Green Factor 1984), a white politician turns green and is now a categorised as a ‘non-white’. He starts a new political party for blacks and whites who have also become green. A biting satire on racism, the film ultimately endorses an ironic reverse discrimination: the greens now in the majority now ostracise the whites.

Anti-Apartheid Cinema: Consolidation

What, then, had changed after 1984? First, was the takeover of Satbel by casino king, Sol Kerzner. This resulted in a reorganisation of Satbel Films and the appointment of Edgar Bold to head the new production company. Bold had directed the TV swish TV series, Westgate (1980-1983), and used this experience to push through Jock of the Bushveld (1986), a true story of a dog, jock, and his trekker owner, in the eastern Transvaal goldfields of the 1880s. The script that had passed through the hands of no less than five producers over a 20 year period before it was made. Film industry common sense always held that Jock would make the archetypal South African colonial ‘story’. It was probably for this reason that financiers were reluctant afraid to invest in it. Jock is more significant than is realised for this and a number of other reasons. The producer resisted the temptation to Hollywoodise it ; South African technicians were employed and John Cundill's script is another example of his subtle ability to inject social criticism into his narratives. The film has some violent scenes, the white Veld Kornet whipping his black labourer at the slightest provocation. The racial conflict shown did not pull many punches ; indeed it mirrored the mindless institutional violence against black people that occurred under apartheid(3).

Jock is a milestone in a cinematic sense too. Both the director, Gray Hofmeyer, Cundill and many of the technicians had cut their teeth on television (see Tomaselli et al 1995). This source of recruitment differs markedly from most established film directors and scriptwriters who only moved into television well after 1976, the year that broadcast television was introduced to South Africa. The film is a fine example of cinematic, technical, musical, performative, special effects and animal handling. This kind of all-round cinematic sophistication is rarely seen in earlier South African cinema. All this was provided on a relatively small budget. The indigenous ‘feel’ of Jock was considered not negotiable. A major breakthrough, it took a new generation of committed feature film makers deriving from television to irrefutably establish this point.

Enter Singh. Enter a very astute Singh. No mucking about with ageing South African film directors, formulaic scriptwriters or the local offices of distributor-exhibitors. He did not appeal to traditional funding sources, such as capital which normally invests in South African cinema, or banks which like to keep their images squeaky clean. He raised part of the budget from what the government called his `own' [Indian] community. The South African film industry owes this `community' a debt. Singh recognised passion and a incredible knowledge of cinema, if mainly Hollywood cinema, in Darrell Roodt, a young graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand. As a mitigating factor, this was itself an innovation in the South African film industry. Critical knowledge about the cinema, its history and theory was not usually a recommendation for employment in the apartheid film industry. Singh, unlike his ultra-cautious white compatriots, was not uneasy in identifying suffering under apartheid a saleable commodity - either to South Africans or viewers in America. Up till then, with the above exceptions, it was foreign producers who were incubating an indigenous, if surrogate, South African cinema : witness the German-Dutch finance for the Gordimer series (1984), Attenborough's Cry Freedom (1989, partly financed by the Zimbabwean government), Morrocan Ben Barka's Amok based on Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (1951), BBC finance for two of the Fugard films, American Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959), Belgium money on JM Coetzee's Dust (1988), the international scramble for the rights to film Andre Brink's and, to a lesser extent, John Coetzee's, novels. Singh's commoditisation of suffering under apartheid was opportunistic, as was Roodt's. But it was a necessary opportunism at that time in our murky history. Singh went directly to an American distributor, New World Films, bypassing the South African branch offices of the American majors and Ster-Kinekor. Had he not, Singh's film may well have become another statistic at the Department of Industries subsidy office along with films made by Devenish, Bensusan, Manie van Rensburg and others.

By going to the American head office, Singh was able to bring pressure to bear on the local office to ensure more than a token South African distribution. While Ster-Kinekor and CIC-Warner closed cinemas as a political gesture in municipalities which refused multiracial status to their cinemas, thereby hoping to stave off the growing cultural boycott of South Africa, these corporations remained essentially conservative. That is the nature of capitalist business. It cannot really operate in any other way. So, where local distributors may still have refused distribution in South Africa for fear of offending white audiences and enraging the government, the international offices of such companies could be persuaded to take the film. Place of Weeping was excellent ammunition against the disinvestment lobby and could be argued to show that UIP-Warner - and the industry in general - was `fighting' apartheid. One of the ironies of this development surfaced with Paul Slabolepszy Saturday Night at the Palace (1987) which Paramount wanted to ban from being screened in South Africa, its country of origin. Here, two young working class white men harass a black waiter at a roadhouse. The film reveals the white men for what they are : one is psychopathic, and the other too timid to sop the harassment. Chris Davies' attempt to get a local version of a film on Steve Biko off the ground was scotched by the government before the project was even under way. This ban followed the appalling harassment of Richard Attenborough in 1985 by the SABC and state agencies when he was in the country to research his version of the movie that has now been made (See Savage 1989) .

