To tell a story in South Africa at the time of apartheid for “Mapantsula,” it was always going to take the production twice the work. Fake scripts had to be written to throw authorities off the scent of what director Olivier Schmitz and crew were working on and ultimately, the film would require two releases when it was denied the right to screen in South Africa by its censorship board, first becoming an underground hit when it was first made available on VHS bootleg copies as it gained international acclaim abroad in 1987 and only recently had a proper premiere in the country after being newly restored.
It shouldn’t have been this way for the powerful drama, but unusually fitting when it centers on someone living a double life in Panic (Thomas Mogotlane), a street savvy pickpocket in Soweto who shows little concern for anyone besides his partner Dingaan (Darlington Michaels), who helps him get away with snatches purses and wallets. Yet there is mounting pressure for him to change his ways, both personally and politically as his girlfriend Pat (Thembi Mtshali) tires of how he’s decided to make a living, doing the uncomfortable but unfortunately necessary work herself of serving as a housekeeper to an upper class white family that’s all that’s available to someone in her station, and it’s increasingly difficult for Panic to conduct his business outside of the house when protests against the local government bring out a greater police presence and his own conscience begins to call on him to think about something greater than himself.
From the start of “Mapantsula,” you know something’s got to give when Schmitz presents Panic decked out in a zoot suit at a club and in drab prison attire in a matter of minutes, hardly distinguishing between the past and the present when introducing the character. With its bifurcated structure, the film comes to reflect how the goals of equity in a segregated nation were made even more impossible when beyond uniting communities around common causes, the racist policies that made mere survival a daily concern for Black South Africans created divisions within every individual as they were forced to weigh their responsibilities to themselves versus one another. Schmitz, who had long looked towards culture as a way to bring people together and went so far as to open a club in the early 1980s where he’d defy Apartheid laws by manning the DJ turntable for all South Africans, was uniquely equipped to to convey the restlessness of the times, fearlessly filming in areas where real protests were afoot, and while he hadn’t made a feature before “Mapantsula,” a lack of experience likely encouraged him to push the envelope in ways that have made the film continually electrifying today.
After being restored to match the vitality of the images Schmitz originally captured just shy of four decades ago, “Mapantsula” is now being rereleased by Film Movement in the U.S. after receiving its first release in South Africa and before engagements this weekend at the BAM Cinemas in Brooklyn and the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz 3, Schmitz spoke about the film’s long-in-the-works revival, being able to connect his own passions in tale of internal fractures, his collaboration with the film’s star and co-writer Mogotlane, who sadly passed away only a few years after filming and the possibility of filming once more in Soweto.
That opening title card is quite a statement – “It’s a miracle this was made. It’s a miracle it survived.” What’s it been like to revisit this?
Wow, it’s been quite a journey. I put that title onto the film and Berlinale Classic said, “We don’t normally do stuff like that, mess with the original film,” but I thought it was so important because it really was a film that it shouldn’t have been made, according to the apartheid government of that day. We only made it with a lot of devious energy and because it had been in cans for so many years, when I took this stuff out of storage, I got a fright. Some of the cans were rusted and we did a scan and the material was grainy, blotchy, scratched, dusty — everything you can imagine, so you really had to recreate it from all of that. It was like archeology meets film and it was almost like making the film again.
And the second time around, I know more as a filmmaker now, so the original color grading was very functional and the cinematographer wasn’t there. It was me as a young filmmaker in London with a grader who was about to retire his last job and asking me [rudimentary questions like] “a bit more green, a bit more blue, a bit more yellow,” and now I could say, “Well, actually this film is very much about the colors of the earth and the earth is a very red, red ochre quality in South Africa.” So it achieved a few bonuses in this whole process now. We couldn’t afford the Dolby license back then either, so now there’s a stereo mix for the first time on the film as well.
All the better to hear this amazing soundtrack that you have on the film – and I wondered how foundational was the music when I understand you actually ran a club at one point and were a DJ before getting into filmmaking.
I love music, and as you said, we ran a club and we played a lot of African and South African music, so this was a big inspiration. The music was great at that time. And maybe because you could say a lot with music without it being obvious that you’re criticizing [the government] and a lot of the music managed to achieve a kind of space for creative people, where they feel like I can do this without being sensitive. there was a great fusion of jazz and African music. Dolly Rathebe, who plays the old mother in the story, was a famous musician and film star in the 1950s in South Africa and the music is very much still influenced by swing music back then. She has a great voice and sings on the soundtrack, and the musicians in the film were from a fairly successful and famous band at that time, so they were all very accomplished and it’s all original music. I was there as part of the process, but as their biggest fan more than anything else and that’s how it came about. We’ve re-released the music as well. It’s on Spotify and platforms like that.
How did you first connect with Thomas Mogotlane to make this film in the first place?
After I studied at art school, I went to Johannesburg and I was going to register [to get] a master’s, but then I thought, “No, it’s just this kind of ivory tower existence,” so I didn’t do it. But studying was the only way to get out of military conscription, so I knew I was on a limited leash here in terms of time because I wasn’t going to do it and I knew I’d have to leave the country when they called me up. So I had this little window of time in Johannesburg, which is very different to Cape Town, a huge metropolitan city and I met a lot of people, including Thomas, who had a very accomplished background in theatre. He worked in the film industry, but he hadn’t done anything of note because they were really not interesting projects back then. But he’d worked with a very important Soweto playwright called Gibson Kente, and they did a lot of very influential work. The reason why [Thomas is the] casting director of the film as well is because he knew all these actors, so he made great suggestions. And we got on very well.
