Sex is always talked about as an epidemic in this country, and I’m saying ‘Guess what? I fucked all you whites and you didn’t get gonorrhea … The Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act only went in 1985, and I can’t believe people weren’t, and aren’t, pissed off,” says Yunus Vally, director of the documentary, The Glow of White Women.
With his louche demeanour and tangential rantings peppered with the obligatory ”fuck”, it would be easy to dismiss the first-time director as a narcissist.
The documentary is unashamedly self-indulgent. Vally describes it as ”frivolous” and ”juvenile”. Yet there is some sensitivity to his method, and his nihilism. Giggling along, hankering after a fag, one is compelled to replace ”self-indulgent” with ”intimate” and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
Commissioned as part of the SABC’s Black on White: Reversing the Lens series, Glow appears to revolve around one man (Vally) chain-smoking his way through past conquests and sprouting Frantz Fanon as he interrogates the development (from growing up in a Muslim family in Nelspruit to carousing in Yeoville) of his own sexual identity in relation to the apartheid state and media constructions of white women.
Yet it will also resonate with any black kid who spent his formative sexual years ogling the pages of Scope magazine and blasting his gun off to the skimpily clad commie-basher, Tessa.
It will also evoke memories in anybody who grew up during a time when shagging across the colour line was a legislated no-no, when one ran the risk of having bedroom doors knocked down by the cops and having last night’s underwear waved around as evidence in court.
The documentary is a sort of truth and reconciliation commission of Vally’s libido. But it also asks refreshing questions about the tendency of culture production in South Africa to dictate a broader nation-building programme. It refers to the lack of dialogue in our glossed-over, disengaged, multicultural present. One stated aim of the film was to move away from the meta-narratives of national heroes and national celebrations that dictate the present.
”People are basically dishonest, petrified about who they are and it comes across in their films … we prefer work about nation building — as a result we are too scared to be intimate. We frame everything with a political cloak that never reveals anything about ourselves. We all want to be pleased with ourselves as happy little multiculturalists,” says Vally.
Instead, the work concentrates on copulating bodies. Vally says he is also reclaiming ”sex” from its usual filmic treatment as a ”Soul Buddyz or a Khomanani project teaching you how to use a condom and how to fuck”. Which it does. The movie takes viewers on a meander through media constructions of the white female identity and its impact on black sexual identity within the apartheid milieu.
As an intellectual stab from a darkie, it is particularly disarming because one gets the sense that Vally may once upon a time have used Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks to navigate and justify his own nights of bed-hopping in the freshly liberated Yeoville of the early Nineties.
The details
Encounters takes place at Nu Metro cinemas, Hyde Park Corner in Johannesburg, until July 22 and at Nu Metro Cinemas at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town from until August 5. Tel: 021 465 4686. Visit www.encounters.co.za.
The Glow of White Women shows in Johannesburg on July 21 at 6pm and in Cape Town on July 27 at 6.30pm