As with previous innovative ‘political’ films made by the Devenish, Bensusan and others, the press rose to the occasion. Reviews on A Place of Weeping were kind - perhaps too kind. The film received a remarkable amount of positive press coverage, particularly in the anti-apartheid English press. Well and good, but we should not lose sight of the fact that A Place of Weeping got the breaks, the luck that all film directors so superstitiously hope for. Sarah, Jannie Totsiens, My Country My Hat and The Guest are vastly better films, politically, thematically, cinematically and in terms of narrative structure. They do not ignore history as does Place of Weeping. Their character motivations are much more clearly developed, and political currents backgrounding their narratives are well exposed. The hidden social and ideological structures that dangle individuals and govern their relationships within class designations and historically imposed conditions are intrinsically embroided into the treatments. They are directly informed by the film theory and production practices that have liberated so many industries in other countries from state control and big capital. These are films of integrity - made with the intention of developing a relevant South African cinema which explores in considerable detail the elements that make up the South African landscape and the people on it.

Place of Weeping does not follow in the footsteps of the above mentioned films. Though technically ‘well-made’, its characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is often stilted and the behaviour of both blacks and whites is often incongruous, lacking cultural and social subtleties. Paradoxically, however, the films's bluntness and opportunism are two of its strengths. When Roodt was studying at Wits University he was starry-eyed for Hollywood(4). His relationship with the cinema can only be described as ‘passionate’ and his interpretation of film art then stopped at Jaws... It seems that he had to leave the country before he was in a position to see cinema in South Africa from an indigenous perspective.

The film, however, is American. It derived its production methods from the practice popularised by Roger Corman in America. Fast turnaround production line-methods coupled with competent technique but shallow narrative structure is the hallmark of corman's films. Though Place of Weeping is set in and was filmed in South Africa, Roodt had not abandoned his American emphasis. The film was completed before the police were aware of it. The music is suspenseful electronic - not African or even white African. The representation of the white farmers and the dialogue (in English for American audiences) reinforce the American stereotype of Boers as people who never smile, who carry Bibles under their arms and who want to kill everybody. The cinematic conventions employed are derived from the film and television image of small town America : the corrupt sheriff (public prosecutor), the hostile hillbilly types (the farmers) and the docile and ultra- exploited ‘illegal’ farmhands from South America with nowhere to go. In Place of Weeping, the black labourers don't want to question the death of their colleague for fear of being banished from the only place they have to live - the white-owned farm. The camerawork is competent and functional. However, it is devoid of the revolutionary stylistic innovations that guided ‘alternative’ and oppositional films in South Africa (and particularly elsewhere) during the 1970s and 80s. Neither does the camera draw its style or imagery from the popular struggle that has generated the signs, slogans, gestures and colours that adorn popular gatherings, mass funerals and the progressive media which act as the organisational adjuncts of the revolutionary classes. This lack of cultural contact between the narrative and its context is the film's major flaw. The context is not established in the film ; rather the assumed context is the one pre-packaged and transmitted by foreign television coverage of a violent and self-destructive society. This suppression of history and social process is at work at every level of the film. For example, motivations of individuals are simply taken for granted : the courageous journalist, the cautious missionary, the reluctant slow working public prosecutor, the vicious white farmer, the docile farm labourers, the fearless black woman activist. The guerillas have no political allegiances, no organisational links - the ANC is never mentioned. These are individuals in battle with individuals - the trivialised American liberal view of the world and the conflicts that beset it. Even the title is a misnomer : Weenen, the Place of Weeping, refers to Boer suffering as a consequence of boer-black conflicts which followed the Great Trek. It's not even used ironically by the film maker.

As blunt as the film is, the ending - the four black guerillas spread across the road facing down the murderous farmer and his family - is shot from a low angle. The scene resembles the classical western genre shootout. This not only gives the guerillas dominance within the frame, but is an unambiguous signal of what is yet to come in South Africa. They shoot the unarmed white farmer. Counter-violence wins. That this ending was not banned or cut by the Directorate is indicative of the constantly shifting contradictions which beset apartheid during the 1980s.

The making of Place of Weeping shows that hard hitting political films could be made, they could make money, they could pass the censors, they could negotiate good release patterns. Producers could exploit the contradictions of apartheid - in cinema, to a greater extent than ever before. The key was how it was done.

The years following 1986 and the release of Weeping saw the sustained development of a domestic anti-apartheid cinema financed by capital looking for tax breaks and international markets. Aside from Gibson Kente's and Lionel Ngakane's !(5) work, most critically-acclaimed films were made by progressive white directors about ‘black’ stories. Multiracial teams made films like Mapantsula (1988), Ramadan Suleman's Fools (1997) and Wa Luruli's Chikin Bizniz (1998). Productions like these for the first time gave South Africa a sustained and sophisticated examination of the full spectrum of South African history and everyday life :

*Historical dramas : boer prisoners held by the British during the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 in Dirk de Villiers' Arende (1994), cut into a feature from the SABC-TV series ; and van Rensburg's The Native who Caused all the Trouble (1989).

*liberal opposition to apartheid in the 1960s, eg., Roodt's 1995 remake of Cry the Beloved Country, Euzan Palcy's A Dry White Season (1989), Land Apart (1974) ;

*the psychological impact on white South Africans of the wars waged against South Africa's neighbours, for example, Roodt's The Stick (1987), and urban violence in City of Blood (1986). These are films about pathology as normality.

*The popular anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s was imaged in Mapantsula (1988), Sarafina (1992), Bopha, the BBC's Dark City (1989) and scores of documentaries. Sven Persson's feature length documentary, Land Apart (1974), which predicted the Soweto uprising of June 76, provided a benchmark for anti-apartheid documentaries made within South Africa. Nana Mahamo's Last Grave at Dimbaza (1973), shown clandestinely throughout South Africa during the 1970s, offered South Africans a very different, indirect address style of documentary. The 1980s in particular have seen many more : Jurgen Schadeberg's Have You Seen Drum Recently (1988), recreates the energetic days of Drum magazine of the 50s. Many others have contributed to a growing movement of critical and historically sensitive film and video makers.

*Comedic films critical of white racial attitudes and experiences were made by Manie van Rensburg, eg. Taxi to Soweto (1991), A Zulu on my Stoep, and so on (see below).

*Historical origins and contemporary effects of apartheid are found in Elaine Procter's Friends (1994), Katinka Heyns's Fiela's Child (1988), and Van Rensburg's The Fourth Reich (1990), constituted into a cinema release from the four-part TV series. Andrew Worsdale's Shot Down (1990) reveals the inner turmoil of white South Africans of various races on apartheid (see Savage 1989b).

Towards a post-Apartheid Cinema

Part of the revitalisation of South African cinema since the late 1990s was effected by the establishment of the South African Film and Video Foundation in 1998. This body arose out of an industry-wide consultative process which brought all sectors of the film and video industry into productive discussions over the post-apartheid structure of the film and video industries. The Foundation, administered by the Department of Arts and Culture, Science and Technology, administers development grants for training, production and audience development purposes. The Foundation is responsible to a board of governors drawn from the film and video industry and civil society. This initiative encourages state and private investment financing partnerships with regard to production projects.

In South Africa, unlike in other African countries, the film and TV industries have always been closely integrated. This relationship therefore provides much greater synergies in financing and market opportunities to South African film makers than is available in the rest of Africa. The impact of television, therefore, needs to also be assessed in the development of South African cinema.

Taking advantage of the relatively economic production cost structures of television, the public-service South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the commercial subscription broadcaster M-Net, and the commercial free-to-air channel, e-TV, began to encourage, develop and market the work of South Africa's black film makers and a host of progressive white documentary and short film producers. All three companies invested directly in production of cinema films and all kinds of innovative projects emerged from within the film and TV industries as a whole. With Jeremy Nathan's Africa Dreaming project of 1997, the SABC combined with commercial entertainment giant Primedia, the Film Resource Unit, and other sponsors to produce a series of short features for broadcast. The SABC tries to place South African film makers within the broader context of African cinema's rich history. Thus, the first batch of films under the Africa Dreaming rubric combines female South African director Palesa ka Letlaka-Nkosi's Mamlambo, with Namibian Richard Pakleppa's The Homecoming, Mozambican Joao Ribeiro's The Gaze of the Stars, and The Last Picture from Zimbabwean Farai Sevenzo.

M-Net, a South African-based multinational pay television corporation, initiated an annual New Directions competition for directors and scriptwriters in the early 1990s. In the first half of each calendar year, the company solicits proposals from first-time directors and writers. Proposals are scrutinized by a panel of experienced professionals, and through a process of mentored refinement six proposals are selected for production. The final products emerge from a further refinement session, in the form of 30-minute dramas broadcast on selected M-Net channels. This initiative partly meets the requirements of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, set up in 1995, to regulate the airwaves and issue licences. One 30 minute project was later remade into cinema feature, Chikin Bizniz (1999). The script was written by Mututuzeli Matshoba, produced by Richard Green of New Directions, and directed by Wa Luruli. The plot revolves around Sipho, a retired office worker, who now sells live chickens on the street in Soweto. He gets up to all kinds of tricks and crosses swords with everyone in his path. Chikin Bizniz is not a political film. The freedom of the transition to democracy has offered film makers an opportunity to make films about ordinary people engaged in everyday ordinary activities.

Another M-Net initiative is its annual All Africa Film Awards, an event first held in October 1995, following its earlier Awards which only considered South African fare. Films from everywhere but South Africa were nominated in every category for the 1995 awards. The following year, the Cape Town ceremony saw one partial South African production, Jump the Gun, funded by Britain's Channel 4 and directed by an Englishman, Les Blair, receive awards for best leading actor and for best sound. In 1997, an Egyptian film, Destiny, pipped the South African made Paljas. However much South African production must take its place among other African films to qualify for an M-Net award, the event does showcase a range of producers, directors and products which (even if only once a year) brings the diversity of African cinema home to an audience which mostly watches sport and anything M-Net contracts from a variety of Hollywood sources.

A Deeper Look at Some Recent Movies

Leon Schuster's films, music and performances are an indicator of white negotiations with apartheid and beyond. Through racial, ethnic, classist and guttural humour Schuster mediates underlying anxieties experienced by most whites during the transition, from the fall of Namibia to issues of affirmative action in the post-apartheid era. Schuster's films are thus a form of social catharsis - no matter how impossible the situation, whites can always see in his sending up of holy cows that in the last analysis their victimisation by the United Nations, uppity blacks, the ANC government, is just a dream (Sweet'n Short, 1991), a hallucination, a prank or a joke. Schuster's creations are comedically subversive of prevailing and shifting ideologies - whether apartheid (Oh Shucks, Here Comes UNTAG, 1990), non-racialism (There's a Zulu on My Stoep, 1993) (see Bold 1994) or black domination (Panic Mechanic, 1998). His characters are drawn both from real life (politicians and buffoons alike) and from earlier Afrikaans cinema (eg. Al Debbo and Frederick Burgers). His narratives similarly shift in relation to discursive shifts within white South African society as a whole. Schuster plays with discourses of race, responding to new social shifts, white anxieties and black expectations. (Other films in this genre include Manie van Rensburg's Taxi to Soweto and Edgar Bold's Soweto Green (1995) especially). Schuster's genre emerges from Jamie Uys's popularisation on cinema of the Candid Camera TV genre, and even before Uys, to Al Debbo and Frederick Burgers, in Afrikaans film of the 1950s, in terms of the buffoonish characters depicted. Schuster is as Afrikaans as one can get, while also appealing beyond Afrikaners to anyone who can identify with South Africans and their silly prejudices about each other. Where Candid Camera and Funny People I and II have no discernable story-lines, Panic Mechanic does have a storyline, and all his films directly relate to the unfolding political situation in South Africa.

Jump the Gun succeeds in depicting the ways white South Africans succeed (or fail) to negotiate their country's political transition after apartheid. The strength of the acting performances lies in the way they were developed through a system of workshopping, based on the performers' actual immersion in the unpredictable worlds and seedy communities their tortured characters inhabit. Yet the resolution, fashionably without ‘closure’, uncomfortably leaves the women of the story in a near-stereotyped black-white relationship.

Proctor's On the Wire deals with the white male militarist failure to encompass imminent changes in racial and gender relations. Where Jump the Gun's lead white male renounces the gun as the means for security, Proctor's male lead ends his life by shooting himself. Like the Blair film, On the Wire ends with a strengthened relationship between the black and white women of the story. This kind of resolution both celebrates the strength and perseverance which, despite their untold hardships, helped black African women survive the apartheid era. But this kind of closure then leaves one wondering if in the ‘new’ South Africa the same women will not end up in the same old relationships of dependence.

However, both Jump and Wire illustrate that throughout the dispossession and oppression of the apartheid years, African women persevered with educating their children's to cope in whatever world they inherited. The black women in Chikin Bizniz similarly are similarly shown to be the backbone of the township economy, while their men cavort irresponsibly both day and night. Schoolchildren from relatively stable households headed by women have tended to outperform those from less stable male-headed homes in the wider society in general. Other films like Roodt's Cry the Beloved Country and Ramadan Suleman's Fools focus more on the masculine experience. Indeed, Cry shifts women to the periphery in line with the 1950s-style liberalism of Alan Paton, author of the original novel. Zoltan Korda's earlier version of the same film arguably captured the full passion of the struggle from both sides of the conflict. Roodt's direction of the 1996 film seems almost like that of a travelogue, with camera work focusing on scenic representation at the expense of narrative exposition. Clearly it is a film, like Procter's Friends, that was cut for the US and other foreign markets. For home audiences these films don't meet the demand for much greater texture, detail and character complexity. It is not surprising, therefore, that Roodt severed his long-standing relationship with Singh after finishing Cry.

The lack of local nuance is the problem with Ramadan's Fools (1997). The film images more than adequately the mise-en-scene and ambient sounds of a black township of the 1980s under police seige ; and all the supporting characters are true-to-form. However, the ‘hero’ is a local boy-made-good who returns to mobilise his politically passive community. This plot structure inexplicably ignores the highly organised mass resistance that had developed in the 1980s, so effectively depicted in films like Mapantsula. In the striking last scene of Fools, the large, bullying white policeman single-handedly takes on the school's teachers and students after a rock is thrown at his car. The policeman cracks under the strain of abstract forces he can no longer control with the crack of a whip. His emotional breakdown in the schoolyard while the teachers and pupils look on condescendingly is indicative of the shattering of apartheid oppression, at the personal, racial and structural levels.

Paljas (1997), directed by Katinka Heyns, emerges out of the earlier trajectory of Afrikaans cinema. Like Jans Rautenbach's Jannie Totsiens (1969), it is set in a desert in the middle of nowhere. The narrative occurs in the 1960s when poverty amongst Afrikaners was a serious problem and the South African Railways a key mechanism in Afrikaner affirmative action. Producer Anant Singh says of the film « Paljas is my first Afrikaans language film and I hope that it is successful in its bid for an Oscar consideration as it will provide a bigger profile for South African films abroad as it showcases an authentic South African story in an indigenous language and a totally indigenous cast ».

Jannie Totsiens is a foot-and-mouth artist incarcerated in a mental asylum. The asylum is symbolic of South Africa under the madness of apartheid. As a silenced artist, apart from the Indian waiter from Durban, he is the only sane inmate. Paljas (Manuel) in the Heyns film is a clown who defects from a passing circus to live in an abandoned building near a remote railway station. Manuel remained behind after the departure of an unscheduled stopover of the circus train which came from nowhere. The railway station is symbolic of cultural withdrawal by a family whose breadwinner has been excommunicated by the volk for his undesirable Anglo tendencies. The train, whose circus personnel disrupt the daily predictability of the McDonald family, is a metaphor for the family's turbulent emotional, cultural, and ideological journey from the darkness of apartheid back into the light of a post-apartheid reconciliation (familial, cultural and political).

The station master, Hendrik McDonald (Marius Weyers), had been demoted and relocated to this remote area. He is oblivious of the emotional wasteland that has become his family's life. His nine year old son, Willem (Larry Leiden), has become mute, his lonely wife trapped in an alienating marriage, and his daughter refuses to play the piano any more... Willem is the Jannie Totsiens character of the post-apartheid era. Where Jannie eventually leaves the madhouse populated by all the white crazies mentally crippled by apartheid, on a road to nowhere, Willem is symbolic of the new generation, who regains his voice as he responds positively to the magic weaved by the clown (Ellis Pearson). The clown (Paljas) is possibly symbolic of ‘the Madiba Magic’ - Nelson Mandela - whose policy of non-racialism and reconciliation has healed South Africa's past.

