THE TIAKENl REPORT Behind the first step UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRANO, JOHANNESBURG SS (011) 716-1111 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg 2001 South Africa Telegrams Umwits Telephone (011) 716-3891 Your rel Our ret Date 5th June, 1981. Dear Professor Horner, re: Students' Film Projects I remember Professor Wagstaff mentioning on Senate how useful it had been to have groups of your students doing their film- making projects on aspects of her Unit's activities. I have lately come across a couple of opportunities for similar efforts, which would be most exciting and socially very useful, which I should like to ask you about. Friends of mine, Rob and Anne Collins, set up a couple of years ago, and. now are advisers to, a thriving textile-printing co- operative called Tiakeni, near Elim Hospital, some 50 kilometres from Louis Trichardt. Sone thirty Gazankulu citizens, mainly women, now own and run the operation, which has a turnover of several thousand rands per month in silk-screened textiles, sold both here and abroad. Rob and Anne were most interested when I reported Professor Wagstaff's remarks to them, and thought of at least two kinds of short movies which would be invaluable in their efforts. One would be a piece aimed at foreign donors, to persuade ^hem to support extensions to the present scheme (which hitherto has been largely funded by the German Churches). Another would be aimed at a quite difference audience, namely black people in other rural areas whom Rob and Anne have been visiting in order to enable them to set up, beginning on a much more modest tie- d/rir.a basis, soraetr.ing similar. Critical Aits Vd 4 No 1 l*i5 Do you think these would be suitable efforts for a couple of groups of your students to undertake? The locale, which is spectacular; the activity itself, which has facets from making and wood-cutting the design through printing and baking to distribution and sales; and the participants themselves, includi: some most lively, impressive and fluent black women; all seem ti- me to lend themselves ideally to such a treatment. Rob and Anne could presumably motivate to their present donors for a contributi. towards the costs, and would be delighted to help with the conception, the script, and wherever else they can. What tney cannot afford, of course, is a full-blown commercial treatment. When you have had a moment to think this over, I'd be most interested to hear your reactions; and if it is favourable, to put you in touch with the Collinses to start talking about timing and logistics. If you don't find me in my office, please don't to hesitate to leave a message on Ext.654, or to ring me at home, 726-6495. Yours sincerely, F.M. Orkin. Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 JvZ - Thanks for the note. The address of Rob and Anne Collins is: Tiakeni Textiles Co-op Box 93 Elim Hospital 0960 Tel. (01552) 703 or 701 Rob gives a most accurate account on the 'i-hone of how actually to get there. They're lekker people,.and the whole project!*^ should be a lot a fun as well as most worthwhile. They also have room in the huge farmhouse for about four or six keen workers to stay on the spot, which is on a mountain looking out through pomegranate trees across miles of highveld in one direction and the Soutpansberg in the other... v V*) Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 So, early in March, '82, Greg Carden, casually carrying a thin sheaf of papers in one hand, came into my office. I was irate: Central Television Service (CTVS), the place where our students have to be trained in studio production techniques, had lost our letter booking the year's worth of studio time — the detailed list. Our secretary hadn't kept a carbon copy, so I was stuck. I didn't know any of the times and dates offhand (I'd only joined the Film& TV section of the School of Dramatic Art about a month before, so I hadn't been in on the planning of the year's work). Since I couldn't replace the original with a direct duplicate, I couldn't negotiate with CTVS from a position of strength — if they had been inefficient, so had we. Worse, when I'd arrived at the studios with a group of students the day before, we hadn't been allowed in. The Education Department — "who had booked"! — were inside there doing a teaching programme. "Hi, Pete!" said Greg. "Are you busy?" "Ag, it's just junk," I said. "Trivia. Nothing that can't wait, though I'd better hurry up." Greg looked puzzled, but didn't pursue it. "This," he said, passing me the papers across the desk, "is the stuff I promised you about Tiakeni. You know — I did mention it — the documentary in the Northern Transvaal. The third years . . ." "Oh, yes. Right. When do we do that? In June?" "Next quarter, I think." We made sure by looking up the due date for the project in the course guide: Wednesday, June 16. A deadline which, that morning in early March, seemed far enough away. Promising Greg that I'd phone Rob Collins and make all the necessary arrangements, I turned back to the letter I was drafting to CTVS. The best I'd be able to do would be to try and reconstruct exact times and dates from the cryptic jottings in my desk diary. My other priority at/that moment was to develop a rigorous training schedule for the third years so that, when we reached the end of the year, we might at least have one good studio programme to show. But also, I had course work of my own to do: I had registered for a full-time Honours. The Tiakeni documentary began to slip beneath the threshold of things demanding immediate attention. I let it go. Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 198S The determined director and man as creator Even behind the first step, selection of a topic, there.is a motive. Someone feels there is something that needs clarification, and that if one can document aspects of it (the whole truth is a legal fiction), the work will yield something useful in comprehension, or agreement, or action.1 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. As Barnouw suggests, the idea for a documentary can come to anyone: it need not originate with the director. At this stage, in any case, I did not expect to become the director as such. As I understood it, the Tiakeni project was to be a student exercise, and my role in it would be that of project co-ordinator, on-the-spot adviser and instructor — or shadow director, if you like. My department, on the other hand, demanded the subordination of the learning process to the making of the product. This would have meant the simulation of high-pressure professional conditions, with me as director in charge of a student team of which each member would needs have been confined to a specific and pre-ordained role, from tea-boy to cameraman, for the duration of the shoot. Fragmentation of learning, it was later argued, would have been compensated by the authenticity of the parallel with conditions in the industry, and by the more efficient shaping of the product within a tighter, more centralised structure of control. Unfortunately, the basis and extent of this misunderstanding did not emerge until too late — after the first attempt to shoot the documentary appeared to have failed. Then, during the post mortem discussion, John van Zyl made the position clear to me, forcefully, if not angrily: "This must not happen again. The reason why we were so delighted when you joined the department was because we thought you would carry productions through." Tiakeni thus became an acute test of my personal worth to the department: I was being judged in terms of my ability as a documentary TV producer, and not as a teacher. At the same time, it is noteworthy that my role was not constituted by any personal merit I may or may not have had as a documentary maker, but by the needs of my department. To that extent, therefore, it was coincidental that I became the director. Obviously, if I hadn't joined the department, someone else (Greg, perhaps?) would have had to direct the Tiakeni documentary. Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 A number of months later, however, when the project was 9() N\^ ^ """*» consumption the artist — — — the'observer The above "triangle" is an analogy and not geometry, of course: there is nothing strictly measurable about it. But because triangles as pure lorm concentrate on the most direct connections possible between three pre-determined points, they readily encapsulate the relations obtaining between these points, and can thus function as a sign of such relations. Monaco calls this triangle the " 'triangle' of the artistic experience", and explains: "An examination of the relationship between the artist and the work yields theories of the production of the art, while analysis of the relationship between the work and the observer gives us theories of its consumption. (The third leg of the triangle, artist-observer, is potential rather than actual)"47 A report like this qualifies both as theory of production, therefore, and as an attempt to actualise some of the potential lost by the missing "third leg" of the triangle. Some of the potential only, though. It amounts to no more than supplementary information, lacking in the video itself. Because a reading of the report can never occupy the same time-space frame as a viewing of the tape, it can obviously not be an immediate actualisation of the potential as achieved in a documentary like The Sad Song of Yellow Skin, where Michael Rubbo addresses the viewer directly in his own voice, as though person to person, in the commentary. To return: the "artist" in Monaco's triangle undoubtedly refers to the cinema director as well, although even the most ardent champion of the auteur theory would not claim for the director the kind of autonomy attributable to an artist like Marcel Duchamp, say. In cinema production, there are always too many other indispensable people. Basically, triangles are a useful means of clarifying certain relations, though. So, if we take Monaco's triangle and extend it by throwing out lines to make contact with two other points, the 'producer' and the 'organisation' — the relations with whom are essential, forming the two 'frameworks of determination' for the Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 44 director — a logically connected shcema of triangles can be developed, offering a quick-guide diagram to the network of relations behind the shooting of a documentary like the one at Tiakeni. producer D — director — ;.work C organisation - _ __ E B audience Although any point could be chosen, and its connections read at a glance, let us again take the director as our point of reference. The inference immediately to be gained from the above grid is that the director is not alone in his relation to the work, but himself occupies only a single corner of a field cut aross by interconnecting interests. Now, five triangles can be discerned, relating to the director: 1 Triangle A C B: director-work-audience. (Monaco's triangle) 2 Triangle A C D: director-work-producer. 