John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
I recently attended a seminar about the state of the South African film industry and where it should be going. We do a lot of talking about this topic, instead of getting on with the business of conceiving, and ultimately finding the way to make, these things that we all love to watch, called movies.
The chair was Mongane Wally Serote, South Africa’s enigmatic cultural commissar.
The key speaker and guest of honour was Lord Attenborough, the former Sir Richard Attenborough, also affectionately known to his friends as “Dickie”, “dear old Dickie”, or, in Bombay, during the making of his film Ghandi, as “Sir Dickie-gee” – an affectionate Indianism for the loveable thespian from Olde England who brought the Mahatma to the silver screen, and to the world.
Lord Attenborough has gone through many permutations in his life, but seems quite happy to accept the ultimate accolade of a lordly relationship to the current queen of England – even though, as the actor Richard Harris is reputed to have said in a moment of uncharitable inebriation: “We all know that he knows that we know that he’s just a f.ing actor.” Which is not totally incorrect, since it is of course as an actor that the good Lord Attenborough started his career, with leading roles in a lot of famous films.
But Sir Dickie-gee (which is still my favourite way of referring to him), while remaining a sterling actor (look at his sensitive portrayals in two films made by Indian directors: The Chess Players by the late Satyajit Ray, and Elizabeth by Shaekhar Kapur) stepped up from the prison of being a mere actor and became a film director/producer as well.
At the seminar in Joburg, one speaker referred to Sir Dickie-gee as “the lord”, which jolted the few participants who were listening with its surprising possibilities. Anyway, the former Sir Dickie-gee was not there in his capacity as an English lord, but as a bringer of wisdom on film-making to the new generation of potential film-makers in South Africa.
The initiative was an interesting one, although a little baffling considering how many other talk shops on film-making there have been, and will continue to be. The group of invitees was small, and the intended outcome of the seminar was not clear. Various people spoke about what was going to be done about the film industry from various angles, including a speaker from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology which is setting up a national film fund.
But, strangely enough, the important players of the industry, the distributors and the advertisers, were not present to hear themselves being publicly chastised yet again for not putting their money where it counts.
This has how it has always been in the film industry, and Sir Dickie-gee quickly pointed out that it was not a scenario that was exclusive to South Africa.
Every big movie that he himself had made was a desperate struggle to put complicated financing packages together, the ultimate issue being the bankability of the project – meaning would enough people want to come and see it so that advertisers could market other people’s products in the ice cream breaks, and thus keep the economy of whatever country the film originated in ticking over. It’s a fascinating chain of interconnecting needs and desires, and every film-maker needs to understand it.
The trouble was that most of the would-be film-makers present had fallen into the fatal habit of pointing fingers and whining about how unfair South Africa still is.
True, it is still a country where the structures of a past dispensation continue to stifle creativity – but that is not the only story. True, the new elite, the new breed of captains of industry and wielders of influence, show woefully little interest in the development of indigenous culture, of which film is an important part. But film-makers, like other artists, also have a duty to strike out in new directions, and demonstrate the kind of film culture they wish the country to grow into by example, rather than by circular debate.
Yizo Yizo is a rare example of probing and pertinent film-making that was not didactic, that was true to our tough realities, and was eminently watchable. We ought to have much more of that ilk, on the big screen as well as on the small screen.
Spike Lee became bankable because he used guerrilla tactics to get his first feature off the ground. Where are the South Africans who are prepared to go the same route, and make rough cinema with a funky message instead of sitting in meetings and trying to sound political?
It’s hard, and not everyone who thinks they have a film-maker in them is going to make it. But a start has to be made. And as Sir Dickie-gee also pointed out, the basis of a good film is a good story.
Sitting in that seminar room were hundreds of amazing stories – stories of hijack, stories of love, struggle stories, funny tales.
Instead of reciting them disjointedly to “the lord”, as we were doing, we should have been out there in the mean streets, putting them in the can.
But disempowerment in the mind, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, is a hard habit to break.