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

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Edwin Hees

The first chapter, entitled 'Approaching modernity: antecedent South African cinema studies', traces the many and varying discourses on South African national 'cinemas' from the time of De Voortrekkers (1916), via the pioneering work of Thelma Gutsche and a consideration of the more ideologically driven work of Hans Rompel, to a thoughtful and balanced assessment of more recent studies on the South African film industry. Masilela's writings on South African film inform this opening orientation to the rest of Tomaselli's book, in particular Masilela's helpful synthesis of his views in the volume he co-edited with Isabel Balseiro, To change reels: film and film culture in South Africa (2003)--Tomaselli highlights in particular Masilela's advocating of 'consciousness of precedent' (p. 4), especially with reference to the New African Movement.

The second chapter provides a personal account of these early years in Tomaselli's career as a filmmaker, geographer, academic and visual anthropologist. It traces key influences--Gene Youngblood's Expanded cinema (1970) receives extensive treatment--and outlines the ideological background to several important studies that he authored and co-authored up until the writing of the indispensable and groundbreaking The cinema of apartheid: race and class in South African film, which first appeared in 1988, when the country was in a state of deep crisis. The subtitle immediately makes evident the 'historical materialist framework' (p. 24) of the analysis in that book and his impatience with critics (such as Guy Willoughby and his ilk--'the post-Leavisites' (p. 26)), who are apprehensive about the impact of cultural and media studies, is almost palpable. But Tomaselli's response to them here is not loftily dismissive: 'What Willloughby saw merely as a "dry, closed text", a possibly alien incursion into the previously pleasurable activity of literary studies, 1 saw as a political intervention [...]. Wiiloughby's response is welcomed, however, for it does demonstrate the extremist literary studies case for the exclusive privileging of textual analysis'--or as he puts it more bluntly: 'I expect my students to get their hands dirty in the real world' (p. 26).

Similarly, though he accepts my assessment (Hees 1993) of Botha and Van Aswegen's Images of South Africa: the rise of alternative film (1992) as a 'flawed' study, he adds:

   However, it is a fascinating and discursively valuable repository
   of cultural signification and epistemological assumptions. As such,
   it is perhaps more profitably read as a form of cultural
   negotiation by its authors, especially as it was written and
   published during a period of massive political and cultural change
   in which previous continuities had been fractured and had become
   ideologically elusive in cinema, media theory and 'intergroup'
   relations (p. 60).

This kind of nuanced perspective has not always been extended to Tomaselli's own work.

The chapter from which the long quotation above is taken, Chapter 4: 'Sign wars: theories of cinema and social struggle', is perhaps the key chapter in the book, and perhaps also the key to Tomaselli's 'methodology', which is rooted in the greater contextual awareness of Peircean semiotics (rather than De Saussure's 'semiology'). The chapter provides a useful summary of a complex debate and, typically, also grounds the discussion in the specifics of South African discourses on 'the struggle', especially with reference to Pieter Fourie's theories of intercultural communication (which, in turn, provide the basis for Botha and Van Aswegen's Images of South Africa: the rise of alternative film). The linguistically based semiology of De Saussure--utilising the dyadic 'signifier-signified' system--is too restrictive, according to Tomaselli: 'The different, non-linguistic route provided by Peirce, however, offered a space for materialist analysis that could take account of contexts and a variety of signifying systems (visual, language, sound, reception, habit, etc.), including resistance, and different interpretations and responses' (p. 58). Another fascinating and related facet of this debate is the critique of psychoanalysis--Tomaselli's scepticism about the practice is evident throughout the book--implicit in Third Cinema, which Tomaselli substantiates with fairly detailed accounts of two films by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Quartier Mozart (1992) and Aristotle's plot (1996). The triadic nature of the Peircean theory holds a crucial advantage for a 'historical materialist semiotics' (p. 61): 'This approach is based on the relations between signification and the social, not just within the text. Such theory liberates the viewer from an inexorable "positioning" by the "text" from which s/he cannot escape, an imprisonment indicated by Lacanian psychoanalysis' (p. 69, my emphasis). The point is made with characteristic firmness, but one cannot help wondering (and many have) whether the counter-position has not been stated too deterministically.