kagablog

Citizen Kohen; The Freedom Fighter; Stones Again
Aryan Kaganof
2004, Pine Slopes Publications

Reviewed by Trevor Steele-Taylor

The ever prolific Aryan Kaganof’s latest publications (as apart from an array of new films) are, as ever, self-reflective diaries; narratives formulated from ceaseless notetaking, filtered through carnal nets of young girls, alcohol and cinema and guided through the maelstrom by the philosophers Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

Citizen Kohen is a truly breathtaking work. A book on cinema to rival Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time and equally a book of lies, which creates a myth where cinema is intrinsic along the lines of Stephan Laws’ Demoniac, Tim Lucas’s Throat Sprockets and the classic of them all, Theodore Roszak‘s Flicker.

Citizen Kohen is a filmmaker who, travelling internationally to film festivals as an honoured, if badly behaved guest, slips into the roles of assassin, seducer and philosopher. That which surrounds the narrative is what really matters. The progress of Kohen’s travels is interrupted by film reviews and analyses written by fictitious critics with names concocted from slight alterations to the names of the living. These analyses generally involve a film by the title of Femme de Siecle, a film directed by Kaganof’s previous embodiment, Ian Kerkhof, as a homage to the Spanish director, Jesus Franco. The film does exist. A crystalline meditation on the feet of a girl as she ascends a staircase to indulge in vampiric fellatio. The film being analysed though, does not bear any relation to the film as it exists and references all manner of other Kaganof/Kerkhof productions, including those, which do not exist.

The joke of jokes is the vast filmography, which concludes the book. Some films listed really exist. A good deal of them don’t. Many will never. Some will in time.

With The Freedom Fighters, Rimbaud stands at Kaganof’s elbow as he anguishes over turning 40. A slim volume of poetry, beautifully produced by the Amsterdam-based illuseum press, the brief verses take us on a journey through low budget eateries and sexual episodes with Joan of Arc, escaping the process of ageing and, more importantly feeling the scorn of Rimbaud who, by that age had given up poetics altogether for the more fulfilling epiphany of criminal activity.

“He finishes typing the manuscript of his fictional autobiography and realises that he has not written a novel”
Kaganof’s intrinsic romanticism is doom laden to be sure. Shedding tears over growing old is a difficult river to cross safely (and joyfully) and his memories of women veer from the blunt (”I once fucked a girl in Beaufort West”) to the visionary (”In my dream, a naked woman drove my car without her seatbelt on”) but the lesson is Rimbaud’s once again with support from Wittgenstein – Silence – “without Rimbaud’s silence there is no Beckett. Not yet mature enough for silence, Kaganof writes poems in shabby bars – entertaining the teenage waitresses”.

Stones Again, Kaganof’s most recent opus is the follow on from this. By no means silent, but without a plot, he sits in a shabby bar (Stones, on the right side of Main Road, Melville, Johannesburg, going up and on the left, going down), entertaining the teenage waitresses with his notes, observing alcoholic delirium tremens, cocaine-fuelled visits to the toilet and young girls playing pool. Wittgenstein will not leave him alone and neither will the obsession with turning 40.

The narrative is divided by brief haikus called Shooters (the concocted drink guaranteed to land one on the floor – 12 certainly would to even the stoutest stomach). Kagonof sits on his barstool and the interminable bustle of meaninglessness goes on around him. He would never pursue a conversation with a girl (be she barmaid or waitress) who had never heard of Wittgenstein, but, the pre-finale of the book involves teenage waitress, Nina slicking her tongue deep into his mouth, unrepulsed by his prophylactic tooth-brace. Is it a dream or is it not? Does it matter? Has she heard of Wittgenstein? Forty is just around the corner.

If viewed as a sub-Bukowski presentation of alcoholic eternity, Stones Again comes a trifle short, but that is clearly what this book is not. It is a book about the failure to construct sense (plot) out of senselessness (life). He says so himself:

“Kaganof has failed. He finishes typing the manuscript of his fictional autobiography and realises that he has not written a novel. There is no plot.”

