Like most major cities around the world Johannesburg arouses strong opinions. For some middle class citizens it is a test of character and proof of character, while for others it is about where you choose to live and the quality of life you are after. In his first film, ‘Unhinged: Surviving Jo’burg,’ Adrian Loveland gives viewers a sense of what living in Johannesburg is like for him, namely unhinged.
‘Unhinged: Surviving Jo’burg’ is showing at the twelfth Encounters Documentary Film Festival in Cape Town.
HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO MAKE ‘UNHINGED’?
Three years, almost to the day.
HOW BIG WAS THE CREW YOU WORKED WITH AND WHO WERE THE CREW MEMBERS?
I used a variety of people over the different shooting periods. The most we ever had at one time was eight, which quickly proved to be far too cumbersome. By the last year I generally kept it to just me, a camera operator, a radio mic and some batteries.
DID THE FILM TURN OUT EXACTLY AS YOU HAD VISUALISED? IS THIS THE FILM YOU WANTED TO MAKE?
All I knew at the start was that I wanted to make something and this something turned out to be in the medium of film. I used a basic idea to build from and then proceeded to follow the trail that it took me on. It was only after about nine months that we finished the original eight minute promo. When we played out that first version, it was the first time that I’d seen anything tangible at the other end, having only worked on the inputs up until then. After that it became easier to visualise what would come out at the end of the next build. By the end of the process the vision lived quite closely to the outcome, though it only developed through tons of practice.
THE MAIN MESSAGE THAT COMES FROM THE FILM AND THAT MORE THAN ONE OF THE INTERVIEWEES ALSO MENTIONS IS THAT JOHANNESBURG IS A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE ARE PROSPECTING FOR THEIR OWN KINDS OF GOLD. MAYBE THE TITLE ‘PROSPECTING’ WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE APPROPRIATE – WHY DID YOU GO WITH ‘UNHINGED’?
The title was actually the first thing that ever came. I was doing my nut in generally and was very caught up in reading and following every single bad thing that was going down in Jo’burg and in South Africa too. There was a long period – around the Donovan Moodley / Leigh Matthews case, when things were crazy: Lucky Dube, other hijackings, cops being killed, heists, all that type of thing. The incident that took me to the next level was actually outside Jo’burg, when David Rattray, the battlefields guy, was killed at his lodge in KwaZulu-Natal. ‘Unhinged’ was my state of mind – very much influenced by the city, and ‘Surviving Jo’burg’ was the name I gave to my personal goal. The think I most like about the name ‘Unhinged’ is that it implicitly (for me at least) helps to justify all the film’s oddities.
Police in Johannesburg
THE TEMPO OF THE MUSIC SLOWS DOWN WHEN WE GET TO PRESENT DAY JOHANNESBURG IN THE INTRODUCTION. MAINTAINING THE PACE WOULD HAVE ALLOWED US TO CONTINUE IN THE UNHINGED MANNER YOU HAD SET UP AND WOULD ALSO HAVE MATCHED THE PACE OF THE VOICE OVER – WHY DID YOU CHANGE IT?
It actually used to be like that and that’s how I wanted to make it: as chaotic as possible. Not only with regards to the music, but also the sound design and any other elements we could tweak to add to the mix. At some point though, I found that the hectic nature got to some sort of threshold beyond which much of the emotion seemed to get diluted. It was a sensory overload and the words, although still there, were lost in the confusion. I’d missed this myself – I guess because it’s easy to understand yourself – and only realised this after watching the film with other people. Thereafter I made the VO the priority in the intro and tempered the pace and volume of everything else to keep it calmer and ensure that as many future viewers as possible would hear the words clearly. I often sacrificed creative eagerness for clarity.
