kagablog

www.smssugarman.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

Sms sugar man - a fantasy

seen without memory or expectation sms sugar man is claustrophobic. This is a clue. Sugar man climbs to the top of a building to condemn his enemy – the father of Selene’s child- as if going up into the head, eyes and ears of a body to see who and where his double is.

Selene is introduced as preening - making her body acceptable to a stranger, more defined where its eye openings, lips and hair are vague, perfumed where it is odorous etc - as if shifting towards her double, the mirror, gives her power over and information about her place in darkness.

The car is a valiant steed – the means by which the three moles tunnel from place to place. It is also a kind of dustbin in which their reservations are expressed and a source of bounty (the money able to change fate, kill rivals or start life anew). sugar man carefully presides over exchanges in the car as if it were the antechamber to a dream. A fear is expressed to him - he splits it into the thought of consuming a lollipop plus an object dismembered and expelled (the rosebud). the car is a generation old- precisely the car sugar man’s father might have aspired to . By driving his father’s car illicitly he has one more magical means- besides cynicism – of moving about inside the huge body in which they all find themselves trapped.

Certain guests are allowed to enter this body to feed it with money. These are among the many denizens of the contact barrier between inside and outside. Such wallets are admitted only on condition that they stringently caricature or impersonate some aspect of the body itself 1) its generational structure (father -son) 2) its split between vilified past and ideal future (I told my wife I love you) 3) its ambiguity (listen to the great sex i’m not having over the phone) 4) its dissimulation into ideas (the Shakespearean sex sermon) 5) its dissimulation into personification (a grandfather in drag). Although coming from the outside (from nowhere) the wallets bring no news of this outside. They immediately change into a fragmented aspect of the body-surface below which sugar man and his avatars wait for clues like ant lions or tics.

The series of tricks extend to infinity - fragmenting both experience of the inside and losing whatever pattern the short intrusions from outside carry. The contact barrier, for all the characters’ preoccupation with it (dressing up, nursing a fantasy, investing money, traveling to rendezvous) becomes tattered and shredded by their use but yields nothing about its form or many compartments.

Rage remains possible – hence sugar man and Atilla’s bids for omnipotence -and so does hibernation (drugs, short circuiting the trick by having sex with your double). Both possibilities fuel the mirror of fascination and aggression where sugar man and Atilla , Selene and Grace collide with each other.

sugar man combines omnipotence (I am the author of vengeance, I allocate sex) with inanition (he can neither sleep nor wake), making his character the most complete reflection of the imprisoning city as well as the victim of its Chinese finger traps. Character though is a misnomer because Sugar man requires the two women even for the realization of the meager range of actions available to him. His preoccupation with their liaisons (spying, recording, revulsion) is like a breathing pipe from his captivity to an imagined supply. He wants to know them filled by other men (interestingly this hardly happens in the film) and wants them as microcosmic proof of a coition that, in his hopes, takes place elsewhere – between father and mother producing a child- a coition only rumoured in the body where they are all trapped .

Within this irreparable situation only a fresh beginning in death is possible – hence the sentimentalizing of death magically seen as rebirth into a family cosmos – a tantalizing clue that the entire action may be taking place within a wildly anamorphosed family structure - the city viewed through the noisy keyholes of the cams as an unencompassable mother’s body- sampled only grain by grain in sex with the sugars.

If sms sugar man is a fantasy (= bions alpha and beta functions in projective identification mode) then its resolution (endlessly extending uniform city becoming a particular mixed body) demands depression. Aryan Kaganof has functioned as a scapegoat in this regard. He told me that this film almost killed him. It has also taken on some of the peripatetic fate and irresolution of its contents; embroiled in legal wrangles and generally bouncing on the surface of south african sensibility like a stone across water.

Sms sugar man is of course many other things – if it has a personal unconscious it must also have a social one. The anthroploogy of the film - the nature of its particular society - has yet to be explained. Sex as exchange but with only incidental procreation is a regal or priestly model.

Christmas as a family rite celebrating procreation without a father and conception through the ear is highly unbalancing of kinship. The permeable inside-out structure of sugar man-society mirrors the outside-in claustrophobic fantasy that draws the fate of its individual members.

Viewers might wish to dust off their Vladimir Propp and tick off his sequence of 31 narratemes and seven character types while watching the film. This formal saturation of an otherwise boiling surface lends sms sugar man great charm and ingenuity: as if Aryan Kaganof were spending his captivity like the Birdman of Alcatraz -patiently taming and propagating whatever element of form strays through his bars.

there is something of this film about Aryan Kaganof - as if he sloughed it off in search of a new skin. For example, his love of Heidegger makes sense as part of its endless wandering on dead end forest paths with no clearings - crushed under somebody else’s interpretation of being. His admired Adorno turns here into pure dislocation of subject and object. Even the derive is tied in its own entrails – tunneling the city for money and sex makes it less and less marvelous, unable to sustain a psychogeography or even a literal one.

It is not surprising that he could fulfill so many roles within its realization: writer, director, actor, editor. His presence in these functions does not unify but serves to underline splits - just as his own versatility as writer, artist, film maker, composer and raconteur makes him less polymatic than unnervingly spectral . Aryan Kaganof is therefore the perfect ghost to haunt his own projects, animating them without personalizing them - exploring their pockets, bodies and caves with unmatched humility.

A few South Africans are trying to escape the fog of self congratulatory bombast, yuppie grandness and voluptuous white self pity that masks south africa now. Some, like painter Karel Nel, attack identity itself as delusive and parochial, others like composer Mokale Koapeng desaturate western music with African choral tradition . Some like choreographer Vincent Truter use Butoh to strip the over-signifying south african body. Aryan Kaganof belongs with this group of precise deflators.

Sms sugar man plots the growth phase of south african dystopia - predatory righteous whites, a new bourgeoisie eager to sleep with its money, opaque streets filled with calculatedly wasted people - all trapped inside a soap bubble or bloating corpse. As such it is already an overnight piece of Afrikana, like the Bitterkomix of Botes and Kannemeyer. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to see in Aryan Kaganof a Savanarola: he has an exact sense –hegelian or freudian it does not matter- that somehow the private vice is a public virtue and that his bombast-driven country must travel to the end of its grandiose night to become something worth sublimating. Sms sugar man will be the charts of Magellan to future navigators in this void.

by stacy hardy

South African film maker Aryan Kaganof shot his new film SMS Sugar Man entirely with a cell phone. That the media is the message is old news, so it’s hardly surprising that most readings of the film have focused on its presentation of the superficiality of our hyper-real late capitalist society. And indeed Kaganof’s film is a relentless presentation of error, bad taste, artifice and a lack of truth or reasonableness, chronicling with zeal the hyper-violent banality of South Africa as a cell phone society where media image replaces reality and texting replaces language as a means of communication.

What these readings fail to consider however is SMS Sugar Man’s textuality and intertextuality, and how Kaganof employs these strategies as a radical alternative to the banality of “sms society”.

Once upon a time, that’s the first clue. SMS Sugar Man opens with that fairy tale promise. Once, yes, but also now and forever - always. One night: Christmas Eve. From hotel to hotel the Sugarman (played by Kaganof) and his girls journey like Joseph and Mary looking for a manger. Only this Christmas things are fucked up.

“Women are sugars. Men are wallets. Money is God. Life is very simple.” Like God, Sugarman is emblematic and exemplary; he is reduced to sign, the cellphone he carries - at once a communication and a surveillance device. Omniscient, all seeing and all knowing; male authority - yes, but also the author, the film maker: Kaganof.

Emblems proliferate. Mary is three in one, an unholy trinity: the mother, the virgin and the whore. Sugar man plays the carpenter: Capital as Coffin Maker, Grim Reaper, Time’s Passing. His raptures lead not to Heaven but to Hell. He is the assassin and the undertaker and the hearse. A Valiant ’66. What else? It cruises. The road is black. A liquorice lick. Everything slo-mo so you can almost feel the sides melt off like chocolate. Like the Fred/ Pete character on his drives down David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The road ahead, everything is concrete and light, there nothing else. No getting off, there’s no truck stop, no rest room, no rest for the wicked….

