Janet Smith
When SABC3 announced early this year that it was to screen a two-part South African
documentary called Death, TV writers muttered darkly about a bleak society, an odious world view and the depths to which our national psyche had sunk.
Then the documentary from writer-director Luiz DeBarros and producer Mark Schwinges
won three Avanti Awards before it was even screened: a gold in the documentary category, and two craft awards for editing and camera and lighting. Death took the local TV industry by surprise and negotiations are under way with Itel UK and Britain’s Channel Four for it to be aired abroad.
These achievements for a profound piece of television provide certain vindication for DeBarros and Schwinges – the young film-makers behind Underdog Productions – as they journey to find South African stories inside a global culture. Their vision belongs in a rare group of South African film-makers who share the opinion that we must move away from an ideologically driven approach to our society without losing our sense of national identity.
Death is very much a product of South Africa at this time. As it seeks to uncover the unifying factor among all of us during our peculiar paranoia, it also feels its way into a universal oneness that touches on a significant number of issues: suicide, religion,
politics, medicine, ritual.
In the end, you believe you must have found a new way of looking at death. DeBarros
and Schwinges’s own philosophical metamorphoses from an essentially Western outlook to one that encompasses a range of value systems is likely to reflect that of many viewers.
>From the Hillbrow Hare Krishna temple and the West Park cemetery to the Pagan
Federation of South Africa and the Hysterix Comedy Club, the men toured culture and personal experiences to find expectations of death and the afterlife and fears of our own mortality. Ultimately, the sweep of the camera is extraordinarily broad, yet not undignified.
“We have an almost repulsive attraction to the subject,” DeBarros says. “And I suppose with a documentary like this, people are not quite sure what to expect. It’s almost as if we are expected to express shock, but we found shooting the documentary made us much more aware of what it is to be alive. We were looking at things people don’t always like talking about, particularly in the West, and we came away from it with much more understanding of the boundary between life and death and what that means for different cultures, what that has meant for the development of art.”
Propelled by constant discussions about death – dinner parties where conversation
endlessly roams around the consequences of crime in South Africa – the film-makers
produced their documentary with the intention of stimulating debate . Apartheid had so much to do with death, yet few white South Africans are able to acknowledge the continuum, to confront the result that has muted their celebration of democracy.
“There was a lot of stuff we just couldn’t show,” Schwinges says. “The greatest effort was put into editing the visuals. In the case of the Hindu temple, for instance, there was a very real protocol we had to follow. We realised, throughout filming, that we were in strange territory. We found we had to switch our own cultural perceptions on and off to get a really broad picture of what death means to South Africans, and what it means as a universal reality.”
The documentary is challenging in unexpected ways, using two or three case studies in each of the two parts to provide opposing points of view on a single theme.
The strength of the ideas behind each theme was enhanced by using two cameras on each shoot, presenting a rich display of images.
In the first episode, One Way to be Born, but Many Ways to Die, death and dying are explored from the traditional African and Christian perspective, by people with Aids and other terminal diseases who are coping with imminent death and by those who have
attempted suicide or euthanasia.
Interestingly, however, DeBarros opens more windows on the subject as a vocation or a calling, using doctors, nurses, journalists, goths, vampires and comedians as
alternative voices. The result is amazingly diverse.
In the second episode, Death Be Not Proud, a pathologist with a startling, wry sense of humour leads us into an autopsy. We tour graveyards and associate with the people
who work in them, leading us into the business that occupies stonemasons and undertakers.
Buddhist, Zulu and San post-death rituals are unveiled, and a pagan Halloween ritual to remember the dead is filmed to mind-tingling effect.
A seance at a spiritualist church and a past-life regression session will undoubtedly
linger as among the most controversial moments of the piece.
Finally, ghosts and near-death experiences are approached with a genuinely surprising
outcome.
There is very little in Death that is predictable or easy. As DeBarros says, it has moments of humour and horror.
“We tried very hard to integrate an overwhelming death denial in daily life without being didactic. If you consider what an impact the hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission have had in developing our ideas about the humanity of the enemy, it is obvious there is a higher consciousness to our feelings about death.”
After 1 700 edits on each episode and more than 170 tapes from which to select
material, Death is something of a phenomenon in South African documentary film-
making.
Now Schwinges and DeBarros are determined to confirm investment and a distribution
route for their feature films, Pressure and Shopping in Hell.