[Anthropgrad] Work-in-Progress Seminar - 17 October - Neil Parsons

[Sharon Komidar]

The Research School of Humanities presents,
 Work-in-Progress Seminar Series 

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 17th October, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

STONE AGE CINEMA AND THE CINEMA OF THE STONE AGE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA 

Professor Neil Parsons, 

Department of History & Archaeology, University of Botswana

 

Cinematography, which arrived in Southern Africa a couple of months
before Australia in 1896, can trace its proto-history back to the
Renaissance camera obscura. Some speculate on a prehistory dating back
to Cromagnon cave-paintings lit by flickering light. The stone sculpture
of a reptile head in a secret Kalahari cave, recently revealed to
archaeologists, therefore has particular salience-since it is animated
into apparent movement by a beam of projected sunlight. Dating before
40,000 BP it raises questions of pre-cinematic perception as well of
spirituality and aesthetics. 

Khoe and San genes may be almost the oldest on Earth, but their
hunter-gatherer cultures in the Kalahari cannot with any certainty be
traced back more than a few thousand years, and have undergone profound
change particularly in the last thousand years. Between the 1930s and
the 1950s their image on film was transformed from that of primitive
savages to post-nuclear innocents living in affluent subsistence. This
image was politicised in the1980s by apartheid anti-liberation
propaganda and ecological politics (with the wildlife lobby), and
politicization has since been taken further by the global First Nation
movement for land rights. Despite attempts by filmmakers to
contextualize the myth of self-sufficiency, and thus to historicize
modern Khoe and San people, the stereotype has persisted of their being
'our living ancestors' encapsulated in a timeless Stone Age-only
recently threatened with extinction. The paper ends with an invitation
for comparisons with Australian experience. 

 

Neil Parsons is Professor of History at the University of Botswana,
Gaborone, where he also teaches cinema studies. 

 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome