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The Fairest Cape of Them All? Cape Town in Cinematic Imagination VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH AbstractWork on film and the city is still in its infancy forAfrica. To my knowledge, there is little research on the way that film has contributed to promoting the image of African cities. This article aims to help fill this gap. In doing so, it draws on Giuliana Bruno’s observations on the close relationship between cinema and mass tourism. The article reviews existing literature on cinema and urban Africa. It then explores ways in which Cape Town was represented on film before the ending of apartheid in 1994 and the subsequent rapid rise of the city as a mass tourist destination, international film location and centre of a local film industry. A number of films about the city have since been made for tourists and sold as DVDs or aired on the likes of the Travel Channel. They predictably construct Cape Town as a desirably ‘unique’and exotic, yet sufficiently safe and ‘vibrant’, city of the imagination. Through close analysis of a typical local travelogue, this article analyses how film language is deployed to this end in the context of Cape Town’s apartheid past, the reality of extensive poverty, disease and violence in the present, and dystopian imagery in a growing number of locally made films. Cities of the imagination Stephen Watson (2006: 8) has recently stated that ‘Cape Town persists as a place not much mythologized by its writers’. He has done so while introducing an anthology of essays in which literary contributors convey ‘their’ Cape Town. The very diverse ‘city of the imagination’ that results tends to confirm Watson’s (ibid.: 5) assertion that there ‘is no longer any single, dominant myth about Cape Town for the simple reason that this city has lately changed, expanded, diversified to such a degree that no one myth could any longer contain it’. However, cities have not only been mythologized in literature. They have often also been places of cinematic imagination and consequent reputation: Godard’s Paris or Woody Allen’s NewYork. So this article examines how Cape Town has been imagined in film. It demonstrates that this city has, thus far, had limited exposure in feature films, though this is increasing. Cape Town has been more obviously and directly the focus of local and foreign travelogues, coinciding with the rapid escalation of mass tourism to the city in the wake of apartheid’s demise. Yet, there would appear to be, as yet, no research on how such films have overtly promoted Cape Town, or indeed any African city. A major intention of this article is to suggest that this is a fruitful area of investigation for those I would like to thank members of the Centre for Urban Studies, Leicester University, the anonymous reviewers appointed by the IJURR and Eustacia Riley for insights that have shaped this article. I would also like to thank Lesley Marx for putting me on to several Cape Town films. And finally thanks to Ian Rijsdijk, Lance Van Sittert and Nigel Worden, all of the University of Cape Town, for helpful references. Volume 34.1 March 2010 92–114 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00902.x © 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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The Fairest Cape of Them All? Cape Town in Cinematic Imagination

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Page 1: The Fairest Cape of Them All? Cape Town in Cinematic Imagination

The Fairest Cape of Them All?Cape Town in Cinematic Imagination

VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH

Abstractijur_902 92..114

Work on film and the city is still in its infancy for Africa. To my knowledge, there is littleresearch on the way that film has contributed to promoting the image of African cities.This article aims to help fill this gap. In doing so, it draws on Giuliana Bruno’sobservations on the close relationship between cinema and mass tourism. The articlereviews existing literature on cinema and urban Africa. It then explores ways in whichCape Town was represented on film before the ending of apartheid in 1994 and thesubsequent rapid rise of the city as a mass tourist destination, international film locationand centre of a local film industry. A number of films about the city have since been madefor tourists and sold as DVDs or aired on the likes of the Travel Channel. Theypredictably construct Cape Town as a desirably ‘unique’ and exotic, yet sufficiently safeand ‘vibrant’, city of the imagination. Through close analysis of a typical localtravelogue, this article analyses how film language is deployed to this end in the contextof Cape Town’s apartheid past, the reality of extensive poverty, disease and violence inthe present, and dystopian imagery in a growing number of locally made films.

Cities of the imaginationStephen Watson (2006: 8) has recently stated that ‘Cape Town persists as a place notmuch mythologized by its writers’. He has done so while introducing an anthology ofessays in which literary contributors convey ‘their’ Cape Town. The very diverse ‘city ofthe imagination’ that results tends to confirm Watson’s (ibid.: 5) assertion that there ‘isno longer any single, dominant myth about Cape Town for the simple reason that this cityhas lately changed, expanded, diversified to such a degree that no one myth could anylonger contain it’.

However, cities have not only been mythologized in literature. They have often alsobeen places of cinematic imagination and consequent reputation: Godard’s Paris orWoody Allen’s New York. So this article examines how Cape Town has been imaginedin film. It demonstrates that this city has, thus far, had limited exposure in feature films,though this is increasing. Cape Town has been more obviously and directly the focus oflocal and foreign travelogues, coinciding with the rapid escalation of mass tourism to thecity in the wake of apartheid’s demise. Yet, there would appear to be, as yet, no researchon how such films have overtly promoted Cape Town, or indeed any African city. A majorintention of this article is to suggest that this is a fruitful area of investigation for those

I would like to thank members of the Centre for Urban Studies, Leicester University, the anonymousreviewers appointed by the IJURR and Eustacia Riley for insights that have shaped this article. I wouldalso like to thank Lesley Marx for putting me on to several Cape Town films. And finally thanks to IanRijsdijk, Lance Van Sittert and Nigel Worden, all of the University of Cape Town, for helpful references.

Volume 34.1 March 2010 92–114 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00902.x

© 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by BlackwellPublishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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interested in how any city or region in the world may have been imagined or moreactively promoted.

Modern places, facing global competition, compete to attract investment and touristrevenue (Kotler et al., 1993; Law, 1993; Kolb, 2006). And, as Urry (2002) haspersuasively argued, a major strategy that their official tourist experts and privateentrepreneurs employ is to suggest that a particular destination will be ‘out of theordinary’, perhaps ‘unique’, from a visitor’s perspective. This suggests that such placesellers will create some unifying myth about modern places, however objectivelycomplex they have become. Slogans and ‘destination brands’, as Ward (1998) hasdemonstrated, have enduringly attempted to convey a place’s supposedly uniquecharacteristics, even if they deploy many clichéd components while doing so. This articleexplores how this has occurred in local ‘boosterist’ films, while drawing comparisonswith senses of Cape Town conveyed in some international travelogues. Travelogueswould seem to be a major way in which many places are promoted and imagined in theglobalized world.

A growing body of research has revealed much about contemporary place marketingin South Africa (Maharaj and Ramballi, 1998; Rogerson, 1999; Hiller, 2000; Freund andPadayachee, 2002; George, 2004; Rogerson and Visser, 2007). These works demonstratethat South African cities have copied common international strategies, as outlined byWard (1998: 186–9), with waterfront developments, the building of convention centres,the hosting of (or bidding to host) major sporting events, the renewal or regeneration ofthe built environment, the refurbishment or development of cultural attractions and,clearly centrally connected to all of this, the promotion of tourism. A recent essay byPirie (2007) has usefully synthesized what this has meant for Cape Town. He has drawnon existing work to reveal some ways in which Cape Town’s uniqueness among SouthAfrican destinations has been promoted. Perhaps, most notably, this has been through theidea of Cape Town as the gay capital of South Africa (Visser, 2002; Visser, 2003; Elder,2004) and as a city with a particularly rich and diverse multicultural heritage (Worden,1994; 1996; McEachern, 1998; Nuttall and Coetzee, 1998; Robins, 1998/9; Rassool andProselandis, 2001; Malan and Soudien, 2002; Coombes, 2003; Thornberry, 2003;Murray, 2007).

But although Pirie (2007: 235) makes fleeting mention of a Lonely Planet DVD onCape Town, there is, as yet, no detailed investigation into how ideas about the uniquenessof this city may have been conveyed through film. So this article reviews existingliterature on cinema and urban Africa before exploring ways in which Cape Town hasbeen represented in feature films. Particular attention is given to a privately producedlocal boosterist film, Cape Town: The Fairest Cape of Them All, and how it uses a varietyof narrative and iconic devices to construct Cape Town as both a unique destination andas a safe ‘city of the imagination’ for tourists. This means analysing how it deals withuncomfortable elements of the city’s and South Africa’s past and present, and, ergo, howit represents Africa and Africans. Such analysis clearly requires some understanding offilm language. Fairest Cape is briefly contrasted with two foreign travelogues (made forthe Travel Channel and for Lonely Planet), as well as with other locally produced visualrepresentations of the city. The aim is to explore the nature of Cape Town, whether mythor reality, conveyed in these particular and popular representations of the city.

