Fratse in die Vloot
Although the tourist or publicity gaze is visible in Matieland, what this film promotes is an idealised cultural landscape accessible only to a select group:
educated, middle-class, youthful Afrikaners. In contrast, Fratse in die Vloot, directed in 1958 by Pierre de Wet and starring the popular comic song-and-dance team of Al Debbo and Frederik Burgers, is an explicit evocation of the Mother City as a postcard city or film cartolina. This is one of the first such
234. Kauffman quoted in Foster, Washed with Sun, 48.
235. In Lord Oom Piet (1962), the labourers “belonging” to warring Afrikaner and Englishman fight comically for control of a gate, gibbering in mutually unintelligible languages (Afrikaans and Xhosa). In Nofal’s similar King Hendrik (1965), black and coloured farm workers race their English and Afrikaans masters in horse-drawn carts along the town streets.
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61 representations in a local feature film.236 The Debbo/Burgers team and the slapstick/song-and-dance/ adventure format of the film are designed to appeal to a different, more democratic and less sophisticated mass audience. While the 1960s English-language films are at least partly aimed at overseas audiences (Britain and the USA), signified by images of tourists and aeroplanes, Fratse depicts Mother City sightseeing for local visitors, probably from upcountry (where the majority of Afrikaans film audiences were located). This everyman film visualises the Cape for a new breed of working-class Afrikaners, who might now for the first time afford to take holidays and experience the leisure activities and metropolitan infrastructure promoted in the film. The main characters, Fanie and Stoffie, though local, are clearly not from the Cape; their unsophisticated routine and dress suggests they are “plaasjapies”.237 However, they know the Cape’s attractions without having visited before: these are part of a Cape Town mythology they have grown up with or seen in newsreels and magazines. The city is thus a familiar vacation spot: inexpensive, worthwhile and accessible to almost everybody by virtue of its tourist identity and representation in the national visual culture of the earlier 20th century.
The film provides a sense of the Mother City in the early days of its transformation from an older, “English” city to a modern South African metropolis – and apartheid city. However, it also alludes, with humour and sympathy, to the lingering experiences of an earlier, less confident and more impoverished era, and to the hardships facing the newly urbanised lower-income Afrikaner. Fanie and Stoffie are down-on-their luck song-and-dance performers, drawn to the metropolis looking for work: while the city is confident, the heroes are fish out of water. The show that we briefly see the men performing (to an almost empty house) is distinctly low-brow, illustrating a
236. Although scenic publicity newsreels of the 1930s and 40s often featured the city. Gutsche describes the AFP-SAR&H (Publicity and Travel Department) co-production of scenic newsreels and publicity films, made for exhibition overseas as well as commercial local exhibition. Scenic films included 1932's The Cape of Good Hope, made by the AFP with the Cape Publicity Association. This included a costume sequence showcasing the Cape's historical associations. The AFP also made The Blue and Silver Way for the SAR, 1935-6. The film depicted the main routes of the company: Rand to Cape, including Cape Peninsula views, and Cape to Durban. Gutsche, The History and Social Significance, 325; 327.
237. Ignorant farm boys.
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leisure activity of the volk declining in popularity by the late 1950s.238 Although Cape Town is visualised as an Afrikaans city, there are clear class differences between the heroes and just about everybody else they meet – at the naval base, on the beach and in the city.
In contrast, 1967’s Hoor my Lied describes the experiences of a sophisticated city-dwelling opera singer – an upwardly mobile member of the middle class. In the decade between the two films, the concept of the Afrikaner everyman has changed from working to middle class; from innocent rube to sophisticate and professional; from poor city outsider to wealthy city insider.
These representations reflect real fluctuations in Afrikaner prosperity and identity. By the 1950s, the NP had managed to uplift ordinary urban Afrikaners through legislation and state employment.239 The state’s nurturing of Afrikaner business meant that the GDP increased at an annual average of over 5%, creating an atmosphere of greater prosperity for the volk.240 Thus Fratse occupies a complex socio-economic middle ground between 1930s urban poverty and the upper-middle-class Afrikaner lifestyle of the 60s. While the representation of the two comics speaks to the old-fashioned but still relevant Afrikaner working class, the representation of the city, the professional naval vessel and the holidaying sunbathers illustrate the increasing upward mobility (and leisure) of the city and its people. The film conveys the atmosphere of an assured, increasingly urban white South Africa. It functions as a slick ”official”
promotion of the city of Cape Town and the South African navy, reminiscent of Matieland’s publicity for the University of Stellenbosch, and reflects the general confidence of the apartheid state under Verwoerd.
