An Approach to Afrikaans Film for one thing. the purely aesthetic The frames are of two kinds. The pages of for that matter, In having identified kitsch, more need be said; and there is little Robert J Greig Introduction Among ways of regarding South African films, derision is most popular. aesthetic terms, this is entirely justifiable: unless one wishes to dignify it, no doubt that most South African films are kitsch. Yet the problem is a little more intricate. like the method, not least of all in a post- judgement is itself questionable, colonial society where aesthetics imply politics. for this reason, if for no others, the ungraceful eagerness with which our intellectuals employ received frames of criticism is not without interest. first, there is the dismissive comparison with the monuments, real, alleged or apparent, of Western film and holding up these monuments as goals. whatever film journal seems to be up-market come in useful. Whether one can actually and seriously compare our works with the products of developed industrial societies is still an open question. whether our works can escape such comparison is as open a question. One argument for making the comparison hinges on the mode of film production. Here and elsewhere, it is an industrial process, or can be viewed as such, whose division of labour and marketing can be safely compared to the division of labour and marketing of, for examijle, motor cars. But the analogy is only an analogy. film may serve functions but is not tangible. of entirely different kinds. enthusiastic gush of reviewer's jargon. When the house lights go down, the analogy with industrial pr~cess~s mu~t perforce yield to another image of film - that of the network of relat1onsh1ps w~th the society, as represented by the viewer. This network is immensely.compl1cated, often subtle and probably inexhaustible: an adequate theory of f11m would have to entJrace the complexity and subtlety ,and range as best it could •. T11isis where the second frame of criticism comes into play. often does so in reaction against the preciousness of aestheticism. the dedicated, up-front follower of the latest that of the tough neo-Marxist, left Bank thinking - allDWi~g for the five year time lapse that intervenes. All that actually happens is that, instead of tuning into the London hot-line, a snobbery has been attached to other, less familiar sources. This is not to deny the value of insights gained from homage to the greats, from nagging cultural inferiority or from a desire to play the international guru slumming As long as our film is an aspect of a borrowed it among the hicks back home. culture and as long as it is a Whites-only affair, this will continue. The crucial need, of course, is to connect ways of seeing film to the ways life is actually lived in South Africa. bound to be indifferent. a You cannot take a film with you, except in the A car has functions; it is tangible: The functions, in any case, are Unfortunately, it The mien is Until this happens, our film criticism is 14 that, trle structuralist, se.~iotjc, ~~~r;(i:.tt autc~r~st, That may be a lane The war film is an example. Tomaselli's argument is as follows: they explain to the Black audience the fact of class/race domination. ~:.en trlc':'.] tic. ; 1terary ~r even - to use a current ~'..,ear-word- tr.t: pr,,(.crit. apprc.;:nto _outh Afr1can films is as good or bad, useful cr useless as any other. ihe most on~ can hope for is,that whatever approach is provisionally adopted be free of Jargon and access~ble ~o ncn-specialists. r:q~est, but the ways of see1ng WIll only change usefully when the Objects of Y1S10n do substantially. This brings us to a discussion of the paradigm employed by Keyan lomaSI'lli (1979a; .1979b). the genre film embodies Afrikaans a~d afflrms the existing social relationships of a given society. fl~ms, dependent for their eventual screening on investment capital, distrib- u~lon and state approval, express the dominant social ideology. "Breakaway" fllms, on the other hand, by postulating alternatives, challenge that ideology. Si~ilarly, films made for the Black market project the ideology of class domin- atlon: Afr!kaans films, he notes, are also beginning to reflect a disintegration of the soc1ety on which the ideology is based. Until recently, the Afrikaans film was characterised by social withdrawal; more recent films reflect a conflict of social roles. Tomaselli concludes that the "goal" of the Afrikaans film is "anaesthesia" and its function "the externalization of a disintegrating social structure, the result of inevitable forces arising outside Afrikanerdom". Afrikaans films and the market. It should also be remarked here that the financial plight of the Afrikaans filmmaker is a direct result of his unwillingness to separate himself from the ideology-forming structures of society. In other words, the filmmaker has tended to automatically accept the fact that he should go to Afrikaans financiers for capital; should anticipate