Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 34
Part 2 continued
1956–1966
Looking back on my life I now realize that my career consisted of wild swings between my involvement in film or television and finding myself in some remarkably isolated parts of our planet. As I wandered around in the Namib, I became aware of the utter silence of the desert. In fact, one day I was disturbed for a few moments by a faint sound I couldn’t locate. I suddenly realized that it was the sound of my own breathing; such was the silence around me. I had never really heard it before unless I was out of breath after running around. This was a gentle rhythmic rise and fall of breath and it underlined my sheer solitude in a vast space with endless blue skies, sands stretching to all the horizons around me and not a breath of wind, except my own. Some may have found it oppressive. I found it exhilarating.
On another occasion I spent the night camping out in the desert. Apart from the surprisingly biting cold that visits deserts at night, looking up at the skies of the Southern Hemisphere was an almost magical experience. Without any clouds or manmade pollution, the clarity of the skies was staggering. It brought the stars seemingly to touching distance. If I experienced space in the daytime desert, my space now extended to the vast infinity of the entire physical universe. It was a truly spiritual moment. The southern skies reveal many more stars than in the North and I was drawn irresistibly into dreams of other planets and civilizations, both in the Milky Way galaxy of which we are a tiny part and the rest of the great universe beyond. I usually took some paper and pen with me into the desert. I wrote a number of poems about space, solitude and inhabited worlds far far away at that time.
Three or four weeks later I received a call from Dennis to say that he was available to continue filming. With somewhat mixed feelings I told my parents that I was heading back to the east coast to finish the film. I could never quite judge what my dad thought about my adventures. At one level, I believe he was pleased that I had not chosen to become an accountant or a lawyer but at another level he and my mother probably wondered where my weird travels would take me.
I also got the feeling that my dad was jealous of me. He could play almost any musical instrument without any previous training. He was an accomplished artist and from time to time he would write some very funny sarcastic poetry, eventually at the age of 93 getting a book of poems published in Swaziland. Nevertheless, he only dabbled in the arts whereas it eventually became my major focus in life. If we include my slightly whacky grandfather (who was a racing driver mostly at Brooklands racetrack in Weybridge, our hometown, and who ran away with an actress to Kenya in the 1930s leaving my Gran and four children in England), three generations of male Dressers hardly complied with what would be considered normal lives.
I made it known amongst the fishing community that my car was for sale and had three offers the following day. Based on the laws of supply and demand, I set the price of the car at R500, which was R50 more than I bought it for. A few hours later, one of the fishermen approached me with the usual large wad of banknotes they all seemed to carry around. He peeled off R500 and the deal was done. Now I had plenty of money with which to live while I finished the movie in Durban. I just had to get there!
I took the train to Windhoek, as it was unlikely I would get a lift through the desert to the town that would later become the capital of independent Namibia. I had an introduction to a girl in Windhoek who confirmed that she had a spare room for the night before I set off on my hitchhiking adventure. She was a charming and friendly soul who was intrigued by my efforts to get back to Durban with as little expense as possible. The following morning she insisted in driving me some forty miles to a point just past the airport on the main road heading back to South Africa. Furthermore, she insisted that she would return to see if I had left by late that afternoon.
Just as well! When she returned, she found a rather morose Dresser, who had seen four cars all day. One did not stop but the other three did and in each case they were farmers going no more than a hundred miles down the road. If I had taken a lift with any of them, I would probably have been stranded in the middle of nowhere. The girl, bless her heart, piled me into her car and took me back to Windhoek. In exchange I took her out to dinner at a nearby hotel. While we were eating and chatting about the inevitability of my paying for a train all the way back to Durban 2,500 miles away, she saw someone she knew and excused herself.
In a couple of minutes later she was back with a grin on her face. “I know you’re heading for Durban but I can get you to Cape Town tomorrow by plane. It should be easier to hitch from there.”
The idea of hitching a ride on a plane was irresistible. Her friend had a twin-engine Cessna and would get me there by lunchtime. I would still have to travel about 1,500 miles but at least I would be on major motorways with plenty of traffic. I thanked the girl, (secretly wishing she would come with me) and early the following morning the pilot picked me up, drove me to the airport and we took off for the Cape.
The flight itself was another magnificent experience. We flew over miles of desert. At the relatively low altitude we were flying I was able to see in detail massive rock formations with rich striations of various minerals running through the rocks, ranging from dark green to ruby red. These rocky outcrops were surrounded with the rolling, scalloped-shape dunes also in a variety of colors ranging from intense yellow to brown, pink and even a couple of small black dunes. I felt it was as though a surgeon had cut through the flesh of the land to expose the organs and ganglia under the skin of our planet. Much as I love greenery and foliage, the stark beauty of that flight will remain with me forever.
We landed in Cape Town. Fortunately, I had a number of good friends still in that city and managed to find myself a bed for a night or two. I was quickly persuaded to spend a couple of days in the mother city. My friends were going to a nightclub that evening in District Six. This was an area that had been allocated to the colored community many years before. The coloreds are a wonderfully cheerful bunch of people. As more and more whites took perverse pleasure in ignoring the Apartheid laws, the colored nightclubs were popular places to visit. The music was usually superb. On this occasion the famous pianist Dollar Brand and his alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi were playing. I was to film both of them years later, but it was the first time I had heard or seen them. This was world-class jazz and we had a marvelous evening. I even met a girl who did her best to persuade me to remain in Cape Town. I was definitely tempted but stuck to my plan and left the city two days later.