And Sugar man is wicked, or so it seems, the amoral pimp, peddling his girls in the underbelly of Joburg where sex is a commodity and violence a form of communication. His customers are automatons, “Wallets”, the sins of lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, pride personified. Out to buy their salvation for Christmas, they rotate around the dark hole of Sugar man’s greed in a spiralling orbit.

Here time is money, and both spell Death. The promise of salvation, the immaculate conception of the Christ Child, cast into question by Sugar man’s growing paranoia. “Who is the father? Who is the father?” The question punctuates the film like a litany that creates a snarling vortex, a cingulum of sorts, a noose. In a way it’s almost as if time had stopped, looping back upon itself as the car cruises in order to intensify, by a sort of positive feedback, the film’s overall sense of apocalyptic imminence - of something catastrophic not so much happening, as always being about to happen. Like teetering on a precipice without actually falling over; or better, falling over but never finishing falling over, never quite hitting the ground.

The narrative is filled with plots and schemes that go nowhere, that implode on the plotters themselves, and with paranoid, apocalyptic premonitions that are significant precisely as premonitions, not because of what they actually really foresee. Motions are started, but not completed. “The son shall inherit the sins of the father,” predicts Sugar man after a father orders a “sugar” for his son in a twisted urban initiation ritual that never transpires. Phones ring and ring. Smoke from a cigarette spirals eternally upward. Loaded glocks are locked against temples… but never fire. It’s too dark to make things out clearly.

The sinking that permeates the film manifests in strange poetic interludes that intercut the action. The camera twists and swirls. Up-side-down. Inside-out. Sugar man suffers peculiar spells, curious lapses of consciousness when his mind misses a beat. Pause. Rewind. Again. Again. The ground is swept out from under our feet, literally as the image inverts. Sugar man underwater. Drowning? Or swimming against the tide? The eye submerged and displaced, in that liminal space between things, continually transgressing the distinctions difference between the seen and the unseen - the periphery, blind spots, what is underneath the surface, invisible, or below, or to the side of, or just out of sight from the visual. Poetic and symbolic? Yes, but also purely pop. Remember the toilet scene in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting?

The Trainspotting doesn’t stop. Lynchian surrealism blurs into Godardian Nouvelle Vague. Sadeian Woman rubs shoulders with Red Riding Hood. Chaucer is intercut with scenes that recall low-budget British Carry On films. Fellinni trades secrets with the Brothers Grim. The unholy Mary trinity morphs into Charlie’s Angels and Thelma and Louise are reinvented via classic mythology. Genders morph and change (“This is Grace….she thinks she’s a man…..”) as Cat People bleeds into Bram Stoker (“I’m not a woman, I’m a cat…..”). Over and over this threat to the symbolic order, as if this promiscuously jarring mixture of styles and media were the only way Kaganof could express the actuality of life in the 21st Century.

This fragmentation, the irresolution, the continual switching back and forth between moments or sequences that are plot-driven, and ones that are instead purely affect-driven, the insistence that genre conventions and expectations can neither be transcended and escaped, nor fulfilled: all these features of SMS Sugar Man reflect - or better, work towards, and help to construct - the vision of a world that is too far-flung to be totalised on the level of any grand phallogocentric narrative, paranoid, conspiratorial or otherwise.

But if SMS Sugar Man is both infinitely diverse and expansive, at the same time it’s oddly claustrophobic because of the way that all of its crazy tangents, detours, irrational cuts, and meta-fictional references are all enclosed within the cellphone camera’s tiny frame. This claustrophobia is what gives the film its compulsive power.

The city scenes are gorgeous, in murky chiaroscuro, the mobile camera tracking the actors close enough so all we can see are their faces, filling the screen, emerging out of, and returning to, the shadows. Sex is subtly, but powerfully, modulated throughout these chiaroscuro sequences. Scenes of abject violence and sexual consumption intertwine with poetic images and philosophical frameworks. Plots play out across the body, as if formed, deformed, reformed by culture. Close up: a woman’s face. She grits her teeth. Closes her eyes, but the closing is identical to open. The blindness of a desire beyond death.

This is a radical break from cinema’s usual divisions between porn - film as sadistic gaze male, as penis - and the more “wishy-washy” erotica reserved for the feminine. Sugar man subverts these clean distinctions. It dirties the dichotomies, the traditional lines of demarcation between romance and porn, art film and exploitation film, between spirituality and sleaze, high culture and popular trash and, perhaps most important of all, between film, literature and art world. In all these respects, the work signals the tremors of a deep cultural shift, a new relationship between avant-garde artist and popular entertainer, between esoterica and pulp, between conceptualism and narrative.

As the film proceeds, things become more and more unhinged. A sweet nativity tale about the Christmas Eve Angel soundtracks explicit imagery. Close up. Tits, like perfect champagne glasses, nipples round and hard. An opera aria underscores arse shakes. The screen is all arse, hips, mesmerizing and fluid, deep and dangerous. Flesh-quiver, dizzy spasms born of the heat of anticipation of coming events, the head rocking back, the eyes closing, lolling in their sockets. Until finally, even Sugarman is forced to concede: “I’m losing the plot, I don’t know what’s what and who is who?”

In this way, Kaganof charts the struggle between the doctrinaire impulse to control and contain and the more dynamic (albeit sometimes equally dangerous) impulse to transgress, struggle, and create; to dissolve once self in a torrent of both sexuality and textuality.

Significantly, it’s only when Sugar man “loses the plot”; loosens his grip and abandons his lust to conquer, possess and own all he touches, his desire for authorship and authority; for fatherhood, that he finds love.

In this con-text, radical texuality and inter-textuality can be read as modes of resistance, a way of subverting the control system inherent in Western society, the words of the parents, the authourised version, authoritarian text, the author itself; a way of fucking with the control system inherent in discourse, of expanding the possibilities of creation by ceaselessly creating the new out of the old; of escaping the double-binds imposed by the structures of family and society – sexual, textual, ontological. Who am I? What is the meaning of “I”?.

In proposing the magic of textuality, language as a revelation which translates into social agency, SMS envisions the possibility of love’s reconstitution and thus moves beyond a nihilistic deconstruction to point the way toward a feminist subjectivity which, like sexuality itself, is provisional, temporary, changing, fluid, and multiple.

SMS Sugar man’s visual and graphic effects editor Jurgen Meekel is quoted as saying: “(the film) will hopefully democratize filmmaking. After this film no one can say I cannot make a film because I don’t have the equipment”

But Kaganof’s film also democratises filmmaking on a level besides the technical. The figuration of SMS corresponds to what author Angela Carter has called “the slow process of decolonialising language” (Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. Virago Press Ltd, 1992): happiness only becomes possible after the myth of the omniscient author has undergone a process of derision and corrosion; from the ruins of such an operation, salvation, “the Christmas Eve Angel” promised in the film can be conceived.

As such, SMS must be read as a tale of magic- the magic of language and memory which exposes the politics of the human condition. SMS stands for an alphabet which allows us to see that even the depth of the abyss can be inhabited by love. SMS, indeed, is the language of the voiceless and the damned who speak outside of the logic of the domination that has previously emarginated and silenced them.

In this context, Kaganof offers a reading of contemporary South Africa far more hopeful and interesting than could ever be encapsulated in the 128×128, 176×220 or 128×160 screen resolution of a cellphone.

sms sugar man will be screened during the africa in the picture festival in amsterdam on 12 september at 21:30m in bioscoop het ketelhuis. for more information click here

Dieser komplett mit Handy-Kameras gedrehte Film von Aryan Kaganof zeigte die Geschichte eines Zuhälters und den drei für ihn arbeitenden Prostituierten. Explizite Sexszenen gibt es nicht, was aber auch nicht nötig war, da es ja ein Film über Sexworker war.

