Unusually for films made in English by non-Africans, Korda’s film spurns stereotypes and exoticism. Faithful to the tone of the book, it saw fear as the problem and proposed reconciliation based on understanding and compassion, and this was forty-five years before the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Lionel Rogosin’s clandestinely made film Come Back, Africa (1959) is widely regarded as a classic and perhaps the best picture of Johannesburg at the time. Rogosin, a New York-based documentarian entered South Africa as a tourist and lived in Johannesburg for almost a year before he felt ready to roll his cameras. In April 1958 he applied for government permission to make ‘a musical travelogue.’ After two months of palaver with six suspicious federal bureaus, Rogosin got his permit. He dashed off his script in less than a week, and then shot for three months with scarcely a day off.
The film tells the story of Zachariah who moves to the city and has a succession of jobs: mine worker, servant, garage assistant, and hotel waiter. His family later join him, but they face racial prejudice and institutionalised discrimination and a fight with a township thug ultimately leads to the death of his wife.
It’s a bleak film, but filled with moments of energy and joy. Its most famous sequence takes place in a Sophiatown shebeen presided over by a tuneful Miriam Makeba whilst real-life Drum magazine journalists Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane chew the fat about apartheid and white liberalism.
In 1973 Peter Hunt’s Gold was a serviceable but reactionary piece of hokum based on a Wilbur Smith novel that had a pre-OO7 Roger Moore as the mine-manager hero who has to intervene when some white industrialist baddies try to flood a mine in order to drive up the price of gold stock. Explosions, underground amputations, the calamity of an underground flood, deceit, conspiracy, loyalty, betrayal, murder, tribal dance and assorted heroics were all moulded together around Johannesburg as an exotic and fascinating place filled with financial power and racist exploitation.
1976 was a watershed year in South African and Johannesburg’s history – it was the year of the Soweto riots, the groundbreaking and influential Market Theatre opened in Newtown in downtown Joburg and SABC introduced television for the first time. Unfortunately the film industry didn’t reflect this and few distinctive films were made.
A unique depiction of Johannesburg only re-surfaced again in the mid-1980s and like the 1950s with films that were made underground and voiced opposition to the regime. Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula made in 1986 is the story of a petty criminal’s gradual coming to political consciousness; it paints an extraordinarily vivid, and sometimes frightening, portrait of township life under apartheid. Panic is a small-time crook who keeps his nose out of politics. The trouble is that politics touches everyone on the streets of Jo’burg, as Panic discovers when he is picked up by the police for questioning and dumped in a cell with a bunch of township militants, precisely the people he most despises. The film captured the sights, sounds, smells and rhythms of Soweto far more accurately than Hollywood anti-apartheid films like “A World Apart” and “Cry Freedom” and after a premiere screening at Cannes went on to play to critical acclaim abroad despite being banned for many years in the land of its birth.
A rarity that is not often seen was made in the same year as “Mapantsula” and was also banned for many years. Shot Down made by the Johannesburg group Weekend Theatre in 1986 showed Johannesburg as a bohemian melting-pot of white left-wing cabaret as it followed a state agent trying to infiltrate a subversive township performance group. Time Out magazine said, “as a slice of South African cultural resistance Shot Down is extraordinary, full of self-mocking humour, and – in bursts – exhilarating”. The film is now regarded as being of historical importance as it recorded the community of young white artists in Johannesburg’s Yeoville suburb who opposed P.W. Botha during the country’s States of Emergency.
Manie van Rensburg’s Taxi To Soweto in 1991, was the first film to show signs of the dawn of a post-Apartheid South Africa. It concerns a bored, middle-aged, over-pampered Afrikaans woman Jessica (played by Elize Cawood), her workaholic husband (Marius Weyers) and a snappy street-sharp taxi-driver Richard (Patrick Shai), whose lives become entwined despite the chasm of South Africa’s racial divide. When her car breaks down, Jessica is ‘rescued’ by Richard who in turn is hijacked at gunpoint and she is thrown headlong into “the black experience” of Soweto. Her restricted perspective of South African life changes forever.
In Taxi to Soweto there are no outcasts, nor liberal whites who fight for the rights of blacks or ultra-right-wing Afrikaner stereotypes – a human and amusing face, although critical, is given to both the black activists and the rich whites.
In 1992 Darrell James Roodt helmed the movie adaptation of Mbongeni Ngema’s Tony-Award winning musical Sarafina! featuring showstopper Leleti Khumalo in her screen debut as the young schoolgirl who through the help of her teacher (a rather contrived Whoopi Goldberg) starts to understand the machinations and evils of apartheid and its racist education system. Based on the real children’s resistance movement in Soweto in the mid-1970s the film unleashed vivid and telling images of now-archetypal facets of the South Africa political struggle: the funerals, the stone-throwing youths, policemen with teargas and so on. This township “Fame” meets a kid’s version of “Cry Freedom” displayed a wealth of heart in its showcase of amazing home-grown Jozi talent – some of whom, not only Khumalo, are amongst the city’s top stars today.
Young white left-wingers was also the focus of Elaine Proctor’s Friends in 1993, a sombre film about politics that was without diatribe and distinctly unsentimental. The story revolves around three women who share a ramshackled Victorian house in the city and who have to come to terms with the moral chaos of the time when one of them plans to plant a bomb at the airport.
Darrell James Roodt helmed a skilful remake of Cry The Beloved Country in 1995 but tackled the troubles of the new post-apartheid South Africa with his gangster film Dangerous Ground in 1997. It featured American rap-star Ice Cube as a South African exile who returns home and ends up in Jozi trying to save his younger brother from the clutches of Nigerian drug-dealers in the inner city. This was the first in what would become a particular South African and Johannesburg based genre – the crime wave movie. Less stereotypical and a more perceptive insight into the new South Africa and Johannesburg’s place within it was Les Blair’s Jump The Gun made in the same year. With the by-line “Living in hell – and loving it” the movie, which was largely improvised by an impressive roster of local talent, revolved around the tangled lives of six working class people trying to succeed in the rainbow nation. From Gugu who is trying to get a break as a singer to Clint an oil rigger who notes that “South Africa is getting very…. African” the disparate characters and separate stories are united by common insecurities as black and white try to find common ground in a society investing in a new set of rules. It’s one of the finest portraits of Johannesburg as a melting pot of sex, class and race.
Ntshaveni Wa Luruli’s Chikin Biznis in 1999 was a welcome change from politically driven stories. The engaging comedy penned by Mtutuzeli Matshoba had Fats Bookholane in an award-winning performance as a messenger at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange who gives up his job and goes into the ‘informal sector’ with the business of selling chickens as he pursues independence. Filled with Soweto street-cred and an ironic sense of humour, the film won many awards internationally and is a delightful whimsical slice-of-life piece about what it takes to get ahead in the “City of Gold”.
The same year saw a much more grim view of Johannesburg with the feature documentary Hillbrow Kids by Michael Hammon and Jacqueline Gorgen. A scalding look at the lives of street children on the streets of Joburg it tells its story without a single talking-head and no voice-over documenting the teenage children’s lives in an urban playground where malnutrition, rape and child prostitution are everyday facts of life. It’s an existence where even glue-sniffing can seem sensible, as one of the kids says, “It’s like this: Sometimes it gets very cold . . . and I like to change my thoughts”. A poignant, enlightening and heartbreaking film about the inner city and the legacy of apartheid.