Waywardness of mood and mode in Love the One You Love and Necktie Youth

Abstract

Abstract At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increasingly coming under stress, a number of South African filmmakers have been offering viewers deeply felt, often autobiographically inflected and experimental filmic engagements with the everyday, affective textures of contemporary political disillusionment. This article reads two films associated with the so-called ‘New Wave’ in South African filmmaking – namely Jenna Cato Bass’s Love the One You Love (2014) and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) – in order to map the contours of waywardness as a mood and mode of cinematic narration peculiar to a particular post-transitional South African political conjuncture. Inspired by a recent flurry of international scholarly activity on the topic of mood, my analysis of these films considers the nuances that a reading of mood bring to understanding the aesthetics of ‘wayward feeling’ in contemporary South African visual culture.