kagablog

Two South African films showing at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (July 2 to 11) might be classified as “indie” productions.

Not that we really have an indie film sector as such. In the United States, where the term originated, “indie” means lower-budget films other than those made by the big studios, and we don’t have studios of that ilk in South Africa, so maybe all our films are indies.

But “indie” is also a look and a feel, and both Crime and My Black Little Heart have that feel. Perhaps it’s just the relatively minor budgets, though the latter wasn’t a whole lot cheaper to make than White Wedding, which is very much a mainstream movie (and a commercial success).

It is also the apparent determination of both movies to tell an uncomfortable story head-on — and not to attempt to ingratiate themselves with audiences by getting all entertaining.

Both deal with trauma, either as a specific event and its aftermath (Crime), or as the pain and unhappiness generated by drug addiction (My Black Little Heart). Which leads one to wonder: when narratives are about trauma and pain, what’s the pay-off for the audience? It may feel helluva good for one to watch a movie about a whole lot of suffering, as if you were getting the unvarnished truth about life rather than mere escapist fantasy, but where’s the fun for viewers of unremittingly dark, traumatic films?

I don’t really know. This is a question I keep pondering, not just in relation to certain movies but also about some novels. The issue was raised when JM Coetzee’s Disgrace became, briefly, part of a national discourse about self-perception and representation (of, in part, “the other”).

If I recall correctly, one view expressed at the time was that Coetzee wasn’t actually such a gloom-merchant as it seemed from his books, but rather a charlatan who sort of pretended to be so gloomy because that’s what we expect of “high art”, of serious literature with a “message”.

I think that’s a silly argument, and I can’t see Coetzee’s gloom as anything other than genuine, but it does make one ask about the usefulness and/or the pleasure of depressing art works.

No thinking viewer or reader likes to slip into the position of the empty-headed hedonist who just wants to be entertained.

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Rather, we want to feel tougher than that, able to take a bit of hardcore high art — work that claims to speak about something real and relevant. It feels more meaningful than laughing at Seth Rogen or being thrilled by Jet Li.

Is that just intellectual snobbery? After all, we’re not all artistic masochists. If we got nothing enjoyable or stimulating from such works, would we watch or read them? There is, surely, an authentic desire to get from such a work a sense that it has penetrated to a more profound level of reality and has come back with insights we need to hear.

It may be a need for what Aristotle famously called catharsis, the emotional release achieved by vicariously participating in the tragedies of others.

I think I tend to deal with this question on a case-by-case basis; that is, I try to decide if a particular novel or film (traumatic or not) worked for me or not, and why. This may have as much to do with a day’s mood or preoccupations as anything else, and may also have to do with the way trauma is presented in fictional narrative, which feeds into the much larger question of realism and fantasy. As far as realism goes, at least, there may be some clues in Crime and My Black Little Heart.

Crime is about a well-off bourgeois (Kevin Smith) who comes home one evening to find that his wife (Kim Cloete) has cornered a man (Tsepo Desandro) who broke into the house. She believes he is one of the men who hijacked her a few weeks before, and she wants revenge.

What to do? (Apart from get better security.) As the increasingly heated discussion between husband and wife proceeds, the film flashes back in fits and starts to the earlier hijacking and the trauma visited upon the wife.

And traumatic it certainly is. Crime gets harder and harder to watch as it goes on. That’s mostly because the events it portrays are hard to come to terms with, and because they haunt all our lives in South Africa (except perhaps politicians with bodyguards and motorcades). It’s also hard to watch, though, because the acting can’t always bear the weight placed on it as the characters become ever more unhinged — which is really to say, I suppose, that I wasn’t entirely convinced by their emotional journey.

Cloete, for instance, is very good in the hijack scenes but seems to be straining in the discussions with hubby.

My Black Little Heart, by comparison, is very convincing indeed — almost too much so. In a meandering, back-and-forth way, it traces the experiences of a young Durban woman who’s a heroin addict. It’s ugly, it’s sordid, it’s depressing. And, as in so many such narratives, from Requiem for a Dream and Candy to Melinda Ferguson’s autobiographical book, Smacked, the line from addiction to dereliction to prostitution and violent abuse seems to follow a horribly inevitable course.

It is undoubtedly courageous of writer-director Claire Angelique to make such a film, let alone to cast herself in the lead as Chloe (though the credits tell us coyly that Chloe is played by one Skyf Umlungu). And My Black Little Heart is undoubtedly a good film. The acting never feels like acting, the storyline seldom feels contrived (I place a question mark next to the Nigerian-voodoo passages, shockingly photogenic though they are — they feel like exotica for a non-African audience). The narrative confuses at points, and one is not sure if that’s just muddled storytelling or a deliberately “non-linear” approach, but it doesn’t matter much.

This story is compelling for as long as it lasts — you’re horrified, but you can’t quite tear yourself away. It’s hard to watch, like Crime, but somehow it delivers more satisfaction to the viewer.

