Modelo del primer encuentro de Socialización

Introduction

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language… We say, ‘a person is a person through other people’. It is not, ‘I think, therefore I am’. It says rather: I am human because I belong.189

The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.190

…How far back should memory reach? How deeply into the recesses of the past? The answer that springs spontaneously to mind is that memory is not governed by the statute of limitations, and that collective memory especially is the very warp and weft of the tapestry of history that makes up society. Unravel and jettison a thread from that tapestry and society itself may become undone at the seams. And yet, the opposite is also true.191

The thesis now takes what may appear as an uncharacteristic leap through time from the end of the 1980s (films discussed in chapter two) and the early 2000s (films discussed in the current chapter, chapter three). Although the period of the 1990s has been discussed in other South African film scholarship, the choice to exclude it here is based on two reasons: the first is that film production slowed down significantly in the decade of the 1990s, partly due to political changes and the official reconstruction of the nation; the second reason is that because official changes were happening, there was not a great deal of time for conception and production. Nevertheless, two

189 _{Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (London and Parktown: Random House, 1999), p. 34.} 190 _{Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, (New York: Columbia University}

Press, 1998), p. 103.

191 _{Wole Soyinka, “Memory, Truth and Healing” in Ifi Amadiume and Abdullah An-Nam (eds.), The}

important films of this decade often discussed in film scholarship are Sarafina and Cry, the Beloved Country, both directed by Darrell Roodt. The primary reason for excluding these films in the thesis is that they deal with the same/similar concerns of the films of chapter two through their emphasis on the end of apartheid. In my research period I found that the films discussed in chapter two were no more or less interesting than for example, the two mentioned above, except that they were more firmly rooted in an apartheid present. It is really then the films of the following decade, which are dealt with in this current chapter, that begin to explore the historical narrative of the 1990s. Because this is the emphasis of the thesis, an exploration of the post-apartheid through representations of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, it seemed fitting that more of the chapters dealt with post-1994 discourses and films that emphasised the transition and complexities of the ‘Rainbow’.

The year 2004 marked a new direction for films that dealt with apartheid. This chapter considers representations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in four films and brings together that referential historical event, the culturally specific concept of ‘ubuntu’, film language, through analyses of flashbacks in these films and, the different production circumstances of the films. The films discussed in this chapter have received significant attention in scholarship and have come to be known in a category of their own, ‘TRC films’.192 _{The analysis throughout this chapter extends or}

shifts that category from its current status to consider these films as contested narrations of the TRC. Fiction and non-fiction TRC films are heavily influenced by the actual events and testimonies of the TRC, a government-mandated institution which existed between 1995 and 2002. Most South African film scholars identify the four

192 _{Dovey African Film and Literature, pp. 53 – 57., Maingard, SA National Cinema, p. 169., Saks, Cinema}

feature films dealt with in this chapter among the prominent representations of the TRC. These four films, which were all released in 2004, are the focus of this chapter:

Zulu Love Letter directed by Ramadan Suleman, John Boorman’s In My Country, based on Antje Krog’s Country of My Skull, Ian Gabriel’s Forgiveness and Tom Hooper’s Red Dust. Other noteworthy films of the time are documentaries like Of Joyce and Remembrance (Mark Kaplan, 2004) and The Gugulethu Seven (Lindy Wilson, 2000), Sechaba Morejele’s controversial short film about the inadequacies of the TRC,

Ubuntu’s Wounds and Norman Maake’s feature-length film about the return of exiles after apartheid in Homecoming (2005).

These films are varied and although they provide interesting insights into the ways in which the TRC and the context of the country at that time have been represented, my concern here is with fiction films. With reference to TRC films by Black directors, Cara Moyer-Duncan critiques big budget productions (Red Dust and In My Country), arguing that other films (like Ubuntu’s Wounds, Zulu Love Letter and

Homecoming) “…give voice to perspectives historically denied by apartheid and in many ways still stifled by the legacy of inequality, which limits black access to the training and resources needed to produce narrative film”.193

Although the films discussed in this chapter are all fiction features, they also differ from each other. In My Country and Red Dust are literary adaptations, while

Forgiveness is a measured and sombre presentation of a small coastal town family’s struggle with coming to terms with their son/ brother’s death. Zulu Love Letter is a story about two mothers who try to connect with their daughters in spite of the traumatic and challenging histories that shroud their lives. Jacqueline Maingard

