I thought I would share with you my paper that I have to deliver during the film school that I'm going to next week:
A STORY LIKE THE WIND: THE WORK OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL FILM, VIDEO AND SOUND ARCHIVESBefore I commence, let me show you something [screen first few minutes of STAR TREK 16mm episode]. You’re probably scratching your heads right now, wondering “How on earth did THAT get into the NFVSA?” To tell you the truth, I don’t know either.
My name is Trevor – I am a long time film fan, a devout film buff since the age of seven when my parents dragged me kicking and screaming into a seemingly horrible place called THE CINEMA. Kicking and screaming into the place because I didn’t want to go in and then when the movie – Sidney Lumet’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS – was over, they had to drag me kicking and screaming out because I didn’t want to go home.
As a film archivist and noted South African film historian of twenty one years standing, tottering around and falling over, it pains me to be made aware that some people still believe that Charlize Theron was the first South African to win an Academy Award for her role in Monster. While she was in fact the first South African actor to win an Academy Award, the honour of being the first South African ever to win in fact belongs to the Cape Town born cameraman Ted Moore BSC (1914 – 1987), the director of photography on Fred Zinnemann’s A Man For All Seasons for which he was awarded the Oscar for Best Colour Cinematography in 1967.
Other projects involving Moore’s homegrown talents include such diverse projects as The Day of the Triffids, Psychomania, Orca: Killer Whale, Dominique and several little known productions such as Dr No, Thunderball, Goldfinger, From Russia with Love and the first South African western genre film The Hellions. I’m sure that you all know what a ‘spaghetti’ western is: The Hellions is a boerewors western. Incidentally, if you have ever wanted to see two really strange films, Psychomania and The Day of The Triffids should be at the top of your lists, with the former film concerning Satanistic bikers who commit ritual suicide and return from the dead as biker zombies, while the latter film concerns alien plants which walk and kill people with a stinger: rather like a Venus flytrap with a machine gun.
The other South Africans awarded Oscars who came before Charlize Theron were filmmakers such as Eric Abraham [Kolya], Jon Blair [Anne Frank Remembered], and Paul Kemp [Violet], with nominations going to actors born locally such as Basil Rathbone and Cecil Kellaway, as well as those raised in this country such as Lawrence Harvey and Sir Nigel Hawthorne.
Some, who should actually know better like the late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, believe that in 1995, the African film industry was only thirty years old. In fact, thanks to South Africa, the film industry in Africa was precisely a century old and thriving, due to the Kinetoscope being exhibited for the first time in Africa in 1895 and inadvertently causing an entertainment revolution in the so-called ‘dark continent’.
Films were screened at the Empire Palace of Varieties in Commissioner Street, Johannesburg on May 11th, 1896 and the first full length feature film was produced in South Africa and Africa in 1910. There have been literally hundreds of films made in this country since the first production The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery [aka The Star of the South] in 1910 and South Africa was thus put on the world cinema map long before Hollywood was even thought of. Just to put this in perspective, the first film made in Hollywood, Cecil B DeMille’s production The Squaw Man was released in 1913.
The first fully functional film studio in Africa was established in the Johannesburg suburb of Killarney, by Isidore William Schlesinger, the tea and coffee hating one time penniless immigrant to South Africa and later millionaire, due to his establishment of many flourishing companies, not the least of which was the company known as African Film Productions. This once prosperous seat of industry in Johannesburg was razed in 1972 with a huge shopping mall and a Toyota car dealership now in its place. You’re probably wondering why I referred to I W Schlesinger as a tea and coffee hater. The legend about him – one of many – is that if he saw someone carrying a tray of tea or coffee around the AFP building, he would go and kick it out of their hands. Strange dude: but it is he that we have to thank for starting the film industry here.
Other well meaning but slightly misinformed people believe that the National Party government’s reign of benign terror from 1948 to 1994 did this country no favours whatsoever. Despite being one of the most repressive, oppressive, backward and blinkered governments that the world has ever known, the National Party government did in fact pull off something little short of a miracle in their creation of the National Film Board and its’ in house preservation unit, the South African Film Institute in 1964, under the leadership of Dr Francois de Villiers and Pieter Germishuys respectively.
The creation of this institution can be traced back to a South African visit by John Grierson whose report to the government of South Africa in 1954 led the government to consider setting up a unit similar to the Canadian National Film Board established by Grierson and the Academy Award winning experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren in order to locate, preserve, access and make available film productions made in or concerning South Africa.
In 1964, this dream was realized, only to collapse in 1979 with the disbandment of the National Film Board which by then had been dismissed in Parliament by non NP backbenchers as a ‘money-guzzling white elephant’ and by noted South African filmmaker Emil Nofal (1926 - 1986) as an instrument of destruction to the local film industry. Despite the eminent filmmaker’s dislike and distrust of the NFB’s activities, every single one of the films he produced and directed has been preserved through that and this institution’s efforts.
[SCREEN LOOK INTO THE PAST]
[COMMENT ON ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE THROUGHOUT]
The SA Film Institute had however, by the date of the termination of the NFB’s activities, amassed an enormous amount of historical film material and continues with the NFB’s activities under the new branding of the National Film, Video and Sound Archives until the present day. The oldest recorded footage in Africa is preserved here – the oldest accurately dated footage is that of Adderley Street in Cape Town, showing life in that city in 1898, just prior to the commencement of the Anglo-Boer South African War, also the first conflict to be recorded on motion picture film. The Adderley Street footage also shows that the traffic situation in Cape Town central has not improved since 1898.
Among the NFB’s briefs were to produce films for the various government departments and how the laws of the day should be interpreted by the man on the street. There is no better depiction of apartheid at work than in the two documentaries John Citizen and the State and Order out of Chaos, the latter production showing how and why slums should be demolished and people given a better life elsewhere. It is odd that both the NFB – a creation of the apartheid government - and a democratic South Africa should have been born in the same month of April, only thirty years and a few days apart.
[SCREEN ORDER OUT OF CHAOS]
[FILM SERVICES DEPARTMENT EVENTUALLY BECAME PART OF NFB]
Despite it being what could loosely be termed a National Party ‘sock puppet’, the NFB itself and those in charge there were first and foremost film archivists who took their work seriously and the frothy-mouthed ravings of the National Party a lot less so. A case in point which proves that the archivists then kept their minds on their work and only on their work were the receipt of copies of the anti-South African documentaries such as 25 Years Of Apartheid, Sabotage in South Africa, The Afrikaner, South Africa Loves Jesus, White Africa, The Colour Line and Heart Of Apartheid among others, made by foreign filmmakers who conveniently chose to ignore the social issues and problems in their own countries and focused on South Africa’s supposedly unique issues instead.
On receiving what were then known as ‘kinescope recordings’ of these and other productions that were overtly critical of South Africa on 16mm film, the NFB archivists were ordered to destroy these by the government but refused to do so and by not doing as ordered, preserved very valuable – if a trifle painful – productions on the anti-South African hysteria so prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. The cards for many of these productions still contain the words BEPERK / RESTRICTED.
The anti-South African feature length productions of the period described, including Gibson Kente’s How Long, Chris Menges’ A World Apart, Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season, Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom and Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon 11 among others were also obtained and preserved by the archivists so pro and anti-South African productions sit preserved cheek by jowl in our holdings. Anti-South African productions such as Last Grave at Dimbaza, The White Laager, The Dumping Grounds and the horrific Discarded People were also obtained on various formats via various international sources and preserved at the NFB.
The other material which caused controversy, issues and heated debates between the government of the day and the NFB hierarchy was the production Land Apart [1974], produced and directed by Sven Persson as a government project to show how South Africans live now. Despite the fact that the government had approved of the script and funded the production, those in charge were horrified and ordered the filmmaker to re-shoot almost the entire film and also ordered the NFB to destroy the uncensored 35mm print which they thankfully did not do. As legend would have it, on being asked for evidence of the fact that Land Apart had in fact been destroyed, those desiring such proof were allegedly presented with a pile of junk 35mm film that had been discarded.