THE FILM COULD HAVE BEEN MORE ENGAGING WITH A FEW SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL FACTS SPRINKLED THROUGHOUT, RATHER THAN ONLY AT THE BEGINNING. E.G. BEFORE YOU CONDUCT THE EXPERIMENT WITH THE STREET VENDORS A BRIEF SOCIO-ECONOMIC EXPLANATION – IN KEEPING WITH THE TONE OF THE FILM – OF THE PHENOMENON OF THESE STREET VENDORS MAY HELP STRANGERS UNDERSTAND WHAT IS GOING ON – WHY DID YOU LIMIT THE FACTS TO THE INTRODUCTION?
Something that will end up explaining many flaws of the film is the fact that, although I knew it was a solid concept and that I could produce something watchable, I really didn’t know exactly what I was doing until each new level of learning set in. Because of this, what seems like missed opportunities as a filmmaker, are more often than not simply inexperience at the time of locking down a particular piece. Your idea of contextualizing the street vendors better was one I wanted to do. I especially wanted to do it better with the xenophobia section. Once I had something down, though, we moved on to other things. In a perfect world I could have gone back and augmented all those things. In reality I did go back and tweak many of them, though I had to stop doing it eventually. So, from that point onwards, whatever made it in stayed as it was.
Vendor sells giant tennis balls
INCREDIBLE STILLS ARE USED THROUGHOUT THE FILM – WERE THESE STILLS TAKEN SPECIFICALLY FOR THE FILM?
Only the ones that I took myself were for the film. Many of the good skylines, skies and general beauty shots were ones kindly given to me by a few people I connected with through Flickr. All of the news stills, such as the Lucky Dube story and xenophobia, were all taken by the same person – a friend of mine who has taken some of the best stills I’ve ever seen. Often I would write script simply to justify getting another of his shots in there. He’s a quiet type who wouldn’t want me to put his name here, but his contribution was such an important part of the whole process.
WAS IT PART OF YOUR INITIAL TREATMENT THAT THERE WOULD BE SO MANY STILLS IMAGES IN THE FILM?
After I decided to go the whole way and make something more than a short film of a few minutes, I knew that we would use a lot of stills. I like using them on a few levels. Most importantly, sometimes you can get stuff in a snapshot that you can’t on video. For two years I used to drive around with my little Sony Cybershot wrapped in my right hand. I was just going about my days so it had to be unobtrusive and I would only take a shot that got my attention. Of over 1000 of my own shots, only about 20 of them are in the film. They’re 20 that capture things that I never would have gotten outside of stills because a good still captures a single moment and they’re very useful when you’re using rapid editing. The viewer doesn’t need much time to register what’s on screen. Finally, generating substantial amounts of original video content is extremely taxing and time consuming so building up a library of stills to choose from meant that I could write script for them. I think using the stills allowed for better video content around them.
Lightning in Johannesburg
MOST OF THE SOUNDTRACK IS MUSIC BY SOUTH AFRICAN ARTISTS – HOW DID YOU FIND THE RIGHT MUSIC FOR THE FILM? WAS THIS MUSIC THAT WAS PART OF YOUR CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH, OR WAS THE SEARCH SPECIFIC FOR THE FILM?
The music compilation was one of the biggest challenges. If there were no such thing as music licences and permissions, I would have made a soundtrack the equivalent of a perfect mix cd to accompany and sometimes drive the film. There are songs you want to use because they’d work so well with content that you have, and songs you want to write and film for to make them work. At the end of the day the constraints (licences and permissions) are massive, so what you end up with is a mix of the two factors you mentioned in the question and some others. Favourite songs from my own experience that made it in are ‘Feel Irie’ by Lucky Dube, ‘Haunted when the Minutes Drag’ by Love and Rockets in the xenophobia section, and ‘Burn Out’ by Hotstix, which is the last track before the end credits.
I was fortunate enough to have the guys from Goldfish and Tiago from 340ml on board to let me use tracks right from the start so that gave the music search a major boost. About 18 months into making the film a guy called Nigel Laver from Laswho started helping me a lot and there are 6 tracks in the film that were cleared by him at excellent rates. The shortest answer here, though, would be that some songs were special for me before, some I found in the search, and all of them passed through so many filters to end up where they are that they all became special. The whole music licensing process would be an essay in itself. I will say that, although it’s a necessary process, it’s too restricting for the greater creative good.
