MICK RAUBENHEIMER
Aryan Kaganof, an internationally lauded filmmaker and provocateur who playfully, and sometimes gleefully, refutes the received boundaries of any given discipline, delivers a striking, aesthetically fresh documentary intervention with Metalepsis in Black. This documentary, along with the fabulous conceit, the docu-remix Say It With Flowers, is to debut locally at this year’s Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, which runs from 1 to 11 June at select venues in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Fees Must Fall movement
Metalepsis in Black is constructed around academic discussions held at the University of the Free State in 2016, to address the Fees Must Fall movement, its ramifications, and the responses and responsibilities its presence demands and requires.
“Last year I was commissioned by Thinking Africa, an Institute that was then based at Rhodes University, to film their annual colloquium which was on the theme of Fees Must Fall, and Metalepsis in Black is the result of that commission. The colloquium was held at the University of the Free State, who also bottle their own water.”
Composer Leonhard Praeg’s music
In keeping with Kaganof’s filmic approach – in both his feature films and documentaries – the camera is a restless agent, engaged with and stylistically reacting to what it witnesses, conducting the flow of information through unexpected framing and sometimes incongruent focus, now zooming the audience’s awareness into a key intellectual exchange, now bouncing away and cutting to histrionic dancing. The soundtrack colludes in all this, sometimes emotively amplifying a sequence, at other times ironically distancing the audience. Its central theme is especially affective.
Says Kaganof, “I fell in love with composer Leonhard Praeg’s music and it worked very well with the image constructions. His debut novel will be published later this year. An enormously talented South African.”
During footage of clashes between students and police there is an intimate intensity – one practically tastes the metallic tang of adrenaline – which draws the viewer in, upsets her physically. It is a species separate from the gratuitous snatches of documented violence seen on news channels. News stations capitalize on the power of the sensationalistic to grab audience attention, whereas Kaganof is trying, and succeeds, in momentarily throwing you into the fray, effectively displacing you from the comfort zone of static viewer, leaving you with the scent of blood and urine, panic and excitement, long after you’ve moved away from the document.
You taste it as your head finds the pillow, it is with you when you whisper good morning to a loved one, it follows you in as you sit down for a sunny cup of coffee at your fave bistro.
A found footage bouquet
Only Kaganof, when tasked with compiling a tribute utilizing the subject’s collected film material, would turn the commission on its head and hand in, as vivid, decaying bouquet, a slanted remix of said footage. Say It With Flowers is fascinating – a stylistically audacious cut-up and rearrangement of former Die Burger music critic Charlie Weich’s film collection.
Kaganof explains, “The “seed” was a commission that I received from the Africa Open institute to make a film out of the complete Charlie Weich film collection that is housed at the National Film Archive in Pretoria. I was commissioned in 2013 to make the film but it took a very long time to find the right “in” to the material, and I kept on having to postpone the delivery of the work. The institute very graciously allowed me the extra time that I needed to finally find a way to dissect the cloying whiteness of it all without surrendering or denying my own ‘positionality’. In short – it was a very difficult and very personal project for me, one that I would describe as intolerable.”
There is a tongue-in-cheek feel throughout, as the editing mocks and exaggerates the staged sentimentality and superficial contentment of Weich and co, as they waltz through their empty pantomime, but it is a bitter cheek, fully aware of the quiet atrocity of the seemingly innocent material. Overlayed dialogue is enacted from a Noel Coward play, and, along with the music, creates a ghostly remove which further alienates the viewer from the visual material.
Originally a series of home movie-style clips by Weich, around such mundane tropes as ‘family-on-holiday’, ‘visiting-the-city’ and ‘look-who’s-come-to-visit!’ – the footage is disrupted, remixed and recast into a disquieting study of Colonial Whiteness. Bar identifiable foliage and landscapes, and occasional architectural clues, the banal moving images of the original may as well have been taken in any mid-20th century European setting: The paranoiac dislocation which served to facilitate Apartheid’s fabricated, desperate White reality seethes through each frame, accompanied by a silent scream – the indignation of the disappeared millions so painstakingly structured out of sight and mind.
“My intention (in Say It With Flowers) is to estrange white people from their nostalgia for a time that was not, in fact, better than the world we live in, but rather, an intolerable state of serious injustice (for those not classified as “white”).”
Say It With Flowers recently had its international premiere in Oberhausen, Germany. See the links for two Kaganof documentaries, preceding and related to the Fees Must Fall movement, below.
Who: Aryan Kaganof
What: Encounters South African International Documentary Festival
When: 1-11 June, 2017
Where: The Labia, Nouveau V&A Waterfront, Bertha Movie House, Isivivana Centre, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and Bioscope, Nouveau Rosebank, Joburg
Watch the doccies:
Decolonising WITS: https://vimeo.com/135187062
Opening Stellenbosch: From Assimilation to Occupation: https://vimeo.com/178217681
Web: http://www.encounters.co.za
WS
