kagablog

by martin p. botha

The South African film industry is one of the oldest in the world. A long history of documentary filmmaking dates back to 1896. Edgar Hyman filmed scenes of Johannesburg and President Paul Kruger. The first ever newsreels were filmed at the front during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and at the same time fake newsreel footage of battles were shot to create propaganda for Britain’s war effort.

New York-born Isodore W. Schlesinger’s African Films started a tradition of newsreel production in the form of The African Mirror, the world’s longest-running newsreel (1913-1984). During the next six decades The African Mirror captured current affairs in South Africa, but in a rather superficial manner and since 1948 it was used as a propaganda tool to support the dominant culture of apartheid. In 1937 and 1938 a “documentary” was made with a deliberately propagandistic agenda, namely Die Bou van ‘n Nasie (They Built A Nation).

It attempted to depict the history of the white Afrikaner people and was made to be used as part of the celebration of the centenary of the Great Trek (Afrikaners leaving the Cape Province to settle elsewhere in South Africa) and the Battle of Blood River, a clash between Afrikaners and Zulus in the nineteenth century. The centenary included a re-enactment of the Great Trek, with ox-wagons starting from Cape Town on the 800 mile journey to Pretoria. As was intended the event was a great outpouring of patriotic sentiment, with the political goal to celebrate white Afrikaner nationalism. Another notable documentary of the 1930s was The Golden Harvest of the Witwatersrand (1939), which celebrated the mining industry in South Africa. It won a Special Mention Award at the 1939 Venice Film Festival.

Although a state subsidy for fiction feature films has been available between 1956 and 1995 no money was granted to documentary films other than propaganda films made by the National Film Board. Although the South African government of the 1950s consulted John Grierson of Canada’s National Film Board regarding the establishment of a national film board for South Africa, his recommendations for experimentation within film to stimulate a truly national cinema and the democratic process, were basically ignored. Ten years after he submitted his report in 1954, the National Film Board (NFB) was established and functioned primarily as a production and distribution facility for the apartheid government’s National Party (NP) propaganda. The structure was finally dismantled in 1979. Documentaries such as Anatomy of Apartheid (1964) attempted to defend apartheid policy.

It was left to independent filmmakers after 1948 to look at the socio-political realities of South Africa under apartheid in a critical manner. The reality of South African filmmaking was that in many ways black South Africans were excluded. Black South Africans had no money to make films. They had no access to equipment. Opportunities were almost non-existent for black scriptwriters or directors to create their own images on the screen.

By the end of the 1950s and the first decade of the National Party Government, most of the worst laws of mandatory separation had been passed - regulating education, sexual relationships, work, living space, in fact, virtually every area of human activity, on the base of race. New York independent filmmaker, Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back, Africa (1959),

the first local film to be made covertly, tells the story of a black man, Zacharia, who becomes trapped in the classic South African situation: A migrant worker without skills looking for a job where he has no right to work. The film is a seminal work on the conditions of blacks under apartheid, depicted in a semi-documentary style.

One of the seminal documentaries on the horrors of apartheid is Nana Mahomo’s Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974).

It is an insight into the lives of people living under apartheid during the 1970s. So powerful was the indictment provided by Last Grave at Dimbaza that the South African government produced a film during the 1970s to counter its effects, entitled To Act A Lie (1978). The South African Embassy in London tried to stop the film being broadcast on the BBC and in the controversy that followed, the BBC allowed the South African government to screen their own film alongside Last Grave at Dimbaza. This film led to an international media war over South Africa’s image. Last Grave at Dimbaza won the Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival. When Mahomo made Last Grave at Dimbaza in 1974 he was a member of the Pan African Congress and wanted to use the film medium to educate people about the horrors of apartheid and the conditions in South Africa. His films are characterised by a direct and simple approach to shooting (much of the camera is hand-held and shots are repeated) and are edited with the intention of maximising understanding. Unfortunately Mahomo was forced to live a large part of his life outside South Africa, for example in Botswana. He was one of the few black film directors in South Africa during the 1970s.

Ironically in the same year as Mahomo’s anti-apartheid documentary another South African documentary received international praise: The Golden Globe Award for Best Documentary went to Jamie Uys’s Beautiful People,

a celebration of wildlife in the Namib and Kalahari deserts of Southern Africa. Since Uys’s international success several South African filmmakers won international acclaim for their work on wildlife, the environment and nature conservation including Neill Curry (A Stitch in Time, African Ark, A Fragile Harmony, Bring Back the Red-Billed Oxpecker, Touchstones, Eagles and Farmers) and Trevor de Kock (Springbok of the Kalahari, City Slickers).

Since the late 1970s and the early 1980s a group of film and video producers and directors who were not affiliated to the established film companies in the mainstream film industry, made documentaries about the socio-political realities of the majority of South Africans. Some of these films were shown at local film festivals such as the Durban and Cape Town International Film Festivals, and from 1987 until 1994, the Weekly Mail Film Festival. Other venues included universities, church halls, trade union offices and the private homes of interested parties. Most of the films experienced censorship problems during the State of Emergency during the 1980s, and many were banned.