3 Triangle A D B: director-producer-audience. 4 Triangle A D E: director-producer-organisation. 5 Triangle A E B: director-organisation-audience. Of the five, only the first two produce the 'work' as the apex of their triangle. The rest simply pass through that point (C) in order to connect with the others. It would appear, therefore, that although the work remains central to the figure, the director's involvement with other points over and above the work could exclude and outweigh his straight relation with it. In addition, that 'straight relation' makes up no more than a single strand in the web of controlling relations. Every triangle, except ACB — which, on its own, would now seem misleading as an illustration of the "rapports de production" — connects the director to at least one point of power structurally his superior, which point can also connect without his mediation to the work itself (DE, EC). In concrete terms, the producer and the organisation are free to form expectations of the work without first referring to the director, but the director is not free to act without at the same time relating to their combined expectations (as AC connects with DC and EC at C). The fact that the director is subordinate both to the organisation and to the producer strengthens the status of their conceptions of the work, exerting pressure on the director to act in terms of their expectations. The grid could therefore be viewed as providing a graphic illustration of the structural constraints on the director's autonomy. Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 At its simplest, however, the grid is like an abacus of production relations. There is triangle ACD + triangle DCE + triangle ADB + . . . The shape of the overall figure produced, e.g. the rectangle ABDE, is contingent, an amalgam of the triangles concerned, but the basic unit, the triangle, is as replicable in its way as the brick in building: any number of triangles could be constructed and grouped together, depending on the relations that needed to be determined. For instance, the triangle director-work-crew could still be added. And the triangle director-work-(front-of-camera people). And so on. And if the relations under consideration at present had happened to be those of the actual shoot, instead of those which combined to make the shoot possible in the first place — the forces "behind" the shoot, so to speak, invisible on location but undeniably present all the same — then the triangles of the immediate situation as such would definitely have formed the prime focus of attention here. So simple an abstraction as the figure AB(C)DE is static, outside of time. In order adequately to reflect the sequence of events and contacts that led to Tiakeni, provision would somehow have to be made for showing the steps in time. Perhaps progression could be indicated by isolating one section after another from the grid, in the due and correct temporal order. Following Monaco's example, arrows could be used to give direction to reading, and broken lines to suggest potential not yet realised. So: Mark Orkin, acting for the producer, Rob Collins at Tiakeni, contacts the School of Dramatic Art, as film- and video-making organisation. What is essential to the development here is contained in the single triangle: producer D = — organisation __ _ - ' -- E ~ — « .— — ••""' C w o rk Once accepted and set as a project for the third-year Film and Television students, the as-yet unrealised programme is passed by Dr van Zyl to Greg Garden and then to me, and the following extension of relations begins to take form: producer 1 I .. .— . - • "• ~~~~ A director _ . ..... -—=^~~ Cwork organisation "Begins to take form" because this is still an early stage. It corresponds to the third entry in the preamble (p. above), where I accepted the project without Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 46 giving it a second thought. Note that although I was not fully aware that I had been constituted as director until we arrived at Tiakeni for the first shoot I had been constituted as director until we arrived at Tiakeni for the first shoot (when Greg and Matthys would impress it on me in no uncertain terms), the role must needs be regarded as binding on me from the start. Product-centric structures dominate the people they include. The focus of all energy is on forging the product, and people become the means to this end. The above triangle cannot be completed until the final contact has been made —contact between the director and the producer. At this stage, the actual character of the power relations between them, the direction of control as' indicated by the arrow, can be seen to be still undecided. The crucial question is therefore whether all power will be vested in the producer, or whether some balance of power will be instituted between him and the director. In terms of Tiakeni, however, we already know the answer. Ultimately, the power lay fully in the hands of Rob Collins. It is significant, for instance, that when I tried to inject a more critical spirit into the documentary, he did not have to listen to me. As it affects the director, then, the final triangle of the relations behind the Tiakeni production would take the form of the solid-line half-section of the grid below: producer director work organisation audience In terms of which, the pressures resulting from both 'frameworks of deter- mination' are concentrated on the director's head. He must put the product together, whatever the odds. The structure, determining his role in production, demands it. Triangular conceptualisation, versatile enough to be applied to innumerable situations, need be developed no further here. It has proved its point and worth. There is no need in the present context to plot the triangles related to the audience, for instance. Anyone concerned with that perspective could do so himself. 47 Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 It is possible now, however, to proceed with the recommendations of this report. The aim of the recommendations is to outline a sounder basic procedure to be followed when a major cinematic project involving an external producer is to be undertaken by this department of the university; to suggest an acceptable balance of power between the director and the two frameworks of determination, and finally to emphasise the need for a widening of horizons in video work. It will be recalled that it was on the basis of a single letter broadly, if charmingly, outlining a number of tempting schemes, that the department committed itself to a documentary on Tiakeni. The move was premature. Commitment to a project within a product-centric structure unquestionably implies, and thus tacitly guarantees, an end-product. It empowers the producer to expect everything of the director. This is risky if (as was the case at Tiakeni) the producer is inexperienced and has no knowledge at all of what goes into video production, but still retains control over the director. It means, among otherthings, that the director has no structural powers at his command for securing input to the production fr6m the producer if and when this becomes necessary, but is forced to fall back on 'personal' requests, which may not be heeded. Take the issue of a script. A strictly planned and fully developed written script can be invaluable in the shooting of a documentary: it can form the conceptual blueprint for camerawork, when the director is confronted by the otherwise incoherent medley of events, locations and actions from which his cinematic statement is to be cut. Most frequently, however, the bulk of the information necessary to blocking out a fi rst script resides solidly with the person proposing the work, i .e. the producer. It follows that at least a draft script should be required of the producer before a major project can even be thought of being undertaken by the department. Failing this, the situation becomes fraught with difficulty, for the script in particuilar tends to become the site of an unequal struggle between producer and director. The first recommendation of this report is therefore that the acceptance of a project by the department remain provisional until a draft script has been approved by the director. Before giving his approval, the director must embark on whatever research, recce trips, face-to-face negotiations and discussions with the producer, changes to the draft script, etc., he may perceive to be necessary. Without the director's approval, the department is not committed to the project. As a corollary, the department may not hand the director a few stimulating but indefinite general ideas for production, guarantee an end-product, and then withdraw, relying on a deadline and the fact that its own reputation is at stake to pressurise the director into honouring the commitment. (If such an abuse of power characterised the department's attitude towards me over the Tiakeni documentary, I take it that the overriding reason was that the project had already been agreed upon some time before I joined.) In addition, early and repeated consultations between the department head and the director involved Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 48 in a major project would not only humanise relations within the first framework of determination, but also give the director the basic security of knowing exactly what his department would want. The second recommendation concerns the problem of ideology. Inevitably, the ideology of any programme made by the department will be associated with the department (unless a disclaimer of ideological identity between the producer and the department were to be prominent among the credits). It is therefore in the department's own interests to maintain an awareness of the ideological dimension at all times, and to have ready at hand flexible ways of meeting the problem actively during production, if necessary. To begin with, in order to avoid