There was a handful of other hitchhikers on the road, ranging from obvious deadbeats to a well-dressed young chap of about fifteen heading back to school in Johannesburg. I had also been advised to go straight to Jo’burg and from there to Durban, rather than try to hitch along the coast. The youngster and I started talking about various things while waiting for a lift. He was Afrikaans-speaking but was quite fluent in English. He was also highly intelligent and told me that he intended to become a writer when he left school. He was fascinated by my adventures, and we hitched together up to Jo’burg where he lived. I sometimes wonder whether he made it as a writer and wish I could have given him better advice. After all, I was still in my own creative infancy. Had I known even a fraction of what I know now, I might have been really helpful to him. What I did do, however, was to tell him to never give up, no matter how tough it may become. That’s been the guiding principle of my life from infancy onwards.
Arriving in Jo’burg, on an impulse I called a lady who had been a fellow copywriter at Grant Advertising. She was quite a bit older than me, but we hit it off in the short while I was with Grant’s. She had also lived an adventurous life. I remember her telling me that she had visited the artist Salvador Dalí at his home a few years previously. He welcomed her cordially and after chatting for a while he had invited her to step out into his garden. She did so and as she looked around, what she saw made her quite dizzy. He had placed huge mirrors in the garden, to give the effect of making it seem as though the garden stretched to infinity. It was a typically surreal experience in the presence of one of the world’s greatest surrealist artists. Curiously, I can find no reference to mirrors in his garden while searching Google for details. I have no reason to doubt the lady’s story but other than the references to Dalí’s “Gardens of the Mind,” I have no further details.
Anyway, I spent a pleasant evening talking of many things mostly relating to art, writing and the crazy but fascinating antics of Dalí. The following day I set off on the last leg of my trip to Durban, arriving that evening and booking into a cheap hotel for the night, with a decent chunk of my money still intact.
Dennis was delighted to see me and apologized for the break in filming. We got “stuck in” and finished within a few days. There had been a slightly unnerving moment on the second-to-last day. We were setting up to shoot Kamal, the little boy in the movie, trotting through a narrow arcade on his way to the sweet shop where in the movie he worked to earn his twenty cents every Friday. I noticed a couple of large men dressed in ill-fitting suits approach Dennis as he set up his camera. They spoke with him for a few minutes then moved away. Later Dennis told me that they were police Special Branch asking him what kind of film he was making. He told them the story in outline and offered to show them a copy of my script. The cops told him it wasn’t necessary to see the script and they seemed satisfied that we were not making anything subversive and anti-Apartheid. They left us to it, although I suspect they had other eyes in the watching crowd to make sure the sequence was as innocuous as Dennis had claimed.
I had in the meantime taken a room in a boarding house which was just large enough for me to set up a primitive editing table, with strips of film hanging from clothes pegs on a rack behind the table. Not only was it my first effort at directing a film, I would also have to edit it. In those days before digital technology, the film negative was processed and a copy made. I then had to literally cut all the “takes” of each scene from the copied roll of film and hang them up in sequence on the rack. I had bought a little machine that enabled me to tape sequences together. Feeling somewhat intimidated, I set about editing the film. In retrospect it was a valuable experience. It quickly taught me how to shorten a shot that went on too long or to put a cutaway shot in to fill the gap if I needed to cut a shot and then come back to it. Fortunately, I had previously learned the necessity of shooting cutaways whenever I could. It didn’t make much sense at the time of filming, but it was a lifesaver in the cutting room (slang for editing room). All in all, I was proud of my first effort and Dennis had done an excellent job with the cinematography.
To be honest, both Dennis and I were halfhearted about trying to sell the completed film or get it distributed. It had been a learning exercise for both of us and we both benefitted from it. Looking at it later, I realized my biggest mistake as both director and editor was the number of shots of Kamal running to his job after school. I had fallen in love with the streets of the Indian part of the city, with its colorful shops spilling onto the pavement. women wearing elegant saris, men playing checkers on rickety tables and the cheerful hubbub of a community going about its own business in the face of a repressive regime. One or two shots would have sufficed.
Every one of us learns from experience, some more so than others. Where we differ widely is what we do with that experience. There are those who are driven to attain one or more goals and those who tend to let the world shape our futures, mostly to their detriment.
Peter Warren had been intensely driven by his goal to produce, with ExoTech, an entirely new and remarkable echelon of computing experience. Far in advance of any comparable technology, yet simpler, less expensive and for a technophobe like me a dream come true, ExoBrain is opening new horizons to millions who have never even considered using a computer. It has simply seemed too complicated.
I had to struggle to learn about every step in the process of filmmaking and even writing. I used to write every word I wrote longhand, fearing the complexities of computing. I finally forced myself to confront the keyboard and get on with it. This will not happen with ExoBrain. The coming generation of computer users will simply have no understanding of the agonies we had to go through to make things work for us. ExoBrain is like having a personal assistant at your beck and call twenty-four hours a day. Lucky old you!!!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.