Strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from 1976 to 1995

[摘要] This thesis focuses on strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheiddocumentary film and video from the late 1970s to 1995. It identifies and analysestwo broad trends within this movement: the first developed by the organisation calledVideo News Services; the second developed in the Mail and Guardian Televisionseries called Ordinary People. Two history series are analysed against the backdropof transformations in the television broadcasting sector in the early 1990s. SouthAfrican documentary film and video is located within a theoretical framework thatinterweaves documentary film theory, theories of Third cinema and of identity, ridworking class cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.The concepts of 'voice’ and the 'speaking subject’ are the two key concepts that focusthe discussion of strategies of representation in detailed textual analyses of selecteddocumentaries. The analysis of three documentaries that typify the output of VideoNews Services reveals how these documentary texts establish a symbiosis betweenrepresentations of the working class as black, male, and allied to COSATU, and theliberation struggle. The analysis of selected documentaries from the Ordinary Peopleseries highlights those strategies of representation that facilitate perceptions of themultiplicities of identities in South Africa. This focus on representations of identity isextended in analysing and comparing two television series. The strategies ofrepresentation evident in the Video News Services documentaries and the meaningsthey produce about identify are repeated in the series called Ulibambe Lingashoni:Hold Up the Sun. In Soweto: A History, strategies of representation that follow thetrend towards representing identity as multiple are used to present history as if fromthe perspective of 'ordinary’ people.The thesis creates an argument for South African documentary film and video tomove towards strategies of representation that break down the fixed categories ofidentity developed under apartheid. With policy moves for creating more 'localcontent’ films and television productions there is opportunity to re-shape thedocumentary film and video movement in South Africa using representationalstrategies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and betweenindividualised, discrete categories of identity.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand