‘How much does anyone need to know about Eugène Marais?’ The Guest and Die Wonderwerker

Abstract

Comparing and contrasting two film versions of Eugène Marais's life by means of close analysis, this article explores the relationship between film and history, where history includes both that of the film-makers and that of the referential world they seek to represent, in this case specifically history as it is embodied in the enigmatic figure of Eugène Marais – naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict – whose protean nature enables individual film-makers to appropriate those aspects of his life and persona that mesh most creatively with their own creative and ideological sensibilities. Thus the contexts out of which Ross Devenish and Katinka Heyns develop their respective projects are examined, taking note of the key roles of their collaborators, writers Athol Fugard and Chris Barnard. Central to the discussion are the choices and effects of casting (especially drawing on the work of Jean-Louis Comolli's idea of the ‘body too much’), genre (the art film and domestic melodrama) and formal aesthetic (realism, formalism and heritage cinema). The shifting forms of representation of Marais speak to the multiplicities of his own identity, the shifting forms of his own biography.

Keywords:

• biopic
• adaptation
• casting
• art film
• melodrama

Notes

1. I am using an edition described as a ‘special limited edition’ published in 2012.

2. While this article focuses on two films, 2005 saw the production of two utterly different theatrical treatments of Marais, and will be the subject of a separate study. Briefly, for my current purposes: Nicky Rebelo's Prophet of the Waterberg, a tortuously wordy three hander, offers its audience much exposition and very little drama. Framed reflexively, a father, Mike, and his reluctant daughter, Edna (who shares a name with the last of Marais's little-girl friends), camp in the Waterberg where the father hopes to find inspiration for his film script on Marais. The ghost of Marais joins them. If one knew nothing of Marais before, one would no doubt benefit from the abundant information offered by the many lengthy monologues, spoken by Mike and Marais. The attempt to imbricate the frame narrative with the disquisitions on and by Marais is intermittent and clumsy. Reza de Wet's play, Verleiding, is, by contrast, a rich, complex and riveting piece of theatre. Here the frame is that of a monologue spoken by a professor mourning the disappearance of her favoured student, Lizelle, in the course of research on Marais that leads both professor and student into the gothic labyrinth of family secrets hidden within the Free State home of his much older brother Charles (and de Wet's great-grandfather), where Marais had frequently found comfort and care. The title of the play signals the theme of desire: of Marais for women, of women for Marais, and the continuing, hypnotic power he wields, present through effigy and image in spite of his material absence. De Wet makes use of film and photography to suffuse the stage with the spectral lure of Marais, even as her play enacts her quest for the secrets of her own family. My grateful thanks to Miriam Terblanche and Antoinette Kellerman for making the unpublished text available.

3. The parodically monumentalizing cartoon by Clifford Bestall that accompanies Coetzee's review is clever and amusing but also misses the point of the film's treatment of Marais, although it prompts questions about ‘genius’ in relation to Athol Fugard as Marais. This casting and his performance will be dealt with below.

4. Bingham explores the issue of knowability of the subject of biopics in detail.

5. The response of one of my postgraduate students who admires the film very much, partly for this reason.

6. The challenge to believe is slightly different in Die Wonderwerker, where we have to deal with extensive imagining of events, rather than adjusting to the casting, although the sight of a photograph of the historical van Rooyens (image 37 in Rousseau, The Dark Stream [2012 [1982]]) may produce a risible effect.

7. See, for example, the montage of stills of Fugard/Marais shortly after he arrives at Steenkampskraal, evoking his extreme and debilitating lassitude.

8. Rousseau at several points notes the tangled nature of Marais's sexuality: for example, his quest for avatars of his dead wife (2012 [1982], p. 332), his repeated attraction to much younger women and little girls, suggesting a Lolita complex (p. 198), the mix of adoration and increasing cynicism that marked his attitude towards women (p. 294, p. 303).

9. Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist (1988) is a conventional biopic that unequivocally eroticizes affective links between [wo]man and gorilla in a more realist and, as Dennis Bingham (2010) argues in his chapter entitled, Hacked: Gorillas in the Mist and other female biopics of the 1980s, ideologically muddled narrative.

10. Robert Kee (2003). Ireland: A History.

11. Coincidentally, Barnard's novel ends with the protagonist wandering into the veld, although for Delport, at least, the mist lifts and the sun rises. The phrase ‘This here is Africa’ feeds, of course, into the stereotyping of the continent seen in Afro-pessimist films such as Blood Diamond (2006).

