[Socrates] Landmark anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa this Thursday

[Larissa Swedell]

Dear all,

This Thursday at 4:45 pm in Rathaus 209 we will be screening Lionel
Rogosin's 1959 anti-apartheid film, *Come Back, Africa *as part of the
Representations of South Africa film series.  Please see below for more
information.  Apologies for cross-posting!

All the best,

Larissa Swedell


The *Representations of South Africa* film series, part of the core
programming for the Year of South Africa at Queens College, consists of six
critically acclaimed films focusing on the social and political challenges
and rewards of life in South Africa, historically and today.  Three of
these films – *Come Back, Africa*; *Last Grave at Dimbaza*; and *Mapantsula*
– were produced clandestinely in South Africa during apartheid and helped
to expose the inhumanity of this regime to the outside world.  Three
additional films – *Amandla!*, *Yesterday*, and *District 9* – were
collaborations between South African and foreign filmmakers that reached a
global audience and became internationally known for their portrayals of
South Africa during and after apartheid.  These six screenings, from Oct.
16 through Dec. 4, will be followed by a joint discussion and critique by
Professors Noah Tsika of Queens College and Paula Massood of Brookyn
College on Thursday, December 11 at 4:45pm at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum.

For more information and full film series schedule:
http://southafrica.qc.cuny.edu/representations-of-south-africa-film-series


*Come Back, Africa*

*Thursday October 234:45 pmRathaus 209*
Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 powerful classic *Come Back, Africa* is one of the
bravest and best of all political films.  After witnessing firsthand the
terrors of fascism as a soldier in World War II, Lionel Rogosin vowed to
fight against it wherever and whenever he saw it reemerging.  In an effort
to expose ‘what people try to avoid seeing,’ Rogosin travelled to South
Africa and secretly filmed *Come Back, Africa*, which revealed the cruelty
and injustice suffered by black and colored peoples under apartheid.
– Milestone Films

The miracle of Lionel Rogosin’s apartheid drama *Come Back, Africa* isn’t
that it’s a solid, affecting artifact of a cruel society, but that it
exists at all.  In the wake of his debut film, the New York skid-row
chronicle *On the Bowery*, Rogosin set out in 1957 for Johannesburg, and
for months laid the groundwork for surreptitiously shooting a follow-up
that would lay bare the pain and humiliations of black South Africans
subjugated by the white majority, enlisting native writers Lewis Nkosi and
Bloke Modisane to collaborate on the scenario.  Mixing documentary-like
footage with scripted scenes as he had in his first feature, the filmmaker
heavily features music and dance by throngs of street performers, a
diegetically captured salve for the wounds of extreme poverty and social
oppression—and an ideal camouflage of his critical agenda from the South
African authorities, who were persuaded that he was assembling a musical or
a travelogue.  Its narrative spine the unhappy emigration of rural villager
Zachariah (Zacharia Mgabi) to the big city, which is often characterized by
montages of forbidding skyscrapers or smoke-belching refineries, the film
has its aesthetic shortfalls (the nonprofessional cast and fly-by-night
production values let the seams show), but fulfills its goal of presenting
this time and place in all its vibrancy and sorrow through atmospheric
scenes of real daily life and labor.  From a garage owner snarling about
the African National Congress to a mixed-race crowd, together but with
subtly different reactions, watching busking boys dance on a Jo’burg
sidewalk, *Come Back, Africa* was the first film of its kind to bear
witness to the hypocrisies of this riven country, particularly to audiences
in segregated America.
– Bill Weber, *Slant Magazine* (January 25, 2012)