Shaun de Waal on The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Directed by Sophia Fiennes, United Kingdom/Australia/Netherlands, 2006
The Slovenian “philosopher and psychoanalyst” Slavoj Zizek is famous for cornering a hitherto underexploited niche of the cultural-studies market, producing several books on a subject best described in one of his own titles: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock).
Basically, Zizek uses popular culture such as the movies to explicate the often impossibly arcane psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the Frenchman who proposed a radical re-reading of the canonic Freudian exploration of the human psyche. Or perhaps it’s that Zizek uses Lacan to uncover the hidden human drives that appear in popular culture. Either way, the technique works in both directions. The problem with Zizek’s books is their freewheeling or spiralling forms, their lack of straightforward development in their arguments, which are often very densely packed; there are few neat summations in simple language to help the reader out, and an acquaintance with Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel would be useful too.
The Zizek who retails his ideas in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema takes a somewhat more accessible approach — he even manages to avoid mentioning Lacan. Instead, he glosses classic psychoanalytic ideas to comment on scenes from famous movies, Hitchcock of course being a favoured source. For example, The Birds exemplifies the violence of the maternal superego, and Vertigo shows how sex is always governed by a pre-existing structure of fantasy. Zizek also makes use of much material beyond Hitchcock, with movies such as Fight Club and The Red Shoes putting in an appearance; the films of David Lynch, in particular, provide clips that seem tailor-made for Zizek’s approach.
In person, the bearded, lisping philosopher comes across as an engaging and entertaining figure. His accent is heavy but his English is excellent (though he demonstrates in speech the same preposition-dysfunction common to his written works). Zizek’s analyses pour forth unstoppably in every context, whether he’s boating across Bodega Bay like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, or is inserted practically into the frame of the movie he’s talking about, or is shown watering his garden and explaining why he finds tulips so repulsive — children should be protected from them, he jokes. Even at a total of 150 minutes for its three parts, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is a consistently absorbing performance of intellectual titillation.
Percy Zvomuya on Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man
Directed by Robin Shuffield, France, 2006
Was he African’s own Che Guevara, a prickly thorn in the backside of the French empire, or just another tin-pot dictator? These are the questions that the documentary Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man attempts to answer. Shuffield presents a tight history of the young captain who seized power in Upper Volta, a country he then renamed Burkina Faso, meaning the land of upright people.
The work documents the far-reaching policy changes that his government undertook in health, transport and education, benefiting millions of his people. This sketch of his life in power uses old television footage, recent interviews with journalists, the words of Jerry Rawlings, former president of Ghana, and people who felt the effects of Sankara’s presidency.
The documentary comes out at a time when Africa is still trying find a voice and an identity. It’s a critical eulogy of a leader who could have been great but who just fell short.
Percy Zvomuya on Keiskamma: A Story of Love
Directed by Miki Redelinghuys, South Africa, 2007
This documentary, which has its world premiere at this year’s Encounters festival, is set in Hamburg, a small village in the Eastern Cape. It is the tale of a community’s battle against HIV/Aids — in part by making a massive tapestry to tell the world its story.
The community’s resilient spirit and frankness about the scourge in its midst is shown by its work on the altarpiece. The work, which will be accompanied by a question and answers session with filmmaker Redelinghuys, captures exquisite images of the Eastern Cape. But central to its action is an adolescent boy, Nkululeko, who is HIV-positive, and a white doctor called Carol.
This documentary film does not escape the usual problems that are faced by films of this genre. One feels ones know the subject matter and, at about 90 minutes, it is a tad too long.
Yunus Momoniat on Taxi to the Dark Side
Directed by Alex Gibney, United States/Iraq/Afghanistan, 2006
The notion that abuses at Abu Ghraib (Iraq), Bagram (Afghanistan) and Guantánamo Bay (Cuba) were exceptional occurrences is the lie exposed by this documentary, which details the travails and deaths of various prisoners at these three “interrogation centres”.