censorship; and should make films with an eye to the history of Afrikaans films. He has been reluctant to perform market research and has therefore tended to confuse political and cultural attitudes with audience attitudes. Obviously, these are intertwined but there is a difference of emphasis. Whereas political attitudes tend to be rigid, market attitudes tend to be more fluid. Katrina for example, was perceived by the Nationalist establishment as controverslal and, perhaps, abhorrent. But Katrina was seen and enjoyed as a different kind of South African film, a welcome-rarity. On the rare occasions that filmmakers have tried to appeal to the market for "different" kinds of South African films, they have emphasised the political controversy implicit in the subject matter. interference and the timidity of distributors. stressed the difference of the film, as a film, the results might have been different. Because of their incestuouS links with capital and government, the Afrikaans filmmakers have tended to assume that capital and government are the audiences they want to appeal to. The result has been a static view of the ~inema-going audience, one that assumes that the audience wants cultural or polltlcal re- assurance; and one that, inevitably, leaves the field open for overseas film- makers who have no exaggerated conceptions of their social roles. Inevitably, this has provoked state If, on the other hand, they had 15 New and Old. Secondly, if we are Several observations are pertinent. Up till recently, the group Conflict is usually in the form of This outsider is He is tempted to abandon his Afrikaans films: The.first q~estion that comes to mind is whether we are faced with a new ~frlkaans f11m.or the old A!rikaans.film.in new clothes. lndeed faced w1th a new AfrlKaans flTm, ln what ways is it new? Tomasel~i notes that the standard structure of the Afrikaans film is based on a confllct ~etw:en the outsider and the group. representat~ve 15 based upon a farm, usually a Cape wine farm. usuall~ ~ clty-dweller and often a woman. compet1t~on for the soul of the pure young farmer. blonde flancee, also a farm girl, for the outsider, frequently a flashy and unscrupulous city girl. This Seems to be the usual formula. First, the insider-outsider conflict is not peculiar to Afrikaans film, least of all as a conflict between urban and rural values. The conflict seems to be archetypical or, to be more precise, it is found in modern English and American fiction; it runs through European melodnama; and it is the mainspring of Black township plays. Without detailing the history of this theme, one can say it is common in the narrative arts of industrialising countries, and even more strongly in th~ arts of industrial countries. It seems that a common feature of the urban consciousness is a tendency to explain itself nostalgically in terms of a Fall from pastoral Grace, with all positive values assigned to town and negative ones assigned to country. As George Steiner V971 ) has remarked, if there is any recurrent ~th through Western art, it is ~at lives in amity with man and nature. discontent and offers hope of a remedy in return. film performs. However, to remark that a myth is generally found does not account for its specitic and different usages. {This is the point where most of our local luminaries of cultural life duck out. The heights of Shakespeare, Bergman et a1., however well-travelled by better minds th~n theirs still provide a~ irresistible temptation to the neo-colonial-sensibility which, at bottom, lS as profound as an American tourist's~ To explain the precise relevance of the Eden ~th' to Afrikaners, one must look at their history.' (The distance between the history and the Eden ~th is an. indication of the nature of the ideology. Ideology is, in a sense, a s~lectlve reading of history. To put it another way, for an ideD1Dgy.to exist, h1s~ory must be revised, parts turned to ~th, the rest discarded llke soggy port10ns of an old apple.) Two versions of histo~ One suggests that, once upon a time, the Afrikaner was the independe~t ma~ter of his own pastoral destiny. He lived, as is common in myths, in amlty.wlth nature and his surroundings. Ne1ther These included his Coloured servants. Blacks nor the English distu~ed running of a Fall from the Garden of Eden, where man The myth offers an explanation of urban co-exist in what may be called "the Eden.film" •. These functions the Afrikaans the idyll. i.. ...... ,.' • , ...... - _ - ~ 16 What is significant about individual identity. :~j5implie~, too, the absence of tne internecine quarrels t~at characterise to onglns. It lS essentially a myth in revolt against the The presence of the urban visitor is an It admits the fact ,frlkaner hlstory; the absence of the need for the Great Trek and the various oars out of which the Afrikaner grew, as Afrikaner. ~ myth cannot be dated, of course. It takes place "once upon a time" ("in il1ud temp~re", as.Mirce~ Eliade (1928) calls it). thlS myth lS