South Africa: A Stymie history through the lens

In the thematic section Vivre la ville proposed to last year’s festival-goers, we programmed District 9 by South-African director Neil Blomkamp. Coproduced by Peter Jackson, this science-fiction feature shows refugee aliens resembling two-legged giant shrimps cooped up in corrugated-iron huts much like those in the townships and peacefully awaiting a solution to their plight (the authorities mention deportation). Here, a digression via the science fiction genre and its artifices allows cinema to steer reality between a past (the film opens in a false documentary mode with archive footage) and a future (a cataclysmic Utopia) that seems possible. The uchronia of District 9 lies in the film’s clear intention to place some of the social, historical and ideological realities of the Apartheid years in a future that is equally if not more absurd than actual history. The climate of urban guerrilla conflict, which unfortunately is not pure fiction, projects an ambivalent image of present-day Johannesburg, where the film was set. It was undoubtedly on recalling District 9’s crazy and almost paranoid representations that the idea emerged of putting together films (features and documentaries) that could be watched essentially as documents about a country. The question was which specific images, fictions or imaginaries in South Africa’s national film output would be able to recount the half-century-long history of racial segregation and the system that legitimatised it? As District 9 hints, sometimes a little heavily, abolishing the system does not induce an immediate switchover to another age. Contemporary South African cinema clearly shows that the consequences and relics of this system are still deeply anchored. We thus need to pinpoint the eventual pitfalls that come into play if one is tempted to take a retrospective look at these years. The first pitfall lies in the potentially spectacular nature of the context, whereas what really imports is to show the cinema’s ability to bear witness and provide a filmic reflection on its subject matter. The second, on the contrary, relates to the limits of (over)exploitating anti-apartheid motifs as an antidote or operation that can purge and re-legitimise cinema – this can be driven either by the kind of sincere intentions that rarely make for a good film, or by commercial instrumentalisation, or even both.

Although South African cinema is one of the most productive on the continent, the fact remains that it is still scarcely known, and the pre-1990 films even less. What then has really characterised the situation of South African cinema? What are the real drivers of the directions and revised ambitions of its Anglo-Saxon-style film industry? Our programme does not offer detailed answers to all these questions but instead attempts to plot out South Africa’s relations with its cinema and provide some milestones that will hopefully afford greater understanding. What we can certainly say is that the first impact of segregation is to compartmentalise cinema, and the first impact of ideology is to weaken its expression or often impede it. Established order and capital have always got on well together and, united, they provided funding for a national film industry for Whites only and mostly in Afrikaans – setting aside the large but mediocre Bantu film output that took off in the 1970s. For many, film production from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s holds little interest – except perhaps with respect to the structural changes in production finance. Nonetheless, the general public got enough out of these films to give commercial cinema, and later community cinema, a relatively stable attendance record throughout the whole period. There was hardly any thrust for these films to address wider or even international audiences. While the South African Blacks were excluded from power and administrations in their home country, the Whites entrapped themselves in a closed world and a system of representation turned in on itself. The Afrikaner society had become the sole but never problematized reference for a cinema that shied away from any critical engagement. What mattered instead was to flatter a conservative ideal bound up with a moral and religious principles and the purity of a language and of the race that spoke it. In the 1960s and 1970s, the films of Jans Rautenbach (Die Kandidaat, Katrina) and Emil Nofal, along with the films of Manie van Rensburg and Ross Devenish (whose film, The Guest, was awarded at Locarno in 1977), began to displace some very rigid references by introducing a more noticeable reflexive dimension into their films and, above all, by recognising the reality of a multicultural and multiracial society. In his book, The Cinema of Apartheid, Keyan Tomaselli explains that the National Party ideology had been determined by the blind denial of history’s inexorable advance, and that toughening this ideology even further in the mid-1980s, during a period that saw growing protest, merely delayed the inevitable. For the whole world this inevitable had a name: Nelson Mandela…

Jérôme Baron