kagablog

it’s a very good movie. Bloody good in fact. Totally unique to have an insider’s view of the media machine at work. I’m most impressed
with the fact that you had the vision twenty years ago to shoot it the way you did. That moment unlocking the door - with the 80s glasses
and post punk hair - “strange lyrical, never before seen on film”.

The Dada jump cuts are totally in keeping. And I’ve never seen Mandela so candid and vulnerable in interview. When did you shoot that? The development with him talking about not renouncing violence and then cutting to police shooting on the parade that very day is breath taking. You’ve managed to say something interesting about the general through the particular. It’s what we’re always striving for, in fiction too.

I hope your agreement with e-tv allows you to do the festivals internationally and to sell the film foreign. Besides TV I can see it being a prescribed ‘text’ for media studies. Silverdocs will love it, and probably Seattle, Toronto, IDFA…… Big hand.

welcome nelson
2010
23min
produced and directed by craig matthew
edited by aryan kaganof
sound design by daniel eppel
theme song written by croc-e-moses and sung by alice matthew

starring andrew human

aryan kaganof

shot johannesburg, 7 march 2010
edited cape town, 11 march 2010
24 min
nokia 95 image file

kaganof & deane
johannesburg, 2002
dv
7min45sec

syd is like franz kafka in bataille’s description - a man who refuses to grow up into the adult world around him (= apartheid manhood) and so becomes its image from within an eternal, very intelligent, teenhood.

his takes on the gruesome second hand trombone and musical saw numbers are worth the price of admission.

the great harry partch was like him except in a frenzied, gay version. your film is a rehearsal with so many asides that everything becomes an aside - including the performance. here is keith richards, stripped of his johnny depp guise and now a bare legend stalwart medusa’s head to gross-out white hip sensibility. he is the perfect kinderschrek to white pseuds - close to death several times, immortal as a cat, a nihilist filled with wholesome advice, a cyclops for whom only music is sacred.

defiant, hazed in his suicidal cloud of smoke he goes on about the innocence of childhood and the evils of society (including dire warning about emphysema) as if he were channeling rousseau to the sounds of leo kottke.

the crazy, temperamental, hybrid guitar is exactly like its owner. he is the great durban pleb - the wozzeck of blues or maybe the nosferatu of the guitar - the klaus kinski of the lowered third.

musical britain re-invented rock from the remaindered bins of black american vinyl. it also invented itself and then invented monsters like dylan via the posey rolling stones. amazing how the UK-sanitised black american music became available to woody guthrie /kerouac/ intellectual wannabes - the common thread? wildmen, noble savages all except of course the original blues inventors who were utterly sophisticated and civically nuanced (blues is a black urban culture but a white gauguin’s tahiti)

when syd performs all this above becomes a detail. he is a fantastic, total inhabiter of musical time.

you reinvent all this perfectly on tape, the coughing punctuations are a masterstroke. your piece is one more cigarette in the lungs of the hunger artist of cool durban: long live the sages of the g string.

jean-pierre de la porte

first published in the sunday independent, 28 february 2010

Review: WELCOME NELSON viewed as FIRST STEP TO FREEDOM

e TV 11 FEBRUARY 2010

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY CRAIG MATTHEW

The pre-release press splurb was very mischievous.

Footage of Mandela:

“being taken completely by surprise at his release.”

HUH?

“tragically identifying with his white warders in what must be one of the most acute cases of Stockholm Syndrome in history.”

HUH?

In 1980 Craig Matthew had a MAJOR international scoop when he leopard crawled through the undergrowth with his huge camera to film apartheid style demolition/forced removal tactics (Guguletu/Khayelitsha?) after a tip-off at 2 am. Those around at that time would be aware how extremely life threatening this activity was. It is to Craig’s eternal credit that he tackled this task with gusto. I shared a communal house with him and 3 others, situated in Kennilworth, a ‘coloured’ area on the ‘un’ side of Harfield Village in Cape Town. It was a lively time of political and philosophical discussion.

With Craig’s journalistic nose for being in the right spot at the right time, I had a good sense that I was about to watch something authentic and well centred. I was not disappointed.

Underlying footage of the immense historical import of this event, is an interview with Mandela, cross referenced with an interview with a cameraman at the event, Chris Everson. The interview with Mandela shows him to be an extremely astute politician, in spite of the fact that he had been insufficiently prepared for his release (the political expedience was obvious) and that he had known very little of the type of impact his release would have. In this sense Mandela, being the compassionate gentleman that his is, was thinking that he would need to bid farewell to his prison warders when he left. The frenzy of the day made sure this was never going to happen. Mandela mentions this fact IN CONTRAST to the smallness of his everydayness within the confines of prison, in relation to his sense of intimidation at having to face the WORLD at a press conference. This hardly has anything to do with ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ - after 27 years in prison!!?? The document points out that the Nationalist Party manipulated a media coup in releasing the first photograph of Nelson Mandela in 27 years, standing next to F.W.. de Klerk. Well, given that they had to face the dissolution as an illegitimate ruling party, it is little wonder that they had to try and save face. And what a monolithic Afrikaner face that was! F.W. de Klerk while just breaking short of being patronising, never the less comes across as a lotto announcer placidly trying to convince somebody of their win. In hindsight it becomes clear that P.W. knew he was doing EXACTLY that: the ANC (elite) have not won the country - they have won the lotto. Yet, as we now face the paternalism of the ANC, the paternalism of the Nationalist party was hardly any different. Apartheid kept an entire nation shackled to the past, in a vain attempt to promote the interests of a few. Thus, when apartheid came tumbling down, an entire world rushed IN. EVERYBODY had to suddenly make a huge paradigm shift. 20 years later, and many are still struggling. Mandela also makes the point that the Nationalist party had not given him enough time to prepare for his release and NOT that he was ‘taken completely by surprise’. Funny how meanings can be misread!

In the interesting cross reference interview with Chris Everson, we get insights into the media frenzy plus rapid, almost glib ‘reminders’ of what it was like under apartheid. I say ‘almost glib’ because the following 20 years have flown by so rapidly and it seems as if we are being spin doctored into thinking that ‘apartheid wasn’t that bad’. However, many of us are now wondering: where/how HAS IT SINCE gone so wrong? I wonder how many South Africans fully appreciate the immense diplomatic task that faced Nelson Mandela on his release? Quite clearly it wasn’t just a case of ‘now you can rule’!

The documentary quite chillingly shows that at exactly the same time as Mandela was being released, the Grand Parade in Cape Town was fraught with thronging masses, and apartheid-style control mechanisms (still evidenced today by the ANC). If anybody needed any proof of the REVOLUTIONARY pressure that had long since exceeded boiling point, the dense aggregation and events at the Grand Parade bear testimony. Chris Everson makes the point that the media and the international press undoubtedly played a huge part in freeing this country. It goes without saying that the black population of this country provided the REASON! It was also interesting to note that the throng of international journalists were almost 100% white.

Make NO mistake, those times were fraught with a peculiar insanity. The tensions, that hatred - 20 years later and we still have a long, long way to go. This is said not to undermine the ENORMOUS strides this country has made, nor to disrespect the fact that for the first time in South African history, the entire nation is FREE.

helgé janssen

every good metaphor is a literal falsehood: saying somebody is like an asshole is stupid and meaningless - saying they are an asshole is mindbendingly apt.

blake writes this complicated gloss on david dargie and all the xhosa music he likes . you come and say it’s a transcription of a sketch for sein und zeit . you make your point with something very heideggerian - the Holzwege and the cars which are so nicely de-entifying.

the time fundamental is shot along by your cutting and the murmuring movements and zooms of the cam - just enough to stop anybody thinking it’s a poetic bunch of stills. the vertigo in the middle is fantastic as is the little window of clouds/ goosefeathers /blossoms - who knows and who cares because your point is not to culminate anything by anything else - so we see the big heidegger deal of 1925 - time is equiprimordial with being.

my son commented- unusually tender for blake - but blake in non-heidegger mode does not sound tende r- you have tenderised him.

