Andrew Worsdale: Cinema
Film director Cedric Sundstrom is probably best known as the director of Cannon schlock during the tax-driven South African movie boom of the mid-1980s, having helmed titles like American Ninja III and IV. He candidly admits that ”I might be regarded by some people as a sell-out for going from making my own arty movies to making exploitation Ninja ‘crap’ … but even with those films I had to take these martial arts experts doing cartoon stuff and make them believe it was for real.”
A season of Sundstrom’s films begins this week at Cape Town’s Labia Theatre, the line-up includes three of his early, experimental shorts: The Hunter, Summer is Forever and Suffer Little Children, as well as his kinky thriller The Shadowed Mind, which has only recently been unbanned. The sole reason the censors gave for prohibiting the picture in 1989 was one line: ”We find the film completely undesirable,” recalls Sundstrom.
The film is set in a looney bin where people with differing psychosexual problems are treated by a wacky shrink played by German comic Towje Kleiner.
Interspersed with the patients’ neurotic monologues is a red-herring whodunnit with a gory finale. It’s an interesting film because it’s one of the few, if not the only, made under the import/export movie- making scam of the late 1980s to deal with the psychological interface between sex and death; whereas most of the other Cannon product focused purely on death.
What’s more fascinating is how it came to be made. After producing the radical, and still widely respected political gangster pic Mapantsula, producers South African Pierre Montocchio and Australian David Hannay had more cash to make another movie – The Mind Boggles, a comedy with a British director.
They shot for three days when the director, so Sundstrom believes, realised it was just a movie made for tax and unlikely to get a decent release or proper marketing treatment. He jumped on to a plane and Sundstrom got a phone call in the middle of the night at his wrap party for Fair Trade, an uninspired actioner with Oliver Reed as a South American cocaine baron and warlord who kidnaps some US college kids.
”I sneaked away from the party into a Mercedes that had a red rose on the front seat … when I met with Hannay and Montocchio they just said we’ve got to get a movie made and all of us sat up till four in the morning trying to come up with an idea.” The result was workshopped in 10 days and shot in three weeks. It is regarded in some circles as a cult piece of doom-laden sex schlock, not least of all because of the heady contribution made by the industrialised score courtesy of Kalahari Surfer Warwick Sony and Shaun Naidoo.
That was a busy time, with the local industry popping with production (over 80 films were shot between 1985 and 1986) and cocaine abuse. Sundstrom acknowledges the plethora of powder on film sets during the late 1980s but defends its use by saying: ”you must remember we were working constantly, and anyway everybody was doing it. It wasn’t like someone slipped off quietly and did it by themselves. it was part of the whole communal thing.”
Sundstrom has been making films on super-8 format since the age of 13, influenced heavily by sword and sorcery epics like Ben Hur and El Cid, which his mother used to drag him to see at His Majesty’s cinema in downtown Johannesburg. After showing one of his short movies to Panorama Films in Pretoria he got a job as a trainee clapper loader on Stop Exchange.
After that he joined Pact as a stage manager. It was during this spell that he made Summer is Forever while touring the country with a play. The film, co-written by Norman Coombes, Ken Leach and himself, is an archetypal hippie picture. Shot on super-8 in 1971, it tells the simple story of a stressed-out city dweller played by Regardt van den Bergh who decides to go walkabout. On the way he meets another drifter, played by Sundstrom, and they journey across the country, spreading love and happiness.
In 1973 he made The Hunter, based on a short story by Olive Schreiner and again starring Van den Bergh, this time as a young man in search of a big white bird in the wilderness. Again it’s a hippie-trippy mumbo-jumbo piece.
His best short film has to be Suffer Little Children, about a group of kids in a small mining village in the 1930s who are so strongly influenced by the story of Saint Stephen and the crucifixion that they re- enact the events, which leads to tragedy. ”When I was a kid, we used to go to the movies and come home and act out the various parts of the film. That’s where I got the idea,” he says.
All of Sundstrom’s work, even the Cannon stuff, deals with repression, guilt and sacrifice and Suffer Little Children is the most successful example of the strong theological strain in his work. When I ask him about his favourite films, he says: ”Well, I had a religious experience watching West Side Story. That film said to me ‘you must make movies’.”
And that’s why he made the Cannon ”fodder”. ”Because I love making films.” Sundstrom has decided not to continue helming action pictures and is returning to the more personal work of his early shorts. He is presently preparing to make Finding Fellini, a romantic drama set in the Atlanta Cinema in Swakopmund. It is being co-produced by and will star Anthony Quinn as Fellini and is set to begin shooting in November.
Sundstrom, a natural charmer with an enviably encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema, smiles. ”I know people just think of me as making B-grade action flicks. They’re probably surprised I want to make a movie about Fellini.”
See Cedric Sundstrom’s work at the Labia cinema in Cape Town from August 22