1. INTRODUCTION
There has been a clear increase in interest in Jungian film studies, as the rise in publications on Jung and fIlmincrease.Hauke and Lockley (2011, p. 11), themselves key figures in the promulgation and practice of Jungian reflections on cinema, additionally cite the work of John Izod (2001; 2006), John Beebe (2008), Terrie Waddell (2006; 2010) and Greg Singh (2009) in this regard. The publications Jung and Film, in two volumes, offer stimulating critical readings of films and open up numerous possibilities for how the viewer’s affective, intuitive and intellectual responses to a film can be explained. Put differently, these publications offer provocative perspectives on how - broadly stated – a Jungian approach to film can illuminate not only one’s understanding of a specific film, but also of one’s various reactions to the film.
In presenting a contribution to Jungian film studies, especially insofar as correlations between psyche and politics are concerned, this chapter provides a Jungian critical reading of Oliver Hermanus’ Afrikaans film Skoonheid (2011) by way of positioning the film as a healing fiction. In this sense, a healing fiction is a work of art, a film, that presents and provokes a psychological reading of and response to the film in its capacity to transform the viewer in some way by presenting a narrative that thematically addresses processes of transformation (or the frustration and even failure thereof) pertaining to specific characters. The discussion of healing in reference to Skoonheidtakes on a dual purpose: to address the frustrated healing for the main character, and to illuminate possibilities of healing for the viewer engaging with this film. Skoonheidwas awarded the so-called ‘Queer Palme’ at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.
In providing the following critical reading of Skoonheid, the authoris cognisant that no text can control how it is read and responded to, and this chapter does not suggest an intentionality on Hermanus’ behalf as filmmaker. In addition, it does not assume the existence of a homogenous audience of like-minded individuals; instead, the author suggests how a hypothetical viewer may use a Jungian framework to experience the film as a healing fiction, especially as the film sharply comments on and draws energy from South Africa’s apartheid past in which the Afrikaner male enjoyed a particular position of socio-political privilege. The author will discuss selected Afrikaans films in this regard, taking my cue from Elsaesser’s (2005:19) position that I write about a film that provides some sort of symptomatic revelation about itself or that serve as some kind of cultural event.[1]
2. APARTHEID’SCULTURAL SHADOW: REFLECTING ON DAMAGES
Reflecting on the country’s volatile past, De Kock (2004) explains that South Africa “has been a fertile ground for foundational binary inscription, a place of blatant dualisms, such as civilised and savage, settler and indigene, White and Black, oppressed and privileged, rich and poor” (p. 18). In grappling with remembering, processes of selection (inclusion and exclusion) and a palimpsest of binaries, De Kock (2004) suggests the notion of the seam as “the place where difference and sameness are hitched together – where they are brought to self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms” (p. 12). This notion of the seam, and its possibilities of self-awareness or negation, offers a point of entry for a Jungian approach to psychologically make sense of what De Kock(2004) is describing: that apartheid was a psychologically destructive system to all involved in different ways, and that living in post-apartheid South Africa requires a psychological shift to make sense of, amongst new social order constellations,individuals’ new statuses in a changed political landscape. Joseph Henderson first introduced the notion of the cultural unconscious – as opposed to the collective unconscious – in 1984. The cultural unconscious is a valuable notion; as Izod (2006, p. 18) explains, “it points to an intermediate zone from which unconscious or semi-conscious arousals disturb and sway consciousness but without the potentially cataclysmic consequences which can occur when contents irrupt from the collective unconscious”. So damaging was apartheid to individuals’ psyches that Olivier (2009, p. 53) recounts how a psychologist acquaintance was required to ‘normalise’ black political prisoners to accept and inscribe themselves into the absurd socio-political realities of late apartheid South Africa.
The damaging effects of apartheid on the black majority poplation of the country was culturally negated by the specifically Afrikaans-language films, particularly thosein 1960s and 1970s which were thematically and aesthetically unremarkable. Botha (2012, p. 12) observes that South African films made during this time, during apartheid, were aimed at conservative Afrikaans audiences. These films presented their audiences with idealisations of their culture, and did not offer any critical interrogation of Afrikaner identity. South African films that did address the socio-political tensions of the time were either banned outright, or did not receive distribution. A lack of distribution meant that those films were not screened in public spaces for public consumption, except possibly at certain film festivals (2012, p. 13). There was much emphasis on racial purity, religious values and moral norms at the expense of an exploration of what Botha (2012, p. 51) refers to as the “national [collective] cultural psyche”. There were exceptions; some Afrikaans filmmakers, such as JansRautenbach, did attempt to make sense of a white Afrikaans-speaking collective’s shadow side. Rautenbach’s film JannieTotsiens(1970), for instance, “uses a mental institution as an allegory of South Africa society under apartheid” (Botha 2012, p. 66), where the apartheid government is represented as an asylum (2012, p. 68). Seventeen years later, Fiela se Kind (KatinkaHeyns, 1987), an adaptation of the acclaimed novel by DaleneMatthee, addresses issues of racial exclusion and oppression without the melodrama and sentimental excesses of earlier Afrikaans cinema (Botha 2012, p. 139). Modes of sentimental excess and melodrama are explicitly associated with the type of escapist filmmaking endemic to 1960s and 1970s Afrikaans language cinema. Seldom did a film peel the veneer of social coherence away to reveal a deeply divided South Africa.
In attempting to address the complex socio-political dynamics of a changed South Africa, contemporary South African cinema – to use an umbrella term that broadly groups together the varieties in South African film output – has provided some important cultural outputs, such as the Oscar nominated HIV/Aids drama Yesterday (Roodt, 2004) and redemption drama Tsotsi’s (Hood, 2005) Oscar triumph for Best Foreign Language Films at the American Academy Awards; as well as the short films of Zola Maseko (such as 1994’s The Foreigner, about xenophobia). As these films indicate, after South Africa’s official transition to democracy in 1994, South African films would often address key socio-political issues of the country’s past that inform its present (gender and crime in Jump the Gun (Blair, 1996); individual and collective redemption in Forgiveness (Gabriel, 2004);andcoming to terms with land and patriarchal legacy in Promised Land (Xenopolous, 2002). Fu and Murray (2007) explain that “[w]ith the end of apartheid, film-makers have struggled with finding their voice to express the ambiguities, contradictions, and nuances of the ‘new South Africa’” (p. 127), and the films mentioned above foreground these ambiguities, contradictions and nuances. Shepperson and Tomaselli (2001, p.42) point out that although South Africans experienced a socio-political situation where a minority group exercised great influence on public and private life of all citizens, there was a “long tradition of radical resistance to this situation”. This resistance contributed to the eventual fall of white Afrikaans minority rule. South African cinema speaks to this tradition of resistance in the films of, among others, Andrew Worsdale, but Afrikaans film since 1994 has been silent about its privileged political origins. As Flanery (2009) asks, “why has South African film failed to come of age? Why are its products so often either aesthetic, narrative, critical, or commercial failures, both within South Africa and in the global marketplace and mediascape?” (p. 239).When I substitute “South African” with the more specific “Afrikaans”, Flanery’s (2009) comments on failure ring even clearer. Afrikaans-language cinema is far less invested than South African cinema in general in addressing socio-political issues in narratively and visually innovative ways.Indeed, most post-1994 South African films reflect the interests of a wide variety of filmmakers concerned with the plight of certain minorities, such as the marginalised children of Zulu Love Letter (Suleman, 2005),while the homosexual female characters in The World Unseen (Sarif, 2008) predate Skoonheid’s homosexual tensions by about four years. South African filmmakers were and are dissecting and representing numerous issues – psychological, economic, historical, social - associated with South Africa’s political transition and the tempestuous aftermath of democracy. As Botha (2012, p. 203) states, marginal communities finally have a cinematic voice in post-1994 South Africa by way of socially conscious documentaries, narratives that confront the legacy and impact of apartheid on contemporary South Africa and a renewed interest in the possibilities of oral storytelling for and in cinema. Even in a more generic form such as the gangster drama of Jerusalema (Ziman, 2008) or the ruralised romantic comedy conventions of White Wedding (Turner, 2009), these films would consistently speak to key issues of race and class. Absent from this type of cinematic political engagement is Afrikaans film, which was the dominant film in South African cinema for decadesand now exists as a minority cinema located in slippery understandings of so-called post-transition cinema, transnational cinema and even problematic notions of third cinema, or the cinema of the developing world.In Olivier’s (2009, p. 147) view, it is necessary to discuss images because it has ‘Everything’ to do with the socio-political realities of contemporary twenty first century existence.
Contemporary Afrikaans cinema does not include or reflect me in its narratives of exclusivity (Liefling (Kruger, 2010) and Platteland(Else, 2011)), scatological excesses (the films of Willie Estherhuizen, starting with LipstiekDipstiek(1994)), romantic road trips as negation of political accountability (Pad Na Jou Hart (Smit, 2014)) and conservative nostalgic necrophilia that yearn for a space and time that is either dead and past (StuurGroeteaanMannetjies Roux (Eilers, 2013)), or that in all likelihood never existed in the first place. As such, these films occupy a specific position in Afrikaans consumer culture, as Oliver (200p) explains: “[T]he dominant culture, globally, is consumer culture, and it has proved to be unparalleled in the efficacy with which it anaesthetizes ‘consumers’ – the masses of spectators … absorbed in the imaginary world of soapies – in this way effectively dulling the potential for revolt that still exists in the recesses of people’s psyches” (pp. 169-170).
While most Afrikaans-language films suggest an uncomfortable mix of denial and amnesia about the South African past and the psychological price paid by all involved, Elsaesser (2009) uses the term “double occupancy” rather than similar notions like ‘diversity’ or ‘multi-culturalism’ to “signal our discursive as well as geopolitical territories as ‘always already occupied’” (p. 50).Elsaesser (2009) positions double occupancy is a “condition of possibility, as the conditions of entry, even, into the European political space” (p. 51). Double occupancy thus facilitates a presence in a designated political space. In elaborating on Europe’s political situation, Elsaesser (2009, p. 51) views Europe as doubly occupied by its history (including the Holocaust and more contemporary historical events) and its colonialist activities and consequences. For Elsaesser (2009, p. 54), double occupancy can also be an aesthetic strategy. There has been “a shift from realism versus illusionism towards a different pair of alternatives: from claiming the real to performing presence”, which requires “a different way of thinking about cinema’s relation to fiction, to the mode of ‘as if’” (Elsaesser 2009, p. 55).Insofar as an Afrikaans film such as Skoonheidperforms presence, it acknowledges its position as one of double or even triple occupation: that is occupies a political space both as film text and in its depiction of South African spaces such as ruralised Bloemfontein and tourist hub Cape Town. Double occupancy here also evokes multiple psychological ‘presences’ (some known to the ego; some repressed) that are articulated in response to the process of socio-political transition following 1994. In addition, Elsaesser (1989, p. 254) also refers to Baudrillard’s notion of retro-scenarios to refer to history films. In Baudrillard’s view, “contemporary societies, locked into political stasis, nostalgically dream and imagine through the cinema – the traditional refuge for myths – a time where history still involved human agents and individual victims, forces and causes that mattered and decisions involving questions of life and death” (Elsaesser, 1989, p. 254). Such films invent a time of agents and victims clothed first and foremost in fiction. What Elsaesser describes here by way of Baudrillardis a complex system of film fictions that often revert to nostalgia and victimhood, and may inhibit processes of healing (where healing indicates a coming-to-terms-with the past in the socio-psychological and political present).
Much of Afrikaans cinema’s ideological and structural components can be traced back to the work of Hans Rompel, a film critic and prominent figure in South African film history, who articulated specific ideas about what Afrikaans cinema should look like. Says KeyanTomaselli (2008): “Rompel claimed that Afrikaners reflect their true God-given orientation in film” (p. 136); for Rompel, there is only a single reality, “a God-given set of conditions, a pre-existent state of being, uncluttered by ideological (or even theological) interpretations” (p. 136). In keeping with the idea of a God-given state of privilege, Rompel argued that Afrikaans film could resist cultural influences seen as volksvreemd(alien) and volksgevaarlik(national threats) (2008, p. 136). Originally, an Afrikaner cinema was established as an intervention to resist the ascendancy of Anglo-American cinema in South African cinema before World War II. For Rompel (TomaselliEckardt, 2007, p. 231), a successful Afrikaner film industry would be one based on the business design and ideological template of state-controlled German cinema. In constructing such an Afrikaner cinema, resistance to Hollywood dominance was primary. Rompel was especially critical of Hollywood cinema’s role in the “capitalist system” and how it nurtured “consumer subservience” (TomaselliEckardt, 2007, p. 232). Instead of using Hollywood as a model for an indigenous film industry and culture, Rompel gathered ideas on how an Afrikaner cinema should function from Soviet cinema – in particular its Eisensteinian aesthetic and documentary output - but also the Weimar Republic (2007, p. 232).
