Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 38
Part 3
1966–1976
Going freelance sounded great. No overbearing bosses, no daily insistence on arrival on time at a studio every day, above all no internal politics. One slight problem, however, no work! It took a couple of months before I landed a small job. I was asked to write and direct a short period film, using the Kyalami castle as a backdrop. The Kyalami castle was originally the home of a wealthy Greek Cypriot who built the huge edifice for his large family. It was situated on top of a steep hill overlooking Johannesburg’s northern suburbs on one side and South Africa’s Formula One Grand Prix motor racing circuit on the other side. The circuit hosted Formula One twenty-one times between 1967 and 1993 but has not qualified for the international circuit since then. During that time, South Africa produced one Formula One World Champion, Jody Schekter, a wild fearless driver who was nicknamed “Sidewise Schekter.” He would slide sidewise into corners and somehow remain in control, causing both fright and fury amongst his fellow drivers. Kyalami castle was sold to a hotel group for some years before becoming a globally recognized religious retreat.
To be honest, I cannot recall anything about the project itself. I remember having a couple of actors in costumes of the 1600s but have gone blank on the story. Perhaps because the investor got cold feet and the project was never finished.
A short while later I became friendly with Sven Persson, a Swedish cameraman who had come out to South Africa many years before. He loved the place and stayed. He shot a couple of international movies in the country, including a successful picture with American Cornel Wilde, called “The Naked Prey” and local South African actor Ken Gampu, who later became a good friend of mine.
Sven invited me to write the script for a documentary on Soweto, a township for Africans on the borders of Johannesburg. It was a political hot potato as the township had been administered by the Jo’burg City Council since its inception. The Council was controlled by the United Party who was the official opposition to the ruling Nationalist Party and were therefore strong opponents of the Apartheid policies. However, the national government announced that it was taking over the running of Soweto (South Western Townships) to impose even greater restrictions on its black residents. The City Council decided to have a film made which would show that despite virtually no assistance from the government, it had managed to slowly improve living conditions over the years. It was far from ideal, but they figured, correctly as it happened, that the Nationalists would make matters worse for the residents.
Sven was a very capable and well-organized man as well as a fine cameraman of an international standard. He and I had a couple of meetings with the City Council, who had put together a subcommittee of about thirteen councilors to liaise with us on the making of the film. Inevitably, there were numerous different opinions as to the content and style of the picture. After our second meeting, Sven spoke to the mayor and said that we could not proceed with the project if a huge committee wanted to control it. The mayor took the point and appointed one man, Councilor Lewis, to act as their spokesman and deal with us. This made our lives much easier, and I completed the script a couple of weeks later. We started filming a few days after that. In addition to writing the script I acted as production manager for the film.
Whites driving around an African township had its dangers. Although the majority of the people were really welcoming and friendly, there were criminal gangs as well as anti-white political groups who were quite capable of attacking us, even killing us, if the opportunity arose. The administrators were housed in offices in the middle of the township. They warned us not to stay after dark if possible and on the first Friday afternoon one of the officials came to where we were filming and said, “It’s now 4:00 pm. By 4:30 all the white administrators will leave Soweto and stay away for the weekend. We advise you to do the same.” He went on to say that largely due to heavy drinking, all the violent elements of the township were inclined to go on the rampage and it was extremely unsafe. We took his advice and left on time.
After the second week of filming, Sven came over to me looking troubled.
“I have to go to England immediately. I’m working on a big movie project, and they want me there in a couple of days.” I was aware that the City Council had given us a tough deadline for delivery of the finished film. So how could we overcome this? Sven looked at me and continued, “So I’m asking you to take over. I’ve got a good cameraman who I can get to do the filming, but I want you to direct the rest of the picture.”
I was both excited and nervous. Despite the trauma of my Lions Rugby film at Killarney, I knew I had done a good job of writing and directing it. I did not know at that time that Killarney had completed the rugby film and submitted it, without my name, to a French sports film festival, where it won an award. So I did not have that validation at that moment. Nevertheless, I felt that we were in the process of making another good film in Soweto. I was enormously grateful to Sven for having confidence in me and I immediately agreed to complete the film. Sven added that he would be back in time to edit it.
And so I finished the film. We showed both the good and bad. Some suburbs were well paved with street lighting and the houses, although very small, were sturdily built. Running water was available to these areas. Unfortunately, there were still a few areas that needed to be sorted out. These had unpaved roads, no real sewerage, no electricity and the only water was supplied through one tap per street. Rubbish lay everywhere and the houses were still shacks built from a mix of corrugated iron (if they were lucky) or cardboard and any other scrap they could find. We filmed both but stated in the commentary that the City Council was doing its best to rid the township of these slum areas and replace them with decent housing.
