kagablog

ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY.
• An overview of SA Film Industry Fragmentation.

The starvation of project development processes has ushered forth an advent of skills-for-sale attitude that transudes in the industry’s work force, and many factors have been both cause and effect of this weakness. First, there is a lack of effective processes of weeding out projects with no realistic prospect of social relevance and commerciality – result, lack of capital for reinvestments in project development for future productions. Cabals form in the midst of this cultural stagnation, with mushrooming sects proclaiming auteurist tendencies, multiple production houses seeming to monopolize marginal genres in the name of their universal appeal. Fragmented practices/mechanisms of identity expression ensue, falsifications occur for the sake of commercial palatability, and other detrimental individualisms begin to take hold of the sector to an extend that it solely becomes a platform for personal enrichment. Cinema for Profit.

The concern is on the part of benefit from such exclusive ventures going elsewhere, than towards a collective wealth of cultural information, but to other bodies intrinsic in production links. The term ‘production’ from my perspective involves the creation of a whole value added in a film project, inclusive of the costs of doing business. In any industry, the true cost of value added includes the cost of equity and debt and those costs of services such as legal, financial which are critical to the business of creating film projects. But such merits have been eroded by self-centered producer/artist sentiments fueled by the craving for capital affluence. Most of the ventures undertaken under these Cinema-for-Profit merits are signified by nepotistic collaborations, financial mismanagements, and overall leakages which tend to be the fatal blows when completion of projects is concerned.

These forms of fragmentation have crippled the narrative cinema culture and replaced it with the cult of stylization employed by creative practitioners when bastardized by a consumerist commercial industry. Temporary ventures such as entertainment series, reality shows, game-shows, sports, studio talk shows and the like have absorbed a great pool of creative practitioners and taken centre stage as the primary output of the South Africa Film Industry. In reality many South African productions remain scarce, either obscure and solely representative of High Art aspirations of auteurism (looking for instance at locally produced feature films like Tsotsi and Hijack Stories); and it should be noted however that in our supposed quest towards crossing linguistic zones and accessing a broader market, a homogenization of expression through language might retard the output of indigenous language cinema, thus hampering the representational capacity of cinema in identity formation and communication.

Further fragmentation is still inevitable as we are beginning to see during this epoch of globalization through communications technologies, whereby cultural by-products that are poignant decline in numbers and frequency of output. Specialized technologies such as the internet(as a content portal as opposed to broadband content portal) have overtaken the exhibition monopolists of the previous century and in fact proliferated uncontrollable access to virtually any information, but as noted in the pages above the idea of electronic democracy… where does it feature when all information is being allotted to a homogenous cultural pool, close knit through language – English; and other western trends so punted through the audio-visual medium?

This brings me to another question concerning the crucial importance of the cultural dimension greatly reinforced by most African Filmmakers who aimed to counter the overwhelming influence of Western cultural values. How does a homogenous form of expression transmit identities which are transient and in constant reformation through their dynamic linguistic realities?

Further questions that arise therefore become those about distribution of such essential information to the underprivileged and mechanisms of countering commercial distribution by means of competitive selective systems. What other automatic systems aught be in place that can continue to reward success to information dissemination required at grass-root market-levels on linguistic terms relevant to their reality-definitions?