hush, hush -- Catch a Fire
Nov. 5th, 2006 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmWhen I was a teen, my parents took me to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon at Radio City Music Hall. This was after the Graceland album had come out and the problem of apartheid and South Africa was well known to us all.
The 80s were interesting times, especially in comparison to these times now. There were injustices in the world that it seemed easy for us to agree on here in the States. Certainly, there was woe and misery we were perpetuating as well. But the world was changing, and those changes were good. Apartheid ended, the Berlin Wall came down, Tienamen Square galvanized us in some vague way. Certainly, even if we did nothing with our sudden world political awareness it was still better than just being afraid of nuclear war all the time.
My father worked in advertising, and when I was a young girl he was the creative direction on an ad campaign encouraging people to buy krugerrands, this before that was made illegal here or most of us really knew anything about South Africa at all. The campaign won some awards, as did a lot of my father's work. I remember when they shot the photos for it, and he brought home a snapshot of him posing with three milion dollars worth of the coins and some bars of gold too. They had beautiful animals on them, the coins, and my father told me about the guards and their guns there for the gold. I took the picture to show and tell and the framed award-winning ad campaign stayed up in the office, through apartheid and its fall. People remarked on that a lot, "Oh yeah, the krugerrand ads. That was weird." LIke that, not really saying anything.
We were not poor when I was a child, but our lives were largely about other people's money. We did not own property; the other relatives did. I went to private school and whatever we might have had to live richly went to that. My cousin in Atlantic City, whose parents had a black cat that liked to sleep on my head, worked in a casino. We all touched other people's money all the time, in one way or another. Now my mother works at a luxury jewlery store.
I saw Catch a Fire tonight at the SAG screening, and it's just simply phenomenal. For it does not endeavor to be an inspirational story. Nor does it try overhard to make anyone more or less sympathetic to show us complexity. Merely, people do what they have to for themselves and their families. Some of these actions are more justifiable in the big picture than others. That is all.
The concert at Radio City was long. And aside from just being backup on Paul Simon's songs, huge chunks of it (and it went on for hours and hours) was Ladysmith Black Mambazo performing their own stuff. I remember looking around, and everyone at the concert was white, and roaming around and getting beers while this group performed by themselves. I was very embarassed, and sank low in my seat, but I wasn't any less embarassed by my father humming along like this was his music too. Also, dude, everythign your parents do is embarassing at that age; all the better if you can attempt to ascribe reason to your horror.
I used to work with this Canadian guy who had lived in South Africa for a while. He lived in a small apartment with a bunch of foreign students. He said there was always too many of them, and people and matresses seemed to pile up on the floor. He said that South Africa felt like home to him, but that he never stopped feeling strange when he spoke to white South Africans his age because their predicament was so strange. He said they were paying for everything and willingly too, but that they didn't know why their number had come up more than anyone elses. Most of them, he said, talked about leaving because there would always be assumptions, and the suspicion of excuses no matter what they said, did or had done. He wasn't the most emotionally articulate guy in the world, but he was watching something dying (a theme, this year it seems), that should be, and trying to understand it.
What is remarkable about Catch a Fire is not that it takes your breath away, not that the music will be familiar to some of you who remember that period in the 80s, not that it has the requisite moments of uplifting battle against a grotesquely oppressive system. What's remarkable is that it captures this sense of teetering, teetering -- lives, politics, families -- and it caused me to burst into tears repeatedly, not in moments of cinematic punctuation, but just because for all the news I watched, for all those school room Amnesty International meetings I went to, this put a face on what the "normalacy" of a South Africa under apartheid looked like.
Of course, this was also a film about What is a Terrorist. And it's November 5th.
The title of this post comes from a song sung at the end, when apartheid is done, and people welcoming a boat of freed political prisoners sing, "hush, hush, South Africa."
Fantastic film which also must be commended for its absolute rich (if not always logical) use of language -- English, Afrikaans and Zulu.
The 80s were interesting times, especially in comparison to these times now. There were injustices in the world that it seemed easy for us to agree on here in the States. Certainly, there was woe and misery we were perpetuating as well. But the world was changing, and those changes were good. Apartheid ended, the Berlin Wall came down, Tienamen Square galvanized us in some vague way. Certainly, even if we did nothing with our sudden world political awareness it was still better than just being afraid of nuclear war all the time.
My father worked in advertising, and when I was a young girl he was the creative direction on an ad campaign encouraging people to buy krugerrands, this before that was made illegal here or most of us really knew anything about South Africa at all. The campaign won some awards, as did a lot of my father's work. I remember when they shot the photos for it, and he brought home a snapshot of him posing with three milion dollars worth of the coins and some bars of gold too. They had beautiful animals on them, the coins, and my father told me about the guards and their guns there for the gold. I took the picture to show and tell and the framed award-winning ad campaign stayed up in the office, through apartheid and its fall. People remarked on that a lot, "Oh yeah, the krugerrand ads. That was weird." LIke that, not really saying anything.
We were not poor when I was a child, but our lives were largely about other people's money. We did not own property; the other relatives did. I went to private school and whatever we might have had to live richly went to that. My cousin in Atlantic City, whose parents had a black cat that liked to sleep on my head, worked in a casino. We all touched other people's money all the time, in one way or another. Now my mother works at a luxury jewlery store.
I saw Catch a Fire tonight at the SAG screening, and it's just simply phenomenal. For it does not endeavor to be an inspirational story. Nor does it try overhard to make anyone more or less sympathetic to show us complexity. Merely, people do what they have to for themselves and their families. Some of these actions are more justifiable in the big picture than others. That is all.
The concert at Radio City was long. And aside from just being backup on Paul Simon's songs, huge chunks of it (and it went on for hours and hours) was Ladysmith Black Mambazo performing their own stuff. I remember looking around, and everyone at the concert was white, and roaming around and getting beers while this group performed by themselves. I was very embarassed, and sank low in my seat, but I wasn't any less embarassed by my father humming along like this was his music too. Also, dude, everythign your parents do is embarassing at that age; all the better if you can attempt to ascribe reason to your horror.
I used to work with this Canadian guy who had lived in South Africa for a while. He lived in a small apartment with a bunch of foreign students. He said there was always too many of them, and people and matresses seemed to pile up on the floor. He said that South Africa felt like home to him, but that he never stopped feeling strange when he spoke to white South Africans his age because their predicament was so strange. He said they were paying for everything and willingly too, but that they didn't know why their number had come up more than anyone elses. Most of them, he said, talked about leaving because there would always be assumptions, and the suspicion of excuses no matter what they said, did or had done. He wasn't the most emotionally articulate guy in the world, but he was watching something dying (a theme, this year it seems), that should be, and trying to understand it.
What is remarkable about Catch a Fire is not that it takes your breath away, not that the music will be familiar to some of you who remember that period in the 80s, not that it has the requisite moments of uplifting battle against a grotesquely oppressive system. What's remarkable is that it captures this sense of teetering, teetering -- lives, politics, families -- and it caused me to burst into tears repeatedly, not in moments of cinematic punctuation, but just because for all the news I watched, for all those school room Amnesty International meetings I went to, this put a face on what the "normalacy" of a South Africa under apartheid looked like.
Of course, this was also a film about What is a Terrorist. And it's November 5th.
The title of this post comes from a song sung at the end, when apartheid is done, and people welcoming a boat of freed political prisoners sing, "hush, hush, South Africa."
Fantastic film which also must be commended for its absolute rich (if not always logical) use of language -- English, Afrikaans and Zulu.
