Why we need film criticism in South Africa?

As someone who consumes a lot of South African content, I often get asked my opinion on how the film industry is growing. My answer is that every year as more diverse content is created, we are developing, the quality is improving and stories are becoming more personalised. This is a good thing, but I often add that South Africa cannot reach the next level of its film movement without proper film criticism, which I fear is waning.

So what is a film movement?

Masterclass.com states it is “a filmmaking trend shaped by and reflecting the time, people, culture, social norms, and political events of the location from which it emerged."

There have been numerous film movements over the 100+ years of film, but some of the best-known ones are the French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism and Soviet Montage.

For me, one of the most interesting things about studying history (of anything) is taking note of what patterns take place and how that can apply to what is happening right now. As a self-appointed pop culture scholar, I like applying this thinking to what I love. So while studying the different film movements, I looked at how this applied to the current state of South African film.

Establishing a South African film movement

It is my firm belief that we are sitting on the precipice of a film movement in South Africa (my source is trust me bro, and just my instincts tbh). Everything before 1994, was firmly within the laws of apartheid and mostly framed around the stories that the apartheid government was trying to tell (of course, with a few outliers).

Immediately after 1994, there was a lot of course correcting and stories of formerly marginalised racial groups were able to tell their stories. But the top brass were still mostly white and male, and the choices of what gets made and what doesn’t were still in their hands. Even when we look at the most successful South African film, Tsotsi (2005) which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It was written and directed by a white man, produced by a white, British man, and based on a novel by a white man.

Now, we are seeing a shift as executives are of different races, genders and sexual orientations and the stories are becoming more individualised as well as more diverse. But we are still feeling out the landscape. We are still learning. We are still developing. We are not at that next step yet.

So what can take us from the exploring period that we are at now to where we need to be in order to truly create an establishing film movement in South Africa that creates quality and renowned films? To me, it’s good film criticism.

What role does film criticism play?

Okay, let’s zero in on one of the most popular film movements - the French New Wave. The French New Wave began in the late 1950s in Paris, France and focused on giving directors full creative control of the work. This resulted in the blueprint that paved the way for modern auteur filmmaking and produced filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda and François Truffaut.

This movement was born after World War II when critics associated with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma rejected the films at the time which were referred to as the Tradition de qualité ("Tradition of Quality"). These mainstream films focused on craft over storytelling and adaptations over experimentation. It was safe. Many of the filmmakers of the French New Wave began as critics, but there were others who used their expertise to help improve the industry and push filmmakers to take risks.

The story of the French New Wave, which is often credited with changing the way films were made across the world, works in tandem with the story of film criticism. Through accurate criticism, these filmmakers were able to improve upon their work and also experiment outside of the norm.

I mean, it makes sense why Tradition de qualité was popular after the war, as people just wanted something familiar and comfortable after a difficult time. If we watch post-apartheid South African films, other than the films that were about apartheid and South Africa’s history, they tend to take the ‘rainbow nation’ slogan to heart. The stories seem to live in either an ideal where the different races didn’t mix or they all live in such unity which was not the reality of the times. But in the effort to promote a sense of ‘Rainbow-nationalism,’ this made sense.

However, now we are thirty years post-apartheid and we no longer delude ourselves into thinking things are all hunky dory. For most of us, we would like to see our experiences onscreen. The current film landscape has become more intersectional and less stereotypical. But when it comes to criticism we still seem to be tiptoeing around films, and giving more promotion and marketing rather than actual constructive criticism.

Not to say that there is no criticism, as a film critic, I’m living proof that there is. However, there is a limited amount of criticism of local content. Mainstream publications are often click-based and that means that assignments are based on either international content that is popular or the outlier local content. We are no longer living in the world of Barry Ronge, who could put all his reviews in the newspaper and people will read it all. People click on only what they are interested in and if they have not heard of the film, they are less likely to click on a review about it.

Sometimes the internet model just does not suit. Instead of reading a whole lot of reviews to decide what to watch, we wait for an aggregated score on Rotten Tomatoes or see what everyone else is talking about. And where does local content fit in when we don’t even know it exists, let alone see it on Rotten Tomatoes?

I feel like this, in turn, does not encourage filmmakers because there is not enough discussion about their content, not enough feedback, and not enough momentum to encourage them to improve or truly challenge themselves.

How can we move to the next phase of filmmaking without adequate criticism?