The interactions between the clown, whose initial existence is unknown to the rest of the family, and the son, result in Willem regaining his speech. This healing co-incides with new tensions occurring between the family and the local white neo-fascist townspeople nearby. They demonise and physically attack the McDonalds and their paljas friend because they have accepted the ‘outsider’ (communism, the devil, the unknown future). Like in all the films of the earlier insider-outsider genre (1965-1980 ; Tomaselli 1988), the ‘outsider’ who weaves his magic in Paljas is hunted and shot by the town's Afrikaners who fear him. Willem's regaining of the capacity of speech is indicative of the family's political reawakening. At the end of the film Hendrik carries the dead clown along the railway track. This shot is significant for two reasons : it is eerily reminiscent of the June 16, 1976 news photograph in which the body of Soweto's little Hector Peterson is carried towards the camera. Peterson's picture came to represent the Soweto uprising. The shot in Paljas is a stark reminder of previous casualties of resistance against intolerance, fear and fascism.

Secondly, the railway line along which Hendrik is carrying the wounded paljas, represents the journey to a democratic, if unknown, future. Paljas is an affirmative film. Like the teacher who is brought to consciousness by the returning black activist in Fools in the era of struggle, so the despised Afrikaner family come to consciousness in Paljas, and spread the value of reconciliation. The character who represents this intergenerational maturity is the mute boy Willem.

Willem's speech impediment developed as a response to the station master's self-destructive relationship with the world. The father's social and professional marginalisation represents the kind of constrained and isolated world whites encountered as apartheid drove them simultaneously deeper into each other's presence, and further from the wider world. The clown's defection into this microcosm of spiritual isolation becomes an opportunity for the paljas to develop the boy's latent talents in a world of sound. These talents have the potential to reverse entrenched habits of isolation. This communication seeks to inculcate new habits of family renewal, of coming to consciousness at the personal, cultural, and political levels. The white Afrikaner community, in a rather forced closure, is no longer a stranger to the McDonalds or the now recovering clown.

These are just some of the films which have made their mark since 1994. Others include Gavin Hood's A Reasonable Man (1999), a courtroom drama in the Dingaka (1974) thematic vein about the clash between African mysticism and Western jurisprudence. In this film a white lawyer relies on the mystical testimony of a black sangoma (indigenous healer) to make his case against the westernized propositions offered by the black prosecutor. Paul Slabolepsy's Against the Head (1999) is a comedy about two fans who head for Wales for the Rugby World Cup : these are working class Afrikaner characters whose buffoonery and childish exploits would have previously been unacceptable in Afrikaans cinema under apartheid.

Where most films returned the bulk of their costs, Chikin Biznis failed, even in black townships, which was assumed to provide the mainstay of its audience. The film is set in Soweto, in the teeming informal food and meat street markets where most blacks do their daily shopping. The high costs of cinema tickets was one factor in its failure, but black teenagers seem to prefer Hollywood films. Perhaps they are better marketed. The fact that few South African films have earned a profit since 1990 is serious cause for concern. If the home market is endistanced from themes which engage its own experiences, what hope can there really be for an industry which desperately needs to reinvigorate itself from the two or three productions it now makes in any given year.

Some Final Remarks

The technical golden age of South African cinema epics occurred between 1916 and 1922. The period of sheer quantity at 30 films a year occurred between 1962 and 1980, the heyday of apartheid. But the South African industry's political and aesthetic coming of age was signalled by a sustained movement towards historical interrogation which began in 1986. The mid-1990s saw the next phase facilitated by the new democratic government which for the first time created a development strategy for the wider development of the industry as a whole, from grassroots video to international co-production. But the audiences which once ensured higher domestic returns than imported fare no longer support South African film. And, black South Africans have yet to become a significant sector of movie audiences in cinema rather than on TV. Audience development is the task that awaits us.

K.G.T.

on the Author

Keyan G. Tomaselli, Professor and Director Graduate Programme In Cultural and Media Studies University of Natal Durban 4041 South Africa
Tel : +31 260 2505 Fax : +31 260 1519 (email see : Contacts - site)

He was a co-writer of the White Paper on Film, and has served on the juries of the M-Net All Africa Film Awards, The Milano Festival of African Cinema, and Riminicinema. His videos have been screened at a variety of international festivals. He serves on the Training in Developing Countries Board of the International Association of Film and TV Schools, and consulted for UNESCO on a strategic plan for the UNESCO Zimbabwe Film and Video Training Project. He edited with Guy Henebelle Le cinéma sud-africain est-il tombé sur la tete? CinémAction, 39, 1986 / L'Afrique Littéraire, 78, 1986.