kagablog

by Marc Lauria

Marc Lauria is a F.C. (Freelance Cinephile) whose other obsession is writing. He has two scripts in development, with producers having options on both. Hopefully one will get made. He has two cats.

Pixote (1981 Brazil 123mins)

Source: ACMI/NLA Prod Co: Embrafilme Prod: Paulo Francini Dir: Hector Babenco Scr: Hector Babenco, Jorge Duran, from Jose Louzeiro’s novel Infancia dos Morto Phot: Rodolfo Sanchez Ed: Luiz Elias Art Dir: Clovis Bueno Mus: John Neschling

Cast: Fernando Ramos da Silva, Jorge Juliao, Gilberto Moura, Marilia Pera, Jardel Filho, Elke Maravilha

Hector Babenco’s Pixote has as its antecedents such works as Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933), Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959); the gun-toting youth of Barbet Schroeder’s Our Lady of the Assassins (2000) would certainly have been influenced by Pixote. The script was written by Babenco and Jorge Duran, from Jose Louzeiro’s novel Infancia dos Mortos.

The film begins as a documentary. Babenco addresses the camera, and states that 50 percent of the population in Brazil is under 21, and this includes three million homeless children. Brazilian law prevents anyone under the age of 18 to be prosecuted for criminal offences; older criminals thus prey on these youths. Babenco, standing in front of a slum area, then introduces Fernando Ramos da Silva, who lives there, as ‘Pixote’ in the film proper. Los Olvidados had a similar documentary beginning: it is used as a foregrounding of events to come, a merging of the real and fictional, so while we are witnessing events in the fictional story, we must, in fact, take them for truth.

Pixote is divided in two parts. The first details Pixote’s ordeals in a juvenile reformatory. He witnesses violence, rape, humiliation. As in the Hollywood prison genre (except in this case, the protagonists are children), the point of view is exclusively of the inmates, and emphasis is placed on power structures operating within personal relationships. Those in power (the guards, the police chief) are corrupt and violent. It is only when the lover of a 17-year-old transvestite, Lilica (Jorge Juliao), gets killed, that escape is necessary.

The second part of the film is set in the urban world outside of the reformatory. The narrative follows four of the protagonists (Pixote, Lilica, Chico and Dito) as they survive by pick-pocketing, drug-dealing, pimping for the prostitute Sueli (Marilia Pera), and robbing the johns whom Sueli brings back. Both Lilica and Sueli act as mother figures to Pixote. Both also sleep with Chico, the father figure and principal breadwinner. Possibly the most disturbing scene in the whole movie is when Pixote discovers Sueli’s dead fetus (aborted by her) in a waste-bin in the bathroom. This is directly linked to Pixote suckling on Sueli’s breast, at the end, after he accidentally kills Chico. This Oedipal triangle results in her pushing Pixote off (stating that she does not want a child), thus precipitating his aloneness in the universe.

Though Pixote was rejected by the American Academy’s Foreign Language Film Award Committee, the film garnered excellent critical reviews in the United States, winning best foreign film from the New York Film Critics Circle. Perhaps it was a reaction against the over-produced and over-budgeted U.S. epics at the time, which seemed to indulge Hollywood directors whilst only inviting critical derision (e.g., Heaven’s Gate, One From the Heart). Pixote, on the other hand, seemed to be influenced by Italian neo-realism, with its casting of actual people to play themselves, that is, non-professional actors (Marilia Pera was the only professional actor in the film), and then shooting on the locations where they lived and worked. Babenco used the children’s ideas to form almost half of the script. Critics such as Pauline Kael were also impressed by its raw, documentary-like quality, and a certain poetic realism:
Babenco’s imagery is realistic, but his point of view is shockingly lyrical. South American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, seem to be in perfect, poetic control of madness, and Babenco has some of this gift, too. South American artists have to have it, in order to express the texture of everyday insanity. (1)
The film seemed to capture the spirit of the ‘arthouse’ cinema of Hollywood of the late ’60s and early ’70s, itself influenced by European art films and Italian neo-realism. Incidents in Pixote don’t seem to be set up for the cameras; the film seems to follow the characters no matter what they do or say.

The ending is genuinely tragic, more so because in reality da Silva was actually killed by police bullets in 1988, when he was 19. And so the ending seems to foretell his real death – after being rejected by the mother figure of Sueli, Pixote/da Silva is walking along a railway line, gun in hand, away from the camera, his figure disappearing in the distance, out of the film (documentary or fiction), and out of our lives.

