Andrew Worsdale
The first South African “movie” was produced in 1896, 10 years before Hollywood even kicked off the ground. Edgar Hyman simply filmed scenes of Johannesburg and President Kruger and showed the film at Oom Paul’s home in 1899. In 1916 Harold Shaw wrote and directed the first local epic De Voortrekkers. He was an Englishman imported by local producers and it’s ironic that he made the first and possibly the most famous (silent) depiction of Afrikaner history.
The first two sound films were Sarie Marais, followed in the same year (1931) by Moedertjie, directed by Joseph Albrecht. Together with the five-hour epic of the Great Trek, Die Bou van ‘n Nasie in 1939, they were to set a precedent for Afrikaans language cinema for the next three decades.
In Johan Blignaut and Martin Botha’s landmark compilation about South African cinema Movies, Moguls and Mavericks, critics identify Afrikaans cinema as working in three categories: the nationalistic recreation of the historical past; the Eden film (where a pastoral area going through decline is restored to harmony); and the traditional comedy where humorous unity can be upheld with traditional values. This became the well- spring of Afrikaans film and television success with the arrival of television in the mid-1970s, where these parochial styles boomed.
Prior to that, as with the “sestigers” in literature, film-makers like Jans Rautenbach started pricking the Afrikaner underbelly in satires like Jannie Totsiens (1970), an experimental movie that was a metaphor for the whole country. In the previous two years Rautenbach had scored successes with Die Kandidaat, an acerbic examination of verkrampte political structures, and the legendary Katrina (1969), a controversial look at sex across the colour line.
These were to lay the foundation for the mid-1970s and early 1980s, with film-makers like Manie van Rensburg and Johan Blignaut. Van Rensburg chronicled the Afrikaner psyche during the struggle for economic power in the 1930s in his award-winning TV drama Verspeelde lente. In The Native Who Caused All the Trouble he examined the rise of Afrikaner nationalism; in The Fourth Reich he created the dedicated Afrikaner policeman hunting a Nazi sympathiser; in Taxi to Soweto he continued the legacy of Afrikaans farce with a political insight into the urban landscape.
Katinka Heyns’s directorial debut Fiela Se Kind in 1987 was also lauded as a milestone in Afrikaans-language movies because it spoke of crushing socio-political issues in a romanticised way. She followed that with Die Storie van Klara Viljee in 1991, a sentimental pic about the self-imposed exile of a young woman in a southern Cape village in the 1950s.
Afrikaans cinema seems content to ply its trade of investigating the past in an allegorical manner or by pursuing the easy farce like Kaalgat Tussen Die Daises. When the Afrikaans cinema begins to talk about its more recent past with gut effect and feature-film-makers follow the example of documentary-makers and Tv journalists like Jacques Pauw and Max du Preez, then we can truly say the film-makers have the courage of their convictions and not the hangover of a well-protected and rather clichéd, paternalistic past.
In 1985 johan Blignaut co-wrote, produced and directed Mamza, a breakthrough Afrikaans film that used melodrama to look at the lives of coloureds living in the township.