An amusing but often irritating element of filming in Soweto was that the moment we set up the camera, we had hordes of young children running in front of the camera, pulling faces, waving and adopting ridiculous poses. I finally solved the problem by having the camera pointed in the opposite direction to where we intended to film. We set everything up, had forty or fifty children “performing” in front of the camera and at the last minute we would turn the camera around and film what we wanted. It usually gave us no more than a minute or two before the kids would realize they had been conned and dash over in front of the camera again. Not ideal for filming but we managed somehow.
I met Ken Gampu for the first time on this film. Sven had asked him to make some introductory remarks on camera. I did not want to battle with the kids when filming Ken with sound. I discovered that in the middle of Soweto there was a small park named “The Oppenheimer Gardens.” Harry Oppenheimer was the son of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, who founded the massive Anglo American Corporation. Harry took over the corporation in 1957 after the death of his father. After Harry retired in 19 his son Nicky took the reins.
(The Heritage Portal)
Harry Oppenheimer was a fierce opponent of Apartheid and the park was just one of many philanthropic gestures he made towards the underprivileged and oppressed peoples of South Africa. A tower was built in the middle of the park and was known as the Oppenheimer Tower. I put Ken on the high viewing platform of the tower where he could overlook the park and the Soweto township beyond it.
In fact, the park also housed a miniature traditional Zulu village, designed and built by Credo Mutwa, a direct descendent of the great warrior King Shaka Zulu. Credo, due to the influence of his very traditional grandfather, studied to become a Sangoma (traditional healer), which in turn led to his lifelong interest in both the early history of the Zulu people as well as the origins of man.
Sven wanted to include him in the Soweto film, and I went to see him in his home in
the township. He was a fascinating man and one of the first things I noticed was a series of paintings on the walls of his house. To my amazement they were all paintings painted by Credo himself, of planets, spaceships and people wearing space helmets standing on the alien planets. It was hardly what I expected of a Zulu healer in the heart of Soweto township. Once I had arranged to film his traditional village in the Oppenheimer Gardens, I asked about the paintings. Credo chuckled and said that contrary to the beliefs of most whites, the Zulus are not ignorant primitive people but have a sophisticated awareness of such things as alien civilizations, of UFOs (which they call in Zulu “lightning birds”) and some unusual ideas about the origins of man. These are too lengthy to go into here, but I found Credo to be one of the most interesting people I have ever met. When filming in his Zulu village I discovered that he and a group of women, who mostly produced traditional artworks, were also involved in experiments with mental telepathy. The women would decide on a word; then Credo would retire to one of the beehive huts and attempt to write that word on a small blackboard. From memory he had about an eighty percent success rate. Credo will appear in a later blog, when he and I had further encounters, but he added a brief but fascinating element to the film.
Sven arrived back from Britain. I anxiously showed him the footage we had shot in his absence. Most of it he approved and was quite complimentary about its content. However, there were one or two items that caused him to make some caustic comments about the way we had shot them. Overall, I was delighted by his reaction. He and I then worked together to edit the picture and for me to write the final commentary.
We showed the completed film to the subcommittee of the City Council who were delighted and just asked for a few changes in the commentary and then shown to the full City Council who also approved it. It was then screened in cinemas around South Africa as a documentary before a movie. This was still about five years before the start of television in the country. Ironically, the government’s State Information Department also felt it fairly represented Soweto and they screened it overseas where they could.
As a result of the success of the film, Sven was commissioned to make another picture for the City Council called “They Serve a City.” This production featured all the tasks the Council performed on behalf of the city, ranging from the fire service to the police, parks and gardens, street maintenance, sewerage systems and many other departments. It was frankly rather a dull subject but once again the Council was delighted with the result. In the process I certainly learned a lot about how a city was organized and managed.
Sven was a mercurial character. He could be very temperamental but also extremely warm and generous. He would frequently invite Hero and I around for dinner or a lunchtime braai (barbecue) with his wife Pat. I learned many aspects of the movie industry from him. Shortly after we finished the second City Council film, he announced that we had a new project. The major wine cooperative in the Cape, KWV, was founded in 1918 and called in Dutch Ko-operatiewe Wyjnbouwers Vereniging. (Afrikaans only became an official language in 1925 taking over from High Dutch as one of the two official languages of South Africa at the time. This was later expanded to eleven official languages to include the nine major African tongues in the country.)
Our adventures into the world of wine will be outlined in my next blog.
Sven Persson, who died many years ago, was a major influence in my learning the craft of filmmaking. He tended to rub some people up the wrong way by his blunt manner of speaking – but it was based on a solid grounding in the movie profession. He started in the Swedish film industry when that country was emerging as an important creative force with major talents such as the director Ingmar Bergman.
In much the same way I have begun to understand the shortcomings of the existing computer systems and the remarkable re-alignment of technical data developed by Peter Warren. Rather like Sven, his blunt appraisal of today’s overly complex and hugely expensive technology stumbling blindly into an uncertain future is both challenging and refreshing. His correction of existing flaws in computing will go down in history once ExoBrain is launched.