The following sequence opens with a pan across an essentially empty plain where the laying of communication lines is visible, followed by shots of the erection of newer telegraphic communication posts, alternated with shots of processes of labour by local Africans employed or enlisted for this work. The laying of the telegraph communication lines suggests that the film serves as a document of the modernisation of infrastructure, with telegraphic communication a theme in many empire films. Thus, communication produced by wireless and heliographic signalling enables the production of the singular spatial field which the film navigates for us, and the film narrative itself hinges on a montage of vehicular and human movements between heliograph signalling stations.

Figure 5.3. Landscape framed by signalling station, *K.A.R. Signals*. Source: Imperial War Museum; screen shot from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/

Interestingly, however, the film never positions us within any kind of specific national territory. We, the viewers, are instead placed within a borderless, stateless field in which movement and labour are organised around this massive communication project. In some shots, the landscape is framed by the new telegraphic signalling station apparatus, the poles and wires of which are shot in an aesthetic reminiscent of Russian Constructivist photography, often also focused on industrial infrastructures as social documents. These lines thus organise our perception of the visual field in which both landscape and a stateless, dislocated African labour and military force are placed.1

Figure 5.4. Borderless, stateless visual field, *K.A.R. Signals*. Source: Imperial War Museum; screen shot from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/

1  Thelma Gutsche, Ian Christie, Tom Gunning and Tom Rice provide accounts of exhibition and circulation of early film by travelling showmen and theatre troupes, as well as accounts of amateur filmmakers.

#### *Inscription and transmission*

If we now enquire further into the particular nature of the heliograph as one form of communication technology employed by the Signals Section, along with more modern wireless technologies, we see more clearly how those technologies function, both as means of inscription of African territories within a colonial imaginary of space and time, and of transmission and communication between the disparate *territoires* of empire. Invented in the early nineteenth century, the heliograph is an apparatus that produces a physical light signal using a gridded mirror that can be decoded and as such read across relatively large distances (almost a manual version of Morse code that employs natural light).

Interestingly, the heliograph is also the name given to the earliest device capable of producing a photographic image, and was indeed the original process used by Niépce to produce the first photographic image on a glass plate negative. Striking here is the strangely filmic nature of the heliograph, which is not unlike the camera apparatus, whose operation also depends on a reflected light signal from a mirror, a function unchanged in the mechanism of digital single reflex cameras. Like film technology, the heliograph is a device both of inscription (writing) and transmission in the sense outlined by Fatimah Tobing Rony.

Figure 5.5. Framing of African subjects and the heliograph 1, *K.A.R. Signals*. Source: Imperial War Museum, screen shot from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/

Figure 5.6. Framing of African subjects and the heliograph 2, *K.A.R. Signals*. Source: Imperial War Museum; screen shot from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/

Tobing Rony (1996) discusses inscription in the context of the anthropological chronophotography of Felix Regnault, a trained physician turned amateur ethnographer working in the 1880s. She sees chronophotography as an attempted form of scientific inscription, understood as a form of evidence, as the fact of what is seen recorded by the neutral apparatus or device that *writes* it.

For Regnault 'film was the true scientific inscription'; able to contain an 'emanation of the referent', it is 'by its nature indexical' (Tobing Rony 1996, 40). For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to note the uses of filmic and proto-filmic technologies like the chronophotographic camera as devices used for the scientific inscription of human and other movement. Thus, the African subjects within the frame of *K.A.R. Signals* are inscribed within a filmic gaze as labouring subjects responsible for the building and operation of the communication infrastructures of the empire. It is these subjects who carry out the heliographic signalling shown within the film. Thus, a double act of transmission and inscription of the landscape, and of the black subjects within the frame of the camera, takes place within the film's temporal ordering of movement.

#### *Off-screen space as part object*

A similar double act of inscription and transmission is visible within the two South African War films I discuss below, and I turn now to the work of visual anthropologist, Christopher Pinney, and film- theorist Christian Metz to investigate the relation between movement in *K.A.R. Signals* and these earlier titles. Kingston-Davies's camera movement follows the lines of wireless and heliographic communication in the landscape. As in other colonial films of the twentieth century, an equivalence is set up between filmic kinesis and the building of railway lines as means of transmission and communication within and between territories.2

There are several sequences in *K.A.R. Signals* that register forms of filmic movement and stillness and I argue gesture to an off-frame space. The first sequence opens with a shot of a landscape from the vantage point of a hill, what is called 'a commanding position'. Two figures enter the frame from the right, first an African man in military uniform, followed by a British man in a tan uniform. The camera follows them into position on the hill, framing them to the right, while the landscape fills the rest of the frame. The African soldier points to the left, gesturing towards the visible landscape but also further, into the off-screen space. In rather a camp fashion, the khaki-clad English soldier mimics his pointing, there is some exchange of words and more pointing, followed by the white man gazing into the landscape through binoculars. It is finally an order and gesture from the latter that initiates the movement of the pair off-screen, exiting the frame diagonally to the left, leaving the landscape once again 'empty'. The over-staged narrative and formal structuring of this short sequence forms the model for several similar sequences that dramatise looking and movement within the landscape, by both African and British figures in the employ of the Signals Section.

In his chapter, 'The Lexical Spaces of Eye-Spy', Christopher Pinney (1992) draws on Christian Metz's essay (1985) 'Photography and Fetish' to formulate a critique of certain uses of film in contemporary visual anthropology. His argument hinges around differing notions of 'stillness' and 'movement' within photographic versus filmic registers. He argues for a return to photographic stillness to counter what he calls the 'complete mastery' ofthe supposed 'narrative coherence of film'. He turns here to a description by late nineteenth-century writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes of the stereoscopic image of a landscape as a 'sun sculpture' as against the 'flat carte-de-visites', which Holmes describes as 'sun pictures'.

2 The camera's fetishisation of the movement of trains and telecommunication technologies from its very inception is well known within writing on early cinema (see Gunning 1990). This suggests an almost indexical relationship to tropes of modernity and global empire trade and is echoed in more formally interesting films such as Basil Wright's sound and image montage of telegraphic cables in *Song of Ceylon* (1934).

Figure 5.7. Gesturing to the off-screen space, *K.A.R. Signals*. Source: Imperial War Museum; screen shot from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/

For Pinney, the stereoscope encodes the landscape with depth, and thus the potential for movement or at least the analogue of movement by the suggestion that the eye travels across or within the illusory depth of the visual field. The point made here around stillness and implied depth will be further explored in relation to staged and documentary stereoscopic images of the South African War, which were in circulation along with films. For Jonathan Crary (1992), stereoscopic viewing is a medium that produces a specific observational mode and viewing subjectivity in the nineteenth century, which anticipates, more than photography, a filmic sensibility in its awareness that depth in the image is created through the unification of a double image into a single image.

Pinney's (1992) distinction between registers of stillness and movement, as well as his discussion of movement through time as enabled by the extension of space that occurs in stereoscopy, is useful in order to think through the affect of filmic movement in the films I am discussing. For Pinney, the play between stillness and movement within film is connected to Mulvey's (2006) notion of visual pleasure, where both camera and character movement are heroic, active, masculine, and the stillness of that which is gazed at or captured in the masculinity of the 'look' is feminised, passive, acted upon. While I am cautious about the schematisation of stillness and movement here, I see some resonance

Figure 5.8. 'Yorkshires signaling … so bravely held after their unit had fallen'. Source: A stereographic card from the Underwood and Underwood stereographic set, 1900. This image is from the author's personal collection.

with the stillness of the landscape and the camera's gaze on the labouring colonised subject in *K.A.R. Signals* as producing potential registers of visual pleasure for a British colonial audience. However, I think a more interesting reading is possibly available through returning to Christian Metz's more directly psychoanalytic reading of film. Metz complicates the medium's relationship to fetish via an emphasis on off-screen space and time as partial objects. I quote at length:

Film is much more difficult to characterise as a fetish. It is too big, it lasts too long, and it addresses too many sensorial channels at the same time to offer a credible unconscious equivalent of the lacking part-object. It does contain many potential part-objects (the different shots, the sounds, and so forth), but each of them disappears quickly after a moment of presence, whereas a fetish has to be kept, mastered, held, like the photograph in the pocket. Film however … endlessly mimes the primal displacement between seen absence and the presence nearby. Thanks to the principle of a moving cutting off, thanks to the changes of framing … cinema literally plays with the terror and pleasure of fetishism, with its combination of desire and fear*.* (1985, 87)

For Metz, it is the suggestion of the off-screen space that marks this play between absence and presence, between desire and terror. In film the off-screen space is substantial, it is the implied 'castration' of the look, a 'stopping', a cutting off of perception, but also a suggestion of potential entry into the unseen, what cannot be seen. I would like to suggest that a more complex, and perhaps more violent, constellation of colonial desire, fear and promise is held by the potential in the moving image and the stereoscope via the suggestion of what Metz calls off-frame space and time.

#### **Camera movement and camera stillness in two South African War actuality films**

Let me now develop this idea in a brief initial sketch of an analysis of two South African War films, and finally a return to *K.A.R. Signals*. My reference is to the actuality films of the South African War, as distinct from fictional fake films produced by Edison and other production companies in the period between 1899–1903. The former are short fragments of silver nitrate film shot in the field, normally unedited and of varying lengths, without explicit narrative structure but within the conventions of early cinema.

Billed in theatrical programmes at the time as animated photographs, they were shown on reels that included several standard features, possibly including some of the original Lumière films, and films of city life, such as a ride on a tram. These bills often included theatrical performances and screenings might on occasion be accompanied by the oration of a lecturer.3 What they encompass is simply a scene (in its double sense, as what is in view and what is seen), and the films are formally in line with actuality films shot in the period from 1896–1903, essentially documents staging an encounter between viewer and the scene/seen.

Thus, already certain conventions of early film form define these fragments shotinthefieldofwar.Largely shotby self-taught cameramen,theyareexamples of amateur and experimental early film; hence the resonances between the amateur colonial film, *K.A.R. Signals*, and these early war documents shot within an essentially colonial theatre of war. It is also important to situate the South African War films within the period referred to by Tom Gunning (1990, 56) as the 'cinema of attractions'. This period of actuality films begins with the ceaseless documentation of modern life, especially defined by movement: of crowds, of trams through cities and landscapes. Gunning notes that the attraction was within the affective registers of the image seen, both magical and 'stimulating an unhealthy nervousness', in the very speed at which images

3  Questions of representation of the body and the relationship between African and European subjects in the frame still need to be addressed. In other writing I explore this further by looking at movement and gesture in early anthropological and ethnographic film, centred around Tobing Rony's analysis of 'inscription' that begins with Regnault's ethnographic chronophotographs and Assenka Oksiloff's (2001) *Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography and Early German Cinema*.

moved across the field of view. Early cinema audiences are also often described as being literally moved by the images, with descriptions of audiences running away from approaching trains, or moving closer to touch, even penetrate the projected image.4

A similar fascination with movement is evident in the *Frere Camp Films (1899)*. *Repairing the Broken Bridge at Frere Camp* shows a massive timber beam being carried by a group of African men across the field of the frame. The men move diagonally across the frame and are positioned in the lower left-hand portion. As they move out of the frame, it becomes visible that they are moving through shallow water. In the background is visible the mangled ironwork of the bridge, which appears to have been dynamited or blown up by cannon fire. The landscape in the background is framed by the remains of the bridge structure. In the mid-ground another diagonal line is formed by a line of men, British and African, who observe the process of the carrying of the beam. Some men move along this line of observers, with the movement of the beam. The camera remains still throughout the movement of the beam off-frame; following this, the camera pans right, passing across the line of observers and coming to rest on the concrete section of the bridge.

Two figures are striking in the scene/seen. The first is a centrally framed man, African, who stares or gazes directly at the camera as the beam crosses the filmic space. The second is a white, I assume British, man who enters the frame towards the end of the panning shot. This second man also engages his gaze directly at the camera. The panning shot functions as an in-camera cut from the still shot of the beam crossing the space of the frame; panning right metaphorically returns our gaze to the place from which the beam emerged prior to the time of the film. This off-frame space from which the beam and the men carrying it emerged, is unseen and implied until the camera movement right reveals it.

What is the effect of these plays between the stillness of observers, and the movements of the beam and bodies that hold it, and finally of the pan to the right at the end of the sequence? The second film in this series, in which no camera movement takes place, proves instructive for how to read the movements of the first film. In the *Rifle Hill Signal Station near Frere Camp* (1899) a still camera

4  Film historian Ian Christie traces a recurrence of what he calls the departure/arrival genre in early colonial cinema, within the period of the Cinema of Attractions. It includes many South African War films. A formal convention is set up where movement across the filmic space is by a diagonal movement towards the camera, as in the Lumières' film *Workers Leaving a Factory*. Christie locates several colonial and British national figures, for example, Lord Kitchener making a triumphal return to London from a successful military campaign in Sudan in *The Sidars' Reception at the Guildhall.* Christie proposes that this popular genre 'played a significant part in communicating the experience of empire' (Christie 2011, 22).

