The Dispossessed Through Mirrored Lenses

A NEW COUNTRY/DYING FOR GOLD

Mirror lenses in a nutshell are compact telescopes, mainly based on mirrors rather than glass and they are tools for capturing images, moving or static. 

Yet the expression speaks adequately to a mode of perception that is not refractive but reflective and that which somehow penetrates limits of our optics and involves our inner reflections on a public plane. 

Film, as a craft employs lenses to in fact “shoot and capture”, and based on this premise, any analysis of works made by self-reflective audio-visual practitioners should be viewed yet another mirrored gaze.

And over the past claustrophobic year, this becomes crucial when contemplating two radically political and aesthetically charged documentary films that left an indelible mark on my psyche, first because of their subject matters, and secondly, the filmmakers’ treatment of their narrative.

By some unfathomable serendipity, Richard Pakleppa and Catherine Meyburgh’s DYING FOR GOLD, an indictment on the genocidal practices that founded and sustained the South African mining industry, came into my radar together with Sifiso Khanyile’s A NEW COUNTRY, an intuitive analysis of the psychology of a nation disillusioned by its falsified past and fictitious present.

These two films seemed to possess disharmonic narratives, woven into a somewhat discordant nature of polarized mirrors through which each filmmaker perceived their world of the story. 

The first, giving sight of the origins of inter-generational tyranny that is the mining industry, and the second, its manifest consequences as seen through the eyes of a new generation claiming the gains of a demoralized nation.

The stories seem to continue a thread of ruin and exploitation, Dying For Gold providing a historical critique, which is the cause of the present disharmony of a new democratic dream, while A New Country questions the authenticity of freedom in light of exploitation without tangible and quantifiable reparations.

One film traces the destruction of black family units and the other traces evidence of ruined identities resulting from dislocation felt by children of the dispossessed, and together they narrate a unspoken genocidal history that continues unabated even today.

DYING FOR GOLD pivots on centralizing voices of the aggrieved and decentralizing institutional voices of exploitative enterprises and churning illicit truths of their brutal machinations that brought generations to their knees. 

A film that intricately dissects blisters of bruised bones, lungs and souls of mine workers and their families, providing evidence of inhumane nonchalance to black misery meted out by imperialist corporate voices spying from lofty offices.

Hostels are visibly designed like prisons to house men who volunteered for their servitude, cramped testosterone in cubicles packed with cement bed posts under asbestos roofing.

But what becomes of their children and wives, one might ask?

A surgical display of a racist lens that viewed blacks as sub-human, which is the dominant view the affluent white minority held when devising schemes of dispossession of land and possession of black bodies is boldly provided through clinical statistical data provided through audio archives of secret meetings and correspondences.

Through aerial shots of mining infrastructure, giving an air of observation from above, not interrupting the dignity of those denuded by poverty and rampant disregard for human sanctity, DYING FOR GOLD delves into intimate interviews with concerned persons whose livelihoods have been irreparably shattered.

And this perspective of invisible purveyors of power adds mystery to the blatant disdain for black masses entrenched through exploitative labor practices.

***

I constantly wonder why the urge to view the two films felt imperative, and after thoroughly engaging with their subject matter from the vantage point of a people steeped in disparate poverty resultant from well-sustained inequalities.

In Dying For Gold, voices of parents who felt the brunt of dispossession and lamentations of those herded to migrant labor camps are prominent narrators of the effects, while inversely in A New Country, voices echoed through lips of latter generations of those dispossessed as living victims of an ongoing imperialist project that leaves black folk disoriented by perpetual servitude.

 

In Dying For Gold are slovenly bodies with maimed dreams speaking innocently of their shattered present lives, in A New Country their children analytic of the slave purgatories that sundered their familiar bonds.

Like two mirrors facing each other, the films reflect two generations facing each other’s tainted realities, and the consequent disorientation that eclipses basic morality. 

The two films, viewed as mirrored lenses on a history unresolved posit pivotal social discourse on bare and dilapidated walls of the oppressed, exposing their oppressors’ intentions for exploitations, the naiveties of the oppressed as well as the moral campus of a world that has a disdain for black folk.

(These thoughts are still simmering and evolving.)

Both films are startling in their own way, dealing with equally vital subject matter, the past and its impact on the present, gazed upon by eyes confronted by a vast fabric of external opinions.

Each theme as treated by these films metastasizes into indiscriminant tales of urban alienation together with rural suffocation, seemingly occurring in unobstructed continuity and similitude. 

When I always engage Khanyile, there is always a prudence of fervor about matters close to his heart, such as the black condition within a milieu of social discrepancies characterizing the modern age, and this is visible in his documentary films.

There are plenty of diverse issues addressed by his recent meditative documentary A New Country, which he admits having “drained and extracted all optimism I had for this country”.

 A young filmmaker making a mark on a growing compendium of contemporary voices in continental cinema, he remains perennially relevant, using his craft to become a best channel imaginable for the urgent questions we have today as a society.

Not cluttered with personalized details, the narration speaks of a method of distilling a vast array of opinions into a coherent impulse, paced through galvanizing shots and edits, all woven into rhythm by sublime sonic interpretations of moods.

And with an intriguing crop of minds speaking on contentious issues related to identity, sexuality, economic freedom versus equal access to mineral wealth and the colonial legacy of neo-imperialism, A New Country is a brave collection of thoughts by minds who are proprietors of a diseased legacy.

Although it poses divergent opinions in harmonious sequences of intentionality, the film, unintentionally I suppose, often feels like an academic dissertation from multiple trajectories speaking from a single vantage point of those begrudged souls vindicated by public evidence.

This is not a terrible thing when one accepts the inextricable continuity that belies all struggles assailing this disillusioned generation of freedom’s children, for even though occupying different socio-economic strata, a commonality of ruined lives is omnipresent.

Dying For Gold on the other hand, while becoming a filmic witness to the treachery of conditions underground and aboveground, exposing various deceptive techniques used within the mining industry’s propaganda machinery, its use of archives and old films of the time explicitly testifies to the exploitation, prejudices and utter contempt for future generations.

The intonations of cold commentary juxtaposed with approved images by the powers that be, are haunting reminders of the disregard for human dignity that influenced and characterized all adopted policies of a tyrannical apartheid regime, as well as its repercussions into the future.

These two films will go down in our memories as a dare for a generation of activists, who require adequate ideological grounding in order to confront all organized exploitation with eloquent dissidence.

And as I hope that Sifiso Khanyile has mustered his faith in the trajectory our new minds are geared t guide the country, I wonder if he has changed his mind after allowing truth to excruciate his person for the sake accountability to the past.

Catherine and Richard are active in this collectively continued struggle for reparations for the mineworkers, with those fathers and mothers who shared their stories being among a vast majority now relegated to obscurity of rural existence, discarded like used tools and forgotten by globe-trotting profiteers.

And it is my hope that these documentaries travel far and wide to townships and squatter-camps, mine hostels and churches, schools and taverns, in order to sensitize our communities about a ceaseless assault on the livelihood of the poor and disadvantaged.

It is when artistic practice bends to the whispers of those rendered voiceless, when film speaks in the jargon of the maimed, with them and on their behalf, that is when film BECOMES that which is not only a reflection but an introspective gaze into all horrors that make up our troubled physical and inner spaces.