The Devil You Dance With is Audrey Thomas McCluskey’s recently published study on South African filmmaking.

An associate professor of African American and African Diaspora studies in America, Audrey has compiled interviews with 25 South African filmmakers, including prominent personalities like Mike Dearham, Mickey Madoda Dube, Sechaba Morojele, Akin Omotoso, Angus Gibson, Ntshaveni Wa Luruli, Norman Maake, Teboho Mahlatsi, Zola Maseko, Teddy Mattera, Khalo Matabane, Bhekizizwe Peterson, Xoliswa Sithole, Bridget Pickering, Dumisani Phakathi and Isabelle Rorke.

Audrey has used an accessible question and answer format, which feels like you’re listening in on a conversation rather than straining to understand an academic study. Reading the book reminded me how quickly the landscape of South African film is changing, both for the better and the worse. On a positive sides, the 2004 interviews were before the likes of White Wedding, Jerusalema, Bakgat, Hansie, and Faith Like Potatoes started to prove that there is a (barely) viable financial case to be made for low-budget local content, while Isabelle Rorke and Dumi Gumbi are the only hint of South Africa’s current animation boom. On the negative side, the SABC had not yet collapsed, and it’s sad to read the filmmakers’ hopes and dreams, knowing that so many of them are still unrealised.

Still, despite showing its age and the occasional need for a South African proofreader, the study is a valuable addition to the slim body of research on the local industry.

Audrey’s introduction sketches the history of film in South Africa, reminding readers that South Africa has one of the oldest industries in the world, having generated some of the first war footage during the Anglo Boer War (1899-1902). She traces the separate development of white and black cinema before highlighting some of the remaining challenges the industry faces, like the need to confront its xenophobic and colonialist attitude towards the rest of Africa and the challenges still faced by black and especially black female filmmakers.

Throughout, the film industry’s challenges serve as a metaphor for those faced by the broader South African democratic experiment. The film industry is judged on ethical and theoretical grounds rather than its cash value, so there are warnings about the dangers of letting our stories be told by foreigners and of artists’ losing their critical voice in the over-optimistic dawn of our rainbow nation.

I particularly enjoyed the biographical insights into some of South Africa’s most influential filmmakers, like discovering that Khalo Matabane had never seen any movies or television until he was sixteen, or that Dumisani Phakati only spoke Zulu until he was a teenager; or that Zola Maseko spent two years of guerrilla warfare in the ANC army.

However, what was most refreshing about the interviews for me was their record of how much we have achieved: from learning how to accurately represent the everyday, informal use of indigenous languages to depicting urban Africa on screen for almost the first time.

As Zola says in the book, “My generation is the first generation of black filmmakers in the history of South Africa, and we are ten years old, so there is no tradition. There is no track record. We are making the rules as we go along.” Mike Dearham says, “We are in the formative stages of making films, without any sense of audience, patterns or trends. That’s a problem.” Agreed, but it’s also an opportunity, which our industry must continue to seize.
Kevin Kriedemann