John Greyson has invented a new kind of film: the documentary opera. The Canadian director is no stranger to crossing and disturbing genres, from his musical about Aids, Zero Patience, to his postmodern history movie, Proteus, based on a true story (and trial and execution) set in South Africa in the early 18th century.
Fig Trees, which Greyson will present at the Out in Africa film festival in coming weeks, is largely about South African anti-Aids campaigner Zackie Achmat and his Canadian counterpart Tim McCaskell — but it is by no means straightforward.
The opera’s libretto, for instance, contains (sung) quotations from various official documents, or disquisitions on the musical language itself. There is split screen (twos and threes), subtitles (palindromic or not), black-and-white contrasted with colour footage, and other cinematic flourishes.
There are interviews with ÂAchmat and McCaskell, plus commentary by the then-United Nations envoy for Aids in Africa, Stephen Lewis, and cultural theorist Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. The film has hilariously reworked pop songs — you will never hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Bruce Springsteen’s Philadelphia the same way again. Oh, and there’s an albino squirrel in a speaking role. Peter Greenaway, eat your heart out.
Scored by David Wall, Fig Trees began as an installation — an opera in seven rooms. “We thought we’d go on a world tour with it,” says Greyson, “but the world didn’t cooperate. When we decided to expand it into a feature film, in about 2004, I had the idea of adding Tim’s story, so there would be the contrast of two movements, two battles.”
Both Achmat and McCaskell founded Aids movements and fought for access to drugs for the infected. “They don’t know each other — they’ve met once — but their stories have parallels,” says Greyson. Apostles of Civilised Vice, Achmat’s own documentary about gay and lesbian life in South Africa from colonial times to the present (made for the SABC in 1999), will be shown at this year’s festival as well.
Fig Trees is Greyson’s second film (after Proteus, co-directed with Jack Lewis) to build on a South African link. His interest in South Africa began, he says, when he sat with McCaskell on a committee supporting Simon Nkoli, the gay activist jailed as one of the Delmas treason trialists in the 1980s.
Woven into Fig Trees, as a kind of ancestral presence, is a reflection on Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s opera of 1934, Four Saints in Three Acts — which, as one newspaper noted at the time, is neither about four saints nor in three acts. Like Fig Trees, it was a kind of anti-opera, featuring Stein’s nonsense prose and an all-black cast playing a bunch of saints in heaven having a picnic. (The stage directions were also sung.)
“We wanted to take this studiously apolitical, otherworldly engagement with the absurd and give it an urgency in the real world,” says Greyson of Four Saints in Three Acts. “We wanted to turn it on its head, to invert it.”
Of course, “invert” was once a word for homosexuals, just in case you missed that connection. And what Greyson does so well is to invert things. In the film, Koestenbaum turns the score of Four Saints in Three Acts upside-down and plays it inverted, while singing the libretto (and/or the musical directions) backwards. Hence the film’s interest in palindromes, too.
Fig Trees is an anti-operatic opera in more ways than one. “What do opera audiences like?” Greyson asks, and answers: “Tragedy. And in feature documentary, it’s the tragic narratives that get more play.”
But here tragedy is not the inevitable climax. As is now well known, for years the HIV-positive Achmat refused to take antiretroviral medication in protest against the South African state’s reluctance to provide it free to those without the means to afford it. These were the years of the rule of the Great Denialist, Thabo Mbeki, and the potato-punting Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
Eventually, after court victories against the state that paved the way for a proper roll-out of antiretrovirals, Achmat began to take the medication.
“The narrative spine,” says Greyson, “is Zackie deciding to take his pills, thereby denying the tragedy of opera.”
That’s just part of what happens when you make a documentary opera or an opera-documentary. As Greyson says: “We thought if we combined the two they might take each other apart.”
The 16th Out in Africa South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival shows at Nu Metro Montecasino, Johannesburg, from September 3 to 13, and at the Nu Metro V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, from September 10 to 20. For more information, including a full listing of all the movies on show and a screening schedule, go to www.oia.co.za