Cinema, cities and senses of African urban placesIn the last decade, there has been a burgeoning literature on cinema and the city thatdraws attention to many ways in which urban development and the history of cinemahave been intimately connected (Clarke, 1997; Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 2001; Bruno,2002; Krause and Petro, 2003). Cinema, which in its earliest years attempted to capturethe wonders of urban modernity, has continually explored and reflected ‘the distinctive

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spaces, lifestyles and human conditions of the city’ (Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 2001: 1).Early film makers and their audiences were fascinated with the way that cinema couldshow movement of all kinds, and not least the seemingly frantic pace and disjointedrhythms of modern urban life (Clarke, 1997: 3). Film makers themselves used new formsof urban transport and elements of cityscapes — they put cameras on trains, trams, cars,boats, bridges and skyscrapers — to bring new (panoramic or street-level) perspectiveson the city, whether in city travelogues or fiction films (Bruno, 2002: 18–20). Cinemathereby came to reflect and shape the new visual, and subsequently aural, experiences ofurban life.

One urban experience first captured in literature was that of the flâneur or city-stroller,who was physically close but socially distant to the people around him in the metropolis.The flâneur could gain pleasure from gazing gratuitously at strange people and places,not unlike the experience of cinema-goers gazing at cities and citizens on the big screen(Bruno, 1997; Clarke, 1997; Neumann, 2001; Bruno, 2002). Films about cities, or set incities, reflected (perhaps changing over time) contemporary social attitudes to particularplaces, or the urban in general (McArthur, 1997; Marshall, 2001; Rockett, 2001). Suchfilms could also help shape or maintain these attitudes — whether utopian, dystopian orambivalent — and thereby contribute to conveying senses of place (Bruno, 2002: 27–8).

Giuliana Bruno’s (1997: 47) work has explored the close relationship betweenconveying senses of place, the growth of cinema and mass tourism: the way that thecinema’s depiction of particular places is ‘both an extension and an effect of thetourist’s gaze’. Cinema, whose development correlated with the travel technologies ofthe late nineteenth century, offered a form of virtual tourism that provided a mixtureof spectacle and education. Travelogues and fiction films drew on a long Europeantradition of representing cities in which literary descriptions had largely given way tovarious visual and picturesque forms by the late nineteenth century, whether paintings,photographs or magic lantern shows: ‘the tongue gave way to the eye’ (Bruno, 2002:191).

Cinema’s development also coincided of course with late-nineteenth-century ‘new’imperialism, and ‘often acted as an agent of imperial obsession . . . implicated in the actof “discovery” and the desire to possess’. Part of ‘discovery’ was finding ‘otherness’ andportraying it as ‘exotic’ (ibid.: 77–9). How Africa and Africans were subsequently (mis-)represented and stereotyped in Western cinema has been explored in several majorstudies (Armes, 1987; Cameron, 1994; Shohat and Stam, 1994; Davis, 1996). There isalso the beginnings of a literature suggesting that Africa was represented in manyWestern feature films and documentaries from the 1950s onwards primarily in terms ofexotic landscape and animals, thereby, inter alia, all but avoiding African politics(Beinart, 2001; Penn, 2007; Watson, 2007). Films about Africa drew on previousrepresentations of the continent in travel writing, novels, painting and photography.These had served, through a combination of ‘scientific’ information and picturesqueromanticization, to promote Africa as a (potential or actual) desirable imperialpossession (Edwards, 1992; Landau, 1996; Ryan, 1997; Stevenson, 1999).

However, there is still little work focused directly on how cinema has portrayedAfrican cities. Surveys of African cinema (Pfaff, 1988; Tomaselli, 1989; Diawara, 1992;Ukadike, 1994; Thackway, 2003; Maingard, 2007) make all too brief mention of itsrelationship to African cities and urbanization. Some of these though are insightful andsuggest potential lines of further research: Tomaselli’s (1989: 54–8, 73–5) briefdescription of apartheid era films that dealt with urban South Africa; Diawara’s (1992:142–4) discussion of music and culture in the Kinshasa of La Vie est Belle (1987);Ukadike’s (1994: 84) reference to the concern with polyglot architectural styles in theDakar of Contras’ City (1968); or Thackway’s (2003: 12–13, 45) comments on theportrayal of urban youth culture in Francophone African cinema. Otherwise, publishedwork that overtly focuses on the portrayal of particular cities is limited. It includes pieceson Algiers (Bayles, 1999; Vann, 2002), Lagos (Oha, 2001) and Port Elizabeth (Baines,2001).

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Perhaps most work has been on the cinematic portrayal of one sub-Saharan city,Johannesburg. This is, at least partly, a result of the fact that Johannesburg has been muchfilmed, itself largely a consequence of it being the centre of the South Africanfilm industry. Substantial film studios were built there by I.W. Schlesinger’s AfricanFilms Production company early in the twentieth century (Gutsche, 1972). Hence,Johannesburg became the pre-eminent South African city of cinematic imagination,perhaps most famously (and enduringly) due to Cry the Beloved Country (1952) and thedystopian anti-urban vision it conveyed (Davis, 1996: 20–59; Marx, 2000; Baines, 2003;Bickford-Smith, 2006; Kruger, 2006). The fact that this film was an adaptation of theAlan Paton (1948) novel reminds us of the often close connection between cities of thecinematic and literary imagination.

Few recent works in either medium have promoted Johannesburg in much morepositive, let alone utopian, fashion. Instead, and sometimes recalling films like AfricanJim (1949) that lauded the possibilities of making a lucrative career in the Golden City,while lamenting its crime, many modern takes have portrayed Johannesburg as the EdgyCity, an abrasive but stimulating place in transition from the apartheid city (Kruger,2001; 2006), reflecting a similar literary trend (Holland and Roberts, 2002).

Other films have been more unambiguously dystopian, conveying contemporaryinsider popular concerns for safety and security in the Fearful City (Dirsuweit, 2002), aswell as external perceptions of Africa’s ‘infamous city’.1 The Johannesburg of A Walk inthe Night (1998), Hijack Stories (2001) and Tsotsi (2006) is largely a nightmare place ofgangsterism and brutal violence. Significantly, two of these films are screen adaptationsof novels set in earlier periods and, in the case of A Walk in the Night, set in another SouthAfrican city: Cape Town (La Guma, 1968; Fugard, 1980).

That the latter was not shot in Cape Town, despite the development of a localfilm industry there after 1994, probably reflected the fact that its makers believedJohannesburg was, by the late 1990s, more fitting rather than merely more convenient.Johannesburg then, and now, was ‘popularly believed to be the “crime capital” of SouthAfrica’ (Palmary et al., 2003: 101). But the rate of violent crime was, in reality, not muchlower or less horrific in Cape Town in the late 1990s (Camerer et al., 1998; Bickford-Smith et al., 1999) and official statistics show that it subsequently surpassed that ofJohannesburg.2

Cape Town: location and localeCape Town is the oldest extant city in South Africa, the capital of first the Dutch thenBritish (from 1806) Cape colonies, and legislative capital of a unified South Africa from1910 onwards. As two modern histories of the city have demonstrated (Worden et al.,1998; Bickford-Smith et al., 1999), the growth of Cape Town stemmed mainly fromits functions as administrative capital, commercial centre, coastal resort and modestmanufacturer of goods like food and clothing. From the late nineteenth century, thegrowth of trade and manufacturing was fuelled by the discovery of diamonds and gold inthe South African interior. In the course of the twentieth century, Cape Town became asubstantial port, with a reclaimed foreshore that became the site of skyscrapers, roadsand car parks. This provided a glaring contrast with what remained of the older CapeTown closer to the mountain, one still with numerous Dutch and British colonialbuildings. The city also increased the extent of its light industries, particularly textiles,and developed a sizeable service sector.

The original site of Dutch settlement in the mid-seventeenth century was on the shoresof Table Bay beneath Table Mountain. So the port, central business district and

1 The sub-title to Holland and Robert’s anthology is ‘stories about Africa’s infamous city’.2 Statistics taken from URL http://www.saps.gov.za (accessed 21 April 2008).

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immediately surrounding residential areas lie within a magnificent amphitheatre at theSouth-western tip of Africa. But the greater metropolitan area is far larger, bounded bythe Atlantic Ocean in the West, False Bay in the South, the Hottentots-HollandMountains in the East and agricultural land (the Swartland) in the North. The firstsuburbs grew along the Atlantic coast and around the verdant and well-forested back ofTable Mountain, with views across the Cape Flats towards the Hottentots-Hollands. Thelatter by the late seventeenth century formed a barrier between the Dutch settlement andthe ‘Hottentots’ or Khoikhoi (a less offensive contemporary term).