Oddities abound in the holdings of the National Film Archives – everything from a 16mm copy of the Star Trek television episode The Immunity Syndrome to footage of Black South African intersex patients being “cured” to an anti-British film [Ohm Kruger] made as a present for South Africa by the Nazis, showing Winston Churchill as a concentration camp guard to films about what can happen if you are in the armed forces and have one too many drinks at a bar, to films describing how the policy of apartheid should work and to what is arguably the longest running newsreel series, the African Mirror, which ran from 1913 to 1984 with only a change in title to the South African Mirror in 1969 and the Mirror International in 1977.
This series continued even when television was introduced to this country and viewing of this causes me much embarrassment to this very day, as I used to complain bitterly when the newsreel was projected in my hometown cinema, wondering why this nonsense was being shown when all I wanted was to see the feature film. Little did I realize that one day, I would be working with this nonsense every day of my working life.
This nonsense is arguably the longest running newsreel series by virtue of the fact that a television service did not commence in South Africa until 1975, [ASK WHEN SA GOT TELEVISION?] because of the National Party’s – and particularly Dr Albert Hertzog, the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications’ – view of television as being “the devil’s box”. The aforementioned Minister’s view on it was expressed as “Over my dead body will television ever come to this country!” and shortly after he passed away, television did in fact start its’ first broadcasts here. A further irony is that the first telecommunications tower in Johannesburg capable of transmitting television signals was named after the television loving Minister himself.
Possibly the most painful oddity in the NFA collection is a newsreel clip of the first recorded soccer match in Africa, showing England taking on the Springbok team in 1920 – the viewing of this clip is only painful due to the final score: [ASK FOR SCORE LINE?] South Africa 1, England 9.
The National Film, Video and Sound Archives is arguably the only film archive in the world which spreads itself to encompass and preserve all facets of filmmaking as well the ephemera such as stills, posters, books, magazines, journals that go hand in hand with film production and film releases.
As a direct result of its’ nearly half an century of work in tirelessly preserving the South African nation’s film heritage, many gaps in our film history have been plugged and many feature films, most of which have never been released to the public and some of which, like Jans Rautenbach’s Katrina and Die Kandidaat [The Candidate] challenged the government of the day outright, have now been transferred to a digital tape medium and are now available for purchase on DVD, thus permitting members of the public to see firsthand the preservation efforts of the NFVSA since 1964. I’m particularly proud of these DVDs as I have the honour of writing the liner notes for most of them. I don’t get paid for this but it is still an honour.
A question that is almost always asked of me when dealing with certain clients is “Why do you preserve this stuff?” My answer to that is you should look to your past to determine your future and with a turbulent past such as South Africa has had, one would need to look back to determine what went wrong here and to ensure that those mistakes were not made again. The obvious – but always unspoken answer (i.e. the one I would like to give but cannot) – is “if these films were not preserved, you would be the first person to ask why they had not been preserved.”
In my day to day work of answering enquiries, I have received and continue to receive some really weird enquiries and could write a book about my experiences, both here and when I leave the NFVSA to go on outreach, screening films and trying not to get scared by what I see on screen.
[SCREEN SCARE SCENE FROM RIDE THE HIGH WIND] That scene is especially embarrassing to me because the first time I saw that, I got such a scare, I fell off my chair. During a screening, I hasten to add. David Millin, the person who directed that film was not only a friend of mine, as well as a mentor to me but he was also the first African recipient of the American Society of Cinematographers’ award which allowed him to use the letters ASC after his name. I had the privilege of working with David when he came to the NFVSA several years ago to film posters and stills from the NFVSA collection for an exhibition in the Killarney Mall which stands on the site of African Film Productions Ltd. As I brought the posters to him, our conversation went something like this:
DM: “Trevor: I need a camera assistant and you’re it.”
