How Much Does Anyone Need to Know About Eugène Marais?’ the Guest and Die Wonderwerker

‘How much does anyone need to know about Eugène Marais?’ The Guest and Die Wonderwerker

Lesley Marx

Abstract Comparing and contrasting two film versions of Eugène Marais’s life by means of close analysis, this article explores the relationship between film and history, where history includes both that of the film-makers and that of the referential world they seek to represent, in this case specifically history as it is embodied in the enigmatic figure of Eugène Marais – naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict – whose protean nature enables individual film-makers to appropriate those aspects of his life and persona that mesh most creatively with their own creative and ideological sensibilities. Thus the contexts out of which Ross Devenish and Katinka Heyns develop their respective projects are examined, taking note of the key roles of their collaborators, writers Athol Fugard and Chris Barnard. Central to the discussion are the choices and effects of casting (especially drawing on the work of Jean-Louis Comolli’s idea of the ‘body too much’), genre (the art film and domestic melodrama) and formal aesthetic (realism, formalism and heritage cinema). The shifting forms of representation of Marais speak to the multiplicities of his own identity, the shifting forms of his own biography.

Brits is a town west of Pretoria and the Hartbeespoort Dam, blessed by fertile lands and rich platinum deposits. It also boasts a primary school attended a few decades ago by director Ross Devenish, who recalls his first teacher, Mrs Gibson, a Catholic who could not divorce her husband and whose relationship with Marais’s only child, Eugène Charles, was thus very discreetly conducted—her house was at the bottom of the koppie, his room at the top (Interview). An awareness of Marais senior was strengthened by the young Ross’s father talking about The Soul of the White Ant (Marais, 1970, first published in 1937 as Die Siel van die Mier) and adult conversations about the naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict who had shot himself on Gustav Preller’s farm at Pelindaba, east of the Dam, just three years before Ross was born. As a schoolboy, the future film director had also been fascinated by the photograph of Marais included in the prescribed anthology of Afrikaans poems: ‘I was haunted by the photo,’he remembers. ‘The eyes were so disturbing, I used to turn the page quickly.’ Leon Rousseau, author of the magisterial biography Die Groot Verlange (1974, translated by him as Dark Stream in 1982),1 notes how witnesses offered varied descriptions of those eyes: ‘… it seems that Marais’s eyes could change colour, from grey or light blue to violet’ (2012 [1982], p. 464). It might be argued that this undecidability is merely one token of the resistance of Marais to easy readings, be they verbal or filmic. Sandra Swart (2004a) describes the changing fortunes of Marais’s image through the twentieth century: from pioneer of the Afrikaans language early in the century to popular historian of Afrikaner heroism in the 1930s (and himself the object of such mythmaking after his death by champions of Afrikaner nationalism such as Gustav Preller), to ‘lonely rural genius’ (p. 861), championed by Robert Ardrey in the 1960s (a version of Marais she sees portrayed in The Guest, p. 863) to Afrikaner dissident, honoured by

1 Jack Cope and André Brink in the 1970s and 80s. During the 1990s she writes, ‘Marais was once again re-deployed as an icon of alternative chic, anthologized in a collection of “Green poetry”, as an early “ecological poet”’(p. 866). Swart’s key concern is to show how these varying interpretations of Marais are the product of their specific socio-political contexts and the particular interests of the authors of these images. In another article she debunks the image of Marais as miracle doctor, arguing that where C. Louis Leipoldt was indeed a qualified medical practitioner who ‘despised quacks, Marais was one’ (2004b, p. 253). Most recently, Stephen Gray has offered a detailed and iconoclastic account of the ways in which the Marais myth has been served by his editors and by his own skill as ‘a confidence-trickster’ (2013, p. 63). So the lens on Marais shifts.2 It is clear that The Guest and Die Wonderwerker, separated by 35 years, are also the products of both their times and the vision of their film-makers. In his acerbic review of The Guest, J.M. Coetzee prefigures the sceptical view of Marais and notes sardonically:

In Eugène Marais, South Africa came its closest yet to producing a Genius. Think of Marais’ qualifications. He had deep-set piercing eyes. He loved many women. He lived in wild and dangerous places. He was addicted to an exotic drug. He wrote poems about death and thought morbid thoughts. He was mainly unhappy and finally slew himself. (1977, p. 4)

Analysing the nature of Genius as product of European Romanticism, Coetzee remarks on ‘two contradictory attributes’:

On the one hand he is the prophet, the man of godlike vision (hence the piercing eyes) who foresees the future.… On the other hand he is a child, a weakling, fleeing from a reality which more solid people easily sustain, into a world of illusory gratifications, obsessed with death rather than getting on with the business of living. (1977, p. 4)

This scepticism does not inform the two films devoted to Marais, yet neither do they offer us an uncomplicated portrayal of ‘Genius’. While Die Wonderwerker betrays its more hagiographical intent in its title, the narrative and generic framing of the character displaces him from centre screen. In the more complex case of The Guest, however, conventional expectations of, even, sympathy for the protagonist are repeatedly unsettled. Many years after his boyhood in Brits, and having completed his first collaboration with playwright Athol Fugard, Boesman and Lena (1973), Devenish was looking for material for a second collaboration. He read The Soul of the White Ant and the idea of making a film about Marais was born, significantly helped on by Rousseau allowing him to read the manuscript of his biography of Marais. Devenish was struck by the chapter called ‘Die Hoek van die Kraal’ (the corner of the pen): ‘This is it’, he thought, ‘this spells it all out’. He adds, ‘It was an emblematic episode. It set the pattern for the rest of his life’. As the basis for a film, it also had the advantage of being ‘complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, a crisis and

2 the hope of recovery, showing both the dark and the light of Marais’s life’ (Interview). It might be argued, as Rousseau does, that the pattern had been set many years earlier and ‘consolidated’ with Marais’s sojourn in the Waterberg on the farm Rietfontein, the focus of the Barnard/Heyns production, Die Wonderwerker (2012). According to Rousseau:

This pattern was as follows: Marais always lived with friends (sometimes with family) or with people he could befriend—usually a family with children—and almost always in a stoep room, outside room or rondavel. He very seldom had a permanent job, he seldom worked hard and sometimes not at all. He would devote a great deal of time to observing nature. To an increasing extent, he veered away from criticism of his morphine addiction, which restricted his social intercourse to those he had known for a long time, strangers who knew nothing about him, and especially children. Finally, he always had to find actors to play four crucial roles in his life: the supplier of morphine; his host; an influential patron; and a protégé—a young person or animal—to whom in turn he could give his love and care. (2012 [1982], p. 249)

It is unsurprising that the two films centring on Marais should adapt sequences from his life that conform to the pattern described by Rousseau. Following Devenish’s comment, they accord so well with the conventional expectations of the well-made script: an inciting incident, conflict, turning points, crisis, climax and resolution; even, with some creative licence, Aristotelian unities of place and action, and a sufficiently contained time span to sustain tension and cohesion. While the episodes have much in common, and do endorse Rousseau’s view of a pattern in Marais’s life, they also represent different stages of that life: between 1908 and 1926 lie nearly two decades of achievement, abortion and, crucially, addiction. The choices made by the two sets of film-makers are initial indicators as to the different view they will take of Marais’s life and the different ways in which source material will be transmuted through translation, elision and invention. As Robert Rosenstone (2014), points out in History on Film/Film on History, the same life may yield entirely different biographies (or biopics):

Biographer and film-maker both appropriate some of the trace details left by a life and weave them into a story which has a theme that infuses meaning into the days of their subject. The resulting work is ultimately based less on the raw data than on that data incorporated into a vision created by the literary (or filmic) skills of the biographer. That is why very different bios can be made about the life of the same individual, without any new data having been found. (‘Telling Lives’)

Writing of the evolution of biography in the early 1900s, Hermione Lee makes the point even more strongly: ‘The biographer could be the equal, not the respectful or awe-struck disciple, of the subject. Biographers were self-conscious; biography might even be seen as a form of autobiography’ (2009, p.72).