inadvertent complicity with the producer's ideology — unavoidable if the simple grid of constraints on the director's autonomy (p. 47 above) is crudely in force — the department should reserve the right to assume a critical stance in a documentary, if the department as a whole should agree that such a stance were necessary. Clearly, the decision to include a^ritical factor in the approach to a programme would have to be made early — before final approval of the draft script — and the producer would have to agree, or the programme might not be able to go ahead at all. But then if, on the shoot, serious divergences from the approved script were to begin to take hold and develop ideological implications far beyond what could possibly have been envisaged by the department initially, or, again, if practices were urged upon the director which would place the credibility of the documentary and its makers at risk for the sake of ideology, the director, as the department's representative, would have to be able to re-invoke the critical option. In other words, breach of contract by the producer on location could immediately and legitimately be counteracted by the director, backed in his decisions by the full authority of his department. Retaining the right to criticise does no more than uphold the autonomy of the university in its quest for truth, of course. In effect, however, it also protects the status of the department as a cinema-making concern, for ft does not permit it to be regarded merely as a cheap alternative for those who "cannot afford . .. a full-blown commercial treatment".48 And importantly, in terms of what is being said about reality by means of a documentary, it creates a balance in the 'triangle' of power between producer, organisation and director. The producer is the financial backer — a relationship which looks compellingly simple when reduced to a matter of Rands and cents, but which is actually far from simple if it means the introduction of commercial values into the functioning of a university department. For instance, even the irrefutable fact that our department needs money for new equipment, and for its own independent 16mm film productions, and so on, does not of itself justify the conclusion that the department should therefore earn money by making certain class projects double as products for cash. In the first place, the use of unpaid but compulsory student labour might well be construed as exploitative. In the Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 second, the demands of commercial work tend readily to overwhelm and suspend the validity of the academic structure itself — ironically enough, for instance, by removing the students' right to fail and not even complete a production. The third recommendation is, then, that if a production is undertaken for money, it should be voluntarily crewed, and all work on it done outside of standard class hours. If ordinary classes are to work for an external producer at all, they should do so on the understanding with the producer that a product is to be attempted, not guaranteed, and that the emphasis will be on the process of carrying the production through to a conclusion, rather than on culminating in a saleable, high-quality commodity. The cost of such class projects would have to be borne by the department itself, but the mastertape and copyright would in the end remain with the department. The external producer could then, perhaps, negotiate to purchase replay rights from the department at a fair price. A major theme of argument throughout this paper has been that the paradigm of professionalism is not the only authentic one for video production. It follows that the simulation of professional conditions in the training of students is not self-evidently the best mode of teaching, but simply reigns as such as a result of the department's short-term, common-sense goal of trying to ensure that students are equipped to work in the industry after graduating. A university, however, has not only a supportive role to play in society, but also a progressive one, linked to research. Potentially, there is far more to video than its exploitation by the professionals of commerce and broadcasting will allow. The trigger videos and radical-democratic documentaries outlined above are only two possibilities for development. There are bound to be more. The final recommendation of this report is, therefore, that video be released from the confines of the professional as the only paradigm, and encouraged to enter and explore as well exactly those areas closed to the professionals. Democratic video- making among rural black people, for example, where the subject is sought in the objective needs of the social situation as articulated by the people directly involved, and the determining criterion for organising the shoot is not how the professionals would manage it, but how appropriate the relations inherent in a particular production practice might be to the situation being documented. The central thesis to the entire paper here is that cinema production is cultural action, with its source, most often, in the creative co-operation of a group of people. If video, however, is to become cultural action for freedom, its core problem emerges as one of method: how to turn documentary production, for instance, from a means of generating persuasive ideological statements about the world, into praxis, and a means of people's transforming and expressing the world. Itself marginalised as a force by the dominance of broadcast TV, video production could in all likelihood realise its most powerful potential in political alliance with the masses marginalised by the capitalist economy of a state like South Africa. Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 50 These, then, are the thoughts arising from the experience of making the Tiakeni documentary. But what of the documentary itself? What happened during production to provoke this response? What is the end-product like? These questions, and others like them, form the impetus for the remainder of the essay. The only film journal organized thematically A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice Edited by Peter Lehman, Ohio University, Athens In-depth critical anah/m...challenging and controvenial theorie*... provocative interview* with filmmaker*...review* of the newMt film book*...examination of every genre and historical period...coverage of all national cinema*...W1WB ANCLE bring* you film from every point of view. Each u ne i» devoted to a tingle topic. Part isme* have foctued on mch divene cubjects u Jean Luc Godard, Japaneee Cinema, Melodrama, John Ford, Political Cinema, and Film Aeathetk*. Eater My • • t o r t p t i o* tm WIDE 4IVGJLE (published quarterly I n*15.00/ye*r Individual G $26.00/y»r Institution vkl n.SOcmutde ihi U.S. Miiytand rtndenti pkuc a4d 3% utet u>. nquflrcd. ^ubKriptioM will begin with the current twoe. L) CUd lor mm) o t f e r l - i * , * !* to The Jotw Hopkta. Uatnnltr fnm LI VI9A [J MaiUrCanl Cm)* Sitnate* . _ Etp. C h ,. S u w. The John. Hopkm. Unhenhy Pmn JoomaW DivWoi Bahhnore. MvyWnd 21218 51 Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 Kunaplpl is a bi-annual international arts magazine with special but not exclusive emphasis on post-colonial literatures and arts. In just four years we have published John Agard, A(ha Shahid Ali, Phyllis Allfrey, Mulk Raj Anand, The* Astley, Kofi Awoonor, Okot p'Bitek, Nora Vagi Brash, Doreen Campbell, G.S. Sharat Chandra, Nirad Chaudhuri, Frank Chipatuta. John Clanchy, Laurie Clancy, Tony Cosier, Alison Croggan, Cyril Dabydeen, Anita Desai, Buchi Cyprian Ekwensi, Nissim Ezekiel, Yvonne du Fresne, Zulfikar Chose, Nadine Gordimer, Cray, John Green, Wilson Harris, David Ireland, Mike Jenkins, Robert Kroetsch, Doris Lessing, Bernice Lever, Dorothy Livesay, David Livingstone, Jayanta Mahapatra, Bill Manhire, E.A. Markham, Bob Marley, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Morrisey. Felix Mnthali, Alice Munro, Les A. Murray, Meja Mwangi, Mbulelo Mzamane, Anthony Nazombe, Mark O'Connor, Raja Rao, Judith Rodrigues, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Shapcott, Michael Sharkey, Mihir Sinha, Ian Stephen, Randolph Stow, Subramani, Norman Talbot, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Aritha van Herk, Derek Walcott, Brian Walker, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Stephen Watson, B.R. Whiting, Punyakante Wijenake, David Williamson. Emecheta, Articles also on African, Australian, Canadian, Indian, New Zealand, South African, South Pacific, and West Indian literature, art and film plus photographs, graphics, and reviews. Stephen A special feature is The Year That Was — an annual summary of the major events and publications in each country. Subscription rates: Individuals 1 year: Dkr50 — £5 — $10 Individuals 3 years: DkrIK) — £13 — S26 Institutions 1 year: Dkr70 — £7 — $14 All correspondence to: Anna Rutherford Editor Kunapipi Department of English University of Aarhus 8000 Aarhus C DENMARK Critical Arts Vol 4 No I 1985 52 TlAWSNl 1EX\1UES •^ Cooren-vnVB.. O record the JVC inaction — and 1 jumped at it. In the editing. I knew. 1 would he able to cancel out the Panasonic's peculiar colour by switching to black-and- white. The master tape. then, would be coded both in colour and in black-and- white — colour for the Tiakeni documentary as such, black-and-white for the footage on the shooting of the documentary. The implications were arresting. offering as they did a dialectical interplay of significance between the two levels of what would be recorded. It would be video looping back on itself, so to speak. Critical Ans Vol 4 No 1 198 5 and exposing the process of making the video being watched. The documentary would literally be seen to be the outcome of a particular group of people's work with a camera, for instance, which might sharpen the viewer's critical insight into what takes place on a TV screen as in fact a matter of others' choice. The complexity of the alienation-effect alone promised to be intriguing. After the initial shock of Rob's announcement that there was no script had worn off, I could admit to myself that in some way I must have known all along that there would probably be no script. Well, what now? Logically, the only option left was simply to rely on the organised structure of the work process itself to provide a basis of predictable action upon which the camerawork could be developed. The human encounter central, I