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I privately joke that Schuster is the closest thing SA has to an auteur filmmaker. There are few artists, let alone filmmakers, whose work is so idiosyncratic to post-Apartheid SA than his... and that's a big part of the problem with him (1/?) https://twitter.com/News24/status/1274013791244750848
It's hard to critique Leon's films via the generic rules of film criticism bc what he makes aren't actually films. And if you'd argue that his films are artless and trivial, well, he'd agree with you. (2/?)
Showmax's decision to remove his filmography seems to follow suit from HBO's recent controversial decision to remove Gone With the Wind from its streaming platform. What many critics mentioned then, that I think partly applies here is - (3/?)
That it's almost condescending to assume audiences wouldn't be able to deduce by themselves that a film made two decades before the Civil Rights Movement would contain outdated and problematic representations of Black people and the confederate South. (4/?)
So, I tend to give audiences the benefit of the doubt in these cases. More often than we give them credit for, audiences are able to compartmentalize different film genres, how they internalize them and what they come to expect from them. (5/?)
For example, Biopics are often the point of contention amongst film critics and historians, bc they've proven time and time again to influence an audience's understanding of history and politics, which relates to their form - (6/?)
Biopics/Historical films pay a great deal of attention to accurate historical representation from set & costume design to their often Oscar-nominated performances, all in service of the illusion that what you're seeing is a portal into the past. (7/?)
Consequently, it's easy for an average viewer to fall for that illusion and internalize whatever they're seeing as factual representation. It's why we watch them in history classes, it's why we argue about them and most NB, why they've often had significant social impact. (8/?)
Whereas Westerns, a film genre which is almost uniformly conservative, tends not to provoke the same debates partly bc they're easily read as fiction by its audience. Even though you can't necessarily argue the genre's romanticization of settler colonialism is entirely harmless.
In terms of form, Leon's films are self-effacingly unserious, which isn't to say their wholly harmless, but it's part of the reason why a lot of the racist jokes and caricatures tend to fall off the shoulders of the groups of people at the butt of the joke.
He doesn't care abt suspending ur disbelief, or creating an engaging linear storyline, but rather makes cheap racialized toilet humour, and judging from his success, ppl generally accept his films on those terms and don't take them as seriously as they would another type of movie
buuut, I do think the -ve consequences of his films is that it's almost blunted SAn audiences to real events of offensive stereotyping in local films. District 9's depiction of Nigerians and basically the whole of Black Panther came and went w/out much vocal dissent from SAns
(even though arguably, xenophobia and Hollywood cultural imperialism might be the root cause of those two examples)
Leon is complicated, and I hope to formally unpack all of this one day. His filmography does present an interesting study in terms of cinema forms and genre, how people react to them and the nature of race relations in post-apartheid SA. (end)