Trevor Steele-Taylor is co-director of the Cape Town Film Festival

this review first appeared on africanreviewofbooks.com

South Africa 2008 – 81 minutes
Director/editor/Script: Aryan Kaganof
Photography: Eran Tahor
Music: Michael Blake
sound design: warrick sony
sound recordist: nico louw
Cast: Leigh Graves, Deja Bernhardt, Aryan Kaganof, Bill Curry, John Matshikiza, Samantha Rocca,Jerry Mofokeng, Norman Maake

Johannesburg – an evil, ugly city on a Christmas Eve. This is the turf of the lonely and the damned and no more damned can they be than Sugar man (Kaganof) cruising the streets in his Valiant ‘66, continually on his cell phone, peddling his girls, white and Asian, to wealthy black punters. This tongue in cheek inversion of the apartheid-years scenario of Afrikaans business men popping off to homelands to sample black girls is delivered with ironic force. From hotel to hotel to palatial apartment, the girls and he journey like Joseph and Mary looking for a manger. The process of the night will awaken something in Sugar man that will be born on Christmas Day, witnessed by no Wise Men nor sheep and cows but witnessed instead, by those who, like him were lost. Strangely romantic, consciously transgressive and aesthetically audacious – shot on a battery of cell phones – the film is in addition a homage to Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville. A checkered production history, plagued by disagreements between director and producer, almost accepted for Cannes but rejected after Kaganof refused to institute alterations, insisted on by the Cannes selectors, the film is destined to share the same floor as Citizen Kane and El Topo in the great Cinematheque Hotel of the Akashic Records.

trevor steele-taylor

Africa in Motion 2008 came to an end just over a month ago. The festival was bigger and better than ever before, with over 2,000 people attending the various screenings, workshops, masterclasses and other events. We owe a huge thank you to all our audience members, funders, sponsors, supporters and partners for helping us deliver another hugely successful AiM festival.

The opening weekend of the festival was dedicated to two of the most important African directors - Burkinabe director Gaston Kaboré and Malian director Souleymane Cissé, with screenings of retrospectives of their work. Mr Kaboré delighted audiences with anecdotes and fascinating tales from his filmmaking experiences. We were disappointed that Mr Cissé could not join us in Edinburgh due to visa problems, but audiences still flocked to the screenings of his films and we will certainly invite him back in future years.

From l to r: Burkinabe director Gaston Kabore, festival director Lizelle Bisschoff, festival advisor Mark Cousins, and Kari Ann Shiff, a member of AiM’s organising committee (Photo by Claire Cox)

On the first Saturday of the festival we also screened the eight shortlisted films from our short film competition, and the winner was announced immediately after the screenings. The winning film was selected by a jury consisting of director Gaston Kaboré; writer, presenter and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa; Director of the Scottish Documentary Institute Noe Mendelle; and high-profile film critic, writer and producer Mark Cousins. Congratulations again to Rogerio Manjate from Mozambique whose heart-warming 3-minute short “I Love You” won the short film competition, as well as to Tunisian filmmaker Anis Lassoued whose magic-realist short “The Magic Crop” won the audience choice award. Rogerio will receive £1,000 prize money to assist him in his filmmaking career, sponsored by the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA); SA Direct, a new lifestyle and culture TV channel; and Total Black TV, an online film distributor based in New York.

Still from Mozambican director Rogerio Manjate’s short I Love You

Over the 11 days of the festival we screened over 50 films from 22 African countries, which included brilliant award-winning contemporary features and docs, with many filmmakers in attendance to talk to audiences after screenings. Director Zina Saro-Wiwa talked about her vision of changing how the world sees Africa after the screening of her film This Is My Africa. The club night at the Bongo after the screening of Andy Jones’ music documentary As Old As My Tongue, which featured DJ Rita Ray (a producer on the film) and other African musicians, was a great way to keep warm on a baltic Edinburgh autumn night! A host of Edinburgh-based African musicians entertained audiences after screenings in the Filmhouse cafe. Our Nollywood screenings were thoroughly enjoyed by audiences, with Nigerian director Chucks Mordi in attendance to tell audiences about the struggles and joys of making films within this low-budget video-film industry. Our late-night screenings of African horrors and experimental films over Halloween weekend went down a treat too. South African director Richard Stanley almost got us into trouble by performing a voodoo ritual in the cinema before the screening of his documentary The White Darkness but he just about redeemed himself through the hugely insightful discussion with Trevor Steele Taylor after the screening of Stanley’s cult classic Dust Devil the following evening.