realised, to a documentary programme on a co-operative, could surely consist in interviews with the workers, while Rob could add a voice-over commentary later, if he felt like writing one. But I would, I decided, have to follow in detail the progress through the factory from raw material to packaged product — the laying out of the bolt of cloth, the silk-screening, the drying and lifting and kiln-baking of the printed material, the cutting and sewing and folding and parcelling. I would shoot the auxiliary activities, too. The dyeing. Designing. Ink-mixing. The rinsing of the silk-screens at the end of a session . . . And so on. The essential soundness of this decision was revealed only afterwards, during the second shoot when, despite having a typed-out script in hand and adhering undeviatingly to the shooting script derived from it. I found myself following in my own footsteps around the factory. So precisely did my movements on the two separate occasions correspond, in fact, that during the editing it was sometimes possible to include a good close-up or cutaway or even part of a sequence from the first shoot into footage from the second, without too noticeably disturbing the continuity. At length, however, the conversation on the verandah that Saturday afternoon, wound down, and we asked Rob whether it would be possible to do some shooting right away. He thought for a moment, and then suggested that we all go to "Margy's place", a short way up the road. Margy, he told us, was one of the ablest workers in the co-op, and spoke English fluently. We could interview her on her role in the co-op, and then on the role of the co-op in her life. Nearly an hour before sunset we arrived at the homestead, a cluster ot thatched huts on a ridge with a magnificent view across the escarpment valley to distant mountains that were almost one with the calm blue of the sky. While we waited for Margy. who wasn't home, we began to set up the equipment, intending to record some of the traditional patterns drawn into the smooth, dry. flat and cleanswept cowdung-plaster floor of the courtyard, since the motifs of Tiakeni textiles were based upon such patterns. Some of the students scattered around, looking into the only building that was not a wattle-and-daub hut. a flat-roofed concrete-brick structure that stood in the middle of the yard and dominated everything. We did try some shooting, but the patterns in the floor 59 Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 proved to be worn and faint, and light was going in any case, and I had just decided that there was no point in continuing, when suddenly, out of one of the huts swept a middle-aged woman in funereal black, with a broad black shawl flung around her shoulders. She didn't stop moving, but began gesticulatinn and clutching at the air with histrionics worthy of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. "You people come here," she panted in a hoarse, deep voice, her bosom heaving. "You don't ask! You take pictures. But where is the money? Where is the money?" Rob tried in vain to calm her down. She stared at him stonily and repeated: "Where is the money? Give us money!" It turned out that she was Margy's mother-in-law. Among other things, she was deeply affronted that we had not obtained permission from her son — "a policeman at John Vorster Square" — before attempting to shoot on his property. Acting on his own initiative. Andrew Worsdale tape-recorded the whole of her outburst, but Rob. once he knew, was upset to think that we might use it, and after our return to Johannesburg, did not rest until I had mailed the tape back to him. So our first attempt at shooting at all had foundered. We spent the evening after supper arguing inconclusively as to what shots might work best to open the documentary. Then, in preparation for the next day. I briefly outlined my role as shadow director again, and put forward my plan that the students should rotate, taking directing, camera, audio, continuity, etc.. in turn. Since it was the students' first venture outside of a television studio, and their first major production ever with theportapak equipment. I wanted their experience to be as broad and busy and intense as possible. Greg and Matthys objected, however. To them, this approach was unheard-of. The true paradigm, they maintained, was that of the professional shoot. Everybody should have a fixed role. I should be director. "Sombody must take responsibility," Greg said pointedly. It made little difference to me to shift from supervising the directing to being the actual director, but that was as much as I was prepared to concede. It was inconceivable to me that priority could be accorded to the product over the process in a learner-centric situation, a class project. The students would rotate. Quite early on Sunday morning, we were ready for the shoot. The VCR had righted itself as soon as a couple of" switches were returned to their proper positions. The good batten had been left to charge, and when at eleven o'clock Rob came forward with the suggestion that we go to "•Gladys's place", we checked and found it brimming with power. Gladys was supervisor of the co-op that year. (The workers rotate administrative posts annually, so that no elite can solidify to separate management' and 'workers'.)The homestead lay in a fold ol the hills northwest °f Tiakeni, and was laid out on the same lines as the one we had been to the day before — a loose circle of huts dominated at one end by a two-roonied. rectangular, concrete-brick joint. But the whole place looked more rundown Ctiiical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 60 than Margy's, and seemed to be sagging in the heat. The blue numbers of resettlement were painted on the doors. (The police kept — keep — an eye on homes with marked doors. Any sign of maintenance, the Collinses told us. like replastering a wall or fixing the thatch, is an offence punishable with fines and/or imprisonment. So the'huts become wretched and ramshackle, while the people, faced with an alien and uncertain future, and impotent in the present, become the baffled and demoralised dwellers in rural slums. It is not known for sure, for instance, exactly when their removal will take place, but it could be next month, or the next. Or not for a few years.) It was here that we were to record one of our strongest political statements, in the presentation to camera of Gladys's husband, HIengani. Paradoxically it was here, too, that I first became aware with some perplexity that all was not well with the method of production that I was actually already using. My misgivings were not caused simply by the hackneyed fact of the intrusion of strangers from the dominant culture with their stranger-yet technological equipment into a Third World scene, but rather by the realisation that for all our goodwill (and theirs), the people in front of the camera had no structural means at their command with which to control what would be said about them through the Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 documentary. To me, the clearest evidence of this was offered by the production relations reigning between the director and the people in front of the camera. I had the power to stop, start, alter position and angle, reshoot. Gladys and Hlengani had to look to me for direction, the way to act. (See again the ten Freirean "contradictions" listed above, on page 36.) And months later, during my reading for the Honours course, I came to realise, too. that any professional TV team going into a rural South African situation like this — a situation which they might hope to 'expose', 'report on', etc., but could never hope really to change — would themselves in their shooting not only undoubtedly impose without a second thought structures favourable to the dominant culture, but also, in all likelihood, perpetrate the kind of outrage noted by James Agee, fifty years ago, when he and Walker Evans had completed their assignment to document the plight of sharecroppers and others destroyed by land-hungry banking corporations in a single move of expropriation during the American Depression. Walker Evans's still photographs are models of cool perfection, graced with compassion, investing the people facing camera with great dignity. Agee's pages of captioning deepen the reader's basic huhianity by extending an insight into the elemental tragedy of the situation being photo- graphed. But not before Agee has doggedly, painfully, remorselessly, dragged all the arguments, rationalisations, lofty ideological justifications and mere rhetoric persistently brought forward in support of such ventures, through all their twists and turns, to a recognition of their common root. "It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying,4' he writes, "that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of'honest journalism' (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and unbias which, when skilfully enough qualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money (and in politics, for votes, job patronage, abelincolnism, etc*), and that these people could be capable of meditating this prospect without the slightest doubt of their qualification to do an 'honest' piece of work, and with a conscience better than clear, and in virtual certitude of unanimous public approval."4 Agee's footnote is laconic, demonstrating the same truth concealed in every cranny: "*Money." Professionalism, it struck me, can be the smoothest, most plausible guise of the profiteer. It took us the rest of Sunday to set up and record satisfactorily the statements made to camera by Gladys and Hlengani. There was never any question of portraying them as victims. On the contrary, much time was taken up by Rob's efforts to establish the opposite: to get Hlengani, for instance, to relax and assert himself, looking straight into camera, and to speak out with full personal authority on resettlement. Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 62 Thus, clearly, an attempt was being made to reverse the polarity in documenting the oppressed, from negative to positive. Our intention was to depict the rural poor under apartheid not as degraded, mute, crushed and suffering, but as strongly forthright and self-confident people, articulate and prepared to question and resist, if necessary, the force of political circumstance. Insofar as this was no more than a change in image, it was inadequate, I knew. I could see that before my eyes the whole production might become an interpretation imposed on the situation for the sake of an apparent proof of the ideology — a soft-sell for socialism. An obscure sense of certainty provoked the thought that video would definitely have to work in a radically different way among the oppressed if an affirmation of the people's voice and presence were to become a real and not merely an apparent demonstration of the progressive value of socialism. But I would have no time to explore this intuition until many 63 Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 months later, when the Tiakeni production was over. To Rob's disappointment, neither Gladys nor Hlengani —r nor anyone else at the co-operative, later — could actually present themselves to camera with the vigorous and natural air of personal command that he had had in mind. But for anyone but a seasoned TV presenter, so direct an encounter with the camera as having to stare back at the lens trained on you only a metre or two away, readily induces intense self-consciousness. Trapped by the camera's fixed focusing on you, you are drawn into seeing yourself totally as an object of others' perceptions: in other words, your subjective experience of self is contradicted. Overwhelmed, you go empty, blank. So I was not surprised when both Gladys and Hlengani found it impossible to remember what they had intended to say, or ran into difficulties and lost track of their words, winding up embarrassed —Gladys, convulsed with laughter. Rob drew up cue cards. He was very active and concerned, sitting with Hlengani in the oppressive stuffiness of the concrete rooms, and charting out with him all the important themes. Then he wrote the key words in black koki on poster-size white cardboard. "My name is Hlengani Mashemse. I stay here." On the mastertape, Hlengani's voice is strong and clear as the camera pans across a field of standing mealie with a group of huts in the middle distance, and keeps moving smoothly and steadily as another hut emerges in the immediate foreground, with two shy and friendly children in close-up, standing by a low wall and looking over it. "I'm a teacher at Ngalailume School, about one and a half hour's drive from here by car. Ngalailume means . . ." There is a jump-cut into the pan — occasioned in the editing by no more than a dearth of material, but perhaps appropriately abrupt here — to a mid-shot of Hlengani. He is seated quite formally upright against the wall of the hut, 'physically on a lower plane than the children, so that for a moment we seem almost to share their point of view of him. While the children were Warm and close, however, the man is more distant, and looks stern and cold in his square presentation of himself to camera. Then, because of a slight zoom out, we notice that he keeps his hands awkwardly and defensively on his knees. His eyes are like slits in his face. Although Hlengani's eyes never quite make contact with the viewer's, they flick restlessly back and forth, and his vdice by the end of the speech is fraught with rage. /".'..' "Ngalailume means that the lion bites. I grew up here. I'm happy with my home, I (would) like to improve my dwellings, but I cannot, because of resettlement. I'm forced to . .. Maybe we will be moved to township some day. You can see the police numbers there, painted on the door." He points. Cut- away to a handheld shot of the door with the number 54 painted on it. "Maybe we can be removed at any time. But we don't know when. And I don't know why." Critical Arts Vo] 4 No 1 1985 Cut to darkness and a roaring confusion, which gradually resolves itself into a black-and-white sequence of a recording being made with the JVC in the workshop of Tiakeni's mechanic, Andries. The general effect of the Hlengani section as such is rough, direct, grainy, however. The cut to darkness is quite dramatic. HIengani's speech lasts about as long as it takes to read: less than a minute. Brief as it is, the section is a composite sequence put together from three different takes, themselves only part of several hours' work resulting in two full 20-minute U-matic videotapes. 65 Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 Greg grew increasingly withdrawn and critical as the day wore on. I tried tt get him to laugh at the 'Third World' qualities of the shoot, but his attitude remained grave and cool. Greg believes in absolute discipline and a tigh hierarchical structure during production. I, on the other hand, felt that in this case it was more important to keep the students alert, questing, active and free than to circumscribe them with heavy-handed directorial control and let them stew in the slough of resentment and lethargy characteristic of TV crews in the industry. I allowed Giulio Biccari to do a face-to-face interview with Hlengani. simply because he had a hunch that it might work (though it didn't) — despite an earlier decision to avoid that kind of interview. I allowed Andrew Worsdale to climb on to the roof of the concrete rooms and execute the 360-degree pan he was eager to do. (Part of which came in useful as a transitional device later, in the editing.) I encouraged Claire Swartzberg to do hand-held cutaways of anything that caught her eye as interesting: a stack of firewood with a rooster perched on it; the hand-drawn patterns on the walls; a child walking with a blue plastic bucket of water balanced on her head. All of this in the lags between setting up takes with Gladys and Hlengani. Soon, Greg did not want to hang around any more. He requested permission to take the Panasonic to the church and record the women singing. I was only too glad to give it: I knew how important it would be. (Ultimately, the entire musical soundtrack was to be taken from what was recorded that day.) But as Greg and Matthys swung the kombi round and drove off, I realised that a schism had occurred between them and me. I was sincerely sorry, but could do nothing about it. I had too much else on my hands at the time. In fact, I was in a real fix. My proudest acquisition for the shoot, the JVC 2000 E, was acting up. The long rough ride along dirt roads, together with that morning's dip through a vlei and then the slow jolting across acres of veld to the homestead, had disturbed the delicate back-focus mechanism, which was no longer relating in sync to the front-focus: which meant that the camera could not hold its focus properly, except in close-up. I tried to set it right several times, but I am the simplest and crudest of technicians. I learn machine-functions and maintenance slowly and painfully, if thoroughly. The back-focus was beyond me. As a 'software' person in a TV studio, I had been accustomed to relying on the trained engineers of the 'hardware' crew to keep the electronic machinery in trim, until now. And now I was sunk. Later that afternoon, too, the automatic iris jammed wide open. I switched to manual, but not before damage had been done to the recorded material. In all the pictures of Gladys, for example, there is a 'hot spot' on her forehead, a shiny black ripple, wriggling like a snake. That night I did not sleep. I was too 'wired up', as American movie makers say, by all the unpredictable contingencies on production. My head was teeming with all sorts of ideas, suppositions and wild guesses, as I tried to encompass and fortify myself with plans against whatever might lie in wait for us the next day. The chances of success were absurdly less than minimal. In a quarter of the time Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 66 originally set aside for it, we would have to try and document completely the Tiakeni factory at work, with a camera that was 809? useless. Was it worth continuing? It might be. If— and only if— this were to be a recce for a later, more carefully mounted production. After everyone else had turned in for the night, I lay outside, on my back in the grass, until I felt that you could well be looking down into the stars from here. I got up, and walked to a tree at the top of the hill. The valley was filled with giant shadows. With a keen sense of curiosity, I thought of Orson Welles, whom I jokingly regarded as my spiritual great-uncle, another insomniac who could never sleep while a movie of his was in production, but would stand at his hotel window and stare out, like a massive stranded hulk. tit 67 Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 Next morning, bright and early, Greg and Matthys set up the Panasonic outside the long lowslung building that was the Tiakeni factory, and shot our arrival in Rob's microbus. First the long avenue of trees, then the white bus as it appeared from the left and sped through between them, emerging into the open and heading straight at the camera for a while, then swinging around in a wide curve through the long grass and parking, finally, before the factory doors. In a moment, the students climbing out, carrying equipment, tripod, lights, camera .. It was, at last, our opening shot. As soon as I set foot in the factory, however, I wanted to thrust everything else out of my mind and concentrate solely on what I had worked out in advance: the laying out of the cloth, the printing, drying, lifting and baking — the factory processes that were to constitute the vital core of the documentary. This proved impossible until most of the student band had left for Johannesburg with Greg and Matthys in the battered blue kombi after morning tea. Then, with that great burden lifted, I felt I could get down to work. Only Siphiwe, Claire and Brenda had elected to stay when I said I was going to spend an extra day — or rather, an extra morning at Tiakeni, I couldn't afford a whoile day — in an effort to get things done. There was no time to set up the fluid head tripod and consider with care every shot. Often, I simply hoisted the JVC on to my shoulder, and went into close-up as soon as possible. If I grew tired, I would pass the camera to Brenda or Claire, knowing that sooner or later it would return to me. (I remember at one point drinking hot sweet tea from an enamel mug and eating a hunk of dry brown bread, and conscious of nothing more than the pleasantly icy touch of my shirt drying on my back.) That afternoon, in the vain hope that the Panasonic's colour qualities might just, by some freak of fate, prove in the end to be compatible with the JVC's, I sent Claire off with the small camera to do the outside shoots we could not cover: cutaways of the front of the factory; the dyeing of the cloth; the drawing of the patterns in the wet cowdung paste as it was spread across a courtyard floor. Using lights and the thumping Tiakeni generator, we worked into the night, recording Andries at his drill-press in the workshop, while Siphiwe on the Panasonic recorded us. As early as possible the next day we pushed on, but lunchtime brought the inevitable hiatus. '.'I haven't got what I wanted," I fretted aloud as I climbed into the driver's seat of the kombi. Nobody else said a word. We were all tired. I turned the key in the ignition, and the engine shuddered as it swung over and caught. Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 Post-production We got back to the campus at about eight that night. The first thing I did was to view some of the tapes. The back-focus problem was magnified on the bigger screen of the monitor in my office. There was no point in watching for long. I switched off the machine and sat back to reflect. If in any way I had unconsciously subverted the whole shoot (and I wasn't sure that I had), then it could only have been because I felt that it had been imposed on me, dropped into my lap with a coolly imperious air and the silent command: "Do it." The next day, when I saw Greg and Matthys together in the lecture room outside my office, I invited them in to discuss the shoot. It was very tense. Greg and I faced one another across the table. Matthys looked enormously uncomfortable. For a minute or two, we discussed things in general, and then, at last, Greg and I clashed. My temper flashed so high, it was ridiculous. I slammed the desk-top with my fist and demanded more autonomy. The confrontation only intensified antagonism, however. After the two of them had left, fatigue and a strong sense of futility overcame me. I dropped the videotapes in an untidy stack on the floor beside my bookcase, as though that was that. Later in the week, however, Greg and I had to report to the Tiakeni documentary to Dr van Zyl. My spell of insomnia had not yet lifted: I had not slept since the Saturday, five days and four nights before. I must have looked like the walking dead. My perceptions were almost hyper-acute. The discussion that followed was bitter and acrimonious. Greg turned on me. "You are the professional," he said. "Where was your script?" It was impossible to answer all the accusations that were fired at me. In any case, I was inarticulate, as I often am when called upon to deliver an explanation. But also, I was trapped by a circular argument: I was responsible for the production so, whether the production went right or wrong, I was responsible for the production. The underlying imputation of incompetence did not worry me, really. I knew I was capable of pulling through a standard documentary without too much difficulty. What I really wished I could understand was that obscure sense of certainty that I had felt, that intuitive condemnation of professionalist production methods that had come to me on site at the Mashemse homestead, that perception of incongruity, of one-sidedness. It would take me a long time to gain any clarity on that issue, however, and my efforts at the meeting sounded, even to my own ears, unintelligible. I repeated a previous offer to Greg to take part in the practical TV teaching, though. I even went so far as to offer him the directorship of the next major television project. At that, Greg gulped and looked astonished. Dr van Zyl must have thought that I was trying to get out. of directing myself, because he leaned forward and rapped out: "You are the television person. You must direct." 69 Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985 In the end, I emerged from that meeting feeling personally damaged in a way that seemed to point to eventual estrangement from the department, rather than to any promise of integration into it. In my office, over the next few weeks, I scratched up in chalk on the blackboard some random but recurring thoughts, that ultimately became the first tentative steps towards this essay. Aphorisms. Axioms. 'Watch it. It is not only the petty bourgeois value of professionalism that dominates television production, but the petty personal struggles that infect it.. . And the most difficult thing of all is to know how much you are yourself to blame.' Unlike the relations of production, personal relations do not yield to precise systematic exposition. Yet micro-level conflicts — affinities, too — can have make-or-break power over any production, though they leave the broader structures unaffected. The problem, therefore, is how to indicate the complexity of the personal in all its specificity, how to convey the play of relations within a situation in all its concreteness, in a theory of production. Here — as existentialist philosophers once did in trying to present the centrality of their thought to human experience — I have used the codes of the travelogue, personal reminiscence, even the novel. Although such codes are undoubtedly in the end inadequate to reality, too, for the internal coherence necessary to them as narrative form does not entail a corresponding order discernible in the world at a\]~ still, these codes are perhaps not altogether inappropriate, either. At least, they imply a dimension to the argument which can only be fully encountered at the level of interactive human experience, and not in the realm of pure systematic theory. Blocking them out one at a time in capital letters on the chalkboard, I sloganised my ideas as directives, except if they turned into questions: SAVE YOURSELF TROUBLE. DO YOUR RESEARCH THOROUGHLY. DON'T BUDGE WITHOUT A WRITTEN SCRIPT FROM A CLIENT. DON'T NEGLECT THE RECCE. IT CAN GIVE YOU VALUABLE EARLY INFORMATION. USE ONLY A CAMERA YOU KNOW. (You haven't got a good camera? Then get one, and get to know it. Without becoming an electronics whizzkid, be able to rectify its smaller troubles and tummyaches.) KEEP OPEN AT ALL TIMES THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN YOURSELF AND OTHERS INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT. TV IS ABOUT PEOPLE. (Is it? Then how come I know so much better the behind- camera contributors — Rob and Anne and Greg and Matthys, Siphiwe and my students — than the people the documentary is supposed to be about, the Tiakeni workers, whom I do not really know at all?)" Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 70 In the meantime, during their practical classes, the third-year students and I carefully viewed every inch of the footage shot on all fourteen of the worktapes. Interestingly enough, after the first few moments of watching the screen, it was possible to accommodate the soft focus in mid- and long-shot without noticeable displeasure — perhaps because there is a common precedent in the bad video copies of movies we all occasionally see. "I think we could edit something together out of that! It's not so bad," said Giulio Biccari in the end, and the others agreed. But I had already resolved to reshoot the documentary, if I could. enclitic 15/16 1984 SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE Critical Reconsiderations: Postmodernism, Hktory, Cultural Politic! enclitic is * review of film, literary *nd cultural criticism that provides an engaging forum ibr practical and tbeofetical discussion of changing issues in the Humanities and Social Sciences Jochen Schulte-Sasse Jiirgen Link Alan Singer WiadGodzich Lawrence Grossberg Samuel Weber and Klaus Zehelein Andrew T. I. Ross Denis Hollier Charles Sugnet Steven Ungsr Jonathan Romney The Use-Value of Popular Literature and Culture: Identification and Reflextvity m Adomo and Benjamin For Althusser Desire's Desire: Towards en Historical Formalism The Culture and Polkks of WHeracy "I'd Rthtr FttI Btd Then Sot Tnl Anything At AIT: Rock tnd Roll, PUmsurt snd Power Optr* dnd Drtmstmrgy m Frankfurt: Dossier I. The Death of Open? II. Taking Place: Towards 4 Theater of Dislocation Viennese Vetoes: Postmodernism, Feminism, History Zola and the Politics of Exclusion: Realism, NatwraMsm, and Pleasure literary Theory as Anti-Theory: Eagleton One Year Later Philosophy, Criticism, Cuhtml Practice: Debate and Institutional Reform in France Since 1968 Paul Scbreders Cat People: Commercial Cinema as Counter-Cinema Plus Reviews, Essays, Fiction, Poetry and Photography IS 00 200 Fohvell Hal) 9 Pleasant St. S E. Minneapolis, enclitic 71 Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 The Second Attempt Preproduction I arranged with Central Television Service for the TK-76, the three-tube ENG camera I myself knew best and had used on outside shoots when I had worked there. Also, the CTVS producer whose work I held in the highest regard, an American graduate in television production called Joan Wagenseill, was set to accompany me. We were to take the CTVS kombi, which was in perfect trim. I saw Dr van Zyl, and outlined my plans for the reshoot. "I didn't think it would be so simple!" he remarked, and wished me luck. Then there were some bad moments with Professor Charlton of the Screening Committee, as I have already described, but in the end the project was passed, received a phone call from Joan however, "Listen," she said, "I've got cold feet about the political thing. Kirsten's coming with you." Production Kirsten Lampbrecht was an ex-Rhodesian, inflamed by the loss of the war, in which he had fought for seven years. "Houties?" he said "I hate them. In the war, if they gave themselves up, we would just take them into the bush and shoot them. Once. Right here, in the head. Pow!" Surprisingly enough, he got on very well with Rob and Anne, who seemed to like his warmth, directness and cheerfulness. "Rob and Anne are great people," he told me more than once, and quite genuinely. He regarded them as sacrificing themselves for the factory which, he was certain, would fall apart as soon as they withdrew — "Just like Rhodesia". He was not in any way warm-hearted and open towards the Tiakeni workers however. He did not seem to see them at all, except as objects. Once, when Anne was calling to one of the women who did not seem to have heard her, he growled: "Hey! Don't you listen to the madam?" Anne blanched. "Don't call me the 'madam'!" she insisted, with a bright but awkward smile. But Kirsten sometimes forgot. "Just go and tell the madam we need her here." My own problems with Kirsten were somewhat different. Before joining the CTVS staff, he had worked for SABC-TV as a cameraman on outside broadcasts. Rugby, cricket, tennis. The odd news spot. An on- location feature