Strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from 1976 to 1995
Date
2014-05-20
Authors
Maingard, Jacqueline Marie
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid
documentary film and video from the late 1970s to 1995. It identifies and analyses
two broad trends within this movement: the first developed by the organisation called
Video News Services; the second developed in the Mail and Guardian Television
series called Ordinary People. Two history series are analysed against the backdrop
of transformations in the television broadcasting sector in the early 1990s. South
African documentary film and video is located within a theoretical framework that
interweaves documentary film theory, theories of Third cinema and of identity, rid
working class cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.
The concepts of ‘voice’ and the ‘speaking subject’ are the two key concepts that focus
the discussion of strategies of representation in detailed textual analyses of selected
documentaries. The analysis of three documentaries that typify the output of Video
News Services reveals how these documentary texts establish a symbiosis between
representations of the working class as black, male, and allied to COSATU, and the
liberation struggle. The analysis of selected documentaries from the Ordinary People
series highlights those strategies of representation that facilitate perceptions of the
multiplicities of identities in South Africa. This focus on representations of identity is
extended in analysing and comparing two television series. The strategies of
representation evident in the Video News Services documentaries and the meanings
they produce about identify are repeated in the series called Ulibambe Lingashoni:
Hold Up the Sun. In Soweto: A History, strategies of representation that follow the
trend towards representing identity as multiple are used to present history as if from
the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people.
The thesis creates an argument for South African documentary film and video to
move towards strategies of representation that break down the fixed categories of
identity developed under apartheid. With policy moves for creating more ‘local
content’ films and television productions there is opportunity to re-shape the
documentary film and video movement in South Africa using representational
strategies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and between
individualised, discrete categories of identity.