it happens that mary rorich and i are making a sort of survey of western philosophy and western music together; we sit and present to each other - off the cuff but in some kind of sequence - the cross-play between music as an invention and philosophy as an invention. today we talked about heidegger and were struck by the way he straddles two avantgardes - he’s the peak of expressionism in 1927 and then he resurrects in 51 as the cool objectivity on everybody’s lips - from stockhausen to sartre.

what can i say? i prefer your sheer false assertion of heidegger in blake to blake’s assertion of dargie/xhosa and to my assertion that hes using the whole occasion to pay debts to debussy. now he has a debut piece to MTV too.

hola. been travelling. settling. now i finally got a chance to look at the beautiful work you’ve done. it is was always a great experience to listen to bra geoff, and i like the fact that he speaks a lot in the film. otsile and lesego are very sharp and provide the necessary notes . how do i begin to speak about mashishi, duma, zim and the music they make… the editing is be-witching… this is mind blowing stuff. thanx for posting it. it will be a great teaching aid in my workshops.
peace be with you.

in an extraordinary intervention etv boss marcel golding changed the title of “welcome nelson” to the more politically correct (and cheesy) “first step to freedom”. director craig matthew was informed about the name-change on monday. there was no discussion, no possibility of discussion. an ironic twist on the notion of freedom of the press…

This is just a short note to encourage you to have a look at a documentary I have just edited called WELCOME NELSON which will be broadcast by etv on wednesday 10 february at 8pm.

This documentary takes a different angle on the 20th anniversary celebrations of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

The release is analysed in terms of Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle and views the event as an entirely staged media coup for the Machiavellian F.W. De Klerk.

Instead of the customary portrayal of Dr. Mandela as a liberating Messiah he is shown to have been taken completely by surprise by his release, pleading with De Klerk to allow him to stay inside for longer, and tragically identifying with his white warders in what must be one of the most acute cases of Stockholm Syndrome in history.

The never-before screened behind the scenes footage of the press conference and first speech provides a fascinating glimpse into how the news media shape and manipulate our memories of the future.

The documentary is shot, produced and directed by CRAIG MATTHEW
sound design and original music score DANIEL EPPEL
sound recordist WARRICK SONY
theme song SIMONE WHITE
editor ARYAN KAGANOF

2010, 23 minutes
first broadcast wednesday 10 february 8pm on etv

more info and tickets here

Ce film court de Aryan Kaganof est une méditation sur la vie, sur l’histoire et l’art. Un écran blanc et fragmenté commence très lentement à se transformer et à prendre forme. La musique minimaliste de Martin Bladh pendant les 6 minutes du film crée un suspense émotionnel et méditatif. Dès le début on aperçoit au fond un visage humain. Si on n’a pas lu le titre entier du film, on ne devine pas encore la personne. C’est seulement à la fin qu’on voit une image moins floue du célèbre et jeune tueur en série Cho qui s’est suicidé aussi, comme le grand peintre Rothko du titre.

Le thème du tueur en série revient souvent chez Kaganof depuis le début de sa carrière. Cette fois les connotations sont un peu différentes. C’est la deuxième fois que Cho revient dans un film de Kaganof et le titre “Des Grands suicides américains” ne veut pas dire “des suicides médiatiques” mais plutôt “des suicides nobles”. On connait les sentiments anti-américains de Kaganof depuis longtemps. La citation finale de Rothko dans ce film serait “Je ne suis pas un peintre abstrait….. Je m’intéresse à rendre la tragédie, l’extase et la destinée”. On comprend très bien que la première phrase fait référence au statut ambigu du film qui commence abstrait et qui finit figuratif à la fin. Mais avec la dernière phrase de Rothko qu’est-ce que Kaganof voulait connotait indirectement ? Peut-être que les Etats Unis sont en train de vivre le tragédie de leur propre destinée, de leur propre fin ? Cette interprétation plairait aussi à Oussama Ben Laden mais (si on passe de l’autre côté) à plusieurs intellectuels humanistes d’aujourd’hui.

écrit par Dionysos ANDRONIS

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1331

dear aryan

how are you?

