A review of the film Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony

Barnard, Ian

English

Chapman University Digital Commons

Chapman UniversityChapman University Digital CommonsEnglish Faculty Articles and Research English2003Review of Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-PartHarmony (film)Ian BarnardChapman University, barnard@chapman.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_articlesPart of the Film and Media Studies CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in English Faculty Articles and Research by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For more information,please contact laughtin@chapman.edu.Recommended CitationBarnard, Ian. Review of Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (film). African Arts 36.2 (2003): 86-87, 96. Print.Review of Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (film)CommentsThis article was originally published in African Arts, volume 36, issue 2, in 2003.CopyrightMIT PressThis book review is available at Chapman University Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_articles/59 other yellow. As the flesh-like tones play off each other, the gritty, tactile nature of the surface tempts the touch of the viewer. Appropriately, further investigation into the context of the painting's creation leads to the discovery that the ochres used as pigments in the painting are also applied to the skin of participants in initia- tory ceremonies in the Transkei region of South Africa. Not coincidentally, deeper investiga- tion will reveal that the Transkei is also where Nelson Mandela was born and where he went through ritual initiation. So, Karel Nel is not an overtly political artist. His work is wide in scope and multiva- lent in meaning, two characteristics that will grow and deepen not only upon further in- vestigation into the work but also upon fur- ther personal rumination. Although new to U.S. collectors and museums, the artist has displayed ingenuity and potential to such a degree that curators in the Department of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum deemed it appropriate to acquire a Nel for their own collection. This exhibition was a small but noteworthy step toward redefining contemporary African artists of indubitable promise, such as Karel Nel, as, simply, con- temporary artists. 0 The catalogue Karel Nel: Status of Dust (Art First Contemporary Art, New York and London; 29 pp., 17 color illustrations, $10 softcover) contains essays by Jessica Dubow and David Bunn. It is available from Art First New York or Art First London. film/video Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony Directed by Lee Hirsch Produced by Sherry Simpson Kwela Productions, 2002. 108 minutes. U.S. distrib- utor: Artisan Entertainment. Reviewed by Ian Barnard This documentary film by first-time U.S. director Lee Hirsch chronicles the role of music in South Africa's antiapartheid move- ment from the 1940s through the 1990s. Amandla! argues that music took on numerous functions in the Struggle. It was able to reach and politicize people who might not be moved by speeches and pamphlets; it served as a source of strength, pride, and support; it boosted morale and inspired action; it served as a secret communication tool among acti- vists; it chronicled the history of the Struggle; and it even acted as a weapon in itself, as with the fear-instilling Toyi-Toyi dance-song com- bination. Moreover, as musician Abdullah Ibrahim says in the film, music was not only part of the liberation struggle but also part of the process of self-liberation for black South Africans. In addition to being heard as a soundtrack to visual images, the music per se is presented a) in the form of archival footage of singing and dancing in concert and other public settings (such as political rallies), b) in contemporary community and studio perfor- mances (presumably created for Amandla!), and c) in the more informal singing of many of the performers and activists interviewed (who sing unaccompanied, often in their own homes and usually seated in their "inter- view" chairs). The film has a potentially important point to make about the imbrication of politics and music (and art in general); and its attention to superstar professional musicians, such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, togeth- er with singing individual activists and groups of everyday citizens suggests a democratic view of art, a view contrary to those para- digms that normalize individual star "spe- cialists" and narrow aesthetic criteria. Such paradigms are tellingly exemplified in Chris- topher Null's review of the film on the Web site filmcritic.com: "Note to filmmaker Lee Hirsch: A bunch of people singing out of key is not a four-part harmony." British and U.S. punk musicians of the 1970s and 1980s similarly challenged political and artistic norms with their usurpation of elitist assumptions of qualifications for musi- cianship: according to their democratic adage, anyone who could hold a guitar could be a good punk musician (see Hebdige 1979). The recent controversy around the Poets Against the War in the U.S. has rightly renewed debates about definitions of "good" art. Amandla!'s filmmakers are to be commended for not whitewashing the militancy of some of the freedom songs' lyrics ("We will shoot them with our machine guns") in order to placate more