TM: [huge gulp] “Mr. Millin, I’ve never done anything with a motion picture camera before.”
DM: “Let’s see if I understand this. You’ve never set a camera up, loaded it, operated it, nothing?”
TM: “No, I’ve never done anything like that at all.”
DM: [smiles] “OK, so why don’t you just do it anyway?”
TM: [stunned] “Sorry?”
DM: “Why don’t you just do it anyway?”
So I did.
During screenings in 1998 at the Klein Karoo Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn, the projectionists including myself, played cricket in the projection booths.
At our 2001 screenings in Ermelo in Mpumalanga, I found to my horror that my bosses had booked me into a health spa for the duration of my visit and I hardly received any food to eat during those four days – I couldn’t even have so much as a beer.
During the final two days of screenings in Bloemfontein in 2008, I got a nasty bout of food poisoning and had to be stretchered out of the hotel to be on a saline IV for a few hours. I will never forget the idiot receptionist saying to me while I was being carried to the ambulance: “Are you OK, Mr. Moses?” My answer was not repeatable and not printable.
At the Volksblad Art Festival in Bloemfontein in 2009, I stood up in the audience to talk to them about the NFVSA, what it does and what it can do for them and was told to shut up and sit down. This was ten minutes before the screening was due to start.
At outreach screenings in Middelburg, I was quartered in a hotel which had dirty sheets on the bed, terrible food, no water in the pool but plenty of angry, hungry mosquitoes in the field next to the hotel and those mosquitoes had a nightly conference in my room, using my blood as their drinks.
Also at the Volksblad Art Festival in 2008, I was asked what the controversial South African film DIE KANDIDAAT [The Candidate] was about – I told the lady asking the question that it was SA’s first political thriller and that it was actually a caricature of the feared, faceless and all-powerful Afrikaner Broederbond who pulled the strings of the National Party government. On hearing this, another lady stood up, glared at me and told me that I should not dare to come all the way from Pretoria to Bloemfontein to talk such nonsense [not the word she used] about the Broederbond.
I could spend all day here talking about some of the idiotic calls that I get and these are mostly the ones that make you want to teleport yourself down the wire and strangle the life out of the person at the other end of the phone. The amount of abuse I take from clients is thankfully balanced out and superseded by the enormous amount of grateful clients I have but the idiotic calls still continue. Many of them are people wanting copies of films they saw many years ago and they do not understand two basic things about the NFVSA that (1) while we hold and curate the films, they are not ours and (2) we cannot “just put it on DVD for them”. I have also gotten into trouble when clients request cricket and rugby matches from the 1950s and 1960s and then scream at me, demanding to know what the hell have I done with the entire match and where are the tapes of the live feed broadcast?
Live feeds and tapes in the 1950s and 1960s? That is a giant FACEPALM moment, I can tell you. Those moments are few and far between but you sometimes would like to murder those people but then you remember the golden rule of film archiving client services: DO NOT KILL THE CLIENTS NO MATTER HOW ANGRY THEY MAKE YOU BECAUSE IF YOU KILL THE CLIENTS THEY CANNOT RETURN AND THEY CANNOT RECOMMEND US TO ANYONE.
On a more positive note, there is an almost certainty that The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery has been located in a private collection in Ireland – on 8mm film, no less – but me being who I am and what I am – a cynic by nature and having Thomas as my middle name – I will believe it when I see it. More and more films, long believed lost, continue to be located on an ever-increasing basis.
As we enter the seventeenth year of our virtually bloodless delivery from the maniacal insanity of apartheid, the NFA‘s treasure trove stored in its’ vaults is seeing the light more and more often and its’ existence and activities are becoming more visible on a daily basis: great news for a person such as myself who has dedicated the last twenty-two years of his life to preserving the film history of Africa’s oldest film industry.
Long may this continue: viva South Africa and viva South Africa’s film industry: 111 years young this year.
