noted

I should not spend too much time on this. Getting sidetracked by the motives, movements and gabble of the boss classes in cinema means less time spent elsewhere. And it just depresses me.

So I’ll go there briefly if only to re-affirm why nurturing contrary spaces outside of what Solanas calls “The System” is essential to a life worth living.

A hard-to-miss double page spread in the Business Day Weekender (22-23 March) solicited the views of the National Film & Video Foundation (NFVF) on how they intend “turning film into an industry”.

The NFVF is a statutory body that was set up with the mandate to develop and grow the local film and video sector. When it was first launched there seemed promise in it making at least some effort to ‘grow’ more independent, indigenous and entrepreneurial filmmaking initiatives. There can be no doubt now that it is being well-led to thwart such misadventures.

At the helm of this charge is Eddie Mbalo, CEO of the NFVF. His approach to developing the “film business” is to launch an attack on all who counter the Hollywood God-narrative.

He says:

It is also possible that our cinematic screen stories do not successfully engage South African audiences because our institutions produce filmmakers who have been schooled in antinarrative forms of film discourse. These are stories deliberately designed to alienate or challenge audience engagement and enjoyment because this is understood to contribute to the resistance of the master narrative and Hollywood’s dominance of our screens.

The truth is that the antinarrative and anticlassical narrative so beloved of our institutions engage only small audiences within these institutions, and do not attract the vast numbers required to make our films financially viable, in addition to their other inherently good qualities.”

(eish). If Hollywood is our grand-model, then the rest of Africa has nothing to offer us according to Mbalo:

Nollywood isn’t a film industry, it is a television industry. It isn’t true that Nigeria is the third-largest producer of films in the world; they produce videos. In reality, SA produces much more content than Nigeria – a lot of it goes straight to television. What Nigeria is doing cannot be called filmmaking, it is video-making and isn’t a model we can use here. It works there because people are hungry for local content.”

I won’t engage here with the inherent contradictions in his own statements but rather turn to Solanas & Getino’s views that adopting all or any part of the “cinema as an industry” model, which has been established and organised to generate certain ideologies, will result in replicating the ideologies of that model.

The 35mm camera, 24 frames per second, arc lights, and a commercial place of exhibition for audiences were conceived not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to satisfy, in the first place, the cultural and surplus value needs of a specific ideology, of a specific world-view: that of US finance capital.

The mechanistic takeover of a cinema conceived as a show to be exhibited in large theatres with a standard duration, hermetic structures that are born and die on the screen, satisfies, to be sure, the commercial interests of the production groups, but it also leads to the absorption of forms of the bourgeois world-view which are the continuation of 19th century art, of bourgeois art: man is accepted only as a passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make history recognised, he is only permitted to read history, contemplate it, listen to it, and undergo it.”

The effect of the bourgeois cinematic “industry” on “audiences” (to reuse what I’ve used elsewhere before) resembles Nietzshe’s indictment of history more than a century ago, where as interpreted by historiographer Hayden White, Nietzshe saw history as promoting “a debilitating voyeurism in men, made them feel that they were latecomers to a world in which everything worth doing had already been done, and thereby undermined that impulse to heroic exertion that might give a peculiarly human, if only transient, meaning to an absurd world.”

I’m interested I suppose in how “the audience” is being used by the boss classes of cinema to welcome Hollywood home; when in fact nothing can be known about the world of actual audiences. The audience is not a homogenous, taxonomic collective – but this is indeed what the cinematic industry, the ratings system in TV, marketing practice, advertising and public relations base their business upon: defining, knowing and selling the audience, their wants, their needs and their very desires.

So noted. We must next move on to how the audience is constructed, if at all, in alternative cinematic spaces.