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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 10, Issue 1-2, 2018
Volume 10, Issue 1-2, 2018
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Revisiting film cities and film services: Methodology, theory and applications
By Tom O’ReganAbstractFilm cities and film services perspectives have become an important part of policy thinking about film and television production. It is now routine for a variety of governmental and industry agencies to assist in supporting, marketing and developing local capabilities, infrastructures and resources. The aim is usually to extend the local footprint of the film and television industries by attracting foot loose globally dispersed productions. This article revisits and expands earlier perspectives on film cities and film services developed by the author and his collaborators. It does this in order to compare Australian and South African cities’ participation in national and global film production and to consider how such approaches may be usefully redisposed for policy thinking and opportunities for South Africa’s large informal market settings.
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Hard to Get, film friendliness and local production
Authors: Keyan G. Tomaselli and Ndu NgcoboAbstractThis article offers a comparative analysis of film services in Johannesburg and Durban using the example of a feature gangster comedy, Hard to Get (Ntuli, 2014). The study of cities as media hubs is a recent development. Audio-visual media, being highly capitalized and labour-intensive products, are centralized in large cities, urbanity having been the central hub of first, industrialization and second digitization. Initial work on South African media cities focuses on the perspective of economic sustainability through skills development, job creation and distribution and exhibition as prerequisites for assistance incentives. This film services approach is less concerned with media as texts, but examines the intermediate inputs, organizational arrangements and expertise associated with processes involved in the development of media projects. Media services are examined with respect to their respective foci on sustainability, creativity and the skills development potential of each value chain’s input in the production of product. Crucially, however, the South African studies have linked the production-consumption value chain to exhibition and audience development in currently unserved black urban areas that continue to lack entertainment services.
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The African Metropolis and the aesthetics of superfluity
By Ivo RitzerAbstractDrawing on Achille Mbembe’s idea of superfluity as both quantity and a paradoxical hybrid of indispensability and expendability in a city’s life, this article maps out possible relations between aesthetics and politics, aiming to understand the often contradictory spectrum of cultural and artistic production in an urban context. Looking at recent negotiations of the African Metropolis in media culture, the article not only attempts to describe artistic practices as preoccupied with conspicuous spectacle but also to come to grips with a contemporary aesthetics that itself imagines the African Metropolis in a hysterical way, obsessed with thrills and a rush for the rush.
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The ghetto in the cities and films of Johannesburg and Cape Town
More LessAbstractThe ghetto as a metaphor is strongly present in the hood film and offers both utopian and dystopian representations of the city for African Americans. The ghetto or hood film has influenced the gangster genre in South Africa, where racial and socioeconomic segregation is a legacy of colonial and apartheid planning in cities. This article focuses on the geography of locations and aspects of mobility in the construction and depiction of the ghetto in two films of Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jerusalema by Ziman (2008) and Four Corners by Gabriel (2013). Although the ghetto is not easily applied to South African cities, defining elements are present in a variety of urban spaces including townships, the inner city and informal settlements. The ghetto, as Lefebvre’s ‘representational’ space, offers insights into the cultural, social and physical spaces of South African cities.
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The flexible city: Cinematic (re)constructions of Cape Town
More LessAbstractSafe House (Espinosa, 2012) is, in almost all respects, a conventional Hollywood espionage thriller. What is unconventional about Safe House is the setting: the narrative’s ‘remote outpost’ is Cape Town, South Africa. And, in a refreshing change (at least for South African viewers), Cape Town appears as itself, not as a mock-up of another city in the world. Drawing on Edward Soja and Gilles Deleuze, I critique the ‘apparently innocent spatiality’ of urban settings by examining the identity of Cape Town within the globalized image economy of transnational cinema. The article shows the complicated ways in which media cities are marketed, and the tension between how they are perceived and how they are promoted as filmmaking destinations. The versatility of the ‘flexible city’ as a location masks the process through which places become globally interchangeable and exploitable spaces.
