Towards a "National Cinema" in South Africa : Limits and Possibilities

This study investigated whether a truly national cinema exists in contemporary South Africa. In the process, the study theorised and provided a working definition of “national cinema” and sought to determine the limits to and possibilities of the emergence of such a phenomenon. The backdrop to the investigation is the fact that the corpus of apartheid cinema was too racially divided and unjust to constitute a national cinema. Thus, in the context of this study, a genuinely national cinema must be for the whole people, not just for some people. This implies that the putative search for a national cinema in South Africa only begins after 1994 when the new democratic constitution held out citizenship to all the people. The new constitution states unequivocally that “there is a common South African citizenship”, thus ending the racial division of South Africa on the basis of the Population Registration Act of 1950 which sorted South Africans into White, Black, and Coloured, with an Asian addendum. The original racial division of the Population Registration Act set the stage for the further subdivision of Africans into nine ethnic boxes that fitted the National Party government’s design and invention of the Bantustans. Given the divisions and injustices of the past, a discussion of what a national cinema should look like in South Africa merits sustained and systematic attention. Using the notion of film services as a theoretical framework, the qualitative study closely examined the film production value chain of four purposively selected South African feature films. A critical observation is that the post-1994 film production context has been a messy affair, characterised by a distribution duopoly (Ster-Kinekor and Nu Metro), virtual subsidy dependence (National Film and Video Foundation handouts), division in terms of budget, and the persistence of racial division. The study found that ownership and access are still far from diverse, and that the film production value chain as a whole is characterised by complexity, tension and contradiction. Given this complexity, tension and contradiction, can we speak of a national cinema? The working definition adopted in the study regards a truly national cinema as being at the heart of an emergent “national culture”, one that is intended by design to be inclusive and to transform and redress the injustices and “imbalances” of the past. The study found that South African film is in the process of becoming, characterised by broadened participation, meaningful exposure for some, and potential for growth. Nevertheless, these positive developments continue to be constrained and limited by remanent systemic problems. Past hierarchies and power relations remain, fuelling transformation-resistant patterns of infrastructure-resource ownership, industry networks, film financing, and limited industry access. Film production for those normatively described as “previously marginalised” remains a precarious affair, with financing largely dependent on limited government subsidy and uneven industry access and networks. Meanwhile, the cinematic experience for the majority of South African audiences continues to happen at the periphery. Film distribution and exhibition remain the core challenges for a transformed and sustainable national cinema in South Africa. Digital distribution and streaming hold some promise, although their overall effect on film services and ingrained practices and structures remain to be seen.