tha~ ~t denles .the existence of the Afrikaner in returning so ngorously consciousness of The.second version admits the Fall. admlssion of chronological history and of social forms. of the Trek, of urbanisation and concedes the limitations of Eden. The .second ~ie~, also implicit in what Tomaselli calls "the key structure of AfClk~ans f?lm , portrays the urban Afrikaner as threatening and malevolent, Usually the urban visitor is antagonistic to the natural ThlS 1S a glven. harmony of relationships on the fann. The visitor is usually a woman and characterised by icons of a foreign way of life. She wears nail and face paint; she drives an open car; she "throws herself" at the man; she is disrespectful to the matriarch on the farm; and she i~ disapproved of by the servants. (Again, it should be remarked, that these characteristics are not peculiar to such figures only in Afrikaans films. Every Mills and Boon novel, for example, contains a villain with such equipment.) The accent of villainnesses A significant feature of this figure is her aCCent. in Afrikaans films is usually the artificial, precious, slightly Frenchified accent of Waterkloof, Pretoria. It is contrasted with the earthy Boland accent. (There is an additional irony here: Afrikaans actresses, born and bred in the Transvaal, frequent travellers abroad and to all intents and-purposes detribal- ised, have told me that their popularity depends in part on the ability to assume a Boland accent. This apparently says to the audience that although the actress belongs to a slightly disreputable profession, she is nevertheless in tune with the traditional verities of the Afrikaner:) In the context of Afrikaans films, however, the villainness is identified ambiguously. speaking actor in the role of villain or play the villains role in English. However, the verbal signs to an Afrikaans audience are that the villain is an outsider - a non-Afrikaner. Whether the villain is a fallen angel or an alien proper is unclear. For example, it is possible to read this as a sign that the Afrikaner is split into two streams: Certainly, this is defensible. In terms of this, the Eden film portrays a clash within cultures and a reaffirmation of traditional values. But in so doing, it acknowledges the fact and the potency of the urban culture; it admits a strain of South African history which contains the Great Trek, the dispossessio~ of the . Afrikaner, the ~igration from the country to the town; the modernisat10~ of South Africa - and the capability of the outsider to destroy the insiders way of life. An alternative reading is at the level of myth, where the Afrikaner is port,'ayed as rural, threatened by the modern, urban world and yet, through his fidelity to traditional values, able to counter this threat. the urban and the rural and that these are antagonistic. The Afrikaans director will not be 50 blatant as to cast an English- , ,- ~ 17 The the boeredoqter is blonde, chaste The boeredogter is markea, from the beginning, But the link with the villainess is is a witch, the boeredogter a mother' the but the boereseu~ as ---------- The villainess The pojnt of this discussion is that one has to tread warily in stating that the Eden film is either a clash between cultures or a clash within a culture. A c~ucial factor i~ de~iding is the audience. The question is, how does the aud1ence see the v,lla,nness and how is the audience intended to see her? F~rst~ the ~illainness is contrasted with the blonde boeredogter. v1lla:ness 1S dark.a~d sexy and free-thinking; and llnked to trad:t1onal values. as a proper ~ompanlon for the bQe(eseun. sexual and v1olent. boere~eun as boereseun is destined far the boeredogter, ,nd1Vldual 1S drawn to the villainess. is portrayed, therefore, as the outward manifestation of indiv- The villainess In terms of the challenge id~alism, of the forces that threaten group identity. Literally and figuratively, she th,S poseS.to.the farm, she must be destr~yed. does not f1t 1n: allowed to remain, she wl1l tear down the structures of authority and traditional values whiCh the farm represents. To this extent, then, the outsider-insider structure is a replay of a recurring theme in Afrikaner history - the tension between ~he individual and the group. At the same time, this structure seeks to explain existing conflicts by suggesting that the conflict began with the move from the farm. And finally, the structure is allegorical, depicting, as a warning, the danger that outsiders pose to the group identity, and the continuing value of rural-based traditional values. Functions From this, One can hazard a guess about the functions of such films. A limitation is Our 1ack of knowledge about audiences. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that in asserting traditional values, seen at This is chiefly source. the Eden film reinforces such values where they are held. in the country district. where there is something of a literal connection between the life of the viewer and life depicted on SCreen. In the case of the urban viewer, the function is more complex. given the short time that the Afrikaner has been urbanised. that the urban Afrikaans viewer retains a physical memory of the farm. have grown up on one or migrated from one to the city~ at the very least. his parents or grandparents would have had that direct knowledge. Though within living memory. the relationship between the film farm. ~den, ~nd the surroundings of the urban dweller is indirect. Eden has metaphor1cal tlnges. Thus ~he functionof Eden films for the city film-goer is nostalgic. viewers. the Eden film will fulfill the functions that pastoral poetry fulfllled for a Restoration Court: - it provides a stylised set of values, etched w~th quaintnes~ a never-never 1and~ for the contemplation of the viewer •. The function. then is to provlde values Whlch are, as it were, preserved in amber. The viewer can choose whether ~~ ~ot to ~ke them and his world. That discretionary power llmlts thelr the connectionbe~n effectiveness as ideology. On the other hand, it could be argued that it is upon those values that the ideology objection to that remainder. For so~ it Is a reco1lection of things past; it represents lhe objection that Afrikaans films are .crude" is an It is likely, He knows farms, he may is based. 18 loIar Film 'tr 'omase11i's (1979.;1979b) thesis seems to be that the war film is a response to external circumstances and the reflection of a disintegrating social structure. ihe move is from the slightly obsessive privatization of the Eden film to the film that deals with a conflict of social roles. If evolution has occurred, it is within the conventions of the love-story genre. But emphases have changed and it seems that the Afrikaans film has reached the point where the genre itself is dissolving, revealing the tentative outlines of a new one. A genre breaks down according to an alter- This process is by no means simple. ation of existing social pressures.1 The indication of either of these, in a work of art, may be as subtle as a change of locale or as obvious as three acts of a play instead of five. Nor are casual effects easily traced. Rather than talkin9 of a change in social circumstances leading to a change in a work of art, it could be more helpful, if less precise, to use the analogy of an electrical field which includes ideas, human behaviour, institutions and works as different manifestations of the field. The problem here is partly the problem of using a language which seems bound to subject-object relations. The Social Circumstances The obvious change in the last few years has been the intensification of the war on the border. The facts of this are generally known; suffice to say that may white South Africans feel threatened by the fact of the war "on the border"; and because it is a guerilla war, the exact position of the border is unknown: the term "border" indicates a locale potential or actual conflict and not a political or geographical or topographical division. This means. then, that "the farm" (see Tomaselli, 1979bp.39) is no longer secluded and safe, no longer a shrine of group values. potential area of conflict: Yet the war has exacerbated racial thinking: Black and White, however tactfully it is couched in terms of communism versus capitalism. or bad versus good. Because of this, though, the definition of the Afrikaner has had to widen; foreigner aRd outsider no longer mean merely non-Afrikaner: The effect, in Afrikaans films, has been to alter the insider-outsider axis. outsider now becomes a dark, inscrutable and inhuman enemy: to portray the outsider would entail humanising him and this would imply at least a partial denial of the category of enemy. 'Caricature offers little scope to the film-maker because it depends upon rigid ,and static relations to what has been caricatured. in the action sequences of war films. But a large portion of war films is the :portraya1 of relations between characters on the inside. This is one of the chief differences between the Eden and the war film. focus of the former was the relationship between insider and outsider; the focus ~f the latter is on relations between insiders, in the context of a war against the outs'ide. outsiders are Black. The These relations are portrayed it, too, is a border. The farm, like the city, is a it is perceived as a struggle between The 19 The audience The industry The actors Thus the audience for Changes in the Film Industry It would be wrong to attribute this change solely to the war. factors in the film industry are at work too. a. Though, by large, the filmmakers are the same and distribution and censorship barely changed, the audience is different from what it was. Because of TV, the rural drive-in audience, the mainstay of the Afrikaans film in the country has shrunk. The urban Afrikaner apparently now has an aversion to Afrikaans films. In any case, they are not felt to compete with overseas films in terms of entertainment or technical skill. In