Dargestellt wurde vor allem, wie der Umgang der vier miteinander in diesem Geschäft stark von Mißtrauen und Geldgier geprägt ist. Die Verzweiflung der Handelnden war streckenweise sehr greifbar, und der Schluß war daher umso überraschender.

Insgesamt aus meiner Sicht ein Film mit interessanten Anteilen, wenig Höhen aber auch wenig Tiefen. Ganz OK.

Pornfilmfestival Berlin 2008: Impressionen

this review first published here

Its blisteringly superb! The texture of the image is extraordinary. And the spatial relationships in the image is genius! I salute you!

sms sugar man will be screened in groningen during the dutch mobile film festival on friday 17 april at 17:30

full programme is here

February 2009, nr 307

SMS Sugar Man

Aryan Kaganof, the filmmaker formerly known as Ian Kerkhof, shot his new film with a cell phone, even before Dutch’ enfant terrible Cyrus Frisch did so. SMS Sugar Man is now available on dvd, and sure is missing in the Rotterdam Size Matters line up, observes Martijn Meijer.

‘Women are sugars. Men are wallets. Money is God. Life is very simple.’ Such is the philosophy of Sugar Man, a pimp driving through Johannesburg on Christmas Eve with three of his ’sugars’. On a night like this, men become lonely and Sugar Man and his companions do good business driving from hotel to hotel. Selene, Grace and Anna are the names of these girls and that’s all we learn about them. True identities don’t exist in this world of shadows. Sugar Man (convincingly played by director Aryan Kaganof) has an eerie premonition, but we never find out why or about what. He acts the part of the amoral pimp, but seems to hide a genuine vulnerability. “Why do you wear that mask?”, one of his girls wants to know. “Mask? That’s my business face”, he replies.

SMS Sugar Man has been described as ‘Tarantino meets early David Lynch’, but it is unmistakably Kaganof’s film. Its shady characters, its mixture of sex and violence, its nihilism - all are typical characteristics of the director formerly known as Ian Kerkhof, who shot SMS Sugar Man using eight Sony Ericsson W900i cell phones with built-in cameras. Such technical innovations breed high expectations: on the director’s blog, Kagablog, visual and graphic effects editor Jurgen Meekel is quoted as saying: ‘It will hopefully democratize filmmaking. After this film no one can say I cannot make a film because I don’t have the equipment.’

Kaganof was the first to shoot a feature on DV tape (Naar de klote!/Wasted!) then blew it up to 35mm. Now he claims to be the first director to have made a cell phone feature. In a certain sense he’s right. Matthew Noel Tod made Nausea in 2005, but this was a piece of video art compiling footage shot on cell phones that ran 54 minutes. And Cyrus Frisch’s Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan? (2007), shot on Sharp 902 and 903 phones, may have been released before SMS Sugar Man, but the latter was made earlier, in December 2005. The reason for the delayed release (the film was recently shown in Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Edinburgh and was released on DVD in December) was a protracted legal battle between the director and production company DV8 Films, concerning the director’s refusal to make changes to the finished film.

Apartheid

At first glance, SMS Sugar Man seems content to rehash certain clichés about prostitution. Upon closer inspection, though, a number of surprising nuances reveal themselves, such as the fact that all the clients are black businessmen and all the hookers are white girls - a reversal of the situation in the days of Apartheid. Or take the scene in which a father orders a ’sugar’ for his inexperienced son: when the girl takes him to a hotel room, we expect to see the usual tale of a boy’s rite of passage, but instead the young man declines to sleep with her because he refuses to obey his father. He prefers to get stoned and when they dance together after smoking a joint, he asks her for a kiss. She refuses on principle, kissing a client would ‘blur the lines’. But eventually she gives in. Afterward, in the car, those few kisses turn out to have upset far her more than a string of quick lays.

No contact - this seems to be the film’s conclusion. The pimp, the girls, the clients, they are all lonely, lost in a world in which people look at each other up close but never get to know one another. It’s as if they are mere images, momentarily appearing on each other’s display screens. All life is superficial. In an interview, Kaganof mentioned Baudrillard as an influence, and his characters do indeed appear to be living the French philosopher’s concept of hyper-reality: physical reality has been replaced by a reality of simulacra (images) that only refer to themselves and each other. In simpler terms, the real world is only experienced in the shape of media images.

The plot may have its shortcomings and the finale lacks credibility, but the ambiance and beauty of the images more than make up for these. The low resolution creates a coarse pixilation, which lends the film a sort of painterly quality that suits its dark, dreamy atmosphere well. Kaganof made inventive use of the cell phone camera, sometimes tilting the frame, as we tend to see in home movies, and making imaginative use of split screen: we see Sugar Man filming one of his girls on his phone, and in the frame next to it we see the recorded image. Moments like these erase the divide between cast and crew, creating an intimacy between camera and actors and subsequently between the film and its audience. The viewer feels like a voyeur, as if staring at spontaneously recorded footage. Intimacy created by a film about people who shun it.

Martijn Meijer

Martijn Meijer studied Philosophy in Amsterdam. He published two novels (’Arthurs apocalyps’, 2005 and ‘Foute man’, 2008) and works as a freelance journalist and editor.

SMS Sugar Man (Aryan Kaganof, South Africa 2008). On DVD from SMS Movies.

this article first appeared in the filmkrant of february 2009
online edition www.filmkrant.nl

“a fairy tale assumption in which an all but non-existent condition is assumed to be rampant” —Samuel R. Delany

South African film maker Aryan Kaganof shot his new film SMS Sugar Man entirely with a cell phone. That the media is the message is old news, so it’s hardly surprising that most readings of the film have focused on its presentation of the superficiality of our hyper-real late capitalist society. And indeed in Kaganof’s film is a relentless presentation of error, bad taste, artifice and a lack of truth or reasonableness, chronicling with zeal the hyper-violent banality of South Africa as a cell phone society where media image replaces reality and texting replaces language as a means of communication. What these readings fail to consider however is the films textuality and inter-textuality, and how Kaganof employs these strategies as a radical alternative to the banality of “sms society”. This paper investigates how Kaganof’s gleeful weave of fucked up fairy tales, nightmarish slapstick violence, literary references, mythology, personal narrative, b-grade trash and a wistful quest for spiritual unity encapsulates a cinema of multiple artistic personalities and irreconcilable differences. It is as if the film passes from the reality of our suppressed lives into the history we dream of making, and back again — left in ruins, our dreams haunt us like memories of an imaginary homeland that has disappeared from the map. In this context, Kaganof offers a reading of contemporary South Africa far more hopeful, far more complex than could ever be encapsulated in the 128×160 screen resolution of the cell phone.

In keeping with Kaganof’s refusal of the traditional dichotomies between art and popular culture, academic and b-grade strategies, this investigation presents itself as much as a fiction, an sms and a tabloid review, as a traditional academic analysis or paper.

Belangrijkste gast van de tweede editie van VIVA LA FOCUS is Ian Kerkhof of Aryan Kaganof, zijn ‘nom de plume’, als ware het een schrijver. Ian was al eens eerder in Groningen. Eind jaren tachtig/begin jaren negentig was hij in Nederland een aanstormend talent die een branieachtige vorm van filmen in Nederland introduceerde, waarbij (seksuele) taboes niet werden geschuwd. Of misschien wel het experiment in het algemeen. Ik herinner me dat hij in 1992 naar het toenmalige Groninger Filmfestival kwam met de film LA SEQUENCE DES BARS PARALLELES, die vanuit drie 16mm-filmprojectoren geprojecteerd moest worden. We improviseerden er vanuit de cabine van de huidige zaal 3 van IMAGES lustig op los, maar wisten het gewenste resultaat niet te bereiken. Eigenlijk wilde Ian met de drievoudige projectie een ‘triple écran’ maken zoals dat in 1927 ook al te zien was in NAPOLEON van Abel Gance. Deze splitscreen techniek past hij nu ook soms toe in SMS SUGAR MAN, hoewel dat dan wel gemonteerd moet zijn.