I had to leave then because I did get called up [for military service], so I ended up in Germany and we continued to communicate. There was no e-mail back then, so it was a lot of writing of letters. It’s hard to conceive of in today’s world, and I found a young South African in London who was very supportive [of the project] and he sold his apartment to finance the beginning of this project and the financing was very bizarre in South Africa up to that [point], but we didn’t know. We were young people trying to do things, so it kind of grew out of this idea of wanting to do this, that people joined along the way and you follow a journey where you don’t know where it’s going to lead.
It’s got an unusually sophisticated structure that flits between the past and present and you had a prior background in editing. How did you figure out how best to tell this story?
I worked in Johannesburg as an editor for two years on a long-form documentary and I continued editing in Germany for a TV station, and I think coming from an arts background, the whole concept of editing and the structures that make themselves available to you if you look for them in editing was fascinating. I had a big passion for that and maybe a sense of rhythm from the music and a sense of deconstruction. I think we take for granted that films have to be linear in a certain way. They don’t. Books aren’t linear, so it’s not even about flashback. This film has two timeframes basically that run parallel. That’s why there’s no sort of dreamy transition between timeframes or any of that and it ended up being a powerful vehicle for the film. A lot of people responded to this as a very emotional way to tell the story [because the main character’s] whole journey is this clash between the selfish version of himself and then the version of himself under pressure to maybe be somebody different, so to do that, it’s this continual contrast of the way it was and the way it is now in the story.
What was it like filming in South Africa at that time? There are so many huge scenes in public.
I had the strong desire and there’s a certain anger of about the way things were in South Africa, so [I went in] with a little bit with blinkers in terms of what could go wrong and what can happen. We knew that there were dangers involved. We wrote a fake script to give us a cover story and I went back to South Africa basically AWOL because I didn’t go to the army and I came back to make an anti-apartheid film. We actually did it, but all of that could have been very different, and I think it’s not just about me. A lot of the actors realized that it was pretty hardcore and were nervous sometimes about doing this as well. A lot of them never saw the full picture of the film — they only saw their scenes and then they said, “Well, we didn’t realize it was going to be like this,” so you keep the thing a secret as long as you can and compartmentalize and everybody just sees what they need to see until you put it all together.
It must’ve been bittersweet to see the film become a huge underground hit in South Africa when the censor board prevented a proper release. What was it like to learn of it reaching audiences?
Internationally, amazingly, we ended up in Cannes and they had a debate beforehand. Some people didn’t want to watch it in principle because it was from a white director, [which] I can understand, and then Pierre Rissient, somebody who became my friend and was a very influential man behind the scenes in the festival, was one of the first Europeans to acknowledge Korean cinema and Jane Campion. So this is a great human being and he was always a supporter from then on and that opened doors. The film screened in 52 countries, so it did get seen broadly.
But the irony is we couldn’t screen it in its full form in South Africa and we didn’t want to submit to the censor board, so it created a conflict with the main producer because he wanted to make his money, and we said we’re we’re not cutting the film. We let it go out on VHS tapes and be pirated in South Africa so people could see that, but that means a really bad copy was around for all these years in the wrong aspect ratio. So it’s now on Netflix Africa and we did a small release in South Africa. We finally had a cast and crew screening. People could see the film properly for the first time. So it was very emotional.
From what I understand, Thomas’s family got to be there, which must’ve been special.
They were so appreciative. It was fantastic. I made sure that the families of several actors who passed away came to the screening and introduced them to the audience and the audience applauded them and they just felt really good about this process. You know a lot of those artists weren’t properly appreciated back in those days, so suddenly to have their names there and thank yous and in memory of and all of that it made it it made it it meant a lot for for them. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do this, so it didn’t disappear into a realm of analog art that never made it into the digital world.
Is it true that this whole process may have stirred ideas about making another film in Soweto?
It was very inspirational. I made two films is Soweto and met so many great people there during this period [of making “Mapantsula”] and restoring this film, I thought I really want to do a third one, so I’m talking to different people right now about doing that. I’d like to look at another story from a different generation in the same suburb where I shot the other films to give this place meaning in a third film, so you can see this progression of generations in South Africa.
One of the moments that’s really striking now to see in “Mapantsula” is the scene where Panic runs into a older man in the streets who confronts him, basically saying he has no history to fall back on when his generation has no parents. Is it interesting to reflect on a scene like that now, seeing what became of that generation?
Yeah, it’s little moments. I think it’s the place, it’s that actor, it’s the sense of an older generation not understanding a young generation, and that keeps going. I’m 64 now, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things the young people think and do and feel that I can’t access in the same way. But it’s not true, because you have all this memory and baggage on your shoulders of things you’ve done, that you’re not completely free in the same way as a young person. All these little things have meaning for people, and for me. So yeah, so maybe when I go back, and if I make this film, I’ll be seeing it obviously through a completely different lens of the generation, which is a bit older than me.
“Mapantsula” opens on July 26th at BAM in Brooklyn and will screen in Los Angeles at the Los Feliz 3 at 4 pm on July 28th.