Back in the pre-deadline ooze, when beautiful abstracts were putting plump flesh on the bare bones of our outline, it often seemed as if The Routledge Companion to World Cinema might actually meet its own remit of uniting contributors from key areas of world cinema studies and re-uniting several of the leading authors of key works that this blog has previously mentioned such as David Martin-Jones, Belén Vidal, Rosalind Galt, Karl Schoonover and Lucia Nagib.
Tapping leading scholars in the areas of contemporary distribution and reception studies promised cutting edge analysis of why and how film-watching is often no longer a time-consuming activity for a captive audience but an elliptical one for the solitary and easily distracted spectator. And yet, at the same time, the complexity of the issue meant that these same chapters would effectively have to dialogue with those that investigated why film-watching nonetheless often remains a communal activity for a worldwide spectatorship. Thus, Jeffrey Geiger’s chapter on contemporary Nollywood would be followed by Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk’s on the history and histories of South African cinema. Building blocks.
Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk directs the African Cinema Unit at the University of Cape Town. He has published widely on Terrence Malick, as well as articles on South African film, wildlife documentary and literary fiction, and has written for the stage and television. He is currently working on early South African cinema and South Africa imagined in international films. His abstract hit the bullseye of what The Routledge Companion to World Cinema was intended to be about.
Reassessing Audiences and Histories in South African Cinema
While South African cinema has made faltering steps in the twenty years since the 1994 elections, the narrative of South Africa’s film history has remained relatively unchanged. Two survey histories by Maingard and Botha have been supplemented by a handful of edited collections, but the ‘canon’ – from early cinema exhibitions in 1896 through De Voortrekkers, to Mapantsula, and post-apartheid award-winners Yesterday and Tsotsi – has remained unchanged.
As a new generation of South African filmmakers (Hermanus, Qubeka, Bass) and scholars emerge, more is coming to light of South Africa’s cinematic past. Hundreds of neglected films from the 1970s and 1980s, many made in indigenous languages are coming to light through digitisation and public broadcast, while even older aspects of South African cinema (for example, South Africa as imagined by Hollywood in the 1920s) revealing new ways in which South Africa has been imagined and represented.
South Africa’s re-entry into the global screen world has coincided with profound changes in film technologies as well as a noticeable shift in film discourses on the African continent. Alexie Tcheuyap boldly claims, “until recently, African film scholarship has been almost systematically dominated by cultural, historical and political considerations that are dated and have become somewhat obsolete”, while Kenneth Harrow opens his book Postcolonial African Cinema with a call for nothing less than a revolution in African film criticism, “a revolution against the old, tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in forty years. Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view – a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today.”
Carli Coetzee writes that “one way of supplementing and reframing our histories [of South African film], and creating new archives, is through paying more attention to audiences”. This raises two key points in relation to film scholarship in South Africa. The first concerns audiences, and the second relates to archives, not just in the sense of preservation and development, but also a broader understanding of what ‘the archives’ might entail. As film scholarship moves into new areas (film festival studies; audience mobility and interactivity; transnational studies) the focus in South Africa needs to move beyond histories of production and identity, and shed light on neglected areas such as restoration, audience and language and ‘alternative’ archives.
This chapter will reassess the accepted histories of South African cinema and open discussion on the ways in which South Africa’s screen cultures are being excavated and transformed. Remapping, in the South African sense, is thus as much about digging into the past as it is about new directions and innovations.
Bullseye! Three abstracts in and we were already looking forward to reading the whole book.
Meanwhile…