© Marc Lauria, February 2003

Endnotes:

1. Pauline Kael, “Pixote,” Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics’ Video Guide to Foreign Films, ed. Kathy Schulz Huffhines (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991) 498.

this article first appeared on sensesofcinema.com

What is concealed behind the physical planning term ”land use”? This is
the question in this cross-disciplinary project, engaging ten artist and
researchers from around the world. In an intense, four day workshop, and
through the use of arts-based “methods” or poetic practice, the group will
examine how we humans affect the land we have at our disposal. The area of
investigation is delimited to the intensely exploited and at the same time
historically complex landscape between Malmö and Lund. Here, agriculture,
shipping, and industry, already left non-erasable imprints. Today,
however, also entirely different kinds of activities leave traces and
dislocate meanings. Through different forms of spatial engagement – bus
tours, walks, gathering of specimens, study visits and discussions – these
traces and meanings will be explored, scrutinized and mapped out. The
result – or the more or less sketchy findings – will be on show at the
Museum of Sketches in Lund.
The show will open Sun March 22 at 2 pm, followed by an open panel
discussion on landscape change and arts-based research at 3 pm.

Every now and again a novel rises out of the slew of new fiction titles and makes a claim on one’s attention that is extraordinary. Trencherman by Eben Venter is such a novel.

Published in Afrikaans in 2006 as Horrelpoot – to wide critical acclaim, and to some controversy, too – it is quite simply the most devastating fictional account of apocalyptic South African collapse yet written, and it has been superbly translated into SA English by Luke Stubbs.

Novels of apocalypse (or ‘dystopia’) in local fiction are a well-established tradition, many of them incorporating anti-pastoral variations of the farm novel. These novels include Karel Schoeman’s Na die Geliefde Land (translated into English as Promised Land), Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, and several of J.M. Coetzee’s novels (specifically In the Heart of the Country, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace).

However, none of them travels quite as deeply, and quite as startlingly, into the very heart of livid, psychic fear, into the focal point of horror and the terror of dissolution – collapse of every known system and quantity – as does Trencherman.

Venter is a hard-hitting writer, and deeply contemptuous of political correctness. But he is also a lyrical, subtle writer with a developed literary sense.

Trencherman is a deliberate rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Its narrating character, Marlouw (Martin Louw), a SA émigré living in the over-refined, ‘sepulchral city’ of Melbourne, is convinced by his sister, Heleen, to go back to South Africa to find her lost son, Koert.

All of this is a replay of Conrad’s Marlow going on a riverboat journey into the Congo, into the ‘heart of darkness’, to find Kurtz. Each chapter in Venter’s novel is introduced by an epigraph from Conrad’s novel.

In Trencherman, however, the unspecified future South Africa is a scene of abysmal collapse and dark chaos not simply in realistic terms, but more so as the stark realisation of the deepest, most collective and ancient of white fears about belonging in Africa. More precisely, the novel plays out these fears in explicit, psychologically dramatised detail.

So, as Marlouw penetrates the country in shadowy images of a river journey (although the land is wrenched by lack of water), he encounters every white fear in the book: dysfunctional infrastructure; bribe-taking, corruption and desperate barter as the only valid currencies; devastated roads; hordes of shadowy masses converging on anything of value; collapse of electricity and water distribution systems; political anarchy; starvation; and near-universal HIV/Aids infection.

Taking off where Coetzee’s Disgrace left off, with the symbolic hand-over of the white farm to its actual black occupants, Trencherman sees a strange reversal. Heleen, Marlouw’s sister who, with him, handed the farm over to its black labourers and left the country for Australia, has a son called Koert.

Unlike the rest of his family, Koert returned to the abandoned South African farm, Ouplaas. Once there, he established a corrupt power-base in the guise of a meat-mogul, cornering the consumer meat market and growing obscenely corpulent himself.

Ramparted off from his minions in a section of the old farm house on Ouplaas, he gathers together an inner circle and runs an autocracy grounded in ‘Bells and meat’. He and his crazed confidantes obsessively play a Nintendo game called Mario Kart.

On a larger scale, Koert dispenses meat and Bells inconsistently and arbitrarily, keeping his growing province of subjects in a state of expectancy and dependence. Their regard for him is a mixture of awe, adoration, mystery and hatred.

Koert is possibly one of the most grotesque and fascinating fictional figures I have yet encountered in a South African work of imaginative writing. He is an abomination, a demi-god, the apogee of inward fear and horror. Physically, he is a malformed, obese and sweating Hulk who spits vengeance, largesse and crazy intelligence by turns. He is the ultimate white anti-whiteman. His repulsiveness knows no bounds.

