The arts in contemporary South African higher education: Film and media studies

Introduction

In late April 2015, Mbembe presented a seminar on Frantz Fanon at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The seminar was one of many lectures, panel discussions and readings organised by RhodesMustFall, a student-led movement that, as the symbolic starting point to decolonise the university, rallied around the call to have the statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed from its central position on the UCT campus. This decolonisation project echoed protests at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), and has ignited public debate throughout South Africa on the lack of transformation at higher education institutions in terms of the small number of senior black academics, alienating institutional cultures and unrepresentative university curricula.

In his opening remarks, Mbembe made several statements contextualising the struggles higher education institutions in South Africa face: the lack of government funding, the increased corporatisation of university courses and spaces, and the lack of transformation of staff and students. Then he turned outward to consider the contemporary university in a global context

To be perfectly frank I have to add that our task is rendered all the more complex because there is hardly any agreement as to the meaning, and even less so the future, of what goes by the name the university in our world today. Not only in South Africa. There’s no agreement. There might have been some agreement at the beginning of the 20^th century, but that is no longer the case. So when we say decolonising the university, what are we talking about?

In Mbembe’s words, one hears echoes of high-profile jeremiads by Terry Eagleton and Marina Warner marking ‘the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique’ (Eagleton, 2015) and a ‘new brutalism in academia’ (Warner, 2014). ¹ In his letter to John Higgins, which forms the forward to Higgins’ book Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa, author JM Coetzee writes that ‘universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy’ (2013: xi). For Mbembe

The function of higher education is not to create jobs; it is to redistribute as equally as possible the capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know but do not know yet.

Coetzee and Mbembe draw on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire in their caution against education serving ‘as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system [to] bring about conformity’ (Shaull, 1970: 15).

The task of assessing the current state and future development of the humanities in South Africa is indeed a daunting one: at the present moment, the volatility of the debate around the nature and role of the university is both exciting and uncertain. Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections and there appears little doubt the country is in the process of a second transition. Twenty years is, after all, enough time to give birth to, raise and educate a generation of people who voted for the first time in 2014.

Amidst the celebrations last year, there were profound reflections across the political, social and cultural sectors of society on income inequality, education, vulnerable infrastructures and freedom of speech and access to information. Restlessness among South Africa’s youth was also noticeable as the ‘born frees’ began to question the apparent successes of the rainbow nation, the TRC and Nelson Mandela’s ideals of compromise and forgiveness. This frustration has found a voice in RhodesMustFall at UCT and student movements at WITS, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and Rhodes.

Thus, the place of the humanities within ‘the university’ and the place of ‘the university’ within South African society appears to be both profoundly troubled, but also an opportunity to re-envision the role of the humanities. This article considers the state of film and media studies in higher education institutions in South Africa both in terms of teaching (curricula) and scholarship (research).

Before outlining the four major areas of focus, I need to set out the parameters of my inquiry. The grouping of film and media studies is partly a consequence of the way the two disciplines are related at my institution, UCT. The Centre for Film and Media Studies was established in 2004 in response to the growth of interest in these subjects that were, up until that time, fragmented within the departments of English Language and Literature, and Historical Studies. The decision to combine film and media studies intellectually also involved the decision to teach both theory and practice: courses in film and media production (including print media, multimedia and radio) were offered alongside courses in film and media theory, and staff were encouraged to teach across both disciplines, and to contribute to teaching both theory and practice.

This structure is dissimilar to other universities and South Africa, where film is often part of either dramatic or visual arts, and media either stands alone as a department or forms part of courses in communications. Within media studies, a distinction must also be noted among media studies, journalism practice and journalism studies. While Rhodes University has a long-standing department dedicated to journalism practice and research, journalism is also being taught widely throughout South African universities.

It is thus worth noting that some of the challenges and developments in film and media studies will be subject to the way they are positioned within different institutions (for example, through soft funding and subsidies calculated through student admissions or research outputs).