Why is this? You get increasingly irritated with the Chloe character — often you want to give her a very hard slap. You get exasperated by the cycles of repetition that characterise addiction. You fall into the kind of despair that anyone who has dealt with an addict will know. But there’s enough in My Black Little Heart to keep you watching.

I think what makes all the difference is aesthetic stuff. The music by Chris Letcher is excellent, and the grungy-beautiful cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot Slumdog Millionaire and a few films for Lars von Trier) is what gives this unhappy tale its poetry.

So, after all that querulous pondering, I come to a conclusion I’m not sure I want to embrace: the idea that look and style and feel, indie or not, can make trauma bearable as a viewing experience. If Crime were more good-looking, would it be more watchable? It might be less realistic.

Perhaps I am just punting the “consolations of form”. Or I’m merely echoing Nietzsche, without knowing whether I agree with him, when he said: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world justified.”

this review 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

SHAUN DE WAAL

‘These are like sketches. They’re fully formed pieces, but they are like my workshop,” says composer Michael Blake of the piano music on his new CD, performed by the internationally acclaimed South African pianist Jill Richards. And, indeed, the pieces on Complete Works for Solo Piano 1994-2004 provide an insight into Blake’s compositional language and is a handy introduction for those coming to his work for the first time.

Born in Cape Town in 1951, Blake studied at Wits, Goldsmiths College in London and at Rhodes University. He moved to London in 1977 and stayed there for two decades, during which he performed with the “electroacoustic” group Metanoia and founded the London New Music ensemble.

He is now the director of the New Music Indaba in South Africa and has taught and had his works performed all over the world. His piano concerto, subtitled Rain Dancing, premiered in Johannesburg earlier this year, the latest work in an oeuvre that works across a wide variety of often unconventional instruments and formations.

Hence the CD of piano pieces is a useful — and eminently listenable — introduction to Blake. It ranges from an early composition for piano, the two-part French Suite (18th-century harpsichord meets the African mbira) through the Satiesque Three Toys to the more recent Oh Clare. One piece, Nightsongs, even reworks bits of Cole Porter songs (all, except one, with the word “night” in the title) into a new work.

“Each piece was requested by someone for something quite specific,” says Blake. The first of the Toy pieces was requested by the Evenings of New Music festival in Bratislava, which celebrated Erik Satie that year; the CD presents that first Toy and two more, to echo Satie’s three Gymnopédies. Oh Clare was requested by Australian pianist Antony Gray, who was making an album of pieces based on Bach. The title is an anagram of “chorale” and the piece is based on the Bach chorale Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, in the Myra Hess arrangement for piano.

“Because I’m a pianist and I’ve learned and played the traditional repertoire, I find it difficult to write for piano without drawing on all that tradition, so I constantly avoided that. Then, in 1994, someone asked me for a piano piece, and I deliberately wrote something that was not pianistic in the traditional sense. It’s more like kora music from West Africa than anything else.”

The way Blake uses the piano is one reminder of the African music on which he draws — and blends with the American experimental tradition that opens the way for such freedom (the music of Charles Ives and John Cage particularly). But that is not his only African resource. Blake develops harmonies from those of the Southern African uhadi, a bow attached to a calabash that resonates when the bowstring is struck.

The uhadi, says Blake, “has just two chords, but with all the overtones, for me there’s enough there to be able to do what I want to do. With that in place, I can work on the rhythm and other elements of the music. The rhythmic element is one of the most important in my work. It’s rhythm that really binds my pieces together, that articulates them, but not in an obvious way.”

Western art music, casually called “classical” music, has by now investigated every melodic and harmonic possibility, from the well-tempered clavier of Bach to the total serialism of Boulez. In the 20th century it was rhythm that came into its own as a new arena for development, and here Blake’s work joins the Western mainstream.

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“Trying to mediate African and European music,” he says, “I realised it was the American experimental tradition that had made it possible — because of those freedoms, because it was not teleological.”

Of that tradition, Cage, of course, was the great revolutionary. But Ives is the protean forebear, a maverick who lived from 1874 to 1954 but most of whose important work was done in the early part of the 20th century. Ives “gave composers freedom”, as Blake puts it.

Ives was classically trained, but his sonic world absorbs many different kinds of music — in one famous instance, he creates the impression of “two brass bands marching past each other, playing different tunes”.

For himself, says Blake, “I love having all these different musics grinding together and creating new sounds.”

Yet the aural experience of Blake’s music, at least in the form of most of the piano pieces, is not “grinding”, but one of poise and spaciousness. It is not only the Three Toys, here, that echo Satie, or have what Blake refers to as Satie’s “sculptural quality — you can see an object from different angles”.

Their percussiveness and off-kilter, staggered rhythms have a ritual, dancing quality, which links the piano works to pieces he has composed for instruments such as xylophone and marimba. One piece on the CD, 38a Hill Street Blues, exists in versions for both piano and percussion duo. (Many Blake pieces have been transcribed or recomposed for various resources.)

