South African film production began with the Anglo-Boer War – and remained in the trenches, writes AndrewWorsdale
Cut to SouthEAfrica at the beginning of the century. The country is at the forefront of film-making internationally. No one in the industry is bitching about viability. It’s really Hollyveld, and it’s amazing.
Given the dreary state of SouthAfrican cinema today, it is hard to believe that between 1895 and 1909 British and American films flooded South Africa through mobile cinemas and caused as much of a furore as a flurry. The public rushed to catch the Frank Fillis spectacle. Fillis was a Cape Town-based kinetoscope entrepreneur who got into hot water with his showing of The Most Beautiful and Most Famous Pictures in Life: The Temptation of St Anthony, which the press referred to as “the most indecent and profane exhibition that may be held as an utter obscenity and blasphemy”.
The first newsreels in the world may have been shot during the Anglo-Boer South African War from 1899 to 1902; but the first South African drama was The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery of 1910.
The synopsis reads: “On the banks of the Vaal River, a Hottentot discovers a big diamond. Two diggers down on their luck buy it for four shillings but it is entrusted to a hero, Dick Grangeway, for delivery to Standard Bank in London; however, two desperadoes are after the diamond and are assisted by Lokoko, chief of a marauding tribe of kaffirs, who agrees to assist for one third of the loot … The outspan at sunrise. Surprise by the kaffirs. Retribution. Kate, Dick’s wife, escapes, taking the diamond with her and runs for assistance. The mounted police come to the rescue.”
In July 1910 a document of the black American boxer Johnson defeating his white opponent Jeffries was banned in South Africa.
The film had incited race riots in the United States, Canada and in New Zealand, and was banned in many towns in the US. Soon after, the town clerk of Johannesburg passed an order warning all exhibitors not to show the film.
“The sole menace of the film,” according to historian Thelma Gutsche, “was the inculcation of racial hatred which could instantly be obviated by prohibiting its exhibition to coloured people.” The scourge of censorship would, in the future, deem hundreds of films “unsuitable” for black audiences.
Since 1910 more than 1 350 feature films have been made in South Africa. The first Afrikaans film, and one of the most notorious, was the epic De Voortrekkers, which was completed in 1916. Die Burger launched a vociferous attack on the Sabbath-breaking shoot, but prime minister Louis Botha defended the film.
As recorded in the Cape Argus, the shoot also had its share of problems during the filming of the Blood River sequence. A group of black extras playing marauding tribesmen refused to recoil and fall “dead”, and continued into the laager where a violent exchange ensued with white Boers. Mounted police were summoned – one black man was killed during the shooting.
Forty-three films were made between 1916 and 1922 by Isadore William Schlesinger’s African Film Productions. In fact, the development of the South African film industry has largely been ascribed to Schlesinger, who through his business managed to incorporate all the film distributors in the country and for 43 years from 1913 had the monopoly of film distribution from the Cape to the Zambezi.
Sarie Marais, the first local sound movie, was made in 1931. Not long after, a group of Afrikaner nationalists established a film production organisation called the Reddingsdaad-Bond-Amateur-Rolprent
Organisasie (Rescue Action League Amateur Film Organisation), which rallied against British and American films pervading the country.
The 1940s saw a huge group of Afrikaans films, and the rise of several local stars like Al Debbo and Frederik Burgers, who reached fame in such successes as Kom Saam Vanaand.
In the 1950s Jamie Uys started to garner recognition with local films like Daar Doer in die Bosveld, and in 1951 Zoltan Korda made Cry the Beloved Country, based on Alan Paton’s award-winning book. The film caused a furore because of its politics, and even led president DF Malan’s wife to complain to Paton’s wife that it was not a true reflection of what was happening in the country.
Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 production of Come Back Africa provided what is still a landmark in South African cinema, a docu- drama of the lives in Sophiatown. The film’s weaknesses are overcome by its classic verit shebeen scene spiced up with the singing of Miriam Makeba.