193 _{Cara Moyer-Duncan “Truth, Reconciliation and Cinema” in Bisschoff and Van De Peer (eds.), Art and}

describes Zulu Love Letter as comprising a special quality in that its emphasis is not on making a didactic political point.194 _{Instead, she writes, “… it draws a picture of the}

state of the post-apartheid nation from a Black point-of-view, represented by one personal story that stands in for many”.195 _{This latter point is also relevant to Ian}

Gabriel’s Forgiveness, in which the TRC looms but is itself not recreated in the film. In this film, the focus is on a family in mourning in the quiet fishing village of Paternoster. Beyond the Grootboom family, who stand in for others like them around South Africa,

Forgiveness is about the perplexing and more difficult counterpart of forgiveness: the often unpredictable processes around being able to forgive such as “acting out”, “working through” and “coming to terms with” what happened during apartheid.

In My Country and Red Dust are arguably not South African films because of their formulaic Hollywood narrative construction and aesthetic composition. Both films received British and South African funding, In My Country from the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC) and the UK Film Council and Red Dust

from the IDC and BBC films. Despite the fact that both directors, John Boorman and Tom Hooper, are English, the films themselves are South African in narrative and because of their locations around the country. The trial of reconciliation is central to the films, as are various other traits of the new nation, strongly displayed in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ rhetoric apparent in both. The choice to include these films is because of the thesis’s interest in films that grapple with representations of new identities of the new nation. The TRC was the large-scale national platform through which South Africans were ushered into whatever the ‘Rainbow Nation’ had promised.

194 _{Maingard, SA National Cinema, p. 169.} 195 _Ibid.

The choice to include these two mainstream films also seemed fitting in relation to arguments I make for the two non-mainstream films.

This chapter also explores the figuring and performance of memory through how some of the films favour the cinematic trope for memory, the flashback. Flashbacks occur in Red Dust and Zulu Love Letter but they are not employed in In My Country and Forgiveness. Maureen Turim defines the classic flashback as, “…an image or a filmic segment that is understood as representing temporal occurrences anterior to those in the images that preceded it”.196 In the classic flashback the information about the past that we are provided with contributes to the current narrative and helps to make sense of the present-day narrative. This chapter however argues that in

Zulu Love Letter we see a different kind of flashback, one defined by Joshua Hirsch (and drawing on Hirsch’s work, Maingard) as a post-traumatic flashback. Such a device, Hirsch argues, makes use of temporal and stylistic codes that help the viewer experience the film in a way that is “…analogous to a series of characteristics of psychological trauma”.197 This kind of flashback works not only to show the past or reveal a plot or a character’s biography, as in the case of the classical flashback, but creates a disturbance in the temporality of the content and in the form of the film and transmits an experience of trauma for the spectator.198

Zulu Love Letter is also the only one of the four films that does not rely heavily on racial binaries in TRC narratives. The end of apartheid relied quite significantly on negotiation between the apartheid government and the African National Congress (ANC) and in this chapter I consider negotiation also as a ‘rite of passage’ through

196 _{Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 1.} 197 _{Hirsch Afterimage: Film, Trauma and The Holocaust, p. 98.}

which it is possible to overcome more than apartheid. The ‘more than’ refers to something that lies beyond forgiveness and it is these considerations I turn to in Section Three of the thesis. Julie Reid offers insight into white identities in South African films, arguing that they are remythologised in films. In this process of remythologisation, white identities are reformulated by perpetuating the binaries of good white versus bad white as seen in Chapter Two.

Keeping in mind the social value of such a reformulation and who this might be for, Reid argues that it should be a matter for concern that some of the TRC films are made by non-South African directors. In relation to foreign directors it is vital to question who these films are actually for, as it appears that an over-reliance on the racial binary shown in TRC films has the accompanying effect of oversimplification of the processes of forgiveness and the complexities of the transition to post-apartheid. Reid offers that seeing such films as developing myths,

empties out the representation of complexities and even history, and offers a type of short-hand which can be easily understood and consumed by the reader. But the counter-mythical representations of whiteness in these films may, under critical scrutiny, amount to the stereotyping of South African whites by and for foreigners.199

This leads to the persistence of the good and bad whites of anti-apartheid cinema into post-apartheid films.

While the narratives of TRC films are unique to South Africa, the larger concepts that the films deal with, such as memory and trauma, are relevant to other contexts around the world. The films of this section thus also resonate with representations of other narratives of memory. Although the context is different,

films like Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and the sequel, The Look of Silence (2014), which deal with Indonesian communist history, are further examples of filmic representations of the trauma of a national and individual past.

