Traversing the cinemascape of contemporary South Africa: A peripatetic journey
Date
2018-04
Authors
Ebrahim, Haseenah
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
South African cinema, South Africa- film, Bollywood South Africa, Indian South African filmmaking, Lokshin Bioskop, Mzansi Magic