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

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Edwin Hees

Chapter 5 was jointly written with Arnold Shepperson and Maureen Eke. It is the most philosophically demanding and abstract (and abstruse, quite frankly) chapter in the book, and it is with some relief that one comes upon the carefully considered account of Gavin Hood's A reasonable man (1999) at the end of this chapter. Its greatest value is probably in making relatively explicit the impact of Peirceian 'pragmatism' in this whole critical enterprise. It follows through on many of the points raised in the previous chapter, adding a detailed consideration of 'orality' in Third Cinema. But I felt that the persistent (obfuscating) generalisations about 'Africans', 'they', 'them' (as opposed, presumably, to 'us') made this the least illuminating--and uncharacteristic--chapter of the book. In the most recent issue of the South African Theatre Journal Tomaselli has provided a revised version of an earlier article written by him and Shepperson, 'Semiotics in an African context: listening to reality' (2008), which offers a more accessible account (for those of us who are not professionally trained philosophers) of the critical distinction between semiology and semiotics, and repeats the fine analysis of Gavin Hood's A reasonable man, implicitly demonstrating the fundamental point that any context within which an interpretation is attempted includes the interpreting or reading subject.

One final point: Tomaselli has not been well served by his publishers as far as the copy editing is concerned. The book is distractingly riddled with typing errors of the most basic kind, names misspelled, shoddy proofreading of formatting, and a few odd factual errors and discrepancies. This is a great pity, because it means that an important book has been presented rather unprofessionally.

The same cannot be said of the Maingard volume, which meets the highest standards in this regard. It took a very long time coming through the publishing process, but it was worth the wait. If there is a problem here, it is of a more conceptual kind. In any event, attempting to write a book on 'South African national cinema' is a bit like going out and asking for trouble. 'South African' in what sense? 'National" in what sense? 'Cinema' in the singular? These are rather predictable conceptual traps, and perhaps the title of the book has more to do with the publisher's desire for consistency in its series on national cinemas, than addressing pernickety academic qualms. Be that as it may, Maingard has (purposefully?) on the whole evaded the problem by not addressing head on (or in much detail) the issue of what constitutes a 'national cinema' in the abstract; instead the Introduction suggests a fairly nuanced approach: 'The book is largely premised on a selection of films that invoke a sense of "the national" and their positioning in the historical moment/s from and in which they emerge' (p. 3, my emphasis). This is sensible and does not raise unrealistic expectations. Perhaps the enterprise is not as fraught with traps and minefields as trying to write a history of South African 'national' literature--a battlefield strewn with corpses--as the film industry in this country has until very recently been in the hands of very small groups of(mainly white) people--but then in what sense can this be a 'national' history? The question will not go away.