Figure 5.9. Still from *Repairing the Broken Bridge at Frere*, 1899, shot by WKL Dickson, British Mutoscope and Biograph. Source: South African National Film Archive, Pretoria.

shot describes a battalion stationed at the top of a *koppie* (small hill). A line of riflemen form a semi-diagonal from the foreground to the background of the frame; the signaller is placed on the left-hand corner in the foreground, furiously waving a flag throughout. A centrally placed leader figure, distinguished by his helmet, looks to the right into the landscape off-frame with a viewing device, a set of binoculars. To his left and a little to the foreground a man is sitting writing in a notebook. The riflemen occasionally cock and seem to point their guns into the off-screen space in the same direction as the gaze of the captain.

The film, while not fictional, is certainly more staged than the first, suggested by the careful positioning of all the 'characters' and the self-awareness of the riflemen and the man with the notebook, who looks up and smiles, even laughs self-consciously at the camera as if discussing its presence with a fellow soldier whom we do not see. The continuous motion of the signaller also seems staged, performed somewhat hysterically forthe entire duration ofthe shot. All in the field of the frame seem occupied with the ordinary actions and labours of warfare, all anticipate the potential arrival of combat from a space and time off-frame.

#### **Systems of fragments: Re-inscription | re-transmission**

What emerges in these two South African War films, shot in the context of war, is a play between what is inscribed within the field of the frame and an implied off-frame space and time. This play produces the desire and potential for movement by the camera, and by proxy the viewer, as a means to master an implied but absent territory. This returns to Metz's and Pinney's point around the play between photographic stillness and filmic movement, where the latter implies an object that can be held, like the photograph: a view contained and held. The gesturing to an off-screen space and time in the moment of the camera's stillness, or the cut at the moment of its potential motion, imply a territory outside of the frame that can be 'held' in this same way. At the same time, the fragmentary nature of these films and their frustratingly short duration suggest an elusive and illusionary relationship between the camera and a territory that includes the landscape, but also the objects and bodies in the frame: the labouring African bodies that produce the infrastructures not only of war but also for the geographical territory of empire trade.5

There are useful connections to be made here to the framing of the landscape in *K.A.R. Signals* by telegraphic lines and poles. In that film, the camera and the heliograph share a field of inscription and transmission within the frame. The comparison between the three films also raises a further question, which is that of the effect generated in the colonial audience by its relation to the part-object of the uninscribed territory suggested by the camera's framing of the off-frame landscape. In the moment of the films' projection, the off-frame space within the field of war, on the one hand, and of colonial occupation, on the other, is potentially mastered, possessed, communicated and transmitted by the signal of the projected film, itself a mobile unit.

However, it is also always and only an absence, like the borderless, unbounded territory of Kingston-Davies's fragmentary film, disorientating and incomplete. In the South African War films, the off-frame space and time to some extent exists as threat, as void, cut off suddenly as the film stops rolling, incommunicable, untransferable. It is an attachment to this unmasterable territory of the off-frame space and time that perhaps sustains the viewer's attention, and perverse enjoyment.

*K.A.R. Signals*, *Rifle Hill Signal Station near Frere Camp* and *Repairing the Broken Bridge at Frere* all function to unite a series of dislocated spaces, both visible in-frame and implied off-frame. Inherent in their inscriptions of colonial space and the field of battle is an imaginary of empire as a singular territory that emerges despite the fragmentation of spaces.

5  Grieveson addresses the enmeshment of colonial films with the shifting economic policies of Britain in relation to the commonwealth, seen after World War I as a market rather than a territory of conquest.

#### **War's recording surface**

My final point returns to the entanglement of cinematic form with war, and Gilroy's (2011) description of 'war as backdrop' to the colonial project. When Virilio (1989) argues that 'the landscape of war became cinematic', I understand him to mean that it becomes filmable, and thus narratable in fragments that only in their reassembly, both between shots and within shots via camera movement, produce a singular space as 'effect'. Virilio refers to the blindness of troops in the battlefield due to the long range of automated artillery, and thus the role of film and aerial photography in constructing the singular space of the battlefield. Virilio notes that this is a reversal of the work of Muybridge and Marey's movement studies in the nineteenth century as it aims not to break down but 'to reconstitute the fracture lines of the trenches, to fix the infinite fragmentation of a mined landscape, alive with endless potentialities' (Virilio 1989, 89).

Virilio's argument hinges on the mobility of the camera, attached to planes, often on the same apparatus and using the same mechanism as automatic weaponry. This mobility is also an aspect of mechanical kinesis: to shoot continuously and move across spaces no longer visible from a singular point of view. Essentially, Virilio makes no distinction between the mobile apparatus of the stills camera and the cinematographic camera, which is an oversight on his part. For Virilio, the war effort depended on the continuous transmission of images and information using telegraphic and wireless signalling between reconnaissance planes and ground staff who were using material to update the maps of a shifting landscape.

Virilio's writing largely concerns the two World Wars and a much more mobile set of camera technologies. Nonetheless, certain resonances are visible between the filmic inscription and transmission occurring in these spatially and temporally distant battlefields. In a passage concerning the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima during World War II, Virilio describes 'the blinding Hiroshima flash which literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things so that every surface became war's recording surface' (Virilio 1989, 85). While the use of heliograph signalling across a 15–16km radius in a barren Orange Free State landscape in Southern Africa in 1899 feels far from this war of light and surreal projection, there is the same attempt to produce the sense of a space both inscribable and ordered by a military and a colonial gaze.

I argue that we can make a connection between these military acts of inscription and transmission and the overtly staged flag signalling of the white British soldiers stationed on the hill at Frere camp, and the equally over-acted gestures of the African heliograph signallers in Kingston-Davies's *K.A.R. Signals*. This is, to borrow again from Virilio (1989, 89), an attempt to produce a space 'alive with endless potentialities' and thus endlessly inscribable within a transmittable military and colonial imaginary.

It is moreover not only these three films that generate a space ripe for war or colonial mastery through their stitching together of disaggregated space. Martin Stollery (2011) has discussed in similar vein a failed propaganda film produced during World War II, the unfinished 1943 Crown Film Unit production, *Morning, Noon and Night*, a feature-length documentary about the empire war effort. Stollery describes the film's focus on infrastructure across a variety of distant empire territories, with independent film crews producing footage to be compiled into the final work. While not part of my corpus, comparison with the film is interesting in its attempt to draw a picture of the 'people's war' across a vast range of spaces, structured in the genre of a day in the life of the empire, and explicitly drawing on several Soviet films, such as Dziga Vertov's *Man with a Movie Camera,* as precedents. The failure of the film was due in large part to tensions throughout the empire, with growing calls for independence, but also due to the unmanageable scale of the production itself. Stollery notes that by the middle of 1943, it was 'proving difficult to hold the empire together even at the level of representation' (Stollery 2011, 49).

This impossibility of the completion of *Morning, Noon and Night* resonates with the impossibility of seeing the battlefield in the continuously shifting aggregate pictures produced by mobile photography and film during World War I, but also in the fragmentary nature of film documents of the South African War, and the disorientating spatial language of Kingston-Davies's amateur editing. Finally, it speaks to the only possible image of empire as an imaginary and shifting field compiled of indexical footage inscribed within a 'narrative of war as backdrop'.

#### **Towards re-inscription (end notes)**

I would like to end this chapter, which I see as a basis for further research, with a potential act of re-inscription, and re-transmission. I would like to return to the gazes of subjects in the films that disrupt the neutral point of view of the camera. First, there is the laughter of the British note-taker as he looks directly at the camera in the second war film, clearly performing an act of inscription that is fake. Second, there is the African man who stares directly at the camera, ignoring the movement of objects and bodies in the frame, refusing to watch what everyone else watches: the movement of the beam.

Tobing Rony (1996) discusses in this context the similar 'filming' by Regnault of African subjects at the Exposition Ethnographique de l'Afrique Occidentale (Ethnographic Exhibition of West Africa) of 1895. She notes that in the chronophotography of Regnault there is a young West African girl who 'appears to break the cinematic code' of ethnographic film by looking directly at the camera. Tobing Rony emphasises the 'chain of looks' in order to argue for a potential to see the subjects in the films as 'not just bodies' but as 'people who returned gazes' (Tobing Rony 1996, 24).

Figure 5.10. A direct gaze at the camera in *Repairing the Broken Bridge at Frere*, W.K.L. Dickson,1899. Source: South African National Film Archive, Pretoria.

I am curious here about how these looks mark potential disruptions in the colonial inscription and transmission of territories and subjects within these films. My conclusion is a provocation, and also a question about my own placement as a white South African researcher and artist in relation to these films. Can we situate our re-viewing of the colonial film archive (in its original analogue formats or digital translations) to open the space and time of the cinematic event to the potential for re-inscription and re-transmission of those subjectivities caught within the very violence of its movement?6

6  Sol Plaatje's mobile cinema can be seen as a direct counter-movement to the movements of mobile cinema units in the South African provinces, which reinforced the separation of rural and urban central to the policy of separate development. Plaatje's circulation of moving images within the rural areas can be seen as effectively undoing this separation.

#### **References**

Christie, Ian. 2011. '"The Captains and Kings Depart": Imperial Departure and Arrival in Early Cinema.' In Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), *Film and the End of Empire*, 21–34. London: BFI.

Crary, Jonathan. 1992. *Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.* Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Diawara, Manthia. 1992. *African Cinema.* Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Elsaesser, Thomas and Adam Barker (eds). 1990. *Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative*. London: BFI.

Gilroy, Paul. 2011. 'Great Games: Film, History and Working-through Britain's Colonial Legacy.' In Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), *Film and the End of Empire*, 13–32. London: BFI.

Grieveson, Lee and Colin MacCabe. 2011. *Empire and Film.* London: BFI.

Grieveson, Lee and Colin MacCabe. 2011. *Film and the End of Empire.* London: BFI.

Gunning, Tom. 1990. 'The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.' In Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds), *Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative*, 56-62. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gutsche, Thelma. 1972. *The History and Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa*, 1895–1940. Cape Town: Howard Timmins.

Jaikumar, Priya. 2011. 'An "Accurate Imagination": Place, Map and Archive as Spatial Objects of Film History'. In Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), *Film and the End of Empire,* 167–188. London: BFI.

Metz, Christian. 1985. 'Photography and Fetish.' *October*, *34: 81–90.*

*Monthly Film Bulletin*. 1937. 'KAR Signals.' November, 230.

Mulvey, Laura. 2006. *Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.* London: Reaktion.

Oksiloff, Assenka. 2001. *Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography and Early German Cinema*. New York: Palgrave.

Pinney, Christopher. 1992. 'Lexical Spaces of Eye-Spy.' In Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton (eds), *Film as Ethnography*, 26–49. New York: St Martin's Press.

Rice, Tom. 2008. *K.A.R. Signals: A Film of Routine in Remote Places*. http://www.colonialfilm. org.uk/node/2561.

Stollery, Martin. 2011. 'The Last Roll of the Dice: *Morning, Noon and Night*, Empire and the Historiography of the Crown Film Unit.' In Lee Grieveson, and Colin MacCabe (eds), *Film and the End of Empire*. London: BFI.

Tobing Rony, Fatimah. 1996. *The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle*. Durham: Duke University Press.

Vasudevan, Ravi S. 2011. 'Official and Amateur: Exploring Information Film in India, 1920s–40s.' In Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), *Film and the End of Empire*, 73–94. London: BFI.

Virilio, Paul. 1989. *War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception*. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso.

## **06**

## **Reading Gestures in** *De Voortrekkers*

Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe

The South African silent epic *De Voortrekkers: Die Winne Van 'n Nuwe W*ê*reld* (GustavS.PrellerandHaroldM.Shaw1916)mythologises themigrationofDutch settlers from the Cape Colony as a great exodus to escape the encroaching British Empire and reconstructs *iMpi yaseNcome*, or the Battle of Blood River (the River Ncome), from an Afrikaner perspective. Also known by its English title 'Winning a Continent', *De Voortrekkers* (the Dutch word for 'pioneers'), would often be screened in commemoration of what was later known within the Afrikaner nationalist idiom as the 'Day of the Covenant' or 'Dingaan's Day' to mark the Voortrekker triumph over the generals of the Zulu King Dingane on 16 December 1838 – a victory that heralded the foundation of the Boer Republic of Natalia and secured the passage of Dutch settlers further into the South African hinterland.

