School of Arts (Journal Articles)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37882

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Start date: 2010End date: 2019

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    Traversing the cinemascape of contemporary South Africa: A peripatetic journey
    (2018-04) Ebrahim, Haseenah
    This article offers a series of observations, reflections, descriptions and opinions as stopping points on a tour of the multifaceted cinemascape of South Africa. It addresses how discourses of cinema in South Africa conflate the development of a distinctive South African cinema with the development of a robust film industry—concealing the structural barriers to entry, the development of indigenous aesthetics, and domestic audience development. It maps the emergence of several nodes of film production and consumption for non-cinema platforms as well as several subnational “mini-industries” characterized by ethnolinguistic markers of appeal. The author warns that the sole use of a national cinema lens to look at cinema in South Africa blinds us to both the politics of identity in postapartheid South Africa as well as the variety of film-related activities that constitute film culture, arguing that film scholars would be better served by adopting a polycentric approach when attempting to map the cinemascape in contemporary South Africa.
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    The cinematic life of the Sistren Theatre Collective: Forays into biographical documentary
    (2016) Ebrahim, Haseenah
    This article explores two biographical video documentaries produced by the Sistren Theater Collective of Jamaica. Together, the documentaries, Miss Amy and Miss May and The Drums Keep Sounding, document the lives of three Jamaican women activists: Amy Bailey, May Farquharson and Louise Bennett-Coverley. Although video/film production never attained a prominent role in Sistren’s approach to its activism, which focused on participatory drama to address issues of concern to working-class black women, the documentaries produced in the 1980s and 1990s allowed the Collective to expand its reach beyond the limitations imposed by the geographical proximity necessary for live theater. The article examines the structuring devices of these two biographical documentaries and interrogates how the utilization of the medium of video raises class-based ambiguities within the Collective’s mission to celebrate the lives of Caribbean women.
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    Are the "boys" at Pixar afraid of little girls?
    (Journal of Film and Video, 2015) Ebrahim, Haseenah
    The notion that American animated films are somehow excluded from ideological concerns, that they are “ideologically empty,” so to speak, reflects a widespread perception within both the USA and South Africa that children’s films are just innocent, escapist, fun. Walt Disney himself was known to perpetuate this perception by, somewhat disingenuously, remarking that “we just make the pictures, and let the professors tell us what they mean” (quoted in Bell, Haas and Sells 1). Although sometimes tongue-in-cheek, I examine Pixar’s construction of little girls within the context of a brand image of Pixar’s animator-directors as “boys at heart”--that is, as Peter Pan types who have never really grown up. I explore whether Pixar’s films reflect a certain apprehension about little girls that can, perhaps, be likened to the way young boys often display a notable ambivalence toward girls. Pixar’s little girls—Hannah, Molly, Boo, Darla and Bonnie and Daisy—are not always so “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but rather embody toxicity to varying degrees (though not always seriously), becoming a source of fear, pain, or humiliation to a number of male characters in several Pixar films. What initially appears to suggest an aversion to little girls emerges as a more complex construction of little girls by the “boys” at Pixar.
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    Women Screenwriters: South Africa
    (2014-08-31) Ebrahim, Haseenah
    Emerging from this research undertaken to map the presence of women screenwriters in the South African film industry, are two significant findings: first, an awareness that while a few women of colour have begun to enter the filmmaking sector, they remain at the margins of the mainstream film industry, writing primarily for documentaries and short films and, secondly, the complete absence of black African women screenwriters. The reasons for this are unclear, and suggest that further research is warranted into the structural factors that continue to hamper the participation of women of colour – and black African women, in particular – in the film industry in South Africa, other than as actresses.