Koert’s meat-stuffed body is collapsing on him, gangrene spreading from his legs upward. He is self-restricted to his bed in a room in the middle of the old garage cordoned off by ex-farm furniture. This throne-hovel stinks of stale sweat and the contents of the overflowing pottie under his bunk. Somewhere in the folds of his crumpled beddegoed lies a bottle of Bells and a Nintendo game console.

He is everything that every white man fears becoming: a gangrenous despot whose life and language has degenerated into a tinpot mélange of debased dialects, a SA pidgin creole that is as liberating as it is monumentally awful. (Stubbs deserves a few prizes for his rendition of this demotic under-language.)

‘Hast thou heard what Koert tunes you?’ he bellows at Marlow after Marlow eventually gains access to this über-whiteman-devil-king. ‘Not one snot makes sacrifices for me, mine brudder … Mammie’s stopped loading mine credit card. Right? Right! Love is reality, brudder … Do youz realise how many little sheep I graze on dis farm … how many little sheep I myself got for de town and de districts an de global province? Meat fo’ de people. Right? Right! Wij hebben gedansen an celebrated on thiz liddle Platz. Bells ran like syrup. I showed them Mario Kart and we gamed … Peware, I warned de mudfucker. Laughing ends in shit …’

Everything that has been consecrated in the name of whiteness and Afrikanerdom over the course of more than three centuries is finally brought into a kind of glorious, riotous, and lyrical abasement in the figure of Koert. He is the heart of darkness. ‘De horror. I am de horror’ (‘die horrel, die horrel’ in the Afrikaans original), he shouts in the climactic moments of the novel, when his wayward meat-acolytes turn the knife on him and carve him up during an orgiastic, ultimate, apocalyptic farm party, the party to end all parties, the ultimate outcome of the big SA jol, the one that self-destructs cataclysmically and decisively. Finally, a denouement. Finally, the SA story comes to its end. Nothingness. It’s what we always feared, isn’t it?

In Venter’s novelistic intelligence, this self-destruction, this realisation of the fear of internal and moral, as well as external and systemic, downfall, has been lodged in the white SA psyche since time immemorial, in the amygdala (the almond-shaped structure in the brain linked to emotional states) – and it is coupled in the novel to what Venter calls ‘erfvrees’, a kind of fear and loathing so deep that it is carried physically in the body, phylogenetically passed from one generation of white progenitors to the next. Eventually, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it eventuates in its own self-fulfilling prophecy, it becomes what it has always feared it will become.

The abomination and destruction in Trencherman is complete. Not only does Koert stack up the family furniture (‘erfgoed’) and sideline it, for good, in the passageways leading to his smoky and demented meat-lair, but the crazed people of his principality of corrupt flesh also succeed in desecrating the graves of his and Marlouw’s immediate family.

In a brilliantly realised scene in the novel, Marlouw (with the gangrenous Koert strapped on his bed to the back of a bakkie) travels to the family graveyard, intent on destroying the family graves himself so the hordes can no longer continue pissing and shitting on the forefathers’ tombstones, as they regularly do, and, once there, the party encounters gravediggers, coffin thieves, in the act of excavating their parents’ and grandparents’ earthly remains. The scene that follows is high drama, breathtaking reading.

This is the beginning of the end of Koert’s shady meat-kindgom. As it is, the sheep are ill, Koert’s bloated body is collapsing and his consorts are dying of Aids.

The party escapes from the massing grave-throngs and Koert announces a celebration, a boisterously self-destructive finale. The mad ‘witch’ who crawls around on all fours in the surrounding hills, crepitating and cursing, Ouma Zuka, comes down to the drunken bonfire celebration and pronounces: ‘He’s the mzungu. He’s not one of us … This mzungu is vermin that’s come to live on your werf, meant for humans only.’

Mzungu – the greatest and final curse upon the white person in Africa – a non-being. Koert’s henchmen take out a long knife and begin to stab him, ritualistically murdering the King of Meat, the apogee of white self-elevation. Koert himself, in his dying moments, exclaims: ‘I am the trencherman, Marlouw. I am he … I have devoured you and your language. I have cut you up into pieces.’

A ‘trencherman’ is one who cadges meals, an eater of meat, but a ‘trencher’ is also a cutting instrument, a person who carves meat.

Asked to comment on the doom-laden preoccupation with meat in his novels (one of them entitled Foxtrot vir die Vleiseters), Venter says: ‘I think in all cultures meat is seen as a privilege. In Foxtrot van die Vleiseters this privilege is specifically connected to the white farming community. A lot of meat becomes an indulgence.