South African film festival programmer Trevor Steele Taylor and director Richard Stanley in discussion (Photo by Kari Ann Shiff)

USA 1972 – 110 minutes
Director: Bill Gunn
Producer: Chris Schultz
Script: Bill Gunn
Photography: James Hinton
Cast: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Sam Waymon, Richard Harrow, Bill Gunn
Doctor Hess Green, doctor of Anthropology, doctor of Geology, while studying the ancient Black civilization of Myrthia, was stabbed three times by a stranger; once for God the Father, once for the Son and once for the Holy Ghost. Stabbed with a dagger, diseased from that ancient culture, whereupon he was addicted and could no longer die. Nor could he be killed. Thus begins one of the most bizarre vampire films ever made. The brainchild of New York actor and writer Bill Gunn, it is a remarkable confection of vampire story, anthropological study of African mythology, social document of black Haarlem mores and the culture of resistance to white domination. With a marvelous gospel soundtrack archly commenting on the theme – the first sequence is in a black revivalist church where the congregation are singing I know it was the blood the vampire theme is never mentioned specifically and its relevance relates to the devouring of black culture by white Christian society, with its absorption of black artifacts into white institutions. The film’s white producers, although sympathetic to black literature and arts realized that the market lay in the exploitation cinemas. Gunn’s film was too subtly laden though and after it failed on release they recut it and shortened the film by 33 minutes. Only now after Gunn’s death has the film been restored to its former glory. Called by critics James Monaco The great underground classic of black film and perceptively analysed by critic Tim Lucas as follows If you try to engage with this film with your brain – with anything but the pagan instincts of your blood and your bowels – you are crashing the wrong party, it can be summed up by Bill Gunn’s words: To remember a man’s name is to give him eternal life.

TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR

Born in Cape Town in 1952, he remained there far too long, completing a degree in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. After various rambling positions including being part of a group of young punks who programmed an alternative cinema called The Labia, he spent a year in the off-beat cinemas of London, Amsterdam and Paris. Although in retrospect, he should have introduced himself to the less respectable film-making fraternity in Soho and the Champs Elysees at the time and offered his services, he instead returned to South Africa to programme The Cape Town International Film Festival – a position of immense freedom which gave him the opportunity to introduce Japanese cinema to Cape Town and to champion filmmakers such as Walerian Borowczyk, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Shuji Terayama and Peter Whitehead. Many other festivals entered into the equation, most notably the confrontational Weekly Mail & Guardian Film festival. Widely traveled, presenting South African film programmes in France, Holland, Scandinavia, the USA, Brazil and Switzerland, he peered further and further into the depths of lesser known South African film practitioners, searching not for the obvious but for the maverick non-conformism that lurks on the fringes of every mainstream. He has for the last nine years been the Programme director for Film of the annual National Arts Festival which takes place in Grahamstown. He has been a film critic, has lectured, has written film scripts, has directed and has acted. He fervently loves gospel music and country music, favours high heel boots and owes a debt of gratitude to Aleister Crowley for opening his eyes to the true will. He is married and has a son with whom he often discusses the comparative aesthetic virtues of American cars of the sixties and seventies.

BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS – AFRICAN CINEMA OFF THE TOURIST MAP

I always knew there was another Africa. I always knew that film aesthetics were profoundly housed in the archetypes of a culture. I always knew that African film aesthetics were as vast and profound as the continent that housed them. For the European explorer, clad in pith helmet and climbing boots, the search for the aesthetic pile, beyond the Mountains of the Moon, where the great Ayesha reigns is a quest as fascinating as being locked into the vaults of Eurocine and having the hours of the night to piece together the mysteries of Alternative Versions.

I saw my first Nigerian film in a little cinema in Brussels called CineNova. I was sitting next to Richard Stanley (also a guest at this festival). The film was End of the Wicked a film by Teco Benson and Helen Ukpabio. I had never seen anything like it before. I turned to Richard. He turned to me and said My faith in cinema is restored!
There you are – even when you think you know the dog, it still has the ability to bite you.

This late night, three programme season is not exhaustive. It is a small delicate bite on a far bigger morsel. The films are primarily from South Africans with one Nigerian exception. The quality is great though and to those who know neither Kaganof nor Stanley, this should be an eye opener.

Did you know that a certain William Akouffo in Ghana made a block buster on no money called Diabolo about a man who turns himself into a snake which enters by way of the genitalia of sleeping women causing them to vomit money? Have you heard of Othello the Black Commando and its prolific director Max H. Boulois? Have you ever encountered The Slit – shot in Zimbabwe and almost ending in tragedy for its German cast and crew? Have you heard of Elvira Hoffman, prolific pornographer and director of Dust Raider and South African Girls? None of these this year but who knows what the future holds?

