gets
the chop
Anton Marshall
An old, decayed building in Wynberg is all that stands as a reminder of an entire era in film culture on the Cape Flats. From as far back as the Seventies and up until the late Eighties, features at cinemas like the Luxurama and Studio 1 donned a fairly uniform face. It was a time of poor marketing infrastructure, informal distribution and dubious licensing deals.
Back then kung-fu was known as “karratti”, and the karratti-stuk was the bread and butter of weekend cinema, for young and old. It was the standard prelude to features like Superman, Rocky or The Village People.
Kung-fu’s popularity hinged on far more than its acrobatic cinematics. The little weak guy, untrained-at-first, but avenging injustice with ultimate finality was the stock storyline. It seemed to strike a chord with Cape Flats audiences. While far from being the sole scapegoat for the state of affairs in coloured townships today, it would be hard to dismiss the catalytic effects of genre-saturation on an entire generation of largely isolated filmgoers.
In the cold, non-dolby, dusty, thousand- seater cinema, hundreds of noisy, rambunctious kids (mostly pre-adolescent boys) cheered, jeered and gasped their way through endless hours of badly dubbed (not that dialogue mattered) Chinese fighting films.
Later in the day, parents coped with the consequences of their kids rushing out of the movie-house emulating their “heroes” by kicking, biting and scratching the living Shinto out of each other. Today these things might concern the modern parent, but then they never raised an eyebrow, because this was “entertainment”.
It was the corporate juggernaut that proved to be a rake to the face of karratti-bioscope. After an invasion of shopping “mauls”, not to mention TV and video, most of the original cinema houses have disappeared from the Flats. A few remain, sparsely located in areas like Athlone and Rylands. These old- timers lend their survival mostly to the continuance of the double-feature – something long forgotten by the corporates. One notable exception is Ster Kinekor’s only Flats house in Mitchell’s Plain, where they’ve been unable to maintain regular audiences without double features.
However, with John Woo and Jackie Chan, the two biggest names in Hong Kong, making successful transitions to Hollywood, kung-fu of the traditional Hong-Kong variety seems to be absent from the current cinematic experience in Cape Town. These days, sci-fi and guns tend to put bums in seats.
But kung-fu has merely found a new stage. Countless Flats video stores have bought huge stockpiles of video transfers of titles like Shao-lin Super- Monks and Dragon Fist vs Eagle-Claw, and labelled them “karate”, turning old- style kung-fu flicks into a predominantly domestic phenomenon.
Cinema-going in the Flats hasn’t really changed much after all. The cinemas are smaller, better equipped and warmer, but the pre-adolescent boys have grown older – ticket-prices make bringing children to main shows difficult. Many of them are still a bit rowdy, and perhaps some still emulate what they see on screen on the way home.
Considering the Cape Flats’ current reputation regarding gangs and violence, perhaps one need ask how different for their respective times Jean-Claude van Damme and Steven Seagal are from Sonny Chiba and Jackie Chan.