WE KNOW WE ARE IN JOHANNESBURG, BUT WE NEVER KNOW WHERE WE ARE AT ANY MOMENT IN THE FILM – WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO KEEP THE VIEWERS IN THE DARK CONCERNING LOCATIONS?
Keeping the viewer in the dark was very important to me – not only with regards to places, but also dates. As soon as you set up that you’re in a specific suburb, say Parkview, it implies a whole lot more than just where you are. When an international viewer takes that in it is alienating because they obviously won’t know specific parts of the city. When a local viewer takes it in, unless they live in places that might be mentioned, I think it leads to a very small frustration that their own hood never got a mention. With so many different places in the city I decided to never mention specific ones. For instance, when setting up Jo’burg’s xenophobia, instead of getting caught up in the specific facts, (that it’s a countrywide issue and that it started in Primrose) it simply becomes: “In this place here (image of Alex), which remember is so close to here (image of mansion in Sandhurst)”.
With regards to dates, there are only three instances, which mention or imply time:
1. in the set-up of today’s Jo’burg the VO says: “Since 1994 the city’s become a whole new beast …”
2. in a link in the middle I say: “… in 15 – 20 years … Jo’burg will be a proper megacity.”
3. the Gautrain project gets a mention
1 and 2 mean that the film could be set any time between those dates. Including the Gautrain brings the end date of the film closer because, when the last piece of work is done on the entire Gautrain project, it will immediately place the film in the past if the viewer is aware that the Gautrain construction is over. Construction will carry on for a long time yet, though, so I think this will keep that section topical for a few years.
Jo’burg changes fast. Giving ‘Unhinged’ as long a life as possible was the biggest challenge of all and keeping it as vague as possible about places and dates was the solution to that. Before I realised how vital that was I had a nice, meaty section about the World Cup. When I first started the film, the World Cup seemed ages away. Imagine watching the film right now though, and it’s talking about whether we’ll be ready and how the event would play out? It would already seem slightly out of date and that would carry through in the viewers’ minds for the rest of the film. Now I have the luxury of inserting a single line on how amazingly SA pulled the tournament off (I’m doing one more updated version before it goes overseas and I lock it down forever). Inserting just one new line like that will make the whole film fresher. Using past dates was less dangerous for the film’s shelf life because what’s happened won’t change; though I still had to use them cautiously.
A place to visit
DID YOU HAVE A PLAN OF SPECIFIC PLACES TO VISIT AND THAT YOU WANTED TO TALK ABOUT?
Not really, no. In order to justify the time and money it took to organise periods of shooting, I did it without altering my regular daily movements. If I had to pay traffic fines, get my car washed, go to meetings for other things and everything else I would use that as my itinerary for the week and film everything in the car between driving to places. When it got to late afternoon we would go to a convenient spot to get some visuals or time lapses. So, say I left a meeting near Eastgate at 15h00 we’d go to Linksfield Ridge and find a spot, or Northcliff Hill if we were nearer to that side. Near the end it became clear which places were left out that would give us good stuff. These places I’d fit in either at dawn or on weekends. I always had faith that if I used Jo’burg as the main character for long enough, it would show itself well.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY?
Honestly, even though I could use what I know now to go back and save massive amounts of time, energy and money, the learning that came from all the mistakes is too valuable to ever wish away. So, in a weird way, I feel warmth for the mistakes and the paths they set me on with similar fondness that I have for other elements. The one thing that I could definitely say, though, is that I would have gone to the NFVF (National Film and Video Foundation) when I first finished the promo. However long the process of their application system may have taken, I think I should have gotten some financial help from them. Put it this way: if I’d put the same amount of energy into getting a grant as I did into clearing music licences, I wouldn’t always be running out of pre-paid airtime and petrol as I am right now 
. Next time around I will be sure to have a producer who follows through with those things, without me having to do anything other than go to meetings when required.
Interviewed by Tina-Louise Smith