Today, the oldest suburbs contain most of the city’s more expensive and desirableresidential areas. The social geography and built environment of the metropolitan area asa whole is marked, and marred, by Cape Town’s history of slavery, racial discriminationand segregation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, and in terms of categoriesused by the census of 1904, Capetonians were divided into ‘Europeans’ or ‘whites’,‘coloureds’ (people largely of slave, Khoikhoi and ‘mixed race’ descent) and ‘natives’(largely Xhosa-speaking ‘black’ South Africans from the Eastern Cape). Thesecategories more or less coincided with a three-tier social hierarchy, with whites andcoloureds forming the (roughly equal) vast majority (over 90%) of the city’s 170,000inhabitants. Almost a century later, and despite the growth of a considerable coloured andblack middle class, a similar racial hierarchy remained. But the 2001 census found thatwhites were now in a declining minority. Of Cape Town’s population of almost 2.9million, 48% were described as coloured, 31% as black, and 19% as white.3

In the course of the twentieth century, and most rigorously during the apartheid yearsfrom 1948 to 1991, the apparent lived reality of such labels was enhanced by legislationintended to create comprehensive social and residential racial segregation. In addition,Cape Town was part of a ‘Coloured Labour Preference Area’, which meant that country-wide controls over ‘black’ urbanization (which involved ‘pass laws’ and ‘influx control’)were particularly vigorously enforced in this part of South Africa and that ‘blackAfricans’ remained a minority in the city. Such discrimination also ensured that most‘black’ Capetonians lived in the worst housing, the majority by 1994 in shanties on theCape Flats.

At the advent of the twenty-first century, a highly inequitable distribution of wealthand resources, still largely along the fault-lines of ‘race’, was apparent in the socialgeography of the city (Turok, 2001; Pieterse, 2002; Miraftab, 2004). The growth ofshanty areas was fuelled by high rates of rural-urban migration, itself partly the result ofrapid (national and regional) population growth (Kok et al., 2005). Yet, Cape Town hadalso developed many of the characteristics of a post-industrial city of the ‘North’ (Ward,1998: 289–93): a waterfront development; the construction of spectacular retail areas;and an employment structure dominated by mostly lowly paid service jobs, notably ingrowing tourist and security industries. The built environment of Cape Town reflected allthese factors, with its combined elements of the post-industrial city, a suburban ‘city ofwalls’ (Caldeira, 2001) and a vast ‘shadow city’ of shanties (Neuwirth, 2005).

Cape Town in the cinematic imagination before 1994Actuality or documentary films, or sequences in such films, were made on location inCape Town from the late nineteenth century onwards. Many of the earliest examples thatwe know about (Gutsche, 1972: 31–9), in keeping with cinematic counterparts elsewherein the world (Bruno, 2002: 18–20), used Cape Town’s new forms of urban transport, andparticularly the ‘electric trolley bus’, to bring local audiences new perspectives on the

3 Statistics taken from URL http://www.statssa.gov.za (accessed 5 May 2008).

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city and also to impress viewers in Britain. As one contemporary catalogue cited byGutsche (1972: 38–9) put it, Cape Town’s transport system ‘is only just coming into usein England experimentally’.4

Such films could simultaneously celebrate the city’s modernity and also serve astravelogues. Woodstock to Cape Town by Tram, for instance, gave non-Capetonianaudiences a sense of travelling on a ‘picturesque suburban road’. The picturesque, aconcept emanating from Europe, came to characterize both literary and visual depictionsof South Africa (Coetzee, 1988: 36–62; Foster, 2008: 83–4, 141–2). Gutsche cites other,as yet unanalysed, later travelogues and longer films produced by the Publicity andTravel Department of the South African Railways and Harbour that offered andpopularized picturesque perspectives of topography in and around Cape Town. Theirtitles included The Beautiful Cape Peninsula (1915), The Cape of Good Hope (1932),The Sea (1935) and The Day Awakens (1936).

Cape Town was less frequently the location for feature films before 1994, let aloneblockbusters that might have helped construct a city of the global imagination. Yet, twothrillers aimed at an international audience were shot in the city in the 1960s, thoughneither would appear to have attracted much of an audience. Code 7, Victim 5 (1964) andThe Cape Town Affair (1967), like earlier documentaries, emphasized respectivelypicturesque and modernist elements of the city.

Code 7 was an American production, directed by Rob Lynn and starring Lex Baxterand Ronald Fraser. The action, such as it is, revolves around an American privateinvestigator on the trail of Nazi war criminals; apartheid and South African politics arenot mentioned. The Cape Town it imagined was the tourist city, with the film takingWestern audiences on a voyage to many of the city’s attractions as listed in officialguide books or mentioned in travel writers’ accounts after the second world war(Rosenthal, 1950; Bickford-Smith et al., 1999: 114–8).5 These included whatdisturbingly to outsiders was (and still is) called the ‘Coon Carnival’, New Yearparading by predominantly working-class ‘coloured’ Capetonians. In Code 7, thecarnival provides a raucously exotic opening backdrop to a murder committed by threemen dressed in clown outfits. The murder takes place in the inner city area of DistrictSix, ‘where the toughs live’, in keeping with written accounts in the 1940s by the likesof H.V. Morton and Douglas Reed (Bickford-Smith et al., 1999: 115) that themselvesechoed middle-class Capetonian prejudices towards this predominantly colouredworking-class neighbourhood. But, thereafter, the film consists largely of picturesquescenes that both reflected and promoted established (through written and visual forms)tourist sites and gazes such as Chapman’s Peak Drive, Llandudno beach or TableMountain with its cable car.

In contrast, relatively little of the Cape Town Affair dwelt on the picturesque, beyonda fleeting appearance of Adderley Street flower-sellers and a closing panorama of TableBay. A brief establishing shot in the opening sequence of the film, in which the cameratilts upwards from the street to Table Mountain, seems to be included merely to confirmthat an otherwise ubiquitous modern cityscape is indeed Cape Town. The film was a coldwar espionage thriller, a South African remake of Pick Up on South Street (1953).Seemingly in keeping with the genre, much of the action takes place against themodernist backdrop of Cape Town’s newly developed downtown foreshore area,complete with double-decker buses. In contrast, the other major external location is theold nineteenth-century harbour area. Here, the only inhabitant would appear to be a pickpocket called Skip (James Brolin), who eventually helps defeat a communist plot. Skiplives in a log cabin at the end of a wooden pier, and his choice of habitation andoccupation none too subtly mirrors his (initially) not-interested-in-politics ideology.

4 Gutsche lists a number of film titles that she found in contemporary catalogues: Cape Town, seenfrom a tram; Woodstock to Cape Town by tram; Cape Town to Seapoint by tram.

5 This was when a new Guide to Cape Town series was introduced after a considerable hiatus, not leastdue to the second world war.

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Eventually, he is drawn into becoming a hero in a real (modern) world fight againstcommunism. South African politics are portrayed in this fashion, and security branchpoliceman shown to be an essential part of this struggle. An ordinary detective says that‘we’re not keen on such things [i.e. the security branch] in Cape Town’; but the filmargues that ‘we Capetonians, Skip and indeed all right thinking members of the audienceshould be’. Apartheid once more is unmentioned.

It was left to Katrina (1969), a South African film made under a government subsidysystem and aimed at a local audience, to persuade any doubters that they should also beright thinking in matters of race relations (Tomaselli, 1989: 119–20; Maingard, 2007:136–7). Again, the setting is Cape Town, and implicitly it is the inhabitants of a SouthAfrican city in which the colour line was frequently indistinct that are most in need ofpersuading. Katrina, despite director Jans Rautenbach’s sympathetic portrayal ofindividuals either side of the line, does so by arguing that South Africans should keep totheir ‘own race’. Attempting to ‘pass for white’ or engaging in love across the colour barwould lead to tragedy, in this case the suicide of the female protagonist. Despite itssombre theme, the melodramatic plot unfolds within a Cape Town that is stillindisputably picturesque, both in terms of landscape and appropriately ‘traditional’coloured communities: whether Kalk Bay fishermen or residents of Cape vernacularcottages in the Bo-Kaap or ‘Malay Quarter’ beneath Signal Hill. Both the people and thephysical spaces they inhabit are, in terms of the tourist cliché, ‘colourful’.

Fifteen years later a made-for-television drama, Jantjie (1984), produced by the CapeTown based company C-Films and directed by the latter’s owner Dirk de Villiers,combined several elements of earlier feature films and travelogues. A love story setfirmly within ‘the coloured communities’ of the Bo-Kaap (or Malay Quarter, beneathSignal Hill) and Woodstock, Jantjie is a fish and chip shop worker (and son of afisherman) who falls in love with a seamstress. She is called, perhaps significantly,Katrina and contemplates marrying her relatively wealthy employer, the smooth MrPietersen. Their romance takes place amidst a succession of picturesque Cape Townsettings, or tourist ‘gazes’, such as Table Mountain from Blouberg Strand, AdderleyStreet flower sellers, and views of and from the cable car and Table Mountain. Jantjeeventually becomes a hero by tackling gangsters and protecting a white family fromcommunist ‘terrorists’ when serving in the army. In a closing sequence reminiscent ofDustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), he grabs Katrina just before she marriesPietersen.

