To a Golden Land
Date
2006-11-16T08:24:42Z
Authors
Greenblatt, Samuel Shlomo
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Abstract
The story of the Jewish community in South Africa is a long and colourful one. The
population is based entirely on immigrants who first began arriving in the late 1860s.
Their presence in the country is characterised by a disproportionate visibility and as being
distinct from other “Diaspora” communities. The community has shrunk by a third in the
last thirty years, in a mirror image of the initial waves of immigrants to the country a
century before. This sense of movement spanning a long period of time in the context of
the historical phenomenon that is South African Jewry suggests itself to a documentary
film.
A cinematic treatment of the phenomenon of waves of Jewish immigration to and from
South Africa requires approaching the subject matter from a number of directions
simultaneously. The film genre “historical documentary” requires equal emphasis on the
techniques of cinema as well as an historical approach. This document addresses each in
turn, with Section 1 dealing with the historical framework underlying the film. Section 2
addresses the theory and practice of documentary film inasmuch as it pertains to the
proposed film. This section also contains a review of existing film documentary
approaches to the subject matter. Section 3 contains a scene by scene breakdown of the
film. The appendix contains a literature review and supplemental notes.
Overall Aim
The starting point for the construction of the film is an attempt to develop an approach
that deliberately eschews the conventional documentary technique used in the making of
similar films. By ignoring the fact that film is a predominantly visual medium, films often
fall into a trap of “over-textualising” i.e. their visual or metaphorical essence becomes
subordinate to the text of the film. Since the text drives the narrative, this can result in a
sapping of visual interest in favour of what is often a tedious voice-over. This film wishes
to take advantage of film as a rich visual and symbolic medium. I aim to show that this
approach need not lead to a loss of overall transmitted content, historical or otherwise.
The maxim “less is more”, though seemingly cliché, applies in large part to the making of
a historical documentary.
Description
Student Number : 8238599 -
MA dissertation -
School of Social Sciences -
Faculty of Humanities
Keywords
Jewish community, South Africa