3 Applied to film-makers, one might ask, then, what was it in Marais’s experience at Steenkampskraal that appealed to the two men who shaped The Guest? Marais had already fired Devenish’s imagination. Moreover, travelling back to Brits to meet Eugène Charles and discuss the project entailed going back in time to his own memory of a school that was, says Devenish, ‘a horror’, where a Dominee would treat assemblies as an opportunity to instil virulent racism. Moreover, it was a dual-medium school with only two classes for English speakers, who were bullied and beaten merely for being English (Interview). (That Marais was fully bilingual with a great passion for the English language, and the culture that it opened to him, even while hating British imperialism and championing Afrikaans, speaks its own irony.) Having returned from a burgeoning TV career in England in order to engage in creative activism in South Africa, Devenish’s work with Fugard in the increasingly politically fraught 1970s necessarily meant working in both realist and allegorical modes to dramatize and illuminate themes of alienation, oppression, suffering, despair and sometimes a hard-won, if temporary and provisional, hope. These are Fugard’s themes too—in both Boesman and Lena (1969, filmed in 1973) and Marigolds in August (1980). Thus, too, The Guest. Moreover, Devenish and Fugard both sought forms that would adequately serve the narrative, eschewing the orthodoxies of structure, slick pacing or protagonists with whom audiences are invited to identify. Devenish’s comments on the perfect shape of ‘Die Hoek van die Kraal’ serve merely as a starting point. The film adapts this shape in ways that both complicate and defy it. There are instructive points of connection between The Guest and David Bordwell’s very helpful essay on the art film. For example, the subtitle of the film, ‘An episode in the life of Eugène Marais,’ immediately signals both the kind of ‘biopic’ this will be—not a sweeping cradle-to-grave epic, but an interlude from the life which may be read as significant in its minute details, emblematic of the broader life and as a window into the times of its narrative and its production. Bordwell argues that the art film is notable for its ‘loosening of causal relations’, prompted by ‘realism and authorial expressivity’ (1979, p. 718). Realism may refer to both the legacy of Italian Neorealism and the later emphasis on ‘psychologically complex’ characters. He notes that ‘whereas the characters of the classical narrative have clear- cut traits and objectives, the characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals … lacking a goal, the art-film character slides passively from one situation to another’ (p. 718). These films, he proposes, have a ‘broken teleology’ that focuses on the ‘biography of the individual, in which events become pared down toward a picaresque successivity’ and where the pithy maxim operates: ‘Slow to act, these characters tell all’ (p. 718). Art films thus strive for ‘both objective and subjective verisimilitude’, the latter leading to cinematic experimentation that breaks down the barrier between illusion and reality (p. 719). The author/auteur has much more free play in this form of cinema, suggests Bordwell, calling on the audience to ‘recognize and engage with the shaping narrative intelligence’ (p. 720). The audience would, similarly, need to be responsive to the art film’s refusal of clear-cut character motivation and closure. Wittily, Bordwell writes: ‘Put crudely, the slogan of art cinema might be, “When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity”’ (p. 721), an ambiguity underscored by the ‘open-ended narrative’ (p. 721).

4 The Guest reveals several of the features described by Bordwell as characteristic of the art film. So, for example, the assumptions that underpin J.M. Coetzee’s grumble that the episode on which the film is based ‘leads from nowhere to nowhere’ and is ‘of no inherent importance’ (1977, p. 4) appear to have more to do with classic narrative structure and miss the qualities of the film that enabled the curators of the Nantes Film Festival to describe it as follows: ‘A twilight film on the origin of pain and grief, man fighting against himself in a poetic exploration of an intense inner life, which his contemporaries cannot connect to’ (Festival de 3 Continents, Nantes, 2013). ‘A twilight film’ is a singularly effective way of describing the liminal space inhabited by both the film’s protagonist and the aesthetic choices made by the film-makers. Furthermore, Coetzee’s assertion that ‘the question we must ask is: Is Eugène Marais, as man or myth, important enough to us to justify a film about him?’ (1977, p. 4) intimates not only a question better asked of a conventional ‘Great Man’ biopic as defined, for example, by Dennis Bingham (2010, Introduction), but proposes another series of questions. Why ‘must’ we ask this particular question, and who is ‘we’? Would it not be sufficient that the episode in Marais’s life is interesting, even compelling, for the reasons proposed by Fugard and Devenish in their preface to the published screenplay (1992, p. 60): the exploration of addiction, which in Marais took the form of both a personal and an intellectual obsession, in the context of a deep commitment to living as imaginative writer and naturalist in Africa?3 Not the ‘Great Man’ biopic, then, but what Bingham terms a ‘warts-and-all’ account of one instance of the pattern that dominated Marais’s life—and from which more general insights into time, place and human experience may be extrapolated. The film is, moreover, an adaptation from Rousseau’s narrative—itself an adaptation of the ‘raw data’ of the life to which all biography is subject. Thus, multiple frames contain the human subject, mediating his ‘knowability.’4 The effects of adaptation are present in the title of the episode. Devenish recalls the Afrikaans title, ‘Die Hoek van die Kraal.’ In his English translation of the biography, Rousseau chooses ‘Cornered’ to suggest the entrapment that he sees as central to the episode and that marks the beginning of the end for Marais, who, speculates Rousseau, felt guilty for his failed relationship with Brenda Steyn, sought relief through massive intakes of morphine and finally allowed himself to be guided by A.G. Visser, doctor, poet and friend, to submit himself ‘to the harshest possible punishment’ and ‘entered the portals of a torture camp in the district of Heidelberg. The place was called Steenkampskraal, and it was to leave him with such bitter memories, that he was never to speak of it’ (2012 [1982], p. 382). The family whose home Marais enters comprise Doors Meyer (Gordon Vorster), his wife Corrie (Wilma Stockenström), their sons Doorsie (James Borthwick) and Louis (Emile Aucamp) and small daughter Little Corrie (Susan Maclennan). Fugard and Devenish take much of their material from the episode as recounted by Rousseau: Marais’s catatonic state on arrival, the desperate confrontations with Doors for increased supplies, his attempt to run away, his slow recovery, brewing of mampoer, writing, wandering over the veld, conversations with the Meyers’ son Doorsie, attempts to win the favour of Little Corrie, and the final cataclysmic regression and departure from Steenkampskraal.