The primary object of these apparatuses, effectively laboratories of humiliation, was ultimately the deconstruction of the people incarcerated in them. If information was being sought, it was not of the type the prisoners could consciously provide. Everyone knows that information yielded under such duress is constructed to appease the torturer. What the tormentors really aimed at was reaping knowledge of human limits to pain and sensory deprivation in a kind of Mengellian experiment in psychological, physiological and existential destruction.
These laboratories — where “Arab male sensitivities to gender” were explored by making the men wear lingerie and masturbating at the command of a butch, Yankee dominatrix; and confronted by vicious dogs because Arabs don’t enjoy the same relation to canines as Westerners — were the scene of a bizarre Sadism, informed by theories of multiculturalism, one that masquerades as social science in an age when science obliterates ethics. Arabs are peculiarly sensitive to sexual humiliation, says one informant in the movie, before he rightly wonders if anyone isn’t.
The definition of torture, legalistically enumerated, is the key to these practices, designed to escape the strictures of the Geneva Convention, or indeed of any ethical code. Perpetrators of the torture argue that individual instances of humiliation do not constitute torture, which, strictly speaking, is a total practice made up of an entire series of violations.
Of course, all this is integral to the general plan of the US in its war on terror, and techniques perfected at one centre are rapidly adopted at the others. Donald Rumsfeld, our very own Lao Tzu, in one instance wonders why a detainee was made to stand for only four hours when prescriptions allowed for eight-hour sessions. Grand science indeed, deployed to render the world susceptible to higher realm that is American civilisation.
Stephanie Wolters on Every Good Marriage Begins with Tears
Directed by Simon Chambers, UK, 2006
This is a classic tale of the generation gap, tradition versus change and parents versus children. The main characters of the documentary are the London-based Bengali Begum sisters; Shahanara, the rebellious middle sister who spends five years in foster care after being kicked out of the house by her father for refusing to marry a man she has never met; Hushnara, whose on-again, off-again arranged wedding provides much of the plot; and Azirun, the pushy older sister whose sole aim seems to be to please her parents by marrying off her sisters.
This could have been yet another film about arranged marriages and cultural change, but director, producer and cameraman Simon Chambers not only makes us care about every one of the sisters, he also asks some interesting questions about the nature of arranged marriages, free will, and just who is happier in the end. The film also has some very funny scenes, like when carefree Shahanara runs off to the arcade with her sister’s future fiancé instead of dutifully awaiting her husband at the airport, and her reaction when he later tells her that he has been praying for her to lose weight.
Kwanele Sosibo on Sweet Memories Garden Centre
Directed by Simon Klose, Sweden/South Africa, 2006
Sweet Memories Garden Centre, the nursery whose beginnings are captured in Swedish filmmaker Simon Klose’s documentary of the same name, doesn’t exist any more, at least as far as the eye can see.
Save for a few palm trees planted on the edge of the lawn outside, the rest of the premises in Embuzini crossing are just as parched as the rest of “Wild West”, the westernmost part of Soweto that includes townships such as Zola, Naledi and Mndeni.
Pule and Twish Malungwane, whose attempts to turn away from a life of crime and run the nursery from home form the film’s narrative arch, insist that their business is seasonal, but concede that it could do with a serious injection of capital.
Perhaps it was an ill-fated idea: running a nursery in a working-class township with rampant unemployment where many only think of flowers during funerals and weddings. This is probably why much of the film, the filmmaker’s first, features just as many shots of chock-a-block house parties, spinning Beemers and around-the-fire stories of botched robberies as those of visits to plant wholesalers.
In 2000, Klose, then a master’s law student at what is now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, was meant to spend an exploratory weekend in Soweto but ended up living at the siblings’ house in Naledi for a year. At the time, Pule had just been fired from his job as an immigration officer and Twish had recently been released from prison for weapons charges.
Klose captures this transitional period, marked by blind ambition, raucous parties and the daily struggle to make ends meet. “When Twish told me he was fresh out of jail and wanted to sell roses, I just aimed at that story,” says Klose. “Personally it was an opportunity for me to get to know the Soweto vibe, which involved a lot of partying, another side of township life I wanted to show back home. Pule and Twish are super open-minded and more or less let me film just about anything, except for their laundry.”
