South African Director Pays Tribute To The Past
By GL Harris
“I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me.”
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. ”
The opening scene of Bill Duke’s Hoodlum is claustrophobic. We find Bumpy Johnson (played by Laurence Fishburne) in a jail cell. After his release from prison the movie becomes expansive as he makes his way to Harlem. He passes a homeless man sleeping holding his shoes, a child begging for pennies.Then in brightly lit scenes, we see black street vendors, evangelists, even a passing funeral as our “hero” returns to the numbers racket and mob bosses he knows.
"I'm a colored man and white folks left me crime,” says Bumpy.
Angus Gibson’s Back of the Moon is a different kind of “gangster movie.” It opens in black and white, with the feel of a documentary. Whites look on at black South Africans street dancers.
As the film transitions to color, people are carting and carrying, some on their heads, all of their belongings. A youth carries a book, The Outcasts, reading it as he picks ups winning from a bet placed by his boss, BraMaxx head of the local mob, Vipers.
We meet a BraMaxx, played by Richard Lukunku, wearing a silk robe reading a book, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. As the Kid, played by Siyabonga Xaba, returns and draws his boss’ bath, you see books, everywhere.
“I’d like to tell you a story,” announces our narrator who wishes to remain anonymous. “It’s a sad story.”
It is based on play about the 1958 forcible removal of South African blacks whose homes and businesses were literally bulldozed by the white minority government to make way for a white neighborhood ironically and cruelly named Triumph.
It is also a love story about the people of Sophietown and the changing landscape of South Africa as she began to enforce the brutal system of legal separation of black, colored and whites. It is told from the point of view of someone who manages to still dream, cautiously.
Back of the Moon is set several decades after the violent reign of American Jewish, Italian, Irish and black mobsters ended, yet this film has a much older feel.
“I had originally intended to shoot the film in black and white to match the documentary footage that bookends the film, but instead, together with the great talents of our DOP, Zeno Petersen and art director, Dylan Lloyd, we saturated the film in the red of blood and passion,” said Gibson.
The film’s title conjures great myths that have existed since humankind began looking up at the night sky, to the stars and moon, to glean its mysteries. There is beauty in the night, but there is harshness.
“This was a mixed area close to the city centre that was the first place that the Apartheid government targeted for removal. I knew nothing of the place so I immersed myself in research. We interviewed journalists, politicians, musicians, house-owners and members of the legendary gangs,” said Gibson, whose 1996 film Mandela was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature.
“It was a heady mix of characters and I was fascinated by the life and anarchic vigor of the place. The play travelled all over the world. Thirty years later I got the opportunity to revisit Sophiatown in a telenovela for Mzansi called The Road. We had these 1950’s sets and wardrobe and when it was done we decided to make a feature film before it was all dismantled,” he said.
While the film opens joyfully, it quickly turns violent. Eve, the model/ jazz singer, played by Moneoa Moshesh, dazzles at her photoshoot in the desert scene. She has to overcome a controlling relationship with the reigning prize fighter, and survive the violence of a gang who literally kidnap her off the stage of the nightclub while she performs. Aided by her faithful piano man, she adapts and prevails.
Cinema has always romanticized the bad men who rule by force. The director turns an unflinching eye to the misdeeds of his mobsters.
“Don Mattera, an intellectual, gangster and poet I interviewed, was my main reference for Badman. Back then the enigmatic and style conscious gangs like The Americans, The Vultures, and The Berliners, had professed to be the Robin Hoods of the ghetto but faced with the monolith of Apartheid, they often turned on their own,” Gibson said.
But BadMan has a heart. The attention he gives the Kid, and attempt to control his gang as it disintegrates on the eve of forced removal, and the care he shows the woman he has fallen reveal his humanity. Eve’s character was inspired by 1960s icon Miriam Makeba who was forced out of South Africa.
“The film shows the dignity of a man who refuses to surrender. The tenderness of their love affair,” says Dr. Reinaldo Spech, Co-founder and Co-director of the African Diaspora International Film Festival.
“The plot also reflects contemporary South Africa. Badman, like the politicians of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu’s generation, is holding on to ideals, that Ghost and the other younger gang members have no time for. They will survive by any means necessary and they will prey on any evident weakness in order to gain the upper hand,” Gibson said
The tender side of BadMan the director attributes to his co-writer, Libby Dougherty.
“The leader of the gang, Badman, emerged as a complex and sympathetic character and it evolved into a bittersweet love story,” he said.
While difficult to watch at times, a rape scene may be triggering for some viewers and is not addressed, Gibson manages to wring out an ending that offers hope for a brighter day. We imagine the songstress will make her dream of becoming more famous than Ella Fitzgerald come true.
“In a brutal world there is still a place for tenderness,” Gibson said.
Directed by Angus Gibson, South Africa, 2020, romantic drama, English, Zulu, Afrikaans with English subtitles