I have also chosen to include in film studies, the fields of television and documentary. Television in particular remains poorly covered in South African research outside of sociological studies, and often falls under the focus of media studies. Documentary is also taught within a range of disciplines, from anthropology to visual arts. As technologies transform the ways in which we produce, watch, consume and distribute media products, these could all be considered part of the family of screen studies. However, this is not currently the case at universities: unless they are the subjects of specific focus, I will consider these fields within the ambit of film studies.

Finally, for the purposes of this article, I am not including tertiary institutions focused on training and practice in the film industry such as AFDA (The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance), the SAE Institute and The Open Window Institute. However, it should be noted that these institutions do have relationships with state-subsidised universities and do form part of the broader film and media landscape at tertiary level. ²

Film, media and the marketplace

There is no doubt that one of the drivers for the establishment and growth of film and media studies programmes has been the growth of film and media industries in South Africa. South Africa still does not have a national film school, and film training has occurred mostly in private institutions. ³ Although universities tend to emphasise film theory and history far more than private film colleges, the question might be asked: with their explicit links to industrialised and commercial culture industries, are film and media studies qualifications just refuelling pumps in the ‘service stations for neocapitalism’ (Eagleton)? Seen in a different frame, how do graduates from film and media studies degrees contribute to the economy? ⁴

The ubiquity of screens in our daily lives and, as a result, the content that plays across them, suggests that, first, film and media studies graduates are employable and, second, that their contribution to the economy is widespread and complex. Indeed, a colleague in the English Department recently remarked to me, ‘You guys have it easy’, a grim reflection on the fight for some departments to remain ‘relevant’ in the contemporary university. Reflecting on the first 10 years of film and media at UCT, the outgoing director noted in the Rhodes Journalism Review, ‘the charisma of our early days, with the heady mix of external practitioners and endless innovation, with students complaining they were guinea pigs, has given, and gives way to academic rationality and bureaucracy’ (Glenn, 2014: 66).

Certainly, the most asked question at Humanities faculty open days – where school pupils and their parents partake in a noisy jamboree, supposedly to gain insight into the various departmental undergraduate courses – is what kind of career will the degree lead to. Career advice and curriculum advice are collapsed into mollification of the parents’ fears that their children might end up unemployed if they study humanities courses.

This merging of the ‘real world’ with intellectual engagement and development often breaks down erroneously into a separation of creativity and analysis: ‘Doesn’t analysing a film ruin your enjoyment of it?’ echoes a similar question I was frequently asked about poetry when I was an English literature tutor, as if novels somehow weren’t creative, where poetry – vulnerable to offence – was. The value of a film and media degree lies not so much in the content of the courses, but in the range of skills it provides its graduates. The characterisation of such degrees as amorphous and a ‘soft option’ is a lazy judgment that fails to see how social sciences and humanities skills are being deployed in the contemporary workplace (a point I will return to later when discussing transdisciplinary studies). What feeds the myth of the ‘Bugger All’ degree is the fact that employment in culture industries – from investigative journalism to government communications, NGO work to corporate advertising – is very fluid with graduates often moving from job to job frequently over the first 5 years after their graduation: ‘graduates with a non-occupation-specific degree are suitable for a wide variety of employment and are less pressurized to find work that exactly fits their training because they have skills that are applicable to a large number of sectors’ (British Academy Report, 2004 in Higgins, 2013: 153).

While the demand for practical training increases in a period of youth unemployment (and impatience to enter the job market), universities need to emphasise ever more strongly a critical engagement with logic of the consumer economy. Higgins calls for critical literacy to, in Raymond Williams’ words, ‘call the bluff of authority’ (2013: 81) but also to challenge the polarization of humanities and sciences. In the context of the media’s antagonistic relationship with government over reports on corruption, service delivery failure, and unstable energy infrastructure, it is easy to see ‘authority’ only in terms of the state. However, it is crucial to challenge complacency towards the authority of ‘the marketplace’, of economic drivers and emerging markets.

