Encountering modernity: twentieth-century South African cinemas and South African national cinema

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Edwin Hees

Keyan Tomaselli. 2006. Encountering modernity: twentieth-century South African cinemas. Pretoria: Unisa Press/Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers. (ISBN 978-90-5170-886-8, 183 pp.)

Jacqueline Maingard. 2007. South African national cinema. London: Routledge. (ISBN 978-0-415-21680-7, 220 pp.)

Two major full-length studies of South African cinema have appeared within the past year or so--one by Keyan Tomaselli, Encountering modernity: twentieth-century South African cinemas (2006), and the other by Jacqueline Maingard, South African national cinema (2007). 1 shall be focusing on these two volumes here, but they are by no means the only serious critical investigations into the state of the South African industry to emerge since the start of the new millennium--not to mention a string of major studies of African film in general. Other volumes dealing with South African cinema include three substantial compilations edited by Balseiro and Masilela (2003), Martin Botha (2007), and Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn (2007), which focuses more on African film; a wonderfully lively and detailed 'case study' by Sheldon Hall (2006) of Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964); Peter Davis's important edition (2004) of Lionel Rogosin's notes and diaries on the making of Come back, Africa (1959); and Martin Botha's (2006) generous and timely account of Jans Rautenbach's work (see Hees (2007) for a review). For an industry that has practically no commercial viability--in terms of the feature films produced and circulated, at any rate--and no international profile any longer (post-Tsotsi), this is interesting, to say the least. Significant and engaged scholarship in this field is clearly alive and well. As I have essays in two of the three compilations--Balseiro and Masilela (2003), Martin Botha (2007)--it is hardly appropriate for me to review them here; Peter Davis has reviewed the former (2004b) and Andre Crous (2008) the latter.

I can still remember to this day, decades later, how abashed I felt as a timid young lecturer on being informed that Raymond Williams was 'a minor and marginal English critic'. This seemed to fly in the face of my own experience of reading Williams as someone who took 'literature' absolutely seriously as a lived part of culture in an all-encompassing sense ... and not only literature, of course, but the media in general. His writing on the visual media, in particular, simply increased my fascination, because at that point--in the stiflingly oppressive English Departments of the 1960s--I was apparently far too interested in the movies for someone who had serious literary and scholarly--and, most damaging, educational--pretensions. It was almost inevitable, then, that when Keyan Tomaselli started writing about (among other things) South African films in a way that seemed to me to take for granted so many of Williams's premises, I felt that my guilty pleasures were finally vindicated by the work of a pioneering cultural activist with impeccable credentials! In many ways the influence of Williams's groundbreaking work in cultural studies has become so pervasive as to be almost invisible, or at least unacknowledged. The impact (not necessarily direct influence) of Williams's work is evident in Tomaselli's and Maingard's studies--both are profoundly informed by a materialist sense of the culturally specific, the locally significant, the socially dynamic. Tomaselli is more explicitly self-reflective about his point of departure: 'My experience of working in the film industry opened my analysis to a study of practice, itself conducted within the framework of political economy' (p. 14). And although this has not always gone down well with everyone, his work remains resolutely and astutely materialist in its approach.

It is important to note that this book is not a wholly original work; the chapters are revised and expanded versions of earlier articles and chapters (their originals meticulously noted in the Acknowledgements), integrated into a more sequentially arranged argument. So much of the content may be familiar, but it is nevertheless useful to have a book that synthesises and summarises so accessibly many of Tomaselli's long-term interests and preoccupations. Indeed, Tomaselli himself has a sense of the book as a kind of 'retrospective' on his career (p. 16). As such, the bibliographical material is also a valuable resource. What makes this study consistently engaging as a sustained deliberation is the steady focus on specific detail--the great strength of Tomaselli's work has always been its specificity: this thing, under these circumstances, at this time. For some readers this has sometimes meant that the writing has not always been particularly elegant in academic terms, but this is a small price to pay for the incisiveness and vigour of the insights. Also, Tomaselli's (apparent) reluctance to engage in very detailed formalist analysis fits--quite logically in my view--with his interest in the processes of signification as essentially entailing an understanding of shifting, unstable 'cultural indicators'. This latter concept has been particularly influential, though Tomaselli's influence as a teacher and mentor has also been widespread. But, like him, I would credit John van Zyl as 'launching' what we now call 'cultural studies' in South Africa. In fact, Tomaselli had worked with Van Zyl on film courses at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s--Van Zyl was instrumental in setting up an influential film school there, and I can testify from personal experience to the excitement generated at this novel (for the time, for the place!) enterprise.