FILM OF THE WEEK: Come Back, Africa

Come Back, Africa's primary intent is explicitly polemical: to depict apartheid in action and show the world what it was condoning through inaction. After premiering at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, director Lionel Rogosin couldn't find a distributor and opened his own theater in New York* in 1960. By the time the film opened there, the Sharpeville massacre—in which South African police opened fire on a crowd and killed 69 Africans—had taken place, so his message came through amplified.

When evaluating revivals of socially important documents, a standard critical fallback is "flawed but powerful," a grudging assessment inadvertently implying worthy intentions trump bad filmmaking; such caveats don't help anyone and wouldn't get at what makes Come Back, Africa interesting. A few years ago, Film Forum's revival of Rogosin's 1954 On the Bowery unexpectedly drew sell-out crowds eager to soak up his non-judgmental, flavorful portrait of the long-gone bars and bums of Bowery St.; the film's easy flow—everyday homeless tragedy between binge-drinking—is comparatively relaxed alongside Africa's urgency. The opening shots show Johannesburg as a human-free monstrous metropolis: the script specifies "steel girders of new construction indirectly suggesting a crucifixion." The soundtrack is full of shrill whistles and pounding of doors, sounds of work and police persecution that are ambient constants for South Africa's black labor force.

Before beginning the story proper, Rogosin takes in skyscrapers and crowds, with masses of men and women exiting trains in such a hurry it could be the stuff of slapstick. Throughout the narrative, Rogosin views passing laborers, and they look right back, curious but harried. New city arrival Zacharia (Zachariah Mgabi, a real laborer Rogosin found waiting for a bus) bounces from job to job, the most hypnotic of which shows real footage from 6,000 feet down in gold mines: you can't fake such palpable danger. To get even such a risky, unrewarding post, Zacharia has to assemble cubes into towers as part of a cognition test. "This image of black men mechanically assembling make-believe buildings recalls the symmetrical, towering skyscrapers in the opening sequences," writes academic Isabel Balseiros. "On the labor of these men rests the foundations of the modern city they are barred from inhabiting."

The architecture—with its sonic reminders of the people who built it but can't enter—makes an indelible impression; the narrative itself, however, feebly offers cyclical presentations of domestic arguing and white discrimination on multiple jobs. One scene towers over others: Zacharia—at this point multiple-times-fired and generally clueless—sits in on a group of South Africa's leading black intellectual dissidents drinking and arguing their way into the night. The drunkenness is real (the shoot broke up when Rogosin underestimated how much liquor was needed to keep it going), as are the sentiments, never more so than when the assorted company sneers at Alan Paton's book Cry, the Beloved Country as a weak liberal's inadvertently condescending expression of would-be solidarity for the African peoples.

It's a long discussion—causes vs. symptoms, racial fault-lines, religion vs. secular idealism—but the takeaway line belongs to journalist Can Themba, speaking of a local gangster: "Sometimes he forgets the things that he wants and he remembers only the force." Rogosin intended to make a follow-up film for the U.S.—Come Back, America—and this scene keeps domestic audiences from getting too smug, a preview of militancy and violent resistance to come. The talking points are still relevant long after the dismantling of the apartheid state, not least being the intricate debate over underlying social causes for crime and disorder vs. individual responsibility.

To fool the authorities, Rogosin used various cover stories about what he was shooting: one involved capturing street musical performances, of which there are too many in the final film. Watch for the white Afrikaaners at their most progressive: standing and conspicuously "appreciating" the native music, the height of societal tolerance. Atmosphere trumps story, here as everywhere: Zacharia's brief stint in a car-repair garage is more notable for its view of the actual environment than his unconvincing pledge to join the African National Congress. It's almost certainly the sole fictional American take on South African apartheid between 1951's adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country and the 1975 Sidney-Poitier-on-the-run action film The Wilby Conspiracy. Like any footage of a now-lost world, Africa is captivating even as it depicts a repellent society: the Sophiatown district was being torn down even while Rogosin was shooting, so the film has been a time capsule from the moment it was released, but the dissection of racial frictions haven't aged as much as we'd hope.

* A new 35mm print of Come Back, Africa screens at NYC's Film Forum starting January 27. For more info, click here.

Posted by ahillis at January 24, 2012 1:50 PM