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'.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/20800 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Katz, Jacqueline Lee |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (210 leaves), application/pdf, application/pdf |
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