kagablog

Our second article about Aryan Kaganof’s latest full-length film completes the first, bringing up several points which were not mentioned before. Kaganof’s most recent feature film is the first ever to be shot with mobile phones and then blown up onto 35mm – this technical point cannot be left to go unnoticed. Thanks to this important technical element, the whole film becomes an event not to be missed. As we know, the technical aspect plays an important aesthetic role in cinema, and determines the evolution of different schools of film. If it hadn’t been for the manufacture of light camera equipment in the 50s, the “New Wave” of French cinema at the end of that decade, very closely linked to “Direct Cinema” documentaries, would never have existed.

This is a primordial example because with his new full-length film, Kaganof defies cinematic history by mixing the mobile phone with 35mm film. The result is very impressive, and also extremely innovative in visual and dramatic terms. The film turns out to be a very beautiful – and successful – improvisation, which will not leave indifferent all those who love artistic liberty. The filmic temporality is confused so as not to give the audience definitive answers and we do not really know what happens at the end, but veer between its three possible interpretations. Will Sugar Man the pimp be gunned down by Attila the hit man, or will he leave to start a new life as a family man with Selene the ex-prostitute and their daughter Jacky? Will the two ex-prostitutes manage to fulfil their dream to live together as lesbians, far from their pimp, or not? It’s this third interpretation that we personally shall keep in mind, as you will see at the end of the article.

Sugar Man, the protagonist, played by Aryan Kaganof, is very cunning at blending all that is contradictory. He’s the boss of the Johannesburg underworld, working at Christmas to highlight the contrast. As in all Kaganof’s films, there is always one central ambiguity leading to others. One key scene sums up all the hero’s essential ambiguities; in a prostitute’s imagination we see Grace’s face (Leigh Graves) in the memory of a mobile phone and we hear the phrase “Here is the face of Grace,” we then hear the same phrase on the picture of Sugar Man’s face, his expression brutal. She lets out a scream of fear when she sees his terrifying expression. Our main character is frightening and hard, yet vulnerable and charming at the same time - this is why his face replaces that of Grace. This dream sequence is a key to understanding all Kaganof’s sophisticated and enigmatic aesthetics, rooted in the misleading and multiple facets of the digital reconstruction of reality.

To come back to the question of confused filmic temporality, let’s borrow a phrase from Mick Raubenheimer: “Technological advances are always a strictly a linear phenomenon, but linear time and the psychology which houses it, isn’t really Kaganof’s thing. He is more concerned with qualitative time. To free human psychology from its bureaucratically webbed self-censorship.” (Mick Raubenheimer “Cracks in the Pavement. The Underground Reaches Up” - Sunday Tribune, South Africa, May 14th, 2006). It is the use of this new, adaptable medium of the mobile telephone which prevents Kaganof from falling into the trap of self-censorship, (a distinctive feature of commercial cinema) for, in this way, many different paths of improvisation open up to the film-maker and the actors.

Chief cameraman Eran Tahor’s account is significant; he is answering a journalist’s question about the difference between shooting with a mobile phone and shooting with a digital camera: “For me it was the lack of distance or separation from what I was framing – mostly the actresses and what they were going through. It created a level of intimacy that I had never experienced before on set. Where something happens I had to respond to it immediately, no two takes were ever alike. I mean sometimes I’d be as close as 10cms from the actress when filming close-ups, you can imagine how stressful it was for them performing like this.” And to the question of whether shooting this film was different from his other films, Eran Tahor replies: “This film is like a roller coaster ride from beginning to end. We were all feeling our way in the dark guided by our belief in Kaganof, the story and that we are making something very special that has never been done before…I had to explore what this camera can do and create a cinematic style for the story…starting from the premise of a no-budget strategy”. (Eran Tahor - “A Conversation with Cinematographer Eran Tahor”, on the official site of the film: www.smssugarman.com).

The greatest advantage of this method of filming, however, is the independence and the liberation of the images from the reductive vision of the world in low-quality “realism”. In all Kaganof’s films the human element is worthy of the greatest respect, and that is true here. Kaganof’s cinema revels in representing human misery (serial killers, prostitutes, drug addicts) with a significant freedom of style, which also renders its heroes free, as in the film “Wasted” (1996), - another technical revolution (it was the first full-length film digitally shot and blown up onto 35mm well before the group Dogme) - the heroes end up winners with a large sum of money. In the author’s new challenge, the heroines succeed in gaining their freedom as they take flight for a new life, this time a happy one. This is the third possible ending, and the one that we prefer.

Dionysos ANDRONIS

(translated from the French by Lucy LYALL GRANT)