The ‘real world’ of the media is also increasingly present on university campuses. Corporate promotions target students as future consumers under the guise of the university making money that assists students unable to pay their fees. Somewhat ironically, some student activities surrounding the RhodesMustFall campaign at UCT were forced to compete with corporate events that dominated the physical spaces of the campus. As Mbembe noted in his April seminar, ‘decolonising of the University starts with the de-privatisation and rehabilitation of the public space’.

Against an increasingly corporatised campus space, and the encroachment of vocationally focused courses in marketing, branding and entrepreneurship, media studies courses promote journalistic critique and inquiries into modes of consumption, intellectual property and media independence. In film, there are a growing number of young South African filmmakers (in documentary and fiction) challenging the prevailing attitudes of commercial fiction filmmaking in the Hollywood form. The South African film industry remains caught between trying to make home-grown hits, playing to the international art-house market and servicing major international productions, for which Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town in particular are known internationally. ⁵

Film and media scholarship and teaching can also engage more with media ecologies that, in Adrian Ivakhiv’s terms

entail the material production and consumption of… images; the social or intersubjective relations of people whose efforts shape and inform those images; the people and things portrayed or represented by them; those delivering, receiving, interpreting, and being moved by them; and the cognitive, affective, and perceptual relations connecting bodies, sensations, desires, sensory organs, and media formations (2013: 5). ⁶

Researchers can learn a lot from how the classroom is changing, how their students’ media consumption is changing, and how the histories of texts can change the discourse around them. To extend this ecological practice further, we also need a clearer understanding of how film and media graduates are not just ‘fitting into’ but contributing to South African society, in economic and social terms.

Film and television studies in South Africa

In 1990, Higgins concluded a paper he presented at the Conference on Developing Media Education in the 1990s, by asking ‘Film and media studies may have begun in South Africa but where have they begun?’ (1991: 122). Higgins was responding to a tendency he had noticed in other academics to lump film together with drama and literature, against which he proposed a ‘move away from what I shall call the naïve realist view of film, which belongs to its pre history, towards a critical account of cinema as signifying practice’ (Higgins, 1991: 111).

A few years later, Ethiopian filmmaker Gerima delivered a forceful presentation ⁷ in which he declared ‘African cinema is a victim of fraudulent and false scholarship, a scholarly impersonation. At the end of the day we are left without any clue as to what constitutes an African cinematic language. Again and again, in the name of searching for the film’s language, we are given a synopsis of social, political and cultural analysis of the film’ (1996: 146).

Higgins and Gerima, in different ways, attacked an approach to film that derived meaning from film narrative without consideration of the semiotics of the film medium. This led for Gerima, to an ‘underdeveloped state of film analysis within the confines of African cinema discourse’ (Gerima, 1996: 146).

If the argument for a ‘critical reflection’ on film has informed one aspect of the teaching and study of film and television studies, then the place of South Africa within African film studies has been the subject of another important debate in the post-apartheid period. While film has been studied at South African universities since the 1970s, it was not included in the degree structure of the Humanities as a discipline on its own until around 15 years ago. Even now, very few institutions of higher learning offer degrees in film studies; they rather include courses on film or screen studies as part of degrees in visual arts, or media and communication.

Revised histories of South African cinema in the past 10 years (Botha, 2012; Maingard, 2007) have supplemented the important, although few, pre-1994 studies in the field (Blignaut and Botha, 1992; Gutsche, 1972; Tomaselli, 1988, for example), while several collections and monographs have examined the trends and diversity of films over the past 20 years (Balseiro and Masilela, 2003; Botha, 2007; Saks, 2010). ⁸ However, the development of screen scholarship in South Africa is a subject that has received comparatively less attention. Has South Africa mended its relationships with the continent? How does South Africa’s post-apartheid state relate to Africa as a whole? How should one go about teaching screen studies in South Africa given the ubiquity of mobile technologies, the realities of the ‘download generation’, and the decline of conventional cinematic distribution?

