the rise of an alternative film movement

The 70’s and more specifically the 80’s saw the first rise of an alternative film movement in South Africa, located outside of the mainstream. A prolific number of protest films were made that have not been seen by most people. Films and videos were often produced by ordinary people with few resources and screened in rooms or backyards to an ‘audience’ who came to see them with a purpose, paying or not.

I’m writing something on what is meant by ‘audience development’ (more about that over time)… but this task led me to a useful book by Botha & van Aswegen that traces the origin, development and role of alternative film called Images of South Africa: the rise of the alternative film (1992).

Something they quote by Solanas and Getino is what I want to reproduce here:

The placing of the cinema within US models, even in the format aspect, in language, leads to the adoption of the ideological forms that give rise to that language and no other. The cinema as a spectacle aimed at a digesting object is the highest point that can be reached by bourgeois filmmaking.

The world, experience, and the historic process are enclosed within the frame of a painting, the same stage of a theater, and the movie screen man is viewed as a consumer of ideology, and not the creator of ideology. This notion is the starting point for the wonderful interplay of bourgeois philosophy and the obtaining of surplus value.

The result is a cinema studied by motivational analysts, sociologists and psychologists, by the endless researchers of the dreams and frustrations of the masses, all aimed at selling movie-life, reality as it is conceived by the ruling classes.

The Hollywood model is based on creating surplus; it’s about reproducing mind-numbing and hackneyed story-lines of cause and effect. The burgeoning organised ‘movement’ of an alternative, indigenous cinema less than twenty years ago – where filmmakers and audience were all cast members in one way or another – has been fragmented into individualised or scattered efforts. Still, all efforts against the homogenising effect of imposed culture, of ‘cinema as spectacle’ – all of it counts.

…will revisit Solanas and Getino’s Third Cinema Manifesto sometime.