Images of Apartheid

Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa

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by Calum Waddell

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Africa

Keywords

South Africa, racial issues

Publishing date

2023

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Collection

Traditions in World Cinema

1st publishing

2021

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 192 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4744-5003-4

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Book Presentation:
Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa is an exploration of the low budget, black-action cinema that emerged in South Africa during the 1970s and led to subsequent gangster and race-conflict films that defined an era of prolific genre activity, from Joe Bullet (1973) to American Ninja 4 (1990). Contextualising and documenting the cheap, government-funded ‘B-Scheme’ films, largely unseen since the fall of the National Party, but also acknowledging the impact of international co-productions such as The Wild Geese (1978) and locally made provocation, including the classic Mapantsula (1988), this study is an exhaustive tour of race-representation and state-subsidised subversion. Also discussing the political turbulence of the era, Images of Apartheid argues that so-called ‘ZAxploitation’ should be considered within both localised and wider international paracinematic networks of genre adaptation, resulting in the identification of a uniquely South African form of trash and treasure, and schlock and awe.

About the Author:
Calum Waddell is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Aberdeen

Press Reviews:
Waddell examines South African (or B-scheme films), i.e., the country's iteration of Hollywood blaxploitation. ZAxploitation cinema was surreptitiously tainted by the apartheid ideological undertones because it was supported by the National Party regime, which provided financial underwriting in the background. These low-budget exploitation films reimagined Black lives in a modernized (rural and urbanized) context. Waddell's book is in conversation with Ken Harrow’s Trash: African Cinema from Below (2013) and Tomaselli’s Encountering Modernity: Twentieth Century South African Cinema (2006). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. -- K. M. Kapanga ― CHOICE

Waddell examines South African (or B-scheme films), i.e., the country's iteration of Hollywood blaxploitation. ZAxploitation cinema was surreptitiously tainted by the apartheid ideological undertones because it was supported by the National Party regime, which provided financial underwriting in the background. These low-budget exploitation films reimagined Black lives in a modernized (rural and urbanized) context. Waddell's book is in conversation with Ken Harrow’s Trash: African Cinema from Below (2013) and Tomaselli’s Encountering Modernity: Twentieth Century South African Cinema (2006). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. ― CHOICE

Images of Apartheid is a game changer, offering next generation analysis. Waddell’s fresh, supremely nuanced eye upends inherited assumptions and overturns received analytical frameworks. He provides new ways of making sense of ‘fringe’ sectors of South African cinema watched by many but ignored or inappropriately judged by most scholars of South African films. Crucially, Waddell’s research is based on intense viewing of the films discussed, dredged up from dusty vaults. He interviews their makers, and he offers an intelligent reading of South African generated scholarly literature. Moreover, this is an easy book to read, compelling and wonderfully engaging. ― Keyan G. Tomaselli, author of The Cinema of Apartheid and Encountering Modernity

Waddell fills a gap in global cinematic histories by illustrating Blaxploitation cinema’s influence on South Africa’s oft-overlooked Zaxploitation films. Thoroughly researched, this book demonstrates how Zaxploitation filmmakers were at times able to create critical cinematic interventions that challenged the apartheid status quo. A must read for cinema and cultural scholars. ― Novotny Lawrence, Iowa State University

See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press