In 1993, Hees noted the ‘disconcerting… exclusion of South Africa (except for a few passing references) from the discussion’ of African cinema, but added hopefully that ‘there are encouraging signs that this situation of mutual exclusiveness is changing’ (127). Those encouraging signs have not really developed. In Postcolonial Cinema: from political engagement to postmodernism, Harrow has called for nothing less than a revolution in African film criticism: ‘Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view – a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today’ (2007: xi). Notably, South Africa hardly features in the book from which this bold claim is drawn. The similarly excellent book Postnationalist African Cinema by Tcheuyap also barely mentions South Africa. Evidently, ‘post-apartheid’ has struggled to find a theoretical space in film amidst other ‘posts’. Murphy and Patrick address this anomaly, writing in the introduction their book on ten African directors, ‘the fact that we include North Africa and South Africa – both routinely excluded from otherwise generally comprehensive survey works – marks… our desire to reverse this pattern of exclusion’, though South Africa is still identified separately as ‘colonialism of a special sort’.(2007: 3). ⁹

There are signs that the scholarly separation of South Africa from the continent is changing (even as a re-awakening of xenophobic violence draws intense criticism of South Africa from the rest of the continent). Two factors underpin my claim. First, and this applies to media studies as well as television studies, a new generation of scholars graduating from programmes at South African universities is maturing in a more global scholarly environment. Raised on a greater diversity of film cultures than students before them, and able to access film more easily, postgraduate scholars are enthusiastically exploring the neglected, the obscure and the taboo in African and South African film.

Second, as film scholarship moves into new areas (film festival studies, audience mobility and interactivity, transnational studies, archive studies), the focus in South African film is beginning to move beyond histories of production and identity, and is shedding light on neglected areas such as restoration, audience and language and ‘alternate’ archives. As Coetzee notes, ‘One way of supplementing and reframing our histories, and creating new archives, is through paying more attention to audiences’ (2013: 724). This raises questions of how films are being archived (and disseminated), and how African countries are maintaining their archives. Are ‘lost’ or neglected films being restored? The ‘rediscovery’ and restoration of numerous films made under the subsidy system in South Africa in the 1970s – most of them in indigenous languages – offers fantastic new research opportunities, not only in the fields of film history and representation, but also in the under-researched area of film publics and audience histories identified in Modisane’s recent monograph, South Africa’s Renegade Reels (2013). ¹⁰

In one sense, then, South African film scholarship is entering a tremendously exciting era as new areas of research open up and lacuna are explored. There is also a growing field of television criticism beyond sociological analysis that considers specific texts and histories of the medium. ¹¹ Universities need to build on the critical literacy of theory courses to meet the challenge laid down by Gerima: to study African film and television intensively using the skills one might use to analyse art-house, experimental, or blockbuster films.

Media research, funding and internationalisation

Recently, the journal Ecquid Novi was relaunched as African Journalism Studies. This was not simply a case of re-branding an obscure Latin title. As editor Wasserman indicates: ‘These developments follow a progression of the journal over the past years as the scope shifted from a strong regional focus on southern Africa to a broader, comparative one which strives to incorporate perspectives from around the continent and, increasingly, between Africa and other parts of the Global South’ (2015: 1). In the same edition of the journal, Bosch identifies some of the obstacles in African journalism scholarship

Research, which is an integral part of the academy, is institutionalised in various ways that frequently result in an unequal imbalance of power. Southern researchers often find themselves following the guidelines set by their Western counterparts as they publish in international journals (often required for tenure, promotion or to secure funding). The ways in which the production and circulation of knowledge are organised produce metropolitan dominance and peripheral marginality (Connell, 2007) (2015:20).

While Wasserman emphasises the ‘comparative’ nature of this global outlook, a significant aspect of journalism studies (and, I think, media studies in general) is the tension between global contexts consuming African points of view and the ‘[recognition] that journalism practised in Africa is radically different from journalism in the North, primarily because of the different socio-cultural circumstances under which African journalists work’ (Bosch, 2015: 18).

It is notable that African Journalism Studies is one of several South African media journals published by Routledge in partnership with Unisa Press. This partnership increases the international reach of these journals, but also brings into focus the battle between open access and embargoed or inaccessible journals. The discussion over the state of African journalism and comparativism is thus taking place within the wider context of the commodification of international scholarship, which is weighted heavily against African institutions of higher education.

