Playing Our Parts: An Ode to Selected Twentieth Century South African Newspaper Film Critics

Abstract

The first part of this analysis discusses film critics as historians and historians as film scholars via an examination of texts, subtexts, and contexts. The article recalls the primary contributions of some prolific film critics, offering a personal testimonial to those who had significantly contributed to the teaching of film at universities or who had contributed to popular film discourse. An autobiographical historical overview explains how newspaper and magazine film critics shaped the author’s own analyses of twentieth century South African film, with special reference to Afrikaans movies framed by the insider-outsider genre. As an active member of the film industry since 1970, the author explains the significance of key contextual events. The study focuses on the metaphorical and subtextual elements where fictional characters engaging in discursive social struggles are studied as indicators of wider social roles in conflict. The second part examines questions of language, empirical observation, and subtextual analysis in metaphorical relation to the methods used by the film critics who informed the author’s theory of Afrikaans film narrative as a social metatext. The conclusions are two-fold: first, that academics who are also critic-practitioners constitute holistic value; and second, that journalists are actually theory-based intellectuals.