1 Necroaesthetics: Essays on Apartheid, Documentary Film and the Black Filmic Image

Abstract

This PhD dissertation is an attempt at an examination of the documentary film practice of a set of filmmakers known for their ‘oppositional’ films between 1976 and 1994 – in hindsight described as the anti–Apartheid documentary film movement. Through this the dissertation (hopes to) presents and archives the past and present of South African history through the study of one of its cinematic outputs. Although engaging the history of the documentary film in South Africa, this dissertation is not intended to contribute to documentary historiography per se. The objective is to engage the ontological premise upon which such a historiography is premised by rearticulating and reframing many of the theories and historiography to give insights to the problems in documentary film, especially as it concerns the Black