Thelma Gutsche: A great South African film scholar

Abstract

While I was doing my post-doctoral studies in communication systems in West Berlin in the late 1980s, it was a marvellous joy to discover Thelma Gutsche's remarkable book, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa 1895-1940 (1972) at the Staatsbibliothek (State Library), located in the magnificent building by Hans Scharoun, close to the Berlin Wall. Those of you who have seen Wire Winder's Wings of Desire (1987) know how breathtaking the sense of space is inside the building, since a long sequence of the film takes place therein. I had the book on my desk for a year just flipping through it, totally unable to read it through systematically. The liberation straggle which was traumatising and unfolding at home just made it impossible for some of us to read any kind of books at that transitional moment in our history. While I was in my imagination doing a ritual dance around this book, totally transfixed, I received a copy of SAFTTA Journal (published by the South African Film and Television Technicians Association) which had a short obituary notice on Thelma Gutsche. I do not know why, but I was profoundly shaken that the obituary was so short and did not say much, given the mythic proportions she had taken on in my imagination. I had thought and wished that the Journal would later do a special tribute by devoting a whole issue to Thelma Gutsche. This was not to be. I think part of the significance of the book for me is that I associate it with the incredible joy and pain of the end of the apartheid era. In my mind I associate The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa with a certain kind of sacredness. I am mystified by this for I consider myself an atheist embracing the rationalism of the European Enlightenment. It may be that my putting an aura around this book disqualifies me from commenting on it, since I might be incapable of reading it critically. I have waited for nearly a decade for someone in South Africa with greater authority--since her archives are located there--to write an appreciation of the book, or even, as is fashionable to say today, a deconstruction of it. As far as I am aware, none has been written as yet. The thing that impresses one immediately upon encountering The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa is the extraordinary amount of archival work that went into its construction. This really impresses and should be an unforgettable lesson to all South African scholars of film culture: to construct a theoretical and conceptual edifice or an architectural structure based on archival material and/or concrete facts. This is a lesson worth relearning in our post-modern times. It is as though Thelma Gutsche wanted to write a total history of South African cinema from the moment of its inception, interweaving the endogenous and exogenous elements of its making. Gutsche's preoccupation with these factors seems to have compelled her to develop a very peculiar thesis in the book: for her South African cinema is not constituted by the totality of films made by South Africans on aspects of South Africanness, but rather, in the early decades of its inception, by the impinging of foreign films on the imagination of South Africans as well as the cultural and social institutions that made this possible. In other words, Gutsche approaches the making of South African cinema as a historian of social and cultural institutions, rather than a film historian of artistic processes or from a concern with the aesthetics of form. To fully appreciate what she was attempting to achieve in this book--or did achieve in it--it has to be seen in the context of her other writings. Gutsche achieved the astonishing feat of publishing six books within a six year period from 1966 to 1972: No Ordinary Woman: The Life and Times of Florence Phillips (1966); Old Gold: The History of the Wanderers Club (1966); The Microcosm (1968); The Bishop's Lady (1970); and A Very Smart Medal: The Story of the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society (1970). …