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Re-Examining Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa

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Re-Examining Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa Re-examining Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back, Africa : Innovations and Limitations Kristin Kingsbury Smith Middlebury College Spring 2008 Introduction: Scene reflection Zachariah, a middle-aged migrant laborer from rural South Africa, walks into the frame, back turned towards the camera, and dutifully puts away folded laundry. Reaching under a pile of clothing, he discovers his female boss’s hidden bottle of whiskey and takes a couple sips. Smiling, he refills the bottle with water, turns the radio on, and dances in front of a mirror laughing; however, his employer interrupts his few moments of amusement and accuses him of drinking her alcohol, talking to her with “cheek,” and wearing her scarf instead of working. She promptly fires him for his intrusion into white society. Once again unemployed, Zachariah is subjected to the unrelenting oppression of 1959 South African apartheid. This scene occurs approximately twenty minutes into Lionel Rogosin’s anti- apartheid film, Come Back, Africa (1959), which follows Zachariah through his daily life under intense oppression. Due to the scene’s polysemy, analyses could range from discussing racism to its aesthetics, the government’s restriction of alcohol, the boss’s “white fear” of rape, or the power relations between a white madam and her black domestic worker. Furthermore, since Rogosin is an American director visiting South Africa, one could also explore how the scene fulfills his Western stereotypes. For my thesis, I am most interested in questions regarding power structures within the film: How does Zachariah assert his agency? Is his agency curtailed and, if so, by whom? How does 1 the film recreate social hierarchies? What formal, cinematic choices does Rogosin make and how do these empower or dis-empower the characters? How does Rogosin insert himself into the visuals? Does the film reinforce or disrupt South African or American dominant ideologies, like white supremacy or patriarchy? How does contextualizing the film within South African and American history help understand these ideologies? Analyzing a politically-charged, racially complex, and aesthetically creative film like Come Back, Africa is complicated because its encoded messages confront directly and indirectly, consciously and sub-consciously, power struggles over race, gender, and class. Consequently, the film is structured, both visually and ideologically, around contrasts and contradictions. Despite these complexities, academic analyses often simplify Come Back, Africa into a binary interpretation: critics either praise it for its empowerment of black South Africans or criticize it for its unorthodox craftsmanship. In contrast, I will acknowledge the film’s prevailing dominant and resistant ideologies by discussing its innovations and its limitations, refusing to categorize it as either “good” or “bad.” To film Come Back, Africa , Lionel Rogosin and his wife, Elinor Rogosin, traveled to South Africa on a tourist visa in May 1957. After months of researching South African culture and traveling throughout the continent, Rogosin decided to create an anti- racist film about apartheid’s oppression of non-white South Africans. However, the government’s restrictions on media and overwhelming bureaucracy provided major obstacles. As a cover story, Rogosin lied to government officials that he was planning a musical travelogue or an adaptation of the Afrikaner classic novel, Commando .1 After 1 Lionel Rogosin. Come Back Africa: A Man Possessed . Edited by Peter Davis. (South Africa: STE Publishers 2004), 42. 2 weeks of paperwork, interviews, and frustration, he eventually received the permits needed to allow his crew and equipment into South Africa. Rogosin then collaborated with Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi, two prominent black South African journalists, to write a minimal script that personalized the oppression of apartheid. 2 Unlike many of the later feature films about apartheid, Come Back, Africa seamlessly blends together the documentary and fictional drama genres. Shot secretly in Sophiatown and Johannesburg, the film uses documentary techniques, like on-location shooting and an attempt to cinematically represent the “reality” of South Africa. However, the film also borrows drama conventions by including a loosely-constructed, episodic, and fictional plot: Zachariah leaves Zululand to work in a gold mine outside of Johannesburg. After obtaining a work pass, he moves to Sophiatown and becomes a domestic worker in the city. However, upon being fired, he wafts through a series of menial jobs at a garage, a hotel, and a road construction crew. In and out of employment, he becomes familiar with Sophiatown’s urban culture, including illegal shebeens (bars) and violent tsotsis (gangsters).3 Halfway through the film, his wife Vinah and their children join him in Sophiatown, leading to Zachariah’s imprisonment when the couple is caught illegally sleeping together. During his absence, a tsosti named Marumu, with whom Zachariah has had previous encounters, murders Vinah after she denies his sexual advances. When Zachariah returns home, he finds his wife dead and 2 Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi were two writers for Drum magazine, a prominent newspaper in Johannesburg aimed at black audiences. In addition to contributing to the script, both writers also acted in the film, along with fellow Drum writer Can Themba. 