The perspectives on South African politics and apposite race relations offered by TheCape Town Affair, Katrina and Jantjie were subsequently countered, as anti-apartheidfeeling gained ground in the West, by two Hollywood-style feature films and arelatively low budget BBC drama. Many narrative elements of the two feature films,The Wilby Conspiracy (1975) and Cry Freedom (1987), were remarkably similar. Bothinvolve a cross-racial ‘buddy’ partnership between black and white male protagonists(Davis, 1996: 73–81, 98–119; Bickford-Smith, 2007: 256–78). The previously naïvewhite buddy is gradually educated by the black protagonist into the evils of apartheid,and particularly the evils committed by security policemen, as, presumably, are hithertonaïve members of the (predominantly Western) audience. The opening sequences ofboth films are set in Cape Town. In fact, beyond an establishing (and most popularpostcard) shot of the city from Blouberg Strand across Table Bay in The WilbyConspiracy (1975), and the back of Table Mountain in Cry Feeedom (1987), the rest ofthe ‘Cape Town’ scenes in both films were shot elsewhere, in Nairobi and Harare,respectively. But whether Cape Town was ‘staged’ or not, and however briefly itappeared, these films both convey a decidedly more dystopian vision of the city thaneither Code 7 or The Cape Town Affair.

In The Wilby Conspiracy, the white protagonist is a British tourist Jim Keogh(Michael Caine) who has come to Cape Town to visit his girlfriend and enjoy ‘sunnySouth Africa’. Instead, and countering the travelogue-style depiction of the city in Code7, Keogh learns of the existence of Robben Island political prison (in Table Bay), ‘pass’

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searches (aimed at routing out ‘illegal’ black migrants to Cape Town) and policebrutality. He flees to Botswana with an ex-Robben Island prisoner Shack Twala (SidneyPoitier).

Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom correctly assumes that the majority of itsaudience will already have associated South Africa with apartheid and already seenextensive television footage of actual police brutality. Its opening sequence disdains thecommon establishing ‘postcard’ shot of Cape Town, the flat-topped perspective of TableMountain from Table Bay. Instead, the audience is shown the shacks of Crossroadsbeneath the more undulating silhouette of the back side of the mountain and, thereby,another side of the city: a shadow city of poverty and police raids.

The association of Cape Town with racism and discrimination is continued in themade-for-television BBC production A Private Life (1989), which revisits the theme ofKatrina and revises its conclusions: love between a white policeman and would-be‘passing-for-white’ coloured barmaid is portrayed as strong and enduring. Tragedybefalls them only because of the inhumanity of racism and apartheid laws. Filmed inCape Town, with a South African cast, some picturesque shots of the mountain(including from Blouberg Beach), harbour and fishermen are counterbalanced by a plotcentred round the discrimination experienced by the lovers’ children. Fleeting familyhappiness is only possible well away from the city and South African society, in thedepicted-as-empty countryside.

Film and Cape Town in a democratic South AfricaThe coming of democracy in 1994 coincided with Cape Town’s accelerated transitioninto a place with all the ingredients of the typical post-industrial city. And individualentrepreneurs and local authority ‘experts’ employed internationally ubiquitous place-marketing strategies (Ward, 1998: 193–235) to attract investment and tourists. Pirie(2007) has recently provided a detailed description of how the consequent promotion ofCape Town through resort, business, sport, adventure, environmental, medical and ‘pink’tourism was accompanied by the building of new hotels, restaurants, specialist retailareas, a convention centre, a waterfront development and regeneration of the centralbusiness district. Cape Town’s bid to host the 2004 Olympics was also calculated to bringbeneficial global exposure, even if Athens was ultimately chosen (Padayachee, 1997;Hiller, 2000). By 2002, all these efforts were rewarded as the city received almost amillion overseas tourists, more than 50% of those visiting South Africa (Pirie, 2007:230).

In Cape Town’s case, the promotion of business tourism was particularly associatedwith the development of a local film industry (ibid.). This development was chiefly, atfirst, the product of private initiatives that led, for instance, to the building or upgradingof studio complexes and the hosting of an international film and television market, calledthe Sithengi film festival, from the mid-1990s (Ensor and Marrs, 2001). But the filmindustry was also soon actively encouraged by national, provincial and municipalgovernment initiatives. Such encouragement included the establishment of a NationalFilm and Video Foundation (NFVF) in 1997 ‘to strive for a quality South African filmand video industry that is representative of the nation, commercially viable andencourages development’ (Botha, 2003: 182) and the opening of the City of Cape Town’sfilm office in 1999. This promoted and facilitated, particularly, foreign applications forfilm shoots in the city (Joseph, 1999). The latter’s efforts were supplemented by the CapeFilm Commission from 2003.6

In 2003 alone (admittedly a particularly good year), 37 feature films and 700television commercials had been at least partially shot in the city (Business Day, 2004).

6 URL http://www.capefilmcommission.co.za (accessed 14 April 2008).

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Yet, very few of these productions overtly promoted Cape Town by constructing anattractive or intriguing city of the imagination. One reason was that the city andsurrounds were often used to represent other parts of the world, Cape Town was seldomplaying itself. Instead, ‘shoots in Cape Town have recreated everything from the RomanColosseum to St Helena in the time of Napoleon’s exile and a Hong Kong streetmarket . . . a Paris fashion show . . . [an] Australian sporting stadium, South BeachMiami, the London of the 1960s [and] . . . several generic US cities’ (Sukazi, 2002).Cape Town even played 1930s Los Angeles in Ask the Dust (2006) and a West Africancity in Lord of War (2005) (LaFranière, 2004). This was because, after all, ‘there are evensettings that look like [other parts of] Africa’ (The Economist, 1997: 65).

Another reason why Cape Town failed to emerge as an internationally well-knowncity of the imagination was that feature films that did portray Cape Town as itselfseldom attracted much of an audience (The Economist, 1997; Sunday Times, 2002).And perhaps as a result, NFVF backing of new projects began to dwindle (Botha,2007). As it was, the Cape Town that featured in movies such as The Piano Player(2002), Shooting Bokkie (2003), A Boy Called Twist (2004), The Flyer (2005) orU-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005) was largely a dystopian place.7 This was a city of‘marginal lives and painful presents’ as the title of an anthology on post-apartheidcinema put it, and which contained contributions that analysed several of these filmsin considerable detail (ibid.).

The dystopia of a city scarred by apartheid now became the dystopia of a city full ofgangsters, street children, violent crime and poverty, even when these post-1994 filmsoffered its protagonists hope of redemption. Picturesque moments recalling long-standing tourist gazes were occasionally present, but relatively scarce. Notable amongthem are a brief postcard view of Table Mountain accompanied by romantic music in TheFlyer, sequences in uCarmen that suggest conscious attempts at making Cape Flatsshacklands look chic, as captured in some photographic collections (Fraser, 2003) andseveral sequences in the rare and small-budget romantic drama A Cape of Good Hope(2004).8

Cinematic dystopias were accompanied by a number of collections and analysesof still images such as photographs and paintings that also now contested long-enduring positive representations of Cape Town. Several in the process challengedpicturesque and sublime images of Table Mountain. This was significant because,whereas for most cities built structures (Sydney Opera House, Eiffel Tower) providedtheir pre-eminent ‘icons’ (Sennett, 1990), Cape Town’s icon was most obviously theNorth face of Table Mountain, its outline had become part of the city’s official place-marketing logo.

One such challenge came from a book by Nicolaas Vergunst called Hoerikwaggo(Mountain of the Sea), the Khoisan name for Table Mountain. Such naming immediatelysuggested a revisionist approach. His collection of images of Table Mountain includedsome apartheid-era contestations, such as Sydney Holo’s ‘Hector Pietersen’, DavidGoldblatt’s ‘Suburban Garden and Table Mountain, Bloubergstrand, Cape Town, Cape,9 January 1986’ and Billy Mandini’s ‘Cape of Storms’, as well as a number of

7 The Piano Player tells the tale of a hitman (played by Christopher Lambert) who is hired to protectthe leading witness (Dennis Hopper) against a terrifying gangster called Kristo. Shooting Bokkie is amockumentary (a shorter version of which was first screened in 1998) that purports to relate howa documentary is being made about child assassins, or Bokkies, on the Cape Flats. Twist is a versionof the Dickens novel set in Cape Town rather than London. U-Carmen a version of the Bizet operaset in Khayelitsha, the largest African township in Cape Town, rather than Seville. Flyer is about ayoung man who escapes life on the streets and gang membership to become a successful trapezeartist.