conservative viewers, such as the author of a letter to South Africa's Sunday Times, who wrote in response to the newspaper's review of Amandla!: "'Whites watch out, we are going to kill you...slowly' even as a quotation from the past is still shocking, vicious, racist, bar- baric, uncalled for, and damaging. Living in southern Africa as an elderly white male is stressful enough without having ignorant American revolutionaries cashing in on the situation" (Thesen 2002). And just when we might be wondering about the many pieces of music in South Africa that, even in the midst of the most dire conditions of discrimination, oppression, and brutality, must not have had overt political content, the film shows how this "non-politi- cal" art becomes unexpectedly politicized in the context of apartheid. Thus a love song becomes a Struggle song as it functions as a means of communication between an under- ground guerrilla fighter and her or his lover; a song like "Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika" ("God Bless Africa"-now the official national anthem of South Africa), which has no "political" con- tent, becomes politicized by reason of the con- texts in which it is sung; people transform a seemingly innocuous old song into something more militant by "putting an 'AK' [machine- gun] there, taking out a 'Bible' there" to reflect growing protests against apartheid; and lin- guistically challenged white South Africans paternalistically applaud the singing of black South Africans, symptomatically oblivious to the fact that the songs are actually criticizing and threatening the white listeners, and are not about the stereotypically banal matters the onlookers clearly think the singers are addressing. Given these promising premises, it is dis- appointing that Amandla! doesn't explore the wider (and more challenging) implications of its thesis about the interweavings of music and politics. Such an exploration would neces- sitate moving beyond the specifics of music and South Africa to at least a gesture in the direction of what this thesis means for art in general and for music and art in the rest of the world. This extrapolation is especially impor- tant given that the filmmakers are U.S. Ameri- cans and that the film has, until now, been most widely shown in the U.S. (The recent controversies around the timid and subse- quently retracted antiwar statements of Madon- na and the Dixie Chicks point to the need for this kind of discussion in the U.S.) Alas, Amandla! resists making such connections by emphasizing the specialness of the South African case; it ends with Abdullah Ibrahim asserting that the South African "revolution" was the only one to have been "done in four- part harmony." It also reinscribes racist essen- tialisms. All the black people in the film sing; the white antiapartheid activists make speech- es and write poetry. Its ultimate effect is to rehearse the distance between subject and object that made antiapartheid activism such a comfortable cause in the U.S. in the 1980s: as long as American liberals could decry the exceptional horrors of South Africa, they did- n't have to interrogate racism in their own country or delineate the continuities between South African apartheid and U.S. racism. Ironically, Amandla!'s ideological specifici- ty does not translate into visual precision. In fact, as a film, Amandla! often doesn't work at all. Despite the claims of the official Web site that "In form as well as content, Amandla! breaks new ground" (Amandla! The Movie), the film's visual iconography and methodology are frequently dominated by well-worn and uninspired mainstays of bad documentary filmmaking. Thankfully, it is not weighed down by voice-over narration, but it is pop- ulated by many talking heads, numerous cringeworthy reenacted scenes (in one, a close-up shot of a pair of legs in camouflage pants walking through some bushes, accom- panied by bursts of gunfire on the soundtrack, is meant to illustrate the guerrilla war waged on South Africa's borders), and seemingly random insertions of archival footage. This is the technique of lackluster music videos or 86 african arts - summer 2003This content downloaded from 206.211.139.192 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:18:06 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms most U.S. television news, where sound bites and overused visual clips stand for a particu- lar event or idea or feeling-reductionism replaces critical analysis or development. Amandla! was made in 2002, many decades after countless documentaries and feature films first started chronicling the horrors of apartheid, and during a time when many more challenging films about apartheid are being produced. A spate of provocative recent films about the Truth and Reconciliation Commis- sion come to mind here: Long Night's Journey into Day, Ubuntu's Wounds, and The Guguletu Seven, for instance. However, instead of creat- ing a complex and nuanced visual depiction of apartheid, Amandla! can only rehearse simplis- tic platitudes. The generic images are duplicat- ed by predictably vacuous captions: the film opens with the assertion that under apartheid, black South Africans "were denied the most basic rights of African citizenship." Amandla! can only give us Apartheid 101 over and over again. Random images of shoppers, of people walking, of someone smoking, of a white