Rompel’s concerns about a ‘pure’ Afrikaans cinema in South Africa translated into the creation of loyal white Afrikaans audiences to sustain such an industry. During the 1950s,
[t]he white Afrikaans audience for this local cinema was relatively large and very stable, guaranteeing nearly every Afrikaans-language film a long enough run to break even as long as it provided light entertainment, basically escapism, and dealt with Afrikaner reality and beliefs in an idealistic way. It meant that Afrikaners wanted their ideals visualized in these films. This idealistic conservatism was characterized by an attachment to the past, to ideals of linguistic and racial purity and to religious and moral norms (Botha 2012:43).
Two key ideas emerge from the above description of 1950s Afrikaans cinema. Firstly, financially successful Afrikaans films were films that provided audiences with an escapism and idealism removed from the socio-political reality of South Africa at that time. Secondly, this cinema is best described as conservative, given its preference for (often nostalgic) notions of ethnic and sexual purity.The contemporary Afrikaans films mentioned above do not offer healing fictions. These films are much too focused on constructions of the South African past, the idealisation of a pastoral Eden that fails to meaningfully psychologically engage the viewer. In addition, these films are populated by redundant symbols that have become, in my view, psycho-culturally out-dated and, much like Afrikaans films from previous decades, aesthetically unremarkable.
3. SKOONHEIDAS HEALING FICTION
Kenevan (1999, p. 9) suggests that a film audience can connect with a film on two levels: a “personal emotional” level and also an “abstract intellectual” level. “The organised information of the film gives coherence to the viewer’s mental energy; in a reciprocal way, the film is brought alive – ‘amplified’ by the energy from the spectators” (Hauke, 2014, p. 163).The core role of narrative is at the heart of human expression, of the implications the narrative holds for those who encounter it (Hauke, 2014, p. 125). A film must be an emotional experience in order to move its audience. Here, ‘move’ refers to a film as an emotionally moving experience as well as an experience that moves the individual viewer towards a psychologically introspective engagement that in all likelihood differs vastly from viewer to viewer. Movie watching is a personal (individual) and mass (collective) experience, an experience that invites, as Hauke (2014, p. 4) explains, comparisons to church and psychotherapy. In this sense, the experience of watching a film can be an engagement with processes of transformation located in a contained space (2014, p. 4).
Botha (2012, p. 203) positions post-apartheid South African cinema as a cinema of marginality, where issues and mechanisms of marginality are exposed and the marginalised (black women; homosexual filmmakers) have a filmic voice.Oliver Hermanus’ film Skoonheid(2011) offers a disempowered, disenfranchised and self-less middle-aged Afrikaans white male, Francois (Deon Lotz), as the main character. At his age, Francois would have seen the effects of apartheid and benefitted from its policies. In addition, he would have been present for the transition from apartheid to democracy. At his eldest daughter’s wedding, Francois sees the young, charismatic and handsome Christian (Charlie Keegan) from across the room. Francois is evidently infatuated with the younger man, an infatuation absent from his marriage to Elena (Michelle Scott). His domestic life is composed of routine and habit; a swimming pool that needs cleaning, a timber mill that needs to be restocked.
Figure 1: Francois cleans the swimming pool in Skoonheid(2011). Screenshot by author.
Against the backdrop of these environments, the film makes Francois’ sexual desire for men explicit in a MSM (men-who-have-sex-with-men) scene set at a farm house on the outskirts of Bloemfontein, an all-male group sex scene that seems mechanical and rehearsed.[2]