Personal and professional
priorities have kept me from updating this blog regularly, and I hope I can be
excused for posting so late on an interview I read with a prominent young South
African artist on the website of the national paper I subscribe to, the Mail & Guardian. Three months ago,
it published an interview The Daily Vox
had had with Lidudumalingani Mqombothi, a writer, filmmaker, and photographer
from the Transkei who won the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing. (The short
story for which he was awarded the prize, Memories
We Lost, can be read here.)
He gives an insight that
closely echoes what I’ve written here before on adapting literature for the
screen:
The problem
is to take all these pages and squeeze them into 90 minutes. We would tell
better stories taking a page out of a book and making a film out of it.
Mqombothi doubtless
understands that much of a literary work is lost in adaptation, especially when
done so literally as filming an enactment of its actions and dialogue, or when
it must be compressed to fit a standard of running time, or when it needs to be
pared down to meet his concerns of accessibility.
I think
access is very important. Adapting a book into a movie doesn’t mean everyone
can access that story. It’s important to tell the story and I know stories will
always find their people, but work needs to be done to make that access
possible. I know people in Cape Town and Khayelitsha who have had film
screenings, so I think they need to be screened in these areas to take the
films to the people and make them accessible. I don’t want my films screened in
a festival that my people can’t come to. The problem with film is that it is
visual media, it’s different to take text and turn it into visual media.