Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION
Last week SABC2 showed an hour-long assortment of early work by the Community Film-Makers, a endeavour intended to nurture local television material. Funded principally by the World Bank and the SABC, a group of young producers, directors and reporters are getting the chance to develop. In the first instance it is encouraging to see the SABC spending our money intelligently, that is, instead of squandering staggering amounts on flashy Sun City schlock like that offensive opening ceremony to the recent Aids 2000 conference. In this instance, as was well proved by the product shown, the corporation may feel very pleased. The hour contained about 10 short documentaries, under the overall title Community Voices in the City. The first of these was a decidedly cynical look at the recent Urban Futures conference – yet another few thousand litres in the unquenchable torrent of the fashionable society-improving talk shops. The documentary started by interviewing some of the Urban Futures fodder, in the form of local adults and some street children in Newtown, Johannesburg – in whose patch the conference was being held. Had anyone of these folk heard of the important conference which, as one of its primary inspirations, had their interests at heart? No one knew a thing about it, let alone where it was being held. Eventually the location was visited and a few of its participants were given the chance to explain what they were about. Out drooled the usual verbal legerdemain, the swarm chant of the numberless parasites who thrive off the misfortunes of others. Questioned as to the purpose of the conference, one delegate answered through a gale of breezy giggles – verbatim: “Well, like what is a city? How do you decide where it fits in some kind of like? Is it important as a city? Do you look at it in relationship to other cities in the world?” Another, a granny-bespectacled American academic wearing a red sock for a hat, offered his own profundity – again verbatim: “Like I was doing a paper on about some things about African cities. Yeah, yeah. And it was about the way some African cities function as some kind of platform to operate at a larger world.” Thrilling stuff for those being mugged, sleeping in drains or dying of the cold. Of the other documentaries in the collection, I would only say that most of them needed firmer structural support, notably in central linking commentary: a thematic scaffolding for the talking heads. It’s too easy just to chuck them all together. s Otherwise, the Community Film-Makers’ first showing was full of inventive spirit and humour. The perils of talking-head documentaries were to be demonstrated well in an SABC production last Sunday evening: Mother City Sex – in the Xpressions slot, as it were. The main trouble here was the obvious one: people in the so-called sex industry are seldom either articulate or attractive. Be it sex-shop attendant, massage- parlour owner, hooker or pimp, they are almost invariably rather unpleasant and very boring to boot – especially when they start talking about what they feel are their own sensitive and valuable contributions to the carnal biomass. Worst of all are the attendant coterie of socially concerned apologists, the brothel lawyers and used- condom inspectors who lurk around the fornication territory flashing their vexations. Talk about sexually transmitted scourges. In this case it was a couple of tweezer-lipped ladies of inflamed moral probity, squeaking on about the need for public and political sanction of the flesh market but somehow overlooking that, since these days our inner cities fair stew with fuck bazaars, it quite obviously already has such permission.
And anyway, why yet another on an already overstocked shelf? It seems that whenever there’s a shortage of ideas for meaningful television documentaries, all eyes turn to the streets. If it isn’t whores, it’s hobos. There have been literally many dozens of these kinds of programmes. To which, I imagine, the answer is that there have also been countless thousands of blue movies made. An apparently insatiable need is being serviced – notably on the part of the producers. Coverage of the British Open golf tournament again showed M-Net deploying its most powerful money- suction pumps. The time is long overdue for some sort of externally applied mechanism which will bring the commercial gluttony of our television under control, some containment of the creeping metastasis of advertising. More in a later column.