5 Where the episode has its place in the larger narrative of Rousseau’s biography, however, and where we have had ample time to engage with Marais as a multifaceted figure, by turns fascinating and frustrating, whose addiction may have been the informing feature of his adult life, but who nevertheless lived a life filled with incident and productive of deeply absorbing prose and exquisitely crafted poetry, The Guest must find ways to focalize this breadth and depth of living in 90 minutes. The title chosen by the film-makers is one cue as to the strategy they will adopt. No longer a trapped animal, the protagonist has become that threshold figure, the guest, both welcome and yet a stranger in the home of the Meyers. No longer penned or cornered, he is in limbo and open to shifting meanings. Also, there will not be a clear beginning and certainly no simple resolution. The film opens with a long shot of the vast, dry, brown landscape and a road on which a 1920s motor car travels towards us. The wind whistles loudly on the soundtrack, accompanied by the notes of a violin which recur intermittently throughout the film in moods both sombre (as here) or gentler as Marais’s experiences modulate. For the rest, the soundtrack is stripped down in keeping with the visual austerity that marks all the present-day realist sequences. The first close- up reveals the character we will come to know as A.G. Visser, clean-cut, healthy, with a twinkle in his eye and a good-humoured caring manner. Next to him, his face bisected by the windscreen is the man we will come to know as Eugène Marais, small, shrunken, sullen. Of course, we may also recognize that the actors are Marius Weyers and Athol Fugard, and herein lies the first complication. Arguably, Marius Weyers with his strong bone structure and blue eyes, looks more like the Marais we know from photographs. In 1977 Weyers was a relative newcomer to the screen, perhaps most notable for recreating on film his outstanding 1971 theatre performance as Jakes, the brandy-swilling, tattooed, long-haired biker whose violence and hopeless aspirations dominate P.G. du Plessis’s Siener in die Suburbs (filmed in 1973). In The Guest he plays Marais’s loyal friend, A.G. Visser, with urbane charm, a sense of humour and a flair for comedy (a flair that would catapult him to international renown in 1980 with his performance as Andrew Steyn in The Gods Must Be Crazy) and demonstrates his exceptional range. He acts, then, as a necessary foil to Fugard’s Marais, bringing some respite to the ‘torture camp’, less of Steenkampskraal than of Marais’s own obsessed mind. Viewed in 1977, a film audience would have recognized Fugard from his performance in Boesman and Lena, a theatre audience from stage performances and from the mere fact that he was, by this stage, a widely known playwright engagé. In addition, his name appears above the title as the lead actor, below the title as the playwright and joint owner, with Ross Devenish, of the film. Viewed nearly four decades later, Fugard is the Grand Old Man of South African Theatre, with, indeed, a theatre named for him. The marriage of his celebrity status to the enigma that is Eugène Marais creates a dissonance that underscores the fact that he looks nothing like Marais. The question that I use as title of this article is the moment where we find out that he is in fact meant to be seen and experienced as Marais. Our response to Fugard in the role depends on our extra-filmic knowledge of Marais. If we know nothing or very little, the ensuing film may offer an unsparing and disturbing

6 representation of drug addiction.5 If we know something or a great deal about Marais, not least the photograph and bust of his charismatic good looks (and those eyes!), we may have some difficulty adjusting to Fugard in the role. Jean- Louis Comolli’s essay on the relationship between performer and historical referent, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much” (1978), becomes invaluable at this point. He points out that when an actor plays a fictional character, we first encounter the actor’s body, ‘the body as an empty mask’, and only gradually the character ‘as effects of this mask’ (p. 43). When, however, an actor plays a historical character, that character already exists in the world as ‘traces in images other than cinematic ones which have to be taken into account’ (p. 44). In sum:

If the imaginary person, even in a historical fiction, has no other body than that of the actor playing him, the historical character, filmed, has at least two bodies, that of the imagery and that of the actor who represents him for us. There are at least two bodies in competition, one body too much. (p. 44)

As spectators we are invited to play the game of disavowal: we know the actor is not the historical character but we want to believe in their coincidence. ‘We want both,’ writes Comolli, ‘both to be fools and nobody’s fools, to oscillate, swing from knowledge to belief, from distance to adhesion, from criticism to fascination.’ The degree of knowledge we bring to the film will affect the strenuousness with which we need to play the game in order to derive pleasure from the spectacle: ‘The more one knows the more difficult it is to believe and the more it is worth managing to do so’ (p. 46).6 Fugard’s authoritative presence in the film is seen not only in the opening credits, but in the extratextual weight of his reputation—by the time the film was made he already had 20 years of groundbreaking playwriting behind him, plays that dealt crucially with issues of class and race. Playing Marais seems a departure, until one takes into account Devenish’s observation that Fugard, for many years an alcoholic, knew about addiction (Interview). For both Fugard and Devenish, then, casting has nothing to do with creating a body as simulacrum: aside from a few props—worn-out clothes, tackies without laces—signalling poverty, there is nothing beyond the subtitle and Marais’s opening question to link Fugard to the historical figure. If we, as spectators, do have knowledge about Marais, we will need to play the game that Comolli describes: ‘The “I know very well”irresistibly calls for “but all the same”, includes it as its value, its intensity’ (p. 46). If we don’t sustain belief “in spite of”, ‘the game stops, even if the spectacle does not’ (p. 46). The stakes of the game are very high when the distinctive body of Fugard meets the equally distinctive body of Marais—and in this case, it is as important to talk about their distinctive faces, for the film depends a great deal on Fugard’s face—almost lipless, wizened, beak-nosed. Comolli observes the ‘taxing’ nature of the challenge to the filmmaker when there is a disjuncture between the image we have of the historical character and the actor, when we are acutely aware of the ‘ghost in this body’, of the paradox of ‘the two bodies which exclude each other while coinciding’ (p. 47). He

7 argues provocatively that the most interesting way for the film-maker to seduce the spectator into playing the game of belief is not to camouflage the difference, but to foreground it:

… this body will not be something automatic. It begins to count, to weigh. The self-evidence of the image of a body as a result of which it is seen without being seen, the apparent naturalness, the familiarity of the body are thwarted here.… Fiction and mise-en-scène … make this body the major preoccupation both of the character and of those surrounding him. (pp. 49–50)

Part of the power of The Guest lies in Devenish’s relentless focus on Fugard’s body, the body as still life,7 the filthy body, the body in pain, the body in flight. But lest such a relentless gaze merely objectify the body in these different modes, there is Fugard’s layered script playing off the disembodied voice-over against the body as bare, forked, suffering animal. The narrative is structured around the rhythmic recurrence of Marais injecting himself with morphine, ritualized, invariably shot in a series of close-ups. His repeatedly pierced left arm becomes the most haptic image of sordid horror, invoking the self-inflicted pain of the saints even as they seek transcendence. But over the intense physicality of these images, we hear Fugard’s undistinguished, slightly high-pitched voice and the flattened vowels of his Eastern Cape accent recounting verbatim Marais’s philosophy of life as the perpetual attempt to conquer pain and suffering. The degree of abstraction is extreme. The dissonance between calm, ruminative word and harrowing image is deeply unsettling. Voyeuristic absorption is impossible. Possibly the most difficult sequence to watch is that of Doorsie pouring scalding water into a bathtub in which Marais sits, knees apart, the water appearing to fall directly onto his genitals. The boiling water, we are told by Rousseau, was meant to counteract the pain of withdrawal (2012 [1982], p. 384). The excruciating scene dramatizes the cycle of pain within which Marais is trapped. Towards the end of the scene a close-up of Fugard’s face reveals stricken eyes staring up, mouth wide with imminent weeping, hands mechanically wiping water over his shoulders. The image is heart-rending and brings us very close to feeling an identificatory pain for the protagonist. The moment is fractured, though, by the voiceover quoting Marais: ‘There remains the question … what is it about euphoric poisons that make them so irresistible to man and baboon?… Both man and the baboon experience consciousness as something based on pain and suffering’. The diegetic voice is heard asking for ‘More [water]’ even while the voice-over offers its philosophical musings. Fugard’s face is blotted out by another bucket of boiling water. The scene plays with sound and image in complex ways to produce both a powerful visceral effect and yet to force us away from a purely affective response to Fugard’s body so that, in a version of Brechtian verfremdung, we must pay attention to Marais’s mind. From the visual realism of the bath scene, we cut to a dream sequence: Marais dressed in a red robe and fez responding to the call of the baboons. The irruption of realism by dream sequences is a second recurring motif in the film visually linking Marais’s addiction to morphine to his fascination with baboons, who seem to invest his unconscious powerfully enough to melt the boundaries between self and world,

