Change Your Image
trevormoses-62824
Reviews
In Darkest Hollywood: Cinema and Apartheid (1993)
Promising at first and then lost its way
I assisted in pre-production research on this production and was delighted to learn that I would be working with an Oscar winning filmmaker. No sooner had my work on the production as a film archivist commenced when I became uncomfortably aware that this was going to be more of an anti South African film than an exploration of Africa's oldest film industry.
Worse was to come from the filmmakers when I was informed that "we as foreign filmmakers know your country's history better than you do so shut up, bring us what we demand from you and keep your opinions to yourself".
That was bad enough but it at least prepared me for a 30 year career as a film archivist in which I assisted with research on more than 500 film productions including the ghastly Long Nights Journey Into Day.
Long Night's Journey Into Day (2000)
What a wonderful film!
I assisted in pre production on this film when research was done by the filmmakers into the TRC witch hunt trials held in my country. The TRC process needlessly reopened up old wounds, an example of this is where a former terrorist is treated like royalty at one of the hearings while a distressed family member of one of the terrorists' bombs is almost strip searched and humiliated at the venue's security gates.
Advice to foreign filmmakers: deal with your own country's issues before tackling South Africa's issues: our history was ours to live and our stories are ours to tell.
Once you have dealt with your own horrible histories, then you can tell ours, not before.
The Pennywhistle Blues (1951)
"Eish, this housing problem is getting serious!"
Odd for a cinema industry emerging from the birth of apartheid in 1948, several films were produced from 1949 - 1951 in which the focus was on Black South Africans, rather than their oppressive rulers. The films were Donald Swanson's African Jim aka Jim Comes To Jo'burg (1949), Hyman Kirstein's Zonk (1950), Emil Nofal's Song of Africa (1951) and this gloriously funny musical comedy, filmed in the Johannesburg suburb of Alexandra and featuring almost all of its' residents in a madcap chase in pursuit of a thief who stole money from a church whose oldest parishioner had just donated his life savings to that church. Among the hugely funny moments is a scene set in a dustbin of all places: the thief is hiding in one and when the police confront him, he claims the bin as his home, leading one police officer to say "This housing problem is getting serious."
There is only one dark spot in this film's legacy and that is the fact that the film's screenwriter, James Ambrose Brown attempted to track the film down in 1988 and found it at the National Film, Video and Sound Archives in Pretoria. Once there, he was made aware of the fact that not only was the film there in 16mm print format but its' negative masters as well: all well preserved for many years.
All well and good, until Brown demanded that the negatives be released to him as he claimed copyright on it, despite only being the screenwriter and the fact that producer and director Donald Swanson had passed away in 1977. This demand was entertained by the archivists on the condition that Brown could produce proof that he was the actual rights holder: this he could not do and thus went away in a huff, later writing an article in the The Star newspaper in which he alleged that "the film is available in Europe but in Pretoria, the film moulders in a vault".
In light of the positivity of this long unseen film, it is troubling that the next three features made by foreign filmmakers with Black South Africans as the focal point - Zoltan Korda's bleak, depressing Cry The Beloved Country (1952), Lionel Rogosin's covertly filmed awful disaster Come Back Africa and Henning Carlsen's dire Dilemma aka A World Of Strangers - chose the negative view typical of anti-South African foreign filmmakers of this country instead and chose to portray South Africa as a ghastly hell hole with no chance of redemption nor rescue from the pit of despair that apartheid had spawned.
Simply put: South Africans should tell their own stories, nobody else has the right or should be allowed to. With Dolly Rathebe, Tommy Machaka and Willard Cele.
Ipi Tombi (1994)
An undeserved failure
Based on the internationally popular stage musical written by Bertha Egnos and Gail Lakier, this film had more production problems than Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980), Elaine May's Ishtar (1987), Michael Lehmann's Hudson Hawk (1991) and Kevin Reynolds' Waterworld (1995) put together. So serious were these issues that producer and director Tommie Meyer took his workprint to Russia to search for investors and then when that venture failed, he searched for local investors and offered his expensive Italian car as a prize.
All attempts to attract investors failed and Meyer - the one-time boss of South Africa's biggest filmmaking studio, Kavaliers Films - declared bankruptcy, his film studios in Randburg on Northcliff Hill were sold off, later torn down to be replaced by what is now known as the Northcliff Ridge Eco Park and his film was sold to a consortium headed by film producer Johann Schutte.
New inserts and a sub-plot involving two estranged American brothers - one, an embittered writer (Jan-Michael Vincent) and the other, a diplomat (Maxwell Caulfield) who reconnect with each other after bringing peace to Africa via the protagonists of this film - were filmed in California by Don Hulette a few years later and the film was released to cinemas here in 1994 but was not the success everyone had hoped for. The best of these scenes shows Jan-Michael Vincent driving around Los Angeles, listening to the song The Warrior on his car's sound system.
Failure or not, the film's music lingers - remixed and reworked by Mbongeni Ngema and others - as does the cinematography by James Robb SASC, including the final shot of the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe in full flow with a heavenly rainbow encompassing the shot and the sounds of an angelic choir making people born there like myself cry genuine tears for a home very long last seen and very long since lost.