Sixty films were made between 1956 and 1962, of which 43 were in Afrikaans, four bilingual and 13 in English. Part of the reason for this was the subsidy system which only rewarded box office successes. The percentage rewarded to producers was higher for Afrikaans movies (55%) than for English ones (44%).
Ross Devenish, director of Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, Marigolds in August and The Guest, said in an article on the state subsidy system: “Nobody gives a damn about merit … as things stand we subsidise the producer’s avarice not art.”
Lionel Friedberg, for many years chair of the South African Film and Theatre Technicians Association, wrote in a newsletter: “Almost overnight, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers were becoming film-makers.”
The result was a glut of films that were nothing more than visual extensions of popular Springbok radio plays like Taxi, The Men From the Ministry, Flying Squad, Gold Squad and even Dog Squad.
But the 1960s did see some films that showed a some insight into apartheid society. Jans Rautenbach’s Jannie Totsiens had the country represented by the allegory of a mental institution with the insane running the asylum while the doctor in charge (the prime minister) tries to justify the situation.
Apart from Rautenbach’s cross-cultural romance Katrina, which the censorship board insisted have a different and officially sanctioned ending, none of the films made any money.
The 1970s saw a new genre emerge – the war movie which attempted to reflect the ongoing border conflict. Films like Kaptein Caprivi, Aanslag op Kariba and Terrorist were propagandistic with ruthless communist baddies getting trounced by our fearless God-fearing boys on the border.
In that decade, Uys’s box office hit, Beautiful People, won him the 1975 Golden Globe award for best documentary. His hit The Gods Must Be Crazy had a Coca-Cola bottle falling out of the sky that, in a racist twist, ended up being deified by Bushmen tribespeople.
Then came the 1980s with the tax-breaks they afforded the industry by allowing off- shore money to be off-loaded through suspect schemes. Fly-by-nighters, including Canon films headed by Avi Lerner, spent more than R400-million of taxpayers’ money making straight-to-video dirges like American Ninja 3, 4, and 5. Forgettable stars like Michael Dudikoff pretended to be in Vietnam, while blasting baddies away in KwaZulu-Natal in propaganda like River of Death.
But the 1980s saw some major breakthroughs for South African cinema with the rise of many alternative films made either on a shoe-string budget or with the fill-up of a government tax-break.
Darrell Roodt’s Place of Weeping, about oppressed farmworkers, probably started the cycle. Initially shot on borrowed (or pilfered) stock, the film struck a chord, even premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.
Controversial films of that time include Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula, which was a township melodrama with the brilliant Thomas Mogotlane as a petty thief who gets involved in politics against his will. Also up for mention is Roodt’s war psychosis thriller The Stick, and Manie van Rensburg’s portrayal of 1940s Afrikaner nationalism in The Fourth Reich. And let us not forget this writer’s own film, Shot Down – a political satire about young white lefties, which was banned for ten years because (and this is verbatim from the Publications Control Board) “it has no artistic merit whatsoever”.
During the 1990s South Africa got a new force – short films and innovative documentaries found new life with the emancipation of the SABC, the introduction of pay channel M-Net and nowadays free-to-air channel e-tv.
M-Net’s New Directions initiative produced over 20 short films including Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s Chikin Biznis, which won an award at Fespaco and was later extended and remade as a feature film. Sexy Girls by Russell Thompson was also an M-Net feature; but both films failed to drum up significant money at the box office.
The same can be said for Neal Sundstrom’s Inside Out, the tale of a kugel directing a nativity play in a small town, and Gavin Hood’s A Reasonable Man, about a liberal lawyer taking on the case of a tokolosh murder. Both films were part-funded by African Media Entertainment.
On the bright side, in 1995 the government introduced an interim film fund which disbursed R10-million over two years for the development and production of shorts, features and documentaries.
The truth remains that the South African movie industry is still saddled with an NGO mentality, hence of late our documentaries are more memorable. Today, though, foreign- produced films are made here and so are many international commercials; our crews and our technical expertise are undoubted, but whether we can get out of the rut and write good scripts and make movies that really work remains to be seen in the next century.