Neil Sonnekus
Film & Television
Two new documentaries one on cinema screens and the other to be screened on TV look into South Africa’s tortured past. The results are varied.
Long Night’s Journey into Day tells the stories of four cases that appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the Amy Biehl, Matthew Goniwe, Robert McBride and Guguletu Seven cases. This Oscar-nominated documentary was mostly put together from archive footage. Made by Americans, all it really shows is the different shades of opinion about the past in this country but within a certain paradigm.
Only one of the cases the Biehl case has been completed. So the question is: why did this documentary come out now? Has it been made primarily for Americans?
There is no probing beyond the received wisdom of TRC chairman Desmond Tutu, who says it was all about ”restorative” as opposed to ”retributive” justice. There were voices opposed to the process, but they are not present in the film. There is none of the academic or intellectual discourse that surrounded the process.
The subject of Facing Death,Facing Life (e.tv, 6.05pm, June 16) is the Sharpeville Six, the first people to allegedly kill a township councillor during the rent boycotts of 1984. The apartheid state convicted them under the ”common purpose” law. They were sentenced to hang by their necks until they were dead. Later their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In 1991 they were released as part of a political package.
The documentary focuses primarily on one of the six, Duma Kumalo. In the first half he tells us what it felt like to be on death row, in the second he relates what it has been like since being released: ”Facing death is hard, but facing life after facing death is even harder.”
The film grabs you by the throat from the very first image and never lets go. Directed by Ingrid Gavshon, the voices and music are back-to-back and the well-shot visuals are usually literal. For example, prisoners would be given R7 and a cooked chicken before they were hanged. Thus appears a cooked chicken on a plate in a cell.
There are allusions to the Holocaust (Kumalo has become somewhat obsessed by it and collects whatever reading matter he can about it) and the music, by Philip Miller, reinforces that. The musical style is decidedly middle-European: a brooding orchestra backing up a melancholic violin. At one stage Miller ”quotes” the Christmas carol Oh Come All Ye Faithful. It’s a cynical bit of scoring, given that the one person who did consistently support the six was a Catholic priest.
In a speech at the launch of the documentary Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs said anyone who says nothing has changed in this country since 1990 is wrong. By the same token, he added, anyone who says everything has changed would also be wrong.
This is essentially true, but it’s rather sad that political documentaries like Facing Death, Facing Life have changed so little, if at all. For it is so insistent on its own victimhood surely a symptom of an inability to come to terms with the past that it propagates a deeply unhealthy psychic state. The vicious circle of pointing a finger with the hand that isn’t clutching the begging bowl.
The film fails to recognise and therefore acknowledge, let alone celebrate, the archetype beyond the political clich: Kumalo has become a healer, not because of apartheid but in spite of it.