There is no doubt that internationalisation is a major trend in media scholarship in South Africa at present. In late May, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, chair of the African Union Commission, delivered the keynote address at the opening of the China-Africa Colloquium at UCT, an event hosted as a partnership among the Confucius Institute at UCT, the Centre for African Studies, the Institute for African Alternatives and the Hanban, the Confucius Institute headquarters in China. This convergence of political and cultural power within the scholarly context of the colloquium is significant if unsurprising, and reflects the growing economic relationship between the two countries. A key question is whether this internationalisation will come at the expense (literally, in terms of funding) of south-south and African collaborations.

Funding is another significant area for universities who either do not rely on state subsidies, or who have developed additional research capacities through soft funding. Soft funding involves links with either government or the corporate sector: in the case of the former, funds can be withdrawn as a result of activities seen as unfriendly to the government; and, in the case of the latter, the independence of research can be brought into question because of the nature of the funder. In terms of media studies in particular, there is a conflict between teaching and research aimed at questioning hegemonic institutions and receiving financial support from those institutions.

In the midst of financial and management scandals around the SABC (South Africa’s national broadcaster) and ongoing debates around media regulation, the announcement by the Minster of Communications Faith Muthambi that her department will ‘investigate the possibility of pooling government media assets with a view to support the creation of a black-owned media house in the country’ should be greeted the some alarm (Phakathi, 2015). This transformation objective supposedly corrects the imbalance in media ownership (many media houses are still largely white-owned), but it also casts more doubt on the security of media independence.

Transforming the curriculum

To some degree, all of the discussions above touch on the very current debate of the decolonisation of the South African university, a significant part of which is transformation of curricula. ‘Transformation’ has become a buzzword, but it runs the risk of being used too generally without enough attention paid to exactly what is being ‘transformed’ and why, and what form new curricula should take.

Perhaps because film and media studies – in relation to other disciplines within the Humanities such as philosophy, history or classical languages – tilts the most towards the commercial imperatives of the contemporary university, it thus attracts a large and diverse body of students which, in turn suggests a more diverse mediascape in the future. However, as Mbembe asks of his predominantly student audience: ‘Is it the kind of future in which we are all consumers before we are citizens?’ Students see in media studies a range of career opportunities: virtually every corporate, non-profit, social or governmental institution employs media practitioners.

It is also important to note that mobile technologies and social media in various forms allows for the capturing and dissemination of both raw footage and public commentary that leads to debate in the conventional media contexts such as new bulletins, government debates, and university classes and colloquia. Cellphones and open forums such as Facebook and YouTube have been instrumental in exposing murders committed against black men by police officers in the US in recent months; news feeds via Facebook and blog accumulators are challenging conventional network news broadcasting; and where else but the internet could Compton ‘publish’ his ‘100 Days @Western: the alternative listening tour’, a personal diary of the contemporary university (Day 34: The University of the Spectacle – ‘no sociology will be committed’).

Transformation is intersectional: it does not concern only race, but also considers institutional cultures in terms of class, gender, disability, nationality and religion. The transformation of the curriculum is, therefore, not about replacing content, but about re-examining disciplines from a different perspective. Transformation is also not just about undergraduate curricula, but must also focus on how academics develop postgraduate courses to attract and develop future researchers.

Curricula in undergraduate media courses reflect South African and African issues almost out of necessity – however, film and television studies courses are in a different position. Introductory courses are likely to prescribe texts like Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art (now in its 10th edition, 2012), Nelmes’ Introduction to Film Studies (2011) or Hayward’s Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (2012) as a basis for exploring the ‘major theories’: psychoanalysis, realism, Soviet montage and expressionism, for example. Film History textbooks are notorious for making only the most cursory comments about African cinema, a reflection of how little African cinema is taught outside of Africa. ¹² Thus, the question of how curricula in screen studies might be transformed is interesting.

The answer is not necessarily a text dedicated to African film and television. In the digital age, university access to a range of humanities journals – including those that publish on African screen studies – is relatively secure (though the South African Revenue Service has recently tightened controls on the taxation of electronic publications, which has driven up the price of journal databases).

