Renegade Reels wins UCT’s Book Award

Lesley Cowling

The well-deserved award from UCT for Dr Litheko Modisane’s book, South Africa’s Renegade Reels, has been a decade in the making. Some 10 years ago, I was privileged to be part of the research group in which Litheko Modisane, now a fellow in APC, began a project of looking at the role of film in public intellectual life. His idea set him off on a scholarly journey, and journeys, which carried him to Cape Town, and then to Michigan, to Wits and back to UCT.

The book is a culmination of those years and that journey. And it shows. Not only is it a work of detailed and careful scholarship, but it is a multilayered exploration of his topic. It can be read on many levels: as history, as story, as a discussion of filmic representation, as a critical reflection of black identity. You can dip in and come out with intriguing nuggets of information (about Sol Plaatje’s travelling bioscope, for example), or read up on the one particular film project that interests you. But I would like to focus on what I think are the innovations of Litheko’s book, and the contribution it makes to the study of film generally.

First, it is his choice to examine the public life of film; in other words, to think about and track the work film does in the world, how it travels, what ideas and discussions it stimulates, and the ways in which this publicness exceeds (and sometimes transforms) the intentions of its makers, and the representations of its characters.

What do we mean by the public life of film? Well, it is more than the film’s public, that group of people who collect in a cinema to watch it, and then perhaps discuss it over a glass of wine later. Litheko shows us, drawing on Michael Warner’s idea of circulation, that the public life of film is not confined to the cinema at all. It is not confined to the audience that watches. It is both more expansive and more mobile.

It is also more than the journey of that film from cinema to film festival. A film enters into our messy, chaotic world a bit like a stone into water, sending off ripples, setting off little journeys, like, for instance, articles written on the film or bannings, etc., which may then provoke further public engagements.

Another part of the concept of the public life of film is related specifically to the capacity of a film to generate discussion, reflection, or what Litheko calls “public critical potency”. When we talk of the public sphere, or public opinion, or public debate, or say “the public supports this issue” or “the public is opposed to that road”, we are imagining a rational discussion related to societal issues, the back-and-forth of debate, rather than the scene-by-scene storytelling of film. So, Litheko asks, in what ways does film intersect with this wordy, rhetorical world of debate and argument? Under what conditions can it generate critical public engagement? What sort of contribution does it make, if any?

He explores this question in the book through five filmic projects at different moments in South African history, in the apartheid and postapartheid eras: Come back, Africa; uDeliwe; Mapantsula; Fools and Yizo Yizo. They are all what Litheko calls “black-centred” films, films concerned with the lives and experiences of black South Africans, specifically defined under apartheid as “African”. Each case provides the opportunity for an exploration of “the intricate ways in which film intersects with the public sphere”, under the particular conditions of its historical context.

So, for example, Come back, Africa, made in the 1950s by an American independent filmmaker, was imagined as a political project, a film that would reveal the horrors of apartheid, and its impact on black South Africans. Its critical public engagement was thus already imagined before its making. It was filmed in secret, with the collaboration of some of the key Drum writers (Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane), and included a scene in a shebeen in Sophiatown in which the writers talk about life in South Africa from the perspective of black intellectuals. The film’s portrayal of the conditions of apartheid was not the only way in which it engendered critical reflection; in Come back, Africa, we see also the rise of what Litheko notes is a new experience of film, for Africans—a move away from the “colonial lens” that portrayed stereotyped images of Africa to the visual foregrounding of urban black life. This challenged “official constructions of blackness” and allowed a reimagining of black identity, a central project of black intellectuals of the time.

I have already mentioned that film is a visual, storytelling medium, and this means it cannot be part of public critical engagement in the same way as a rationally argued text. But Renegade Reels shows that the filmic representation of black life and of black protagonists continually raised the issue of black identity. In an era in which there was a sustained representational onslaught on black South Africans, attempts to confine them to narrow and preordained categories, in order to justify a policy of white overlordship, a film such as Come back, Africa offered alternative, more authentic possibilities.

A project of this nature was bound to do this. What is more mysterious, and intriguing, is the film uDeliwe, made by an apartheid film company for the black audience, apparently intended to represent black urban life as difficult, in order to valorise the rural homelands. Despite the possible propaganda intentions, the film was directed by a black filmmaker, achieved great popularity, was taken up by Drum and given the nod by certain Black Consciousness organisations. Litheko shows the ways in which this film, partly because of its representations of black urban life, precipitated oppositional readings that were themselves further circulated and conditioned the ways in which the film was read.

Renegade Reels pays a great deal of attention to the ways in which the public engagement triggered by the films moves from one site, transforms into another position, goes dormant, and is re-engaged in another context. An intriguing example of this is Yizo Yizo, the last filmic project Litheko looks at, the most recent, and a departure in terms of circulation, due to its dissemination through the medium of the public broadcaster. The television series was made in order to provoke debate about the issues faced by township schools. Unlike commercial entertainment series, it was based on extensive research on schools, audience responses were monitored, and written materials were distributed to further encourage discussion of educational issues. However, the series soon ran into controversy for its gritty portrayals of township life, and the debates in the media and in public spaces (such as Parliament) were concerned with issues of representation. Yizo Yizo was accused of glamourising gangsterism, depicting black men as violent, using foul language and representing black communities in terms of social pathologies. The debate on Yizo Yizo thus moved very far from its intended themes, propelled, as Litheko shows, by its representational nature.

Renegade Reels has much to tell us about South African film, but also about film and public engagement more generally. This is a refreshing approach in a time in which film in South Africa appears to have moved away from thinking of itself as a public artefact, and is concerned— almost obsessively—with its possibilities as a commercial product, and its potential for global
attention. This is not to say that filmmakers should not make money; however, I think it is worthwhile to bear in mind what Litheko Modisane calls “the public critical potency of film”; it has potential to amuse, to delight, but overall, to make us think—and rethink—and think again.