‘Consuming even more becomes decadent and eventually repulsive, Venter continues. ‘Koert is the personification of the fallen Afrikaner that is so feared by Marlouw’s father (the ghost voice in the mountain, in Trencherman). Koert is a meat-devouring abomination, a full-on monster that has also managed to bastardise and destroy the language of Afrikaans. I think this is the guy readers should be worried about, not the black people who’ve screwed up their farm.’

Indeed he is. It is in whiteness, rather than blackness, that the horror, Kurtz’s horror, and Koert’s abomination of all things sacred to white flesh, becomes fully and finally real.

● This is the full version of a review that appeared as ‘Book of the Week’ in the Sunday Times on 24 August 2008, cut down to half its original length in the print version.

eben venter’s website is here

they say he’s burned out

but no one has bothered

to tell him

his Sax igniting a spark

across the room

his lips working pure magic

each note attacking the

heart strings of the soul

and for one brief moment

he loses sight of the

bubbling spoon the

heated needle

each note a burst

of machine gun fire

just like he used too

before the angel of death

took him on a straight

line to hell

Lefifi Tladi Wears a Pharaoh’s jutting out goatee, with bright eyes and the ever brilliant smile. At the firm age of sixty (60), he is still the eager wildman whose stories and creative exploits gave color to Pretoria’s 70’s black life. Tladi is least troubled about the past, creatively. His art, he says “…is not in search of the past but in illuminating the future, in plotting new ways of seeing… opening up new scopes of perceiving”.

Lefifi Tladi (right) Motlabane ‘a Mashiangoako (left)

Thus the 1970s as a socio-cultural site produced a unique type of avant-garde in South African Art. Out of Ga-Rankuwa through a collectivist approach to Art making and culture-creation Lefifi Tladi and the Dashiki collective were shaped into astute vernacular creative intellectuals, something akin to what Antonio Gramsci termed “organic” intellectual and was later expounded on by Grant Farred on Black Vernacular intellectuals.

Dashiki, the band, in fusing music and politically charged poetry to their performances understood that… ”the political is not always pleasurable; but the pleasurable, within the vernacular, is always potentially political…” and so it was at one Jazz Festival in Mamelodi, east of Pretoria, with a defiantly festive crowed. “…as soon as Lefifi appeared onstage carrying one of his drums a forest of clenched fists shot up in the Black Power salute and they roared: JO-MO! JO-MO! The people had nicknamed him after Kenya’s independence hero Jomo Kenyatta”.

“…the formation of DASHIKI sort of crystallized our political role because it brought us into contact with the Black Consciousness Movement…” He remembers as he gazes into the air as if he is asking it to remind him.

He adds that combining poetry and music “… was an ultimate devise because it blended beautifully… and it became politically functional in the community… ” Dashiki acquired popular purchase through that mode in which the political and the popular conjoin identificatory pleasure with ideological resistance.

As early as 1966 they had given meaning to the concept of community art project, with a Youth Club they called ‘DeOlympia’ comprising among others Isaac Nkoana, Anthony Molongwana Makou, photographer Matsobane Legoabe… “…DeOlympia was a recreational thing, it was about encouraging more meaningful activities and interactions for our own development. It kept us off the street…” In 1971 Tladi and the collective transposed the House used for DeOlympia activities into a small museum for contemporary Black art in Ga-Rankuwa. Unfortunately, in 1974 it had to close down. The likes of Sir Isaac Nkoana, Anthony Makou used to work hard giving art workshops at this haven.

Encouraged within Black Consciousness thought the collectivist approach to art making, for one, explodes the construction of artist as individual genius separable from the general society and loftier than the environment that produces him, thus coining the cultural worker as an ideological posture in the broader community of resistance workers. “Through the Cultural wing of the Black consciousness Movement, CUL- COM (Culture Committee)…, Tladi recalls: …we organized a lot of Black art exhibitions at some of the Black universities and schools because we were aware of our people’s ignorance. Bantu education didn’t expose us as a nation to our own creative genius”. On the role of their art practice Tladi relates that theirs “was an instrument in the restoration of the harm done to the senses, apartheid had destroyed our people’s senses”. And, so the populace was always at the centre of their creative efforts because as once noted by Farred, “no post /anti- Colonial struggle can be sustained if it does not contain in it a cultural element moreover one that has popular purchase “

Forced into exile after the 1976 explosion, Lefifi and fellow exiled artists in Botswana established TUKA Cultural Unit. A cultural formation aimed at organizing group exhibitions and sustaining working relations with artists at home in S. Afrika. Through the assistance of the ANC, TUKA members managed to participate in the Pan African Arts Festival, F.A.S.T.A.C in Nigeria. The excursion also provided for a novel opportunity to tour other African countries on their way down to home in the south.