8 Cape of Good Hope interwove the stories of three women living in Hout Bay around theirinvolvement with a dog-rescue sanctuary. Even in this film, there were dark moments, moststrikingly when one of the women is sexually assaulted by her employer.

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post-apartheid offerings (Vergunst, 2001: 22, 27, 35).9 More recently, David Lurie’s(2006) published collection of photographs, Images of Table Mountain, powerfullyforegrounded elements of the urban (whether varied forms of housing, roads, busshelters, barbed wire or graveyards) against an often unusual framing of the mountain ineach image of Cape Town. As Ahraf Jamal (2006: 9) writes in an introductory essay:

Parsed quite literally according to a racial and economic designation, Lurie’s sequence ofimages forces one to recognise that the closer one gets to the mountain, the more well-off, ornormatively middle-class, the context.

In addition, a two-volumed highly illustrated social history of Cape Town (Worden et al.,1998; Bickford-Smith et al., 1999), as well as a more contemporary portrayal of the city,Cape Town Uncovered: A People’s City (Warren-Brown et al., 2005), both questionedtourist images of the city, as well as antiquarian versions of its history.10

In terms of revisionist challenges in film, South Africa’s National Parks Boardsupported the making of a film about the social history of Table Mountain, also calledHoerigwaggo: Mountain of the Sea (Fish, 2004). This was made by anti-apartheidactivist Liz Fish and gave particular new attention to Khoi and slave connections. Itrelated the impact of apartheid in making the mountain less accessible for black SouthAfricans (notably geographically, through group area removals, which placed many farfurther from its slopes), and to Nelson Mandela’s view that the mountain (visible fromRobben Island prison) had been a beacon of hope for political prisoners. But it alsoincluded the reminiscences of white members of the mountain club, and whitecontributions to conservation, and even (white and black) New Age theories about theplace’s cosmic significance.

Yet, like the new feature films set in Cape Town, such analyses had limited audiences.Instead, it was images from locally and internationally produced travelogues, togetherwith images featured on postcards and websites (aimed at both tourists and possibleinvestors), that reached a mass audience after 1994. These, and especially locallyproduced material, re-imagined the city in decidedly positive fashion. Indeed, even interms of published photographic collections, numerous, if expensive, glossy celebrationsof the city far outnumbered revisionist work in local bookshops (Fraser and Skinner,1999; 2001; Hoberman and Hoberman, 1999; Joyce, 1999; Skinner, 1999; O’Hagan,2001).

A number of boosterist travelogues of Cape Town were also made by local privateentrepreneurs and sold in city shops and through the internet as tourist numbers increasedrapidly in the 1990s. It was these combined efforts that helped revitalize longstandingtourist gazes (like the view of Table Mountain from Bloubergstrand) and added new ones(for instance, aerial shots of Cape Point, the Waterfront or Table Mountain). This helps

9 Vergunst comments on these three images, inter alia, as follows. Mandini’s lino-cut ‘conveys a senseof impending disaster as angels strive to avert catastrophe during the 1986–92 State of Emergencyin South Africa’; in Goldblatt’s photograph, ‘the most acclaimed view of the mountain has beenprivatized, and the Cape’s seventeenth century frontier transformed into someone’s front garden’;in Holo’s lino-cut, the image of Hector Peitersen (as captured in Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph),shot dead by police in Soweto in 1976, is portrayed against the backdrop of shacks and TableMountain, ‘thus localizing the event’, and suggesting that the struggle was also ongoing in the Cape.In Dave Southwold’s hitherto unpublished photographs, presented, for instance, at the University ofCape Town (20 September 2006), the urban is also foregrounded against the backdrop of themountain in images of (white and black) working-class frequenters of the Milnerton market; andanother image captures the way that at least one commercial photographer in Khayelitsha (CapeTown’s largest township) uses a studio painting of Table Mountain (but with oversized downtownbuildings) as a backdrop against which township residents can be photographed.

10 As the blurb on the back cover of Cape Town Uncovered asserts, and the book attempts to capture,Cape Town is ‘riddled with contradictions and inequities, scarred by a racist past that left afragmented society and alienated many of its residents’.

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explain the appearances of such gazes in international feature films with otherwisesombre themes in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century: Cape Point,Table Mountain or the Waterfront from the air in John Boorman’s In My Country (2005),a film about the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) process in South Africa; or anotheraerial shot, this time of Robben Island with Table Mountain in the background, thatappears in Goodbye Bafana (2007), a film about the relationship between Mandela andhis warder; or shots of Cape Town’s waterfront development against the backdrop ofTable Mountain near to the end of a blockbuster about brutal civil war in (southern Africapretending to be) West Africa, Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2006).

Such appearances could only further the renown of each individual ‘gaze’. However,travelogues of various kinds were the main vehicles through which these were broughttogether in more comprehensive and geographically comprehensible packages. Suchtravelogues have much in common. Most obviously, they have featured Cape Town’slongstanding tourist attractions, cultural features and natural beauty, as well as its newlyconstructed ‘heritage’ and post-industrial ‘attractions’. In other words, they reflect theway that Cape Town was being promoted by official and unofficial place marketers atthe turn of the twenty-first century (Pirie, 2007), along lines suggested by globalcontemporary place-selling manuals (Ward, 1998: 186–35; Kolb, 2006: xv).

Hence, the following thick description of one local boosterist travelogue, theseemingly best-selling Cape Town: The Fairest Cape of Them All, serves to supply acatalogue of Cape Town’s current attractions. It provides a near complete account oflocal place marketers’ conception and projection of the contemporary Cape Town of thetourist imagination. Close analysis of this film reveals the way that the gamut of filmlanguage has been deployed to promote an entirely positive image.

Cape Town as The Fairest CapeTwo notable local travelogue makers, and perhaps the pioneers of the genre in post-apartheid Cape Town, were John and Tina Simpson. Their company, Global Images,produced ‘tourism and information videos/DVDs’ in the 1990s. These included CapeTown: The Fairest Cape of All and Winelands of the Cape. By 2007, the Simpsons hadformed another company called JTS International, based in Montagu (a small town about2 hours from Cape Town) that continued to produce such films, including one called TheCape of Good Hope (2007).11

Another local travelogue maker was Gary Wilson, a more general entrepreneur inCape Town’s burgeoning tourist industry. Wilson’s main business was running helicopterflights for tourists. Employing Karen Fair to write the script and John Bright ascameraman, Wilson directed a travelogue called Cape Town: The Fairest Cape of ThemAll (2003), a title clearly very similar to that of the earlier travelogue made by theSimpsons. Both titles were intentionally resonant of Francis Drake’s judgment on theCape Peninsula: ‘This Cape is the most stately thing, and the fairest Cape we saw inthe whole circumference of the earth’ (Stewart, 2004: 373).

Wilson’s travelogue was seemingly more successful in commercial terms. It wasmade in DVD format through a production company called Bright and Fair Productions.The name, taken from the surnames of the scriptwriter and cameraman, indicated thelikely tone of the film. Wilson’s intention was to make a ‘souvenir’ that would be ‘livelyand able to appeal to younger people’ and The Fairest Cape of Them All (hereafter simplyFairest Cape) sold well to a wide range of foreign tourists.12 In the standard version, youcan choose between narration in English, French or German, but there was also a specialJapanese adaptation produced in the Far East. Fairest Cape was available for sale in

11 Simpson, email communication, 24 April 2008.12 Telephone interview, 15 April 2005.

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almost every shop at Cape Town’s (and South Africa’s) foremost tourist attraction, theVictoria and Alfred Waterfront after its release.13 It could also be purchased online on theGopassport.com website, Cape Town’s ‘No.1 travel, tourism and business network’.

The Fairest Cape is still a wide-selling DVD that seemingly captures all major ‘touristgazes and glances’ of contemporary Cape Town. In other words, it contains a range ofimages to be found in other local travelogues, postcards, photographs or ‘virtual tour’components of websites, or in photographic souvenir collections. As such, a thickdescription of the film provides a thorough account of the Cape Town of predominantcontemporary imagination.

But the following analysis, one that draws extensively on the insights of Bruno (2002)and Urry (2002), is also intended to demonstrate the devices that Fairest Cape employsto sell Cape Town in entirely positive and boosterist fashion. This is something it doeseven while showing the viewer Robben Island (where apartheid political prisoners wereincarcerated) and shanties. The analysis reveals how narrative strategy, iconography andfilm language more broadly are deployed to this end, and how they thereby obscureunpleasant problems of the past and present.