8 unconscious and conscious states, or in Bordwell’s terms, ‘fiction and reality’. The dreams inevitably evoke the realm of unconscious desire. So, for example, the first dream sequence reveals Marais sitting naked among the baboons, eroticizing that relationship and foregrounding the ‘euphoric’ and ‘irresistible’ appeal of the poisons to man and baboon.8 Later, on being told that he is working on his ‘magnum opus’, The Soul of the Ape, Brenda Steyn (his ex-lover played by Trix Pienaar) observes: ‘Back to your baboons again’. Marais responds, ‘Back? I never left them’. The intimation is that, like Dian Fossey in this instance, his first love is for the primate, and also that which is primal.9 Love of the baboons, love of nature: these loves define Marais as much as his addiction, although the generalized love of nature poses particular problems. Where Marais may find connections between man and baboon, there are, after all, irreducible differences between man and nature more broadly. He tells little Corrie that his home is the land, a home onto which Fugard’s script projects a reading of Marais himself: ‘You must learn to see and love it for what it is. Don’t ask it to be something else. It’s dry but not dead. There’s a lot of life down there.’ There is an echo in this scene of Marais’s request to Tant Corrie earlier that he be not judged, but also a foreshadowing of the final scene where he walks into the veld accompanied by the voice-over reciting his poem Die Lied van Suid- Afrika, with its grim description of the nation as brutal mother, at worst cruel and destructive, at best indifferent. Human experience of the land is inescapably mediated by human history. An adaptation of Emily Lawless’s ‘After Aughrim’, the poem also brings into play the peculiar history of the Afrikaners. If Ireland, in Lawless’s poem, speaks to her sons after the crucial step forward for British Protestant power,10 then South Africa speaks to her children after the colonizing Boers have themselves been colonized by the English. As the colonizers colonized, they are at a two-fold remove from the land. Always, as Rodrigues insists in Chris Barnard’s Mahala, ‘You remain a lodger.… You remain a lodger. As soon as you set foot here it’s over for you. This here is Africa and Africa is merciless. Africa feels sorry for no one’ (2009, p. 15). To fight and suffer and bleed for the land does not make it yours, does not make it home.11 Marais’s dual allegiance to things European and to being an Afrikaner in South Africa (and, after all, he was in Europe while the Anglo-Boer War was being fought) places him in an especially uneasy no-man’s- land. The ending of the film is an end only in the sense that resolution or closure are the intimations of death. In terms of the narrative, Marais’s departure from Steenkampskraal rhymes with his arrival. He is no better off than when he crossed the threshold of Steenkampskraal and the repetitions that mark the film (the injections of morphine and the dream sequences, but also the confrontations with Doors and repeated pleading for more pills) forcefully recall the Freudian concept of repetition as an expression of the desire for death.12 The film climaxes with a fugal play of sound and image that brings the crisis of the relationship between the family and Marais to breaking point. We cut between images of the family attempting to conduct its evening Bible reading and images of Marais, his face distortedly reflected in the window (that same window in which the dream image of the baboon has repeatedly appeared). The verses from Isaiah excoriating drunkenness and debauchery are read by Doors with increasing volume and passion, in competition

9 with Marais’s hysterical laughter and strident pastiche of quotations from ‘Diep Rivier’, De Quincey’s Confessions and William Shakespeare’s Othello, all thematically linked by the urges of desire and the urge towards death. Here Marais ‘shores fragments against his ruins,’ in a kind of inversion of the attempt earlier in his conversation with Andries Visser to coordinate the fragments—again from De Quincey and, this time, Visser’s satirical poem about the Voortrekkers, ‘Lotos Land’— into a coherent shared debate about the unruly indulgence of the senses as opposed to moderation, the debate, arguably, between death and life.13 The apparently life-affirming sequences in the film centre on interactions with the family who represent the sanity of communal daily routine, seen in the repeated image of family meals, Bible reading and prayer. Yet each of these encounters is shadowed by implicit critique of Marais. When, for example, in a companionable gesture, Marais gets the still working again and makes mampoer, the sequence bears one of the strongest imprints of adaptive alteration (perhaps motivated by Fugard’s own history of alcoholism). Where Rousseau tells us that Marais would turn to brandy as a way of dealing with a deficit of opium and would sometimes, according to Doorsie, ‘have a whole bottle at a time’ (p. 385), Fugard instead creates a scene between Marais and Doors the elder, where he self-righteously denies ever having been a heavy drinker: ‘I don’t mean to start now’. Doors pleads with him to ‘make allowances’. This scene is rich in irony, with Marais (especially as his lines are spoken by Fugard) coming off a very poor second to his host. Selling bottles of mampoer to the farm workers also makes for very uncomfortable viewing, not alleviated by Visser’s amused tolerance and comic approval of the vintage (‘Unmistakable – Steenkampskraal 1926!’ he laughingly exclaims). So, too, irony attends Marais’s sympathetic conversation with Tant Corrie about the family’s suffering during and after the Anglo-Boer War. While the scene enables a useful glimpse into the backstory of the Meyers and recent Afrikaans history more generally, it concludes with Tant Corrie’s request that Marais forgive her men for not being ‘gentle’. By this stage, after the chaos he has inflicted on the family, surely the need for forgiveness is all Marais’s. Indeed, the suffering of the family under the tyranny of Marais’s need is one of the most moving aspects of the film. These moments are understated—a simple cut to the still listening face of Tant Corrie as Marais argues with Doors, or a slow pan across the listening faces of Louis, Doorsie, their little sister and their mother who tells Little Corrie to go outside as the voices become louder and we cut to a scene of growing violence between Doors and Marais. A shot on Little Corrie’s resentful face tells much of the damage being done to this child. After Marais is brought back from his attempted escape and locked in his room, there is another cut to Tant Corrie, who looks across at each of her men, slumped exhaustedly around the kitchen table. The geography of the house is such that there is no escape for the family: if Steenkampskraal is a ‘torture camp’, the torture is inflicted as much on the family as on Marais. Devenish and Fugard have by no means produced a film that proposes Marais as a ‘Genius’ (Coetzee) or a ‘lonely rural genius’ (Swart). Rather, this is a formally innovative, multi-layered investigation of a tormented, self-pitying (‘I can’t help myself’, he tells Tant Corrie at one point), often petulant man who is addicted to morphine physiologically, intellectually and, thanks to De Quincey, aesthetically.