By 1958, state power had been completely reconfigured and strengthened in the hands of the NP, which was growing from strength to strength. The period saw an aggressive “Afrikanerisation” of all avenues of society, from state to the military to the civil service, especially the Department
238. The first Al Debbo/Frederik Burgers film, Kom Saam Vanaand (also directed by De Wet) appeared in 1949, but by 1970 the comic musical genre had fallen out of favour. It has been revived, however, in recent Afrikaans films like Liefling (2010), a smash hit at the SA box office.
Another Afrikaans musical film, Pretville [funville], set in a small rural town in the 1950s, is in production.
239. In the preceding decades, the late 1930s and 40s, Afrikaner nationalism became increasingly defined by and bound to the concerns of the urban Afrikaner bourgeoisie, their interests protected by the Broederbond and the NP. O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 78.
240. Ibid, 82.
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63 of Native Affairs.241 Filmmaking, too, was Afrikanerised by the introduction, in 1956, of the state-funded subsidy scheme, which was responsible for officially
“creating” an Afrikaner film industry, “moulded over the next three decades into a tool that would cinematically replicate apartheid.”242 The apartheid state’s hand in Afrikaans-language film production after 1956 can be felt in the ideological undertones of even the apparently escapist Fratse in die Vloot (and films discussed in later chapters), not least its militarism and patriotic posturing. The oppressive apparatus of state control infiltrated all walks of life.
The senior ranks of the Defence Force were purged after WWII and filled with pro-NP Afrikaners.243 In 1950, the Suppression of Communism Act was passed, and an amended Riotous Assemblies Act in 1952 brought an end to the ANC Defiance Campaign. By the end of the 1950s, racial segregation was firmly entrenched, African labour was completely state-controlled, Christian National and Bantu Education was implemented in schools and coloured people had been removed from the voters’ roll.
Fratse in die Vloot reflects this build-up of state power by employing an official-looking, militaristic iconography alongside the slapstick. A series of slick, publicity-like sequences emphasise the organisation, scale, professionalism and power of the navy. In one, filmed in the serious, objective manner of a publicity film, the viewer sees a full weapons display when the navy ship, the Vrystaat, participates in a drill exercise, along with other vessels including submarines and airplanes. It is clear that the numerous navy sequences were filmed on location, with official permission, at actual naval
241. Numbers of Afrikaners employed in public administration rose 98,5 % between 1948-60. Ibid, 62.
242. Maingard, South African National Cinema, 125. The scheme lasted, with various revisions, until 1992 and funded 800 features, costing the state R2 billion. Cultural Strategy Group, “Cultural Industries Growth Strategy (CIGS): The South African Film and Television Industry Report, Final Report, 1998”, accessed 25 Sept. 2012: http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=
70492. Initially, the scheme rewarded Afrikaans-language features by repaying R20 000 of the production costs if films performed well. This figure increased to 44% of gross box-office earnings in 1964. In 1969, Afrikaans was stimulated by an increased subsidy of 55% to films with at least 95% Afrikaans dialogue. To qualify, films had to be registered with the Dept of Home Affairs and comply with censorship legislation. While the scheme was supposedly introduced to nurture and protect the local industry, in reality it was incoherent, haphazardly applied and exploited by the production companies. Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid, 32-35; National Film and Video Foundation South Africa, Research Reports, “The History of the SA Film Industry”, 3, accessed 28 Sept: 2012: nfvf.co.za/sites/default/files/docs/profile-2000.pdf. For information about the black subsidy scheme see Paleker, “The B-Scheme Subsidy”.
243. O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 62.
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bases (mostly Simonstown). The SASVrystaat is the setting for most of the film’s action, and it seems likely that the vessel’s crew were filmed engaged in daily routine: drills, ship maintenance, eating and sleeping, parades. These scenes are so painstakingly accurate as to be dull. Luckily, the two comics are in many of them, causing havoc. Buffoonery aside, such sequences showcase the fleet’s capability and present numerous opportunities for propaganda.
