It’s a mystery to us why we have been Schattauer’d on. Florian Schattauer’s opinion piece (“Close encounters of an old kind”, May 7) is disingenuous — of course he knows who runs Encounters and this sly knowledge makes him cocky.
Schattauer misses the point. He, a university lecturer in arts and culture management nogal, should know the benefit of checking his “facts”.
The Laboratory has been in existence for six years and yes, it does “train” filmmakers, accomplished or not.
It takes a lot of time, effort and money to create these laboratories and full participation has always been explicitly required of all those who wish to take part, black or white. Let us fill in the gaps he deliberately created.
Encounters began in 1999 with a laboratory for first-time documentary filmmakers.
It created a platform for debate with more experienced filmmakers and there was the real prospect of being commissioned by a broadcaster — a first in South Africa. Between 1999 and 2001, e.tv commissioned and broadcast nine half-hour Laboratory documentaries.
The filmmakers who emerged from this process include Pule Diphare, Omelga Mithyane, Riaan Hendricks, Penny Gaines, Eddie Edwards, Sello Molefe, Bev Ditsie and Andy Spitz.
In 2002 Encounters partnered with SABC1 and the focus changed from the uninitiated to experienced directors, from half-hour to one-hour films. Catherine Muller, Beathur Baker and Mandelakhe Mjekula were commissioned that year.
Black on White is the result of a number of panel discussions run at the 2003 Encounters Documentary Festival. The topic at hand was “identity”. It was repeatedly noted that few black filmmakers ever direct stories about white people.
Of course, as Schattauer so correctly points out, the Black on White films will hopefully counterbalance the notion of “other” that has been part of a racialised discourse. “Whiteness” is curiously invisible — it is there, but somehow not there.
As Richard Dyer puts it: “White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes — a need to always be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent.”
This is an opportunity for the gaze to shift, and to interrogate whiteness with complexity and depth.
This requires discourse, engagement and exploration of the medium and styles, because there will be no one way, or even a right way, of interpreting the way whiteness is constructed. What better than a laboratory where filmmakers have the opportunity to investigate all possibilities in an atmosphere of debate, argument, discussion, support and consultation.
Let’s not just have boring polemics on white privilege, white poverty, anti-affirmative movements. Let’s make whiteness visible, rather like “otherness” has been visible for centuries.
Black on White is a bold step for both Encounters and SABC1, but in its design, there is little difference from the other projects it has run — except that only black filmmakers will be participating. More’s the pity that only once a year a series brief, composed of individual projects, is developed in a collective atmosphere.
For more information on Black on White visit www.encounters.co.za.
The Encounters team comprises Steven Markovitz and Nodi Murphy, co-directors of Encounters; Kethiwe Ngcobo and Zulfah Otto-Sallies, co-producers of Black on White; Pat van Heerden, commissioning editor for Factual SABC1