The films had small budgets and were either financed by the directors/producers themselves, by progressive organisations such as the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (IDAF), which was striving for an united, democratic, non-racial South Africa, and overseas television stations. The documentaries were nearly all made with an international audience in mind in order to get support for the anti-apartheid movement and to educate an international audience on the horrors of apartheid. Notable earlier work included Anthony Thomas’s The South African Experience (1977), Peter Davis’s White Laager (1977) and Chris Austin’s Rhythms of Resistance (1979). In 1980 two major productions on the history of the South African liberation struggle against apartheid were released internationally: Peter Davis’s Generations of Resistance (1979) and Barry Feinberg’s Isitwalandwe for IDAF. The latter was the first in a long line of films and videos in the 1980s to keep the conscience of the world alive to the issues at stake in South Africa under apartheid. IDAF was instrumental in establishing an alternative news distribution office in London by providing financial and logistical assistance to anti-apartheid documentary filmmakers.

Some of the most seminal political documentaries of the 1980s came from Video News Services (VNS), which included filmmakers such as Brian Tilley, Laurence Dworkin, Nyana Molete and Tony Bensusan. With the assistance of IDAF one of the first productions by Tilley, Dworkin and Molete was Forward to a People’s Republic (1982), which depicted the dynamics of the political conflict in South Africa at the time, juxtaposing the black majority’s militancy with white militarization. From this group of young filmmakers VNS was formed in April 1985. The unit was founded at a stage when foreign television crews were being established in South Africa and local filmmakers found themselves with no control over what was being filmed and what political analysis was made. These filmmakers saw themselves as political activists engaging with the Apartheid State from the side of the liberation struggle. For VNS to achieve this and avoid being shut down, Afravision was established in London to interface with the international arena and solidarity movements, and in South Africa, VNS crews made themselves indistinguishable from the foreign media operating here. They were thus able to work in the terrain without detection. VNS, through its relationships with the unions, churches, civic and youth structures began distributing “video pamphlets,” which serve as a type of news network. They were aimed at South Africans and covered a wide range of current affairs such as vigilante killings, strikes and the white election process.

Apart from VNS other documentary filmmakers have also made important work on political issues during the apartheid regime, including the following themes:

* The forced removal of people from urban and rural communities under the Group Areas Acts and the Homelands policy: Crossroads (1976), Mayfair (1984), Last Supper at Horstley Street (1985) and Katriver: End of Hope (1984)
* Labour problems and organisation: Passing the Message (1981) and Freedom Square and Back of the Moon (1987)
* Different forms of community struggle such as the development of literacy and health projects in rural and urban communities: Ithuseng (1987) and Robben Island: Our university (1988)

* The role of women in the anti-apartheid struggle: You Have Struck a Rock (1981) and The Ribbon (1986)
* General political situation: No Middle Road to Freedom (1984), The Struggle from Within (1983), Witness to Apartheid (1986) and The Two Rivers (1985)
* The role of the church in the anti-apartheid struggle: A Cry of Reason (1987)
* The destruction of indigenous cultures: The People of the Great Sandface (1985) and Have You Seen Drum Recently? (1986).

Kevin Harris is one of the most significant, as well as prolific documentary and community filmmakers in South Africa. His work has already received much international praise, as well as several Oscar nominations. Kevin Harris was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1950 and qualified as an electrical engineer in 1973. From 1974 till 1979 he worked at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1979, because of his political convictions, he practised as an independent documentary filmmaker. Best known internationally for Witness to Apartheid (1987) this documentary was shot clandestinely during the State of the Emergency of the 1980s and subsequently banned. It is a dramatic exposure of the extent of apartheid’s violence and brutality. The narrative consists of testimonies of victims, as well as eyewitnesses to police repression and torture including children as young as fourteen, who were beaten in detention.

kevin harris

With the unbanning of political organisation such as the African National Congress (ANC) and release of political prisoners in 1990, the immediate direct goal of anti-apartheid films had begun to be achieved. Political filmmakers, however, continued to focus on the process of transition itself, to which a large number of films on CODESA (the negotiation process leading up to the 1994 democratic elections) and on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) attest. One significant film from the time is Liz Fish’s The Long Journey of Clement Zulu,

which follows three political activists after their release from imprisonment on Robben Island. Unprecedented freedom of access also allowed new forms of purely observational filmmaking: Harriet Gavshon and Cliff Bestall’s series Ordinary People (1993), a groundbreaking product in terms of South African television at the time, followed ordinary South Africans as they dealt with newfound freedom and in the process, documents the transitions in South African society.