In 1980 Lefifi packed his bags and faced new vistas, as it were, headed for Sweden to study Fine Arts and Art history. Studying in Europe gave a global edge and perspective to ideas shaped in Pretoria’s townships, perhaps, molding what Franz fanon called the global native.

Though not quite returning “home”, in May 1995, the artist-poet-musician held his first exhibition in a democratic South Africa at the UNISA Art Gallery, titled “Xedzedze” Tsonga for “whirlwind”, alongside Fikile Magadlela another firebrand, of Dashiki days. Tladi now lives half and half in the (former) country of his exile and that of his birth: Sweden and South Africa respectively.

Our conversation wasn’t quite concluded, there was a pressing matter requiring his attention. So he lit up a cigarette declaring a wish to quite, his hand unsteady and shaky as he smiled and handed me a CD: Poetry for ARTvanced listeners, it’s an audio anthology of some his poems and Art lectures. He’s signed it:” these are some of our lasting impressions, for Brother Percy”.

Written by: Percy Mabandu
this article first appeared on dashiki dialogues

163

Direct experience is an evasion, or hiding place, for those without any imagination. Reading about the risks incurred by a man who hunts tigers, I feel all the risks worth feeling, save the actual physical risk, which wasn’t really worth feeling, for it vanished without a trace.

Men of action are the involuntary slaves of the men of reason. The worth of things depends on their interpretation. Certain men make things which other men invest with meaning, bringing them to life. To narrate is to create, while to live is merely to be lived.

In a post-apocalyptic world, Y is a documentary-style reality show where the grand prize is the future of our species on planet Earth.

Mythos Media and FoolishPeople will join with DPRGRM/Pilotlite to create ‘Y’, a feature film that starts shooting in Los Angeles July 2009.

LOS ANGELES, CA 02/27/09 – DPRGRM/Plotlite announced a project today that forges a new path in independent cinema by bringing together real world experience and film in a unique way. ‘Y’ brings an audience inside the creation of a modern myth. The audience will become actual cast members, and be immersed in the story in real time. The film crew will also be part of the story as well as part of the cast, therefore creating a total immersive experience that bridges the traditional proscenium of audience/performer.

The ambitious staging and shooting technique is enhanced by the premise that in the future, government facilities, such the as one depicted in this film, will have to turn to unorthodox means of funding, such as contracting the facility out as the subject of a reality based TV show. The actual crew will be made up of news, reality and documentary style cinematographers and the production will be filmed entirely in the Cinma vrit style.

Written by John Harrigan and James Curcio, and directed by Joseph Matheny, Y is a unique production fusing characters from Curcios second published novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning and Harrigans screenplay GraveLand, currently in pre production.

DPRGRM will finance and distribute the film, working alongside online media corporation Pilotlite, a joint venture between Joseph Matheny and Michael Mailer Films.

Joseph Matheny, founder of DPRGRM and Pilotlite co-founder says: We will be employing cutting edge production, post production and distribution techniques that have been gestating for several years while the technology caught up to the vision. We chose this project and this team specifically because the project lends itself to the medium and the people can keep up.

James Curcio, Creative Director of Mythos Media, says: Mythos Media was founded specifically to work on projects like this, and modern myths have been my life passion. I am eager to dive in and create this world, both as production designer and producer of the soundtrack. However, even more, I am eager to collaborate with all of the creatives that are already lining up to become a part of this truly one-of-a-kind project.

John Harrigan, Artistic Director of FoolishPeople comments: Members of FP and I are extremely excited to be working on a project with such a talented and unique team. ‘Y’ will redefine what is possible in film production and I’m looking forward to taking on the role of Performance Director.

About Y:

Civilization has fallen. In the rubble, we at the Y Corporation have developed the ultimate solution to save society: the Y Show.

We encourage all good citizens to sign up for the Show. You will be housed within a wonderful Haze Treatment Facility and undergo unique psychological treatment, which will clear away the illness of individuality. This reprogramming will be broadcast to the eyes and ears of Citizens in our New World, populated with previous contestants and patients. This is a reality show unlike any other!

There is a secret that haunts Haze01, the original treatment facility. Two patients, locked deep within its walls, contain archetypes that reject all reprogramming. They channel portents and omens of another future, a world where myth and divinity remake reality, manifesting a planet fit for Gods.

In this season of the Y show, the doctors of the facility make their final attempt to process these two patients, before they break free and unleash total anarchy. Tune in.

