Cinema from Within Interrogating Black Identity and Representation In South African Cinema

Abstract

The principal objective of this Film by Practice PhD is to explore, through both my identity as a black South African man and my practice as a writer/director/producer of film and television, how black identity and representation in South African cinema has developed from the colonial and Apartheid1 eras to the politically negotiated transition to democracy in 1994. Discourses on black/ blackness—with regards to cinema in both theory and practice— and their connection to race, class and gender are, of course, wide-ranging and often polemical. My research is primarily concerned with discourses on blackness as they relate to my experiences living and working as a black South African man during and after formal Apartheid.