From Tickets to Tsotsi Cinema’s means of representation By David Archibald King Kong’s caged incarceration in a New York Broadway show is emblematic of Hollywood’s desire to colonise and control what it captures, albeit not always successfully. In the current version, directed by Peter Jackson, the inhabitants of Skull Island – Kong’s native land – were cast from indigenous, dark-skinned persons of Melanesian stock from the South Pacific. The film transforms them into blacker than black, zombie-like savages with a penchant for cannibalism and human sacrifice. Devoid of anything other than the crudest of linguistic utterances, their voices, which foreshadow Kong’s animalistic grunts and roars, are erased, their speech silenced by an awkward mixture of narrative drive and white suprematism. Yet the illusion that cinema can be a medium for offering a voice to the voiceless holds a certain amount of currency, most notably in the documentary form. Take, for example, the work of Robert Flaherty who, when filming Nanook of the North in 1922, employed members of the Inuit community he was filming. A supposed attempt to represent the worldview of his subjects, his approach is both ethnographically questionable and not a little out of date. Contemporary documentary is more likely to chime with the sentiment of the Soviet documentarist, Dziga Vertov, who stated ‘I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.’ In Vertov’s work the cinematic apparatus is foregrounded, as in Chelovek s kino-apparatom/Man With A Movie Camera (1929). For Vertov, his subject matter was always represented from his own perspective, for Flaherty letting the subject speak was primary. What more fundamental right exists than the right to speak? But in cinema the voice of the other, the marginalised, the dispossessed, rarely speaks for itself; on the contrary, it is mediated with filmmakers often acting as cinematic ventriloquists. In 1960 the German film theorist, Seigfried Kraucer, suggested that ‘(f)ilm is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates towards it’. His words concur with the notion that all you have to do is point the camera at the right thing and the truth will reveal itself. This approach has been adopted by a strand of political filmmakers, grounding their work in a realist aesthetic as they strive to represent injustices throughout the world. It is an aesthetic apparent in the films of Ken Loach, which are characterised by a number of features that recreate a sense of the everyday experience of real life. The use of improvised acting techniques, combined with an insistence on linear shooting often enhances the original and authentic effect.
And dialogue is critical. If the universal is often located in the particular, the particular is often grounded in the language of the proletariat. In Kes (1969), the character of the young boy, Billly Casper, is authenticated by David Bradley’s broad, Barnsley accent, which, in turn, authenticates the film. ‘Bad’ language has also come to signify proletarian authenticity and is evident in Loach’s latest offering. Tickets is a portmanteau film, the first two sections of which are directed by Ermanno Olmi and Abbas Kiarostami respectively, the last by Loach. It follows a trio of Celtic fans on a train as they travel to Rome for a Champions League match. After a recent screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre, one observer commented that not all Glaswegians speak like that – objecting to the frequency of the F-word in the film. The fact that the culprits had given up their tickets to refugees was deemed secondary to the diabolical nature of their discourse. But the notion that working class characters do speak like that means it becomes an essential choice. Spectacle is at the opposite end of the realist aesthetic, thus you’ll rarely come away from any Loach film commenting on the nature of the cinematography. That’s not the case with Tsotsi, a UK/South African co-production, which follows six days in the life of the titular township hood. An aesthetically polished affair, the characters speak Tsotsi-Taal, a blend of Afrikaans, English and local languages like Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana and Sotho. Like the Kwaito music, a South African version of hip-hop, that features on the film’s score, the characters’ language heightens the illusion of authenticity. It is, nevertheless, an illusion. An adaptation of the only novel by South African playwright, Atholl Fugard, the script was written in English, translated into Tsotsi-Taal and then, at least for Englishlanguage audiences, translated back into its original language and subtitled. Previous South African films, such as Mapantsula (1988), focused on the move from criminal to political action. In Mapantsula (which translates as ‘thief’) the central character leaves a life of crime and becomes involved in the liberation struggle. Shot under the noses of the apartheid regime and smuggled out of the country, it attracted an international audience eager to protest the barbarity of apartheid. But the international success of Tsotsi suggests that the appeal of the language and songs of freedom and liberation have been displaced by the appeal of the language and songs of the gangster and the ghetto. It is a process not confined to Africa. In the last edition of The Drouth Robbie Edmonstone cited the early films of Mario Van Peebles. In 1995 Peebles directed Panther, a cinematic account of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the US whose campaign against police violence and state oppression was augmented by the