###

Notes to editors:

About DPRGRM/Pilotlite: DPRGRM was founded by auteur Joseph Matheny to meet the new age of media convergence head-on with cutting edge media projects like Y and Pilotlite, which Matheny co-founded with Michael Mailer of Michael Mailer Films. For more information visit: jmatheny.wordpress.com

About Mythos Media: Mythos Media was founded by James Curcio, Peter Emerson Williams, Michael Szul and Tovarich Pizor in 2006 to produce modern myths. In the past, these have taken the form of comics, novels, and albums. For more information, please visit: www.mythosmedia.net

About FoolishPeople: FoolishPeople was founded by John Harrigan in 1989, taking its name from one of the major arcana of the tarot, card 0: The Fool. FoolishPeople create weaponized art, ritual theatre, collaborative events, books & film to raise a numinous experience within the witness. FP engineer immersive, open source experiences that become a catalyst for positive change. For more information, please visit: www.foolishpeople.org

Press Contact:

Joseph Matheny

DPRGRM

jmatheny@dprgrm.com

310.928.6959

http://citizen-y.com

A dance theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Directed by Jay Pather

Trading swords and sandals for suits and cell phones, Jay Pathers adaptation of Shakespeares Julius Caesar, brings to life a contemporary South African experience of the classic play. The conspired fall of a leader accused as a dictator by his own comrades, provides rich contemporary themes of power struggle, betrayal and corruption, brought to life through a collaboration of dance, text, video and opera.

Qaphela Caesar presents UCT’s latest in top class student dance theatre and will include members of the Durban-based Siwela Sonke dance company and singers from UCT’s Opera School

Qaphela Caesar is presented in part through the support of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts.

Qaphela Caesar opens on the 27th of March at 20:00 and closes on the 3rd of April 2009.

For further information please call 084 395 8381 or e-mail us on susan.cole@uct.ac.za

Because no new rage registered
on the Research Seismograph of Human Fury

because no new grief mushroomed white and incandescent
above the stale categories of numbspouselessness
and suddenlymotherlessness and lifescorchinglimblessness

because no new human solvents were inquested
beyond tears sweat blood

because the poor souls who flew out of windows in fear
did not fly after all

because the kneejerk was one hundred million years old
and

because a line was not drawn under the horror of hatred
or over the train of terror pulling in and out of Christmas
stations with bigger and flashier blindinglyfatherlessness

nothing new happened and
the world did not change forever on September eleven 2001

for more poetry by chuma nwokolo go to his website www.nwokolo.com

ROSS DOUGLAS

The second Joburg Art Fair will have its private opening on April 2 for 1 500 invited guests. That same day the G20 summit meets in London to agree that the world is in a financial mess and to disagree on how to fix it.

But what has this to do with the second Joburg Art Fair?

After successfully producing William Kentridge’s version of Mozart’s Magic Flute in late 2007, Artlogic was able to secure sponsorship from FNB to produce the first art fair in Africa. The bank took a bold gamble on a big event to be executed by a small company that had never visited an art fair, let alone produced one. After visiting two of the big European fairs, Basel in Switzerland and Frieze in London, we started “reverse engineering” our very own fair. Though the bank was bullish, much of the art community was not. Most galleries felt the local market was too small to warrant a fair and that the real action was in London and New York. Some local art journalists felt that an art fair was too commercial and we would be better off with another Johannesburg Biennale, even though this was never an option because of the massive costs.

Not one of the world’s 300-odd art fairs focuses on contemporary art from Africa. Our intention with the first fair was to fill this gap. It’s not that easy. Without gallerists managing and promoting art, artists don’t find the market they need to sustain their careers. As with so much talent from the continent, Europe and the United States provided the opportunities for African greats such as Owusu-Ankomah, El Anatsui and, more recently, Romuald Hazoume to exhibit. Our solution last year was to commission Simon Njami, who captured the world’s imagination with his Africa Remix show and to a lesser extent the Africa Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He chose work mainly from younger artists starting to break into the international art scene. Njami’s selection of work, entitled As You Like It, attracted interest but did not sell. By contrast, local galleries sold beyond our expectations. Between R25-million and R30-million passed hands, giving the local contemporary art market a major cash injection.

In May last year we sat to plan the 2009 fair. With the absence of a biennale or any other perennial contemporary art show in the country, there was an opportunity for our fair to play a bigger role than providing only a market for art from the continent. At the same time art NGOs, foreign cultural institutions and development organisations started to approach us, as they were looking for an event that was well managed with high visitor numbers that they could contribute to.

The result is that the 2009 fair has 26 galleries, much the same as last year, and 12 “special projects”, most of which are new. The Gordon Schachat collection will host South African Jane Alexander’s Security, commissioned for the 27th Sao Paolo Biennale and never seen before in her home country.

