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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
It is not easy to “like” the documentary “His Big White Self,” which is a close-up portrait of African Nazi Party (AWB) leader Eugene Terreblanche, but director Nick Broomfield does his best to take an amused look at “the banality of evil.”
Broomfield (who brought us “Biggie and Tupac” in 2002) tries, sometimes unsuccessfully, to maintain a delicate balance of documenting the deadly violence wrought by the party, recording the party’s disintegration and, finally, drawing a personal portrait of the portly Terreblanche as a husband, father and avowed racist.
He builds on the narrative that he started in 1991 when he first followed Terreblanche for the documentary, “The Leader, The Driver and the Driver’s Wife” during the waning months of apartheid. Terreblanche was not an easy subject and often disparaged and shooed away Broomfield during filming. The Nazi leader so hated the resulting film, which mocked him and his followers, that he issued repeated death threats against the filmmaker. Fourteen years later, though, Broomfield returned to South Africa to make “His Big White Self.”
Much of this sequel unfolds in cinema verité format, as Broomfield seeks out the same characters focused on in the first film—Terreblanche, his former driver, J.P. Meyer, and Meyer’s now ex-wife, Anne Meyer. It lingers with J.P. in the modest, rural home where he lives with an aging mutt that provides comedic relief to J.P.’s painfully ignorant statements, (for one, that the Bible story of “Noah and the Ark” proves that Blacks are not part of the human (Whites only) race.
Anne Meyer seems to be more accepting of the new order of the country, though some habits die hard and she cannot help but refer to a black cat she owns as a “Kaffir Cat,” using the South African equivalent of the N-word. She admits that she can’t get used to young Black children not calling her some equivalent of m’ am or boss lady.
These sequences, which render bother Meyers as doofuses, depict the party today in a state of inertia and resignation. Both still own property gained under the system of apartheid and farms remain owned and controlled by Whites. The country still, after all, has not significantly changed the economic order of things—especially in the town of Ventersdorp, where Terreblanche and much of his movement maintain a stronghold. And neither Meyer has had to pay any cost for crimes committed by the party when they were members.
Similarly, as Broomfield works hard to secure an interview with Terreblanche, ultimately employing a ruse to do so, the narrative gives too much emphasis on this mission, as if Terreblanche is some sort of sought-after rock star. There are moments in the documentary’s 94 minutes, when this playful hunt overwhelms the gravity of the subject of violent White supremacists. The fact is that, despite being imprisoned briefl, Terreblanche remains unrepentant for any of his acts or beliefs.
Maybe he can be a joke to a visiting filmmaker or to foreign audiences but it is not clear that in a country where the Black majority smolders in poverty, and crime is spiraling upward, that Terreblanche and the White supremacists he represents are a joke to the people of South Africa.
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Coupled with the screening of “His Big, White Self” was the eye-popping “Beyond Freedom—The South African Journey,” a thoughtful, mixed-media work employing animation and other cinematic techniques that coaxes us into perhaps seeing the faces and hearing the voices of South Africa in a new way.
Directed by Jacquie Trowell and including the work of several credited artists, the focus of the 13-minute short is on interviews with several South Africans, Black and White, about life in the early post-apartheid era of their country. It does not dwell much on history or sociology. There are no “expert” talking heads. Instead, we get the sense of seeing and hearing a range of everyday people. Much of the conversation has to do with the fact that though the government is now controlled by the Black majority, much of the country’s economic wealth still rests in the hands of the White minority.
An apparently low-skilled Afrikaner, who had always found steady work under apartheid, tells how, now, finding work is difficult. He says that under the old system, he never thought much about how his White skin opened up opportunities for employment. Now he sells magazines on the street. A Black woman offers that Blacks, historically and presently, are the ones lacking work and resources. “Whites say they have not jobs,” she says. “Blacks are the ones without jobs.”
The faces and voices of this woman and man are just one part of this movie’s imaginative format, filled with color, creative drawings and energetic editing. Altogether, it forces us to submerge our prejudices and lazy viewing habits and appreciate real stories, voices and lives the way we often do fictional narratives.
The U.S. premiere of “His Big, White Self” was held at the 2006 SilverDocs AFI-Discovery Channel Film Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland. It premiered on television in the United Kingdom earlier this year. Esther Iverem’s new book of poems, Living in Babylon, is available through this site at www.Amazon.com
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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