kagablog

yes it’s been years in the making but the sms sugar man dvd with loads of extras and special features is finally on sale!

cape town readers will want to nip down to long street to buy their copy from clarke’s bookshop, 211 long street (tel 021-4235739).

or you can order your copy directly from me. kaganof@mweb.co.za

Son plus récent long métrage “SMS Sugar Man”, filmé en entier avec un téléphone portable, est un conte de fées urbain et hallucinatoire comportant de putes et des chapeaux à mesure égale. Même s’il a des dialogues à la Tarantino (“stop bitching bitches” est un exemple parfait) ce n’est pas du tout un film ouvertement commercial. Les prises de vue sont expressionistes, l’intrigue elliptique. C’est un film B de gangsters avec un peu de sauce de nudité et d’existentialisme. C’est intentionnellement trash sans avoir cette intention au départ, c’est pour ça que le film est drôle et intéressant. Il entame une problématique insaisisable : bon contre mauvais, Hollywood contre Nollywood.

écrit par Sean O’Toole in “Empire” du 5 novembre 2007, pp.64-65.

traduit par Dionysos Andronis

this review first appeared on deon simphiwe skade’s blog

to book tickets click here

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

for more info and to book tickets click here

this review first appeared on the blog blackafricanliterature

this article first appeared on freestateinterviews

www.smssugarman.com

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. Fellini 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!