The Gauteng provincial government provided the budget to commission South Africa-born Tumelo Mosaka, who is now curator at the Krannert Art Museum in Illinois, to select video art from the Global South for a show, titled Here and Now. The BMW art talks taking place inside the fair host local speakers, including artists, curators and the Goethe Institute’s selected guests, Agnes Wegner and Thomas W Eller from Berlin’s Temporare Kunsthalle Museum.

The fair has introduced design on a unique scale. Thirty-two of the country’s top designers have been commissioned to make unique and unusual pieces as part of the Southern Guild initiative. CulturesFrance is bringing out Encounters of Bamako, a selling photographic exhibition from the continent of Africa represented at the recent photographic Bamako Biennale.We raised money from Siemens for Funda, an art school in Soweto, to produce and sell its students’ work at the fair.

Despite an impressive line-up for the second fair, we were still missing one vital ingredient — an influential international audience. The world’s top fairs host the world’s top art personalities with all-expenses-paid packages. We will never have the budget to host this set and, positioned on the tip of Africa, we are slightly out the loop of who the “taste-makers” are.

CONTINUES BELOW

Shortly after Damien Hirst’s Inside My Head Forever exhibition at Sotheby’s sold $200-million in September, the contemporary art world went into freefall. It is no surprise that New York and London became the contemporary art centres of the world. A seemingly endless supply of easy-made cash fuelled an endless supply of ready-made art. When The Guardian broke the story that Hirst was not renewing the contracts of 17 of the 22 factory workers who make his work, it was clear the party was over.

A seemingly impossible international art market has started to work in our favour. The contemporary art world will not die. Buyers will go back to basics and look for quality and value once again and are prepared to travel to find it.South African-born and educated Mark Coetzee, who headed the Miami-based Rubell collection, was recently appointed programme director for Puma Vision and chief curator of Puma Creative. Wanting traction in Africa, he approached us to assist with the fair. We quickly struck a deal whereby he flies and accommodates 50 curators, collectors and writers from Africa and abroad to attend the fair, giving us the audience we have been sorely wanting.

This year’s fair will showcase the work of more than 400 artists and 32 designers from the continent, with the majority coming from South Africa. As the art world focuses more sharply on value, art from Africa will become of greater interest. To capitalise on this opportunity we need to create art events that last long enough to become part of the international art calendar. The start and collapse of the Johannesburg Biennale and the stillbirth of Cape Africa Platform reinforce negative perceptions of Africa.

The Joburg Art Fair has found an international audience in its second year. With the ongoing support of FNB and secondary sponsors the fair will become the single most important meeting place for collectors, curators and writers and those curious about contemporary art from the continent.

Ross Douglas is the director of the Joburg Art Fair

this article first appeared on mg.co.za

The last few Afrikaans movies were so awful that I think I went into Hond Se Dinges with very low expectations. As it turned out, I found it a pleasant surprise.

Not that it’s a great masterpiece of our national cinema, but it does what it does rather well. It’s a comedy with a bit of a thriller element and a dash of love story, entirely populist in its intentions, and it fulfils that brief very competently. It’s not a gross-out farce like Poena Is Koning or a pallid imitation of the American school-sports genre like Bakgat — it may even be made for adults. The tradition it feeds on is that of such oldies as Stadig oor die Klippe and Lord Oom Piet, making it a homegrown comedy not a million miles from the kind of thing we’ve seen a lot of on television before, but it is homegrown and it works.

The key to its success, I think, is to keep the plot rolling at a merry pace. The focal character is one Dolf de Lange, a Kerkorrelish rock star who, when his band falls apart, leaves the big city to return to Lichtenburg and return an old orrel to his oupa, Oudolf, who lives there. Oudolf must be the last living private diamond miner in Lichtenburg, still trying to scratch something that glitters from the alluvium. There’s a history, too, given to us in a flashback, of a mega-diamond found by Dolf’s dad before he was murdered by some skelms.

Alongside this basic outline, there’s Lara, a pretty young Lichtenberg reporter who interviews Oudolf and later gets involved in Dolf’s troubles. I think you can see where that’s going. Then there’s Nardus, a berserk record company executive, Bertus, Dolf’s druggy friend and former bandmate, the loan sharks who are after him and Dolf, as well as odd denizens of Lichtenberg, including the town whore, Rooi Sarie, and her security guard lover, Rommel, who in turn complicate matters further. Oh, and there is also Oudolf’s Jack Russell, Pernans, who plays a central role in the plot.

