Hindu folk dance — the Garba: children playing, adults smiling — some self-consciously, some shyly, some spontaneously joyful, some solemn. The saris are richly coloured — reds, blues, gold.
Then, against a pale, off-white background, we see the words “We remember differently”. From that, we shift to a static view, from below, of the bare branches of a tree against a starkly blue sky.
We then see a familiar Johannesburg suburban house: lawn, looking parched, white walls, verandah. Inside, there are gleaming, polished wooden floors, stillness, quiet and cleanness.
A 30-something white woman is looking nostalgically through family memorabilia. A voiceover gives us her thoughts: ‘Great family holidays were interminable distances, endless stretches of road ribboning into hills we never seemed to reach. They put me between girl cousins in the back seat; I was too young for a window seat. The cousins ignored me. One had a Barbie doll, still in its cellophane box. She kept it on her knees. I didn’t dare ask to hold it.”
And by now — a few minutes into Jyoti Mistry’s new movie — we realise we are watching an exceptionally subtle, complex and moving treatment of major South African preoccupations: race, identity, memory, desire, history, love, eroticism, marriage, women’s domestic and social entrapment, mothers and daughters.
The Garba at the beginning is 8mm archival footage; the suburban house with the white woman and her mother, who is recovering from a hip operation, is modern day. But when the attractive, pensive, 30-something and never-married white woman recalls the ‘great family holidays”, archival footage again gives us the images she’s recalling — and the characters in those are Indian, not white.
Puzzling about why Mistry has cast two white actresses — Vanessa Cooke (the mother) and Clare Staniforth (the daughter) — we then see further archival footage of one of the family holidays.
The archival footage is from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. We see an Indian family in front of the HF Verwoerd tunnel in Hartebeespoort (the date, 1961, is clearly visible on the concrete edifice). There’s Kool Aid for the kids, Zoo biscuits and their icing, a drive through a game park.
And central to the daughter’s memories are three things. The Barbie doll — that plastic repository of society’s image of the ideally attractive and compliant woman: ‘Even when we were in the game park, I fantasised about the doll, imagined how her silky yellow hair would feel, how fresh and satisfying the new plastic scent of her would be.”
Second, if her eyes shift from the Barbie doll, ‘there would only be the road projecting between my parents, and to the sides of that, dry, faded bush”, her voiceover says.
And thirdly, what with the heat, the long car journey, too much Kool Aid and too many Zoo biscuits, ‘My stomach lurched suddenly and propelled vomit. The cousins’ faces were horrified. Dad got some on his arm; there was vomit even on the dashboard. And Barbie’s box was splattered with pink icing and acid yellow juice.”
With those three memories, Mistry sets up the issues her movie explores: female ideals against the social realities that entrap, sicken, protect and sometimes endanger them; men and women forever apart (the road projects ‘between my parents”); and families that are both nurturing (the kids get sweeties and holidays) and alienating (the cousins keep the daughter at a distance and are horrified when she vomits).
So we’re seeing the mundane and the ordinary: the movie attempts no ‘big picture” analysis of politics, race and history. But all three of those formative, enabling and disabling influences are in the movie, even so.
Some archival footage shows Indian women — no men, again — and their children strolling around and playing in the Union Buildings gardens, the centre of white apartheid power. The lawns are immaculate; the gardens beautiful. But the Indians are clearly tourists in a land not theirs.
Race is explored when the white mother and daughter recall their earlier lives, which are shown to us in archival footage depicting Indians. Why? Cultural theorist John Fiske comes to mind: ‘The physical effects of white power are inescapably everywhere, but the discretion of its operations makes the system invisible, except in its effects.
‘For whites, who are largely free of its effects, the invisibility is almost total; for blacks, the struggle is to make visible that which they know is there, to give a materiality to the system and its intentionality … White people can deny … their own whiteness. The net effect of such strategic denial is to produce the truth that whiteness as an informing regularity of the micro-physics of power does not exist.”
I think Fiske is saying, and Mistry’s movie is exploring, that damaging syndrome whereby power (white or otherwise) presents itself as the norm, the universal, the given — and so beyond question. Think of US President George Bush’s assumption that white American capitalism, which he calls democracy, is the ideal towards which the whole world aspires — or should aspire: those who don’t, such as Muslim ‘terrorists”, including woman and children, must be encouraged to see the ‘truth”, usually by means of high-tech weapons of mass destruction.
As a South African undergraduate, I recall one professor of English responding to the challenge that all literature, and so all literary criticism, is ideological in some way with the pained and puzzled claim: ‘But I don’t have an ideology” — apparently unaware both that that is an impossibility (even agnosticism is an ideology) and so that the claim itself reveals a particular ideology (one assuming universal truth floating free of race, class, gender, politics and history).
An extraordinary image introduces another piece of archival footage: a bright red-and-orange flame against a black background. This visual symbol of both warmth and destruction leads on to a Hindu wedding, where the bride is alternately deferential, nervous, fearful and erotically anticipatory. The mother’s voiceover at this point recalls her husband’s hand in the small of her back — protective, warm, but also possessive. He owns her now.
Mistry’s 26-minute movie gently, and sometimes devastatingly, challenges blithe assumptions held by those who wield power — including men who hold the reins over their women and children (whatever culture they’re in).
‘In making We Remember Differently,” Mistry told Indiana University’s Black Film Archive in December, ‘I wanted to question race and identity from within personal and collective memories — perhaps recalling the adage ‘the personal is political’; and rather than evoke the meta-narrative of South African history, I tried to work with the smallest units of personal experience and expression …”
The concept of We Remember Differently was Mistry’s, but she is immensely aided by Lesley Emanuel’s stunningly beautiful script.
‘After the honeymoon,” recalls the mother of her own wedding, ‘I never bothered with a photo album: it felt like I would be putting memories into a coffin.” And the daughter recalls: ‘Once I watched them [her mother and father] sleeping: the air between their beds was sour and wasted.”
In an early scene, the daughter encourages her mother to take a bath. She helps her mother undress, but the latter retains some of her self-possession when she says, slightly irritably, that she can take off her own panties — which are white and anything but alluring. With her mother in the bath, the daughter undresses too: her very much sexier underwear is rich red satin (a link with the fire that introduces the Hindu wedding comes to mind).
And in a scene of striking parent-child intimacy but also tension, the daughter joins her mother in the bath, facing the latter’s back, and gently washes her hair and soaps her body.
Music composer Nishlyn Ramanna’s score is haunting but unobtrusive. ‘All too often,” he says, ‘I’ve ‘remembered’ or performed aspects of my selfhood through white discourses — Enid Blyton kids’ stories, endless movies, Western classical music, and so on, and this movie subverts that.”
Yet the movie’s music is itself Western, again establishing the tension between assimilation (forced or otherwise) and its subversion.
The head of Wits University’s film and television unit, Mistry holds a PhD from New York University. Her earlier short movies include Another NY Story (released in 2000 and screened several times on SABC3, Yoni (1997), BED (1998) and Paw-Paw (also 1998). We Remember Differently premiered in February and will be showing again on April 21 (see the details below).
Mistry’s latest movie takes South African filmmaking into new territory, both conceptually and technically, and is certain to provoke rich debate on both grounds.
The details
Jyoti Mistry’s 26-minute film We Remember Differently will show on April 21 at Wits University, Senate Room, 2nd Floor, Senate House, and will be introduced by Colin Richards. On April 29 it will show at the University of Cape Town in the Robert Leslie Lecture Theatre on Upper Campus and will be introduced by Lesley Marx.