The story rests on the doctrine of Afrikaner manifest destiny and what Neil Parsons refers to as 'Afrikaner irrenditism' (Parsons 2013, 641). *De Voortrekkers* is said to have borrowed from D.W. Griffith's film *The Birth of a Nation* (1915), released only a year before, not only conventions of the epic historical melodrama, but also a nation-building discourse and the narrative presentation of Christian correctitude and moral innocence as the foundations of white identity (Gaines 2000).

Produced only six years after the uneasy formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, *De Voortrekkers* is often framed as a good example of early South African nation-building film propaganda (Hees 2003; Masilela 1981; Parsons 2013; Saks 2011), made at a time when the fervent venture capitalism from Britain and America flooding Johannesburg in the early twentieth century espoused British liberal imperialism and Afrikaner nationalism. The film's scenario attempts to disappear Anglo-Boer conflicts at the root of Afrikaner migration in the early nineteenth century and still at play by the early 1900s, finding instead a convenient third force in two fictional Portuguese traders whose perfidious interference precipitates Dingane's murder of Retief and his breach of an agreement between the two patriarchs – a compromise of Preller's initial version of the story, in which the two mischief makers were in fact English (Parsons 2013, 648).

#### **Rewriting history**

It furthers the reconciliatory efforts of the ambivalent Boer–British Union by literally re-writing recent history to cast Afrikaners as innocent defenders, the British as distant if not benevolent, Anglo–Boer tensions as merely ideological disagreements, Zulu responses to Afrikaner expansionism as primitive cruelty and the formation of an Afrikaner South Africa as a fulfilment of nothing less than a covenant with God (Saks 2011, 151–152).

For film scholars writing about early South African film, cinema's involvement in the work of nation-building throughout the twentieth century is to be understood not only as historicising and as myth-making, but as part of larger discourses that defined citizenship and inscribed national identities through visual language, iconographic representation and narrative.

This is to say that the work of a film such as *De Voortrekkers* was not only to represent a historical moment and to mythologise its meaning for the nation, but also to turn the representational act to the project of defining exactly *whom* this nation is made of. Ntongela Masilela writes in 'Issues in the South African Cinema': 'First, this particular form of imperialist transplantation of film culture, that is, film as the battle-ground of iconographic representations and interests, has had the effect until recently that film production in South Africa was never viewed as an artistic creative act, but rather, as a propaganda instrument against [one's perceived enemies]' (Masilela 1981, 3).

Indeed, for many scholars, the work of envisioning the South African nation in early cinema was also the work of inscribing national identities along primarily racialised lines. In her chapter, 'Cast in Celluloid: Imag(in)ing Identities in South African Cinema'*,* Jacqueline Maingard argues for the study of South African cinema as a 'fertile space for investigations of representations of identity'. She discusses an 'interrelationship' between 'how South African identities are constructed in cinema' with 'the question of national identity':

South Africa may be seen as a laboratory for the study of identity fraught as it has been (and is) by constructions of identities wrought in its colonial and apartheid histories. It follows then that South African cinema is a fertile space for investigations of representations of identity, for exploring how these might be bound into the histories of the country's development, for understanding how these histories determine cinematic representations and how cinematic representations interpret history. (2006, 84)

Like Masilela and others, Maingard is interested in reading the history of South African cinema, and by extension, the writing of South African history in cinema, in the context of the nation's racist colonial and apartheid past. For her, the question of the representation of identities is central to this reading, as it makes obvious how race and the racialisation of identity intersect processes of 'imaging' the nation in early South African cinema and how this imagination in turn shapes South African cinematic representations across the twentieth century.

When Maingard writes: 'Definitions of identity and especially of national identityaresignificantlydeterminedbyofficialorhegemonicpositioningsofthose identities. In the South African apartheid context, race is primarily significant and it is conceptualizations of race and their concomitant representation in the cinema that I focus on here' (2006, 84), she is particularly interested in reading the cinematic constructions of black masculine identities 'against the backdrop of colonialism and apartheid' (2006, 83) in order to surface how these constructions were (and continue to be) central to the project of constructing South African nationhood.

She begins with *De Voortrekkers*, where some of the earliest representations of black figures in cinema are to be found, by stating: 'There is a great deal to be said about representations of masculinity in this context where Zulu men's bodies are represented en masse and near-naked, thus eroticised, whereas Boer men's bodies are represented more ordinarily, at times even as weak, puny, bandaged and wounded' (2006, 90).

#### **Reading for the black male body**

Maingard is correct. There is a great deal to be said about the representation of black masculinity in *De Voortrekkers.* When she reads for the black male body within the film frame, she finds profoundly problematic representations, where identities have been 'fixed' (2006, 84), that is to say, reduced and cast, by a deeply racist colonial imaginary. The operation of an ideology that casts whiteness and blackness as the oppositional relations of master versus slave, the hero versus the villain, the virtuous versus the vicious and the civilised versus the barbarous primitive is indeed writ large both within the film's narrative and by its visual rhetoric.

In 'A Tale of Two Nations: De Voortrekkers and Come See the Bioscope', Lucia Saks discusses two possible modalities of the historical film. In the first, the use of classical codes – costume, natural lighting, continuity editing and narrative linearity – 'encouraged the viewer to interpret such films as historical documents that showed events as they had "actually occurred"', producing what she cites as a 'referential realism' (2011, 143). She places *De Voortrekkers* within this first mode. Just the previous year, Griffith's *The Birth of a Nation* had consolidated certain film techniques into what would form part of classical film language and demonstrated the grand effects of taking 'a fundamental national "moment" as the subject of [this] representational force' (Saks 2011, 142) on a national imagination.

*De Voortrekkers* borrows these classical codes in 1916 to make its own appeal to realism and, therefore, historical verity. As Saks states, this 'referential realism' gives rise to 'the appearance of truth: the truth of how things were independent of anyone's perspective, turning historical myth into the stuff of natural history, and human aspirations towards a reconfiguration of how things should be into the stuff of historical inevitability' (2011, 143). *De Voortrekkers* aligns its rhetoric with veracity through cinematic realism – a mode of cinema that, as Saks puts it, relies on the Bazinian conceptualisation of the medium as capable of reproducing 'the real' (2011, 142).

#### *Foreclosing meaning?*

When Maingard comes at *De Voortrekkers*, she does so with this premise of the ontology of the moving image – as a mode of representation of something real, where objects in reality become abstract reproductions of or signs that stand in for themselves on screen. The 'truth' of these reproductions is measured by how near or far they fall from the reality they represent. By her own admission, Maingard 'proposes some interconnections between image and identity in apparently simple ways' (2006, 85) – a necessary simplification in order to point to where an image is simply not true to the identity it claims to represent, and thus make obvious the ways in which colonial and racist ideologies distort representation in the service of the imagined 'nation'.

But if Maingard's ultimate problem with the way early cinema fixes the complexity of (South African) identities, which complexity she rather vaguely describes as 'a constant movement within the "in-between", and taking this notion further, within multiple layerings of in-betweennesses, which is a multiplurality of identity' (2006, 85), her analysis can only give us a description of the problem, not its solution.

In this chapter my aim is go beyond where Maingard stops: at a description of the problematic politics of representations of black bodies as unindividuated vassals, overcome by the dominion of a colonialist logic. When considering the earliest appearances of black bodies as sites of identity on screen, it is true that we are troubled by the way these identities are represented. It was and remains important to be sensitive to this kind of trouble – to study, analyse and describe it. Yet, it begins to feel as if nothing more can be said of these images except regarding their intentional failure to represent, if not truthfully, then approximately, the complexity of black experience.

There is another dimension to our trouble, which arises from reading these images from the perspective of cinema as primarily a medium of representation. By standing on the innate presumption of the image as representation, we constantly and only read the image in ways that foreclose other possible extractions of meaning. I, like Maingard, am drawn to the black body on screen in *De Voortrekkers*. But where she, as other scholars after her, is concerned in her analysis with recentring black bodies marginalised by both the film frame and by the narratives produced within the hegemony that gave rise to the so-called South African nation film, I look for the black male body within the film frame because it is my contention that in being continually re-framed within discourses of representation, its meaning is over-determined by a perspective that reads it from the outside in – a perspective that describes (even if critically) this body in ways that only the film's own rhetoric permits.

Where Maingard reads the black body in *De Voortrekkers* in its compressed form – as a character or the horde, I wish to decompress it, to read how it *moves*, in order to reach for a meaning that happens beyond what the film's diegesis has predetermined. My critical questions are: What if we try to access what and how the cinematic body 'means', not from the outside in, but from the *inside out*? And how do we make this attempt? What happens when we include within the ambit of the discourse of representation the notion of self-presentation? What might this shift in our act of reading early filmic images allow us to retrieve beyond the problems of representation with respect to race, ethnos and nationhood? What if we read the black body not as a site of identity, as the film's own rhetoric would ask us to, but as the citation of something above and beyond the limits of that rhetoric? And might it be possible to catch a glimpse of this 'in-betweenness' or 'multi-plurality' lamented by Maingard as lost in cinema's compression of identity into representation?

While it is important to recognise the significance of discourse around the continually problematic impact of visual media on social and political identity and relations of power, I intend to explore a different direction. In my reading of black screen presence in *De Voortrekkers*, I hope to move beyond the now quite familiar discussion of how a totalising racist ideology within early South African film has left no room for resistance or agency on the part of black performers before the screen and the black bodies they are said to represent. To do so, I borrow analytic strategies from performance studies, existential phenomenology, and Giorgio Agamben's thesis of gestural cinema. Before entering my reading of *De Voortrekkers*, I would like to first map the philosophical positioning from which I will carry it out.

#### **The black cinematic body within a discourse of representation**

I begin by elaborating on what I mean by the discourse of representation vis-à-vis the moving image. Then I explore the assumptions about the doctrine of the cinematic body within this discourse – a doctrine grounded on semiotic and psychoanalytical theories of cinema. I then identify within this doctrine what Akira Lippit in the chapter 'Digesture: Gesture and Inscription in Experimental Cinema' in *Migrations of Gesture* describes as 'a unique paradox [that] haunts the articulation of bodies in Cinema' (2008, 114), which in my understanding, frustrates a simplistic, realist discourse of the cinematic body – that is, one that takes the body on screen to be representative of the body in actuality. 'Representation' carries several connotations within discussions about cinema.

Shohat and Stam (2011, 2014) have suggested that the body, transfigured into cinematic form, is articulated as a sign, whose meaning is framed by and activated in the service of the film's discourse to represent ethos (character) and ethnos (peoples). As Shohat and Stam (2014, 182) write: 'The narrative and mimetic arts, to the extent that they represent ethos (character) and ethnos (peoples) are considered representative not only of the human figure but also of anthropomorphic vision.' If the film is an utterance, then this double value of the cinematic body, to stand in for other bodies (in terms of gender, race and ethnicity) as well as to personify abstract notions, helps articulate an anthropomorphic vision within that utterance.

This approach implies that the body in cinema – the kind of thing it is – makes its meaning semiotically. In fact, the discourse running through the writing of Maingard's (and other) critiques of cinematic racial representations, draws most heavily from semiotic and psychoanalytical theory. The black body on screen, articulated in the registers of these two approaches, is defined as a *signifier* within the larger mythology of white supremacy and as the object of its totalising racist *gaze*. Akira Lippit writes that a 'unique paradox haunts the articulation of [*all*] bodies in cinema … the body in cinema is also a lost body in some fundamental way, there only as a trace' (2008, 114). Citing Christian Metz, Lippit describes 'reality' in cinema as some 'primordial elsewhere' that at once seems present, breathing and intentional, and irretrievably absent (2008, 115).

Objects ofthis removedrealityare 'imaginary signifiers'(2008,116),generated by a medium that, in so effectively representing them, amplifies their absence. And for Lippit, 'No signifier is more imaginary in cinema, more primordially elsewhere, perhaps, than that of the moving body*'* (2008, 116). The paradox of a body, at once 'moved and removed' before us, is an inescapable part of the 'peculiar phenomenology' of cinema; this paradox remains intact for as long as we keep grasping for a 'true body', channelled by this medium, from some perennial elsewhere. The discourse of representation around bodies (and black bodies) in cinema rests on this axiom (a proposition taken as self-evident) of the cinematic body – the black bodies on screen correspond to actual black bodies in the real world and represent them. But, we cannot speak of what we see on screen as representative of something in reality, without falling into Lippit's paradox.

Harvey Young writes in *Embodying Black Experience*: *Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body*:

When popular connotations of blackness are mapped across orinternalized within black people, the result is the creation of the black body. This second body, an abstracted and imagined figure, shadows or doubles the real one … As an instantiation of a concept (blackness), the black body does not describe the actual appearance of a concept of any real person or group of people. (2010, 7)

Watching with careful attention the 'black' bodies on screen in early South African films, something disturbing threatens to overwhelm the spectator: the sensation of watching a body being erased by its own representation. This is because the spectator encounters the black body on screen as the projection of a projection. An intense instance of Jean Baudrillard's third-order simulacra occurs, where the 'black body', itself 'an abstracted and imagined figure', is now represented on screen to be read by the spectator, is removed by a series of abstractions from what actual body was ever there in reality.