SMS SUGAR MAN is helemaal met de mobiele telefoon gefilmd, maar wel bedacht of geïmproviseerd alsof het een ‘gewone’ film is. Uitgekiend gebruik van licht en veelvuldig gebruik van geel en rood als kleuren (en Johannesburg als decor) maken het mogelijk de film ook op het doek van IMAGES 1 plezierig te consumeren. Met de mobiele telefoon maakt Kerkhof hele mooie en noodzakelijke close-ups, die in vorm wezenlijk verschillen van de gemiddelde televisiefilm. De film doet mij qua stijl en broeierigheid denken aan de films van Amos Poe en Beth B. die begin jaren tachtig nog wel eens in Rotterdam te zien waren en ik heb er zeer van genoten. Zonder montage en geraffineerde muziek zou de film het nu bereikte niveau nooit hebben kunnen behalen. Gek genoeg kreeg ik een associatie met de nooit overtroffen ode aan het amateurfilmen die de helaas veel te vroeg overleden Poolse cineast Krzystof Kieslowski maakte met AMATOR in 1980. De 8 millimeter filmpjes die in deze film verwerkt zitten hebben dezelfde charme als het filmen met een mobiele telefoon. Een huldebetoon par excellence aan het amateurisme in de beste betekenis van het woord: ‘amare’ is Latijn voor ‘houden van’. Het Groninger Forum heeft met de organisatie van VIVA LA FOCUS wellicht onbedoeld een revival van het amateurisme veroorzaakt. Mooier kan het toch niet in deze zo gecompliceerd ogende wereld waarin wij leven!

Frans Westra

sms sugar man will be screening during the viva la focus! dutch mobile film festival in groningen on 17 april at 17:30

this article first appeared here

November 17, 2008

SMS Sugar Man

Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugar Man has either the dubious or celebratory distinction — depending on your point of view of these kinds of things — of being the first feature film shot entirely on a cell phone, specifically the Sony Ericsson W900i. Given the film’s strong sexual content, Sony probably won’t be championing the film any time soon. But, in their absence, I will.

To Kaganof’s grand credit, the technique in which the film was shot never comes across as being gimmicky. The majority of the movie is shot as any traditional movie is shot despite the unique camera being used. Every once in awhile we do get a direct POV shot from one of the characters holding his or her own camera, but this is used very sparingly and is thus unobtrusive.

Scenes are mostly lit and executed as if filmed with a traditional camera. What’s most surprising about the movie is that one might presuppose — or, at least I did — that it would be comprised of mostly quick cuts. I don’t own a cell phone with a camera, but I had assumed one of them could only hold small files for short scenes. Against expectation, Kaganof comprises SMS Sugar Man with fairly longish shots and gives the film a very lyrical tempo.

The entire plot of the film takes place on one Christmas Eve and director Kaganof and cinematographer Eran Tahor suffuse their scenes in yellow and red hues. The effect of this, however, is to give the film a less overall holiday feel and instead nicely gives the impression that these characters are burning in the fires that they’ve stoked for themselves.

Kaganof stars as the eponymous Sugar Man and he’s introduced in a clunky intro scene where he orders a hit on the father of his girlfriend Selene’s (Deja Bernhardt) child. But the bumpy ride quickly smooths out when we learn that Selene is also a prostitute pimped out by Sugar Man. On one Christmas Eve in Johannesburg, Sugar Man pimps Selene and three other white girls, whom he calls “sugars,” out to lonely and horny rich black dudes staying in posh hotels.

Given the smallness of the camera being used, Kaganof frequently brings it in close to capture a brutal intimacy between the characters. And I’m not using “intimacy” as a synonym for sex here despite the film being about prostitutes. The sex in the film is an act that is sometimes consumated, but more often its an act that serves to separate people on a raw emotional level. One prostitute has such a devastating personal encounter with a client that she runs away from her profession and pimp in a psyche-shattering rage, all without ever giving that client what she was paid to do.

In that regard, the script never takes the cheap route in the telling of the story. For that, SMS Sugar Man is a film that defies expectations on several fronts. This is a poetic, haunting film that uses a bold new technology to capture the most basic and primal of human interactions. Kaganof focuses sharply on the evils of love, sex and obsession in a new medium that mutes out the detail and grain that can be seen in traditional film. Some may see this as a heresy to the history of filmmaking, but Kaganof has taken a secure first step on a viable new path of capturing compelling emotions in a whole new lens.

For more info, please visit the official film site.

this review first appeared on bad lit, the journal of underground film

Title: SMS Sugarman

Director/Writer: Aryan Kaganof

Review: Mary Corrigall

Shooting a film with cellphones is obviously going to result in a unique cinematic experience but it is not just the unconventional medium that makes SMS Sugar man novel. Director and writer Aryan Kaganof has produced a film with a visual and ideological character that is not readily associated with South African film-making. It doesn’t deal with any of the clichéd South African themes and it has an extraordinary visual texture that sets just the right level of sombreness required to relay a twisted contemporary fairytale.

Centred on a pimp, Sugar man (Kaganof), and his clique of prostitutes, dubbed ‘The Sugars’ (played by Leigh Graves and Deja Bernhardt) the narrative delves into the underbelly of Joburg, where sex is a precious commodity and violence a form of communication. But it’’s not a gritty reality that Kaganof presents; mostly set in luxury hotel rooms and starring a trio of prostitutes who look more like Sandton schoolgirls than skanky Hillbrow hookers, it’s a glamorised rendition of a seedy counter culture. And with Sugarman decked in a retro suit and cruising around the city in a dated Valiant, SMS Sugar man exudes a Quentin Tarantino-esque vibe.

However, as much as the film parades a cool and alluring superficial façade it has substance; it is more like Tarantino-meets-early-David-Lynch. Belying the attractive veneer that the visuals exude beats a dark plot about a maladjusted society searching for fulfillment - and not just the pimps and the prostitutes but the eclectic array of disturbed clients that they service. A consequence of the troubled society in which they inhabit, each client possesses their own peculiar fantasies, for one client this means dressing like woman and then being put to bed like a child. Their desires, however, all seem to be united by a impulse to retrieve or reconnect with something which they have lost. So while this movie features a lot of sex, these sexual acts are a manifestation of some kind of deep-seated psychological longing.

For ‘The Sugars’ or prostitutes that cater to these yearnings, engaging in sex is about a lesson in emotional detachment. As intimate as the act of sex is, they must divest it of its closeness. Naturally, this leaves them hanging in some kind of emotional wasteland, rendering them unable to connect with anyone. Sugarman isn’t emotionally well-adjusted either; from the start of the film we learn that he is fatherless, rendering him a rootless character grappling for control. And this is probably where ‘the sugars’ come into play; they provide him with a domain over which he has authority - or so it seems.

Most of the story plays out in sumptuous, elegant hotel rooms, which seems at odds with the depraved and desperate sexual acts that take place. But these impersonal locales do serve to underscore the characters emotional detachment.

Set on Christmas Eve a time associated with warm and loving family get-togethers, only serves to emphasise not only the corrupted nature of this society but the meaninglessness of Sugarman and his Sugars existence. So even though their relationship is destructive, with no one else but each other to turn to they are bound to each other.

The world that Sugar man and his Sugars inhabit is a base world, stripped of the rules that govern more conventional societies. It is a place where gender stereotypes are perpetuated; the men are ‘the wallets’, the money makers and the women the objects of desire. Surviving is the only motivator - no matter the cost. While these realities should make for an unpalatable film, Kaganof has sugar coated the ugly truths; the settings, prostitutes and visuals are all aesthetically pleasing,which keeps the audience distanced from the real grime that would define this society.

The twist at the end of the film doesn’t come as a surprise and the plot is not terribly scintillating. But SMS Sugar man is not a plot driven film, it is about the twisted nature of human relationships; the push and pull between intimacy and detachment.