10 He is also a poet in love with nature who reveals a capacity for, at least, attentiveness to people. He disappears into the veld at the end of the film. ‘How much does one need to know about Eugène Marais?’ is as open-ended as that final image … which is not the final word. That belongs to the title that tells us Marais killed himself 10 years later ‘suffering acutely again from withdrawal symptoms’. The adverb recognizes the pattern of repetition that the film dramatizes and that shapes the deathly desire emblematized in the syringe or the shotgun. The bleakness, both visually and verbally, of this ending is in counterpoint to an earlier flashback depicting Marais’s joyous inhabiting of the Waterberg, an episode that Chris Barnard and Katinka Heyns choose as the focus for their 2012 adaptation ofMarais’s life, Die Wonderwerker. The title of the later film indicates the radical differences between the approaches of the two teams of film-makers: not the later, anguished Marais, but the younger man (now played by Dawid Minnaar) energized by the world of the Waterberg. In ‘Road to Waterberg,’ Marais calls this ‘the mystery region of my boyhood’, ‘that wonderland’, ‘the ideal theatre of manly adventure, of great endeavours and the possibility of princely wealth’ (1984, p. 1203) and he describes an Adamic moment reminiscent of Scott Fitzgerald’s imagining of the sailors’ response to their first sight of the New World:

I remember that when I emerged from under the cart tent I was caught by a sense of vastness which held me breathless for a moment. It seemed as if we stood on some mighty projection thrust out into the heavens and that below us the rim of the sky dipped all round. (p. 1205)

Die Wonderwerker presents this vista intermittently as lush background, as context for Marais’s rambles and, on one occasion, offers an image of him gazing across the landscape while the voice-over of Jane Brayshaw (Anneke Weidemann) tells us they could never get inside his head. The first-person point of view of Marais’s text thus yields to either the omniscient view of the camera or the point of view of Jane, whose voiceover, whose own life story shapes our experience of Marais and who bookends the film with her encounter with Marais years after the Waterberg episode. Marais as a mystery whose powers of mesmerism and healing produce awe in the Van Rooyens and the community is one version of him that speaks especially to the concerns of Heyns as film-maker. In a TV profile on her (Bravo/Kyknet, 2013) she speaks of the magical elements always present in her films and tells of her attraction to the qualities of song in Marais’s poems as well as his interest in the paranormal, his affection for children—and fairies. Indeed, we see similar elements in little Annie, a kind of wood nymph of the Knysna Forest with her musical bottles in Fiela se Kind (1988). We may also recall the fabulistic qualities of the eponymous Klara Viljee as she moves a sand dune and dances on the beach in Heyns’s second film (1992), and the centrality of the clown and his healing qualities, presented as a kind of magic in the significantly named Paljas (1998). Marais’s mesmeric healing of Hessie van Deventer (Sandra Kotze), his hypnotizing of the ape and his temporary success in transforming Jane’s broom into a dance partner continue this thematic strain in Heyns’s work, of a piece with her declaration of love for The Wizard of Oz which, she tells HuisgenootTV (2012), she watches once a year. She notes especially

11 the appeal of the land beyond the rainbow to which we can all aspire—rather than the debunking of the wizard as charlatan (or Sandra Swart’s ‘quack’). So, too, Heyns wanted Marais’s piercing eyes to feature and had Dawid Minnaar use blue contact lenses.14 Minnaar, like Fugard, bears scant resemblance to Marais. That was clearly not the issue—the meticulous attention to costume, his elegance and his own charm as an actor (seen in the early Fiela se Kind) convey the charisma necessary for the role as conceived by Barnard’s script. He is not a body too much, nor, indeed, a body foregrounded, partly because he is a body carefully framed and distanced either by voice-over, by several scenes where he is the (absent) object of intrigued conversation, by heritage attention to period detail where display displaces narrative,15 by the conventions of nature documentaries, or by the generic pressures of melodrama. Thus the film announces the mystery of Marais not only through Jane’s smitten voiceover, but in gossipy scenes such as that between Maria (Elize Cawood) and Alice (Amor Tredoux), who confides, ‘Ek het hom net een keer gesien. Maar ek het so aan die bewe geraak, ek kon nie ’n woord uitkry nie’ (‘I saw him only once, but I shook so much, I couldn’t get a word out’). Later, Maria and Mevrou Hotine (Rika Sennett) deliberate in alarm over Marais’s ‘medicine’. Shifting perspective, we also see Maria and Gys (Marius Weyers) marvelling at his power over people and animals. When he is not the object of curious, perplexed or admiring discussion, Marais is presented as spectacle (as in the instances noted above: Hessie’s recovery, Jane’s dance with the broom, Marais mesmerizing the ape). This strategy of distancing sustains the aura of Marais as, indeed, ‘Genius’, but renders him less than interesting as a complex human being. Marais the addict is also framed carefully to camouflage horror and pain. We do see him sweat; there is one scene of him curled up on his bed in pain (but framed by soft white lace curtains and splendid mahogany furnishings) and there is one very fleeting glimpse of his damaged arm, but his addiction is largely used as an opportunity for him to have urbane conversations with Ebrahim Rabat (Vaneshran Arumugam) in a richly furnished setting, with a hookah as centrepiece, or as a plot device to move along the drama with Maria. For, after all, as Heyns says in an Expresso TV interview (Shorey 2013), the film is a love story and eschews the darker side of Marais’s experience. Moreover, in response to Naomi Meyer’s question for Litnet16 about how much of the film is fiction and how much really happened, she argues that if one had to limit oneself to facts, there would be neither historical novels nor screenplays: ‘Jy moet die hiate maar met jou verbeelding en gesonde verstand invul. Dit word dus historiese fiksie’ (‘You need to fill in the gaps with your imagination and common sense. Thus it becomes historical fiction’). Her view is that there is enough evidence to suggest that Maria van Rooyen felt more for Eugène Marais than mere attraction and that he fell in love with Jane as yet another avatar of his dead wife and had considerable power over her. ‘Vrugbare teelaarde vir enige verbeelding’ (‘Fertile soil for any imagination’) she concludes. Of course, how individual imaginations will fill those gaps will differ. The film confines Marais’s nine years in the region to his experience on the farm Rietfontein and his interactions with Gys and Maria van Rooyen, one of their sons (Kaz McFadden) and one of the adopted Brayshaw sisters. Rousseau’s

12 biography gives a fuller account not only of the Van Rooyens and the terrible losses they suffered during the Anglo-Boer War, but also of the varied periods Marais spent on the farm and the range of activities he engaged in while in the region, as well as the increasing intensity of his addiction. It is a given that a film adaptation will need to engage in what Rosenstone (2014, ‘Telling Lives’) summarizes as ‘condensation, alteration and invention’, but in Barnard’s script the greatest of these is invention, in turn determined by his generic choice of domestic melodrama. Dennis Bingham (2010) observes that ‘biopics are presented as the stories of individual real people, not as the latest entry in a genre. Thus, the frequent consternation that results when a spectator finds him/herself confronted with generic conventions in a film about an actual person’. In a related comment, Rosenstone (2014) eloquently notes that ‘the notion of a moment in life as a turning point is a dramatic idea, not a historical one’. The turning points in Die Wonderwerker are, in fact, dictated by the family’s story, the drama is theirs, not Marais’s. Rosenstone might approve.17 The film offers two stories in effect: on the one hand, we find out about Marais the naturalist, poet, healer and teacher of a breathlessly adoring student with whom his relationship offers an affective entry into the world of the film. On the other, we watch the story of a family falling apart. Marais’s presence and effect on Maria acts as a catalyst that brings about the final climactic confrontation. Why the family is falling apart is never dramatized. We enter the film at a point where Gys and Maria scarcely have a civil word to say to each other, Maria’s sotto voce sniping abut Gys’s ‘lack of balls’ making it clear where the key problem lies for her. Her chilly treatment of Jane is also present from the start. Gys’s interior world is never explored. It is immediately clear from Jane’s opening voice-over that women dominate the narrative, but at the expense of, rather than in egalitarian counterpoint to, the male point of view. Chris Barnard, in an earlier incarnation, was one of the compelling figures of the Sestigers and produced such unnerving tales of terror as ‘Die Lang Kat’ and ‘Die Gog’ (in his collection Duiwel-in-die-Bos: Verhale 1963–1968 [1968]) as well as novels such as Mahala (1971), an engrossing exploration of angst and alienation that engages in a sophisticated and unsentimental play with time, colonial anxiety and (male) existential consciousness. With his screenplays for Fiela se Kind and Die Storie van Klara Viljee he demonstrates another string to his bow: gentler, more accessible and ameliorative stories that respond to Heyns’s imaginative world. Paljas, predating Die Wonderwerker by over a decade, also takes as its catalyst a ‘wonderwerker’, the androgynous clown, Manuel, whose ‘magic’ has, by the end of the film, restored the love between estranged husband and wife, effected a budding romance between their daughter and her swain, restored speech to the young son traumatized by the family dysfunction and enabled the entire community to share in the dance. Notably Marius Weyers is called on to play the gruff, insensitive husband emasculated by a failed career on the railways, a sexually frustrated wife, and children who have grown emotionally further and further away from him. The only difference between this and his role in Die Wonderwerker is that the latter finds him older and even more gruff. Where Aletta Bezuidenhout’s worn wife, repeatedly resisting the overtures of the local Lothario (played by Ian Roberts), yearns for