The body is elusive whether we are talking about the real or the cinematic one. If the concept of 'black body' is a projection of ideas and constructs of meaning, projected onto actual bodies, which are then projected onto the screen, what and indeed who can we say is being represented? It is important to separate the multiple levels of projections that collate this 'body' into a representation. The body on screen cannot be taken as given, but rather as *becoming* – that is, we must shift away from reading the body on screen as a description of something, whose limits and contours precede it and are merely represented, but as an inscription, whose meaning is being written within and by the film. This shift makes particular questions not only possible but also necessary: We can now ask not only *what* is being inscribed and *how,* but, most importantly, *who* is doing the inscribing? And, when answering this question, we must look not just at the film's writer, director, costume and set designer and editor. We must also consider the performer.

The body moves itself, and is itself a medium that embodies, performs and projects meanings. The cinematic body is never limited to what the film's rhetoric describes, nor to what the spectator's gaze makes of this description. The cinematic body is performed, yet we very rarely look to performance when reading the black bodies on screen. This is what I endeavour to do in this chapter. I am reaching for what meaning can be gleaned from perceiving how the cinematic body means, not only cognitively or through the gaze as offered by psychoanalysis. Central to my attempt is the notion of the gesture – a unit of meaning making action that belongs to the moving body first before conferring that meaning unto the moving image. To get there, I would like to first unpack the concept of gestural cinema and of gesture within cinema.

#### **Gesture and the cinematic body**

Citing Siegfried Kracauer, Lippit speaks of the current that runs between physical and filmic realities as 'an endless continuum' between 'two registers of movement' (2008, 114). In the waking world, the movement of bodies through space and across unfolding time signals that they are alive, act with intention and are present. Through the combined effect of various systems – 'machinic, perceptual, phenomenal, psychological, photographic' (2008, 116) – cinema reproduces this movement on screen, transfixing our gaze with a 'more perfect' representation of persistent reality, and, when it comes to the body, of consistent *corpo*reality.

The presence of bodies on screen, therefore, is not of figures (objects), but of their movements (events) expressed in cinematic terms. Time (duration) governs the complex algebra that relates actual movement to cinematic movement. When we study 'the body' within a film frame – a unit of cinematic duration – we are studying a fragment of *movement* in time. In a narrowed sense, concerned only with the body's movement, the word 'gesture' connotes singular, small actions – as in the movement of hands – as well as larger (sequences of) actions performed with the entire body. In both senses, 'gesture' refers not just to motion but also to an expressive quality that 'indicates something about the mover's physical, emotional or intellectual being' (Levitt 2002, 25). In everyday encounters, the meanings of gestures, whether factual, cultural or political, are relative and circumstantial. Gestures themselves are temporally bound, arising out of and subsiding into a constant stream of spontaneous activity, as physical bodies navigate environments and enact intentions.

Since early rock art (some of which is thousands of years old) our plastic or visual arts reflected not just the impulse to capture reality in general, but specifically to cleave being and action out of the fugitive flow of 'real time', expressing (or revealing) its meaning by some more eternal mode. Gestures captured in painting, sculpture and photography are not just movements frozen in time, but the meanings of those movements eternally reified and defined. Dance, ritual and theatre, can be defined as gestural arts, by the quality that their very medium is the gesturing body, whose expressions are preserved by repetition and re-enactment. Cinema has the potential to express gestures suspended in time, like the photograph, but also unfolding through time, like theatre. In her article, 'Image as Gesture: The Saint in Chrome Dioxide' (2002, 23–39), Deborah Levittreiterates Agamben's theory ofthe emergence of cinema thus: 'The possibility of cinema's moving image is predicated on the di-vision of movement into its constituent parts' (2002, 25).

Retracing Agamben's steps, Levitt describes various proto-cinematic practices in the nineteenth century that focused the photographic gaze on the human body, out of an impulse to deconstruct, study and catalogue its movement, and particularly, its gestures: *'*Marey's chronophotography, Muybridge's split-second photographs of human and animal motion, Charcot's photographic analyses of hysterical tics, de la Tourette's indexical charts of the footprints … Taylor's analyses of and prescriptions for efficient industrial production' (2002, 25).

Quoting Elsaesser, Levitt expresses the evolution of photographic practice, from the still image to motion, as 'the frenzy of the visible that became a frenzy of the di-visible'. In charting the movement of a body, dividing gestures into visible parts, these practices enabled the human eye to grasp what otherwise slips away in time. Reassembling the parts into a whole gave rise to the moving picture and to cinema. Gestures emerge out of real bodies, and are the force, rerendered in the movement of the motion picture, that creates the effect of 'presence' in cinematic bodies. They are what remain constant between the natural body and the cinematic, carried in the itinerant force of movement that crosses the border between actuality and its filmic representation.

It is movement that coalesces into the 'presence' of the body on screen. This is what sets cinema apart from other representational arts. This shift, from bodies to presence, places us in the province of ghosts and spirits where we may make use of a truer lexicon: cinema, like a medium, does not bring forth objects or bodies, but energies and affectations – in the sense that things only appear to be there, but they are not. What is in fact 'there' at all on screen are records of duration, perceived most obviously through movement. In the silent era, it is clearest that movement, articulated by bodies, by the camera and through the montage, is the primal force of cinema. This primacy, though never replaced, is somewhat eclipsed or obscured with the advent of sound.

I borrow from Leslie Stern in 'Ghosting: The Performance and Migration of Cinematic Gesture' in which she writes:

it is a circuit of energy that passes through actants, gestures that mobilize bodies, affects that travel between bodies on the screen and bodies in the process of performance is a process of entertaining knowledge (in the way that an abandoned house entertains ghosts), of coming to know the past through mimetic enactment. The force of this knowledge, and its energetic circulation, is experienced somatically. (2008, 193)

Before our cognitive faculties grapple with its representation and our unconscious is troubled by the complex interplay of projections, cinema reaches the body first. However, to speak of the resonance of images at the level of the body does not begin at the study of the emotional impact of our perceptions. I am interested in perception itself and in what it might reveal to us to begin our reading of an image here: where bodies sitting in the cinema register the movement of bodies on screen. Given this mode of 'looking' or registering, not bodies per se, but their gestures, I now turn to the images of *De Voortrekkers*.

#### **Reading gesture in** *De Voortrekkers*

A focus on gesture enables us to speak of *degrees or frequencies* of gestures (being, as they are, units of expressive movement, rendered measurable by motion picture). It also enables us to speak of the *manner* of gesture – an energy expressed by the movement of a body that we read over and above the function of the gesture. This is looking at *how* (manner) one moves, not at just *why*. On screen, as in everyday life, we glean both types of information from the gestures of others. This is how we are able to identify consistent mannerisms in the movement of an individual body, across a range of disparate gestures.

Opening *De Voortrekkers*, a title card reads: 'Karel Landman of Cape Colony has sold his farm and prepares to join Retief's party in the national movement to the North'. In the following frame, there appears a bearded figure with a pensive expression and the posture of a man beset by worry. He is flanked by the figures of two women, presumably his wife and daughter, both wearing equally troubled expressions. They huddle together. Their early nineteenthcentury costumes situate us around 1835, at the beginning of 'The Great Trek'. Two horsemen appear, right of frame, interrupting the intimate family moment. The horsemen dismount, remove their hats and extend their hands in greeting towards the solemn Landman.

In the distant background, their horses are led away from the frame by two figures, bare-chested, clad in loose-fitting trousers, with the anonymity of stagehands, their quiet presence easily missed.

For the briefest of moments, their appearance signals the existence of black bodies in the universe of this story, differentiated by the shade of their skin and manner of costume, from the figures that have occupied the frame thus far. Later, as the horsemen prepare to leave, one of the two figures reappears. This reappearance, although lingering longer, is marked by an unnatural stillness.

Figure 6.1. Screenshot from *De Voortrekkers*, 1916, (all subsequent images are from the same film). Note the horsemen in the background.

Figure 6.2. Showing horsemen in the background more clearly.

In silent film, an unmoving body is a voiceless body, an invisible body. The movements of the figures ushering horses off screen (Figure 6.1) are minimal, designed to be without excess, directed only at the function of wrangling the animals. They suggest languor, a lack of individual vitality. The invisibility of the figures (Figure 6.3) is reiterable as the in*di*visibility of their movements – their stillness within the frame. Surrounded by the quick gestures of the others, the two stable-hands are dead bodies, marked as separate not only by their skin or way of dress. They are almost entirely devoid of vitality, supposedly enervated by colonial conquest.

A messenger appears from afar, comes to deliver a letter to Landman (see Figures 6.5 and 6.6). The messenger is dark-skinned and similar to the

Figure 6.3. The horsemen prepare to leave. Note the figure in the background.

Figure 6.4. The unnatural stillness of the figure.

stable-hands in dress. Yet 'his' presence differs, in that, though also at the margin of the frame, it is marked by the movement of panting, the performance of the gesture of out-of-breathness. This small detail, whether as a result of actual (profilmic)runningorpart ofthe narrative's matrix ofpretend, isasubtledeviation from the near-absolute stillness of the two stable-hands. While stillness means a kind of disappearance from the narrative, the power of gesturing beyond the mere functional movements of handing over a letter, brings this figure slightly closer to the notion of 'character' along the film's continuum of 'make-believe' – 'he' enjoys a little more vitality and feels more 'present'.

As explained above, the body represented on screen is only the affect of presence enforced by gesture (movement). The term 'presence' opens us to a useful double meaning: it directs us beyond 'representation' and also implies what is colloquially referred to as 'screen presence'. With the simple gesture of panting, the deliveryman enjoys a higher degree of presence as an almostcharacter (with a life, personality beyond mechanical function), but also the *performer* playing the deliveryman is slightly more visible to us – that is, he is expressive and he enjoys more 'screen presence'.

By speaking of screen presence, we do not do away with the implications of the representation but unravel a new thread that leads us to a performer, a decision-maker, a curator of gestures and calibrator of their style, quality and degree. Even as the screen presence of a performer, the agency of the performer, is in the service of the representation, it remains separate from it. This is why we can speak of the character of Jesse James, but also the performance of Brad Pitt as Jesse James. Something above or beyond the character lingers in all depictions of humans on screen.

Figure 6.5. Messenger is right of screen. Figure 6.6. Messenger seen more clearly.

In the cinema of the twenty-first century it goes without saying that the star system relies on the persona of the actor to carry a certain style, a certain presence on screen, even across different characters and narratives. In early South African cinema, however, when it comes to African performers, this connection is less glib. While, by being named in the credits, the actors that play the Dutch, British and Portuguese characters are given as joint creators of the make-believe world before us, the representations of African characters seem to generate themselves. Performer and character are conflated. Discussions that only focus on representation reinforce this conflation. There is no actor; only the character is intelligible, driven by the impetus of the narrative.

How, then, do we reach for this something above or beyond the character? And what kind of thing is it? How do we know we are right about what we think we see? Especially in the case of a film such as *De Voortrekkers,* created more than a century ago, we cannot access enough information about the actors. How, then, do we try to meaningfully measure their agency over their performance? Beyond representation, which can be analysed and interpreted, do we not move into speculation and conjecture?

Figure 6.7. Sobuza and the trekkers.

I return to *De Voortrekkers* to explore gestural and performance theories where only theories of representation have held sway.

As the saga of the Landman family unfolds, they encounter a Zulu man, 'Sobuza' – once a lieutenant of King Dingaan, now newly converted against the savagery of his people by American missionaries that have settled near the kingdom. Little is known about the actor who plays Sobuza, beyond his first (or last) name, 'Goba'. Parsons identifies him as 'Africa's first indigenous film star', having featured in several two/three-reelers produced by Schlesinger a few years before he is cast again in *De Voortrekkers* (2013, 646).

Like other black South African performers of the time, Goba is unnamed and uncredited in *De Voortrekkers*, subsuming him almost completely in the character he plays and the role he represents.

Colonisation in South Africa, and its culminant, apartheid, controlled the collective movements of people, but also operated at the level of actual, singular bodies, their postures and the scale of the smallest gestures. The African body became the site of physical brutalities and the systematic, quietly violent process, occurring in the everyday spaces between wars, rebellions, riots and arrests, of transforming ideologies of colonial conquest and racial domination into corporeal facts, including determinations of *how* (not just where) individuals were permitted to carry their bodies.

For black South Africans, these ideologies were incorporated (taken into the body) and came to form part of their *habitus* – a term coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as 'the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them' (Wacquant 2005 cited in Navarro 2006, 16). In the case of black South Africans, the oppressive structures of colonialism and what would later become Apartheid dictated onto their bodies ways of moving and interacting with space, things and people of 'other' classes and turned subjugation and inferiority into a lived bodily experience from the inside, not just a social and political effect from the outside.