Filmmakers were also now finally allowed to probe and reveal what actually happened under apartheid, with the result that many films were now concerned with the past. Various films about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process were made, including Lindi Wilson’s The Guguletu Seven,

which depicts the uncovering by TRC investigators of security police duplicity in the murder of seven Cape Town activists. Many of the older generation of political filmmakers have felt the weight of responsibility for making sense of a hitherto-concealed and painful past. Documentary filmmaking during the 1980s was based on audio-visual material that reflected the realities of the black majority of South Africa in their aspirations and struggle for a democratic society, but since the beginning of the 1990s other marginalised voices were added to these documentaries and short films, for example those of women, gays and lesbians, and even the homeless. Most of these documentaries can be described as progressive film texts in the sense that the majority of them are consciously critical of racism, sexism or oppression. They dealt with the lives and struggle of the people in a developing country and were mostly allied with the liberation movements for a non-racial, non-sexist South Africa.

Some of these documentaries also dealt with events which were conveniently left out in official South African history books or in a contemporary context in actuality programmes on national television under control of the Nationalist regime. Therefore, they became guardians of popular memory within the socio-political process in South Africa. Examples are Between Joyce and Remembrance (2003), The Guguletu Seven (2000), The Life and Times of Sara Baartman (1998), Ernest Cole (1999), Ulibambe Lingashoni: A comprehensive history of the ANC (1993), and What Happened to Mbuyisa? (1998).

For the first time South African audiences are exposed to certain marginalised communities, such as the homeless in Francois Verster’s remarkable documentary

Pavement Aristocrats: The Bergies of Cape Town (1998), the Himbas of Kaokoland in Craig Matthew’s Ochre and Water (2001), AIDS victims in Shouting Silent (2001), the gay subcultures of the fifties and sixties in The Man Who Drove With Mandela (1998), street children in Hillbrow Kids (1999), prison inmates in Cliff Bestall’s Cage of Dreams (2000) and the San in the Foster Brothers’ visual poem The Great Dance (1999). The latter has already won more than 35 international and national awards, the most for a single film in the history of South African cinema.

Ten years after South Africa has become a democracy the documentary film industry is blossoming. At various international film festivals during 2003 and 2004, including FESPACO, Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes, Genova, Zanzibar and the Commonwealth Film Festival, retrospectives of South African cinema, including documentaries, were held.

The present is indeed an exciting time for South African features, documentaries and shorts. The South African Government and local government in regions such as Gauteng, KwaZulu Natal and the Western Cape have been quick to realise that the film industry offers this country huge earning potential and the creation of jobs. The government’s national funding institution, the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) has a fund of R250 million per annum earmarked for the film industry within South Africa. The IDC provides financial assistance by means of loans. Parallel with this, the South African Department of Arts and Culture and the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) have made grants to a total of 60 million rands available to filmmakers during the past few years, including documentaries. The IDC, for example, contributed to the budget of Craig and Damon Foster’s documentary feature Cosmic Africa (2002).

Shot on High Definition this visual masterpiece explores and sheds light on traditional African astronomy. Using oral storytelling aesthetics the film vividly captures the remarkable personal journey of African astronomer, Thebe Medupe, through the ancestral land of Namibia’s hunter-gatherers, the Dogon country of Mali and the landscapes of the Egyptian Sahara Desert. This seminal work swept eight awards at the 2003 National Television and Video Association’s Stone Awards ceremony and received ecstatic acclaim at the Ten Years of Freedom festival in New York in 2004.

Apart from Cosmic Africa several outstanding documentaries were made and screened during the 2003/2004. One was impressed by the poetic beauty of A Fisherman’s Tale, a 26-minute personal narrative documentary film set in Kalkbay, Cape Town. Initially it starts as the story of a young man who takes his father’s fishing lines and goes out to sea with the hope of finding what the ocean means to the fishermen. The young man’s story is addressed to his mother. But then the film takes another direction and becomes a moving reflection on the despair and hopelessness of these people’s lives as globalization takes its effect, leaving entire South African subsistence fishing communities on dry land.

Structurally it is amazing to note how the personal narrative about the author’s inability to communicate with his Dad, and the emotions that he could never articulate to his mother, is seamlessly integrated with the harsh conditions of the fishing community. With funding from the NFVF director Riaan Hendricks has realised this project after three hard years. Like in the case of the Foster Brothers (Cosmic Africa, The Great Dance) Hendricks’s documentary is enough proof that documentary work could be personal and poetic, and still succeed as non-fiction.

And documentaries in the post-apartheid South Africa has indeed moved away from the stark political texts of the 1980s to become more personal. Screened all over the world, Project 10, a series of documentaries which examine the personal experiences of ten years of democracy in South Africa, became a landmark in local documentary filmmaking. Project 10 was developed and commissioned by the public broadcaster SABC1 and supported by the NFVF, the Maurits Binger Institute and the Sundance Institute.

A major contributor to the stimulation of documentary filmmaking in South Africa has been Encounters, the annual international documentary film festival in South Africa, which includes workshops on documentary production. Several universities and film schools such as CityVarsity Film, Television and Multimedia School also offer comprehensive courses on documentary filmmaking.

this article originally appeared here