13 colour and joy in Paljas, Elize Cawood as Maria van Rooyen is called on to play a gravel-voiced, embittered, plotting, duplicitous bully whose overtures to Eugène Marais become increasingly rash until the excess of her final urgently whispered speech to him, where she tells him she would have left everything to follow him. The speech fits the cliché of the needy scorned woman but, given what she knows of his addiction and his material insecurity, seems wholly implausible. Nevertheless, the film’s interest lies in the effects of Marais on a relationship that has broken down completely: Maria either castigates Gys for not working hard enough or mutters sarcastic asides about his sexual inadequacy.18 She does tell Marais how lonely she gets, but if this moment is meant to win our sympathy, it is countered by others where she pries into Marais’s belongings, aggressively drives her bargain with Marais about parcelling out his drugs, and lies about both. She is brusque with Jane and pathetically jealous of her, ignores her son’s sexual harassment of the young woman and reveals consummate hypocrisy in regard to her own sexual needs, practising what amounts to blackmail of Marais. That Elize Cawood turns in such a fine performance exacerbates the lack of sympathy for the character. And yet, when Adriaan, her son, challenges his father and accuses him of having nothing but two fists, it seems we are meant to sympathize with her and to see Gys as the root of the domestic problem.19 His role is largely reactive (to his wife’s bitterness, to the invasiveness of Marais’s charm, to Adriaan’s harassment of Jane), or responsive (to Marais’s promise of finding tin or gold, which finally yields nothing, or to Jane’s distress). He never, until the final confrontation, initiates the action. The triangular relationship between Marais, Maria and Jane privileges the younger woman. The still of Jane and Marais dancing graces both the DVD cover and that of the published screenplay. Her voice-over leads us into the film and punctuates the narrative all the way through until she brings us back to the beginning. The narrative is thus shaped in the first instance by a (young) woman’s gaze (literally at the start as she looks at Marais seated on a bench under a tree and later as we are encouraged to experience his actions through her wondering, admiring eyes) and by women’s desire—Jane’s and Maria’s. Where Maria’s desire is desperate, angry and manipulative, Jane’s is presented as that of a blossoming, innocent adopted child, not quite at home in her world, much as Marais is a guest and whose outrage at the intrusion of Maria into his room and private possessions is too easily countered by her insistence that the house is her domain, hers the authority. Thus Marais and Jane are leagued against Maria, notably when they conspire to terrorize her with a snake and are seen chuckling delightedly in the wake of her fear. The suspense of the romantic narrative (and the imperative of melodrama) centres on whether or not Marais and Jane will be united at the end and overcome the obstacles placed in their way (Adriaan’s voyeurism and tattletaling, Maria’s jealousy and vindictiveness).20 In addition, the film offers us both de rigueur scenes of the lovers rambling across the veld—blue mountains in the background, grasses swaying, baboons frolicking—and encounters that heighten the tension between them. Thus we see them recite poetry together in his bedroom (Marais quotes Rumi); Jane falls off a horse and needs to be held and soothed by Marais (watched gimlet-eyed by Maria); Jane, becoming increasingly flirtatious and precocious, tries to make Marais ‘confess’ that the lines of poetry she finds

14 in his notebook were written for her;21 Jane and her broom are ‘magically’ transformed by Marais into dance partners, interrupted by the rasping sound of Maria’s voice, a scene that prefigures the moment of the real dance to the strains of the music played by the patients camped on the farm seeking Marais’s now- celebrated healing powers. This scene climaxes in a chaste kiss at Marais’s door, watched, of course, by the glowering, glassy-eyed Adriaan. The lurking boy is naturally present when Marais responds to Maria’s summons to feel her chest, touch her, recognize her as a woman (a sequence foreshadowed by the much less anxious one, where she lustily straddles a prone Marais in order to inject him: the sexual inversions are hard to miss). The necessary crisis takes place at the dinner table, the emblem of family communion, here the focus of truths that must be told, not in the interests of Marais’s life, but in the interests of restoring harmony to the family. It is here that the tropes and structure of melodrama are most fully on display: the battle lines are drawn between (gendered) polarities; family secrets will be revealed; the apportioning of innocence and guilt will take place. The plot is driven not by Marais, but by a dysfunctional family where sexual repression is rife. Gys’s repeated expressions of feeling marginalized and rejected erupt in a command that Adriaan tell all that he has seen. Marais excuses himself from the scene while the family takes centre screen: Adriaan hedges, Maria lies and Jane is heartbroken by what she hears of Marais’s purported double dealing. Gys and Adriaan have the dominant voices in this scene. Both Maria and Jane are forced into defensive positions. If the focus of the film has been powerfully on the women’s stories, at this point they are superseded. Gys and Adriaan emerge as the focus of pathos, Gys because his emasculation seems complete, Adriaan because he declares his love in vain (his past obnoxious behaviour towards Jane seems to be excused at this point and later he will also be given the role of ‘speaking truth to power’ when he bravely and eloquently confronts his raging father). To be fair, while melodrama is understood by Linda Williams, following Peter Brooks’s seminal work (1995 [1976]), as a mode of excess where ‘moral legibility’ is attained through the ‘assigning of innocence and guilt’ (1998, p. 59), the shifting moral spectrum in Die Wonderwerker does reveal a tentative play with the expectations of the mode. In addition, by the end of the film melodrama’s nostalgic desire for what Christine Gledhill calls the ‘Edenic home and family centring on the heroine as the angel in the house and the rural community of an earlier generation’ (2002, p. 21) has been only very partially achieved in the cautiously affectionate gestures of Gys and Maria towards each other. Adriaan is nowhere to be seen and Jane is left weeping at the side of the road as Marais drives off in his buggy, in one of the film’s inventions that most explicitly reveals how Marais’s experience is subordinated to that of the family: according to Leon Rousseau, his addiction and attempts at withdrawal had taken such a toll on his health (and his wealth) that he eventually left Rietfontein under the chaperonage of his son. ‘My God,’ he is reported to have said, ‘I feel as if I’m escaping from prison’ (2012 [1982], p. 298). The coda to the film reinstates nostalgia, however: Marais and Jane are reunited, if only provisionally, in a reassuring image, evoking the yearning for what could have been, the dream that time could be reversed.22 It might be argued that