12. See Peter Brooks's eloquent application of Freudian theories of repetition, articulated most notably in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), to narrative structure in Reading for the Plot (1992 [1984]).

13. The use of ‘Lotos-Land’ suggests an intertextual critique of both Afrikaner nationalism and stereotyping of the Afrikaner, given that it is, after all, the “Singer of the Suikerbosrand” who presents the poem and Marais, champion of Afrikaans who loves the English language and its literature, if not its imperialists, who listens, amused. The recitals of ‘Lotos Land,’ ‘Die Spinnerak-rokkie’ and ‘Die Lied van Suid-Afrika’ are all in Afrikaans without subtitles, posing questions about how an uninitiated audience would experience these moments. Even for a spectator who knows Afrikaans, they are dislocations, another means of refusing a comfortable viewing experience.

14. See Minnaar's comment, ‘[D]ie blou kontaklense het my nogal ontsenu’ (‘The blue contact lenses unnerved me’) in his interview with Elmari Rautenbach, (Rapport, 29 August 2012, Available from: http://www.rapport.co.za/MyTyd/Nuus/Dawid-Minnaar-In-die-kop-van-Eugene-Marais-20120829 [Accessed 1 March 2014]).

15. My comments here and below on heritage cinema are informed by Andrew Higson's extensive writing on the genre. See, for example, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (2003).

16. Katinka Heyns, interviewed by Naomi Meyer for Litnet, 15 August 2012. Available from: http://www.litnet.co.za/Article/katinka-heyns-vertel-van-die-wonderwerker [Accessed 1 March 2014].

17. There are innumerable ways in which the film runs counter, in its portrayal of the family, to both Rousseau's biography and Marais's account in, for example, My Friends the Baboons (1939). The appalling toll on the family through the deaths of their children during the Boer War is reduced to a brief conversation between Maria and Marais, where she tells him that her husband was broken by the war. Aside from that moment and the fact that Jane is adopted, the War has no other presence in the film. Certainly the farm appears prosperous, the mise en scène even opulent. Gys's lively, productive presence, Maria's remorseless exploitation of Marais for financial gain and Marais's own clinical reference to the two Brayshaw sisters (along with the chacma) on whom he practised his experiments in hypnosis to test their sense of taste, smell and hearing (The Soul of the Ape, 2006, pp. 133–137) have no place in the plot as devised by Barnard.

18. An amusing moment in Rousseau's biography offers a very different take on the couple. Eugène Charles recalls visiting his father on the farm: ‘One night a blood-curdling sound awoke me.… It was a kind of lament which I had never heard in my life before. Only later did I realize that it was Oom Gys and Tamaria who were singing hymns in their bedroom before retiring’ (2012 [1982], p. 252).

19. In 1991 Weyers and Cawood starred in Manie van Rensburg's clever, funny Taxi to Soweto as a younger and much more charming version of the Van Rooyens: Horace du Toit is wrapped up in his work at the expense of his loving wife's needs. The taxi to Soweto changes everything for them and they end up in a happy clinch at Satchmo's nightclub.

20. The conventional melodramatic structure is described by Annette Kuhn as ‘enigma-retardation-resolution’ (2002, p. 339) and operates affectively even if we know that the historical Jane did not get her man. The film's ending will fudge this.

21. According to Rousseau, Gustav Preller found the lines in Marais's desk at the Land en Volk offices seven years after his beloved wife Lettie had died (2012 [1982], p. 170).

22. See Linda Williams (1998, p. 73 ff.) for a deft reading of how the desire to restore ‘the original space of innocence’ informs the temporality of melodrama.

23. For a notably fulsome review, see especially Daniel Derckson http://www.writingstudio.co.za/page4174.html Ways of reading both The Guest and Die Wonderwerker will depend, as with all varieties of biopic, on what one knows about the subject, as Comolli and common sense tell us. Friends and relatives of mine have in all cases thoroughly enjoyed Die Wonderwerker, either because the story is engaging, or the acting excellent or it offers a fresh window on the world of early twentieth-century rural Afrikaner experience. The film does not present itself as merely these things though – it names Marais as its focus and thus takes the risk of objections from beady-eyed viewers whose knowledge of Marais's biography prompts certain expectations.