addition, for some sections of the urban Afrikaans audience, it is unfashionable to go to Afrikaans films -a sign of being a Qlaasjapie. the Afrikaans film diminished: the war, with 1ts associated issues of patriotism, provided an opportunity for filmmakers to recapture the audience. b. An increase in availability of foreign product and a desire in the industry to capitalise on this, cut the amount of viewing time available to the local industry. The industry also showed signs of feeling that only films which would also succeed overseas were a worthwhile financial; the tendency for finance was therefore to back overseas directors making films in English. Then, Ster-Kinekor, the major distributors. announced that they would enter prod- uction (see Tomaselli, I979a,~.2~, effectively creating a monopoly that excluded independent filmmakers, making it hard for them to secure resource, human and financial. c. Why should an actor spend six weeks on location earning R3 000 to R4 000 in a leading role in a film so bad that his future career might be damaged when a series of commercial slots on TV will guarantee him stage work and even an income of R36 000 over three years? d. The days when the Afrikaans critics loyally praised even the worst Afrikaans films are gone. than English-speaking In any case, changes in the newspapers generally put the power of drawing audiences, English and Afrikaans, in the hands of a single evening newspaper. their critics praised Afrikaans films, few members of the urban public believed them. (2) Changes in the Films Superficially, the way Afrikaans films adapted to changed circumstances were dramatic. intended for overseas consumption; the local rip-off of the overseas success; and the war film, which had elements of both. The villainness became a black guerilla and an urbanised stay-at-home comtemplating I future in Houston, Texas. If anything. Afrikaans critics are more damning of Afrikaans films But that is not the only change. More different kinds of films were made: the local production also The Afrikaans press critics. Other important And even when 20 Like Afrikaans films, this drama was based on forms The stereotypes comparatively few war films have been made. may therefore be presumptuous. IS in the various guises assu~~d by the old fem~le siren that the chief The men pair up as twins, one tough and hard, the other In the Eden film, the outsider-woman died; in the war film, :t :lffcrences of the war film lies. ,'~radoxically, in order to discuss this, one must first discuss the "new" male ~,cro. One caveat: To generalise about them, their heroes or their villains On the other hand, it is true that the pattern ofa genre are set early; what follows is a sequence of minor variations. The New Male Hero In war films, partly because war is perceived as a male activity, women are portrayed "at home". sensitive and soft. the soft, sensitive man dies. Those females portrayed in war films are matriarchal figures - the blonde boeredogter of the Eden film. (At the end of Grensbasis 13, significantly enough, the boeredogter receives a medal on behalf of her dead man.) Again, it is worth referring again to Western art generally. are similar.3 An illuminating parallel is between Afrikaans films and early modernist drama in Europe. whose sources were in a rural~urban tension and whose audiences were recently urbanised as the result of the Napoleonic Wars. In the drama, Woman is Cast as an antagonist, a destroyer of civilisation, a force of nature in much the way that the Afrikaans villainness is opposed to the manmade farm - though, of course, the outsider is a city girl. (4) Woman is usually killed or commits suicide or is expelled from human society in modernist drama, leaving man alone. with men. Similarly, the Eden film shows the elimination of the female threat. The war film portrays the resurrection of it as terrorist and as feminized male; both must die for the sake of South Africa. The latent theme of the war film is a homosexual relationship. The relationship is marked by caring, emotional generosity, continual physical proximity, if not intimacy, and understanding. Yet it is illicit, not because it is homosexual, but because it is a display of personal feeling in a context that apparently demands group loyalty. This tension is solved by the death of the feminine partner. The underlying conflict in Afrikaans films is between the safe tepidity of sentiment - the blonde boeredogter being the subject of this - and the steamy dangers of sex (the dark ravlsher). In the war film the terms of the conflict are modified, but the outlines are the same: it is conflict about reconciling the claims of group identity and responsibility with individual impulse, feeling and sympathy. In the war film the conflict is couched in the symbolism of a man divided and having to lose that side of himself that might threaten his group membership. the extent that war is meant to involve the individual as a member of society, the