*De Voortrekkers* presents an interesting study of not only expressive gestures in the silent film, but also of how the colonial imagination defines and depicts the preferable set of *gestures/ways of moving* for Africans at that time. The narrative intends to tell the story of the triumph of the Afrikaner settlers over unforgiving wilderness and its even wilder natives. The movements of the 'black' bodies on screen, read not simply as representative symbolic signs serving this narrative, but as the presentations of *how* 'good' or 'bad' Africans move, reveal the aspiration within the colonial imaginary of installing itself into actual bodies and offers an example of how the cinema of the time worked as a tool that not only enacted but also furthered this process.

'Dingaan' and 'Sobuza' enjoy a dubious privilege within the narrative and within the frame. Both are coded differently by their movements within the film – they move more vigorously than the marginal, stilted figures we saw previously and are in fact placed at the centre of the screen in a much more theatrical composition than are the latter.

Sobuza first enters the frame an upright figure, gesturing towards the missionaries (Figure 6.8, with Sobuza right of screen). His appearance follows that of King Dingaan, who we see at his *kraal* (homestead) ordering his people about and Dingaan uses two women as a footstool.

After Sobuza's encounter with the American missionaries, however, he acquires a new lexicon of inscriptive gestures which he recites throughout the rest of the film: he covers his spear with his open hand; he points upwards to the sky; he turns his gaze to the heavens.

A few scenes later, in a moment of revelation, Sobuza refuses to carry out his king's odious order to kill one of the king's sons. He is banished from the kingdom and forced to roam the cruel hinterland. Exhausted and near death, he is rescued by the leader of the migrating Afrikaner *Voortrekkers*, Piet Retief). In

Figure 6.8 [top left]. Sobuza gesturing towards the missionaries.

Figure 6.9 [top right]. Dingane uses two women as a footstool.

Figure 6.10 [left]. Sobuza encounters American missionaries. a fever of gratitude, he renounces his Zulu tribe and declares his allegiance to the cause of the Afrikaner settler; a moment punctuated by one of the film's few biblical inter-titles: 'Henceforth thou art my Father and my Chief and thy people shall be my people.'

Within the narrative, this is the scene in which Sobuza forms an alliance with the Afrikaners; he will later consummate this alliance by killing his former king, Dingaan. Visually and in terms of motility, this is a moment of rebirth – the figure of Sobuza collapses as if dead at the feet of Retief. It ceases to move.

Figure 6.11. Sobuza refuses to carry out the King's orders

Figure 6.12. Retief discovers Sobuza half-dead.

This collapse is perhaps like a metaphorical loss of habitus – of the potential for and power to gesture. The body is exhausted of all possibility of movement and corporeal memory is truncated.

When the figure of Sobuza is 'brought back alive', the figures from our earlier frames, that stood eerily still, reappear on either side of him (Figure 6.13). They take him by the arms and lead him off-screen, echoing the stilted movement of wrangling the horses. Sobuza is now part of the household of Retief, a servant and object of use, like a trusted horse.

Sobuza from now on 'speaks' in a different style and tone – the figure takes on a cowering posture, never fully standing upright again; gestures become over-animated, over-pronounced and childlike. A new *habitus* emerges through this phraseology of the body. In his new role of servant, Sobuza's gestures now echo those of Dingaan's own servants – the women who acted as his human chair and served his beer in earlier frames. These new gestures construct a particular incarnation of not just acceptable 'blackness' but also 'black maleness and femaleness' in their performance.

#### **Of performance and gesture**

What can be said about performance beyond 'good' and 'bad'? What is behind these value judgements? To tease this out, I return to gesture as the primary element of screen presence in general and screen performance in particular.

Figure 6.13 [top left]. Sobuza and the trekkers. Note the men on either side of Sobuza from earlier Frame (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2).

Figure 6.14 [top right]. Sobuza with head bowed.

Figure 6.15 [middle left]. Sobuza has acquired a new *habitus*.

Figure 6.16 [middle right]. Sobuza's adopts the gestures of a servant.

Figure 6.17 [left]. Sobuza's gestures of servitude.

To an actor, gestures are not just spontaneous, fleeting emergences. They are discrete, knowable actions of the body, carrying emotion and meaning, that are carefully studied, rehearsed, repeated and performed – recited, how phrases of a mundane conversation, might, through repetition and stylisation, be transformed to poetry. That excess quality of expressivity in a gesture, beyond its practical function, is essential to an actor's craft – making a cup of tea becomes a revelation of impatience or betrays the character's alcohol problem in the tremors while pouring.

The mute playwright, director and teacher, Francois Delsarte, studied this connectionandcuratedarichrepertoireof expressivemovements forthemodern actor. Although this technique has given way to more subtle approaches, like the psychological gesture formalised by Chekov (which is a gesture that the actor performs 'internally' in their imagination, to make the performance more subtle), many actors, from the grand Kabuki stages to the plastic sets of soapie opera studios, short-hand the interior intentions, states and personalities of the characters they portray through gestures that have been borrowed and refined from older systems of performative movement.

In *Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films* (1992), Pearson traces the evolution of performance style in early American cinema: prior to 1908, she observes that cinematic performance emerged out of theatrical conventions – a performance style she describes as 'histrionically' coded (1992, 55)*.*

She traces the evolution of film acting styles specifically in the biographs of D.W. Griffith. By 1916, of a number of shifts in filmmaking conventions (such as editing and camera composition), the development of realism in cinematic story-telling – in other words, a cinema that was more mimetic of true or real life – as well as the emergence of the star system and the longer feature film in Hollywood, called for more complex, psychologically motivated characters.

At this point, a new style of acting had developed in which the 'characters' thoughts are revealed through a combination of gesture, expressions, glances and props' (Pearson 1992, 43). This code, described as the verisimilar code, was considered more sophisticated, nuanced and believable by reviewers and audiences alike. To expand, in the histrionic code: *'*actors deliberately struck attitudes,holdingeachgestureandabstractingitfromtheflowofmotionuntilthe audience had "read it"' (Pearson 1992, 25). This style is characterised by 'digital' gestures, isolated from an otherwise continuous flow of the movement of the body. They are discrete units, isolated, simplified and repeated to form a limited lexicon. Following the conventions of theatrical melodrama, the mini gestures on either side of the expressive gesture are left out of the performance: 'The elimination of the small gestures brings about the physical equivalent of silence between the grand, posed gestures, resulting in the "discrete, discontinuous elements and gaps" of digital communication' (Pearson 1992, 25).

The verisimilar code abandoned the conventions of the histrionic: 'Actors no longer portrayed emotions and states of mind by selecting from a pre-established repertoire but by deciding what was appropriate for a particular character in particular circumstances' (Pearson 1992, 21). In this new code, actors did not pose in 'digital' gesture, but rather moved in a continuous flow – a movement *'*composed of little details rather than broad sweeping motions' (1992, 21). This analysis of style allows for discussion of performance beyond good/bad, believable/unconvincing value judgements. *De Voortrekker* was created in the spirit of the silent epics of the era of the biograph over which Griffith held popular sway. In discussing the actor Goba's performance, it can be noted that his style falls into a histrionic code, contrasted with the performances of the other actors (representing Dutch, British and Portuguese characters), which follow a more verisimilar, naturalist style.

Goba's lexicon of only a few gestures, as well as the heightened, exaggerated pitch at which he delivers his static, unnatural gestures brings to the audience the experience of not only the character, but also the process of the character's construction. This style of performance carries with it a self-consciousness – the performer is not presenting an everyday, natural state of being but a heightened, idealised one. With each overt gesture, the actor telegraphs the underlying proclamation, 'I am making believe!' to his audience.

Inthisway,Gobacreatesdistancebetweenhimselfandthe characterSobuza and thus opens space for an analysis that is not absolutely determined by the representation or the character; an analysis that recognises the contribution of the actor to the process of creating the representation. It is in this gap that, I argue, we can begin to posit traces of agency and resistance to representations, for the performer as well as the audience. By offering caricature, the actor Goba frustrates an audience's attempts to swallow the character of Sobuza whole. As Shohat and Stam (2014, 182) point out 'spectators may look beyond caricatural representations to see the oppressed performing self'.

In our discussions of early South African cinema, or any colonial, racist cinematic traditions, we do not leave room for this 'beyond representations', which spectators are very often able to reach. This 'beyond' is often couched in terms of performance, or acting, when it comes to fictional cinematic characters. Audiences know a performance when they see one, and are able to dislocate the actor from the character. It is in this gap that a resistance to the implications of that representation can be situated, especially for oppressed audiences watching oppressed actors, playing oppressed characters within oppressive situations.While it will not be scientifically measurable just how much resistance is born here, it may be hypothesised.

By shifting focus from whole representations to the simplest units of that process, gestures, more nuanced observations are made possible.We can speak of tone, pitch, style of gesture, leading us to ideas of codes of performance and placing us in the realm of *actor* rather than director and apparatus. This is one of many new directions that cinema as *gesture* enables us to take when reading early South African cinematic images.

*De Voortrekkers* offers an example of what Saks recognises as the binary life of the historical film (2011, 137–187) – first, as cinematic storytelling that deals in historical re-enactment, and second, as a historical artefact in itself. The first mode of the historical film asks us, from our present vantage point, to question the strength of this storytelling, and weigh the persuasiveness of its representation against historical facts. Of the second mode, Saks writes:

Historical films may also seek a bridge between present and past that allows the present to complete a mission aborted by a side turn in the history of things, which is now, finally, able to be overcome. The goal is to reach into the past and retrieve the kernel of its spirit, showing that new times are the fulfilment of that spirit in spite of the side tracking of intervening history. Here the goal is caught up with an act of mourning: mourning for the abortion of spirit which kept the prescient actor in his place. And the goal is to return the flow of history to his name, causing him to live a second life in our imaginations. (2011, 144)

I am interested in the possibility of reading *De Voortrekkers* in this second mode, in a way that retrieves traces or a spirit of the past that sits beyond the film's narrative or matrix of representation. In this film, the actors 'kept in their place' by a narrative that emerges out of a racist colonial discourse are those performers that portrayed the black slaves, savages and servants. The force of this portrayal, the continuous presence of these performers on the screen, *must* be recognised as something over and above what is portrayed, not simply as something overwhelmed by it. In this chapter I wished to demonstrate how a different way of *receiving* the images of these black bodies might free them from the particular burden of representations placed on them by the narratives they carry, and by so doing, return some power and agency to the performers whose traces continue to haunt us from the screen.

#### **References**

Akua-Sakyiwah, Beatrice. 2016. 'Education as Cultural Capital and its Effect on the Transitional Issues Faced by Migrant Women in the Diaspora.' *Journal of International Migration and Integration* 17, 4: 1125–1142.

Gaines, Jane M. 2000. 'Birthing Nations.' Cinema and Mation, 298–316.

Hees, Edwin. 2003. 'The Birth of a Nation: Contextualizing *De Voortrekkers* (1916).' In Isabel Balseiro and Ntongela Masilela (eds), *To Change Reels: Film and Culture in South Africa*, 49–69. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Levitt, Deborah. 2002. 'Image as Gesture: The Saint in Chrome Dioxide.' *Spectator* 21, 1: 23–39.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2008. 'Digesture: Gesture and Inscription in Experimental Cinema.' In Carie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (eds), *Migrations of Gesture,* 113–131. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Maingard, Jacqueline. 2006. 'Cast in Celluloid: Imag (in) ing Identities in South African Cinema.' In Michael Wintle (ed.), *Image into Identity: Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity,* 83–100. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Masilela, Ntongela. 1981. 'Issues in the South African cinema.' http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/ general/essays/cinemasouth.pdf

Navarro, Zander. 2006. 'In Search of a Cultural Interpretation of Power: The Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu.' https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/8355/ IDSB\_37\_6\_10.1111j.1759-5436.2006.tb00319.x.pdf

Noland, Carrie and Sally Ann Ness (eds). 2008. *Migrations of Gesture*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parsons, Neil. 2013. 'Nation-Building Movies Made in South Africa (1916–18): IW Schlesinger, Harold Shaw, and the Lingering Ambiguities of South African Union.' *Journal of Southern African Studies* 39, 3: 641–659.

Pearson, Roberta. 1992. *Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films*. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Preller, Gustav and Harold M. Shaw. *De Voortrekkers: of, Die Winne Van 'n Nuwe W*ê*reld*  1916. DVD. African Film Productions, South Africa: Vancouver, BC: Villon Films, 1990.

Saks, Lucia. 2011. 'A Tale of Two Nations: South Africa, *De Voortrekkers* and *Come See the Bioscope*.' *Ilha do Desterro* 61: 137–187.

Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 2011. 'Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation.' In Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White and Meta Mazaj (eds), *Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings*. New York: St Martins.

Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 2014. *Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media*. London: Routledge.

Stern, Lesley. 2008. 'Ghosting: The Performance and Migration of Cinematic Gesture, Focusing on Hou Hsiao-Hsien's *Good Men, Good Women*.' In Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (eds), *Migrations of Gesture*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Young, Harvey. 2010. *Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body*. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

## **07**

## **Reframing South African Cinema History: Modernity, the New Africa Movement and Beyond**

Keyan G. Tomaselli and Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren

How does one write the history of cinema in a fractured South Africa? In approaching this task, in cooperation with Anna-Marie, I (Keyan) will discuss my own encounter with South African film scholars and film practitioners, in the broader multi-disciplinary context that draws on historical materialism. Our chapter examines various understandings of modernity and the role that cinema was seen to be playing in relation to different constituencies that contested each other during the twentieth century. Our lens is the post-1990 political transition that prefaced new challenges on how to examine South African cinema historically.

South African cinema history has been contested since the first newsreels documented the second South African War between 1899–1902. The opposing ideological currents could be felt as the country transited from disparate Boer1 republics and British colonies after the War, through the formation of Union in 1910, apartheid in 1948 and the post-apartheid era after 1990. Our focus is on periodised approaches to South African cinema studies within these respective periods.

Until the publication of *The Cinema of Apartheid* (Tomaselli 1988), Thelma Gutsche's (1972) *The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South*

1  Boer meaning 'farmer', a culturally specific term for descendants of the *Voortrekkers* who migrated to the north during the Great Trek. See Pretorius (2002).

*Africa 1895–1940*2 was the only comprehensive study chronicling the social history of South African film culture, since complemented by recent studies (Botha 2012; Melnick 2016; Parsons 2018). Largely ignored is *Die Bioskoop in Diens van die Volk* (*The Cinema in Service of the People*), published in two parts by Hans Rompel in 1942.

Rompel's and Gutsche's opposing approaches to film and modernity fall within the broad framework of cultural theory, but in entirely different ways. Gutsche was a government- and then African Film Production (AFP) employed supervisor for educational films, while the Dutch-born Rompel was a psychiatrist turned film critic for *Die Burger* newspaper who moonlighted as press photographer, translator, playwright and novelist.3 Where Gutsche was concerned with the film industry's orderly encounter with a stabilising modernity prior to 1945, Rompel argued against modernity, seeking an ideological bearing for the Afrikaner '*volksiel*' (national soul/spirit). Gutsche's book has withstood the test of time, in contrast to Rompel, whose work faded from scholarly interest.4 Gutsche and Rompel's works are, however, two important case studies in a discussion of two separate movements that proposed film culture for their own distinct purposes.

Film culture requires awareness of intellectual movements that inform its reception and practice, and is an expression of modernity (Masilela 2003). Apart from capital, as represented in theSchlesingerOrganisation,the two movements that negotiated modernity during the first half of the twentieth century, were the New Africa Movement (NAM) to which Gutsche was connected, and the Conservative Cultural Theorists (CCT) led by Rompel. NAM, comprised of 'new African intellectuals', held that film offered a cultural facilitator for entry into modernity. In contrast, CCT attempted to halt the emergence of modernity, even as apartheid was imposing a racially sectional modernising route towards it. The two movements are examined below.

#### **Ntongela Masilela, Thelma Gutsche and the New Africa Movement**

NAM was first discussed by Ntongela Masilela, whose awareness of modernity originated from C.L.R. James's *Modern Politics* (1960) and Pixley Isaka Ka Seme's manifesto *The Regeneration of Africa* (1906). Masilela associates

2 This was a reproduction of her 1946 PhD thesis dealing with the industry from the silent era through talkies and ending with the socio-economic developments during World War II. Also see Eckardt 2005a, 2005b.

3  Rompel wrote on diverse topics from adventure stories (*Die Land van die Farao's [*The Land of the Pharoes]*)* to addressing marital problems *(Trou is Nie Perdekoop Nie: 'n Boek oor Huweliksprobleme* [Marriage is Not Horse Trading: A Book about Marital Problems]).

4  Rompel's work was unearthed by Tomaselli in the late 1970s, and later revisited by Michael Eckardt.

modernity with his 'own personal history as an African', and with 'the establishment of a democratic intellectual culture by individuals' that he collectively termed 'the New African Movement' (Masilela 2003, 15–30). NAM includes H.I.E Dhlomo, R.V. Selope, Thelma Gutsche, Nadine Gordimer, André P. Brink, J.M. Coetzee, John Tengo Jabavu, Elijah Makiwane, Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba and Walter Benson, all of whom 'articulated the necessity of constructing modernity' (Masilela 2003, 15). Masilela and Isabel Balseiro's anthology, *To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa* (2003), focuses on 'black voices'. Masilela examines the relationship between film and leisure in terms of broad historical social processes backgrounded by NAM. His plea for analysis of 'film culture' is based on a 'consciousness of precedent' (to account for the recapitulation of the historical sequence of objects (in our case, theories about film and industry) to which it belongs. This framework requires 'an awareness of the intellectual movements that informed its early reception and practice', regardless of their respective ideological persuasions, a framework developed in my book, *Encountering Modernity* (Tomaselli 2006).

Preceding the formation of the Union in 1910 (that made the country a British dominion), NAM popularised a particular type of modernity. Solomon T. Plaatje, for example, used 'travelling cinema' to screen clips donated by Henry Ford, Tuskegee President Robert Russa Morton and documentaries about American New Negroes throughout South Africa (see Legassick 1976; Masilela in Tomaselli 2006). Plaatje believed that the establishment of a national film culture was 'necessitated by the making and construction of modernity in a context of political domination'. The appreciation of film culture extended to those New Africans who had not initially embraced cinema such as H.I.E. Dhlomo, 'arguably the greatest advocate of modernity in South Africa', and who wrote on film censorship and its psychological impact in the Zulu-language newspaper *Ilanga lase Natal* (Masilela 2006; Saint 2018)*.*

Despite the social fractures caused by segregation prior to 1948, when the victorious National Party (NP) introduced apartheid, Gutsche is argued by Masilelatohave influencedNAM's ideologicalperspectives throughinsistingthat film 'is just as crucial as are literature or music in the creation and construction of modernistic sensibilities' (Masilela 2005, 15).5 Poet and academic Benedict Wallet Vilakazi's friendship with Gutsche enabled film culture 'as a central part of New Negro modernity, as the emergence of the Sophiatown Renaissance in subsequent years was to confirm' (Masilela 'Sophiatown Renaissance'). In the 1940s and 1950s, before its destruction as part of government policy, Sophiatown was the epicentre of a multi-racial intellectual community, where

5  NAM intellectuals produced *original* scholarship that characterised modernity's qualitative essence within the South African context.

musicians, artists and journalists rubbed shoulders and exchanged ideas. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 resulted in politicalrepression that Masilela (2005, xix) equates to the decapitation of the Movement and the 'making of modernity' in South Africa. Our argument below is that residues of NAM continued despite these setbacks.

Gutsche's implicit method was treated as primary material by my PhD thesis (Tomaselli 1983), which reassesses her factual narrative through historical materialism. Gutsche lauds industrialist Isadore Schlesinger6 for bringing a cohesive order out of moral, cultural and technological chaos by establishing AFP and its distribution arm, African Theatres Trust, in 1913. I drew on Ernst Mandel's (1978) 'long wave theory' pertaining to late capitalism, of technological revolutions and economic cycles to explain the conditions that enabled Schlesinger's monopolistic consolidation from 1913 onwards. The business and technological chaos surrounding film production, exhibition and distribution prior to 1913 was stabilised by Schlesinger into a single business sector. Mandel's periodisation explains how new technologies drive new economic cycles and offered me a way of understanding Gutsche's narrative, in relation to global phases of technological innovation and economic cycles into which the nascent South Africa was entering.

Initially, I had considered Gutsche to have argued a moralist, pro-monopoly and uncritical frame of reference in lauding Schlesinger's industry consolidation. Masilela, however, cautioned that I had not considered Gutsche's historical context. Gutsche's anxiety about the need for monopoly capital to consolidate order out of the social chaos of the early 1900s stemmed from the consequences that could arise from the following features of modernity: the technological and mining revolutions; demographic upheaval; chaotic urbanisation, as well as the entrance of European and American forms of modernity into South Africa through film (Masilela 2000, 55).

Gutsche's thesis has withstood the test of time. In contrast, Rompel's forgotten imprint found resonance in enduring Afrikaner myths and their manifestation in the themes of Afrikaans films from the 1960s to date (Jansen van Vuuren and Verster 2018). Afrikaans film directors after 1965 supported modernity and urbanisation in their plots, characters and genre resolutions, while implicitly critiquing Rompellian ideological residues.

6  Schlesinger, an American, arrived in Johannesburg in 1894. By 1913, through his insurance business, he had gained a favourable reputation for business organisation and financial acumen (Gutsche 1972, 117). Schlesinger' Consolidated Films employed Gutsche between 1947 and 1959.

#### **Rompel and Conservative Cultural Theory**

Rompel (1902–1981) headed The *Reddingsdaadbond*-*Amateur-Rolprent-Organisasie* (Rescue Action League Amateur Film Organisation) or RARO and its distribution arm, *Volksbioscope* (People's bioscopes), from June 1940 (Wheeler 1988, 34). He became the CCT figurehead for RARO and KARFO (*Kerklike Afrikaanse Rolprent en Fotografiese Organisasie* – 'the Afrikaans Churches' Film and Photographic Association'). RARO was affiliated to the *Reddingsdaadbond*, established afterthe First EconomicCongress ofthe People (1939) proposed an adapted capitalism, *Volkskapitalisme* (People's capitalism). Its aim was to empower Afrikaners through interconnecting cultural, economic and national consciousnesses (O'Meara 1983). Creating an Afrikaans 'cultural' film industry was an important part of that aim (Wheeler 1988, 32).

*Die Bioskoop in Diens van die Volk* formed part of the 'Second Trek'-series,7 an allusion to the Boers' migration from the farms to the cities during the 1930s Great Depression, as opposed to the First or Great Trek that took place from 1836. The Second Trek was a delayed outcome caused by theBritish destruction of the Boers' pastoral societies during the late part of the South African War (1899–1902) (see Pretorius 2002). Following the scorched earth policy, Empire soldiers burnt farms and interned women and children in concentration camps to eliminate Boer guerrilla bases. Over 26 000 Afrikaans women and children had died from disease and neglect in the camps.8 These traumatic conditions underpinned post-War urbanisation, especially after the Depression. Publisher Piet Meyer argued that the British with their 'imported system' had halted the development of the Afrikaner's economic system that was expressed in farm life (Beukes 1938). Thus, CCT was built on nostalgia for pre-war times.

Rompel was concerned with Afrikaners being culturally alienated through modernity, capitalism and urbanisation. Urbanisation was equated with defeat, genocide, depravity and cultural impotence. The city was argued to be contaminating the Afrikaner soul, and CCT was to assist Afrikaners reconnect withthesoil(*bodem*).Thisfeelingresonatedwithothercontemporarypoliticaland aesthetic movements, especially in literature, which manifested in the enduring myth of 'the farm' (Van Coller and Van Jaarsveld 2018). Thus, artists were to be trained to draw inspiration from the *bodem*. Ironically, Rompel proposed features oftheNaziapproach(anultimateindustrialurbanistmodernismcreatedtoservice a war economy) towards sustaining pre-modernity via cinema development as a cultural industry within a pastoral economy. Although Nazism had influenced

7  All titles of the series were published in Afrikaans. Titles include '*The Afrikaans University and His Task in our Nation's Lives*', '*Marriage and Family*' and '*The Living Conditions and Education of the Voortrekker Child*'.

8 20 000 black people also perished in these camps. See Mohlamme (1985).

Rompel's views on the management of an Afrikaner cultural industry, his ideas on representation were gleaned predominantly from early Russian cinema. Of relevance here is that, although the African intelligentsia studied histories of pre-colonial African societies, they also embraced elements of modernity, while CCT mobilised supporters around nostalgia for the pre-modern, pre-war past.

Rompel's writing coincided with rising Afrikaner nationalism, also evident in the subtext of South Africa's first short sound films. In Rompellian vein*, Sarie Marais* (1931) narrates the story of a Boer prisoner of war, Jan, on Ceylon, writing a letter to his girlfriend, Sarie. Through music and lyrics, Jan longs to return to his Transvaal farm. *Moedertjie* (*Little Mother*, 1931) continues the *bodem* narrative: not knowing the whereabouts of her son, a mother leaves the farm to find him. At a train station we learn that she blames the 'British imperialists' for the ills that might have befallen her son in 'the evil city'.9 Though directed by AFP's American director, Joseph Albrecht, and linked to British Commonwealth capital via Schlesinger, RARO mobilised these films for anti-imperialist purposes. The South African War proved popular as a backdrop, with Joseph Goebels and the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda also using it in the 1941 film *Ohm Krüger*. 10 It conveys a prophecy by Kruger 'that the mighty foes of the British nation will one day avenge the injustice done to the Boers' (Hallstein 2002).