15 this is the burden of the film’s final image of Marais too—he looks scarcely a day older. Moreover the film’s overarching nostalgia is espoused in its heritage aesthetic: the historical period and the landscape are put on display, a dehistoricized spectacle for the pleasurable gaze of the viewer. Simply noting the dates 1908 and 1932 in titles is not enough to embed the narrative in its historical moments: shortly after the end of the Anglo-Boer War that decimated the van Rooyen family, or the ravages of the Great Depression. The voluble praise that greeted Die Wonderwerker testifies to its crowd- pleasing strengths: flawless performances, beautifully photographed, and a love story replete with dramatic suspense. In addition, of course, the film tells us fascinating things about the Genius, Eugène Marais, part of our heritage.23 There are as many ways of telling the story of a life as there are storytellers. For Devenish and Fugard in the 1970s, the story of Eugène Marais that spoke most to their creative and political moment was the episode at the end of his life, filmed with unsparing austerity, on the one hand, and with a desire to take formal risks, on the other (Devenish, in my interview with him, pointed out that he was making his film as Soweto was erupting). For Heyns and Barnard in the twenty-first century, the life of Marais continues to fascinate, but their film offers a consolatory world on the other side of the rainbow, where darkness is glimpsed only for brief moments and where a stilled romantic image seeks to erase even those moments. The closing title of their film bears scant relation to the scene of Marais and Jane nestling under a tree. Where that image brings the love story full circle, controlled by the woman’s voice, gaze and desire, we are told a version of the ending of the other story, that of Marais, the celebrated poet, scientist and genius. His suicide is elided. Where The Guest is relentless in the concentration of its singular focus, Die Wonderwerker’s bifurcated narratives yoke disparate worlds and genres together. Of course, in that very bifurcation, one might argue, lies a metaphor for the disparate lives led by the film’s titular subject.

Notes

1. I am using an edition described as a ‘special limited edition’ published in 2012. 2. While this article focuses on two films, 2005 saw the production of two utterly different theatrical treatments of Marais, and will be the subject of a separate study. Briefly, for my current purposes: Nicky Rebelo’s Prophet of the Waterberg, a tortuously wordy three hander, offers its audience much exposition and very little drama. Framed reflexively, a father, Mike, and his reluctant daughter, Edna (who shares a name with the last of Marais’s little-girl friends), camp in the Waterberg where the father hopes to find inspiration for his film script on Marais. The ghost of Marais joins them. If one knew nothing of Marais before, one would no doubt benefit from the abundant information offered by the many lengthy monologues, spoken by Mike and Marais. The attempt to imbricate the frame narrative with the disquisitions on and by Marais is intermittent and clumsy. Reza de Wet’s play, Verleiding, is, by contrast, a rich, complex and riveting piece of theatre. Here the frame is that of a monologue spoken by a professor mourning the disappearance of her favoured student, Lizelle, in the course of research on Marais that leads both professor and student into the gothic labyrinth of family secrets hidden within the Free State home of his much older brother Charles (and de Wet’s great grandfather), where Marais had frequently found comfort and care. The title of the play signals the theme of desire: of Marais for women, of women for Marais, and the continuing, hypnotic power he wields, present through effigy and image in spite of his material absence. De Wet makes use of film and

16 photography to suffuse the stage with the spectral lure of Marais, even as her play enacts her quest for the secrets of her own family. My grateful thanks to Miriam Terblanche and Antoinette Kellerman for making the unpublished text available. 3. The parodically monumentalizing cartoon by Clifford Bestall that accompanies Coetzee’s review is clever and amusing but also misses the point of the film’s treatment of Marais, although it prompts questions about ‘genius’ in relation to Athol Fugard as Marais. This casting and his performance will be dealt with below. 4. Bingham explores the issue of knowability of the subject of biopics in detail. 5. The response of one of my postgraduate students who admires the film very much, partly for this reason. 6. The challenge to believe is slightly different in Die Wonderwerker, where we have to deal with extensive imagining of events, rather than adjusting to the casting, although the sight of a photograph of the historical van Rooyens (image 37 in Rousseau, The Dark Stream [2012 [1982]]) may produce a risible effect. 7. See, for example, the montage of stills of Fugard/Marais shortly after he arrives at Steenkampskraal, evoking his extreme and debilitating lassitude. 8. Rousseau at several points notes the tangled nature of Marais’s sexuality: for example, his quest for avatars of his dead wife (2012 [1982], p. 332), his repeated attraction to much younger women and little girls, suggesting a Lolita complex (p. 198), the mix of adoration and increasing cynicism that marked his attitude towards women (p. 294, p. 303). 9. Michael Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist (1988) is a conventional biopic that unequivocally eroticizes affective links between [wo]man and gorilla in a more realist and, as Dennis Bingham (2010) argues in his chapter entitled, ‘Hacked: Gorillas in the Mist and other female biopics of the 1980s,’ ideologically muddled narrative. 10. Robert Kee (2003). Ireland: A History. 11. Coincidentally, Barnard’s novel ends with the protagonist wandering into the veld, although for Delport, at least, the mist lifts and the sun rises. The phrase ‘This here is Africa’ feeds, of course, into the stereotyping of the continent seen in Afro-pessimist films such as Blood Diamond (2006). 12. See Peter Brooks’s eloquent application of Freudian theories of repetition, articulated most notably in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), to narrative structure in Reading for the Plot (1992 [1984]). 13. The use of ‘Lotos-Land’ suggests an intertextual critique of both Afrikaner nationalism and stereotyping of the Afrikaner, given that it is, after all, the “Singer of the Suikerbosrand” who presents the poem and Marais, champion of Afrikaans who loves the English language and its literature, if not its imperialists, who listens, amused. The recitals of ‘Lotos Land,’ ‘Die Spinnerak-rokkie’ and ‘Die Lied van Suid-Afrika’ are all in Afrikaans without subtitles, posing questions about how an uninitiated audience would experience these moments. Even for a spectator who knows Afrikaans, they are dislocations, another means of refusing a comfortable viewing experience. 14. See Minnaar’s comment, ‘[D]ie blou kontaklense het my nogal ontsenu’ (‘The blue contact lenses unnerved me’) in his interview with Elmari Rautenbach, (Rapport, 29 August 2012, Available from: http://www.rapport.co.za/MyTyd/Nuus/Dawid-Minnaar-In-die-kop-van- Eugene-Marais-20120829 [Accessed 1 March 2014]). 15. My comments here and below on heritage cinema are informed by Andrew Higson’s extensive writing on the genre. See, for example, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (2003). 16. Katinka Heyns, interviewed by Naomi Meyer for Litnet, 15 August 2012. Available from: http://www.litnet.co.za/Article/katinka-heyns-vertel-van-die-wonderwerker [Accessed 1 March 2014]. 17. There are innumerable ways in which the film runs counter, in its portrayal of the family, to both Rousseau’s biography and Marais’s account in, for example, My Friends the Baboons (1939). The appalling toll on the family through the deaths of their children during the Anglo-Boer War

