The Johannesburg born, Dutch trained South African filmmaker Ian Kerkhof does not make films. He makes daring statements, sometimes with a recklessness and abrasiveness that smacks of insensitivity. The statements just happen to be in a medium that uses visuals and sound.
“Well, my social conscience begins and ends with me,” he will tell you. His in-your-face approach to telling stories, or making statements, has earned him the title of Bad Boy of the European underground cinema.
Kerkhof left South Africa for the Netherlands in 1983 to avoid military service. He then worked for the anti-apartheid movement for three years before quitting in disillusionment. “I cannot speak for the British [chapter of the movement] but in Holland it was a joke,” he says, describing how he wrote requests for millions of dollars — but did not consider it work.
Kerkhof spent the second half of the Eighties working his fingers off scrubbing plates at a fast-food outlet and as a delivery boy. This allowed him to enrol at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in 1990. At the same time he was gathering a string of short films stretching from 1989 with titles such as The Masturbator, The Boy Who Masturbated Himself to a Climax and Men are Pigs. His work tackles themes of high-class eroticism and the manifestation of rage.
The turning point came in 1992 when Kerkhof made his debut feature film Kyodai Makes the Big Time, which won him a Golden Calf award for best director at the annual Dutch Film Day in Utrecht. Then he unleashed his fury and dark imagination on the European circuit.
In 1994 Kerkhof graduated from the academy and returned to South Africa, with the threat of conscription removed, to make a documentary about South Africa’s first democratic elections. The sojourn largely departed from its brief and spawned two films that tapped into South African society’s most sadistic feature: rape.
The first film was Confessions of a Yeoville Rapist, a response to the real issue of the rapist who was at large in Yeoville earlier the same year. It caused outrage on the one hand, and on the other it was described as “a stylised glimpse into the South African hell”. It led one member of the public to draft a letter to De Gelderlander to ask how “a film which
displays such devilish perversity should be allowed in Holland”.
Kerkhof is wary of moral high priests. “The moralist is someone who does not feel good about himself and wants to tell you how to live your life,” he says.
He followed up this shocker with Nice to Meet You, Please Don’t Rape Me, made in 1995, the year of his permanent return to South Africa.
In the film, actor Eric Myeni instructs Matthew Oats to lash him with a belt “to make him a good kaffir” and then asks his assailant for anal sex.
Kerkhof says he makes such statements because ” we are not offended enough” and “we are still frightened of our rage”. He believes that ours is a country of more than two nations. The class divide is evident in places like Grahamstown, host of the National Arts Festival. He notes how the affluent pass destitutes on the streets, oblivious to the plight of the locals.
He derides the ethos in which the festival, which made him guest of honour for its film festival, is steeped. From the Eurocentric culture that permeates the programme to the architectural philosophy that gave birth to the 1820 Settlers Monument, he reckons its all one big farce. Far from biting the hand that feeds him, he is just pointing out that it is dirty.
He also does not mince his words in his broadside on this newspaper for what he perceives as harsh attack on President Thabo Mbeki. “It is because of the magnanimity of black people that this country has come so far,” he says, ” It is a miracle the crime level is what it is. It will get worse.”
His frustrations about the movie industry’s ” begging for funding” mentality has driven him to where he has sought other media of expression. He has now turned to digital paintings in his first solo show called Logoff Logon Logos, which he presents under the name of Aryan Kaganoff – see Media as Medium