The CCT filmmakers were to draw inspiration from the *bodem* (in this context it refers to the farming lifestyle) (Wheeler 1988). CCT offered a *positive set of*  moral Christian values. Rompel laments commercialisation as robbing the industry of its art and idealism, proposing instead use of amateur filmmakers associated with Afrikaner cultural, language and religious organisations. With a keen understanding of the relationship between culture and power, an empowering discourse was organisationally manifested in the cultural festivals linked to historical events (such as the 1938 centenary of the Great Trek), while the parallel establishment of Afrikaner-owned financial institutions was designed to compete with, and then appropriate, English-dominated urbanbased capital.

Though critical of CCT because of its 'anti-modernist' tendencies, Masilela concedes that'paradoxically,Rompel's anti-modernism was itself a modernizing project' (Masilela 2005, xv). CCT wanted to organise the industry to produce films mobilising the nationalistic *kultur* (cultural) dimension characterised by a pre-modern life (driven by aesthetic, ethical and spiritual values) thatresisted the excesses of capitalism. CCT relied on rich philosophical and popular dimensions, drawn from a narrow Calvinist interpretation whose aesthetics of resistance

9  *Moedertjie* was followed up by *'n Dogter van die Veld (A Daughter of the Veld, 1933)*, its title again indicative of the film's message.

10 The credits list Hans Steinhoff as the artistic director. The lead actor, Emil Jannings, directed the actors.

called on contemporary exemplars such as Soviet and German cinema, mixing it with the British Documentary Movement's realist documentary practices (Tomaselli and Eckhardt 2011). This aesthetic was a driving theoretical force in creating culturally specific films that were pure, as Rompel demanded that Afrikaners reflect their true God-given orientation in film.

Rompelrejectedfantasyinfilmnarrative,as realismwouldforcethe'Afrikaans cultural film industry' to remain truthful to reality and confront viewers with reallife conflict situations as amateurs would be unable to produce a high-quality fiction film (Rompel 1938). In this pursuit, Rompel mimicked Eisenstein's casting of real farmers in *Battleship Potempkin* (1925), intercut with documentary footage (Rompel 1942,17). Yet while CCT drew on industrial *zivilisation* models offered by early Soviet directors, it ignored their respective theories of film-asfilm-form, devised to chart routes into different arrangements of modernity and democracy in their societies.

Rompel's archaic philosophy clashed, however, with the modernising aims and objectives of both the *Reddingsdaadbond* (Salvation Association) and the Broederbond (Band of Brothers – a secret group of intellectuals that influenced political, economic and cultural policies) (Giliomee 2004, 352). The pastoralist based CCT lost favour in the 1940s when the Broederbond took the Afrikaner struggle to the cities where it competed with English capital.

Gutsche's 'anglophilia' and her 'impatience with cultural nationalism' were in marked contrast to Rompel's CCT prescription (Eckardt 2004). Where Gutsche eschewed South African films as largely amateurish and called for industrial consolidation under the auspices of AFP, Rompel argued for an independent '*volkseie*' (Afrikaner nationalist) amateur-driven industry. Gutsche overlooked texts and aesthetics, while Rompel examined film as art, dismissing commercial cinema as mass entertainment.

In terms of their similarities, Gutsche preferred European classicism, rejected American sensationalism and, like Rompel, frowned upon 'American escapism'. They both investigated cinematic backdrops to a nation-in-the making, poised on the cusp of a stabilising modernity. Masilela later observed that both Gutsche and Rompel embraced a Eurocentric perspective of modernity, while later scholars proposed a Third World approach (Masilela 2005, xvii).

#### **Post-1948: KARFO and Apartheid Film Theory**

Where Rompel and RARO were driven by a nostalgia for the lost pastoralism and values developed by the Boers before the War, with the NP election victory in 1948, apartheid was the mechanism that the Broederbond used to successfully turn the tables on their class, cultural and language subordination. Because of its divergence from the Broederbond (and materialism in general), Rompel's culturalism failed to find wider currency. However, the ascendant NP

government did establish a film subsidy, but not state control of the industry in 1956 to enable Afrikaners to realise their 'own' '*volkseie*' films, an objective that Rompel had extensively propagated (Tomaselli and Eckardt 2011).

The vacuum created by RARO's silent disintegration11 was filled in 1947 by the Dutch Reformed Church, which then created KARFO (Wheeler 1988, 39).12 KARFO deployed film to guide the hundreds of thousands of displaced Afrikaners who had migrated to the cities between 1903 and 1940. Known as poor whites, they became unskilled miners, labouring for the enemy (British imperialism) under the supervision of skilled blacks. In contrast to Rompel's pastoral films, KARFO followed a pragmatic approach to socialise the urban Afrikaner and 'redress the stereotypical media image of Afrikaners created by RARO and others' (Tomaselli and Eckhardt 2011).

John Grierson, leader of the 1930s British Documentary Movement, was invited by KARFO to South Africa in 1949. Grierson was excited by the vigorous debate he found on nation-building, and film's potential in the propagation of public information in a fast-industrialising South Africa (Grierson 1990). A Scotsman, he shared anti-imperialist sentiments with Afrikaner nationalists. His unpublished papers described British expatriates as 'pampered Whites' who embodied 'a sort of decadent evaluation of the Imperial idea in which privilege is accepted without any appropriate sense of leadership and guidance' (Tomaselli 2000a, 47).

Grierson found himself sandwiched between the conservative cultural theorists and the Broederbond's pragmatists, leading him to identify the disjuncture between segregation and Western liberalism. The NP pragmatists nevertheless implemented the recommendations within an apartheid frame of reference that embraced modernity as the new site of Afrikaner struggle. KARFO took its production cues from both the public information objective (Grierson) and Soviet propaganda (Sergei Eisenstein), irrespective of their different realisms. This may seem paradoxical; however, by selectively reading both movements, KARFO extracted what would be strategically useful to their own concerns.

For Grierson, blacks were patiently awaiting their political moment. As taken as Grierson was with the vibrancy of apartheid's modernising experiment, he understood this arrangement as merely a 'desperate' political phase through which the country would need to negotiate towards a fully-fledged democracy (Tomaselli and Hees 1999, and see John Grierson [1990] in South Africa). Grierson thus spurned KARFO and offered recommendations that assumed a state management (educational) operation that resulted in the establishment

11 J.J.S. Botha, Kerk en Rolprent, in *Die Afrikaanse Rolprentamateur*, 1 April 1947.

12 In 1955, KARFO's name was changed to CARFO – the Christian Afrikaans Film and Photographic Organisation.

of the National Film Board in 1964.13 Repressive legislation intensified when Hendrik Verwoerd became prime minister in 1958. Despite this, this period witnessed the next NAM generation, and the first to actually make films.

#### **NAM from the 1950s: Lionel Ngakane (1928–2003)**

On moving to Sophiatown in 1936, Lionel's father, a teacher, set up the Diepkloof Reformatory for young black offenders between 1935 and 1949, with Alan Paton as principal. Sensing Lionel's interest in cinema, his father gave the seven year old a 35mm projector, on which he screened small strips of film. At age ten, Ngakane volunteered at a monthly open-air cinema.

Similar to Plaatje, Ngakane was a journalist before entering the film industry. He wrote for the *Rand Daily Mail*, a newspaper that reported on state repression, and the first African pictorial magazine, *Zonk,* before being head- hunted by *Drum* magazine. The latter was central to providing opportunities to writers who broadly constituted NAM. In London, Ngakane interviewed Zoltan Korda, who had the rights to Paton's novel, *Cry, The Beloved Country* (1948)*.* The novel describes social protest against conditions imposed by apartheid, with whites fearful of 'native' crime and blacks who experience social instability, tribal disintegration, the impoverishment of the native reserves and black urbanisation.

Ngakane smuggled himself into a casting session and edged out Sidney Poitier for the role of Absalom Kumalo, the lead character's son. Korda then employed Ngakane as his personal assistant. Ngakane had a crucial influence in terms of artistic integrity in adapting the original source material on two feature films, *Cry the Beloved Country* (1951) and *A Dry White Season* (1989). In the latter, starring Marlon Brando, and based on an André Brink novel, an apolitical middle-class white man assists his black gardener in searching for his jailed son. In the process, Brando's character becomes a target of the vicious security police.14

*Vukani/Awake* (1962), Ngakane's first film as director, depicts how black labour contributed to white wealth. Its non-theatrical distribution interfaced Ngakane with the few other African filmmakers then active. When in 1966 the Austrian Socialist Party invited him to a symposium in Vienna on Third World Cinema, he proposed an African filmmakers' organisation, presented to the Carthage Film Festival in Tunis, and in 1967 FEPACI – the Pan-African Federation of Film Makers – was formed (Ngakane 1983). The postcolonial moment then sweeping across the continent enabled FEPACI's emergence. At the inaugural FEPACI conference in Algiers (1968), a constitution was written and officers

13 Although Grierson envisaged the Film Board to be a facilitator in public discussion within the liberal humanist context, it became the propaganda arm of the pragmatists. See Hees (1991).

14 Imdb. A Dry White Season. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097243/

elected, with Ngakane made honorary president. He was often the sole South African representative at African and international film festivals, and the only active South African member of FEPACI until the mid-1990s (Crowdus 1986).

#### **Tommie Meyer and the pragmatist Afrikaans filmmakers**

Residual CCT was on the retreat by the 1960s, with the urban-based economic pragmatists in the ascension. In film, one of the pragmatists was Tommie Meyer (1928–2017), who understood the relationship between culture and power (Meyer 1994). After working at Jamie Uys Films for four years, Meyer created Kavalier Films in 1965 to produce genre features (directed by Elmo de Witt, Jan Scholtz, Dirk de Villiers and Daan Retief). These directors symbolically empowered urban-bound migrants by stepping away from CCT whose proponents had marginalised staid Afrikaner characters to 'the farm', as in 'n *Nasie Hou Koers* (*A Nation Holds [its] Course*, 1939). In this film, Rompel had compiled footage from amateur cinematographers depicting young scouts who belonged to the organisation known as Voortrekkers, carrying a *fakkel* (lit torch) from Cape Town to Pretoria. Screened in 144 venues to 500 000 viewers, its success was its commemoration of the centenary of the Great Trek. RARO's other films mostly failed due to poor quality. CCT's built-in obsolescence had lost ground with pragmatic Afrikaners.

Meyer was instrumental in charting a pragmatic cinema that built a commercially based industry, while simultaneously addressing deep-seated cultural traumas through popular genres that affirmed the (second) urban trek. Meyer was, in Gramscian terms (Gramsci 1971), an organic intellectual, as the Kavaliers films leveraged the folk wisdom of previously repressed Afrikaners and brought to the fore the need for the myth of 'the farm' to be rearticulated in an urban setting (in the battle for capital). The newly won state now began to consolidate cultural power and accumulate wealth through the establishment of statutory cultural institutions like the Performing Arts Councils, the National Film Board and the censorship apparatus.

The purging of Rompel-led CCT had required a genre like the insider-outsider plot structure, where the 'rural' Afrikaner ('insider') on the farm is visited by the urban 'outsider' who transforms the moral insider 'into a restless urban animal who forsakes the farm, family and the rural community' (Tomaselli 2006, 144). Linked as it was to broader Afrikaner resistance strategies that engaged and appropriated (rather than isolating itself) from English-dominated capital, the genre depicted the pure and innocent *boeredogter* character (boer daughter) being traumatised, killed and abandoned in the narrative. This archetype takes on the collective quest for liberation in a society dominated by the impulses of modernity. Discussions with the genre's contemporary directors revealed unfamiliarity with Rompel's work, but nevertheless their scripts were examples

of the urban–rural tensions that he addressed. The *Boereplaas*-genre15 originated from many young Afrikaner intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s. This earlier generation had read Rompel's articles in *Die Burger* and the cultural magazine *Die Huisgenoot* (The Home Companion) (Eckhardt 2005b). Rompel's mythologising about 'the farm' work may have implicitly influenced Afrikaans cinema because he represented a particular strand of resistance theory (CCT) that was undermined by the later genre in its characters, plotlines, and traumatic resolutions that sought to rethink the value of an, if unpleasant, Afrikaner redemption to be achieved in the city.