But, ultimately, it is the visual texture of the film that seduces. Certainly the shooting with cellphones has imparted a novel character to the film; the characters are framed within more intimate shots, they fill the screen, engendering a personal ambience. The closeness that this facilitates with the audience not only engages with the central motif but creates a voyeuristic relationship with the characters that recalls the reality TV genre. There are instances where one feels as if one is actually filming the scene with one’s cellphone, which can be exhilarating and distressing.

In this way one is always constantly aware of being an observer and the pixelated effect that results from the medium functions as a reminder that the story is mediated - with conventional cinematography one isn’t aware of the presence of a camera.

Shooting with a cellphone also allows for the screen to seamlessly flip from one angle to the next which Kaganof uses to invite the audience into a scene. The soundtrack, courtesy of Warrick Sony, is outstanding and melds in seamlessly with the action.

To be sure, SMS Sugar man is experimental and in need of some ruthless editing but is evidence of a great directing talent in the making.

this review first appeared in the sunday independent of 6 july 2008

the central thrust of the African Noise Foundation’s project “Aryan Kaganof” has been to explore the territory mapped “out” of the market driven economy. The non-existence of works of art that are not for sale, that are not commodities or indeed commodifiable, in the so-called “free market economy” is of course another way of exploring the future history of censorship.

In the African Noise Foundation’s Strategy & Tactics document we clearly spelled out some of the ways that this exploration would take place. We suggested retiring from the market place altogether as a viable, albeit invisible, strategy. However, years later, we have discovered that the function of the pest suits our needs better. Currently the status of the work in question SMS Sugar Man, might be described as “in limbo”. However, given the African Noise Foundation’s passionate commitment to “sample at will, there is no copyright”, this might all change radically, and very soon.

It is a well accepted fact that the world is in need of transformation. What it desperately needs right now is a collective paradigm shift in consciousness spearheaded by an investigation into the state of the male ego. SMS Sugar Man has swept into this arena with a deft and insightful drama, constantly dissolving the barriers of filmography yet paying respectful homage to film noir.

The pressure on families/people to present a happy and united front during the Xmas season, creates tensions that result in the crumbling facade of a delicately held sense of adequacy, particularly of the male psyche. This in turn has repercussions which manifests as a compulsive need to spend money (the fact) to buy happiness (an illusion). Just look at the amount of debt incurred following the season of good cheer.

“Christmas Eve, the most depressing night of the year” bemoans Sugar Man.

This sense of dissatisfaction is strongly informed by a misplaced confidence in the invincibility of the masculine psyche. Sugar Mans claim that ‘money is the glue that binds them’ when referring to his relationship with his ‘Sugars’ is shown to have little staying power. The atmosphere of Xmas thus intensifies underlying insecurities and becomes a dynamic metaphor within which SMS Sugar Man has been presented and where men divert their insecurity in search of sexual gratification.

It no secret that there are strange and illusive patterns that govern human behaviour. The contradiction is that society (and religion) underplay this psychological dynamic.

The repeated image of the arrow-pointer-like lit Xmas tree on the dial of the cellphone in SMS Sugar Man evokes a compass gauge and becomes a vital link in this detective tale investigating the truth of Sugar Mans relationship with SELENE, Grace and Anna. His emotional susceptibility forces him to get to grips with the root cause of his unease - his eroding sense of self:

“Who are you, Sugar Man?” queries Grace with a gun held to his temple.

Sugar Man is not having an identity crisis of his sexuality. What he is having is an existentialist crisis which questions what sort of a male he is, when having to face his emotional liability. This role as the detached male in control has become such a silly notion in a contemporary context and stands in strict contrast to the macho male so overwhelmingly evident in American and many British films and simply serves to entrench negative male stereotypes.

It is here that Kaganof as poet/artist takes precedence: it is impossible for his sensibility to remain oblivious to the overpowering existential evidence of the power of the feminine principal - the Anima - which ‘forces’ him to investigate the Animus:

“Who is the father? Who is the father?”.

Enter the Wallets, each of whom are locked into a mindset which clearly represents varying forms of male dis-ease. These are the males who are determined to do just what Xmas demands of them: buy their satisfaction. The irony of the collective loss of identity in referring to the males as ‘Wallets’ is but one of the alienating insights that Kaganof pursues in SMS Sugar Man.

The Wallets are dissociated from themselves. Each comes to represent an archetypal (core) scenario of the negative male, each of which has ramifications covering a large spectrum of human relationships.

Wallet no. 1 - the father son relationship. Clearly the father and son are not on the same planet. The father thinks he knows what the son wants and what will satisfy him; the son has other plans. If the father is like this with his son, then what kind of a husband is he? How can he know what his wife wants?

“The son shall inherit the sins of the father.” says Sugar Man as a way of making polite conversation while the scenario is being played out upstairs.

What is also pertinent (in a South African context) is that the youth (the young black man) is part of a first generation of having free and fair access to education. There are huge divisions emerging between ‘traditional values’ and ‘education’.

Wallet no. 2 - mistaking sex for love. “You don’t even know my real name.” says SELENE in response to her consorts belief that they are in a relationship. This Wallet is one of her regular clients. It is not her realm to question the fact that he is married. The marriage has finally broken down and she is now being expected to fulfill a role that is quite clearly unrealistic. She stands her ground.

Wallet no. 3 - mistaking colour for superiority. He has hired a ‘white bitch’ (Grace) which gives him a sense of superiority. He is strangely not interested in consummating his escorts come-on. He gets off on trying to intimidate her, and she is having none of it. He obviously has issues of inadequacy linked to race. During apartheid this was happening in reverse where the demand for sexual gratification represented a more complete disassociation of the overriding corrupt value system and the relationship to the ‘self’: sexual schizophrenia.

Wallet no. 4 - linking religion and sex: guilt. The man/priest has to objectify the woman (the sizing up) sprouting religious fervour in his ‘transgression’. His struggle to assuage his guilt is revealed as yet another trap of self alienation. The misinterpretation of religion has lead to numerous cases of repressed expression of sexual diversion and is often at the core of many perversions. South Africa has one of the highest divorce rates in the world.

Wallet no. 5 - the immature male hung-up on his mother. He hires SELENE to play games with him where it becomes evident that his emotional immaturity has stunted the growth of his sexuality. He has never had the courage to break the maternal bond which has created in him a confusion of his sexual identity. Arguably this may be one of the most controversial portrayals of a Wallet, yet no less valid. Homosexuality and identity are strong vexing social dynamics which puzzles many in our population which is largely homophobic.

The ominous and foreboding atmosphere within which the Sugars encounter the Wallets reflects the vulnerability of the women entering the male dominated arena. This gives insight into the courage needed in the implementation of their role.

And yet it is this very vulnerability that enables our ladies of the night to develop their sense of power and superiority. Their power rests in the fact that they are NOT disassociated from themselves and as such are quite clearly far more evolved than their masculine counterparts. It is also this fact that creates the fulcrum upon which Sugar Man is able to bounce his dissolution, for if both players in this dynamic are NOT true to themselves, there cannot be resolution. It is thus that this tale is an extremely upbeat one which demonstrates faith in the power of transformation.

It is important to bear in mind that Kaganof represents the POETIC perception where a dissociation of the self represents a CRIME (sin) against humanity. This is the crime at the centre of our planetary woes, of our collective sicknesses/diseases, our breakdown in relationships, our inability to communicate at a most vital, yet simple, level.

The fact that Kaganof has chosen to use black men to represent most of the Wallets is an extremely complex and challenging move at this juncture in South Africa’s transition:

It challenges White/Indian/Coloured South Africans alienated view of black men because men (regardless of race) would immediately identify with the various male roles. It may be shocking to some but the fact remains that many South Africans find it difficult to believe that black people have the same emotions, needs and wants as they.