3 According to Clive Glaser in Bo-Tsotsi , the word “tsotsi” most likely originated from the American word “zoot suit,” a popular fashion trend in South Africa thanks to Hollywood gangster films. Although the word originally referred to South African males who simply wore zoot suits, by the 1950s it also implied crime, violence, and gangs. Clive Glaser. Bo-Tsotsi: The Young Gangs of Soweto, 1935-1976 . (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Press, 2000), 47-71. 3 family destroyed; in the crushing final shots, he breaks down in emotional anguish, symbolizing the demoralizing consequences of apartheid’s oppression. During the production phase, Rogosin was under continual threat of arrest and deportation; his memoirs, published in a book named Come Back, Africa: A Man Possessed , indicate his paranoia of being watched and having his footage confiscated. 4 Although the National Party did not prevent Rogosin’s efforts, government officials immediately labeled him a communist after the film’s premier in Europe.5 Not surprisingly, the government also banned Come Back, Africa in South Africa until 1988. 6 Furthermore, this communist discourse followed Rogosin to the United States, where he could not find a distributor for the film despite its critical praise from the European film festival circuit. To exhibit the film, Rogosin took out a ten-year lease on the Renada Cinema in Greenvich Village, New York. After using his personal money for renovations, Rogosin renamed the theater the Bleeker Street Cinema and Come Back, Africa opened there on April 4, 1960, two weeks after the infamous Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa. 7 Although Come Back, Africa attracted small crowds at the Bleeker Street Cinema, critics widely applauded its perceived “realism” while questioning its sometimes stilted scenes. The day after the film’s premier, The New York Times published a review that 4 Rogosin, Lionel. Come Back Africa: A Man Possessed . Edited by Peter Davis. (South Africa: STE Publishers, 2004), 14. 5 Peter Davis. In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa . (Athens, Ohio:University Press, 1996), 56. 6 Vivian Bickford-Smith. “How Urban South African Life was Represented in Film and Films Consumed in South African cities—1950’s.” Workshop 2000: Urban Living in the 20 th Century. << http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/history/cuc/2kpapers/smith.html>> accessed 1/17/2008. 7 Nick Pinkerton. “Glasses Full of Rye.” Reverse Shot <http://www.reverseshot.com /article/on_the_bowery> accessed 26 February 2008; Bosley Crowther. “Social Dilemma Documented: Come Back, Africa' at Bleecker Street Movie by Rogosin Uses Native Cast.” New York Times. 5 April 1960. < http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9904E3D61E3DEF3ABC4D53DFB 266838B679EDE> accessed 24 April 2008 4 criticized the film for its non-professional actors but also celebrated it for its “candid, forceful and often poignant pictorial quality—its distinction of catching the image in sharp and relentless terms.” 8 Film Quarterly’s review, one of the harshest, attacked the film’s “painfully cramped and awkward scenes” that were “banally conceived and become melodramatic.” At the same time, the journalists lauded the documentary shots, including the mine scenes, and Rogosin’s attempts at conversational dialogue. 9 Time’s review, published three weeks after the premier, again denounced the film for its “stilted” acting and also suggested that the film was too “scrupulously fair to the whites.”10 Yet, the review praised the film for depicting the vibrancy of South African culture and criticizing the National Party for forcing Africans “to live, as they often have to die, like dogs.” 11 Time went on to name Come Back, Africa as one of its “Best Pictures of 1960” for its “honest, impartial, heart-harrowing study of an average Negro’s life in the black hole of Johannesburg.” 12 Thus, reviews from the film’s 1960 release focused on the film’s aesthetic limitations while still praising its anti-racist message. Since these initial reactions to the film, Come Back, Africa has steadily continued to spark academic discussions about apartheid, Sophiatown, the documentary genre, and South African cinematic history. Two historical analyses, by Ntonglea Masilela and Josef Gugler, explore how Come Back, Africa differs from previous South African films, especially for its inclusion of black South Africans into the production process.13 8 Ibid. 9 Roger Sandall and Cecile Starr. “ Come Back, Africa .” Film Quarterly. (13.4, Summer 1960), 58-59. 10 “A Camera in Johannesburg.” Time . 25 April 1960 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826322,00.html > accessed 18 February 2008. 11 Ibid. 12 “The Best Pictures of 1960.” Time . 2 January 1961. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,895245,00.html > accessed 18 February 2008.
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