One can imagine the film as a recruitment tool: the South African navy was relatively new (founded in 1922) and small, only reaching a “professional”
level in 1963.244 Recruiting for, modernising and improving the navy, defence and police forces was a significant project in the 1950s. The NP government was eager to strengthen South Africa as a regional power, exert naval influence, and be recognized by the West as a valuable Cold War ally in the fight against communism. Answering a call by Western powers to protect the Cape sea-route, South African naval ships such as the SAS Vrystaat made numerous
“flag-showing” trips to Angola and Mozambique.245 This film clearly illustrates the rapid development of the navy during these years. Its comforting representation of the means to arm and protect the nation also reflects the rapid growth and professionalisation of the police and defence force at this time.246 (1945-1966 have been termed “the prosperous years”, for the South African navy in particular.247) In some respects, it anticipates the “border war”
militarism emblematic of the 1970s on film. However, at this much earlier stage, the national security and defence forces were still being created – both mythically and in reality – by the relatively new government, and the
“communist threat”, as yet, loomed only out at sea.
The navy is not the only aspect of Cape Town promoted and idealised in Fratse in die Vloot. The film anticipates the glossy international Mother City/metropolis films of the mid-1960s - with a few differences. Unlike the international leisure emphasis in outward-looking and mostly English-language
244. Able to “hold our own with the Royal Navy”. Rear Admiral Chris Bennett, Three Frigates - The South African Navy comes of Age (Durban: Just Done Productions Publications, 2006).
245. Ibid, 9.
246. O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 61. The number of Afrikaner policemen increased at a rate three times that of English-speaking policemen between 1946 and 1960.
247. A. Wessels. “The South African Navy and its Predecessors, 1910-2009: A Century of Interaction with Commonwealth Navies.” (Paper delivered at the 2009 “King-Hall” Naval History Conference, 30 July 2009), 7.
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65 1960s films, Fratse is inward-looking. The naval ship may visit harbours up the coast, but its navy, police and personnel are South African. The relatively brief glimpses of the Mother City announce the urban confidence and progress of the late 1950s by focusing on the Foreshore, with its signs of improvement and modernity (the new highways; the new station building). Like 1967’s A Cape Town Affair, the film begins with a static long shot of Cape Town set against the mountain, modernist skyscrapers in view. The scene cuts to an immersive street-level shot, filled with cars and pedestrians. A later sequence represents the city from behind the Van Riebeeck statue on what is now the Foreshore traffic circle.248
Despite the frontal view of Table Mountain, the overriding impression is not of the scenic situation but rather of a bustling, contemporary city. This naturalistic impression is further suggested by the camera’s position at eye/street level, surrounded by cars and buses and abstracted views of walls and shop entrances. This is not to say that the film as a whole offers an authentic sense of the city. The film’s view is very much a tourist one. Unlike 1960s Cape films, there are relatively few static or classically pictorial images of scenery. Instead, the film employs a travelling or mobile view. In a whirlwind tour, the viewer is shown the heritage (historical buildings, statues) of the old parts of the city from inside a chauffeured car; then taken on a drive along Main Road to Simonstown (sign-posted) in an open tour-bus; then finally given a tour of the peninsula, again by car. In the tour-bus sequence, the comics sing a sightseeing song listing the sights of the Cape – while also poking fun at them – called “Hier in die Kaap” [Here in the Cape], with car-hooter accompaniment (“Of all the cities that I love … you’re the nearest to my heart … lekker ou Kaap!”
[Lovely/nice old Cape!])249 The familiar tone of this song implies that, to the rest of the country, the Cape was known and accessible.
The tourist gaze employed in the film is not limited to the Cape. As the ship travels up the coast to Lourenço Marques, it stops at naval bases at Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban. The practice of allowing visitors to board naval vessels allows for plot development and for the camera/viewer to explore
248. This view, as if from the point of view of a visitor arriving at the docks (the traditional entry point), would become standard in 1960s films.
249. The song also mentions the ”best-looking women in costumes at Bloubergstrand” – see the bikini-image trope discussed in Chapter Two.
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the ship. Another self-aware “tourist” scene involves a car and rickshaw race through the streets of Durban. Fanie and Stoffie cause mayhem on Bikini Beach, stealing a beach umbrella, radio and deckchair from holidaymakers. Thus, the well-known tourist identity of the Cape (and Durban) is itself an object of fun in the film. This jocular tone is very different to that of the “international” 1960s films.