The core of the film is to be found in the hammy but very amusing performances by Marcel van Heerden as Oudolf, Nicola Hanekom as Rooi Sarie and Frank Opperman as Rommel. Opperman’s Rommel gets the prelude, marching and muttering angrily down a country road, and by the end of the movie we will have discovered why he’s in such a state. (Opperman also contributed to the story, which was then scripted by Johan Heyns and Johann Potgieter; the former directed.) Honourable mention should also go to Louw Venter as Dolf’s daggaroker friend Bertus — he’s hilarious.

Ivan Botha, one of the stars of Bakgat, plays Dolf. He’s a rather anodyne presence, though personable enough. He will probably bring in the Afrikaans teenyboppers in droves. Tinarie van Wyk Loots as Lara isn’t bad either, but I found Lara’s knowing and cutesy voice-over rather irritating. Still, it helps hold the film together and remind us where we are in the storyline.

More that that, there’s not much to say. Hond Se Dinges is frequently very silly, but it does make one laugh. Afrikaans filmgoers seem more committed to the cinema than any other population group in this country, so it even stands a chance of making money. As the work of Leon Schuster demonstrates, this kind of filmgoer seems to relish faecal humour, and Hong Se Dinges fully fulfils its commitments in that department. I’m happy to say, though, that the faeces in question are not human but canine.

this review first appeared on mg.co.za

Dear friends,
South Africa the country of high idealism for racial equality after the apartheid and giving hope for equality, justice, freemind non-violence today is compromising its integrity by rejecting a visa to His Holiness the Dalai Lama for a visit. His holiness’s bosom friends like Arch bishop desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela would be embarassed to see such policy from the present government.
-tenzin tsundue
Dharamsala

From: Elizabeth
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 6:25 PM
Subject: HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA - SNUBBED

We received information this afternoon (Friday 19th March) that His Holiness the Dalai Lama will not be attending the South African Peace Conference in Johannesburg next week.

His Holiness was one of the first Peace Laureates to accept a personal invitation from the 3 Nobel Peace Laureates in South Africa to attend this prestigious event organised by the Premier Soccer League in order to promote peace through sport, especially with 2010 on the horizon.

Apparently the South African High Commission in New Delhi had not issued His Holiness a visa to visit South Africa and it has been confirmed by the Office of Tibet in Pretoria that the High Commission asked His Holiness to postpone his visit to SA but gave no explanation when asked. His Holiness’ office in turn said that he had no intention of withdrawing from the conference since it was an invitation by the 3 Peace Laureates in SA.

His Holiness in fact wrote to the SA Peace Laureates informing them of the situation.

Since a visa for His Holiness has not been issued he will be unable to attend and this is indeed a very sad moment in the history of this country!

As South Africans who would like to see peace promoted in our country we would like a clear explanation why this has happened to perhaps one of the greatest of Peace Makers of our time…. why has it happened???? Why has His Holiness been snubbed?????

Please follow through with your contacts because we would dearly love an explanation!

The hosting body - the Premier Soccer League must be highly disappointed by this situation and Mr Siem is the contact person for comment. (sorry no tel number…. )

The Office of Tibet representative for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Sonam Tenzing can be contacted on 012-6641194.

The citizens of this country need to have a explanation and hopefully this will be forthcoming very soon.
thank you
Sincerely
Elizabeth Gaywood
(sent on behalf of the Tibet Society of South Africa)
tel: 031-7014307 - home
or Chris Kudla 083.654.8182 (Chairperson)

The mix of Delbert Mann’s repertory style direction and Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay, developed from his own teleplay (Mann also directed the 1953 “Philco-Goodyear Playhouse” television version with Rod Steiger in the lead) works well although no-one anticipated its huge critical and commercial success, not to mention 4 Oscars for Mann, Chayefsky, Ernest Borgnine and the film itself, let alone the Palme D’’Or at Cannes. Emanating from the independent production company of Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster and symptomatic of 50s American taste for “realist” films (including here some nice location photography), it tells an endearingly sentimental story of the search for love by a lonely and good-hearted 34-year-old Bronx bachelor butcher (Borgnine). Whilst Chayefsky’s script strikes the right note with its simple everyman story and well-turned, naturalistic yet slightly intellectualized dialogue (there are some nice lines such as the one about college girls being “one step from the street” and Marty’s mates critical evaluation of Mickey Spillane’s writing) it is Borgnine’s performance that wins the day.

Steiger turned down the role because he didn’t want to sign a long term contract with United Artists but one feels that he would not have been as perfect as Borgnine, hitherto best known for sleaze-ball bad guy roles in Westerns, in the role. Less convincing is Betsy Blair, who plays the Plain Jane, being nowhere as plain as the script claims her to be (she was married to Gene Kelly at the time) and having little to do than to be a maidenly (and fairly unlikely) beau for Marty. BH

this review first appeared on cinephilia.net.au