I wanted to thank you for sending me the video on “Civilization and other chimerae observed…” I really found it both fascinating and intriguing.

It sparks some interesting thoughts and questions…

Does the actor always play himself?

How honest is our communication with others? Is our reality subject to our own interpretations?

I felt a sense of loneliness when I watched the individual characters. Perhaps, that is just me. Somehow, when the camera was on them directly, yours or Dick’s they came to life…I saw truth.

My most beautiful line in the film: “That’s the greatest achievement. If you can make the simple things magical.” A metaphor for life, for relationships…But, hey, that’s just my reality…I am in love with the infinite…and I play in the land of dreams…

What is truth for men? What is truth for woman? And how does this manifest? I thought it interesting, the comment: “Men act to tell the truth”, “Woman act to hide from the truth…and to have power”.

I watched it just yesterday, however, I was interrupted towards the end…I will finish it tonight. Thought I would drop you a mail, while my first impressions were fresh in my mind.

I would love to hear your thoughts on it please?

Hope your family are well and happy.

Warm regards

Candice

first published on badlit.com

This short film by Kaganof was made in November 2008 during the three-day seminar of the same name at the University of Malmo from 2nd – 4th November. Compared with earlier works in his filmography, this one is very different. It is also slightly ironic. This hint of irony also makes it different. It is gentle and discreet and becomes especially obvious at the end of film when the director appears in front of the camera, giving us an “optimistic” thumbs’ up. Michael Blake’s music is just as gentle and sporadic as the resulting irony. This backs up a poem by the director which appeared a few days later on the KagaBlog – “most academics aren’t intellectuals, they’re intellect managers” (see “How I died (again)” of 15th December 2008).

Among the academics attending the seminar we can make out Anne-Marie Duguet, Lajos Varhegyi, Michael Heim, Dick Hebdige and various others. They are all turning towards the camera at the start of the film before leaving the scene to Kaganof. Nobody cites their names, either during the film or in the credits! We’d met Anne-Marie Duguet at the Parisian festival “Astarti” in 1998. She is professor at the Sorbonne and specialises in video art. She also directs the wonderful theoretical series “Anarchives”, whose ambiguous title achieves its aim. This same ambiguity characterises most of Kaganof’s creations. The American Michael Heim is also a composer and the nature and quality of his art (like that of our aforementioned idol) could take the seminar in a new direction. The most famous professor at the seminar had to be Dick Hebdige, an Englishman working the States. He is also the darling (among others) of the hugely influential Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which has made reference to his writing several times. “He is particularly interested in the white working class and its subcultures in relation to music, from teddy boys to mods, from rockers to punks and skinheads” (in “Palais” N° 7, Paris, Autumn 2008, page 90). His incredibly famous work “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” has just been translated into French for the first time – an inadmissible thirty years after it appeared in English. “The translated version of the text, now available from publishers La Découverte, enables us to assess, thirty years late, the decompartmentalisation of cultural studies’ disciplines, from which France has distanced itself for such a long time” (Gallien Dejean, in “Zéro Deux” (Nantes), N°49, Spring 2009, page 35).

To return to our argument at the start on Kaganovian irony, which has a new socio-political dimension this time, let us quote once again from the poem “How I died (again)”, inspired by this encounter:
“i can’t
be the only one
who’s onto what an
extraordinary waste of
time and energy this gathering
is?”

The film “New Media Politics – Experiment number 1” is not only available on the famous KagaBlog, but also on You Tube.

Written by Dionysos Andronis, translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

In early 2009, Kaganof made three new short films, his main concern being to shatter the appearances of the banal through Art. His first three films this year are marked, once again, by the grace of their creation. This grace is always existential. The Artist IS his Art. And the cinematic poetic characteristics tend slightly more towards the everyday, especially for the first two films, “Jeanette Ginslov” and “Seven Days at the Silbersteins & What is Opera?”

“Jeanette Ginslov: this is a performance guys!” introduces us to the poetically reproduced everyday life of a gym teacher. The video images are meticulously filled with excessive colour and throbbing with inner life. Someone taking part in this free performance has an attack but she is rapidly replaced with images of a reassuring smile at the end.