As a whole, the Mother City in Fratse in die Vloot is represented as a confident metropole-in-the-making, anticipating the points of view and tropes of the later “metropolis” films, including the depictions of architecture, infrastructure and, most importantly, the views and holiday attractions surrounding the city. However, this earlier film still speaks to an everyman Afrikaner audience, represented by the folk-hero Al Debbo, indicating that the emerging metropolis is also a destination within reach of ordinary Afrikaners.
Crucially, not one single English person, place or object appears in the film: the city and all of its attractions are imagined as Afrikaner places and in terms of an Afrikaner identity. In addition, apart from two coloured cart-drivers, all of the scenes feature only white people. The film represents the successful Afrikanerisation of Cape Town on film.
Conclusion
The films discussed in this chapter use forms of landscape representation that establish and confirm the Cape as a foundational discursive landscape consisting of an array of symbolic spaces, including the ”Cape Dutch”
winelands, the coastal village and the Mother City. These representations, applying imported pictorial conventions to indigenous scenery, naturalise and invent a historical and contemporary narrative for the Afrikaner people, in service of a developing Afrikaner nationalism. In terms of this ideology, the Cape – urban and rural – is represented as Afrikaner territory and a foundational landscape for the volk. This narrative is present in Union-era films like De Voortrekkers and Die Bou van 'n Nasie: epic films that express an official discourse. The later, entertainment-oriented films discussed here are a more covert expression of Afrikaner nationalism, without the strident and didactic tones of the earlier “national” films, but they are just as ideologically loaded.
Their use of place and landscape identity reflects a popular, everyday (and insidious) form of Afrikaner nationalism at work in the 1940s and 50s. They
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67 represent the landscape in a way that identifies it with the volk and justifies its occupation, suggesting apartheid ideology in the making. Afrikaner culture and identity is visualised in an affirming form, recognisable and familiar to the Afrikaans-speaking public (by now likely to be petty-bourgeois urbanites).
These popular films could not make De Voortrekker's claim to be “South Africa's national film”.250 However, they provide special insight into the Afrikaner psyche and the economic, social and political concerns of this community in a period of rapid change. They also offer evidence of the state-sanctioned nationalist ideology and programme of Afrikanerisation underpinning the film industry, especially after the introduction of the subsidy scheme in 1956.
These films, while illustrating the nation and government’s increasingly confident self-image and efforts at modernisation during the first consolidating phase of apartheid, still speak to the concerns of an earlier, less assured era for the volk (the 1920s to the late 1940s). In contrast, the films discussed in Chapter Two – mostly English-language, and produced during the “Golden Age” of apartheid – illustrate how the cinema of the 1960s even more confidently envisages Cape Town as a bilingual, world-class metropolis and international tourist destination. The films in both chapters imagine the landscape in idealised and idealising terms, as picturesque, pastoral and historic:
standardised representations that will dominate the state-subsidised industry until its end.
250. It was marketed as such by AFP. J. Maingard, “Cast in Celluloid: Imag(in)ing identities in South African Cinema”, in Image into Identity: Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity, ed. M. Wintle (Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi BV, 2006), 83-100: 85.
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69 Chapter 2: Mother city/metropolis: representations of the Cape Town land- and cityscape in feature films of the 1960s
Introduction
In this chapter, I argue that feature films shot on location in Cape Town in the 1960s represent the city through a synthesis of the picturesque gaze and a vision of modernity.251 This chapter is structured according to these two representational tendencies, rather than chronologically, as the four films I discuss (Table Bay, 1964; The Second Sin, 1966; Escape Route Cape Town, 1967; Hoor my Lied, 1967) were produced in close succession and share many similarities.252 These films represent the mixed international and local nature of the industry in this decade: two are “purely” South African productions and two are local co-productions with the UK and USA, featuring international actors and directors.253
In a succession of mythical topographies, Cape Town is both the historic, picturesque “Mother City” and the “Metropolis of the Future”: a new, “white”
metropolis severed from old imperial ties.254 As a whole, these films describe an idealised, confident and prosperous landscape, and imagine Cape Town, and the new Republic, in terms of a competitive, global modernism. The Mother
metropolis severed from old imperial ties.254 As a whole, these films describe an idealised, confident and prosperous landscape, and imagine Cape Town, and the new Republic, in terms of a competitive, global modernism. The Mother