The publication of more open access scholarship on screen studies is one area that needs attention, and another is the way in which African films and television texts are taught. ¹³ In my work, as an external examiner for many South African universities, I have noticed the establishment of film courses in several universities, as well as an increased focus on South African and African films and television shows. Since 2007, UCT has offered a full-semester senior undergraduate course on film in Africa, and South African film and television texts are taught in most undergraduate film and television studies courses. Furthermore, the Centre offers one of the few coursework Masters degrees on African cinema in the world.

Two other areas of teaching should also be considered. The first is the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), which has evolved rapidly in the United States over the past few years. UCT offered its first MOOC recently in medical anthropology, and while it is too early to evaluate the success of the course, there is no doubt that universities will continue to explore online learning models. The second aspect is transdisciplinary teaching and research. With the increased global emphasis on anthropogenic climate change and the idea of the anthropocene itself, the need to consider environmental theories, histories and interventions is a central concern for the humanities. In the Q&A session that concluded his Fanon seminar, Mbembe embarked on a series of responses that culminated in a blistering attack on national chauvinism and exclusionism, and a warning that the decolonising project was doomed if it failed to recognise the wider view of the anthropocene.

In 2015, UCT launched a new MPhil in Environmental Humanties that includes seminars from scholars in anthropology, English, sociology, historical studies, fine art, and film and media studies. The course also involves field trips that connect the students with citizen–science projects and scientific research conducted at other institutions. What has become immediately apparent is this enthusiasm from scientists for the opportunity to reciprocate the interest of their colleagues in the humanities toward collaborative research.

The bureaucracy of university administration (who gets credit for what, where should the money go) is often an obstruction to both transdisciplinary and innovative teaching initiatives, and the evaluation of teaching and research that falls outside of (or transcends) the paradigms of subsidy-earning research. Mbembe, once again, articulates this with great clarity:

The system of business principles and statistical accountancy has resulted in an obsessive concern with the periodic and quantitative assessment of every facet of university functioning. We have to create alternative systems of management because the current ones, dominated by statistical reason and the mania for assessment, are deterring students and teachers from a free pursuit of knowledge. They are substituting this goal of free pursuit of knowledge for another, the pursuit of credits.

Transdisciplinary research often runs against ‘the pursuit of credits’ because the results do not break down easily into quantifiable categories. However, the importance of environmental studies to virtually any field of research in the contemporary academy provides a firm context and a resounding call for the urgency of transdisciplinary scholarship.

Conclusion

Is film and media studies reiterating ‘the logic of the present system’, or does it offer new avenues for scholars to pursue progressive and decolonising projects in the South African university?

Certainly, if enrolments and graduation numbers are anything to go by, interest in the field continues to grow, and the volume and diversity of scholarly research suggests that the field is maturing in the post-apartheid context. However, as decolonisation and transformation debates have shown, it is statistical complacency that counts growth alone as a sign of success or progress. A similar proviso applies to the trend towards internationalisation: global reach and engagement is significant only if there is also recognition of the African context of the scholarship.

Furthermore, one needs to ask: Can graduates with film and media studies qualifications ‘promote an imaginative engagement with difference’ (Higgins, 2015: 4) even as they seek careers in industries dedicated to capitalist consumption? In 1982, Stam and Spence wrote

The magic carpet provided by [cinematic and televisual] apparatuses flies us around the globe and makes us, by virtue of our subject position, its audio-visual masters. It produces us as subjects, transforming us into armchair conquistadors, affirming our sense of power while making the inhabitants of the Third World objects of spectacle for the First World’s voyeuristic gaze (4).

There is resistance at the moment to being ‘armchair conquistadors’ of our own experience, to universities leaving behind their constituencies to hover uncertainly above the terrain. And there is an urgent need for the humanities to produce engaged scholarship and engaged scholars. Students and academics in screen studies have the potential to critique the ‘logic of the system’ from within the university, but they also need to challenge the discourse of the marketplace through critical literacy and creative engagement.