Pumulo Ngoma

For millennia, rituals have determined that the lifeblood of a community is preserved from generation to generation. Ritual acts as a character in a community, facilitating socio-cultural transitions from the individual to the collective level. This essay serves to launch a critical discussion concerning female circumcision as a secular ritual in eastern and northern African communities. Firstly, critical definitions for the threefold processual ritual will be provided.

African indigenous theatre refers to theatre which exists natively in Africa, but was subjugated as a result of the colonial project. This theatre includes the inherent performative response of the African towards certain occasions (like weddings or deaths) through dance, song, praise and oral poetry. This essay will serve to discuss the colonial project in terms of the African subject and his identity crisis and its expression in theatre. From here, this essay will then contextualise the background of African indigenous theatre. Lastly, this essay will critically examine the theatricality of Xhosa lobola, the negotiation process to the final wedding celebrations of umdudo.

Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Islamic theocratic rule clamped down on cinema perceived to be dissenting.  It was thus incumbent on filmmakers to encode their films by exploiting other and diverse cinematic devices. Abbas Kiarostami’s, Taste of Cherry (1997) is certainly an exercise in this.  Critically employing Taste of Cherry’s conclusion, this essay serves to analyse whether the film’s tone is nihilistic or hopeful. Finally using, the open image the essay will analyse how the film is socio-politically coded.

In every era, disillusioned artists, frustrated with the status quo, would come to discover that mainstream art is too restrained to express their creativity (Rees, 1999:15). Artists such as Brakhage, Bunuel, Vidor, Malick sought to purchase their reative freedom in what is now defined as the avant-garde or experimental cinema. Experimental cinema refers to cinema which is marginalised, which seeks to interrogate and subvert the constructs of the mainstream. It questions the means and the meaning behind the means. Such is the power of the avant-garde. Thus, this essay will serve to give a working definition of experimental film, video film, experimental art and video poetry. Secondly, I will link these definitions with my own experimental film Forget Me Not. Thirdly, I will analyse the film’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of our editing, cinematography and production design objectives. Lastly, I will discuss how the films Rashomon, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Hiroshima Mon Amour informed the film’s production.

Cinematography and characterization are inextricable in that they work simultaneously to forge audience perception of character. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalyse Now (1979) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), we are exposed to the unflinching rawness of multiple dimensional protagonists through cinematography and direction. Thus, this essay serves to explore the cinematic strategies employed in said films to convey the complexities of character.  First definitions for such terms as subjective and objective camera, and dramatic blocks will be provided. Lastly, the essay will analyze how cinematography choices in the above films contribute to how the protagonists are conceived by the viewer.

The avant-garde Japanese form of performance art called butoh is concerned with the body as subject, material and image. This essay will explore how this form of art challenges the idea of the body as a signifier in performance through diverse signifying practices. The essay further seeks to analyse how butoh expands the idea of the body, widening the body as a language. This will be done by employing some seminal examples of Butoh in action. The essay will also explore butoh’s connection with western aesthetics and intellectual practices, beginning with Artaud.

Bell hooks in her text Oppositional Gaze emphasises the fact that there is a strong “connection between the representation of black women in the media and their ability to construct themselves as subjects”. The outcry against the continual representation of women of colour (non-white women) as immoral, virginal, needy and docile  is not novel in scholarship ( Kaplan,1997; hooks, 1999, Hassim, 2007). This representation contributes to symbolic annihilation, a phenomenon first noted by Gerbner (1972) meaning that  If previously disadvantaged societies are to progress, it will begin with a more nuanced and varied representation of themselves on the part of gender socializing apparatuses like the mass media. In order mobilise critically transitional cinema, we must analyse the colonial gaze and return it with an oppositional gaze, a gaze that defines itself on its own terms and for its own self.
Though scholarship on post-apartheid cinema (cinema from 19994 onwards) is abundant, scholarship on black females post-apartheid in cinema is sorely lacking, with meagre attempts at analysing the multifarious black subjectivities and challenges. This necessitates the need for an unequivocally African perspective on this emaciated category in academia
. Further to this, 21 years post ‘democracy,’ demands a more rigorous accounting for the cinematic representation of black subjects, specifically female bodies. The black female subject has been disdained and desired, since the twin tragedy of colonialism and apartheid. She has been seen as subservient to both white and black patriarchies, resisting complex and nuanced representation in South Africa.
  This essay analyses the representation of the post-apartheid female subject from 3 main angles:
1. The historical nuances of the representation - the importance of the black female body as a site of colonial exploitation.
2. The aesthetic representation of the black subject in terms of cinematic language ( editing, cinematography, sound and mise en scène )
3. The narrative agency of the black female subject.
After providing summaries of each of the films and their context within South African cinema, I analyse the representation of the black female body in said films. I then situate the black body within the context of white patriarchal neo-liberalism, a dominant discourse in the South African milieu.
In order to achieve this, I examine historical representations of stereotypes and adopt filmic analysis deconstruct women as they exist in the featured texts.
In conclusion, I posit that Fanie Fourie’s Lobola, and Tsotsi serve to re-entrench stereotypes of the black female as unthreatening and delectable for white consumption. I further argue that character psychology and interiority is sacrificed. Further to this, a more nuanced, negotiated approach to the post-apartheid discourse concerning black women is sacrificed to re-entrench colonialist discourse.

Like any other national screen body, the South African National Film and Video Foundation is beset with challenges in promoting South African cinema. However, unlike other established screen agencies, the NFVF faces the daunting tripartite task of defining a legible national cinema for a nation with a troubled past, producing economically viable films, all whilst balancing its social cohesion mandate. The foundation inherited a fragmented domestic audience from the Apartheid regime. As such, the existence of such disparate audiences places the NFVF in a unique position locally, but complicates its market potential internationally.

Wes Anderson's masterpiece The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) is a reflexive film about making a documentary within a film. The boundaries between what is 'reality' and what is performed become blurred. The production elements such as production design, cinematography, editing and sound techniques help construct a world where our disbelief is suspended. These production elements assist us in subscribing to this fantastical world. Thus, this essay will serve to analyse how the various production elements work in conjunction with each other to maintain a credible cinematic space. Production design or art direction refers to the look and feel of the film. Working with the other part of the design trinity, the director and cinematographer, they must tell the story visually (Barnwell, 2004: 2). The aesthetic style of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou oscillates between elaborate and ostentatious to a stripped down form of the bare minimum. This represents reality and the documentary space. The film plays out in two main spaces: the hall where the audience is viewing this documentary and the space of the ship and sea-life. The hall location is vast, with the black and white theme highlighting the formality of the event. The set of some of the different locations are made of wood or a wood finish, such as the office of Oseary Drakoulious which resembles art décor from the 80's. Yet the walls are made of granite which links back to the dual set design: elaborate and the minimalist space. The cityscapes that are included in the film, such as the Greek/Italian landscape Steve and Ned fly over is extremely lavish and communicates the type of place they live on the outskirts of. Cinematographic Style There is once again a dualistic style here: the documentary style and the fictional film style. The documentary style produced by fast stock is grainy; the camera work is handheld and abrupt to deliver the on-the-run feel of being as close to the action as possible. At times, we see the crew members of the documentary holding up boom poles that are in shot. Other times we see the camera men, and at times the camera man disappears and we are aware of an omniscient eye, Wes Anderson's. In this way, the documentary and fictional aspects, through conventions of the film flow into each other such as in the helicopter crash where there is no perceivable camera man, yet the camera humorously falls from the sky into the sea.

Regardless of one’s sexual orientation, according to Anat Pick, the spectator can be queered by a film. Thus this essay will serve to analyse how Peirce’s film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) queers the spectator. In order to do so, I will provide nuanced definitions of terms such as queer theory and queer cinema. In the second part of the essay, I will depend on filmic analysis to unpack how the queering mechanisms, that Peirce uses, queer the spectator. The final part of the essay will consider the naming procedures and their importance.

"Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." (Berger, 1972: 47). Seminal theorist Laura Mulvey employed Freudian psychoanalysis to give insight into the erotic pleasure of the cinema. This essay will serve to analyse how Sharon Stone’s character May Munroe/ Adrian Hastings is framed in The Specialist (1994, USA). Further, how this framing allows the male spectator to use fetishistic scopophilia as a rehabilitating device. In order to do so, critical definitions of the male gaze, fetishistic scopophilia, identification, and spectatorship will be explored in line with scene analysis.