Although the garden-centre bit seems a bit stage managed, with the protagonists playing to the camera rather obviously, it is Klose’s relentless voyeurism that yields the indelible images of Soweto life and the eccentric characters that people it. “My sweet ole’ Sony TRV 900 was the smallest three-chip camera available at the time,” says Klose. “I guess a lot of people thought I was a tourist rather than a filmmaker. That really did a lot for the vibe; people tend to open up easier in front of a small camera than in front of a serious TV crew.”
The film starts off energetically, with a post-Soweto Derby celebration and Senyaka’s cartoonish narration, but lags in energy in some parts, which can be blamed on its sometimes loose editing and its protagonists’ stoner demeanours. Also, Klose could have explored predominant attitudes to flora with greater depth, as Twish mentioned a prevailing paranoia in the township to trees planted in the apartheid era.
However, with his unlimited access to township thugs and his urbane street sensibility, hopefully Klose, who has also made a film about homeless people in Tokyo, will make more films about the country’s subcultures.
Lloyd Gedye on Screamers
Directed by Carla Garapedian, United States, 2006
This could have been a really great documentary, but it ends up feeling like a half-baked film-school project.
Its aim was to explore the Armenian genocide through the eyes of metal band System of a Down. In 1915, the Turks systematically killed 1,5-million Armenians and still to this day Turkey, the US and the United Kingdom fail to recognise it as genocide. The link between the Armenian genocide and System of a Down feels tenuous at best, while the director did very little to explore this link in any substantial way, besides wheeling out lead singer Serj Tankian’s 98-year-old grandfather who escaped the genocide and a bunch of shots of the band on the tour bus, waxing lyrical about how angry they are and their quest for justice.
Ultimately what one gets is a rock film, with gratuitous live footage of the band and some loosely strung-together clips about genocide in general. The only time this film grabbed my attention was when the genocide survivors were interviewed, but unfortunately this only made up about 10 to 15 minutes of this hour-and-a-half film. For System of a Down fans only.
Yolandi Groenewald on The Planet
Directed by Michael Stenberg, Johan Söderberg and Linus Torell, Sweden/Norway/Denmark, 2006
A beautiful film showing the absolute havoc that mankind wreaks on the Earth. The film takes you through a host of facts and figures, as well as in-depth interviews with environmental experts and scientists, including the Guardian‘s George Monbiot, about what is happening to our planet. The directors use stirring images of the world as it is and transform it into video art, linking it with almost “mechanical” music to take the viewer from one distressing fact to another.
The film circumvents the globe, going from China to India and Nigeria to show the struggles of developing countries weighing development against the environment. One strong point is its honest portrayal of the Chinese and Indian economies and what the culture of “want more” in these countries means. Some of the most shocking images in the film centre on Nigeria’s e-waste problem, because it has become a dumping ground for the West’s discarded televisions and computers. It leaves the viewer with one message: if we don’t act soon, we will gobble up our planet as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.
Yolandi Groenewald on Everything’s Cool
Directed by Judith Helfand and Daniel B Gold, United States, 2007
Everything Cool delves into the politics of global warming and asks the question why the US has ignored the problem for so long. It takes the viewer on a political journey of about 20 years though interviews with a number of key political activists and politicians who have been closely involved in the debate. It examines the role of how so-called think tanks, funded by energy industries, have managed to create a debate and have cast doubt on science, where the facts should have spoken for themselves. It also asks the question why the US public was bamboozled for so long. It presents an argument about how easy it is to “warp” science though creating controversy in the media.
The film’s strength is that even though it tackles a very sensitive, political topic, the tone throughout is light and accessible, yet the serious message is never lost. It uses scientists, eco-crusaders, whistleblowers, environmental journalists and ordinary people to tell its story. One feels though that the film could have done with a more thorough edit. It tends to be too long and requires intense concentration to stay hooked throughout.
Encounters takes place at Nu Metro Cinemas, Hyde Park Corner in Johannesburg, from July 13 to 22 and at Nu Metro Cinemas at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town from July 20 to August 5. More information: Tel: 021 465 4686 or www.encounters.co.za