Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler as Post-Apartheid Cinema

Abstract

THE YEAR 2007 SAW THE PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST MAJOR edited anthology of academic writing on the South African cinema since the end of apartheid: Martin Botha's Marginal Lives and Painful Pasts.1 The publishing company has since gone bust, but the volume survives and bears witness to the impressive range of cinematic enterprise that the liberation of the South African political process has given rise to. Writing in 1989, immediately prior to Ferdinand de Klerk's decision to open up the South African political process to democratization, Keyan Tomaselli was able to disparage the South African film world at that moment in history thus:While white South Africans continue with their heads in the cinematic sand, foreign producers are cashing in on South Africa's international visibility and making the kind of films that South Africans should be making.2In the brave new post-apartheid cinematic world, Tomaselli' s observation is no longer completely valid. There continue to be South African movies made with at least one eye on the prospect of international distribution, most of them employing at least one major international 'star' in a key role to add glamour and appeal, but their directors are now local South Africans. A case in point is the South African re-make of that paternalistic3 novel by Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1995, dir. Darrell Roodt), starring the African-American actor James Earl Jones in the role of the Reverend Kumalo, and the Irish actor Richard Harris in the role of the conservative white South African farmer whose son is murdered. A similar observation could be made of other recent films targeting the international market, two in particular based on books depicting the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Red Dust (2004, dir. Tom Hooper), and In My Country (2004, dir. John Boorman), all of these films featuring actors of non-South African origin.These all can be regarded as, more or less, effective cinema aimed at narrating to the wider world an 'insider' view of political and social change in the 'New' South Africa. Inevitably, however, there also exist numerous films that speak mainly to a domestic South African audience and which, for a variety of reasons, have not been released internationally: films, some again inspired by the TRC, such as Forgiveness (2004, dir. Ian Gabriel), with its totally indigenous South African cast, which works through a visual medium that at first sight appears drab, lifeless: washed-out colours that symbolize the bleakness of memory, guilt, and the desire for amnesia vis-a-vis the apartheid past. Forgiveness is concerned with the conciliatory rapprochement attempted by a former white policeman and the 'Coloured' family of one of his apartheid victims. The perpetrator visits them, desiring to confess in order to find forgiveness and a form of personal and historical closure, but the past returns in the shape of three of his victim's co-fighters, and the former policeman's personal fate is sealed. Jason Xenopoulos's Promised Land (2002), which draws heavily on Karel Schoeman's apartheid-era and differently nuanced novel Na die geliefde land (1972), also explores - again in washed-out cinematic colours - the connection between past and present, depicting a lack of desire on the part of a marginalized, patriarchal, incestuous white Afrikaner Bittereinder community for either reconciliation or redemption; their sole recourse is communal annihilation, which, at its melodramatic climax, the movie achieves graphically and bloodily.Thus, if a major part of recent South African cinema can be summarized, very crudely, in terms of an attempt to explore the often convoluted personal and communal relationships engendered by colonialism and apartheid, Rayda Jacobs's first feature film, Confessions of a Gambler (2007, co-directed with Amanda Lane), is distinctive for its sheer difference from the mainstream. In consequence, this brief article will consist largely of a discussion of what the film achieves and how it does what it does. …