Marginal lives & painful pasts

by Martin Botha

In an important new book on South African cinema, Marginal lives and painful pasts: South African cinema after apartheid (Genugtig! Uitgewers), 14 contributors document and analyse contemporary film in terms of the political, social and cultural influence of apartheid. Together the fourteen chapters address three main topics: the transformed industry, film and marginalisation, film and documentation, and film and representation. In Post-apartheid cinema: policy, structures, themes and new aesthetics, Martin Botha contextualises recent developments in the film industry. Botha, well-known for his previous meticulous descriptions and analyses of South African film history, its artists and the industry, gives a brief history of filmmaking during the apartheid years. He shows how, despite some landmark films of directors such as Ross Devenish, Manie van Rensburg and Jans Rautenbach, the structures and mechanisms of the industry discouraged serious filmmaking. New structures such as the Arts