Matthew Krouse Down the tube
The coming week will see two showings on e.tv of a local documentary directed by Jurgen Schadeberg dedicated to the life of photographer Ernest Cole called, Ernest Cole 1940-1990 Photo Journalist. It will show on Wednesday at 9pm and then again on Thursday at 10am.
Photographer Ernest Cole is one of those whom history overlooked. He was an exile, another statistic in the role of lost black achievers of a generation that, like the cast members of that legendary musical King Kong, took the first break for freedom they could get.
While he may have been more than just a “Drum photographer”, Cole’s images sit comfortably with our vision of that era – namely the 1950s and 1960s – when zooty African gents hung out on Johannesburg street corners and in drinking halls, doing nothing apart from philosophy and jive.
Cole is set up as a shining symbol of anti-apartheid activism through art, brave enough to smuggle his camera into the tightly controlled mining compounds, and to click away at pass arrests with his camera hidden in a paper bag.
Born in 1940, Cole, a devout Catholic, received his first camera from a generous white clergyman in very much the same manner that Hugh Masekela received his first trumpet with the aid of Trevor Huddleston. Growing up in the old township of Eersterust, the frail youth became a favourite of community authorities, including the bus ticket examiners who fed him sandwiches on his rides to town.
Facts like these seem to contribute to a general quaintness throughout the documentary, with Cole’s mother and sister giving testimony to photographer Struan Robertson. However fine a photographer, Robertson seemed ill- equipped to conduct the discussions. His interviews are dry and completely undramatic, and one gets the feeling that the information he gleaned didn’t scratch in the least beneath the surface of Cole’s complex circumstances.
It’s Cole’s pictures that come off best, with the interviewees providing an obligatory turnstile of talking heads. Whether photographing impoverished African children or impoverished New York tramps, Cole liked to catch his subjects mooning into the lense, seemingly on the brink of tears.
Footage from a documentary about Cole, made in New York in 1967, shows him in a beret, looking intense and revolutionary and talking like a Black Panther. A welcome departure from the stock images of the “Drum decade” that Schadeberg’s previous work has made us so accustomed to.
Another relic of the 1950s is the now- tired footage of Lionel Rogosin’s feature Come Back Africa, dotted throughout the documentary. Although its street scenes provide us with rare footage of the decade, its overuse seems to make anything it appears in seem unoriginal.
The historical contextualisation of Cole’s pictures, and the pictures themselves, provide enough depth and poignancy to make the documentary well worth viewing.
A highlight of e.tv’s 24-hour viewing is the Classic Movie Collection, which screens every morning at 11:30am. But do yourself a favour and tune in a little earlier to the channel to find out what film is on, because the first film advertised for February 1, the 1945 Lewis Milestone anti-war film A Walk in the Sun, was replaced on the day by Howard Hughes’s Western Outlaw.
With one more channel to watch, throughout the night and day, the world does however seem like a bigger place.