Stories. We were always going to be saved by stories. Not any stories, but our own — those that had been suppressed, neglected, discarded and forgotten: the untold that were yearning to come to life on screen.
It seemed very simple 10 years ago. What had been missing were good screenplays; naturally they would emerge in the fertile atmosphere of a democratic South Africa. The primacy of the story was asserted as industry mantra and artistic credo and peddled as conventional wisdom by the critics. Here was the panacea that would dispense with the tired remedies of old regimes, such as dodgy subsidies and tax write-off inducements.
Growing from this would be recognisable narratives inhabited by familiar characters. The past and present everyday of South Africa would become a staple of the screen, and film would attain renewed force for cultural empowerment.
That was then. There is no more intriguing illustration of the now than the continuing success of that perennial bogeyman, Leon Schuster. A fortnight before the country’s third democratic election, his Candid Camera- like Oh Schuks, I’m Gatvol recorded the fourth-biggest opening three-day weekend at the local box office.
While the commercial arc of Schuster’s work appears still to be rising, there is nothing progressive about its content. As the Tony Leon of South African film, Schuster plays unabashedly to the disgruntled and disaffected, the constituency discombobulated by change. (For the benefit of non-South African readers, I should explain that gatvol, politely rendered, means “had enough”.)
At least Schuster’s films are all of a piece — who can forget his brand of alarmist “humour” in the pre-democratic There’s a Zulu on My Stoep (1994)? (Starring, of all people, John Matshikiza.) Add the cultural vandalism of Mr Bones (2001), a supposedly comic look at spiritual healers, and it’s hard not to see Schuster as a demagogue for the Democratic Alliance.
More than anything, Schuster is a beneficiary of the big D — distribution. In their zeal of a decade ago, those who espoused faith in the story ideal set aside the problem of how to get their films seen. Perhaps they assumed that new conditions in the country would lead to a revolution in film distribution and exhibition, but they underestimated the commercial and social caution of Ster Kinekor.
It takes neither courage nor particular commercial nous to release Oh Schuks, I’m Gatvol on 106 screens, as the film company did. But it requires courage and foresight to promote and support an altogether different type of South African film, such as last year’s Promised Land, which received little of either.
A cautionary tale of identity, dislocation and alienation, Promised Land, is one of the myriad possible stories that South Africans can tell. It is proof imagery of what we have spoken about for years: telling our own stories and reflecting ourselves on screen. And, despite the spectres of Schuster and timorous distribution, that idea is being more acted upon than talked about.
Now there is growing substance to the article of faith that once South Africans and their lives are realistically and sensitively portrayed on film, they will have taken a huge stride towards self-actualisation and honouring their own identities. For every wannabe gangsta movie like Hijack Stories (owing more to South Central LA than to South Western Township), there is a subtly rendered social reality such as Tebogo Mahlatsi’s Portrait of a Young Man Drowning.
In this diversity, the absurd notion of the definitive South African film — the tell-all, hold-all, avatar — has, thankfully, slipped away. And the very particularity of our films is imbuing some of them with universality. Of those, the epiphany of the past decade, the film that saves the true believer, is Waiting for Valdez by Dumisani Phakati.
A memoir of childhood, family, friendship, community and much else, Valdez transports the watcher to a treasured time in the life of young narrator Sharky (Raydeen Abdullah). Gathered around a drum from which warming flames weave into the night sky, a group of township boys watches the story of Valdez is Coming, a cowboy movie, enacted by two of their fellows.
The performers are doubly fortunate: able to afford admission to the movies, and earning an income from the small fee they charge each of their audience. It is money well earned, for the detail of their recreation is vivid. In a few deft minutes, Phakati establishes the power and wonder of storytelling in general, and of conveying it through film in particular.
While the narrative is framed around the nightly instalments during which Valdez is Coming unfolds, its contents are rich in personal, social and political history.
At its most intimate level, it is a tribute to the grandmotherly love that sees Sharky through a childhood bereft of responsible parents. It is diminished opportunities under apartheid, not choice, that have driven his parents to a shiftless life, dwelling in a past of beauty-queen mother and jazz musician father.
Beyond this family tableau, the film captures the last halcyon days of a community before exile. It is the early 1970s in the western townships of Johannesburg, and forced removals will soon end the idyll of drum-fire retellings from the bioscope. Black and coloured neighbours and school friends will be sundered and dispatched to different parts of the city, such as Soweto and Eldorado Park.
In response to such subject matter, many films are ruined by righteous indignation, rhetoric and an assumption of victimhood. Phakati’s resorts to none of those. The macro-political speaks for itself; the director is interested in the micro-personal.
His is a low-key study in the most human terms, and is all the more affecting for that. Through the film’s prisms the personal tranforms into the political, as in the coloured woman “trying for white” who, Sharky reports poignantly, spends most of her time indoors, out of the sun, to protect her light complexion.
As its foundation, Valdez has a screenplay by Teddy Mattera. This is a case not so much of memory for advantage or defence, as in his father Don Mattera’s autobiography Memory is the Weapon, but of memory as celebration and vindication. Here we have as well memory as emotion recollected in tranquility — a Wordsworthian conception likely to offend Modernists and postmodernists but one that strikes the absolutely correct tone.
So too with the black-and-white photography, masterfully achieved. Each frame has the quality of a memorable black-and-white portrait, and is beautifully lit. It all harks back to before the advent of the director of photography (referred to in industry jargon by the acronym DOP), to the days when the DOP was called the lighting cameraman. Cinematic art is what happens when lights meets film in a particular, directed way; that wonder is manifest in Valdez.
Then there are the performances Phakati draws from his principal players. Abdullah is remarkable as the 11-year-old Sharky, in what one can safely reckon is a portrait of an artist as a young boy. Dolly Rathebe makes his grandmother unforgettable, an indomitable woman with an infinite capacity for love and sensitivity. The dance on the stoep between the two is one of my most abiding cinema images.
Ultimately, what Phakati’s film does is cut through the anguished wrangles about whether the industry needs to be distribution-driven or production-driven. That great debate assumes the proportions of the chicken-and-egg argument, with advocates of distribution contending that there is no point in making films if they cannot be seen and proponents of production asserting that products enable distribution, not the other way around.
Refulgent with the magic of movies and their ability to touch audiences, Valdez is a triumph of humanity and aesthetics. It addresses what John Tindall of the Community Video Education Trust identifies as a key issue in South African filmmaking: films as ideas, or art, or literature. Phakati’s achievement is to demonstrate the primacy of the story over industry riddles about what comes first, production or distribution.
As a Valentine to films, Valdez is in the same celebrated realm as Cinema Paradiso. But it casts its spell not in the 155 minutes that Giuseppe Tornatore took, but in just 26. A deep understanding of cinematic language on Phakati’s part has created a cornucopia: a single story that tells many, and speaks to all audiences (yes, even those who twice saw Oh Schuks, I’m Gatvol).
We are haunted by our stories but, as in Waiting for Valdez, we have been saved by them, and will continue to be.
Darryl Accone is the author of All Under Heaven (David Philip), the story of a Chinese family in South Africa