personal ties are anti-so~ial.5 Both literally and symbolically, Afrikaans war films deal with civil war: The next phase in the drama portrays men within the body politic and within the individual. To 21 The trauma this reflects, if "trauma" is not too inexact a The Buddy System There are strong resemblances between Afrikaans war films and the American genre known as "the road movie" which is characterised by "the buddy system". The prototype of the buddy system in the relationship between Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer where the pair "light out", away from the voracious power of a woman who represents civilisation and its constraints. As leslie Fiedler (1974) has noted, the road movie developes the role of Jim, the Negro servant who, ideally, is the companion of the hero escaping from a female world. Again, in the road movie, the relationship between the men is doomed by a hostile world and therefore idealised. Male bonding ends in death and the triumph of society. Some Conclusions The most striking feature of the Afrikaans war film is the emergence of a homo- sexual theme. metaphor for conflict, is the same as that represented by the death of bad women in Eden films. At one level, it could be described as a trauma about sex and lost opportunities for love in a society that demands the inadequate substitute of sentiment for its male members. At another, it is a trauma about the competing claims of private feeling, collective responsibility and the demands for sexual gratification. 2. To claim that the "goal" of Afrikaans film is "anaesthesia" says too little and too much. not discussed, embodied. Some of these can be traced back to the structures of the society, others only reveal themselves in a comparative analYSis of symbols, associations, themes, characters and situations. In other words, a social analysis of South African film may tend to reflect the judgements on the society, unless that analysis includes one of cultural ikons. 3. It is the lack of artistic control that makes~pular An analysis that social significances and ambiguities and even coa=radictions. the risk of blurring many . proceeds inductively, rather than deductively, ~ Though Afrikaans films do refTect a ruling ideology, they also la~ers They also include reflect a broad cultural tradition in Western narrative art. doubts about that ideology though, to be sure, those doubts are often buried in Symbolism. 4. 1n making broad statements about their "goal" and their "function". Perhaps, as with most mass media, one must examine not the medium but th~ relation- ship between it and the audience and the relationship with different audlences. To not do so, is to run the risk of assuming that the goal, of, say, Afr~kaans films is to purvey a reigning ideology when, in fact. the ideology explalns the way the film looks - and not how an audience perceives it. 5. Africa is severely restricted by • reluctance of organisations Finally, all significant research fnto the role of the narra~ive arts ~n South 11ke Ster-Klnekor. The existence of conflicting messages in Afrikaans films must exact wariness Within the grave limitations of a genre, crucial problems are, if into one. art such a mine of 22 ar,jthe Perfonnina Art~ (ou"cils to e'.!letheir mark~t research public. by Paladin The S A Film African Studies Institute Com- their figures will not be Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. The Myth of the Vanishing Indian. In Bluebeard's Castle. ..,:.~::.(,t ~ry aM :n.J',e tnem do so, w; th U,e assurance U,at -.,.010u51y u5ed, is a major task. :trtainly, it is beyond the capability of the individual who is not baded ,rostltuticnalsupport. And, sadly, in South Africa, few institutions are Interested in supportin~ such research. Peferences Eliade, M. 1928: fiedler, L. 1974: Steiner, G. 1971: Tomaselli, K.G. I979a: cunications No.7, Wits University Press, Johannesburg Tomaselli, K.G. I979b: "Ideology, the State and South African Film" in Art and tiberation, NUSAS, Cape Town Tomaselli, K.G. I979c: "The Border War: No.5, pp.I6-I7 !!Qill I. Here one heads for a chicken-egg argument. 2. Cinematic Reflections". Faber Industry. Which comes first? Its effect seems to be chiefly negative: The Star's Tonight entertainment guide canaffect the fortunes of minority- appeal films adversely. is impervious to reviews, however. For example, plays by Ibsen, Wedekind, toria and Strindberg Hedda in Hedda Gabler; in A Dolls House etc. E.M. Forster's remark: country and betraying a friend, I would without hesitation, betray mY country" is an unconscious acknowledgement of the mutually exclusive claims. Lulu in the Wedekind plays of the same name; Nora "If I were given the choice between betraying ~ a Superman --- Reality, Vol.II, 3. 4. 5. FRONTLINE "02 Dun.ell, 35 Joriu.en StrUt, Brurnlontein. p.O.lo. 32219 8rumfonteln 2017 Tel. 38.6831 THE NEW MAGAZINE FOR ALL THINKING SOUTH AFRICANS. R6 A YEAR, FOR TEN ISSUESOF INFORMATIVE. LIVELY. THOUGHT.PROVOKING READING. 23