Narrating popular consciousness: testimony in fruits of defiance

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 199

Cinemagoing in District Six, Cape Town, 1920s to 1960s:History, politics, memory

Drawing on recorded and transcribed life history interviews conducted during the 1980s and 2000s, this article discusses the cinemagoing experiences of District Six residents in Cape Town from the 1920s to the 1960s, before the South African apartheid government began, from 1966, to demolish District Six. Cinemagoing was the chief leisure-time activity in District Six in these years, and when recollections of cinemagoing in the interviews are analysed as discourses of memory, three key themes emerge – cinema and place; cinema, culture, and identity; and films, film shows, and stars – with residents’ remembered experiences revealing the peculiarities of cinemagoing in this very particular locale. Cinema was so thoroughly intertwined with everyday life that residents might be regarded not so much as ‘going to’ the cinema as already being there. They were part of a global seam of filmgoers – ‘cinema citizens’ whilst in every other respect stripped of citizenship rights. </jats:p

The Cinematic Cowboy in Africa: Identities and the Western Genre

This article identifies instances in Africa in which the western genre and specifically the figure of the cowboy is appropriated and adapted to local circumstances. It opens with a brief excursion into the western’s influence on African cinema, focusing primarily on Bamako (2016). The article develops a brief discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of comparative research in relation to Africa and proposes that focusing on a specific genre such as the western, is a useful additional element in adopting modes of comparative research. The article focuses on examples drawn from different parts of the continent including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Southern Africa. Finally, it draws conclusions on the potential of future research focusing on the cinematic cowboy and his appropriation into the lives of African audiences

The Cinematic Cowboy in Africa:Identities and the Western Genre

This article identifies instances in Africa in which the western genre and specifically the figure of the cowboy is appropriated and adapted to local circumstances. It opens with a brief excursion into the western’s influence on African cinema, focusing primarily on Bamako (2016). The article develops a brief discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of comparative research in relation to Africa and proposes that focusing on a specific genre such as the western, is a useful additional element in adopting modes of comparative research. The article focuses on examples drawn from different parts of the continent including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Southern Africa. Finally, it draws conclusions on the potential of future research focusing on the cinematic cowboy and his appropriation into the lives of African audiences

Strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from 1976 to 1995

This thesis focuses on strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from the late 1970s to 1995. It identifies and analyses two broad trends within this movement: the first developed by the organisation called Video News Services; the second developed in the Mail and Guardian Television series called Ordinary People. Two history series are analysed against the backdrop of transformations in the television broadcasting sector in the early 1990s. South African documentary film and video is located within a theoretical framework that interweaves documentary film theory, theories of Third cinema and of identity, rid working class cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. The concepts of ‘voice’ and the ‘speaking subject’ are the two key concepts that focus the discussion of strategies of representation in detailed textual analyses of selected documentaries. The analysis of three documentaries that typify the output of Video News Services reveals how these documentary texts establish a symbiosis between representations of the working class as black, male, and allied to COSATU, and the liberation struggle. The analysis of selected documentaries from the Ordinary People series highlights those strategies of representation that facilitate perceptions of the multiplicities of identities in South Africa. This focus on representations of identity is extended in analysing and comparing two television series. The strategies of representation evident in the Video News Services documentaries and the meanings they produce about identify are repeated in the series called Ulibambe Lingashoni: Hold Up the Sun. In Soweto: A History, strategies of representation that follow the trend towards representing identity as multiple are used to present history as if from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people. The thesis creates an argument for South African documentary film and video to move towards strategies of representation that break down the fixed categories of identity developed under apartheid. With policy moves for creating more ‘local content’ films and television productions there is opportunity to re-shape the documentary film and video movement in South Africa using representational strategies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and between individualised, discrete categories of identity