Engagé Film and the Public Sphere: Mapantsula (1988)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on MAPANTSULA, (1988), an overtly antiapartheid engagé film about a petty gangster in the 1980s political unrest in South African townships. Central to the chapter’s exploration is the question of how Mapantsula relates to the public critical engagements on black identity and on the key preoccupation of the time, the antiapartheid struggle. It inquires into the publicness of Mapantsula—that is, the conditions of and tendencies in the public engagements of the film. The chapter critically builds on the approaches of Kluge and Hansen on the question of film and the public sphere, through its reflection on what I call the “public critical potency” of film. It attempts to develop a public sphere perspective on film scholarship, and to reassess the limits and possibilities that Kluge’s and Hansen’s reflections may bring to bear on how engagé films relate to the public sphere. Thus, in terms of form, production history, and circumstances of circulation, Mapantsula is significantly distinguishable from the previous films and allows a fresh perspective into the forms of publicness that different films may constitute. The chapter argues that their approaches labor with a conceptually restrictive understanding of the relationship between “film” and “public,” and ultimately underplay the “public critical potency” of film. Through Mapantsula, the chapter further argues that under certain circumstances, the public sphere of film can be more extensive and critical than Hansen’s and Kluge’s works suggest.