Redefining the Historical Timeline of Queer Film in South Africa: Ernest Thorp’s Nil Desperandum and South Africa’s First Queer Films
Scholarship in queer South African cinemas is barely two decades old. As such, the general perception is that, despite the South African film industry being one of the oldest in the world, there have been very few overt depictions of same-sex sexualities on film. The fact that homosexuality was ille...
Wedi'i Gadw mewn:
| Cyhoeddwyd yn: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/sources, |
|---|---|
| Prif Awdur: | |
| Fformat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Iaith: | Anglais |
| Cyhoeddwyd: |
Sources
2025
|
| Pynciau: | |
| Mynediad Ar-lein: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Crynodeb: | Scholarship in queer South African cinemas is barely two decades old. As such, the general perception is that, despite the South African film industry being one of the oldest in the world, there have been very few overt depictions of same-sex sexualities on film. The fact that homosexuality was illegal until South Africa’s dramatic political transformation, which started in 1991, contributes to this narrative. A recent review of South African queer cinema and its history still claims that homosexuality is almost non-existent in South African cinema up till 1985.This paper sets out to redefine the history of queer film in South Africa by establishing the provenance, authorship and production date of a 6-minute underground short film, Nil Desperandum, directed by Ernest Thorp, as South Africa’s first narrative queer film. The notion that a collective of queer men was secretly producing queer films in the 1940s–1950s, during the early days of apartheid, is revolutionary. However, Thorp and a group of friends—most significantly Salwyn Hurwitz, one of Thorp’s lovers—were prolific filmmakers. Not only did they document their social activities and travels, but they also ventured into producing short films with queer narratives that offer us a personal insight into queer lives in mid-twentieth century South Africa. Through a detailed analysis of multimedia archival sources—including films, photographs, scrapbooks, and audio files—I revise the historical timeline of queer cinema in South Africa by presenting evidence of queer filmmaking that predates current scholarship by more than four decades. |
|---|