It challenges racist views of the interconnectivity of black and white people: apart from Wallet no. 3 (as outlined above) the relationships are cosmopolitan and unpatronising. South Africans are still emerging from an apartheid culture that saw black people as servants, not as human beings.

Apartheid structures were thus that cultures were kept ill-informed of each other. This has created huge gaps in an ability to understand each other and still gives rise (15 years later) to unrealistic expectations and an inability to see each others ‘humanity’. The huge reservoir of racism has not been adequately addressed in the ‘new’ South Africa.

This has been my fourth analysis of this film and yet there is still so much in it! It is thus that SMS Sugar Man becomes the most important film to have emerged in South Africa to date.

this article first appeared on helgé’s website

Anna, Grace and SELENE represent three aspects of the ANIMA and centrally the ANIMA is personified as DIANA the Roman Goddess.

Diana in fact means Goddess.

Diana: Roman Goddess of Light, Moon Goddess, Queen of Heaven, Lunar Virgin (note that to the Romans, “virgin” meant a woman who had never been married or pregnant, not a woman who had never had sex), Goddess of Wildwood, Divine Huntress, Protector of Animals, Lady of Beasts.

Kaganof is not questioning the moral (social) standing of these women as prostitutes. And yet, while presenting them within a narrowly defined context he nudges the viewer to look behind the facade:

“This is Grace….she thinks she’s a man…..”

“I’m not a woman, I’m a cat…..”

“This is Anna, my favourite Sugar….”

If anything (in this film and possibly for Kaganof generally) prostitutes represent an extracted poetic link to a vital Dionysian energy which gains strength through not only a belief in its own inherent dynamic prowess, but also from the empowering results of its actions. This aesthetic approach reverberates within the psychosexual/cosmogonic role that prostitutes have performed in our society at large: the oldest profession in the world.

As such these three character portrayals represent an authentic dynasty which resonates and refocuses female mythology. SELENE is the Moon Goddess and Grace the Warrior Goddess. Anna represents the Lunar Virgin aspect of Diana.

Both Leigh Graves as Grace and Deja Bernhardt as SELENE meet the challenge of representing these underlying mythologies with performances that are nothing short of a tour de force. Further, it is the chemistry of these two women that drive and magnify the narrative inexorably, enhancing their on-screen presence and thereby the depth and import of SMS Sugar Man, the film. It is Deja who perfectly captures the poetic power of Kaganof’s text, and Leigh who perfectly demonstrates the many sides of Diana: vixen, goddess, protector, man hater. In this sense it could be argued that Leigh’s role is the more challenging of the two. However, the roles are so perfectly counterbalanced, so equal in gravitas, that this distinction would become a meaningless exercise. It is fitting and exactly correct that they should express their ‘oneness’ in a hedonistic surge of erotic (never pornographic!!) sexual abandonment. This scene ramifies deep with the echelons of goddess mythology and is absolutely true to its cosmology within a thoroughly modern context: hence the appearance of Anna within the layering collage of the filmography within this scenario. They all stem from the same archetype, and as such they demonstrate the unifying power of their ‘single-mindedness’ which stands in direct contrast to Sugar Man’s dissolution.

The power of this scene is further enhanced by the Tuxedomoon penned track “In a manner of speaking”, here presented with the poignant Nouvelle Vague cover version.

For further enlightening input on the role of DIANA go to:

www.covenofthegoddess.com

p.s.: I find it a little disturbing (sometimes) as to how far one needs to ‘explain’ things in a South African context because all too often one is surprised at how ‘impressed’ South Africans are, and how beguiled they are of surface reality - a condition possibly more evident in Durban than other parts of the country??

Perhaps this is all just another layer in the destruction that has been wrought by apartheid where people obtained an education without having to be intelligent and who now (sadly) occupy positions in our society where they feel threatened by (and therefore block) anything they cannot understand?

I therefore find it necessary to state that in my opinion Kaganof is not ‘using’ mythology as in ‘name dropping’. If anything Kaganof is doing the opposite: he is ‘using’ surface reality to unveil (trigger) undercurrents of meaning, the pursuit of which is not absolutely essential to the enjoyment of film itself, but which is there never-the-less for those who wish to delve deeper. It is this deeper reality which makes the film an extremely satisfying one and which is sustained at every level of analysis. I feel completely the opposite about the disastrously titled film by del Toro “Pan’s Labyrinth” (please refer to my review on my site under ‘reviews’ - the Devil’s Labyrinth) where a deeper analysis defies logic and one is only left with the veneer of a ‘beautifully costumed’ film.

The more I delve into SMS Sugar Man the more it becomes evident that this film is possibly Kaganof’s magnum opus.

this review first appeared on helge’s website

CHRISTMAS Eve in Johannesburg is the setting for independent filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugar Man, which recently premiered on the sidelines of the Grahamstown Arts Festival. The film, written and directed by Kaganof, focuses on Sugar Man (played by Kaganof), a pimp who is losing his grip on reality, and his three prostitutes, the Sugars, as they travel in his 1966 Valiant to hotels in the city to service their clients.

The film is unique in a number of ways, mainly because it is the first feature-length film to be have been shot on a cellphone camera.

“The natural evolution of film is away from film and towards digital projection technologies,” says Kaganof.

The cellphone camera provides film with its next great historical milestone, and evidence of this is that all over the world many festivals are springing up to advance this direction. Hollywood is also embracing the medium, with Spike Lee doing a cellphone film for Nokia.

“I am proud SA was the first country to produce a full-length feature film generated using this technology,” says Kaganof.

The film is a bit pixilated in places, but rather than signalling inferior quality, the pixilation adds to the sense of the seediness of Sugar Man’s world — one of sordidness, exploitation, kinky sex, pimps, prostitutes, junkies, pushers and gangsters.

IT ADDS a dreamlike vagueness to the action, the reality of which is open to question, while simultaneously evoking a realistic and immediate feel, like a homemade film or documentary.

One of the central themes of the film is that of identity. In its first moments, the Sugar Grace (Leigh Graves) asks: “Who are you, Sugar Man?” Identities are mostly kept concealed throughout the film. The Sugars do not reveal their real names to clients, who in turn are simply referred to as Wallets.

It is an anonymous world where sex is merely a financial transaction, and who people really are is not important. The Sugar Selene (leading actress Deja Bernhardt) refers to Sugar Man as wearing a mask, which he says is his business mask.

The characters often use cellphone cameras in the film, almost interrogating each other with their questions, searching for the truth. This also suggests a film within a film, as if the characters are indulging in play-acting.

There are striking similarities between the figure of Sugar Man and Jesus Christ, especially in his relationship with the Sugars, which parallels Christ’s relationship with his disciples.

There is also the theme of betrayal by a favourite. Biblical references are frequent throughout the film, and one Wallet appears to be a vicar (“appears” because it could be fantasy role-play) who spouts biblical passages while receiving a blowjob.

SETTING the film on Christmas Eve provides an opportunity to explore tensions. Christmas Eve might generally be a warm, traditional family occasion, but it is also, as Sugar Man points out, the most depressing time of the year — especially for the lonely, from whom pimps can make good money.

When Selene says to Sugar Man that she feels something bad is going to happen, his response is that it is Christmas Eve, so how could anything bad happen? But the sense of doom is reinforced by Atilla the hit-man’s insistence that he feels “bad things will happen”.

The film opens with the fairy-tale introduction of “Once upon a time”, but there is little that is innocent in this story. At one point, Selene puts a transvestite Wallet to bed as if he were a child, tucks him in and tells him a bedtime story while masturbating him.

THE feel-good movie genre is one I have always viewed with a certain malevolent distaste,” says Kaganof.

“This film introduces South African audiences to the feel-bad movie, a genre of my own that I have finely honed and shaped over the past 20 years.”

The film is filled with loneliness, such as that of Sugar Man and of the Wallets.

In one powerful scene, a Wallet (John Matshikiza) calls Selene “darling” and asks her what her name is. Selene leaves without saying a word, leaving him to his loneliness.