What the present holds though is more tangible: The long awaited, cell-phone shot feature by the prolific South African Aryan Kaganof Sms Sugarman in which on Christmas Eve in Johannesburg a pimp cruises the streets delivering white hookers to wealthy black punters. Kaganof is also the scriptwriter of Akin Omotoso’s short film Jesus and the Giant in which a black woman Jesus takes on a girl-beater, self-justified rapist who is the Giant. A montage of digital still pictures, the editing creates a rhythm of motion. Then there is Richard Stanley, a luminary figure amongst film directors with his unforgettable Dust Devil about a shape shifter on the roads of a newly independent Namibia. Also on the programme is his Voodoo documentary The White Darkness during the filming of which he, like Maya Deren before him, was initiated as a practitioner of the mysteries.

And then there is Highway to the Grave by the Nigerian auteurs Teco Benson and Helen Okpabio - more than just filmmakers, but evangelists into the bargain. With the aforementioned End of the Wicked they awakened my interest in what is now termed Nollywood and which, thanks to censorial interference has lost the creative spark of the years of the Benson/Ukpabio team.

I will be introducing the screenings as well as having an extended chat with Richard Stanley on stage. I am going to enjoy it. I hope you will too!

South Africa 2008 – 12 minutes
Director: Akin Omotoso
Producer: Akin Omotoso, Robbie Thorpe, Kgomotso Matsunyane
Script: Aryan Kaganof
Photography: Eran Tahor
Music & sound design: Warrick Sony
Editor: Aryan Kaganof
Cast: Mandisa Bardill, Sonni Chidiebere Ochuba, Lesego Mabilo

A raped and beaten woman called Mary arrives at Jesus’ door. Her attacker is her lover, the Giant. Jesus believes in peace but realizes that something has to be done. Grabbing a bass ball bat she goes to see the Giant. He is polite and full of concern for Mary. He explains to Jesus that to maintain dominance, women have to be beaten by their men. Abandoning peace for a moment, Jesus wallops the Giant so hard that he will never stand up again. A new balance in place, she can return to a being of peace. An unlikely collaboration of Aryan Kaganof (script and editing) – prolific high priest of transgression and Akin Omotoso (director) – Nigerian-born soap star, producer, director (God is African) and intellectual. Together they bring a mutual abhorrence of rape, handled before by both of them in Nice to Meet You, Please don’t Rape Me (Kaganof) and The Kiss of Milk (Omotoso) and a Jungian playfulness with archetypal characters. Jesus is transformed into a black woman – like her historical counterpart she brings peace but in this scripture she can only do so by violence. Mary, the virgin raped by Father God, here the Giant, is a catalyst for the confrontation between the Princess of Peace and the Angry Old Codger with a Coke Habit who she overcomes. Shot entirely on a digital stills camera (except for the final shot), 7000 stills are stitched together in a montage that is as audacious as the concept.

text: trevor steele-taylor

Tagged: Film • Interview • festival • film • trevor steele taylor
Show: SMS SUGAR MAN
Print Edition: 2007 Edition 03

TREVOR Steele Taylor is not a duck treading water, calm on the surface but frantic underneath, his calm is real and contagious and clearly the sign of a man that has it all under control. A man of immense skill and wry wit, an under-acknowledged asset to the festival and South African film. This world renowned film critic manages to divide his time between Johannesburg, Cape Town and London, running festivals while dabbling in everything from direction to being an agent. He brings his nine years of experience running the film festival.

When asked about his selection criteria for this year’s festival, he puts himself on the side of ‘the eccentrics’, those festival organisers that fill their programmes with personal vision. He is against selections by committee. His response to a general trend of shrinking film audiences is to make the most of his opportunity to stage a world-class line-up for a responsive and keen festival audience.

This year he has selected Mexican films, along with a selection of works by Fassbinder, Kaganof and Shakhnazarov, a Tarkovsky retrospective and a programme of new South African and international films from the circuit. However, Taylor is quick to point out that even this more ‘mainstream’ section is sure to lure audiences who may then attempt more interesting fare.

2007 Standard Bank Young Artist for Film award winner, Akin Omotoso, who acts, produces and directs, is featured with two selections of shorter pieces and two feature films.

