Channel vision
Three local programmes this week, two of which demonstrate how excellent is the standard often being achieved and one, a feeble copy of an already bleary import.
Eugene Paramoer’s half-hour Boss of the Road was as fine a television discourse as you’ll find anywhere: a totally unsentimental look into the vicious warfare of the minibus taxi business. Blood- drenched statistics about taxi violence rolled out on television news as if they were the day’s market prices are one thing, as is the meaningless flatulence of politicians. This programme was otherwise. It took you along, gave you frightening glimpses into a nether world which compares with the urban ferocities of prohibition America.
The same horrors are here: the gangs, the street battles for territorial prerogative, the guns, the revenge killings, obeisant all but wholly corrupt police forces. Just around the corner in Thokoza, St Valentine’s Day massacres are twice weekly.
I often wonder what it is that separates the mundane from the exceptional in television documentaries. The genre looks beguilingly easy. Gather together enough visual material, record a few sound bites, stitch it all together with a linking script, add some suitable mood music and slam it on the air. In the minds of some who see it the programme lives a sort of half-life after that. For a few days its contents get whole minutes of discussion over dinner tables. After that it fades into the void along with all the others.
Not so in Boss of the Road, right from its bitter title to the extraordinary use at its close of a classical string quartet as accompaniment to a slow-motion ballet of a man guiding cars in the city. This astonishing counterpoint of utterly disparate inventions is not new. Remember the opening of the film Raging Bull, with the gowned boxer and the operatic score in a dance of eerie beauty? The idea had been used before that, too. Which is not important. Its use here was satiric blame of immaculate accuracy.
I think what made Boss of the Road so different was its absolute lack of sentimentality and, more importantly, one of sentimentality’s favourite devices, overstatement. I couldn’t but compare the piece’s emotional thrift with those biblical wailings and gnashings of teeth that used to lumber out of Max du Preez whenever Snuki Zikalala PhD (Bulgaria) used to dispatch him to spy on someone else’s misery.
And so to another enlightening slice of South African life, in a documentary broadcast last Sunday in the SABC3 Xpressions series. A neat pun of a title – Skins and Needles – had me wondering how anyone could possibly do a whole hour on the subject of tattooing, to be pleasantly engaged with an hour in the quite intriguing company of a few of the sort of people who get themselves tattooed.
Chief spokesperson was one Peter du Preez (no relation of Max, I fear), ex-Satanist, ex-biker, ex-prisoner, who openly confessed to having in 1985 shot his philandering wife, right there in the arms of her lover. Du Preez received the death sentence for this quite understandable peccadillo and had that commuted to life imprisonment by a compassionate judge – not as far as I know, Foxcroft J. Of this porridge du Preez swallowed 11 years, rising to the position of a senior functionary in one of the prison gangs.
On the back of one hand du Preez has the figures 28 tattooed, the significance of the three mystic stripes beneath these was possibly wisely not explained. Other areas of Du Preez’s body boast some state-of-the- avocation tattoo art. As indeed the bodies of several other pleasing members of this apparently orthodox urban sect: people who have popular symbology etched indelibly into their skins.
Art? Of course it is. The only problem with the programme was that they didn’t show some of the interesting tattoos long enough, especially the long back and sides ones. You needed time to move across these complicated designs, not get just a quick glimpse. This is not “I Love Mom” stuff. Otherwise director Ben Horowitz, with an unerring wryness, captured the essence of this raptly bohemian world. Did you know that some advertising copywriters have tattoos hidden under their shirts?
And so to our third local, Amanda’s Top Dogs, in which Ms A Horwitz does a weekly and rather bilious impersonation of Ruby Wax – prime time Wednesdays on M-Net. Nice way to kill time, that’s if you prefer your time dead.