Dramatic Encounters series supervising producer Mickey Madoda Dube takes umbrage at Andrew Worsdale’s negative review
I was greatly disappointed in Andrew Worsdale’s review of Dramatic Encounters on September 10. Far from professional, it was more about what Andrew would have wanted to see than what the films actually presented.
Surely a professional reviewer should look at what does and doesn’t work, and why, then posit a few suggestions? In short, a review should be another brick in the film-making process, not a hammer upon it – at least that’s what we’d expect in this fragile non-industry of ours.
I am not trying to suggest that reviewers should not be critical, or that the short films made under the auspices of the SABC’s education department were faultless. It is indeed the job of the critics to be critical. But we all know that there is a difference between being “critical” and meting out “criticism”, the latter being the domain of the bitter and frustrated. Criticism should be a passion rather than a pastime, not something one does simply because one studied film theory.
Worsdale is a learned, fascinating film- maker who has proved himself. As a film- maker, and a rather unconventional one at that, one hoped that he would have exercised a little more sensitivity, a more reconstructive bent; prying open the way in which our desensitised audiences see films.
While I agree with some of the points he raised, it is the manner in which he trashed the films that bothers me. There was a certain arrogance in the write-up, a kind of seen-it-all-done-it-all attitude that disturbingly led him to make generalities about the films, thereby missing the subtleties in them. The true themes, which Worsdale largely missed, make way for broad definitions that focus more on plot and less on subtext – what a film says can rise far above its actual plot.
Lotus Dreaming is, for instance, about a woman who decides to listen to her inner voice. It is about a personal quest, not cultural or social disintegration. The Caretaker, on the other hand, is not about “racism and whites confronting new-found . realities”. It is about the black farm- hands who lay claim to land in an unchanged, yet democratic South Africa, a theme that is alive and well in the lives of normal people.
It is apparent in the review that Worsdale is not for films that are “issue-based . pander to characters that are representative ciphers of some kind of message”, as if most films, including Hollywood films, aren’t often made to say something.
He prefers, rather, “universal” stories like Is Chandies Maar is O’Right, a story which for him was “like a gentle anecdote . elementary, naive with no pretensions”, clearly a highly paternalistic, condescending response that is further borne out by his review of M-Net’s Chikin Biznis: The Whole Story a week later, which apparently works “because of its Soweto street-cred and ironic sense of humour . a charming feel-good picture”. It would seem that these “elementary, naive” stories with “street-cred” are what we should expect from the townships. Complexity is a dimension not associated with this milieu, a mentality Dramatic Encounters was subtextually trying to challenge.
Anyone who watches these films will agree that, as flawed as they are, they are to varying degrees very commendable for first- timers. There is a lot in them that clearly surpasses most of the dramas we see on our screens. There is no doubt talent here and it should be encouraged rather than stubbed like cheap, stale cigarettes.
Indeed, one should point out that the notion that politics is bad has so perforated our cultural mindset that it has become authoritarian, reminding one of the cultural Stalinism of the eighties. The new cultural commissars want to force everyone to bury their heads in the sand, to pretend that apartheid is not still thriving today. These people would want us to believe that the scars we received do not force us to reckon with them everywhere we turn.
One wonders if it’s a coincidence that in their independent evaluation of the films, film-makers like Katinka Heyns and Mark Newman saw a lot of redeeming elements. There is the dramatic tension/climax in Mountains are Falling that is too well realised for a first-timer, or the way in which he got non-actors to deliver the believable performances they did; the imaginative construction of the party scene in The Caretaker; the gentle structural realisation in Lotus Dreaming and the quietly strong performance from Baby Cele.
One expected, too, that the brief interviews Worsdale had with producer Lance Gewer (not quoted) would at least help him gain a little more access into the workings of the series. Instead, he preferred to quote script supervisor Maureen Conway about the process that was “too top heavy . basically too many people calling the shots.”
If Worsdale had cared to verify Conway’s statement, he would have realised that there were fewer producer categories than he printed, that Haile Gerima was not involved with Dramatic Encounters and that Conway herself interfered beyond her role with the directors on set (but this is too petty an area to engage in). One wonders, therefore, whether there were other reasons he wrote so negatively about the series and so positively about Chikin Biznis, whose surprising attention has disturbed a lot of film-makers I know, who have viewed it as a highly flawed film for the accolades it has received.
Our fragile industry needs constructive thinking. Every film, however small, should be examined for the purpose of taking it forward, because in the end it’s the team that wins.