The genre films produced between 1965 and 1980 accorded such popular legitimation and redemption to the second trek where the pragmatist Broederbond (unlike RARO) engaged directly with British imperialism. The genre's characters encoded the traumatic psychological contours of ideological struggle and discredited the unidimensional pastoralist characters proposed by Rompel and propagated by Jamie Uys16 in *Doodkry is Min* (They Can't Keep Us Down, 1961).17 Continuity anomalies identified issues that could not be explained in narrative conventions but rather via 'structured presences' in contrast to the idea of structured absences. These related to the trappings of the 'new Afrikaner class', which presaged a headlong rush into conspicuous consumption after 1948. This required a political economy approach that analysed film texts *in relation to* their contexts, where the representation of class is a significant signifier.18 In the end, urbanisation was gained at the cost of an expedient English–Afrikaner alliance threaded through an increasing capitalist compromise.

It was during Tommie Meyer's time that Pieter Fourie, a young communication scholar, offered a pragmatic but unimplemented model for the restructuring of a state-organised subsidy-driven film industry, which included the development of homeland-based (Bantustan) production ventures (Fourie 1982a). One of the key objectives of apartheid had been to re-fragment the Union geographically along racial, ethnic and language lines, and for 'border industries' to extract labour value from such territories, though this never occurred with the film industry.

15 The term hails from the folksong '*O, Boereplaas'* meaning 'Boer farm'. Opera singer Mimi Coertse performed this song at the première of the film *Doodkry is Min* (Uys 1961). See Jan-Ad Stemmet, 'Doodkry is Min', http://www.mimosafilms.co.za/Archive/Film/61/doodkry-is-min

16 Uys often used friction between Afrikaners and English speakers as comic relief in his satirical films *Hans en die Rooinek* (1961), *Lord Oom Piet* (1962) and *Rip van Wyk* (1960).

17 Sponsored by the Afrikaner Academy of Arts and Science and the Federation of Afrikaner Cultural Organisations (FAK), the première at the Voortrekker Monument was attended by the state president, C.R. Swart.

18 An example is Jans Rautenbach's 1971 film with Katinka Heyns, *Pappalap* (Daddy Dearest).

#### **NAM and theorising in exile**

In 1982, Ngakane approached me to jointly facilitate a South African committee under the auspices of the International Film and Television Council (IFTC), Paris, a UNESCO affiliate.19 Ngakane, as had Masilela, had become aware of my book, *The S.A. Film Industry*, first published in 1979. Neither knew the other, and each had contacted me separately. Ngakane established a South African Cinema Archive at the British Film Institute in the mid-1980s as a Council Project, raising funds through the Institute to facilitate the archiving of published and unpublished materials from South Africa.

In recognition of his achievements, in 1997, the University of Natal conferred, on the basis of my proposal, an honorary doctorate on Ngakane. In his statement he explained how he used his income from a 'forgettable film' (*Safari*, 1956, directed by Terence Young) to buy his first 16mm film camera:

After several months playing with the camera and reading film books, I felt confident to make my first film. I decided to make a documentary on South Africa, as I was coming back to visit my parents. When I started filming, I pretended to be a camera-toting black tourist. It worked. I had no problems with the Special Branch police. In fact, when I was filming in a beerhall in Soweto, the white Superintendent assigned one of his security guards to protect me. (Ngakane 1997)

Ngakane returned to South Africa in the early 1990s. He worked with the National Film and Video Foundation and was an advisor on the All Africa M-Net Film Awards.

Apart from Ngakane, the International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF) facilitated most exile discussion. Little was published by IDAF-linked filmmakers themselves. *Sechaba* (the African National Congress journal unbanned in February 1990) published mildly analytical articles that were not easily available inside South Africa. The international cultural boycott had meant that domestic filmmakers were excluded from the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, and were disconnected from discussions on Third Cinema (Tomaselli and Prinsloo 1992). This changed in 1990 when the Film and Allied Workers Organisation (FAWO) leveraged international interaction with the premier Third World festivals and attended Ouagadougou, clearing the way for South African inclusion (Currie 1989).

19 This committee of exiled South African filmmakers and internal representatives was Londonbased and operated for most of the 1980s.

#### **Revisiting Gutsche**

Studies of South African cinema during the 1970s and 1980s were largely typified by their respective pro- and anti-apartheid positions in which early histories, like that of Gutsche, were read symptomatically rather than historically. The element of sacredness with which Masilela (2006) and others describe her tome, must have encoded the 'structure of feeling' that spoke to modernity and modernists, irrespective of ideological persuasion. Gutsche appealed across constituencies as her writing style created a sense of being there, forming part of breaking events, though she had completed her PhD before the onset of apartheid.

The recognition of social and possibly class experience was one that also typified reception from industry professionals to the publication of *The Cinema of Apartheid* – but in a different way. Where NAM had spanned nearly a hundred years of relatively open intellectual fermentation, of charting possible affirmative futures, in contrast, I was during the narrow window of the 1970s and 1980s negotiating repression, resistance and social regression, and largely then unaware of NAM as an overarching framework being simultaneously devised by Masilela.

Introducing neo-Marxist social analyses from the mid-1970s revealed the class dimensions of inequality. Capitalism and apartheid were recognised as interacting allies – rather than assuming, as did liberal analysis, that capitalism would naturally erode the irrationality of apartheid. *The Cinema of Apartheid* appeared at a time when philosopher Louis Althusser's (1971) work on ideological state apparatuses was popularised in the South African academy (Tomaselli 2000b). While critics of Althusserianism charged that it muted agency, overemphasising determining social structures, my book garnered noteworthy support from the anti-apartheid movement (located in a political economy framework which admits resistance) and writer-activists like Dennis Brutus and Gordimer; yet a local literary scholar dismissed the study for its lack of textual analysis (Willoughby 1991). The contradiction was stark, as like Gutsche, I deal with making sense of the industry rather than analysing filmic texts. However, my book is ambivalent on the relationship between race and class that typified much left-wing analysis during the 1980s (Collins 1991). Race and class are not analytical categories in Gutsche's writing. Rompel structures 'blacks', 'whites' and 'nationalists' out of the equation altogether, invoking '*volk*' (nation), '*publiek*' (public) and '*volkskuns*' (folk-art), assuming a homogeneous white Afrikaner group.

My PhD accords little clemency to Gutsche, as I had read her as offering primary material threaded through moralism. Our chapter is thus offered as redress ofthe need to read Gutsche's study in relation to her professional context. Masilela's influence is first acknowledged in his suggestion that *Encountering*  *Modernity* be composed within a revisionist framework that includes NAM (Tomaselli 2008). My argument was that the Afrikaner's pre-modern condition, the Edenic 'never-never land of pastoral harmony' (disturbed by the South African War), became a myth explaining urban discontent and the hope of a remedy in return (Greig 1980), also witnessed in early black cinema of the 1920s to the 1980s. In the later 1970s 'back to the homelands'-genre, white filmmakers fostered an aspiration within black audiences to return to their tribal lands. *Myth, Race and Power* (Tomaselli et al. 1986) examined how South Africa's state films, oppositional and UK-made television series engaged with apartheid (and its pragmatic ethnic and race-based constructions of separated modernities). This study fractured the prevailing understanding within an influential Afrikaner scholarly constituency (Fourie 1982b) that film (and television) could be understood as a self-evident model of (or for) reality (see Hees 1996).

#### **The early nineties and South African cinema studies**

South Africa opened to the African continent following the end of apartheid in 1994. Contemporary local studies, briefly examined below, form part of the growing oeuvre of historical work. As Edwin Hees (1993) observes, a disconcerting feature of Manthia Diawara's (1992) *African Cinema*: *Politics and Culture* was the exclusion of South Africa (except for a few passing references) from the discussion, an omission partly addressed by Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn (2007). Hees admits historical causation for this, as South Africa was not colonised and decolonised as was the rest of the continent. NAM's questions of 'who is an African?' and how international relationships impact on definitions of 'South African cinema', remained open questions. Johan Blignaut and Martin Botha's (1992) *Movies Moguls Mavericks*: *South African Cinema, 1979–1991*  and Botha and Adri van Aswegen's (1992) *Images of South Africa: The Rise of the Alternative Film* discuss 'national' industries, American cultural domination, government intervention and/or interference, distribution monopolies, and racial stereotyping. Both negotiate modernity, though differently to the routes taken by Gutsche, Grierson and Masilela.

*Images of South Africa* paradoxically attempts to marry Third Cinema postulates with intercultural communication theory. Though drawing on Fourie's correspondence theory (1982b) that equates media images with concrete reality, they recognised the need for a different route to negotiate through the structural violence imposed by apartheid on modernity in the search for a post-apartheid state. Such modernity would accept Teshome Gabriel's (1989) socialist Third Cinema analysis, based on its struggles with capitalism. Botha and van Aswegen certainly shifted the notion of 'a South African film culture' by recognising a pro-humanist pragmatism based on a kind of state-centred socialist political economy that would involve directors like Manie van Rensburg,

Gray Hofmeyr, Cedric Sundström, Ross Devenish, Elaine Proctor, Helena Noguera, Emil Nofal, Katinka Heyns and Jans Rautenbach20 (Botha et al. 1996), and producers like Richard Green, who might be considered to be products of the post period of NAM (see Green 2019). Rautenbach had associated himself with Afrikaner literary dissidents, the *Sestigers* (the Sixtiers, indicating the decade of the 1960s), but working in the 1970s via his company, *Sewentig* (Seventy) as his psychological insight and cinematic nuance systematically interrogated the Afrikaner apartheid psyche via expressionism and other stylistic forms (Botha 2006).

Hees (1993) identifies seemingly incompatible paradigms within which progressive sections within the Afrikaner academy approach modernity. These include the inability of the model to balance socialism – whether Afrikaner, pastoral, or post-apartheid – with aesthetic concerns deriving from previous momentsexperiencedelsewhere(UK,SovietUnionorThirdWorld),contradictions that derive from Fourie's correspondence theory. As such, the book draws in an idiosyncratic way from the anti-liberal, anti-humanist, economistic moment centred on a Marxist analysis of the South African Communist Party (SACP) (see, Wolpe 1972), as read through and applied in *The Cinema of Apartheid*. Unlike CCT, the early SACP strand had marginalised discussion on issues of culture and resistance and vested agency in the working class. Classical Marxism, which had some affinity with the Freedom Charter, contested this strand. Appropriations of Gramsci in 1970s South Africa provided 'a particularly receptive field for the application of a humanism that stressed the possibilities rather than the impossibilities of political will' (Muller and Tomaselli 1990, 312).

Botha's (2012) *South African Cinema 1896–2010* differs substantially from Jacqueline Maingard's (2007) *South African National Cinema.* He describes the different historical periods while Maingard analyses, through case studies, films that characterise national identity in terms of modernity. She discusses early black films such as *Jim comes to Joburg* (also known as *Joburg Jim*) and she critically comments on filmic monuments to the Afrikaner *volk* like *They Built a Nation* (1938) and *'n Nasie Hou Koers* (1940).

Leon van Nierop's (2016) book, based on kykNet's TV series, *Daar Doer in die Fliek* [Far Away in the Movies] (2016),provides rich descriptions of Afrikaans genre cinema that spans the same time period as does this chapter, sourcing from his archive of film criticism whilst packaging a century's worth of history in a palatable way for leisure readers. His descriptive history, however, elides discussion of modernity, struggle or liberation, which I imported in my analysis of the TV series (Tomaselli 2015).

20 For more on South African women directors, see Tomaselli and Annecke (1990) and Jansen van Vuuren (2022).

#### **Conclusion**

For Masilela, NAM contributed to film culture by propagating modernity. NAM writings and actions were extraordinarily influential, resilient and withstood the test of time. By reframing South African film studies through the multiple lenses provided by different individuals embraced by NAM, one can rethink cinematic history. NAM had emerged as a loose movement of intellectuals who were not only subjects of an early modernity, but who were actually and actively, trying to shape it, in terms of their respective class, racial, ethnic, language and other intersecting determinations. As an informal intellectual trajectory of like-minded individuals, they responded to modernising conditions not of their own making. In contrast, though CCT had opposed modernity it was rearticulated into the new urbanising conjuncture by Tommie Meyer, NAM triumphed in published studies and was regenerated under the guise of Thabo Mbeki's African Renaissance movement.

Previously hidden trajectories within filmmaking would now include the films made from Gordimer's short stories, Athol Fugard's plays and André Brink's novels, and the 1990s M-Net New Directions series produced by Green which birthed young directors like Ntshaveni wa Luruli and producers like Bongiwe Selane. As such, now organic intellectuals who were key members of the industry like Plaatje, Ngakane, Ken Gampu and perhaps even Simon Sabela (whose activism remains to be studied) and Donald Swanson of *Joburg Jim* fame can be added to NAM (see Modisane 2013). This enables us to now also study South African cinema in terms of intellectual movements and not just in terms of race, class and capital. That is, the study of form is now also included in the mix.

#### **References**

Althusser, Louis. 1971. *For Marx*. London: Verso.