There is a sense, in Blake’s piano works, of a lovely simplicity that has, in fact, been shaped from a deep complexity. They feel old and new at the same time.

“I’ve spent most of my composing life trying to create form from scratch,” he says. “I really have no interest in the pre-existing forms. The most exciting work of the last 100 years is that in which the composers let the material find the form, rather than dumping the material into the old form.”

this article first appeared on the mail and guardian online

SHAUN DE WAAL

Anyone who has seen Abdullah Ibrahim perform live and solo will attest that it is a very intense, even spiritual experience.

He will play without interruption for hours, blending a plethora of compositions into one long continuous suite, driven by the ostinati produced by his left hand, while different, shifting melodies or further rhythmic patterns weave in and out of a seamless fabric that implicitly has no beginning or end.

It was fellow pianist Cecil Taylor who described the instrument as “88 tuned drums”, but it is Ibrahim’s playing that really makes that description come alive. It’s not hard to see the ancestry of Africa’s overlapping polyrhythms translated into Ibrahim’s pianistic style. Appropriately, an early live recording (of a solo concert in Copenhagen in 1969) was called African Piano, and many other releases of his put Africa upfront in their titles — Anatomy of a South African Village, African Space Program, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Echoes of Africa, Ancient Africa …

Ibrahim is about to release his first solo-piano album in at least a decade, and he is touring South Africa to support it (not alone, however, but with his trio, the other two members of which are New Yorkers Belden Bullock on bass and George Gray on drums). The album is called Senzo (Gallo), and the reference is to the Japanese word for “ancestor”, as well as being Ibrahim’s father’s Sotho name, he told me on the phone from New York.

“The idea of this CD, playing extended performances without a break,” he says, “is to try to recreate a spirit of trance-dance storytelling.”

This relates to Ibrahim’s interest in African cultures where dance and storytelling are not just forms of entertainment but have communal spiritual meanings. He is a kind of shaman, communicating with ancestors from all over the continent (and the planet), channelling for them through his music. Healing runs in his family, as well as a strong church influence, and then there is his own 40-year engagement with Eastern martial arts — “Nothing to do with fighting,” he notes with a chuckle.

Senzo is a somewhat different proposition to Ibrahim’s previous solo-piano albums. Instead of the driving ostinato pattern holding it together, and the sense of an intensity, the music on Senzo is meditative and glancing, almost more a form of calligraphy than any other art form. A series of lightly shaped fragments arise and then, almost before their identities have emerged, fade and merge into the next piece. The feeling is of a mind playing upon memory, finding pieces of reminiscence, holding them up to the light and then moving to the next one. If the earlier solo performances were like thunder rolling across mountain tops, Senzo is more like sunlight sparkling through a dancing shower of rain.

Ibrahim’s live concerts in South Africa in November will incorporate his solo excursions into the trio structure. He has worked in many formats, from a duo (his famous albums with Johnny Dyani in the 1970s) to trios, bigger bands such as the seven-piece Ekhaya or the WDR Big Band in Cologne, all the way up to large symphony orchestras.

In the meantime, what we will hear in November offers Ibrahim an improvisatory freedom that is as close to an entirely solitary performance as he could come without actually leaving the New Yorkers at home.

this article first appeared on the mail & guardian website

Cinema attendances are down in South Africa (as they are in the US), but retail DVD has taken off in the most extraordinary manner. Whether or not these two things are connected, retail DVD in South Africa is now worth about R800-million per year, with an estimated further R100-million being spent on pirated products. And that excludes games for PlayStation or XBox and the like — we’re just talking about buying movies, TV series and so on, on DVD, to watch at home. Moreover, this market is growing at a rate of about 25% per year.

What’s even more extraordinary is that this has happened on a promotional budget of zero. The movie distributors spend large amounts of money on advertising and other promotional activities to get people into cinemas, yet ticket sales keep dropping. No money has been spent on getting people to buy DVDs: the amazing growth in this market has taken place without the deployment of any advertising budget whatsoever.

This phenomenon is something I will explore further in this blog; I will be getting comment from industry players. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that we’re spending all this money on DVDs, despite not being treated with quite the degree of care we might like. When I spoke to Ster-Kinekor’s DVD chief, Muzi Siyaya, about this, he admitted that DVD-buyers in South Africa aren’t necessarily getting as good a package as they could. The South African versions of most DVDs omit the extras that overseas versions contain.

A current example would be the DVD release of Shortbus, which in the way of extras has only deleted scenes. There is no director interview, no making-of featurette, no “How to shoot sex: a docu-primer”, no director or cast commentary.

All these features are available on a single disc on the US release , so why can’t we get them in South Africa? Is this really saving the distributor so much money? Surely the kind of person who buys a DVD to keep and re-watch is the kind of person who relishes the extra features. I know I do; they are what add value to something one has already seen at the cinema. Why do the South African distributors subtract this value?

this article first appeared on shaun dewaal’s blog