“I have to give full credit to John Matshikiza for digging very deep into himself, as an actor and as a man, and finding a character that is recognisable and deeply tragic,” says Kaganof.

“It was a great privilege for me to work with John, whose chemistry with Deja Bernhardt was, literally, heartbreaking.”

Kaganof goes on to quote French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: “Even good and evil dream of each other from the depths of their loneliness.”

Feelings matter little in this world of sex for money, and it is notable that none of the sexual encounters in the film result in penetrative sex.

“Real sex, penetrative sex,” says Kaganof, “cannot happen in a world of masks and screens, the world of simulacra.

“But this is the world of the new SA, the world of the spectacle, the world of the mall and the world of the reality of the illusion of freedom, the illusion of democracy, the reality of the illusion of progress. The illusion that we have choices that will make us happy.”

In the film, Sugar Man says: “Money is God.” There are several close-up shots of money being counted, and it is money that binds Sugar Man and the Sugars together. Sex, relationships, trust, and even life and death seem to be purely a matter of financial transaction.

Yet this sordid world in which the film is set is in many ways not very different from the “respectable” middle-class world of the suburbs, of what is “decent” and acceptable, or from the legal financial transactions that take place every day in business.

Kaganof says: “The underworld microcosm of the film’s milieu serves, of course, as a reminder that this is how it’s down here in the new SA, the cashocracy.”

One of the main presences in the film is that of Joburg: its streets, people, garages and convenience stores, the phallic Hillbrow tower, the seedy as well as plush hotels with their equally lonely and mysterious empty corridors. It is a setting reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s ’60s film, Alphaville, to which Kaganof acknowledges a debt. “Alphaville is a seminal film of the ’60s,” he says. “Nowhere is the extreme horror of the modernist dystopia better realised than in that film. What SMS Sugar Man does is update this dystopian perspective in Johannesburg.”

With barely a superfluous shot or word spoken, SMS Sugar Man takes us to the ugly heart of the city — a nightmarish, deceitful underworld in which human decency and self-respect are lacking. All that matters in this milieu is money and gratification, but it comes at a price.

gary cummiskey

this article first appeared in the weekender of saturday, 2 august 2008

“Octavio Paz, in Labyrinths of Solitude, would many years later observe that passionate love, which is after all obsession between two people, is an antisocial act. It is therefore not ours to understand, and has no single set of rules. As such, it is dangerous, not in the public interest, and for that reason a crime. This film poses the question, Can there truly be an honest film about two people in love?”

The above quote was taken from Alberto Rios’ enlightening analysis of “Un Chien Andalou” the 1928 17 minute film by Bunuel. Surrealist artist Salvador Dali (whose work I am not wild about) collaborated on the screen play. This quote carries remarkable echoes in Kagaonf’s latest film: SMS Sugar Man - which is, in essence, a modern love story.

Using the psychoanalytical influence of Freud and his (unbeknown) effect on the Surrealist movement with his investigation of the dream world as a starting point into revelations of the psyche, Bunuel and Dali explored the possibility of film, film technique, imagery and juxtaposition with innovative intent for the first time in cinematic history. Yet, while this film left the audience with a fragmented and unresolved ‘foray’ into the psyche, Kaganof has, with SMS Sugar Man, discovered artistic resolution without detracting from the essences of the mystique of the Dionysian principle: that seething inexplicable sensuality that drives the psyche. SMS Sugar Man becomes a portrait of the modern male, an investigation into the ‘zeitgeist’ of our time, while at the same adding impetus to the significant need for recognition of a collective (if not specifically masculine) transformation…without being didactic.

Working over twelve days in a “frenzy of psychic cinema” (quote: Kaganof) artist Aryan Kaganof, has plumbed the depths of the male psyche in a way that is as startling and as innovative for our time, as Bunuel did those many years ago. As we see Sugar Man emerge from a long corridor (the recesses of the mind) to take respite on a couch placed centre frame, we realise that here is a man at the cutting edge of his dissolution - he is in crisis:

“Scorpio…” states Atilla in a heavily foreign accent, “I have a strange feeling……something very bad going to happen, with Sugar Man….tonight…”

Where “Un Chien Andalou” startled the world with its slashing of the (cow) eye, Kaganof confronts us with two women in a startlingly intimate flash of lesbian tenderness. The screen momentarily sears. Sugar Man’s animus cannot tame either Selene (Deja Bernhardt: Moon Goddess) or Grace (Leigh Graves: Warrior Goddess Artemis).

In the denouement we see him ‘surrender’ to them. For the average male, this is a startling revelation. Surrender here becomes not resignation, but acceptance. As such, surrender is a strength, not a weakness.

Where Bunuel and Dali attempted to show the surreal interrelation of hidden intent and conscious outcome, Kaganof introduces us to a set of characters that all play a role in Sugar Man’s inner thoughts: but Sugar man (Aryan Kaganof) can no longer live with his unresolved ‘multichotomy’ - an induced (some may argue otherwise) essential for survival in today’s fragmented world. Unless we break open this taboo of fear and loathing of the female psyche (a strong element in the Bunuel/Dali film) we are doomed to regression.

It is telling that this film has been created in South Africa, a country where cinema and cinematic art have been in abeyance for almost a century - if it ever existed at all. It also comes at a time in South African political history that is disconcertingly as naive as the political world of pre-war Nazi Germany. The disturbing undertones of Mbeki’s relationship with Mugabe is a case in point; the huge reservoir of unresolved racism currently expressing itself as xenophobia is another.

I am not saying for a minute that Kaganof has set out to answer the question posed in the opening Rios quote, nor am I saying that Kaganof has attempted to make a film to show where Bunuel and Dali went wrong. There is so much more information at our disposal and so much more cinematic exploration that has taken place. Kaganof (undoubtedly informed by Jung who was mentored by Freud) would quote Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’ and Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ as but two of his many influences. But, what I am saying, is that Kaganof has, in attempting to understand his own inner psyche, found a way of translating that very personal process into a poetic and enlightened work of cinematic art. No mean feat. As such, he has given cinematic art a timely injection of a much needed paradigm shift of values.

this review by helgè janssen first appeared on his website

Actress: Samantha Rocca (Anna)

Actor: Norman Maake (the son)

Synopsis: A father buys his son a prostitute to celebrate his birthday. The son chooses the least provocative - Anna - of his three choices. Alone in the bedroom, the son, nervous, expresses how he wants to ‘become somebody’. Anna gets into ‘role mode’ but doesn’t get the required response. All the boy wants to do is ‘get high’. She produces a packet of marijuana - this could not be more geographically South African. The ritual of making the joint is skipped. We see them high and standing in the room. The boy tries to kiss Anna sweetly, innocently. Anna says she ‘doesn’t do kisses’. Yet, in a moment of intuitive ‘summation’ Anna relents, and the sweetest, most innocent of kisses ensue compulsively, without passion, repeatedly. Audibly, the kissing sounds get louder. We are presented with an astonishing visual reality: the son has the thickest sensual African lips, his head a large orb with eyes placed as far apart as perceptively possible; Anna, fragile, absorbing.

This graphic visual is ‘alerting’ and affirms Kaganof’s exceptional talent for cinematic distinction.

A synergy develops between these participants which takes on a life of its own.

Suddenly Anna is kissing her toy doll, her teddy bear, her baby brother:

her innocent childhood.

It is Anna that is being seduced….asexually.

Neither can we ignore the racial dynamic of this scene. Anna is being strongly affected by a black youth, who has no hidden agenda, reflecting in essence, the power of his inner beauty which shines through in his naiveté.

This extraordinary scene is underpinned by the unseen current of its diametrically opposed intent: a young man is supposedly losing his virginity to become a man. He is supposed to be learning how to dominate. He is undergoing the heterophallic ritual that seems to carry the belief that having sex with a woman (any woman) is the ultimate signal of manhood. That life can never be the same again. We know the scenario all too well.

It is a paternalistic notion that entrenches only that: paternalism.