Fairest Cape’s opening, a dawn shot of Cape Town from across Table Bay, announcesits intentions. This is the iconic depiction of Cape Town, one that has appeared inthousands of sketches, paintings and postcards since the seventeenth century (Vergunst,2001). It was the opening, establishing shot in The Wilby Conspiracy (1975). But insteadof being accompanied by Afrikaans folk music, meant to be resonant of Afrikanernationalist governed apartheid South Africa, a very similar framing of Cape Town andTable Mountain in Fairest Cape is accompanied by ersatz ‘African’ music and the lyrics‘Yebo, yebo, yebo, yebo Oh Africa’. The use of such music is in contrast to thedeployment of European symphonic scores in many 1980s feature films set in Africa(such as Out of Africa, Wild Geese or Ashanti), and is doubtless intended to suggest‘authentic’ Africa (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 209–10). This shot then dissolves into anaerial shot of Cape Point, another iconic image of ‘Cape Town’ by the early twenty-firstcentury, one that appears in the opening sequence of In My Country. It is a gaze nowavailable to tourists through (for instance, Wilson’s) helicopter or small plane excursions.

The opening sequence of Fairest Cape reminds us of the way that Hollywood has sooften introduced ‘foreign’ cities by using iconic buildings (the casbah in a North Africancity, the Eiffel Tower, or the Houses of Parliament across the Thames), accompanied by‘a few bars of “ethnically” significatory music’ to establish a sense of place, albeit thatthe same city might be imagined in a number of different ways (McArthur, 1997). Adifference, though, is that Fairest Cape uses natural rather than urban landscapes orindividual built structures to signify Cape Town, and, thus, to conjure up a particular ‘cityof the imagination’. So does In My Country’s opening shot of Cape Point, or the aerial(and another common postcard) shot across Robben Island towards Table Mountain inGoodbye Bafana.

For Vergunst (2001: 19–22), such framing, especially of Table Mountain from acrossTable Bay, recalls ‘colonial pictorial conventions’: the perspectives of those looking ‘in’rather that ‘out’, those with power rather than the dispossessed. Van Sittert (2003: 162)has rightly warned against a reading of the ‘visual imagery of the mountain’ that favours‘ “spatiality” over “temporality” ’ and makes insufficient allowance for divides ‘alonglines of class, ethnicity and gender’. But purely in terms of geographical perspective, thisview of Table Mountain across the sea was the one experienced by successivegenerations of visitors arriving at the Cape for the first time before the advent of mass airtravel and captured in a myriad of visual and literary accounts. The first time we findourselves firmly on ‘land’ in the Fairest Cape (after a kaleidoscopic rapid edit sequence),it is close to where mailships docked between 1945 and 1977, and where cruise ships

13 This opinion was supported by those shop owners and tourist information personnel I spoke to whenin search of contemporary ‘tourist gaze’ material on the Mother City, though there are numerous CDRoms, such as Absolutely Cape Town, Galleria Cape Town or Hello, Hello: a CD video of Cape Town.

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have returned in significant numbers in recent years. Equally, the next shot sees us in theVictoria and Alfred Waterfront, where passenger ships arrived between the 1870s and1940s (Bickford-Smith and Van Heyningen, 1994; Bickford-Smith et al., 1999).

If the opening shots of the Fairest Cape recall previous depictions of the landscapesthey frame, they also echo enduring Western or white settler depictions of the Africanlandscape more generally as a place of picturesque, sometimes sublime, ‘spectacle’ and‘adventure’ (Coetzee, 1988: 36–62; Ryan, 1997: 35–8; Foster, 2008: 83–4, 141–2). Suchdepictions were often part of commercial enterprises (Godby, 2001). They helpeddevelop a longstanding and particular Western sense of African place, an African Atlasof Emotion, to borrow the title of Bruno’s book (Bruno, 2002). Depictions, whether inlandscape painting or, subsequently, photography and film, often focused on picturesqueempty landscapes or exotic animals and people, as well as decidedly more negativeportrayals of indigenous disease and black African ‘barbarism’. These images wereproduced alongside portrayals of heroic white Africans: explorers, soldiers, missionariesand settlers, and their (not least technological and industrial) achievements (Edwards,1992; Cameron, 1994; Shohat and Stam, 1994; Ryan, 1997).14

Such meanings associated with African landscapes were, thus, culturally andhistorically constructed. Consequently, the framing of Table Mountain across Table Bay,in which Cape Town itself is dwarfed, was likely to be experienced by the vast majorityof visitors and many Capetonians as picturesque and pleasurable natural splendour.Ocular pleasure derived from such picturesque landscapes, probably previously viewedin postcards, travel brochures or on websites, could ensure that actual or potentialproblems associated with the urban were obscured.

Elements of the Fairest Cape also reflect, as Bruno’s (2002) work suggests theymight, the film’s ongoing capacity and desire to mirror and shape the new visual, andsubsequently aural, experiences of urban life. And, predictably, many contain resortmarketing’s ubiquitous and longstanding promise that holidaying will revitalize thevisitor (Ward, 1998: 29, 82). Hence, the opening sequence of the Fairest Cape isfollowed by a rapid edit sequence. This is pre-eminently about presenting Cape Townand the Cape as a literally and figuratively transporting, transcendent and carnivalesquesensation. Of the roughly 50 different shots in 63 seconds, 15 are of people providing orconsuming entertainment, many at the Waterfront; 13 are of animals; and 10 are ofvehicles that can transport humans to, or through, a Cape Disneyland. This sequenceworks through a particular combination of choice, sequencing and framing of shots, withsupportive music that is recognizably what Kaplan has referred to as the postmodernform of music video. As such, it is full of pastiche playfulness, calculated to appealparticularly to an MTV generation (Kaplan, 1987; St. Clair Harvey, 1990).

The seemingly random scattering of different kinds of image does not make itimmediately easy to discern overt meaning other than a Cape-Town-as-fun experience.Yet, there would appear to be ways in which the sequence uses both the well-establishedstereotypes of African landscapes and black Africans already referred to, whilesimultaneously drawing on a couple of long-standing utopian depictions of cities. Thus,black South Africans are largely depicted as musicians or dancers. This, both theexistence of such performers available to the tourist gaze in Cape Town, as well as theirappearance in Fairest Cape, is partly in keeping with tourism throughout the world, inwhich gazing on the native body-in-performance is commonplace (Desmond, 1999). Butit also speaks to particular and enduring stereotypes of Africans as ‘corporeal’ and ‘ludic’(Shohat and Stam, 1994: 139, 202).

In the Fairest Cape, such performers are almost always preceded or succeeded byplayful images of animals. So, in contrast to many recent cinematic depictions of Africaas a place of violence and poverty, the Fairest Cape seemingly deploys longer standing,

14 In using terms such as ‘white’ or ‘black’ African or South African, I do not of course wish to suggestthat these are anything other than historically and socially constructed racial categorizations orself-identities.

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if somewhat threatened, stereotypes maintained in the late twentieth century by the likesof Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), National Geographic, whether the magazineor the satellite television station (Lutz and Collins, 1993), and postcards (Edwards,1996). This is Africa as landscape, animals and adventure, in which humans, apart fromNelson Mandela, and his name is soon mentioned in Fairest Cape, are anonymous,exotic, perhaps even erotic and smiling. And animals, as William Beinart has suggested,provided, from at least the 1950s onwards, ‘a more comfortable vision of Africa’ thanits politics, conflict and deprivation (Beinart, 2001). The increasingly common and‘absurdly intimate’ appearance of animals on Western television screens in recentdecades ‘tamed nature for family audiences’ and made animals ‘cosy’ objects ofsentimentality (Mitman, 1999: 134).

Accompanying this comfortable vision of ‘natural’ Africa are, perhaps, twolongstanding urban utopian visions. The first, suggested by the many images ofexuberant performance, is cities as ‘backdrops for intense expressions of joie de vivre’,a vision evident in numerous Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s, like Onthe Town, American in Paris, Singing in the Rain or numerous offerings set in Rio deJaneiro (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 223; McArthur, 1997: 32–3; Freire-Madeiros, 2002).The second, suggested by all the images of people being transported through space, notleast by the image of an aeroplane landing, would seem to resonate with nineteenth-century utopian visions of future cities akin to ‘time-travel’. in which arrival will providean ‘exotic’ (and, again, possibly erotic) ‘spectacle’ (Easthope, 1997).

One further element in this musical montage is the images of local seafood, crayfishand snoek. In fact, of course, almost everything on display can be figuratively or literallyconsumed ‘because they supposedly generate pleasurable experiences which aredifferent from those typically encountered in everyday life’ (Urry, 2002: 1). Many suchimages are effectively ‘placement’ adverts for particular hotels, shops or entertainmentcentres, with the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront particularly prominent at the beginningand end of the DVD. This may help to explain why Fairest Cape is available at numerousoutlets there. And the rest of the film retains this element, while consisting of longer takesand a narration that instructs us how to experience and consume Cape Town in moredetail.

