No alien Karoo landscape, no inbred local characters, no mean streets of Jo’burg, no speed- and coke-driven disaffected youth: this gem of a short film has everything.
Interference, a 20-minute debut film by young writer/director Aurelia Driver, is a pleasure to watch. It’s that rarity, a South African movie that isn’t obsessively concerned with its own South Africanness, but instead with a simple story gently told.
The most-uttered inanity at local film openings (right after ‘I loved your movie”) is the one about Australian cinema. Why can’t we make movies that are stamped with our own unique cultural imprint, the way those devilish Aussies can? Well, the one answer is that we do, it’s just that most South African movie watchers, poor sods, wouldn’t recognise their own culture even if Denzel Washington sat them down personally and explained it to them.
The story that Interference tells is elegantly crafted. Driver describes it as a ‘simple, direct, with classic framing. There’s nothing fancy because then you end up not telling the story. I didn’t want it to look like a music video.”
It’s about a university physics professor (Peter Krummeck) and his relationships with his daughter (Jana van Niekerk) and a sexy ex-student (Christina Beatty). The professor, Alan Sherwood, is reminiscent of JM Coetzee’s David Lurie in Disgrace. Caught in a profession that has increasingly less relevance to a South African context, he lectures young, brash students in a discipline that demands as much aesthetic appreciation as scientific application. The professor’s wave-form demonstrations are beautifully constructed scenes of fire and sound that work their metaphors into the luculent fabric of the film. Driver cites these experiments as part of the impulse behind the film’s genesis: ‘They’re such a fantastic visual metaphor for the movement and stasis, the repetitive patterns that people’s lives fall into.”
In 20 minutes of elliptical dialogue and precise mise en scène, Interference manages to say more about father/daughter relationships than any hysterically realist story of incest. It also manages to present a succinct portrayal of what it means to be a middle-aged man caught at that moment in life when sexual potency transfers to your offspring. The true accomplishment of Interference is that it is a profoundly female film that is ostensibly about a man.
According to Driver, ‘the professor isn’t a pathetic figure, he’s just trapped. He’s not crazy because he’s trapped, he totally accepts his condition. The events in the film force the professor into some kind of recognition of his own sexuality, which he doesn’t ever confront. I wanted to make a film that identified with particular characters, and it’s meant to be oblique and distant.”
There are two reasons for making a short film in South Africa. The first is the usual drive of the artist to express herself, to tell a story. The other is as a kind of portfolio, to show around in the hope of getting that opportunity to direct a full-length feature film. It’s not a cheap enterprise. Interference should have cost around R500 000 to make, but was shot in three days for R86 000.
Cast members and technical staff worked for nominal rates, and film stock, equipment and post-production were free, all donated by people in the film industry doing their bit to promote local film. Cinema Nouveau provided the theatre in Cape Town free of charge for the premiere.
General manager Nico van der Merwe says that this is a common gesture by Cinema Nouveau. ‘As a leader in South Africa for the discerning cinema-goer, we believe we have a responsibility to local film-makers, to help them get exposure and to build a local film market. If we get requests for cinema space, we consider them all on their merits and help as much as we can.”
With this sort of support from within the industry, the only thing missing is the support from investors and moviegoers. When you watch an accomplished film like Interference, you feel this lack all the more keenly. The stories are there, the talent is there: all we need is to give our young film-makers the freedom to make films that are about themselves, rather than about marketing an ersatz South Africanness.
Chris Roper is editor of World Online