History — personal, political, and its inseparable intertwinement — is, perhaps, most truthfully realized when vividly expressed, not just recorded. Documentarian greats like Ken Burns and Claude Lanzmann might disagree since overt stylization and personalization threaten to diminish a text’s educational objectivity. But whatever is lost in revealing objective truths is, when done right, replaced by revealing what Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truths” — something far more mysterious and elusive that is only accessible through “fabrication, imagination, and stylization.” Blurry subjectivity, so often frowned upon in documentary form, is duly weaponized here; every act of documentation also becomes an act of interrogation, not only of the subject, but of the filmmaker questioning the subject.
Milisuthando, the remarkable debut feature film of South African writer, filmmaker, cultural worker, and artist Milisuthando Bongela-Davis, is most confidently forthright about personalizing the political. The film, which first premiered at Sundance in 2023 and most recently screened at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, is ostensibly about South Africa during and after the end of Apartheid. But, as its title suggests, broader political history is only refracted through Milisuthando’s reckonings and realizations. Bullet-pointed academicism about Black life and culture during and after Apartheid is replaced, as per the film’s logline, with “a poetic, memory-driven exploration of love, intimacy, race, and belonging by a filmmaker who grew up during Apartheid but didn’t know it was happening until it was over.”
The first three chapters (of five) in Milisuthando, however, are not as overwhelmingly diffuse as the logline suggests. They — largely to Milisuthando’s credit — strike a keen balance between poeticism and academicism. Chapter 1, titled “Birth,” — set in Transkei, a southeastern region in South Africa that “no longer [officially] exists” — represents this tension most effectively. Milisuthando documents her interactions with her grandmother and aunts, mostly sympathetic to the formation of Transkei as an independent but unrecognized Black “homeland” during Apartheid as a home movie of sorts. It’s all very scrappy and spontaneous — Milisuthando shooting her family members going about their chores in broad daylight, proudly reciting Transkei’s anthems, reminiscing about their homeland before Nelson Mandela took it away from them. Before, almost abruptly, it’s not: geniality is replaced by probing reflections, voiced by Milisuthando over stills of family photographs or a black screen. How can freedom for the rest of South Africa not mean freedom for the people of Transkei? Milisuthando analyzes archival footage to interrogate the whites’ “brainwashing” of the Blacks during the formation of Transkei in 1976. Their objective — as Milisuthando’s grandmother continued to believe — was never to provide freedom for Black people by assigning them a marginal piece of land segregated from the whites; it was to “keep the whites free, without any demands from Black people.”
This underlying rhetoric of Othering, sinisterly operating under the guise of progress, likewise dominates the following two chapters, “Bewitchment” and “Protections,” if only to slightly impersonal effects. Both reify the film’s central dialectic — between utopian illusion and dystopian reality — during and immediately after apartheid in South Africa. In “Bewitchment,” Milisuthando expertly juxtaposes montages of South Africa “blooming” under the white man’s control by playing two very different pieces of music over them. The first one is the white man’s version of it — full of classical awe, wonder, and resplendent supremacy: so, naturally, scored to Richard Wagner’s magisterial “Das Rheingold.” However, Milisuthando immediately undercuts its grandiosity by playing Caroline Shaw and Roomful of Teeth’s “Courante” over a similarly bombastic montage of South Africa rapidly “progressing” under Apartheid. Unlike “Das Rheingold,” “Courante” doesn’t complement the rapturous images of celebration in the montage; its tsunami of arrhythmic echoes, gasps, and tense breathing actively contradict it, highlighting the human cost often buried beneath the façade of progress. In “Protections,” Milisuthando continues to probe this dialectic, albeit to less formally exciting ends: here, the filmmaker compares the promise of freedom and equality afforded by Mandela in 1992 with its unfulfilled realization, focusing on her now-grown classmates recalling the (racial) rejection they faced when attending mixed-race schools immediately after the end of Apartheid.
With the 4th chapter, titled “Purging,” however, Milisuthando jolts us out of the academicism that started to set at the end of Chapter 3. It encompasses all the central tensions explored between white and Black, personal and political, reality and illusion, and past and present, before slowly collapsing them upon each other. Unlike in the previous sections, Milisuthando here makes no concentrated effort to separate historical fact from personal reckoning; this section plunges into (at times, literal) darkness to explore how power structures — established during Apartheid and abolished after it — continue to haunt the filmmaker’s relationships, even with people she considers her closest friends. No life-reaffirming background score or colorful images — or even, for a sizable chunk of this section, any images — complement or contradict whatever Milisuthando or her white producer friend, Marion, and white friend and neighbor, Bettina, are saying to each other. It’s just their deepest thoughts and anxieties — about everything from the suffocating guilt of white privilege to the nauseating double consciousness that’s an unfortunate byproduct of Blackness — voiced with the utmost honesty and clarity. Wrapping things up, the 5th chapter, titled “A Goat Calls Me Back Home,” looks out to the future in a somewhat clumsy, overly optimistic way that the rest of Milisuthando never really hints at. But it’s a minor misstep for a film that’s otherwise this formally daring, thematically ambitious, and — most of all — movingly confessional.
DIRECTOR: Milisuthando Bongela; IN THEATERS: May 15; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 8 min.
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