It is the father’s desire, not the young man’s.

i.e. In this scene we have the subtext - what we expect is going to happen - we have what we see, we have what we think is happening, and then we have a surprising outcome - and the race (note: not racist) context is thrown in for good measure!

Here, Kaganof (as director) shows a truly incandescent depth of psychological nuance and insight, and demonstrates exactly how important the perception of the artist is in understanding human nature, particularly if that perception is unbiased and without flaw.

Kaganof (as artist) thus corroborates the pith of the artist in every day life. This subtle and understated triumph is a ‘tour de force’ in cinematic achievement.

This encounter transforms Anna’s life completely.

She was (very profoundly) touched.

(As such Anna becomes the weakest of the ANIMA portrayals. She has not dealt with her past in coming to terms with her role, and this is her undoing. She is no match for Sugar Man. Selene is by far the strongest ANIMA: kissing (vulnerability) in her sexual encounters presents no problem, whereas Grace simply refuses. Sugar Man’s internal battle hinges on the fact that he has extremely strong female counterpoints with whom (not against whom) he has to measure. He either rises to the occasion (forgive the pun) or there is no battle! This becomes an important statement in the evolution of man’s consciousness, and is not an end in itself.)

(Kaganof’s use of black South Africans as the “Wallets” (except for the homosexual man at the end) and as his ‘aide-de-camp’ (Scorpio) is worthy of further analysis. It unapologetically addresses the use of black people in cinema without being racist. Each “Wallet” has a small yet pivotal role to play in the narrative which subliminally addresses racial issues in South Africa (and possibly globally) while focusing on universal male sexual issues outside of race. Kaganof interestingly suggests the similarity of Scorpio to himself with the striking use of silhouette. That each of these characters are intrinisically inside of Sugar Man - various portrayals/levels of the ANIMUS - is a further stroke of genius.)

this analysis first appeared on helgé janssen’s website

1. GC: Why was the film shot on cellphone? Was it in response to the challenge of the technology?

AK: The natural evolution of film is away from film and towards digital projections technologies. In 1996 I realized this and shot the first full length feature film to be filmed on dv tape and blown up to 35mm. This was in Holland where the film NAaR DE KLOTE! (WASTED!) opened in 93 cinemas around the country. The mobile phone camera provides film with its next great historical milestone, and evidence of this is that all over the world many festivals are springing up to advance this direction. Also of course in the Hollywood embracing of this medium, with Spike Lee doing a mobile film for Nokia. I am very proud that it was South Africa that was the first country to produce a full length feature film generated on the mobile phone technology.

2. GC: I note that the film is a bit pixelated in places – I felt it adds to the sense of seediness, vagueness, yet is also very evocative. It also gives an immediate documentary, home movie-type feel. The characters also use cellphones in the movie, to film action, so one has the sense of a film within a film.

AK: Yes indeed Gary, you are spot on here. This effect is described in literary criticsm as the mise-en-abyme. In Holland it is called the Droste effect. For those familiar with the paintings of M. C. Escher the film will provide a haunting memory, a trace of that creepy, eery feeling ogets when spatial and temporal “reality” is played with. This vertiginous feeling is for me the absolute essence of the cinea experience, of the unheimlich.

3. GC: You mentioned that Alphaville was an influence and I can see traces – the mysterious secret agent, the hotels, the women, the dark gangsterish streets, but also the sense of redemption at the end of the movie. I also see a Lynchian influence, in various ways I was reminded of Blue Velvet.

AK: You are so right Gary. I believe that Lynch is one of the greatest living film makers, although the film of his that really blew my head off was MULHOLLAND DRIVE. that has to be the best film about film about film ever. Dizzying.

4. GC: In the first moments of the film, Grace asks” Who are you, Sugar Man?” I feel this introduces a main theme of the film, that of identity, searching for identity, hiding identities ( such as the Sugars not using their real names, and the anonymous Wallets). Later Selene even refers to Sugar Man wearing a mask, which he says is his business mask.

AK: Yes indeed, THE MASK. Gary I am going to take the liberty of quoting French philosopher Jean Baudrillard on this question as it was this quote that fuelled my thinking about this issue:

“One has to see through the identity to bring forth the mask. One has to see through the truth to bring forth the illusion and the secret alterity. The more subtle approach is that which takes reality for a mask.”

from “Fragments”

5. GC: The film is set on Christmas Eve – it’s a night of tensions: on the one hand it is, for many, a joyous family time, but as Sugar Man points out, it can also be a depressing time – for the lonely that is, after all, it is from the lonely that money is made. It is also traditionally a peaceful time - Sugar Man says “it’s Christmas Eve, what could possibly go wrong?” but of course “bad things happen…” There is this constant tension of “innocence” (like the Sugars eating popcorn) and experience, good and evil. There is also the fairy tale intro: “Once upon a time…” Any comment?

AK: The feelgood movie genre is one I have always viewed with a certain malevolent distaste; this film introduces South African audiences to the feelbad movie, a genre of my own that I have finely honed and shaped over the past twenty years.

6. GC: I see a lot of similarities between Sugar Man and Christ – with the Sugars as his disciples, and of course it is his favourite who will betray him, whom he actually invites to betray/kill him – or am I reading too much into it?

AK: I remember very clearly at Yeoville Boy’s School (my primary school) and then later at Durban High School, the image of Christ hovering over the daily assembly, haunting the education I received with the idea that all of what we received was because of his extraordinary sacrifice. The Christian Nationalist education that all so-called white South Africans of my age received still pollutes and poisons our thinking and our emotions, political correctness alone is not enough to scour it away. This film is a contribution to that particular discussion, an ‘intervention’ .

7. GC: The city is also a major feature of the film – the streets, Hillbrow tower, the hotels and garages and buildings – anonymous and threatening. I picked up on a sense of Alphaville here.

AK: Alphaville is a seminal film of the sixties. Nowhere is the extreme horror of the modernist dystopia better realized. SMS Sugar Man updates this dystopian perspective in Johannesburg, a global postmetropolis.

8. GC: Most of the Sugars’ clients are black – with the exception of the chap at the end, but this client wasn’t arranged by Sugar Man, but by Atilla. Was there any reason for making the Sugars white and clients black? The one cellphone-glued-to-the ear client (played by Ryan Fortune) even refers to the Sugar as a ”white bitch”.

AK: The singular lack of sexually informed racial politics in our cinema is indicative of the juvenile state of the art in this country. It is time that our cinema grew up, that we grow up. Political correctness is a new mask. Getting underneath the mask-erade is what interests and excites me as a film maker.

9. GC: The film is filled with loneliness – Sugar Man’s loneliness, the loneliness of the Wallets, especially the married one (played by John Matshikiza) – the scene in which he asks Selene what her name is, calling her “Darling”, and she leaves without saying anything, is one of the saddest moments I have ever seen in a film. All this sex and transactions but sheer loneliness. A lot of the music in the film (composed by Michael Blake) lends to the feeling of sadness.

AK: I have to give full credit to John Matshikiza for digging very deep into himself, as an actor and as a man, and finding a character that is recognizable and deeply tragic. It was a great privilege for me to work with John, whose chemistry with leading actress Deja Bernhardt was, literally, heartbreaking.

10. GC: Sugar Man says “Money is God”, on Christmas Eve of all nights. There are close-up shots of money being counted, and it is money that binds Sugar Man and the Sugars together. Sex, relationships, trust and even life and death (the payment for the hit) seems to be purely a matter of money. Yet is the ugly world in which the movie takes place – of prostitution and weirdos and junkies – really any different from “respectable” transactions that take place everyday in the business world? People are bought and sold every day, without realising it. Any comments?

AK: Nail on the head Gary. The underworld microcosm of the film’s milieu serves of course as a reminder that this is how it’s down here in the new South Africa, the cashocracy.

11. GC: Any other comments

AK: I really appreciate your questions. They are rewarding. Nothing is so rewarding as the audience that brings so much to the work!

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