ABSTRACT
In the cluster of films made for black audiences in the late 1940s and 1950s, the two that make the most searing political statements of all are Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) and Come Back, Africa (1959). They were both made by foreign directors with foreign funds, Zoltan Korda (UK) and Lionel Rogosin (USA) respectively. Korda worked with his brother Alexander, in their company London Films, which famously produced the imperial trilogy, Sanders of the River (1936), The Drum (1938) and The Four Feathers (1939) (Aldgate and Richards 2002: 29). Zoltan was the more liberal of the two, who was keen to reflect the experience of African lives under colonialism (Korda 1980: 306). Rogosin had made the critically acclaimed On the Bowery (1955) and was concerned about the ominous rise of apartheid and the re-emergence of fascism (Davis 2004: 8). Cry, the Beloved Country and Come Back, Africa have played a critical role in perceptions of South Africa and South African-ness, both when they were made and since, and therefore have a significant place in discussions about South Africa's national cinema and national film culture. Vivian Bickford-Smith highlights this by calling them ‘state of the nation’ films (2007: 257). Like the earlier films in this cluster, these two films also use the rural–urban trope. They are, however, very different films, both from all the others and from each other. Cry, the Beloved Country, 1 based on Paton's novel, uses mainstream narrative conventions with international star actors. It is a fiction film with a mise-en-scène located in rural KwaZulu-Natal and Sophiatown, incorporating the shantytowns of the early 1950s in and around Johannesburg. Come Back, Africa is a docu-drama, co-written with black Sophiatown intellectuals, with ordinary people as actors.
