Ster Moribo has turned one year old. BAFANA KHUMALO looks at the mission to Africanise the movie-going experience
THE shutters hide the glory of the venue’s past. The venue is the Eyethu cinema in Mofolo central, Soweto, and the death of the cinema represents the end of a movie-going era. This is the cinema where liberal film distributors in the 1970s held black premires of major Hollywood movies like The Wild Geese.
It’s an era that was effectively killed by the multi-screen movie houses which, in the past, were not open to black people. Racially integrated entertainment spaces also marked the end of backroom township movie theatres, where an enterprising businessman could rent a 16mm film and show it in his garage.
Nowadays the film-going experience has become quite loaded. No longer does it cost one 50c piece for a double feature before heading straight back home. Now it is probably preceded by a meal and followed by a stop for coffee. More and more black people are converting to this new religion. When did the change happen? For Mpho Serobe of Ster Moribo – the only black-owned chain of local cinemas – the change started when people began realising that they have a choice as to what kind of movie experience is on offer. “You can give people a crate to sit on and if they don’t have an alternative they will take the crate.”
It seems that the old era is gone forever; Eyethu has given way to the shopping mall. For Serobe, however, this is just the beginning of the mission to Africanise movie-going: “Cinemas should reflect the culture of the people that they serve.” For him, one of the most unacceptable features about modern, Westernised cinema is the practice of reserving seats. “While it has been taken as sophisticated to reserve seats, it is not in synch with the broader community whose culture doesn’t require such practices.” So there aren’t any seat reservation facilities in any of seven cinemas owned by Ster Moribo. Because of this, Serobe thinks that most people are more comfortable with using these cinemas than others in town.
He thinks “cinema should move towards an African experience” – an experience that is not about entering a dark, cold cinema with people who want to be left alone, but “where you feel comfortable to come with a group of friends, clap if you want to”.
While one might realistically be able to offer that kind of experience, what matters, ultimately, is what kind of celluloid image you choose to flicker on that silver screen. Is it the usual, made-in-America fantasy or are other types of motion pictures shown at Ster Moribo – movies made in Africa for instance? “African people have shown that they are tolerant of other cultures,” says Serobe, adding that they are quite open to watching Hollywood movies, but believes they would, by the same measure, be equally open to watching movies like Senegalese film- maker Djibril Diop Mambety’s art classic Hyenas.
To get more people watching movies like these from Africa, Serobe believes that a process of education should be taking place: “We will sample them in between the mainstream movies so that people can acquire that taste.” It would indeed seem that this “sampling” will be part of a long, slow process because Hyenas did not do at all well during its run at Ster Moribo cinemas.
If people are open to seeing African movies, why did they not go to one that received such vociferous critical acclaim? “Hyenas is an art house movie from Africa, we would have to test that theory [that African movies inherently don’t do well in South African cinemas] by comparing it to an African action film,” says Serobe. “We tried to show an art movie in an action cinema.”
While people might be open to different African cinema experiences, those experiences might not be readily available. Precious few features emerge from Africa each year when compared to the West. “In the absence of these movies, there is nothing wrong with using the experience of our black brothers and sisters from America.”
Ster Moribo cinemas are the ones where viewers will be able to see more black American-produced and starred-in movies than anywhere else. Movies like the gruesomely violent Hughes brothers production Dead Presidents have done extremely well in places like the Dobsonville Ster Moribo cinemas. And so has Waiting to Exhale.
In addition to experimenting with these movies, Ster Moribo’s inner-city Johannesburg Carlton cinemas will be hosting this year’s Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. But if Hyenas was a niche art house film, gay and lesbian films will more than likely prove to be even more so. This, for Serobe, is yet another way of introducing new tastes to his core audience. “The gay and lesbian community is going to campaign around people who are gay and encourage sympathisers to come and see these movies. In this way we are going to be building another market,” he says. “That is a step in the right direction.”