Cinema in Postapartheid South Africa: New Perspectives

As we approach a quarter of a century of democracy in South Africa, this special Close-Up offers fresh perspectives that reflect critically on cinema and film culture in South Africa. Our contributors address developments within an industry and a creative culture that once marginalized the majority Black (African, Indian, Coloured) South African population, excluding them in numerous ways from the representational apparatus, and constructing an audiovisual regime of power that can be read as an extension of the broader political landscape of colonial and apartheid South Africa. This is not to conclude (incorrectly) that Blacks, mainly Africans, did not feature in films before 1994. From the early days of filmmaking Africans were often central to narratives that depended on their political and economic marginalization and social otherness in order to justify the positioning of whiteness as preeminent in the construction of a particular South African imaginary. Consider, for example, the now important films in the history of filmmaking in South Africa—De Voortrekkers / Winning a Continent (dir. Harold M. Shaw, 1916), The Symbol of Sacrifice (dir. Dick Cruikshanks, 1918), and even a film that came later, Jim Comes to Joburg (dir. Donald Swanson, 1949).

Film historians and scholars have noted that South Africa has one of the oldest filmmaking industries in the world, one that was ignited by the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), during which the first newsreels were filmed by African Films, feeding the world’s fascination with representing violence, death and trauma on screen. The extensive history of South African cinema and its history of racial exclusion has been meticulously documented and examined by film historians like Thelma Gutsche, Keyan Tomaselli, Martin Botha, and Jacqueline Maingard.¹ In this Close-Up, we emphasize less visible developments and practices within contemporary film cultures in South Africa by bringing together a number of novel perspectives on the country’s film cultures, discourses, institutional frameworks, and production, consumption and representational practices—from scholars both within and outside South Africa.

Our focus is to record and interrogate film culture in the two decades after the official demise of apartheid. The year 1994 arrived with the promise of democracy and many hoped that this democracy would filter down and through all levels of society. An important imperative in post-1994 South Africa is to address the imbalances in the representational apparatus (film and television) that had historically represented the majority of the country’s population as a disenfranchised minority. The democratization of the country created the assumption that it would result in a swift and urgent democratization of the film and television industries too and that cinematic and television representations would shift to reflect the changing political landscape. However, the state of the current film industry in South Africa demonstrates that nurturing and harnessing a local/indigenous film culture is a complex and challenging enterprise. As the essays in this Close-Up demonstrate, there are many factors—economic, social, political, economic, cultural, and professional—to consider when thinking through the complexities of a film culture in a newly independent nation-state.

With the advent of democracy South Africans were at liberty to enjoy a new Constitution, one touted as among the most liberal in the world. Freedom and democracy, protected by a progressive Constitution, heralded a welcome era of possibilities, reinventions and reconstructions. Once marginalized communities now had the opportunity to redefine their identities, and to speak back to the oppressive and repressive manner in which Afrikaner Nationalist politics constructed identities during apartheid South Africa. This was the moment of rewriting histories, redefining the master narrative, claiming a space, and being recognized as full citizens of a newly democratic country. Yet the construction of new narratives is never an innocent process. The work of creating a national identity in a newly independent nation-state is often messy and contradictory. The desire to create a homogenous national identity often relies on excluding those who unsettle the coherence of the new national imaginary.

National agendas are important and imperative in consolidating newly formed nation-states. Apart from constructing an imagined community by creating structures of...