Yet, this narration, intentionally or otherwise, is almost overridden by an ongoingeclectic, upbeat soundtrack that contains Cape jazz-style elements. The soundtrackallows those who do not wish to listen too closely to the voice-over the possibility ofcontinuing to experience Cape Town simply as eye candy, whether in the form oflandscape, animals or glistening, often desirably tanned human torsos (ibid.: 35).Accompanied by another round of ‘Yebo, yebo Africa’, and over a shot of TableMountain from the shoreline of Table Bay, the narration proper commences with thewords:

From the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town to the majestic height of Table Mountain and goldenbeaches far beyond, the Cape Peninsula bids you a warm African welcome.

This raises the question of what distinguishes a specifically African welcome from anyother, the question of what sense of Africa and Africans the video will portray. We haveargued that the film already suggests some answers. More are soon provided by the factthat we are taken immediately to the centre piece of Cape Town’s post-industrialregeneration, the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. According to the narration, there is ‘nomore inviting place to start the day’.

For many visitors from cities with similar waterfront developments, this might well bethe case, precisely because Cape Town’s waterfront provides a reassuringly familiararray of amenities — restaurants (offering cosmopolitan fare), an aquarium, cafés,musicians and retail establishments — within a picturesque setting. Cappuccinos arewithin easy reach, and most of the people pictured eating, shopping or enjoying thebuskers could ‘have stepped straight from the advertisements for smart clothes or

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cars . . . [in] . . . glossy magazines’, or indeed promotional material for ‘Glasgow’sAlive’ campaign in 1992 (Ward, 1998: 223). The heritage on offer is equally reassuring,a sanitized and nostalgic evocation of a white, male and middle-class past, a SouthAfrican heritage shaped by entrepreneurial considerations (Worden, 1994; 1996; Murray,2007). The narration of Fairest Cape confirms the visual message: ‘Forlorn oldwarehouses and neglected office buildings of the Victorian era have been magicallytransformed to create a vibrant waterfront with a nautical charm’; ‘elegant hotels. . . stand alongside proud old buildings of days gone by’.

As the description thus far would suggest, Fairest Cape is ‘dominated by a jauntyoptimism’, with a ‘relentless emphasis on vibrancy’ that is typical of the globalpromotion of post-industrial cities, from Baltimore to Manchester, described by StephenWard (1998: 209, 222–3). This jaunty optimism is maintained by a combination of sitesshown, the overall structure of the film, camera shots deployed, expository narration andthe particular use of history. Together, they ensure that Cape Town’s present and past areportrayed as devoid of serious problems or conflict.

Thus, the majority of locations visited are ‘safe places’ of sand, slopes, sea, sails,seals, souvenirs or sauvignon blanc. We are moved in comparatively leisurely fashionthrough a series of tourist landmarks and corridors, whether old or relatively new,around the Cape Peninsula. There is a spatial logic to this journey, itself a narrativestrategy of so many fiction and non-fiction films. The route of our journey closelyechoes both the ordering of Cape ‘sights’ in most written guides, as well as mirroring,though conflating, many available tours. Having started with morning at the Waterfront,we move briefly offshore to Robben and Dassen Islands, back to the city bowl, up TableMountain, around the Cape Peninsula — down the West and up the East side, followinga tourist route already well established by the 1930s (Hope, 1936) — out to Canal Walk,into an anonymous informal settlement, through to Somerset West, Gordon’s Bay,Stellenbosch and the Winelands, and then back to the city centre as evening falls and thejourney ends.

Fairest Cape uses a high percentage of aerial and panoramic long-shots, carefullyframed close-ups — particularly of people, animals and items for sale — and aerial andterrestrial shots of ‘old’, aesthetically pleasing, individual built structures. The long-shots, like elevated panoramas in painting, afford ‘a sense of disengagement from all thehuman frailties and follies within the pictured scene’ (Vergunst, 2001: 78). In theclose-ups or shots of individual built structures, the broader urban context and anyassociated problems are also obscured. Such obfuscation is aided by a narration thatinstructs the viewer how to experience geography and history in positive, or at leastseemingly neutral, fashion. It does so in similar fashion to most Cape Town touristinformation, including that available on the official tourist website.15

Part of the way that this happens is through the use of language of the picturesque,most notably a stream of luridly affirming adjectives: views are ‘magnificent’,‘spectacular’, ‘breathtaking or ‘unsurpassed’; particular (usually dwarfed by naturein long-shot) suburbs are ‘quaint’, ‘picturesque’, ‘quiet’, ‘relaxed’, ‘busy’, ‘bustling’,‘fashionable’, ‘exclusive’ or ‘lush’. The other most obvious verbal ingredient is theprovision of details of space or time: the cable cars can revolve through 360 degrees;Table Mountain has been in existence for 350 million years; Robben Island is 11kilometres from Cape Town; the Castle was built in 1679; Bartolomeu Dias rounded theCape in 1487, and so on. The fact that some of these details might be open to debate —the main structure of the Castle was arguably completed in 1674, and there werenumerous later additions; we do not know whether Dias passed Cape Point in December1487 or January 1488 (and the latter is the more commonly ascribed date) — is notdisclosed (Worden et al., 1998: 37–8).

15 URL: http://www.toursimcapetown.co.za (accessed 10 May 2008).

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This begins to suggest the nature of the third device employed in the Fairest Cape:an unthreateningly antiquarian approach to history that largely sees the latter in termsof dates, old buildings and individuals. Predictably, the particular buildings chosen,and the details given about them, are also largely calculated to be anodyne and free ofconflict. Lighthouses get considerable attention, presumably because they arescenically well set and free of sinister history. But buildings with darker pasts are alsomentioned, albeit that any unpleasantness in their history is simply omitted. Theyinclude the Castle, erstwhile headquarters of Dutch East India Companyadministration, place of imprisonment and brutal justice (Dooling, 1994); the Housesof Parliament, where racially discriminatory legislation was passed both by CapeColonial and South African governments; and Groot Constantia, where wine wasproduced with slave labour until the 1830s. In the Fairest Cape versions, the Castle ismerely ‘one of the oldest monuments in the country built in 1679 to a five pointed starshape as a fortress to protect the settlement from the sea’, while the Houses ofParliament are described by the one word ‘historic’. Groot Constantia attracts a longerpiece of more overtly romanticized narration that focuses on the fame of its wine butpredictably omits to mention slavery.

The four famous individuals mentioned in the narration, and thereby associated withpromoting Cape Town, are dealt with as blandly and briefly as buildings. NelsonMandela merely merits the efficiently depoliticized sobriquet ‘charismatic statesman’.Associating Mandela with Cape Town is in keeping with the way that his internationalpopularity has been used ubiquitously in South African place-selling since 1994, similarto the way in which Martin Luther King’s legacy has been used to promote Atlanta(Ward, 1998: 229–30). The other, potentially more controversial, names cited weredominant figures in white South African historiography throughout the twentieth century.Their mention in a travelogue made by white South Africans is perhaps reminiscent ofthe ‘ancestor worship’ in British imperial films that looked back to heroic pioneers’(Shohat and Stam, 1994: 110). They have been predictably reviled in academicrevisionist work in recent years, yet the Fairest Cape does not disclose this. Instead, Janvan Riebeeck retains the ‘founding father’ status he enjoyed in so much South Africanpublic history before 1994 (Rassool and Witz, 1993). Equally, Cecil John Rhodes retainshis status as icon of English-speaking white South Africans (Maylam, 2005): ‘the loftysetting of Rhodes Memorial recalls the vision of a man dedicated to the development ofthis fair Cape for generations to follow’. Indeed, the narration claims that his legacy liveson in Cape Town’s contemporary prosperity, ignoring the enormous disparities indistribution of resources in contemporary Cape Town.

Yet, the Fairest Cape does not, perhaps cannot, entirely ignore the fact that the touristexperience of Cape Town by the early twenty-first century often included a visit toRobben Island where Mandela was imprisoned for many years or a ‘township tour’(Pirie, 2007: 233–8). So how does the Fairest Cape represent these places, and the darkervision of Cape Town’s past and present they could potentially convey, while retaining itsjaunty optimism? Part of the answer is by dealing with them swiftly. Only about oneminute of the film’s 24 is devoted to the two together. Equally, their temporal placementin the video, as well as the nature of the accompanying narration, contributes to theretention of Fairest Cape’s relentlessly upbeat tone. Thus, the two sequences are placedwell apart in the video: the Robben Island piece near the beginning, followed by the longjourney around the Peninsula whose duration and ongoing playful juxtapositions ofimagery break down any easy ‘meaning’ viewers may have attempted to attach to afleeting ‘political’ moment. By the time an informal settlement is visited towards the endof the video, viewers are unlikely to make connections between past politics and presentpoverty.

