Andrew Worsdale
VETERAN South African film-maker Jamie Uys, who died of a heart attack on Monday aged 76, was often berated by progressive film-makers and academics for being a paternalistic racist who trivialised both nature and black people in his movies. In reality, however, he was a true film fantasist who operated within the confines of the apartheid film industry. He made his major breakthrough with Beautiful People, a humorous wildlife documentary that found great success both locally and overseas. He followed this with a series of candid-camera comedies, Funny People, which were also hugely successful. However, in 30 years and 22 films, his greatest hit was The Gods Must Be Crazy, the tale of Xi, a Bushman who sets off to find the edge of the world so he can return a Coke bottle to the gods. The film grossed over $200-million in the US; it was Japan’s top-grosser in 1982 and France’s top-grosser in 1983, and was a phenomenon in Sweden, West Africa, Canada and, of course, at home. He followed it with the strained and lacklustre Gods II, after which the rights to the story were sold to a Japanese-based company, which made the straight-to-video release Gods III. The original film was severely criticised for its racism and paternalism. In the US it was picketed by anti-apartheid groups, but still drew vigorous audiences. Peter Davis wrote in Cinaste magazine: `Let me admit straightaway that I, too, found the film very funny. Inside and outside the gags, however, the film is saturated with the mindset of apartheid.’ For all the political interpretations of Uys’s work, he remained a comic fantasist at heart, although rooted in a peculiarly South African tradition. As David Denby pointed out in New York magazine: `Uys is a master of the solemnly methodical nature of slapstick, the system of repetition and variation that gives slapstick a formal rhythm.’ In 1984, while studying film in California, I was given an assignment by my African cinema lecturer: to interview Uys, who was in Hollywood raising funds for Gods II. The original had been playing in Beverly Hills for over six months. I was supposed to expose the apartheid mind behind the film, show how ludicrous the `terrorist’ sub-plot was, and expose the workings of Afrikaner paternalism in film. I went to a packed screening, filled with Americans laughing hysterically. I remember thinking that if it was black Americans the film was laughing at, the people would have walked out. The next day I met Uys in an ice-cream parlour near the ocean. He insisted we have chocolate ice-cream plugged with banana. I proceeded to grill him, and by the end of our conversation I was completely charmed by his easy-going irreverence. I resolved not to write the paper, for how can you explain to Americans the complexities of a lekker ou oom?