February 27, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (86A)
FOLLOWING UP AND FOLLOWING ON
1) Some of you will recall the pair of Cabinets from a few months back in the wake of my dear friend and subject, the great Afrikaner émigré poet-painter, activist, and veteran political prisoner Breyten Bretenbach’s passing last November, here and here. I mention them again because this past Sunday, a few months after his funeral and cremation ceremony at the Pére Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, there was a splendidly festive memorial service down in Wellington, in the Western Cape winelands less than an hour’s drive northeast of Capetown, South Africa (just north of Paarl, the very heart, Afrikaners like to think, of their cherished language across whose breadth Breyten himself had so rousingly soared), at the Sentrum Breytenbach, a gallery/cultural center/bookstore/coffee house fashioned out of the onetime boarding house run by Breyten’s hardscrabble parents where they had raised him and his three brothers and sister back in the day. The celebration was broadcast live to hundreds of congregants ranged literally all around the world, and has been downloaded hundreds of times since, and it is well worth a visit—parts in English and other parts in Afrikaans—if for no other reason than to get a sense of the supple sinuosities of the latter language, notwithstanding its often dismal historical associations, regarding both aspects of which Breyten was a past master.
Skim about: Among other things, near the beginning, there’s Diek Groebler’s heartrending animation of a poem in which one-time prisoner Breyten envisioned his own after-death returning to his father’s house there in Wellington (see here), and scattered throughout are several interstitial passages consisting of variously inspired deployments of Breyten’s poetry by South African musicians of all kinds. But I especially commend to your attention the rhapsodic account, by Breyten’s and his Vietnamese wife Yolande’s daughter Daphne, of the morning after her father’s passing: how following a slamming window in the apartment (once Breyten and Yolande’s) that she and her husband now share with their two young children (Breyten’s grandsons), she and the boys had run out onto the balcony where they came upon “a majestic hornbill” perched on the zinc balcony railing, a South African bird “with a red beak, the same velvety red of the red-colored shoes Breyten almost never took off”
(shoes which, incidentally, a few months earlier she herself had placed on the lid of his coffin at the Pére Lachaise ceremony)
and what had happened then, how the hornbill, addressing her by her father’s petname for her, Nike, had coaxed her onto its back and taken off, flying south, past Pére Lachaise and the middle and then south of France, over her parents’ beloved farmhouse retreat just to the other side of the Spanish border, and then further south, across the Mediterranean, into Africa, presently over Breyten’s cherished Gorée Island in Dakar harbor off Senegal and further still, alighting at length there in Wellington itself, amidst all the family shades, his siblings and his parents and all the ancestors further back (I myself once asked Breyten when his ancestors had first arrived in Africa, to which he’d replied, “Millions of years ago, just like yours”)—and the lessons the bird had imparted to her there. (All of which begins at 2:09:25, or here.)
Following that account of Daphne’s, as the afternoon ceremony began to wind down (at 2:26:00), the musicians Lourinda Hofmeyer and Schalk Joubert and the great Afrikaner poet and chronicler Antje Krog (Country of my Skull) delivered a medley of Breyten’s poems, sung and spoken (occasionally in English) culminating, at 2:50:40 or here, in a wonderfully moving In Memoriam video collage (pulled together by Daphne) which begins with film footage of Breyten singing the post-apartheid national anthem, Nkosi Sikeli Africa, before fading into a montage of scenes from across the entirety of his teeming life; followed, by way of a coda (at 2:57:30), with a final lyric (sung by the celebrated Anna Davel, who spontaneously rose up out of the audience) based on one of the poems (“Allerliefste, ek stuur vir jou ‘n rooiborsduif” / “Beloved I’m sending you a red-breasted dove”—full English here ) that prisoner Breyten had once addressed to Yolande (there in the audience), the love of his life for over six decades and truly the co-hero of his epic journey.
***
2) That was last Sunday, but this coming Sunday, March 2, will see the Academy Awards, which I mention because a short film we featured back in our Issue 75, avant garde master Bill Morrison’s splitscreen realtime investigative exposé of the police shooting of an innocent civilian in Chicago, Incident, is up for the Oscar in Documentary Shorts, and has already garnered the nod from critics at some of our top papers.
For example, Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times:
If the academy is looking to reward the documentary short that makes the most audacious use of form, the winner should be “Incident,” from the experimental nonfiction filmmaker Bill Morrison (“Dawson City: Frozen Time”). Working from footage captured by surveillance and body cameras, Morrison reconstructs the scene of the fatal shooting of a barber, Harith Augustus, by a Chicago police officer in 2018.
This half-hour short lasts roughly the time of the events it covers, and although Morrison doesn’t present each step in strict chronological order, he uses split screen to show simultaneity: After the shooting, while Augustus’s body lies eerily still in the street and protesters gather, some of the officers involved frenziedly race elsewhere and speak about the shooting as if they had no choice. Who are you going to believe: them, or the images you just saw? Incident is an outside-the-box use of public material that demonstrates cinema’s capacity to be a forensic tool.
& Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian:
My Oscar goes to Incident from artist and film-maker Bill Morrison, a rather amazing found-footage true-crime film about the fatal shooting in 2018 of a barber on a Chicago street corner by a jumpy probationary police officer. The film simply edits together the bodycam footage (largely silent) that the police were later forced to release, together with traffic camera video; these pictures tell a stomach-turning story of a victim who was indeed armed, but who did not draw his holstered weapon as the officers claimed. You can hear the police screaming at each other and to the public that the man pulled a gun (perhaps believing it in the moment, perhaps not); then we absorb the complex story of how a woman officer, weirdly emotional and protective of the officer who killed the man, frantically gets him (and herself) away from danger as angry crowds gather; and then the other officers becoming strangely reticent as they realise that what they say is being recorded. (To Brits, the really extraordinary thing about all this is that carrying deadly weapons around is normal.)
& just this morning, the NYT’s Kyle Buchanan chimed in with this final prediction:
Best Documentary Short
“Death by Numbers”
“I Am Ready, Warden”
✓ “Incident”
“Instruments of a Beating Heart”
“The Only Girl in the Orchestra”
In a category that is always filled with harrowing subject matter, voters often default to heart-warmers, and this race boasts two good-natured, music-themed shorts (“The Only Girl in the Orchestra” and “Instruments of a Beating Heart”). The smart money would be to pick one of those, yet I feel that “Incident”—an unshakable examination of Chicago police gunning down a Black man, assembled through security and body-camera footage—is simply too bold to ignore.
Those of you who haven’t yet seen the half-hour film and want to before Awards night, you can still do so here (Note that The New Yorker sagely secured screening rights once the film was finished, and make sure to punch up the volume control, even though there is no sound for the first few minutes)—and you really should. You know who I’ll be rooting for (though I should probably note that Bill is another longtime friend and subject of mine, and I had the privilege of sitting in on a good half dozen of the editing sessions as the film wended its way into being). Cabinet readers may also recall how I ended my original reportage on the film by noting how the victim Harith Augustus’s mother Vivian attended the film’s Chicago premiere, and how powerfully she addressed the audience thereafter, and how after that, Bill Morrison’s mother Kate went over to extend her private condolences.
Well, Vivian will be accompanying Bill to the Oscars Sunday night. For her part, Kate passed away just a few weeks ago, peacefully, in the embrace of her loving children, Bill and his three sisters. I’d known her too for many years, and she was a dear and wonderful woman, a clean gleam and a perpetual enthusiast, and no doubt hers will be an abiding presence there at that awards ceremony, as well.
* * *
See you next week!