The anxiety of affect
Melodrama and South African film studies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3608265 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anton Van Der Hoven (University of KwaZulu-Natal, corresponding author), Jill Arnott (University of KwaZulu-Natal) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 162-176 |
| Publication date | 2009-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Dynamics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0253-3952 • E-ISSN: 1940-7874 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02533950802667756 |
| OpenAlex | W2070506062 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 9 |
This paper argues that the realist approach typically adopted in South African film studies reduces films to message‐bearing narratives in a way that ignores the specificity of the medium. Conversely, melodrama both as cinematic genre and as expressive register explicitly draws our attention away from issues of right representation to other neglected but essential dimensions of cinema. We argue that, far from being morally reductive or politically quietist, melodrama is a representational mode wholly appropriate to understanding the South African context including the painful stories of its apartheid past. To illustrate this broader critical point we offer an analysis of two films (of 2004) about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – In My Country and Forgiveness – which, we argue, can only be adequately understood if their uses of the visual and affective strategies of melodrama, which are consonant with aspects of the TRC itself, are acknowledged. Keywords: South Africafilm studiesrealismmelodramaTruth and Reconciliation Commission Notes 1. Although the primary concern of this paper is to argue for a broader understanding of cinema as medium than is commonly operative in South African film studies, it is also worth noting that anthropologically oriented studies have shown that the extravagant aesthetic of popular melodramatic cinema often has a more significant social impact on ordinary viewers than do the ‘progressive’, usually realist, discourses of the modernising middle class. Nandy, for example, argues that the excessive stagings of melodrama found in ‘vulgarly blatant’ (Citation1998, p. 8) popular Bollywood film speaks more directly to the lives of Indian slum dwellers than do the ‘developmental message[s]’ (p. 15) of more self‐evidently worthy films. Similarly, Brian Larkin has recently argued that the extraordinary popularity of Nigerian video films can be traced to their deployment of the ‘grandiloquent excesses of melodrama’ (Citation2008, p. 199) to comprehend ‘the social and economic insecurities of everyday life in a rapidly modernizing society’ (p. 215). Interestingly, Larkin adds that Nigerian videos work not just by ‘reflect[ing] that life but, by evoking bodily reactions, to constitute a living experience of this as well’ (p. 13). 2. This view that physical gesture rather than language is peculiarly appropriate to addressing the discursive constraints of the TRC (and, by extension, other similar projects) is consistent with the conclusions reached by Fiona Ross in her anthropological analysis of the mechanism by which women's experience of apartheid's violence was translated into acceptable testimony. Ross demonstrates that the discourses deployed in the TRC, what she calls ‘currently existing grammars’, were frequently unable to ‘do justice to the range of women's experiences of harm and the diversity of efforts to cope’ (Ross Citation2003, p. 165). For this reason she concludes that what is needed is ‘a new language of social suffering, one that permits the full range of experience, admits the integrity of silence, recognises the fragmented and unfinished nature of social recovery, and does not presume closure’ (Ross Citation2003, p. 165). Ross's own work makes it painfully apparent that such a discourse, freed from power and social constraints, will be very hard, perhaps impossible, to achieve. Our argument in relation to the films that we will discuss is that the visual can be deployed in ways that bypass the constraints of the discursive and, through the inarticulate cry or the eloquent silence of the recorded gesture, solicit empathy for the human suffering and everyday heroisms of those who testified before the TRC
Aesthetics · Art · Commission · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,19 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2021 (12) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |