CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
IAN KERKHOF is South Africa’s most radical and prolific film-maker. He has been resident in Amsterdam since the mid-Eighties, when he went into exile and worked for the Dutch anti- apartheid movement and South African War Resistance until 1986. Since then he’s made over 20 films, all of which push the envelope between art and pornography – dealing, as they do, with sex, violence, fantasy and personal transgression.
His latest film, Wasted, has been playing at Cape Town’s Labia Theatre for the past few weeks to rapturous acclaim. In Holland it’s still showing after being released last October and, apart from playing to critical plaudits at the Rotterdam and Berlin film festivals, has been sold to Belgium, Germany and Japan.
Kerkhof is possibly best known in South Africa for his featurette Diary of a Yeoville Rapist, which had Matthew Oates, Eric Miyeni and Gustav Geldenhuys battling gamely as a trio of rapists struggling within the nightmare of paranoia that is Yeoville. The film was received with a fair amount of derision and backbiting by locals, but Kerkhof remained undeterred and returned to Holland where he immediately began production on Baby Kain, a documentary about the Harlem poet Kain.
Possibly his best film to date is Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers. Made in 1994, it’s an infinitely unsettling probe into the minds of murderers ranging from Charles Manson to Ted Bundy with various contributions from rappers the Ghetto Boys and novelist JG Ballard.
Pierre Klossowski, author of Sade mon Prochain, a seminal work about the Marquis de Sade, and Georges Bataille, sexual philosopher and author of Story of the Eye, are Kerkhof’s main role models and sources of inspiration. The Dead Man II: Return of the Dead Man, a 26-minute film made in 1994, is arguably his most shocking film so far, lending terrifying ideas and imagery from his inspired and transgressive mentors. It takes place in a bar in hell and is a visionary take on a man literally going out of his mind. It ends with the protagonist caught in a car between the rollers of a car wash while a couple have sex in the front seat. This was four years before David Cronenberg made Crash.
Kerkhof’s latest, Wasted or Naar de Klote!, is his most commercial effort to date. Running at a respectable feature length of 91 minutes, it’s the tale of a young girl who innocently sells Ecstasy to her friends on the rave scene. Along the way she becomes entangled with a DJ, resulting in sexual jealousy and inevitable violence.
The climax of the film, where a crowd of ravers takes revenge on a drug dealer’s car and takes anarchy out on to the streets, has been criticised in some quarters as not reflecting Ecstasy and rave culture’s lovey-dovey experience – but it’s nonetheless fabulously cinematic. Shot on digital video, the film was blown up to 35mm and the effect is truly trancey.
Wasted is produced by Dennis Wigman and Kees Kesander, brave Dutch film-makers who are also responsible for Peter Greenaway’s outlandish films. When released in Amsterdam it immediately shot to number one, sweeping Independence Day off its moorings.
While Dutch producers and movie-goers have the artistic courage to tackle the unusual, it appears that South Africans are still more comfortable with the likes of Independence Day. Local independent cinema, the Labia, bought the rights to Wasted late last year. They also own the rights to Greenaway’s latest erotic opus The Pillow Book and Jacques Demy’s exquisitely lyrical masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The tragic irony is that monopolistic distributor Ster Kinekor has passed on all three of the films, so with no viable independent cinemas in the country other than the Labia, cinemagoers in Cape Town are the few who’ll enjoy these celluloid pleasures.
Wasted is one of the titles featured on the Marginal South African Cinema festival at The Labia in Cape Town. Next up: Andrew Worsdale’s Shot Down, Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil, Cedric Sundstrom’s The Shadowed Mind and John Parr’s Night Slave