17 is reduced to a brief conversation between Maria and Marais, where she tells him that her husband was broken by the war. Aside from that moment and the fact that Jane is adopted, the War has no other presence in the film. Certainly the farm appears prosperous, the mise-en-scène even opulent. Gys’s lively, productive presence, Maria’s remorseless exploitation of Marais for financial gain and Marais’s own clinical reference to the two Brayshaw sisters (along with the chacma) on whom he practised his experiments in hypnosis to test their sense of taste, smell and hearing (The Soul of the Ape, 2006, pp. 133–137) have no place in the plot as devised by Barnard. 18. An amusing moment in Rousseau’s biography offers a very different take on the couple. Eugène Charles recalls visiting his father on the farm: ‘One night a blood-curdling sound awoke me.… It was a kind of lament which I had never heard in my life before. Only later did I realize that it was Oom Gys and Tamaria who were singing hymns in their bedroom before retiring’ (2012 [1982], p. 252). 19. In 1991 Weyers and Cawood starred in Manie van Rensburg’s clever, funny Taxi to Soweto as a younger and much more charming version of the Van Rooyens: Horace du Toit is wrapped up in his work at the expense of his loving wife’s needs. The taxi to Soweto changes everything for them and they end up in a happy clinch at Satchmo’s nightclub. 20. The conventional melodramatic structure is described by Annette Kuhn as ‘enigma- retardation-resolution’ (2002, p. 339) and operates affectively even if we know that the historical Jane did not get her man. The film’s ending will fudge this. 21. According to Rousseau, Gustav Preller found the lines in Marais’s desk at the Land en Volk offices seven years after his beloved wife Lettie had died (2012 [1982], p. 170). 22. See Linda Williams (1998, p. 73 ff.) for a deft reading of how the desire to restore ‘the original space of innocence’ informs the temporality of melodrama. 23. For a notably fulsome review, see especially Daniel Derckson http://www.writingstudio.co.za/page4174.html. Ways of reading both The Guest and Die Wonderwerker will depend, as with all varieties of biopic, on what one knows about the subject, as Comolli and common sense tell us. Friends and relatives of mine have in all cases thoroughly enjoyed Die Wonderwerker, either because the story is engaging, or the acting excellent or it offers a fresh window on the world of early twentieth-century rural Afrikaner experience. The film does not present itself as merely these things though—it names Marais as its focus and thus takes the risk of objections from beady-eyed viewers whose knowledge of Marais’s biography prompts certain expectations.

References

Barnard, C. 1968. Duiwel-in-die-Bos: Verhale 1963–1968. Kaapstad: Nasionale Boekhandel. Barnard, C. 1971. Mahala. Kaapstad: Tafelberg. Barnard, C. 2009. Mahala (translated by Luzette Strauss). Wiltshire: Aflame Books. Barnard, C. 2012. Die Wonderwerker: Die Filmdraaiboek. Johannesburg: Penguin. Bordwell, D. 1979. The art cinema as a mode of film practice. In: L. Braudy and M. Cohen, eds. Film theory and criticism: introductory readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 716–724. Bingham, D. 2010. Introduction. Whose lives are they anyway? The biopic as contemporary film genre [Kindle]. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Available from: www.amazon.com [Accessed 26 December 2012]. Bravo/Kyknet. 2013. Profiel: Katinka Heyns. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig0KPLpGhsM [Accessed 1 March 2014].

18 Brooks, P. 1992 [1984]. Reading for the plot: design and intention in narrative. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press. Brooks, P. 1995 [1976]. The melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Coetzee, J. 1977. The white man’s burden. Speak Theatre Arts Journal, 1 (1), 4–7 Comolli, J.-L. 1978. Historical fiction: a body too much. Screen, 19 (2), 41–53. De Quincey, T. 1902. Confessions of an English opium-eater. London: Oxford University Press. Devenish, R. 2014. Interview by Lesley Marx, 31 March. De Wet, R. 2005. Verleiding. Unpublished Manuscript. Stellenbosch: Department of Drama, University of Stellenbosch. Festival de 3 Continents, Nantes. 2013. Programme Notes: Available from: http://www.3continents. com/en/film/the-guest/ [Accessed 1 March 2014]. Freud, S. 1920. Beyond the pleasure principle. In: A. Richards, ed. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (translated from German by James Strachey). Harmonsdworth:Penguin, 269–338. Fugard, A. and Devenish, R. 1992. Marigolds in August and The Guest: two screenplays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Gledhill, C. 2002. The melodramatic field: an investigation. In: C. Gledhill, ed. Home is where the heart is: studies in melodrama and the woman’s film. London: British Film Institute, 5–39. Gray, S. 2013. Soul-brother Eugène N. Marais: some notes towards and re-edit of his works. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 50 (2), 63–80. Higson, A. 2003. English heritage, English cinema: costume drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. HuisgenootTV. 2012. Katinka Heyns se DVD Versameling. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMzTCfe3hZI [Accessed 1 March 2014]. Kee, R. 2003. Ireland: a history. London: Abacus. Kuhn, A. 2002. Women’s genres: melodrama, soap opera and theory. In: C. Gledhill, ed. Home is where the heart is: studies in melodrama and the woman’s film. London: British Film Institute, 339–349. Lee, H. 2009. Biography: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marais, E.N. 1939. My friends the baboons. London: Methuen. Marais, E.N. 1970. The soul of the white ant (translated by W. De Kok). Cape Town: Human and Rousseau. Marais, E.N. 1984. The road to Waterberg. In: L. Rousseau, ed. Versamelde Werke vol. 2. Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik, 1203–1260. Marais, E.N. 2006. The soul of the ape. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau. Rebelo, N. 2005. Prophet of the Waterberg: the soul of Eugène Marais. Unpublished manuscript. Grahamstown: NELM Manuscripts. Rosenstone, R. 2014. History on film/film on History, 2nd ed [Kindle]. London and New York: Routledge. Available from: www.amazon.com [Accessed 26 March 2014]. Rousseau, L. 1974. Die groot verlange: die verhaal van Eugène N. Marais. Kaapstad: Human &Rousseau.

19 Rousseau, L. 2012 [1982]. The dark stream: the story of Eugène Marais. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Shorey, S. 2013. Expresso interviews: getting to know Die Wonderwerker Cast. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=982wkvSM9y0 [Accessed 1 March 2014]. Swart, S. 2004a. The construction of Eugène Marais as an Afrikaner hero. Journal of Southern African Studies, 30 (4), 847–867. Swart, S. 2004b. ‘Bushveld magic’ and ‘miracle doctors’: an exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt’s experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, c.1906–1917. The Journal of African History, 45 (2), 237–265. Williams, L. 1998. Melodrama revised. In: N. Browne, ed. Refiguring American film genres. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 42–88.

Filmography

Blood Diamond. 2006.[DVD]. Directed by Edward Zwick. USA: Warner Brothers. Boesman and Lena. 1973. [DVD]. Directed by Ross Devenish. South Africa: Bluewater Productions. Fiela se Kind. 1988. [DVD]. Directed by Katinka Heyns. South Africa: Sonneblom Films Gorillas in the Mist. 1988. [DVD]. Directed by Michael Apted. USA: Universal Pictures et al. Die Storie van Klara Viljee. 1992. [DVD]. Directed by Katinka Heyns. South Africa: Sonneblom Films. Die Wonderwerker. 2012. [DVD]. Directed by Katinka Heyns. South Africa: Sonneblom Films. Marigolds in August. 1980. [DVD]. Directed by Ross Devenish. South Africa: R M Productions, Serpents. Paljas. 1998. [DVD]. Directed by Katinka Heyns. South Africa: Distant Horizons, Sonneblom Films, Videovision Entertainment. Siener in die Suburbs. [DVD]. 1973. Directed by François Swart. South Africa: Quadro Films. The Guest: An Episode in the Life of Eugène Marais, 1977. [DVD]. Directed by Ross Devenish. South Africa: Guest Productions. Taxi to Soweto. 1991. [DVD]. Directed byManie van Rensburg. South Africa: Toron International.

Published as “How much does anyone need to know about Eugène Marais?” The Guest and Die Wonderwerker,” South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2014): 247-264