kagablog

These two films by Aryan Kaganof were shown at the National Arts Festival 2005, at Grahamstown in South Africa. We loved them because they (especially the second) reflect the author’s themes of predilection since returning to the country a few years before making this diptych: the portrait of recent South African society from the angle of its culture, particularly its music (see “Sharp, Sharp” or “Bantu Continua Uhuru Nihilismus” from the same period). In the first short film, the society portrayed is today’s American society, but it could also be a metaphorical reference to that of the film-maker’s country. “In Brooklyn” opens with a scene of workmen unloading their tools – “Brooklyn” is written on the door of their van, but we are under the impression that this takes place in another country. In 1997, Kaganof made a clip for the song “Lift Your Hands Up” by Sybil Jefferies. Five years later he drew the portrait of Brooklyn through the microcosm of its Christian churches and those who come into contact with them. For 16 minutes the director presents us with a very convivial church service, its gospel songs interpreted by the same singer Sybil Jefferies. However, she is not singing live; the songs are pre-recorded. She performs successive free and improvised choreographies in front of various places of worship in the district. She is pregnant and this is almost certainly a reference to the new life in preparation through faith. For Kaganof, this faith is at the same time religious and artistic, and marked by signs of improvisation, and therefore a “happening”. During this service we see in parallel passers by, labourers at work, a grocer in his shop, a down-and-out going through the bins, and a tramp-writer sitting on the pavement as he writes. The camera observes all these people closely. This film is a “happening” which highlights the liberty of tone and the liberty of the filming, a principle dear to American alternative documentaries since the genre grew to maturity in the 50s with the works of Lionel Rogosin, Robert Frank and Shirley Clarke.

“Casbah and Back” is also the portrait of a poor district, this time in South Africa. The film takes place in a Johannesburg suburb, and not in an Arab country as the title might seem to suggest. “Casbah” means fortress, but this fortress is not enclosed. In the fourth minute of the film we see the lit-up sign of a drive-in restaurant with the same name. It’s an open space, rather than a closed one, and the sign lends its name to the title of the film. Around this drive-in restaurant we see the poverty of the people and the nation that has just been born. The fixed images of their smiling faces testifies to an interior desire to live in a decent human fashion. The tilted frames and retrograde movements of the passers by serves to underline a return to the title – it’s a return to the poverty of the area, which we see in the graffiti on the walls, showing Labor Party slogans, and the low prices on the menu of a market society, instable and mutating. The return to the area justifies the title “Casbah and Back”. The piano and saxophone music, once again improvised, adds an aesthetic character in common to these two films which could be seen as a diptych with a common theme – poverty.

dionysos andronis, January 28, 2007

translated from the french by lucy lyall grant