Zulu film, photos on show at Iziko

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Created on Thursday, 19 January 2012 15:49

SILIVA ZULU, an exhibition of Lidio Cipriani’s photographs and a silent movie, Siliva Zulu, at Iziko Slave Lodge in Adderley Street. Curated by Fiona Clayton, Gerald Klinghardt, and Lalou Meltzer. The photographs are taken from scans of negatives by Paul Weinberg. Until April 30. LUCINDA JOLLY reviews. - Cape Times
ACCORDING to Iziko anthropologist Gerald Klinghardt, the Siliva Zulu exhibition is the result of a co-operative project with the Italian Institute of Culture in Pretoria, the aim of which is to further ties between Italy and SA.

What is interesting, however, is that such an exhibition would not have been exhibited in Italy currently.

Klinghardt explains that Lidio Cipriani, the photographer, was a fascist who worked closely with Mussolini.

It’s only recently, according to Klinghardt, that the Italians have started to look at their fascist past.

Cipriani was one of 10 scientists who worked with Mussolini to draw up a manifesto on racism, the Manifesto della Razza.

This was followed by laws that removed all non-Aryans (Jews in particular) from Italian public life in 1938.

Two threads run through this exhibition.

There is the late 1920s silent movie Siliva Zulu, a romance between two young Zulus – a warrior called Siliva and a beautiful young woman called Mdabuli. Filmed near Eshowe, it was produced by Attilio Gatti with Cipriani, who was also an anthropologist, as consultant.

Siliva Zulu was the first film shot in SA using an all-African cast of characters. The film shows “documentary-style glimpses of indigenous rural life”.

Then there is a collection of anthropological photographic studies of the Zulu culture by Cipriani, who was involved in anthropological and archaeological field work in southern Africa. These photographs are a small fraction of Cipriani’s archives.

With visually appealing and beautifully conceived and laid-out information boards, the exhibition also looks at the stories behind the making of the film and the photographs, colonial representation, anthropology and racial cataloguing, racism and fascist propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s.

Although colonial prejudice cannot but help be present in the images of this time, it is of a much subtler kind compared with Cipriani’s accompanying texts.

Cipriani expresses surprise at the order that Zulu dancing has, finds the music monotonous and implies that Zulus don’t have a true religion and are vain.

For those whose history is sketchy, there is a great timeline stretching from 1883 to 1962 that summarises Italian and SA political history and cinema history during Cipriani’s lifetime.

It mentions the first wholly SA sound film made in the 1930s called Sarie Marais about Boer prisoners in a British concentration camp.

One of the curious aspects reflected in this exhibition is that although the actors in the film are also recognisable as those who are photographed in ethnographic styles, no mention is made of this in Cipriani’s captions.

The question raised by the exhibiting team is: Was there an even greater blurring of boundaries between the colonial ethnographic documentation and fiction in this film?

Siliva Zulu is well worth a visit for historians and the visually literate alike .

Look out for Commander Gatti’s mode of transport – monster trucks called Jungle Yachts.

The Iziko Slave Lodge is open from Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm. For more information, call 021 460 8242      .