This thesis focuses on strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from the late 1970s to 1995. It identifies and analyses two broad trends within this movement: the first developed by the organisation called Video News Services; the second developed in the Mail and Guardian Television series called Ordinary People. Two history series are analysed against the backdrop of transformations in the television broadcasting sector in the early 1990s. South African documentary film and video is located within a theoretical framework that interweaves documentary film theory, theories of Third cinema and of identity, rid working class cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. The concepts of ‘voice’ and the ‘speaking subject’ are the two key concepts that focus the discussion of strategies of representation in detailed textual analyses of selected documentaries. The analysis of three documentaries that typify the output of Video News Services reveals how these documentary texts establish a symbiosis between representations of the working class as black, male, and allied to COSATU, and the liberation struggle. The analysis of selected documentaries from the Ordinary People series highlights those strategies of representation that facilitate perceptions of the multiplicities of identities in South Africa. This focus on representations of identity is extended in analysing and comparing two television series. The strategies of representation evident in the Video News Services documentaries and the meanings they produce about identify are repeated in the series called Ulibambe Lingashoni: Hold Up the Sun. In Soweto: A History, strategies of representation that follow the trend towards representing identity as multiple are used to present history as if from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people. The thesis creates an argument for South African documentary film and video to move towards strategies of representation that break down the fixed categories of identity developed under apartheid. With policy moves for creating more ‘local content’ films and television productions there is opportunity to re-shape the documentary film and video movement in South Africa using representational strategies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and between individualised, discrete categories of identity.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Art in Dramatic Arts / My dissertation presents a textual analysis of John Greyson and Jack Lewis's South African film, Proteus (2003), which is based on archival records and plots the never-before-told narrative of an intimacy between two inmates on 16th century Robben Island. Locating this same-sex intimacy in the 1700s Cape Colony has far-reaching implications when considered in relation to the increasingly pervasive twenty-first century discourse which proposes that homosexuality is necessarily 'unAfrican'. The film's social and political commentary is, therefore, significant for how we might think about sexuality, among other subjectivities, in post-apartheid South Africa. By analysing the film's formal and thematic attributes, I demonstrate that the directors' protean approach to filmmaking has queering effects for the linear notion of time and the cohesive conceptualisation of identity that the colonial archive tends to reinforce. I suggest that commonsense notions of time, space, language and identity that structure the archive have allowed for multiple fissures to develop along the trajectory from past to present. As I show, the aforementioned process has almost effaced from official records narratives, such as the one told in Proteus, that would trouble totalising ideas about the intimate orientations of certain individuals. Therefore, I argue that while the record of this same-sex intimacy does appear in the archive, it has been subsumed by other, more dominant, narratives. The film's work, which I replicate in my reading of it, has been to queer this archive by foregrounding what has historically been repressed. In my first chapter, I argue that by enacting what Halberstam (2005) terms a mode of 'queer temporality', Proteus carves out spaces in the archive for alternative renditions of history to come into visibility in ways that demand fluidity and heterogeneity. I propose that the strategic filmic mechanisms employed in Proteus necessarily engender nuanced spectatorial procedures, which call on the spectator to engage reflexively with the film. I continue to argue for the spectator's need to be particularly reflexive throughout the dissertation. My second chapter deals with the filmmakers' strategic use of language in order to present a commentary on the material effects that the acts of 'naming' and 'categorising' have on living bodies. The final chapter explores a critical perspective which has not previously been brought to bear on the film. I examine how Greyson and Lewis construct positions for their main characters from which they may assert their subjectivity - what Mirzoeff (2011) describes as 'the right to look'.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2003. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The terminology used in segregationist discourse that South Africa is a combination of 'first world' and 'third world' elements has been appropriated from an international discourse about problems of world-wide socio-economic development. The terms are used to describe the sophisticated metropolitan areas inhabited by highly developed whites and simple, backward, isolated, rural regions occupied by undeveloped or underdeveloped blacks. However, in South Africa this dual world metaphor, which has socio-political implications that have brought great misfortune to blacks, was institutionalised by apartheid, with the consequences that blacks have expressed their resistance in what became known as the 'struggle' against the dualist system. Selected South African and African films whose themes have a bearing on such a socio-economic system are explored in this thesis. A supplementary exploration of films dealing with the theme of the 'struggle', which has become a metaphor for the 'generations of resistance', has been undertaken by means ofa detailed analysis. The interpretation of 'development' in this thesis finds a link betweeen the dualist paradigm, the perpetuation of poverty and the migratory labour system. The peculiar relationship which the 'struggle' has had with the cultures of black people, in which there is a mutual influence between the 'struggle' and the nature of these cultures, is explored in the relevant films. However, this thesis offers no solutions, but exposes a VICIOUS system which IS threatening to gain world ascendency. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die terminologie gebruik in die segregasie-diskoers tot die effek dat Suid-Afrika 'n kombinasie van 'Eerste Wêreld' en 'Derde Wêreld' elemente is, is oorgeneem uit 'n internasionale diskoers wat handeloor wêreld-wye sosio-ekonomiese ontwikkeling. Dié terme word gebruik om die gesofistikeerde metropolitaanse areas bewoon deur hoogsontwikkelde blankes en eenvoudige, agterlike, geïsoleerde, landelike streke beset deur onder- of on-ontwikkelde swartes te beskryf. Maar in Suid-Afrika is hierdie dubbelwêreld metafoor - met die sosio-politiese implikasies daarvan wat tot groot ellende vir swartes aanleiding gegee het - deur Apartheid geïnstitusionaliseer, met die gevolg dat swartes hul weerstand uitgedruk het in wat bekend geword het as die 'struggle' teen dierdie dualistiese sisteem. 'n Keur van films uit Suid-Afrika en die res van Afrika, die tema's waarvan betrekking het op hierdie sosio-ekonomiese sisteem, word ondersoek in hierdie skripsie. 'n Bykomstige ondersoek na films wat handeloor die tematiek van die 'struggle', wat metafories geword het vir die 'generasie van weerstand', is by wyse van 'n meer gedetaileerde analise uitgevoer. Die interpretasie van 'ontwikkeling' in hierdie skripsie ontbloot 'n verband tussen die dualistiese sisteem, die voortsetting van armoede en die sisteem van trekardbeid. Die besonderse manier wat die 'struggle' met die kulture van swart mense verhou, waarin daar 'n wedersydse beïnvloeding tussen die 'struggle' en die aard van die kulture plaasvind, word ondersoek in die relevante films. Hierdie skripsie bied egter geen oplossings nie, maar ontmasker eerder 'n wrede sisteem wat dreig tot wêreld-oorheersing.