The Resonance Archive Festival is under way at various venues across Johannesburg, offering carefully curated programme of classic and award-winning films from SA and beyond.
There are little-seen classics from the archive and recent films that use the power of archive to weave layered examinations of the tangled web of recent African history.
An accompanying programme of talks, exhibitions and listening sessions explores the ways that the past still echoes loudly in the present. Here’s a selection of films to catch before the festival concludes on August 31.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s dense, provocative and exhaustive assemblage of fascinating archive material offers a complex examination of the relationships between jazz, Cold War cultural propaganda campaigns and 20th century post-independence pan-African idealism.
It is one of the most impressive and provocative documentaries of recent times. Nominated for this year’s best documentary Oscar, the film jumps backwards and forwards in time through the sticky, angry history of the Congo and the pivotal year of 1960 when the promises of Patrice Lumumba’s independence government were brutally shattered by his assassination.
Grimonprez energetically and with righteous indignation paints a damning picture of manipulation of post-independence Africa using the cloak of ideology as an excuse for hanging on to the country’s valuable natural resources — from rubber in the age of European empire, to uranium in the nuclear era and cobalt and other minerals in the electric-car and smartphone age.
Tied to this battle was the cultural campaign against communism for which the US enrolled the talents of jazz stars, including Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Nina Simone, as unwitting stooges for the promotion of American freedoms. The musicians were sent to entertain audiences in Congo and other newly independent African countries as part of an orchestrated cultural Cold War campaign to win hearts, minds and ears.
The result of this ambitious, illuminating and carefully orchestrated film is not so much a 150-minute history lesson as an essay that touches on the many interconnected ideas that we’re left to make our own conclusions from and whose consequences ring long after the credits have rolled.
How Long?
Gibson Kente, the bold, innovative “father of black theatre”, wrote his angry, mournful musical about the brutal effects of apartheid in 1973. In 1976, Kente and actor Thomas Mogotlane clandestinely attempted to produce a film adaptation of the play.
Racing to keep one step ahead of the authorities, Kente and Mogotlane were completing the final day of shooting in King William’s Town when they were arrested and the film, after only one screening at the Eyethu Cinema in Soweto, was seized and banned by the regime.
Two decades after Kente’s death in 2004 and 49 years after its banning, the film can now be shown for the first time to a new generation in all its rightfully restored glory. Featuring a powerhouse cast that includes Mary Twala, Darlington Michaels, Ndaba Mhlongo and Peter Sephuma, it’s a heartbreaking but deeply human portrait of township life that tells the story of Khulu, a grandmother trying to hold her family together, whose conflict with a local power-hungry policeman will have tragic consequences.
Told with vibrant and powerful music, it’s a multilayered tribute to the resilience of ordinary people living under terrible and extraordinary circumstances, which resonates uncomfortably with the realities of the present.
Ernest Cole Lost and Found
Raoul Peck’s Cannes-winning documentary offers a thoughtful consideration of the life of legendary SA documentary photographer Ernest Cole.
Using Cole’s own words and Peck’s poetically reflective ruminations, the film, narrated by LaKeith Stanfield, takes a sideways approach to Cole’s life in SA before he fled into exile in the late 1960s, when he published his seminal book House of Bondage, which exposed the harsh realities of black life under apartheid.
From there the film unpacks the effects of the schizophrenic nature of life in exile on Cole, who died in New York in 1990. He left behind a vast archive of unpublished work focusing on black American life in the 1960s, which was unseen until it was discovered in a Swedish bank vault in 2017. Peck makes significant use of it as he uncovers the inner world of his absent subject and considers what may have been.
Dilemma
Danish director Henning Carlsen’s 1962 feature, based on Nadine Gordimer’s banned novel A World of Strangers, was shot in secrecy in SA.
Starring Ivan Jackson, Evelyn Frank and Zakes Mokae, it’s the story of a young English businessman, Toby, who arrives in apartheid SA to take over a publishing firm with little knowledge of apartheid and its social and political realities. When he befriends the erudite and charismatic black township resident Steven, Toby begins to realise the bitter truth of the world he’s landed in, and when tragedy strikes his life and principles are changed forever.
Considered a key film of the anti-apartheid movement, it offered global audiences their first glimpse into the reality of life in SA at the time. The film won the grand prize at the 1962 Mannheim-International Film Festival.
Charlie Steel
If you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting Sol Rachilo, it’s an experience you’re unlikely to forget. A national treasure and archive of amazing stories from the Sophiatown jazz era to the present, the 94-year-old playwright, actor and all-round Renaissance man has lived anything but a boring life.
Here he stars as the titular gun-toting, take-no-prisoners private detective in Bevis Parsons’ 1980 SA blaxploitation action drama.
When an old friend’s daughter is kidnapped by a gang, Charlie Steele is called to get her back, and take down the criminals in a high-octane action adventure during which he will face the ghosts of his past, and kick butts and take names.
• The Resonance Festival takes place at various venues in Johannesburg until August 31. For more information visit www.resonancefest.org
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