mili- tary officer moving through a bus of black pas- sengers are no doubt supposed to stand for apartheid's horrors, its victims and resistors, and for everyday life in South Africa. But these images are neither specifically connected to the music in the film nor given any particular loca- tion of their own. We are seldom told what incident a particular piece of footage is show- ing, and we are hardly ever given a time or place. In the familiar trope by which the Other is simplified, commodified, and fixed in time, these times / places / people are all the same (see Fabian 1983). Some specific scenes in Amandla! are pow- erful: Hugh Masekela's concert performance of "Stimela," a song re-creating the train jour- neys of migrant workers leaving their fam- ilies to work in South Africa's cities; Miriam Makeba's simple a cappella rendition of "Bahlei Bonke," a litany of leaders imprisoned under apartheid; ex-guerrilla Lindiwe Zulu's dirge for a dead comrade. Disappointingly, though, it's almost as if the filmmakers didn't have enough faith in the film's music-both the sound of the music and the images of its being performed-to sustain viewer interest or ade- quately represent its political implications. Thus the music is "complemented" by the most banal of illustrative imagery. When the film moves from the specifics of the music to the general (South Africa), the general becomes generic. Critics and artists have insisted for a long time that the specific is the richest source of commentary on the general. The paradox of Amandla! is that its many heavy-handed attempts to depict pol- itics depoliticize South African history through decontextualization. In its eagerness to right- ly place South African music of the past sixty years in the context of its politics, Amandla! attempts to survey, in 108 minutes, all of South African history and politics of the time. This superficial treatment results in a documentary film that is often filmically static and that fails to live up to its intellec- tual promise. UN References cited, page 96 current events Information subject to change m western states (by closing date) Kilengi African Art from the Bareiss Family Collection Through October 19 Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA A Maasai Community Adorns a Bride Through October 19 Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Wall Painting from an Ndebele Community Through October 19 Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Mexican Trees of Life Through December 14 Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Partners of the Soul African Art of the Baule Through January 4, 2004 San Diego Museum of Art San Diego, CA The Beginning of Seeing Tribal Art and the Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb September 3, 2003-January 4, 2004 Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Stanford, CA continuing exhibitions (by state) African Trade Beads A Comprehensive and Aesthetic Approach Picard African Trade Bead Museum, Carmel, CA African Gallery; Pre-Columbian Gallery Selections from the Proctor Stafford Collection of West Mexican Ceramics Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles, CA Matthews Collection of African Art; Harer Collection of Egyptian Antiquities Fullerton Art Museum, California State University San Bernardino, CA Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Gallery DeRoche, San Francisco, CA Fiber, Feather, Shell and Stone Shaping Culture in Native California; Power and Creation Africa beyond the Nile; Realms of the Ancestors Arts of Oceania; Arts of Native America; Vision of the Shaman, Song of the Priest Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, Santa Ana, CA Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Cantor Center for Visual Arts Stanford University, Stanford, CA Exploring African Art; Native American Art; Power and Prestige The Royal Arts of Polynesia Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Multiple Visions A Common Bond Folk art from more than 100 countries Museum of International Folk Art Santa Fe, NM Art of Cameroon; Elizabeth Cole Butler Collection of Native American Art; Art of the Northwest Coast Portland Art Museum Portland, OR Traditional Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Utah Museum of Fine Arts University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT Africa Possessed; Katherine White Collection of African Art; Pre-Columbian and Oceanic Art; Australian Aboriginal Art Seattle Art Museum Seattle, WA m central states (by closing date) The Quest for Immortality Treasures of Ancient Egypt Through September 14 Kimbell Art Museum Fort Worth, TX Remnants of Ritual Selections from the Gelbard Collection of African Art Through October 26 Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Champaign, IL African Art/Western Eyes Through December 19 Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University East Lansing, MI Afr icA i'l' Old City 56n. 3d sree summer 2003 - african arts 87This content downloaded from 206.211.139.192 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:18:06 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Review of Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (film)

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Review of Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (film)

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