to happen more or less when you expect i~

Die Moord
Johan Bruwer
DIE MOORD, Chris Pretorius' second short film, is curiously frustrating.
It
leaves a sense of incompleteness, the feeling that you've "missed something"
- or, more expressly, that the director has been unfairly and wilfully obscure.
In fact, Pretorius claims that one of his main objectives was precisely to
frustrate the viewer "by turning the camera away whenever something important
seemS about to happen".
This objective is reached by the film as a whole, but
Quite a lot does happen in the
P~etorius: statement is not literally true:
f11m and 1S ~
Much less "happened" in his first film Angss; - yet, paradoxically, it seems
more "complete" than Die Hoord.
This is can inned by sampling viewer reaction.
Angsst - a simple portrayal of a young man poised between two apparent choices:
anIIJnOressing girl and a masked male death-figure - left audiences not so much
bewildered as stimulated into trying to analyse their emotional involvement in
this portrayal.
Apparently, viewers accept the whole of Angsst as a ready-made, significant
symbol - a symbol that can be fitted to a-varTety of personal interpretations.
In a sense, one could liken the film to a frozen tableau, which each viewer
would "read" according to the personal mythology it evoked.
(One viewer, in
fact, described Angsst as an "animated Expressionist painting~.)
Viewer reaction to Die Hoord is Quite different.
"Why did that happen then?"; "Why put the body on a zebra skin?" and "What was
the detective doing wTIllhis hand?".
difference between Pretorius' first and second films.
From painting a still
life, he has jumped to telling a "story".
Angsst was the sustained portrayal of
a static symbolic unit; Die Hoord unfolds in a more explicitly
progression.
One could say that Die Hoord is really Pretorius' first "movie".
story - and a murder story at that: - it comes closer to what commercially
conditioned convention expe~ts of a film.
expectations are both spec1 1cally evoked and evasively denied in this film,
that it frustrates the general viewer so.
After the indeterminate title Angsst, the titleJDie Hoord already denotes the
new, narrative approach.
estab1ishes the first of a chain of links with "the COlllllercial"thriller" which
are continuously broken.
evokes an expectant tension, promising the unravelling of an interesting "case".
Yet, just as one has .suspended one's disbelief" in readiness for a good yarn,
the dramatic tension is refuted by the sudden intrusion of what is obviously
waste footage.
Indiscriminate parts of actors' bodies flit briefly across the
screen and someone says in mock French:
The inclusion of this
strip underlines the theme of the film as game: that one shouldn't read it at
the literal face value, but as a subjective manipulation of images.
The opening shot is perhaps the most important set scene in Die Hoord.
a continuous cycle in which initial expectation and the subsequent refutatlon
of that expectation are juxtaposed.
To a commercially conditioned viewer,
Pretorius' most bewildering technique 1s simply to ignore the conventional
"lively" rhythm of editing.

And rn-rne conventional tltle sequence, Pretorius
The ominous stamping of names on a "murder file"

One hears Questions like
These Questions underline an extreme

In a popular thriller it isn't unusual to hold a

narrative

In telling a

And it's because conventional

"My director:"

It,starts

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The view of a

But the length of the shot

surely something must happen?