Narration and the selection of images serve this cause. In the case of Robben Island,narration is particularly brief and misleading. Though the political prison that housedMandela was only constructed in 1964, Fairest Cape states that Robben Island wasestablished as a ‘high security prison’ in the seventeenth century, suggesting that

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whatever happened to Mandela can be associated with an artificially far distant past.Otherwise, we are merely given the island’s dimensions, distance from Cape Town andthe fact that it derives its name from resident seals. This is over panoramas of the islandand a few rapid takes of tourists visiting a prison devoid of any frightening features.

Fairest Cape ‘manages’ informal settlements in much the same fashion, though alsoimportant is how this section is sandwiched between other sequences. As we move awayfrom the well-worn tourist routes around the Cape Peninsula, the narration tells us thatwe are travelling to a new, different, adventure: ‘From Cape Town’s older landmarks toa thrilling new attraction’. This turns out to be Ratanga Junction, Cape Town’s mini-meDisneyland, which has the tagline ‘The Wildest Place in Africa’ and Indiana Jones stylemise-en-scène. The narration continues: ‘Ratanga Junction adjoins the fashionable CanalWalk and Century City, an elaborate development of shops and office parks that lends anexotic dimension to the city of Cape Town’. We then move immediately to the townshipsequence. This begins with a tracking shot of shacks, a now common tourist ‘glance’through air-conditioned bus windows, inter-cut with a shot of tourists receivinginstructions inside such a vehicle. Streets are strangely devoid of people and, indeed,throughout the sequence, tourists (perhaps reassuringly for many viewers) appear easilyto outnumber locals. The narration that accompanies these images once again promisesubiquitous urban ‘vibrancy’, combined with an ‘African’ experience that helps give CapeTown its necessary distinctiveness in post-industrial urban place-selling terms (Ward,1998: 209):

If you follow the N2 from the airport you will discover another facet of this inviting city.Sprawling informal settlements offer you a glimpse into the heart of Africa where a distinctiveAfrican rhythm echoes from open doors and children play contentedly in the streets. Townshipdwellers are proud to extend their hospitality to outsiders eager to gain insight into this vibrantculture. Bus tours are available to give visitors an intimate African experience.

After the short township sequence, Fairest Cape resumes the now familiar panoramas ofnatural beauty. The rest of the film then takes us to safe places beyond Cape Town,notably the Winelands: ‘you have not truly experienced the Cape until you have tasted it’.The film closes with another rapid-edit sequence, ending with shots (evening panoramasof Cape Town from above Table Bay) that signal the end of the day, and our journey. Therapid-edit sequence is similar to the one near the start, accompanied by the words:

When it’s time to return home, we offer you a souvenir of the Cape Peninsula, a memory ofmountains and vineyards, pristine beaches, friendly people and a vibrant city, and an invitationto return for another warm African welcome.

The final shot returns us to Table Mountain across the Bay (if now at dusk), leaving uswith the iconography of the film’s beginning.

ConclusionLocally produced travelogues like Fairest Cape are whole-heartedly andunselfconsciously boosterist. They are predictably and understandably intent on obscuringany urban problems of the present. Fairest Cape presents almost the full range ofcontemporary Cape Town gazes and glances in a relentlessly optimistic vision, typical ofcurrent place marketing of post-industrial cities (Ward, 1998: 186–235). This effect isachieved by the film makers’ use of the various elements of film language, such as narrativestructure, narration, use of sound, editing, choice of camera shots and sequencing.

Particular shots both recall and reinforce longstanding gazes and glances associatedwith tourist Cape Town, while promoting those more recently developed. Many of thelongstanding gazes appeared in earlier cinematic depictions of the city, like the 1960s

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thriller Code 7, Victim 5. More recently developed ones have been reinforced byinclusion in modern international feature films such as In My Country and BloodDiamond.

Many of these gazes and glances also feature in contemporary internationallyproduced travelogues such as the Travel Channel’s Cape Town White (2003) (part of theseries A Fork in Africa) and Lonely Planet’s DVD Cape Town (2006). Such internationaltravelogues provide mostly positive images, while not concealing the fact that CapeTown has had a difficult past and continues to experience problems of the present. Theydo so in the doubtless correct belief that their audiences will know something of CapeTown’s and South Africa’s social problems (of racial divides or poverty or crime),whether this knowledge has been gained from written or visual sources, including featurefilms. The assumption is that such prior knowledge needs to be addressed, even if thetravelogue’s aim is to convey a predominantly optimistic tone.

So these international travelogues are far more savvy pieces than their localcounterparts. They are more obviously aimed at what has been dubbed the ‘post-tourist’(Feifer, 1985; Urry, 2002): the contemporary traveller self-consciously aware of being atourist and someone who expects a variety of experiences, whether playful or serious,self-indulgent or ‘dark’. Using the terms that Bill Nichols (2002) has coined to categorizedocumentaries, the film styles adopted are reflexive and performative in contrast to thepredominantly expository approach of Fairest Cape.

Pria Viswalingam, the presenter of Cape Town White, interviews both wealthy andpoor white (hence the title of the travelogue) Capetonians in their homes, offices,restaurants or places of work about their hopes and fears. In several sequences, he alsoself-consciously and playfully poses as flâneur, overtly an outsider gazing at CapeTown.

Lonely Planet’s Cape Town also soon mentions South Africa’s ‘troubled past’. It alsoshows us considerable disparities in social conditions as presenter, Asha Gill, is shownround the city by six Capetonians from various social backgrounds, who include a whiteSangoma (traditional healer). Yet, the overall tone of both international travelogues iscloser to the relentless optimism of Fairest Cape than these necessarily brief descriptionsmight suggest. This is partly because any present or past problems are also mentionedamidst picturesque shots, many of them the same or similar to those in Fairest Cape. Theoverall affect is reassuring. For instance, a sliding spike-topped gate in Cape Town White,redolent of fear of crime, is followed almost immediately by the postcard shot of TableMountain from across Table Bay; the ordering of shots in this sequence being crucial tothe overall tone established. Both international travelogues certainly portray a morecomplex Cape Town, past and present, than Fairest Cape. They forego the constant useof words like ‘vibrant’ in their narration. But they still show us the globally ubiquitousvibrant and cosmopolitan post-industrial city, albeit with distinct (and predictablysomewhat essentialized) ‘cultures’.

In all these travelogues, the picturesque, perhaps the sublime in the case of a city astopographically well set as Cape Town, together with postmodern place-selling strategiesultimately trump social history or political economy. This is perhaps the nature ofcontemporary travelogues, whatever the provenance of their production or whatever theirsubject. What they have in common is that they are aimed predominantly at a middle-class audience from the developed (usually Western) world assumed to have similartastes. Books or courses teach ubiquitous place-selling strategies emulated by the makersof travelogues. And what the latter deem to be picturesque for a particular city or regionis a combination of what has been established in various media, including feature films,over many years, as well as those newly promoted.

Vivian Bickford-Smith ([email protected]), Department of HistoricalStudies, University of Cape Town, P/B Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa andCentre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London,Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK.

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.1© 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Page 23: The Fairest Cape of Them All? Cape Town in Cinematic Imagination

RésuméLes travaux sur le cinéma et la ville ne font que débuter à propos de l’Afrique. Raressont, semble-t-il, les études sur la manière dont la production de films a aidé àpromouvoir l’image des villes africaines. Cherchant à combler cette lacune, l’articlepart des observations de Giuliana Bruno sur le rapport étroit entre cinéma et tourismede masse. Il revient d’abord sur la littérature consacrée au cinéma et à l’Afriqueurbaine. Il explore ensuite les représentations filmiques du Cap avant la fin del’apartheid en 1994, donc avant l’avènement rapide de la ville en tant que destinationtouristique courue, site de tournage international et centre d’une industriecinématographique locale. Depuis, plusieurs films touristiques ont été tournés sur laville et vendus en DVD ou diffusés sur des chaînes comme Travel Channel. Bien entendu,Le Cap y est présenté comme une ville rêvée, alliant un intérêt ‘unique’ et exotiqueà un degré suffisant de sécurité et d’ ‘effervescence’. En analysant de près undocumentaire de voyage typique de la production locale, l’article étudie comment lelangage filmique est utilisé à cette fin dans le cadre du passé d’apartheid du Cap, de saréalité actuelle de grave pauvreté, maladie et violence, et d’une imagerie dystopiquedans un nombre croissant de films réalisés sur place.

114 Vivian Bickford-Smith

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.1© 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.