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The landscapes and aesthetics of soap opera: Townships, television and tourism
By Sarah GibsonAbstractThe aesthetics of soap opera have been neglected within Television Studies, despite renewed interest in the aesthetics of television. Soap opera has frequently been regarded as a textual object unworthy and incapable of sustaining aesthetic attention, and the limited work that has been done on the cinematography of soap opera focuses on its realism. This article returns to debates on the cinematography of soap opera by focusing on the televisual aesthetic of the South African soap opera, Uzalo (2015–present). The visual pleasures of the landscapes of KwaMashu and KwaZulu-Natal distinguish it from other soap operas and offer new ways of understanding the aesthetics of soap opera. These ‘landscapes of television’ offer new ways of interpreting the conventionally ‘realist’ genre of soap opera through notions of the ‘spectacular’. Uzalo’s cinematography is read as an example of soap opera’s ‘spectacular realism’ that promotes a televisual tourist glance.
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From rural naïveté to urban discontent: Framing post-apartheid South African film identities
Authors: Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren and Wanda VersterAbstractThis article re-examines the dynamic space–place relationships (the urban–rural, insider–outsider, conflict–love plot) in post-apartheid South African cinema with a special emphasis on the representation of white Afrikaner identity. Theories related to this argument were first systematically devised by Keyan Tomaselli in his studies of Afrikaans-language films made between 1965 and 1980. Similarly, the authors analyse the ‘structural basis of the images and recurring motifs reflected in local South African cinema’ in a sample of films made between 1994 and 2014. Johannesburg and Cape Town have gained various guises through vernacular urban narratives set within the gangster and crime genre, such as Jerusalema, Cold Harbour and Four Corners, whilst the rural landscape is explored extensively in Afrikaans romance films such as Platteland, Vrou Soek Boer and Leading Lady. The authors argue that the filmic representations of the rural and urban landscapes reflect the various kinds of South African identities as imagined by the director. The authors conclude that as illustrated by the case studies, whilst most of the Afrikaans films of the last twenty years represent a yearning for the ‘innocent pastoral years’ of their ancestors, there are exceptions to the rule, such as Katinka Heyns’ film, Paljas.
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A particularly Pretorian political economy: Phoenix Films’ Pretorian cinematic imaginary
More LessAbstractThis article explores the spatial homogeneity of Darrell Roodt’s films Trouvoete (Roodt, 2015) and Mignon ‘Mossie’ Van Wyk (Roodt, 2016). These films conflate representations of safe, suburban city spaces in Johannesburg and Pretoria to create the impression that these city spaces – free from explicit political signification – are visually and ideologically interchangeable. To arrive at this explanation, the article discusses the Centurion-based production company Phoenix Films, and how the branding (or product placement) contributes towards the superficial smoothness of the films’ city spaces.
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Introducing the ‘drasofi’: A genre of convenience and context in Zimbabwean film production
More LessAbstractThe article introduces a contemporary type of video film production in Zimbabwe combining aesthetic norms of drama, soap opera and film production. The article makes the claim that the emergent genre, dubbed ‘drasofi’ (drama–soapie–film) is one of convenience, influenced by the socio-economic and political context obtaining in contemporary Zimbabwe. Situated within an eclectic film services (Goldsmith and O’Regan 2005) and political economy framework, the article presents exploratory arguments that a film is as good (and as bad) as the context in which it is produced, vis-à-vis, the organizational arrangements, networks and technological infrastructure supporting its production. These film services affect the production value chain and, ultimately, emergent themes. The study derives data from field interviews with Zimbabwe-based filmmakers as well as a critical analysis of two post-2000 films Tanyaradzwa (Gunda Mupengo, 2005) and Sinners? (Tawengwa, 2013). The cinematograhic techniques as well as filmic fact aspects of the video films clearly combine cross-genre services and themes to make distinctly local ‘drasofi’ video films – a hitherto unheard-of classification in Zimbabwean film historiography.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Hugh Fraser and Yomi OgunsanyaAbstractUrban Film and Everyday Practice: Bridging Divisions in Johannesburg, Alexandra Parker (2016) New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan US, 242 pp., ISBN: 978 137 55479 6, h/bk, $99.99
Nollywood Central: The Nigerian Video Film Industry, International Screen Industries, Jade L. Miller (2016) London: British Film Institute, 175 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84457-691-3, p/bk, £22.99
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