Yet, as nothing continues to happen, he feels

he feels tension at first and then
Here the camera remains static

This builds tension and the expectation of a
\tatic scene for a few moments.
horrifying revelation, which usua11y comes as a sudden climax after a certain
height of tension is reached.
In Die Moord's opening shot this point is reached - and passed.
bedroom seen through a door seems insufferably long.
ha~ an interesting effect on the viewer:
boredom as nothing happens.
tension again:
until one attains an almost palnful familiarity with the bedroom scene.
The aimless wandering of the female figure when she appears, establishes another
of Pretorius' contra-narrative tricks.
Action appears when it can no longer be
bearably put off, and thus fulfills a certain expectance.
But, while initially
releasing tension, the action brings a new perplexedness, because it isn't
"explained".
This happens throughout the film, which employs a conventional
plot skeleton, but~removes the rationale of the plot.
The only possible "key" to an unravelling of the action is the scene which is
IlOstpertinently obscured .. If plot hinges on cause and effect, the scene where
the man reacts in horror to the woman is the single motivational .cause", the
rest all "effect",
But the motive for the man's subsequent killing of the girl
the girl is
remains unknowable, as we don't know the reason for his horror:
Invisibly hidden behind a wall.
Because the viewer realizes after this "hidden" scene that his rational expect-
.tlons have been thwarted, the film thereafter does not regain the tension of
the opening scene with its evocative pOSSibilities.
The viewer follows the rest
of ~he action - the shooting, the remorseful nausea, the intrusion of the police
- wlth detached interest, as if he has been externalized from the events.
(Contrary to commercial convention, the director has refused to conspirationally
"let him in on the secret".)
Apparently Pretorius anticipates this externaiization of interest, for as the
film progresses both cutting and camera movement, although in a slow rhythm,
become relatively more frequent.
Having been emotionally detached from the
plot, the viewer is lured into a visual involvement with the strikingly graphic
quality of set compositions - that betray pretorius' background as an artist.
Yet, the visual compositions again have an .obscuring" effect similar to the
plot,
Pretorius uses visual symbols - a zebra skin, the still-life of a body
on a table, etc. - without explaining their significance cinematically.
One
feels the emotive symbolism of the film is hampered by the static intellectual
dryness of set gra~hic symbols that are not employed cinematically or atmosph-
erica11y ....
The film is indeed wilfully obscure, both in plot and execution - the more so
because of its seeming analogies to conventional, narrative film.
But it is
stimulating precisely because of this disharmonic relation to convention - also
in its perversely "incorrect" editing.
It challenges the viewer to question
his aCCUstomed way of reading a film and to exchange conditioned expectations
for a more immediate scrutiny and reassessment of the images presented.
(r.e.,
Pretorius attacks the viewer syndrome of knowing "how and in wh"t manner things
Ire going to turn out" - a syndrome that can cause one to watch a commercial
film without seeing it.)
Though, perhaps,
Ilevertheless, the "obscurity" of the film wi11 irritate many.
they contain enough thematic
neither of Pretorius' films is all that obscure:
..terial to construct a "hidden meaning", however subjective or personal it may
re.sd,

55

Both hinge on irony.

In Angsst the young man ignores the

Subjectively, one could, for instance, read both films in a sexual context, as
Both films are set in a closed interior, evoking
exploring a fear of women.
a closed ego.
undressing woman (with connotations of ferf1TTty and procreaction) only to be
confronted with death on the other hand.
woman in the intimate space of the bedroom seems to present an unbearable
invasion of the man's privacy.
by killing her, he becomes again irrevocably possessed by her.
invaded by an enormous guilt, and "society" itself bears down on him in full
force in the form of the policemen who trample into his house and tauntingly
confront him with the body.
But the value of Pretorius' experiments lie not so much in what they say as in
exploring - successfully or unsuccessfully - an alternative way of saying it.

But precisely through trying to get rid of her
His privacy is

In Die Hoord the intrusion of the

Angsst - Same Time, Same Place
John van Zyl
If one wanted to be unkind, one could say that Anqsst could only have been made
To be as hung up on sex as the young hero is could only happen
in South Africa.
in a society in which certain sections have not even begun to experience the
permissive society in any form - visual, verbal or physically.
If I had known
how, this would have been the film I would have made in ~
chilhood in Kroonstad
in the Forties.
The sense of Woman being Other, if not The Other, reifies her visually into a
squirming wet dream, and verbally into what lawrence would certainly have
identified as "sex in the head".
Even the last glimpse of the woman as she sheds
her blouse and discreetly shows her naked rump to the camera as she disappears
around the door frame is the way out of any adolescent male's dreams - after the
lubricious offering of herself the female leaves before her offer can be tested.
Apart from a content then that is neither anarchic nor Expressionist, the actual
time sequence in the film gives the lie to any attempt to see the images in any
terms other than in the strictly realistic.
The cigarette that the young man lights and s~es,
he smokes in real time, both
the action and the causality contained within the visible expression of lighting
and smoking a cigarette remain obstinately undreamlike.
This makes the attempted
atemporality of the long takes impossible to .aintain.
The fact that Warhol's
experiments in perception (especially cinematic perception) involving the Empire
State Building and an ice-cream sundae have been invoked regarding Pretorius'
style is misleading.
Warhol's point is a cognitive one, Pretorius' is an artistic
one - a muddled artistic one.
In an Expressionist film like The Cabinet of D~ C~liQari, the mise-en-scene is
uniformly unreal, in AnQsst the mise-en-scene 15 1nconsis~ently 5ymbo11~ and
The man in the mask is neutralized by the actlons and react10ns of the
realistic.
the young man with the cigarette, ~e girl's auto-eroticism by the s~lf-censo~ship
of the director.
It is finally, nelther porno nor poem, thorough-goIng exper1ment
nor homage to Expressionism.

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