Recently the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research, based in Greatmore Street, Woodstock, funded and supported the screening of three documentaries in Cape Town and Johannesburg as part of the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival through the Chair in Culture and Technics and the Chair in Visual History and Theory.
Researcher in the Centre for Humanities Research, Professor Premesh Lalu, answered some questions on the partnership between UWC and the Encounters Documentary Film Festival.
QM: What does the partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC and the Encounters Film Festival signify for the role of the humanities in South Africa today?
Some years ago, when the English Department's Professor Loes Nas left the University, we faced a dire situation with the closure of the only film studies course on offer in the Arts Faculty. Given growing interest in film at the post-graduate level in particular in the 2000s, the CHR successfully raised donor funds to continue a film studies focus together with the English department.
Image: SuppliedToday, the documentary film class convened by Emmy Award winning filmmaker, Francois Verster, has built a programme between the CHR and the Creative Writing Programme in the English Department that has gained widespread industry support through partnerships with Cape Town Community TV and the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival.
The costs of running a programme in film is considerable, but with the newly established Iyatsiba Lab, we are able to offer a dedicated semester of training in film-making that combines the theory and practice of documentary film.
Encounters is the premiere international documentary festival in South Africa and our partnership with the festival team led by Mandisa Zitha and Tarha McKenzie has made it possible for several of our films to be featured as part of the festival programme in Johannesburg and Cape Town. This year, we have partnered in initiating a monthly public screening and discussion of important films in South Africa followed by conversations and performances with artists and scholars. This past month we screened Chaplin's Modern Times set to a musical interpretation with three musicians, Asher Gamedze, Sean Sanby, and CHR postdoctoral fellow, Reza Khota. This was preceded by a reading group on how cinema reconfigures our understanding of the co-evolution of human and technology, underscored by a wonderful text by Bill Nasson about cinema in District Six, titled, "She preferred to live in a cave with Harry the snake-catcher." In September we have a screening of the film on the life of Justice Albie Sachs followed by a panel discussion on biography in South African documentary film.
So, our partnership with Encounters affords us an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the human condition in our contemporary world and to enhance the craft of this genre of film that seems to be gaining ground locally and internationally. Documentary film offers us a textual field for rethinking our research through a different medium and reworking and refining questions of research through a medium adjacent to the more writerly forms of humanistic inquiry.
Image: SuppliedQM: In your view, how does supporting a documentary festival align with CHR’s broader mission of fostering critical thinking, creativity and social engagement?
Each year, the CHR hosts a conference on documentary filmmaking that takes place during the festival. This includes the festival's industry and partnership event that explores new directions in filmmaking, funding, archives and global currents. As partners with Encounters, the CHR's own interest in aesthetic education as a way to undo the inheritance of apartheid has been significantly enhanced. The festival is mutually beneficial, and has allowed our fellows to see how documentary filmmakers undertake processes of research that resemble their own efforts in the dissertations that they are writing. The documentary film is a site for teaching research methods through a creative process, one that works from the premise of a question to the elaboration of an argument and culminating in an edited product that conveys an interpretation. But the engagement has also broadened the way our students view the world and how they ethically think about the representations in which they are involved. As a research centre, we are constantly reminded of the need for nurturing basic research skills. The documentary film is one way to proceed.
QM: What impact do you think UWC’s and CHR’s involvement has on amplifying underrepresented voices and perspectives showcased at Encounters?
As a programme, we are focused on the way the humanities constitutes a mode of study that projects an image of the world as we see it and how we might imagine it to be. Thus, we are somewhat critical of what is called impact films, especially as these tend towards immediacy and urgency. In our perspective, the art of filmmaking is also the art of remaking the world into a liveable place -- asking not just what we are against, but what we are for.
In this sense, even when the human subjects of our films might be faced with the dire challenges of poverty and hardship, of class, gender and racial violence, we always return to the art of film as a poetics of life that can be both critical and hopeful. A few years ago, Rui Assabuji, a fellow of the centre, won the prize at Encounters for his short film, The Art of Healing. It's a beautifully crafted film about Mozambican artist Lizette Chirrime, that focuses on the hardships of her childhood and the perseverance that led her to becoming a world-renowned artist. Over the years we have learnt to work with the understanding that film can serve as an example of a generous form of life. This is a lesson that the University should take very seriously.
QM: How important is it for academic institutions like UWC to collaborate with cultural platforms such as film festivals in shaping public discourse?
The CHR has always maintained through our work in Barrydale, in the communities of jazz, and in the documentary film lab, that it will prove crucial to reconsider the training of the senses for pedagogic purposes if we are to survive our contemporary planetary crisis. This will mean learning to put the hand, movement and thought back into a relationship with knowledge. We have argued that apartheid was constituted as a programme at historically black universities to dull, if not assault the senses. We are not done with this legacy that is unevenly experienced across the landscape of higher education institutions.
Successive Vice-Chancellors at UWC have attempted to change the conditions in which we study and make our arguments. In the past, much of this education of black artists in particular was conducted through projects like the Community Arts Project or Vakalisa and Thupelo Arts Workshops. Without these institutions, we would not have defeated apartheid. Spaces like the Community Arts Project gave aesthetic form to our struggle and forged non-hierarchical pedagogical methods. We now need to orient our institutions towards holding some of this responsibility, to create spaces of interaction that would lead to qualifications amongst artists so that they are better placed to run institutions of education in their respective fields of expertise. The arts must not be seen as mere sites of outreach or benevolent gesture.
They are in fact ways of shaping how we inhabit the world by asking how we desire to be governed and how we desire to be identified. Our work in Barrydale has taught us what it means to work alongside others in a process of learning to learn, and more importantly, how to practice reason from below. You'll be surprised how much those of us at the institutional site of the University will learn. But a university such as ours must also build self-confidence in our expression if we are to achieve the goal of inventing the unprecedented. This requires a dedicated space of training and conceptualisation, which is far too often written off as unnecessary and costly in our neoliberal times. We have argued that the training of the senses will prove to be a very important resource for surviving and overcoming the despair of our neoliberal times. Rather than shaping public discourse, which I often think we are not yet properly equipped to do, we should ask what we might gain from public discourse in reformulating the way we undertake research at the institutional site of the University.
QM: Looking ahead, how do you envision the CHR’s relationship with Encounters evolving, and what new opportunities might this create for students, scholars and filmmakers?
We have developed very strong synergies and respectful relations with Encounters. We would like to advance the profile of the festival, bring the films that are selected for viewing at UWC, and encourage new filmmakers to engage the craft and find options for work in the growing film industry in Cape Town. These bonds will hopefully be strengthened with my appointment to the board of Encounters and through our monthly programming of film screenings and arts interventions at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab. Mostly, we hope to grow this programme in documentary film, which has been offered through soft-funding for the past ten years, into a formal course offering that will make full use of the wonderful skill and facilities we have available at UWC.
Film has been an important part of the change experienced at UWC. In the early 1990s, UWC ran a weekly film programme (convened through the German Department by Richard Berttelsmann and supported by students, Neil Nair, Suren Pillay and Kariema Effendi) called FLASH. It was hugely successful, with weekly audiences filling the library auditorium. A wide spectrum of films were on offer, from Djibrail Diop Mambety to Fritz Lang. Those were such hopeful times in which the moving image offered a passage out of the years of stasis of apartheid. I would like to see the documentary film programme restore some of that energy so that we offer our students a larger perspective of the world they will work in but also a larger screen onto which they can project their desires for freedom.
