Ghetto Diaries, the award-winning M&G-TV series, starts a new season. ANDRE= W W ORSDALE previews=20
WHEN I was asked to cover the new series of Mail & Guardian Television’s Gh= ett
o Diaries I told editorial and filmic staff there was no way I could write = a r eview as an advertorial. I was concerned that I may be inveigled, being a f= ilm
-maker myself, into some criticism flavoured by corporate favouritism. List= en,
I need this newspaper job. I haven’t made a movie for about 10 years.
I didn’t see the first four programmes that won awards in Zimbabwe and were= hi
ghly praised in the United Kingdom and Holland. But the follow-up – a colle= cti
on of six programmes collectively titled Across the Divide, has moments tha= t s hould make any documentary film-maker or feature film-aspirant sit up and t= ake
notice. The content, form and aesthetic are highly cinematic – for televis=
ion
and espec
ially for documentaries.
A friend of mine hates documentaries. She says: “It’s all fixed. It’s alway= s a contrived story told from the film-maker’s point of view.” She’s right, bu=
t w hat’s different about Ghetto Diaries is that the subject is also the film-m= ake
r. What you see is invigorating and visionary although the film-makers are = all
novices.
South Africa has developed a great tradition of documentary film-making and= ab
solutely no heritage of fiction or feature films. The reason is thoroughly = pol
itical. In the mid-to-late-Eighties, film-makers like Angus Gibson, Lawrenc= e D workin, Mark Newman, Jeremy Nathan and Harriet Gavshon – she is head of M&G= -TV
and executive producer of the series – found themselves making pieces of h=
ist
orical art efact. Their films explored the legacies and horrors of apartheid and told = for
eigners, mainly, about South African history for the first time. The result= s w ere edifying but boring.
Despite South Africans’ expertise in recording social and political history= , m ost of the documentaries made here have toed the line and been excruciating= ly=20
politically correct, exploring content instead of context.=20
So a large part of the unique flavour of South African life has been lost t= o d iatribe, didacticism and explaining the paradoxes, ironies and contradictio= ns=20
the country to foreign viewers (because Channel 4, the BBC or some obscure = Swe
dish funding organisation was paying). The results are predictable, sympath= eti
c, laudable documents of our history that, despite their dullness, helped c= rea
te the env ironment for the transformation evident in Ghetto Diaries.
Gavshon says the idea of video diaries came to her when Johnathan Miller, t= hen
head of local production company Free Filmmakers, initiated a long-term de=
vel
opment project called Palestinian Diaries, where youngsters were given bulk= y v ideo cameras) before the home video revolution) and asked to record their t= rou
bled lives across the notorious Middle East divide.=20
Gavshon says: “We were inspired by that and after Ordinary People it seemed= a=20
logical way to progress.” Ordinary People, a 32-part series that chronicled= ev
ents through the eyes of three or four “normal” people, ran for three seaso= ns=20
on SABC and garnered much praise, John Van Zyl, head of TV and Media Studie= s a t Wits University, wrote: “It has the potential of creating a paradigm shif= t i n document ary. It reaches back to the oppositional film-making of the Seventies and E= igh
ties and looks forward to recording the development of a new South African = soc
iety.”
Young film-maker Teboho Mahlatsi, a graduate of the African Cultural Centre= , p roposed the first series. In many ways it was a one-off take on a neighbour= hoo
d, White City in Soweto, where he lives. The unself-conscious nature of the= fi
lms made them an instant critical and popular success. To the SABC’s credit= , G avshon acknowledges, they were screened on Prime Time.=20
The British version, Video Diaries, are screened around 10pm and are made = ove
r about a year, with the editing process lasting five to six months. “We ju= st=20
don’t have the money or resources to do that,” says Gavshon. “We’re much mo= re=20
a guerrilla style of film-making. We train for a week and then leave the su= bje
ct alone to shoot the piece over two weeks.”=20
Editor Robbie Thorpe says: “The British videos are more polished but with o= ur=20
series you get a real sense that people are filming themselves. They don’t = kno
w they’re breaking conventional cinematic laws … and they’re constantly = inv
enting new techniques through intuition. In the first series one of the fil= m-m
akers concealed his camera under his arm so his subjects wouldn’t be self-c= ons
cious. We=20 got all these fantastically weird Dutch tilts and strange angles that reall= y w orked well.”=20
In the new series, coordinated by Mahlatsi, helped by Lance Gewer, Dingaan = Tho
mas Kapa and Msizi Kuhlane, a narrative tension has been created by cross-c= utt
ing between characters. So Lucky Mncegke, a mine-worker in Johannesburg and= Lo
mbasa, his wife, who lives in Ngqeleni near Umtata, both record their daily= li
ves. Some of the material is startlingly realised – like a perfectly framed= sh
ot of Lomb asa chopping wood with their young child in the foreground. This is contras= ted
with Lucky’s equally classic framing of life on the mines: he’s in low ang=
le=20
in front of the mine workers’ hostel, and tracks to where he introduces the= vi
ewer to his dwelling and to the belly of the Western Deep Levels mine. At o= ne=20
moment Lombasa is seen carrying a bucket of water and she talks to the came= ra:
“How many
people can carry water and film themselves at the same time?” Behind her, =
a f riend is seen carrying the tripod.=20
An aesthetic contrast is the story of Victor Zulu, an IFP hostel-dweller, w= hos
e film opens with a brilliant shot of a pair of trousers on a washing line = blo
wing into the camera. It develops into a rough-hewn look at his life, fille= d w ith shaky hand-held shots and a real cinematic energy that’s completely ger= man
e to the grimy context of his daily grind.
The new approach in Ghetto Diaries makes the series more compelling. Perhap= s t he style of the films is so startling because these are not trained film-m= ake
rs and the stories are told from an insider’s point of view.=20
Mahlatsi is editing a 52-minute version of the first series for Swedish TV.= Ca
lled White City, Black Lives, it features the first series’s participants = ref
lecting on the experience of making their films and the representation of b= lac
k lives in general.=20
“Soweto has always been represented by outsiders as a city of death … vio= len
t, passionate and noble death in the pursuit of freedom. But when we gave c= ame
ras to people in Soweto to make films about their own lives we realised tha= t d eath has many faces, and life has many facets,” says Mahlatsi.