What is most pertinent about the similarities found in these films which represent different contexts, is that they all exhibit how national perception can be fixed and curated so that the majority of the population are compelled to (almost instructed to) think about and remember a specific version of history. Oppenheimer’s films remind us of the far-reaching effects of state power accompanied by ideology which can, in some ways, manipulate history. TRC films are also born out of a state- driven initiative geared towards showing the ‘Rainbow Nation’ on screen. The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) was mandated (and this directive remains in place) to prioritise the funding of films that represented the apartheid past and the post-apartheid nation.200 Two points under the objectives of the foundation in the National Film and Video Foundation Act 1997 are pertinent:

3.b) to provide and encourage the provision of opportunities for persons, especially from disadvantaged communities to get involved in the film and video industry;

e) in respect of the film and video industry, to address historical imbalances in the infrastructure and distribution of skills and resources.201

Recent interest in South Africa as a highly viable film set location has also seen major growth in the industry. Local directors have generally not benefited as much as foreign production companies, which has caused some tensions. For example,

Ubuntu’s Wounds director Sechaba Morejele wants to know the politics behind the

200_{http://www.nfvf.co.za/home/index.php?ipkContentID=57. [Accessed 15 August, 2015].}

201 _{Republic of South Africa, Government Gazette, National Film and Video Foundation Act 1997, Act.}

NFVF choices, specifically why the NFVF promotes the funding of South African literary adaptations but then seems to place white South African literature ahead of stories by Black writers.

In an interview with Lindiwe Dovey, Morejeleasks why films such as Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust (2000) or Antje Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), “…are deemed more appropriate for adaptation to film” than for example literature by black writers.202 According to Morejele “…many black testimonies of the TRC have been written, but that film adapters, in order to acquire funding, still appear to require a white intermediary…”.203 Dovey links this comment back to the need for a white intermediary as seen in anti-apartheid films of the late 1980s. What is evidenced in such representations is that the emphasis on unity and the positive outcomes of post- apartheid suggests both a white and Black triumph over apartheid. Such dominant mainstream representations serve the state-driven ideology of post-apartheid and are also suggestive of the fact that TRC narratives, like anti-apartheid films, are marketable to foreign audiences as stories of hope and the triumph of good. Additionally, funding may not be willingly shared with those who might be more critical of the new nation and so mainstream TC films also function to serve the dominant ‘Rainbow Nation’ rhetoric. The insinuation is that the whole project of the TRC and the new nation will fail miserably under the too bright glare of criticality and nuance. This is part of why

Zulu Love Letter and Forgiveness are such compelling examples to consider.

This chapter is comprised of two parts: the first considers films which rely on the Hollywood aesthetic and composition, In My Country and Red Dust. This section focuses on representations of the ‘official’ TRC represented in those films. The second

202 _{Dovey African Film and Literature, p. 55.} 203 _Ibid.

section deals with films in which the TRC is present in the narrative of the film but is not necessarily officially represented. This section shows how Forgiveness and Zulu Love Letter are defined as ‘unofficial’ in their representations of the TRC. Maingard points out that Zulu Love Letter is exceptional because of how it centralises women in this film and also how it sets a different aesthetic standard that is not Hollywood-like but closer to an African aesthetic.204 _{I also analyse elements of the process of ‘working}

through’ or what can be described as attempts at forgiveness beyond the TRC in

Forgiveness. Director Ian Gabriel represents how it might be possible to grapple with and potentially (but not definitely) reach a state of forgiveness after traumatic death. I am interested in what this looks like in the context of the Grootboom family, which is traumatised and debilitated by the death of their twenty-year-old son ten years previously. I am also interested in how the film represents and grapples with the unfashionable aspects and places of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ after 1994.

In the second section, the analysis focuses on seeing how trauma is manifested in selected characters in Zulu Love Letter and Forgiveness. This trauma is not fully translatable or articulate but remains intricately enmeshed with the nation. In the case of Forgiveness, I show how the characters experience the after-effects of trauma. In the case of Zulu Love Letter, I focus specifically on the use of the flashback as a modality through which “acting out” and “working through” are represented and mediated.

Both sections are guided by questions such as: What do the films emphasise in how they represent the TRC and the period around it? In asking this I attempt to uncover what each film deems important to represent. What do the films achieve in

setting up an understanding of the TRC as a watershed event in South African history? Can an argument be made that these films are representative of individual and/or collective traumatic consciousness? How do these films contribute to a further construction of the new nation?