“Seven days at the Silbersteins & What is Opera” is a friendly gesture paying homage to the tenth wedding anniversary of Christine Lucia and Michael Blake. Kaganof’s camera observes them from the same angle, both singing a piece from an opera in the making. The colours change while the camera remains in more or less the same spot. A cry drowns out the second title “What is Opera?” The serene faces of the couple of musicians are the sign of a classic creation, modern and calm, but, as the cry seems to suggest, with an inner originality.

“The Dancer and his Double Arrive at the Gates of Heaven” is a dance film, borne with the brio of Helgé Janssen. The musical score contains pieces by Matmos, Tomoko Mukayiama and the experimental group African Noise Foundation. Janssen first appears lying on the ground, and then begins his impressive dance. With his lens moving at an angle, Kaganof observes the dancer’s every graceful gesture. Janssen combines strength and agility. The greyish images which come and go add a new language, very close to that of Kaganof’s artistic creations which frame this performance like a set. Kaganof’s letters on the gallery’s walls, which the audience can’t make out, refer to the inaccessible dimension of the artist’s work and his desire to give a complex dimension to an apparently simple performance. “His Double”, as the title says, is his “ghostly” shadow. Janssen is somewhat stylised by the supernatural slowness and the almost expressionist lighting. It is, however, the shadow of a serene, calm artist. This justifies the opening phrase of this article, “to shatter the appearances of the banal through Art.”

Written by Dionysos ANDRONIS, translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

This feature-length documentary by Aryan Kaganof was filmed in 2008 with sets from the film “WInterland”, although the editing was only completed this year. Yet another masterpiece from Kaganof, although here the film writing is more conventional than in the author’s earlier films. Kaganof is a fan of the Dutch director Dick Tuinder, and together they devised this fiction documentary as a “making of” Tuinder’s first feature film. We met them both in Amsterdam in August 2008. They were stopping over in the capital as “Winterland” was filmed in the Dutch countryside. Tuinder and his famous producer Gijs Van Der Westelaken * had just been to the Dutch premiere of “SMS Sugar Man” in the beautiful iLLUSEUM gallery on the 9th August 2008.

The film starts with a quotation from Jean Baudrillard from his book “Fragments”, translated into English. The quotation appears as a work of art rewritten by Kaganof on the film’s interior sets. It begins “There are two-way mirrors which allow you innocently to spy on people”. This sums up the philosophy of the shoot. Tuinder’s entire film seems to be a play of illusions on deceptive appearances and their “innocent” cinematic reproductions. It is also the subject of Tuinder’s earlier short film, “Most Things Never Happen” which we watched at the South African “National Arts Festival” in August 2005 during the “Dionysiac film” retrospective.

The spectators are first manipulated with the appearance of the main character, the young Kiriko Mechanicus, who in reality is an alter ego of Sally de Winter, Tuinder’s favourite teenage actress. Here the young Kiriko becomes the incarnation of Sally, offering us a secondary path of reflection about appearances. She caresses a giant eye hanging from the set which is used as a superior surveillance or observation eye.

Dick Tuinder buys a book with the single word “Civilization” (in English) as its title, and he moves around among the sets, going from one actor to another. “We’re going to find the solution to the editing”, the insert titles tell us in Dutch in the middle of the film. He then wanders through the forest in the night, thinking about how he will stage his film. This is parallel action which helps us change location and appearances so as not to betray the “realism” of the cinematic device. Even the costume maker is not spared the principle of filmed interviews. The great actor Thom Jansen returns throughout the film to comment on the positive developments.

And at the end of the documentary, Kaganof asks the director an important question - a question which sums up this game of appearances, “Do you enjoy playing the role of Dick Tuinder?”

This is a simple masterpiece which does not provide answers to the problematics of the original film, but which takes us on a beautiful stroll through an artistic landscape of escapism.

Written by Dionysos Andronis, translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

*Westelaken produced Theo Van Gogh’s last, controversial films and gave several interviews on international TV after Van Gogh was murdered in 2004.