Featuring: Wikus de Wet, Sean Metelerkamp and Sipho Mpongo
The audience laughed uproariously and frequently throughout the opening night movie of the 37th Durban International Film Festival in the Playhouse Drama Theatre last night.
It was the kind of laughter one hears in a Leon Schuster film, when the smelly old sock of South Africa’s racial tension is aired as a grand prank – or in an episode of Jackass, where fearless young men torture themselves in the name of voyeuristic fun.
The film, a documentary called The Journeymen, was born out of the idea of three young photographers travelling 24 000km across the breadth and length of the country in a camper van to explore the state of our democracy 20 years on. It began as a photo project but at some stage director Sean Metelerkamp strapped GoPro cameras to the photographers’ chests and a film – of sorts – is born.
With barely a narrative structure in sight, The Journeymen instead drops a brick on to its story, shattering it into a million little pieces, encounters and images to offer “detail of a puzzled country”.
Fair enough, especially considering the film premiered on Youth Day with a fresh and experimental approach to film-making.
“You see, this country is next to the end of the world,” says a character early on. And with this they are off to test the waters of our post-apartheid state through their cameras and the South Africans they meet. Wikus de Wet to explore the “land issue”; Sipho Mpongo to document “Born Frees” and Metelerkamp in search of the “weird and wonderful idiosyncrasies” of the rainbow nation.
But as a survey, which it purports to be, The Journeymen is uncomfortably skewed. Mpongo aside, this is an all-white affair looking at a mostly black country. And it’s a very strange and oblivious kind of white gaze at that.
The “idiosyncrasies” foregrounded in The Journeymen include the likes of a black South African longing for the leadership of FW de Klerk; privileged white people discussing the hardship and stigma of growing up Afrikaans; rich black private-school kids who want nothing to do with their heritage and can’t pronounce their own surnames properly; white racists declaring that blacks can’t farm; coloured people shown almost exclusively as drunks …
That’s fine, if it’s part of a rounded and nuanced take on our very South African problems, but it isn’t. These narratives are foregrounded as the core of the film.
What they do is cause an audience to howl with uncomfortable laughter. But by holding it all up as a joke, black life in the film – the slaughter of a cow, the process of circumcision initiation, living homeless next to sewerage pipes – becomes a kind of a joke too.
Only Mpongo is there to hold the black narrative – and he battles. There are scenes where he is left to deal with a rabidly racist farmer in Orania who curses him with the k-word. The others just keep filming and it becomes an unpleasantly voyeuristic experience.
There is another scene where a black beggar, clearly drunk but also seemingly mentally ill, is filmed trying to communicate, his mouth rolling open. And the camera just keeps filming and filming.
Did the film makers even get his permission to trot him out as an “idiosyncrasy”? It happens far too often in The Journeymen that the pain of black life is confused with a “joke”.
And then there’s the whitesplaining. De Wet’s exploration of the land crisis is, at best, patronising and oblivious. It centres on whether black South Africans will actually farm the land properly if it is returned to them.
The only saving grace is Mpongo, who argues with him, eventually summing the issue up with these words: “I’d like to know how my life would be if I had that land.”
Cut to a dung beetle pushing dung. Cut to a drunk black man. Cut to a hippo being fed.
Throughout, The Journeymen contrasts narratives and images in epic acts of false equivalence. It is also a very masculine film with a questionable portrayal of women. And it offers a dangerous kind of Rainbowism.
There is a plea – from a white photographer delivering a poem set to guitar – to observe the spirit of us “having no colour” and all being equal. It’s a message easy to push if you’re white and privileged.
There is also an uneasy anti-Zuma narrative peppering the film; the notion that we are all united now that we hate what President Jacob Zuma stands for somehow makes us all equal. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything about our structural and financial inequalities.
Chatting afterwards, some film-makers disagreed with me, saying The Journeymen is fascinating because it shows how reckless and naïve young South Africans are, that they still don’t have the critical tools to discuss the country’s problems.
But many young South Africans do. They just weren’t interviewed in the film. This is a place of buffoonery, not reason.
Where reason prevails – like Mpongo interviewing the daughter of a slain Marikana miner – there are glimmers of hope. The Journeymen asks many relevant questions even if few are answered.
But Mpongo comes with his own issues. After the screening he confessed to being found guilty of sexual assault recently at university. Whether this will become a robust conversation here in Durban is anyone’s guess.
I’m not holding my breath. The three star photographers appeared on stage in costume – the English mechanic, the township slicker, the boer – simply reinforcing the caricatures they frame in their film.
The Journeymen screens in Durban until June 24. It will be broadcast on ED (DStv channel 190) on June 21 at 6.25pm
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