series. OB camerawork in an actual-time relay tends to look excitingly rough and ready, but on analysis betrays itself as functioning invariably within the safest possible limits: long shot, midshot, close-up; long shot, midshot, close-up. Essentially, what is required of an OB cameraman is the Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 72 skill and the nerve to locateaction rapidly and unerringly, to hold it at the centre ot the screen, and then to follow it. zooming in to a close-up or out to long shot at the director's command. Perhaps, therefore, the slower and more painstaking process of discontinuous shooting with a single camera, the careful consideration given, tor instance, to the formulation and framing of each separate shot, were new to Kirsten, or otherwise foreign to his temperament. He needed to keep active. But I certainly had to instruct him in some of the simplest fundamentals ol cinematic shooting — like the importance of changing angle and image-size each time the camera was stopped during the shooting of action that was to be broken down into related shots — which he sometimes ignored, and which would have landed me with impossible complications in the editing, had I not had material from the first shoot to fall back on. Not that his ideas weren't sometimes good. The long slow pan and tilt down Irom the huts on the distant hillside to the factory in the foreground during the narration on the beginning of Tiakeni up to that present time, was all his. And his staunch technical knowledge proved useful too. When, at the commencement of our very first shoot, we discovered that the TK's back-focus was out, too, he spent half an hour meticulously resetting it, after which it focused perfectly. There was nothing, however, that Kirsten (or anyone else, I subsequentfy discovered) could have done about the fact that the camera's green tube began malfunctioning, making the whole image murky, smeared and noisy, and, of course, greenish. It was simply that the camera, after eight years of hard use, and having been in a seriously tncky and cantankerous condition for the past few months, had now slipped into its final decline. After the Tiakeni shoot, CTVS engineers made a concerted attempt to fix it. but it never went out on a shoot again, and was finally scrapped M\ defeat, too, was final. It was almost uncanny, like fate. It was as though I had put up a massive struggle to relaunch the documentary only so that the nightmare of faulty technology of the first shoot should be succeeded by the nightmare of faculty technology of the second. I became a totally pragmatic director, an organised head operating at a purely functional level, as I had been as an educational TV producer. Social and aesthetic considerations ceased to exist, and I applied rule-of-thumb but reliable practicev practices I knew could be counted upon never to fail, e.g. matchingthe visuals to the key statements in the script. In the early evening, we would review the material recorded that day and then, after supper, I would go over the next pan of the script that Rob had written, and break it down into a shooting script. Rob was keeping exactly one pace ahead of us each day with the script. As soon a* *c had shot one section, another would be ready. He did this so predictably that M, hen at four o'clock in the afternoon on our last day of shooting, he handed *"c a full new page. I was dismayed. The page was all about the committees vital to the administration of the co-op and could definitely not be left out. All I could Jo Was seat the people outside the factory in the large circle that they used for a Critical Art* Vol 4 No 1 1983 general assembly, and let Kirsten do a very lengthy pan around while one of the workers read the commentary on to the soundtrack. Rob held strongly to his original idea that the people must appear to be presenting themselves and their opinions fluently and authoritatively to camera, and wrote therefore in a simple and clear style that the people might themselves have used — except that the ideas were possibly too condensed and clear, when they would probably have been expressed more irregularly, repetitively and elliptically in normal conversation. With the written script in hand, I had then to contrive ways of getting the people to read or repeat it while facing the camera. It was this practice more than any other which made me realise that I was compromising the ethical codes of documentary-making for the sake of ideology. In one of the earliest scenes, for instance, where I, microphone in hand, approach Martha, as a representative of the workers' co-operative, and ask her to tell us about Tiakeni, she turns up her face and recounts: "Our name, Tiakeni, which in Tsonga means 'Build yourself up', tells the history of the co-op and it talks about what we would like in the future from our work here." But she has turned up her face only in order to read the words of the script as cast by an overhead projector on to a screen behind Kirsten. Like everyone else, Martha found it difficult to read or remember at the same time as presenting a natural assertiveness. The words were in English, anyway, and she was being called upon to act as though she were not acting — which she simply could not do. Her presentation became at once too didactic and declamatory. Despite repeated attempts, there was in the end no way she could relax and speak the words with the casual directness and strength the occasion demanded. That evening, when Rob saw take after take of Martha in close-up, the strain of concentration showing in every line of her face, he was irritated and disappointed. Although I explained that in the editing I would certainly cut away from her as soon as possible and begin to use my footage on the women at work, Rob remained dubious. Perhaps it was the essential artificiality and unconvincingness of Martha's presentation, not only in her face but in her voice, that seemed unlikely to be overcome. To me, it appeared that the internal contradiction of the method had destroyed it. The second attempt at shooting the Tiakeni documentary was characterised, therefore, by tight attention to the script, together with an unremitting determination to press on and complete the product, despite the demoralising failure of the camera to function properly. With the entire shoot recorded neatly on to only six worktapes — less than half the number thrown up by the first attempt — Kirsten and 1 left Tiakeni feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. We had been 'quite professional'. Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 Postproduction The completed videotape on the Tiakeni textiles co-operative is called Ngonyama Hi Tinwana Tingonyama. A Lion Is Other Lions: We Can Achieve Nothing Alone. The tape runs for 30 minutes, with sound on both channels. The majority of the sequences are coded in colour. A few are in black and white. The transition between the two chrominance modes can, however, cause techno- logical difficulties. Unless a most sophisticated videocassette recorder is used for the replay, the crossover from monochrome to colour (though never the other way round) can throw the colour-lock out of joint: the TV screen may for some seconds or even a full minute or more become divided into a blue side and a yellow, for instance. Considering the importance of the point being made by the change both of key and of content between black-and-white and colour, this mechanical problem can confuse the issue of the significance of contrasted colour modes for the viewer. It is therefore advisable in attempting a reply to use only the best machine available. Visual quality, despite an attempt in the editing to enhance colour reproduction and clarity of image by adjusting the exposure levels during a routing through the time base controller, remains more or less poor. Obviously, the problem had its source in the behaviour of the camera during the shoot, and is not in any way attributable to the actual physical qualities of the tape (a National NV-P26) itself — yet there is a moment during one of the sequences, a close-up shot of blue printing ink being mixed in a bucket, when a blemish on the mastertape and nothing else precipitates a flash and a break-up of the image, followed by a stretch of colour loss and image instability. Isolated as it is, the problem is not easily overlooked, and can adversely affect the viewer's grasp of what has been included narratively in the tape to convey a sense of the TV crew's struggle to get the equipment functioning properly, and what exactly are real but unfortunate snags and hassles with the tape he is watching. Uncertainty as to what constitutes intentional communication and what merely 'noise', can lead to a disengagement of attention, rather than the heightened critical awareness that the dialectical interplay of black-and-white and colour is meant to provide. As for audio quality, the sound recorded on location is generally at least passable, and the tape suffers only from the exigencies of environmental sound- fluctuation to be expected in such documentary production. At times, however, the outbursts of wild sound are destructive of entire sequences, as in the important interview with Rob Collins on his role in Tiakeni shot outside the factory in the middle of a group of workers during morning tea. Rob's voice, level and conversational and quiet, is so frequently drowned out by the teatime racket — tin mugs clattering, fowls being shooed away, people laughing uproariously or talking loudly in their own tongue — that the thread of the interview becomes lost, and again, confusion results. In the long run undoubtedly even more damaging to the sense to be made from the documentary, is the outcome of the basic directorial decision to make 75 Critical Am Vol 4 No 1 1985 up replies and explanations to be given in English by Vcnda- and Tsonga- speaking people addressing the camera. The indigenous accents are sometimes so broad and strong, and the delivery so wooden, that the viewer is hardprcsscd always to understand. The problem is compounded by the inevitable muffling of the voice that results from generational loss in the editing process. So. the viewer. instead of being able to exercise a TV-viewer's privilege and allow himself any depth of involvement he pleases in the programme he is watching, is placed in the uncomfortable position of straining to understand, constantly on the verge of finding something impenetrably obscure to the ear. Onlv tln> m «i hi«M>. motivated — perhaps politically committed — viewer will remain attentive throughout. Transitional devices in the Tiakeni videotape are restricted to simple cutting, because of the limitations of the editing suites at Central Television Service where, across three months of night and weekend work, the mastertape was finally put together. To begin with, there were twenty worktapes. Until a solid familiarity with all the recorded material had been satisfactorily attained, these tapes were submitted to repeated viewings. Then the key tapes were selected and viewed again, the counter readings of different takes noted down, and a profile sketch of the possibilities available drawn up roughly on paper. This made the actual work at the editing suites quicker, more precise and efficient. Cinematically, one of the most successful sequences is the dyeing of the cloth. The great primitive barrel-like contraption over which the cloth is draped as it is wound and dragged through the deep-saffron waters of the enamel bath, is shot in high angle against the sky, and as the handle is turned and the wooden-slat wheels spin, and the orange-and-black cloth is spread out and the light strikes through it, the women's voices singing rise on the soundtrack as though in support of the work, imbuing it with an energy that is at once vital, earthy and heroic. The worst sequence, on the other hand, is certainly that interminable pan around the people seated in a circle on the grass outside the factory in the late afternoon, while the voice-over explains monotonously the value of the committees to the running of the co-op. The roll-up of printed words in the very first take establishes explicitly that the documentary was conceived as a student project — thus allowing a wide margin of tolerance for technical mishaps! But the black-and-white footage also becomes a frame, a bracketing structure, which to some extent objectifies the documentary as product, as something constructed, put together. There is no way at all in the tape of escaping the knowledge that there was once this group of young people who made the programme we are watching. Which personalises the programme, too, making it less public and authoritative, less like TV. The student footage was actually patched together from the two tapes of fairly wild shooting on the Panasonic. The only criterion I applied to the question of Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 whether a particular image and particular words — from different circumstances, perhaps even from different tapes — should be connected together or not was whether they would then cohere and contribute towards a sequence. During the opening scene of the students unpacking and setting up the equipment in the factory, for instance, there is a shot of someone (Giulio Biccari) handling the portable monitor, and saying strongly (Matthys's voice, inadvertently recorded while he and Greg were waiting outside for the microbus to arrive): "Hey, wait, I haven't got a picture here, man!" Similarly, later in the same sequence, the clear voice calling. "Yes! I'm getting a picture," is Lee Harvey's, but the image we are concentrating on is that of Claire Swartzberg, turning towards the factory table with the camera in position on her shoulder — followed immediately by the first cut to colour, and the women entering at the far end of the factory with the long roll of cloth to lay out along the table. In the end, however, the most important element to emerge from the Tiakeni documentary is contained in the dialectic of black-and-white against colour, in the inclusion of the process as well as the product in the programme being viewed — which challenges the viewer not to rest with either but to think of the ways in which they are interrelated. Not only, as a semiotician would, of all the paradigmatic and syntagmatic choices that might have gone into the production, but also of the hazards of chance and the mountains of planning, the struggle with equipment and the co-operation of otherwise-unrelated people in working together towards achieving the production — in short, of cinema production as material, cultural action, again. The Tiakeni documentary also formally subverts the naive realist's window- oh-the-world notion of the nature of documentary, by being awkward and rough and unequal in quality, and blatant about the act of shooting it — whereas the naive realist would suppress not only the processes of production but also all else that might get in the way of the illusion of direct access to reality by cinematic means. Jump cuts instead of invisible cutting, for instance. The Tiakeni documentary has been shown in France, at a conference on development in the Third World and, Rob tells me, was well received. Only, some people would have liked more of the song at the end. At the end, it is late in the afternoon and the workers move away across the veld, going home, and one woman's voice rises above them in a yearning hymn: If you believe and I believe. Then Africa will be saved. And Africa will be saved... There are a few more stanzas repeating the same simple words. The workers vanish. On the screen, a fade down to darkness. The voice vanishes. I. too, have seen people sitting pensively at the end of that song — after a long documentary with all the problems that I have outlined above. And that's when I think that the message has been perceived and that the attempt is worth it. 77 Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 4 5 Barouw, E. 1974: Documentary. A History of the Non-Fiction Film. OUP. New York, p2X8 Hoberman, J. 1982: "Veni Vidi Video". Film Comment, (May-June),^34 Gilbert, C. 1982: "Reflections on An American Family", Studies in Visual Communication. V o l 8 N o I , p 2 4. Ibid. p52 Combes, P and Tiffin, J. 1978: Television Production for Education - A Systems Approach, Focal Press, New York. Ibid. Information on cover-flap Ibid. pl3 Hood, S. 1980: On Television. Pluto, London. p33 Millerson, G. 1979: The Technique of Television Production. Focal Press, London, p275 Ibid. p276 6 7 8 9 10 11 Millerson, G. 1976: Effective TV Production. Focal Press, London, pi 1 12 Millerson, op cit. 1979, pl3 13 14 15 16 17 18 Webster, F. The New Photography: Responsibility in Visual Communication. Calder, London, Ibid. p276 Zettl, H. 1976: Television Production Handbook. Wadsworth, California. pl87 Hood, op cit. p35 Slaughter, C. 1980: Marxism, Ideology and Literature, MacMillan, London, p4 Hoberman, op cit. p34 19 pp4-5 Sekula, A.: "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary. (Notes on the Politics of Representation.)". Photostat Ibid Notes and References Behind the First Step 1 2 3 20 21 Millerson, op cit. 1979. p283 22 Mercer, D. I98b Collected TV Plays, Volume I. Calder, London, p236 23 24 25 26 Wollen, P. 1972: Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Seeker and Warburg, p65' 27 Ibid. p238 Quoted by Stuart Hood, op cit. p57 Tyrell, R. 197^ The Work of the Television Journalist. Focal Press, London, p57 The reversal of standards is not simply a struggle on the plane of aesthetics, of popular art against highbrow autonomous art, but symptomatic of a far deeper dislocation of values. Sekula, ibid, writing specifically of American television, has put the point cogently: "with the triumph of exchange value over use value, all meanings, all lies, become possible". . 28 Mercer, op cit. p238 29 30 31 32 33 34 Ibid. p238 Quoted by Sekula, op cit. Above, pOO Quoted by Len Masterman, 1980: Teaching About Television. MacMillan, London, pi37 Ibid. pl39 See Paulo Freire, 1970: Cultural Action for Freedom. Harvard Educational Review, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ibid, pviii Freire, P. 1972: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Harmondsworth, pp46-47. Nichols, B. 1981: Ideology and the Image. Indiana, Bloomington, p237 Ibid. ppl79ff Sekula, op cit. Barnouw, op cit. p288 Sekula, op cit. Nichols, op cit. p 184 Above, pOO 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Critical Arts Vol 4 No 1 1985 78 44 Quoted in Craig. D 1975: Marxists on Literature: An Anthology. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p527 Sekula, op eit. 45 46 Monaco, J. 1981: How To Read a Film. OUP, New York, p 11 47 48 Two Routes to Tiakeni 1 Ibid, pi 1 Above, pp 1 -2 of preamble Rosenthal. A. 1971: The Ne»- Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making. University of California Press. Los Anceles, pi Production pamphlet on the JVC KY-2700E and KY-2(XM)BE. p5 Ibid. p5 Agee. ,J. An f:\tract from Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Photostat 2 3 4 Other Useful References Consulted Eagleton, T. 1976: Marxism and Literary Criticism. Methuen. London Fiske, J. and Hartley. J. 1978: ReadingTelevision. Methuen. London Hunt, A. 1981: The Language of Television. Methuen, London Lewis, P M. 1978: Community TV and Cable in Britain. BFI, London Mackie. R. (ed) 19X0: Literacy and Revolution: the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Pluto, London Marcuse, H. 1979: The Aesthetic Dimension. MacMillan, London Newcomb, H. (ed.) 1976: Television: The Critical View. OUP, London Pierce, C M. 1978: Television and Education. Sage, Beverley Hills, California Ravage, J W. 1978: Television: the Director's Viewpoint. West view Press, Boulder Robinson. R. 1978: The Video Primer. Quick Fox, New York. Smallman, K. 1969: Creative Film-Making. Collier, New York. Tomaselli, K G. 1980: "The Teaching of Film and Television Production: A Statement of Philosophy and Objectives", Perspectives in Education, Vol 4 No 2, pp65-74 Tomaselli[ K G. 1982: "The Teaching of Film and Television Production in a Third World Context: The Case of South Africa", Journal of the University Film and Video Association, Vol 34 No 4, ppl-13 Tomaselli, K G and Hayman, G P. 1984: Perspectives on the Teaching of Film and Television Production. Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. See especially chapters by Hayman: "Television in Journalism: Problems, Aims and Solutions"; "Cinema in Africa Must be a School" interview with Mahama Traore: Burns: "Film and Video Theory in Television Production Manuals"; and van Zyl: "Beyond Film and Television Studies: Which Jobs for Whom?" Watson, I. 1979: How to Shoot a Motion Picture. MacMillan, London Williams, R. 1977: Marxism and Literature. OUP, London Zettl 1973: Sight. Sound and Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. Wadsworth ?9 Critical Aits Vol 4 No 1 1985