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utilisation of their democratic right to bear arms. Ostensibly an account of the demise of revolutionary black nationalism, it highlights that a liberation movement with both a voice and a gun was a formidable combination. In the closing scenes the narrator suggests that in the late sixties the CIA flooded black ghettos with heroin to depoliticise the population. Controversy still surrounds the assertion, but the retrenchment of the movement is undeniable. If black liberation has taken something of a back seat, black men with guns are still high up on the agenda, none more controversially than the gangster rapper, 50 Cent. Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the script of which is based, supposedly, 70% on his life story, has all the characteristics of a Hollywood rags to riches tale – albeit one fuelled by drug dealing and punctuated by death. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ established another type of authenticity when 30-year-old Shelton Flowers was shot dead after a screening of the film in Homestead, Pennsylvania. But the real level of authenticity comes from 50 Cent’s million-dollar voice. Shot nine times, once through the mouth, he was left with a lisp such that his pronunciation of ‘fifty’ becomes ‘fiddy’ and his slurred speech acts to authenticate both his on-stage and on-screen character. Black actors from the ghetto don’t feature regularly in Woody Allen films. His concentration on the neurosis of middle and upper class white New Yorkers secured his cinematic reputation in earlier films such as Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), but his attempts to plough a similar furrow in recent years has brought scant public or critical acclaim and he’s turned to Europe to create new work. His latest film, Match Point, is a Dostoevsky-inspired tale about Chris, a working class Irishman, who is trying to ingratiate himself with the London upper class. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chris’s lack of elongated vowel sounds signify something awry linguistically. In cinema, accent works as a handy shorthand for characterisation, thus Chris’s accent, more Kensington than Kerry, deals a blow to the film’s authenticity. Allen’s concentration on the middle and upper classes is a counterpoint to Loach’s look at the working class and the dispossessed. But whereas it seems essential to social realism that accents equate with both place and class, the absence of any political agenda makes it less essential in Allen’s films. Match Point might suffer aesthetically, but not politically. English language audiences will have more of a problem identifying the linguistic accuracy of the characters in Kairo, a Japanese film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in 2001, but only released in the UK this year. A complex, intelligent ghost thriller, Kairo is a sensory experience whose appeal is limited by the inability of the ear to engage with the register of the dialogue. It is an undeniable problem in all foreign language cinema that subtitles fail to capture the linguistic nuances of characters’ voices. Thus although subtitles ensure the basic events of the film’s narrative are clear, they also ensure that the foreignness of the film is signified both visually and aurally. While middle class audiences and occasional cineastes will have no problem
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with this, with all too rare exceptions, it is generally a killer at the box-office. Plundering the world of international cinema to remake non-English language hits presents one possible solution. Thus Pulse, an English language version of Kairo, will also be released this year. Another approach is to adapt English language novels about foreign lands. Memoirs of a Geisha, an adaptation of the novel by Arthur Golden, features a cast of Japanese and Chinese actors in a Hollywood treatment of modern Japanese history. In an increasingly post-literate era, Hollywood operates as the High Priest of History. This film is an example of Western cultural hegemony which can play fast and loose with actors and accents with scant regard for local audiences or local sensibilities. Difference is elided as Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li, and Chinese-Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh play the part of Japanese Geisha girls. Thus the actors speak English, albeit with ‘authentic’ eastern accents. The film prompted a bit of a diplomatic kafuffle, but also a rush at the box-office. A similar level of linguistic slippage was in evidence in last year’s Danny the Dog in which Morgan Freeman plays a blind piano tuner and Bob Hoskins plays a London gangster. Filmed on-location in Glasgow, aspects of the city’s architecture, most notably McIntosh’s School of Art, anchor the film geographically, but there is a distinct absence of anything even remotely resembling a Scottish, never mind a Glaswegian accent. But there is one clear verbal reference to the city when Freeman’s character walks into a local Spar declaring it to be his favourite supermarket in Glasgow, only to be met with a warm welcome from a Cockney storekeeper. Of course the film’s producers don’t worry too much about this lack of authenticity. A few disgruntled Scots won’t make too much impact at the box-office. It may even be retaliation for Sean Connery. But there is more to debates about the voice in cinema than quibbles about bad accents. The ability to represent ourselves is a cultural right, but exercising that right is rarely fulfilled. In 2003 Jonathan Caouette arrived at the Sundance Film Festival with Tarnation, a film comprising personal footage charting both his own private battle with mental health and his relationship with his schizophrenic mother. Reportedly made for less than $200, his voice was given the opportunity to speak, by himself, for himself. Edited on standard software on an Apple Mac, the film’s success disproved any idea that only professional filmmakers can make appealing documentaries. Whether this will catch on in the world of fictional cinema is another matter. But as cinema audience figures register a slowdown internationally, mobile telephones and digital technology are already being used to produce exciting short films. With the capacity to reach a mass audience only an Internet connection away, the move from consumption to production presents the possibility that increasing numbers of people can narrate their own cinematic stories. The introduction of sound in 1927 gave cinema a startling new voice. This new revolution in the means of representation could mark as significant a development.