The voice on the other end of the telephone says: “My father, Shan Pillay, died last week — he had heart problems”.
Setting up interviews for a story examining Durban’s film history, this short conversation from earlier this week placed into stark perspective how those fragile memories — exacerbated by the lack of archival material — are quickly being eroded.
According to Neil Coppen, a filmmaker whose Grey Street Cinema Project is scheduled to be completed before the end of the year, Pillay was one of the last old-school movie projectionists.
He had, until recently, been ever-present at the aged wheels of the projection machine at the Shiraz Cinema, loading, rewinding and splicing film reels.
The Shiraz itself is the last of its kind in Durban’s Grey Street casbah area, which, from the 1940s onwards, was populated by cinemas such as the Ishfahan, Naaz, Avalon and the Shah Jehan, the first 2 000-seater cinema in the southern hemisphere.
“Shan was an amazing source of information and a compulsive story-teller. He’d been there for more than 40 years and had never completely watched a film — he was so obsessed with the focus and the image on screen. I’d spend hours up there watching him at his craft. He had a genuine sadness for the modernising changes in the industry,” says Coppen.
Coppen, who, with three other Durban filmmakers, is documenting the history of cinema in the area — especially during its heyday from the 1940s until the late 1980s — says the lack of archival material and correlating different, fading, memories is the most difficult part of the project.
Author Aziz Hassim, who writes vividly of the area and launched his second book, The Revenge of Kali, this week, says films were an integral part of the community experience in the Victoria Street he lived in during the 1950s and 1960s: “There were just throngs of people out on a Saturday night in their best clothes going to the films and, of course, the black market ticket sellers were also out there — the buggers used to buy up all the tickets as soon as they could,” he says, laughing.
American gangster films also influenced the sartorial sharpness of local hoodlums and their mannerisms, says Hassim.
Historian Vashna Jagarnath, in a chapter from the book City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, also contends that the popularity of Hindi films from Bombay in Durban cinemas from the late 1930s onwards provided “a cultural conduit between India and South Africa” for Indians of the diaspora. This, she says, happened after the umbilical cord to India and its cultural traditions and religious rituals had been severed by the harsh conditions and poverty induced by indenture.
According to AB Moosa, managing director of the 70-year-old Avalon group, the only black-owned independent cinema group in the country, says cinemas in Victoria Street were multipurpose venues during apartheid, hosting boxing matches and political gatherings when they were banned by the authorities.
Moosa says he is intent on continuing the trend started by his grandfather, also AB Moosa, who opened the first cinema in the area because “as a young boy, selling newspapers, he always saved his money for the movies and decided that one day he would own his own so that he didn’t have to pay”.
“The political need for clandestine rallies isn’t there anymore, but that has been replaced by our programming — especially during the Durban Film Festival — when we try to ensure that universal stories about conflict, poverty and community struggles get on to the screens.”
Yet, although memories fade and disappear, some are still giving birth to new films set in or about Durban. Filmmaker Junaid Ahmed, director of More than Just a Game, remembers “being as young as 10 and taking the bus on a Saturday from Chassies [the suburb of Chatsworth] to town and being completely entranced by the dreams, imagination and spontaneity of the Bollywood films. I’m reminded about those aesthetics, that spontaneity every time I make a film,” he says.