Taylor is clearly not one shy of controversy

leigh graves and deja bernhardt in sms sugar man

SMS Sugar Man, directed by Aryan Kaganof, which has received a large amount of press for being the first feature film to be completely shot on a cell phone, was removed. Taylor sees it as Kaganof’s attempt to break into the mainstream. SMS Sugar Man was excluded due to a dispute between its director and producer. Taylor has decided to replace it with The Fall by documentarian, Peter Whitehead. This screening comes fresh on the heels of a Whitehead festival run at the Labia in Cape Town and the Goethe Institut in Johannesburg. The film was selected because of Kaganof’s adoration for Whitehead’s work. It is a remarkable document of America falling into violence and turmoil in the late 1960s.

Taylor is clearly not one shy of controversy; at times, he seems to incite it. However, he can’t help but chuckle at a unintentional controversy he caused with one of his previous screenings. Walking into his showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s testament to Hitler’s Nazi Party, Triumph of the Will, Taylor was confronted by a much larger audience than anticipated. After doing a little digging, Taylor discovered that the screening came on the back of a spirited speech by Pallo Jordan on freedom of speech which directly cited the film as a prime example of hate speech. While no such controversy is foreseen this year, it wouldn’t be surprising if the man who lists Deep Throat as one of the best films of all time has something waiting up his sleeve.

this article was first published by cue

dear Trev

Am delighted with the programme! Wonderful.

Also delighted Kaganof will be there. I have seen most of his films - thanks to Dionysos Andronis - and have told the latter several times that I think K is very very important indeed - a brilliant film-maker! I imagine he likes Daddy!?

Best

peter

I have pneumonia which is being stubborn and feeling not so good … but pressing on …

Saturday 9th June
Goethe-Institut
Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg

15:00: Seminar: DISSIDENCE CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS: DOCUMENTARY, FREEDOM AND THE DANGERS OF STATE INTERVENTION IN THE ARTS

Panel includes: Steve Drake (Lecturer in Film Production at AFDA), Aryan Kaganof (filmmaker/writer), Cedric Sundstrom (filmmaker), tale motsepe (department of arts and culture) and others. Chair: Trevor Steele Taylor

world premiere screenings of two new short films by aryan kaganof

suprematist composition #9: Endlosung
(4min44sec)
(music m ward)

TOO DRUNK TO FUCK
(2min02sec)
(image catherine henegan, edit kaganof, music nouvelle vague)

A journey up the arse of God

Sugar Man and Other Bitter Stories
Aryan Kaganof
2002
Pine Slopes Publications

Aryan Kaganof’s second novel begins with quotations from Puerto Rican singer Jesus Rodriguez and Baudelaire and is informed by a quotation from Heraclitus: “Nothing worthwhile is gained without strife”. Existing within the same essentially South African Hell which informed his earlier novel Hectic!, Sugar Man is a work of many levels. Hectic went for the gut with the clarity of a Charles Bukowski. Sugar Man plumbs the depths of a Hell that is on Earth with the precision of Georges Bataille or Edgar Allen Poe. The eponymous Sugar Man, a drug-dealer and philosophical low-life is searching for the drug lord known as the Dark Magus. To truly know the Dark Magus he must become the Dark Magus. This is a journey that leads to death or possibly to realising that he is dead already. Street girls with drug habits pepper the narrative with names such as Nameless Nobody. There is also an array of blondes, perhaps all of them one blonde, perhaps not. Their melanin deficiency is a sign of a particular form of vampirism.

And then there are the meetings with film producers. Kaganof as a successful filmmaker knows this world well, especially the bullshitters, liars, pretenders, sniffers and snorters that do penance in these halls of Karma. Sugar Man takes time out for three such meetings within the narrative. Many of the characters described are mighty close to real celebs of South Africa’s belicose film industry. For those who haunt the places where people with projects congregate, these narrative asides are worthy of note.

No easy read, Kaganof takes his search into the dark side, even unto the very ends of the cosmos, up the very arse of God. J.K.Rowling beware. Sugar Man is a mature Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the Chamber Pot of Secrets. The final revelations exist in the scatological

South African literature has been waiting a long time for the incisive brilliance of Kaganof. Only two South African authors I can think of are his equal. Etienne le Roux and J.M.Coetzee. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Trevor Steele Taylor
this review originally published by African Review Of Books