Spanning three decades of South African film-making, the Awakening Film Festival comprises 36 classical and contemporary films that explore heritage and democracy, many of which have never been screened in South Africa before.
“The Awakening Film Festival is so-called because we believe this programme of films will evoke powerful memories of the past and stimulate imagination of possible futures. Film is a powerful form of cultural expression. It defines world views and shapes the way we perceive ourselves. The ‘awakening’ is a call to conscious engagement with modern storytellers — our filmmakers,” says Mike Dearham, CEO of the Film Resource Unit, which is curating the festival.
Some of the highlights of the festival include the premiers of Dilemma 1962 by Henning Carlsen, The Wooden Camera by Ntshavheni wa Luruli, Scratched, Mixed and ? by Bridget Thompson and Abdul Kadir Said Ahmed, Gums and Noses by Craig Freimond and Freedom is a Personal Journey by Akeidah Mohammed.
Also on the bill is a programme of work by Aryan Kaganof — one of the most prolific and acclaimed of avant-garde South African filmmakers — including the documentary Western 4.33 (2002), which received the first prize for Best Documentary at the Africa and Islands Festival in Réunion and Best Video Made in Africa at the 12th African Film Festival in Milan.
To call Kaganof solely a filmmaker, however, would be an underestimation of his broad-ranging repertoire, which includes books of poetry, novels (including Hectic!, which was translated into Dutch) collections of short stories, short documentaries and features. Kaganof is also an artist — having exhibited in numerous international exhibitions and having presented a solo exhibition at the Association for Visual Arts in Cape Town in 2001 — and musician, specialising in noise music. Most noteworthy of his films are the award-winning Shabondama Elegy (1999), Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994) and Kyodai Makes the Big Time (1991), as well as the feature Wasted (1996) in which Kaganof pioneered the process of shooting a feature on digital video tape and blowing it up to 35mm film, which was later taken up by Lars von Trier and the Dogme movement.
“It is all building up to this huge, sculptural mosaic — a sculpture in time, the project of Kaganof. It is a conceptual-art project about how mythology functions in an urban context. The posters are part of that — the reviews, the books, the films,” Kaganof says on his almost Renaissance man diversity. Despite his international success, Kaganof’s work is not often seen in South Africa.
The problem is “the lack of distribution of non-Hollywood propaganda movies in this country”, which, to a degree, the Awakening Film Festival is redressing. But “first we have to bomb the malls — they’re flattening our culture — and then we can talk about a solution to this problem,” says Kaganof.
His programme at the festival will include Arrested Development (2003),”an investigation into the moment before the moment happened”; Casbah and Back (2002), a portrait of Johannesburg; Sharp Sharp! (2003), a documentary on kwaito; and Bantu Continua Uhuru Nihilismus (2004), a memorial service for Steve Bantu Biko.
The highlight, however, is undoubtably Western 4.33, an experimental documentary about the German concentration camps in Namibia (then South-West Africa) where genocidal strategies were employed and where, to date, the German government refuses to compensate the Herero people for these atrocities.
While the title seems a simultaneous pun on “Westernisation” and the western genre of movies, Kaganof says: “The most cinematic genre in film is the western genre; there is no precursor in theatre or literature and therefore it is most closely tied to what movies are.
“I have always loved the genre and as I studied it, I realised that it was a propaganda machine to substantiate genocide.” Thus the documentary is about the Herero genocide, simultaneously taking on a critique of its propagating genre of cinema.
Kaganof says he has always loathed how we inherit and appropriate United States generic conventions without interrogating them.
The “4.33” references John Cage’s work of the same title, in which a pianist sits silently at a piano for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. There are exactly four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in Western 4.33.
In US cinema, this dead sound is intolerable as it makes people nervous, says Kaganof, “but I think you should feel nervous in this movie”. It is also a reference to technology version upgrades.
The reuse of footage throughout the movie takes on the interrogation of the documentary format, with
its reference to the formalist and concrete filmmaking of the 1970s.
“Memory comes into play — you know what is going to happen, so you are released from suspense and it becomes a moving painting,” says Kaganof. The most striking of this footage is a colour scene in a mostly black-and-white film, in which a woman saunters past a red wall with a group of men sitting next to it.
“The few colour scenes in the film are metaphors for the rich, menstrual blood of the African woman who is truly ‘Mother Africa’ to the human race,” according to a flyer from the 2004 Berlin International Film Festival.
Not a hyperdermic-needle movie that qualifies viewers as instantaneous experts on the Herero holocaust, this metaphoric strand is what entwines the film’s negotiation of the Herero holocaust, the western genre, Westernisation and the documentary into a meditation on the impossible colonial dream of civilising Africa.
The details
The Awakening Film Festival is showing at MuseuMAfricA in Newtown, Johannesburg, until August 26. Tel: (011) 833 5624. Website: www.fru.co.za