Sunny Land

There are countless Sun Cities in the world. Perhaps the most famous and certainly the most bizarre of these is Sun City in South Africa, a huge resort with a disco, casino and swimming pools two hours north of Johannesburg by car. It was built in the 80s, when the Apartheid system was attempting to prevent any sort of encounter between black and white. Except in Sun City, that is. Under the banner of supposed-ly apolitical entertainment, a tourism laboratory to carry out radical political experiments was set up here, a zone simultaneously real and unreal. It is to the film's credit that it is able to make this recognizable. The film unearths the strangest archive footage in a clever and entertaining manner; one visitor to the resort recalls a Frank Sinatra show, while another, fictitious visitor named Hans comes across far more seriously than the utterly absurd German TV report on a Miss World competition held in a country gripped by civil war. The end of the war and the ANC's historical election victory passed Sun City by, astonishingly leaving no trace. SUNNY LAND is the exact opposite of a respectful documentary about a dark place from South Africa's past, working instead like a psychedelic drug in filmic form, expanding consciousness in the here and now.
Architecture as political statement
The entertainment paradise Sun City opened in the “homeland” Bophuthatswana in 1979. “It wouldn’t have been built without the apartheid system,” says the writer Ivan Vladislavić in the film. The economic framework conditions for constructing Sun City were ideal, as was the pseudo-independent status of the homelands, which were regarded as foreign countries. A new and previously unimaginable tourism was boosted between South Africa and Bophuthatswana. Apartheid South Africa was a puritanical state that strictly regulated and sometimes forbade gambling, pornography, and movies that did not conform to apartheid. That’s why Sun City – also called “Sin City” – could stage such things only beyond the border, as a kind of enclave, creating a dream world that was an axis connecting South Africa to the Western world and yet remained an integral part of the apartheid system. This perception of Sun City as “another country” gave visitors from Johannesburg the feeling of actually being in an international place. Many international bands played here, including Queen, and stars like Cher and Frank Sinatra performed here. Athletes like the German golfer Bernhard Langer also took part in the Sun City Tournament, despite the embargo against South Africa.
The homeland system was an integral and especially discriminatory component of the “grand apartheid” project; it meant that black people had citizens’ rights and could legally reside only within the respective homeland assigned them. Black workers became very mobile, commuting between two states, their IDs always within reach when entering South Africa. Their South African citizenship had been declared invalid. For the mostly South African visitors to Sun City in Bophuthatswana, entry was simple. Their IDs were not checked.
The homeland system
The homelands were fragmented structures that covered only a small part of South Africa. Sun City is about 179 kilometers northeast of Johannesburg in a region where platinum is still mined. In 1977, Bophuthatswana was “released” into independence; but hardly any country beside South Africa officially recognized it. Nonetheless, a “Bophuthatswana House” was opened in London to promote tourism and trade for Bophuthatswana; anti-apartheid demonstrations were frequently staged in front
of it. In South Africa, information that foreign companies were opening branches in Bophuthatswana was used as propaganda to document that the homelands were economically and politically capable of survival – which, however, was never the case.
Lucas Mangope, who cooperated with South Africa’s apartheid regime, governed Bophuthatswana in an authoritarian manner. The population had few rights; unions were forbidden. 1988 saw an unsuccessful coup against Mangope. With military support from the apartheid government, Mangope was restored to power. Bophuthatswana was one of the last homelands to resist reintegration in democratic South Africa, not becoming part of the “new” South Africa until 1994. Lucas Ramalthodi, Secretary of the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU), reports on working conditions in Sun City at the beginning of the 1990s and on strike activities during the "Miss World" Pageant there in 1992.
In SUNNY LAND, these historical facts about Sun City’s special status and the construction of the homeland are not narrated linearly or from a talking-head perspective in the style of historical documentation, but staged as a history lesson on the artificial beach of Sun City, based on the material of a German reporter.
Ivan Vladislavić addresses the question of whether Sun City is the architectonic ruins of a former political statement, although Sun City still exists. His experiences in the attractive, thenunique casino and entertainment world are, meanwhile, memories. In South Africa, the magical lure of Sun City has faded. After the end of apartheid in 1994, gambling was legalized and casinos have moved into Johannesburg’s suburbs. SUNNY LAND examines the connection between Sun City and the rise of new gated communities, a significant architectonic arrangement in the conurbation of postcolonial Johannesburg. Sun City has become a way of life. Little autonomous city-states have sprung up everywhere, secured with razor wire and electric fences, their own colleges, sometimes built around a golf course. They advertise with slogans like: “Do not emigrate, live a secure life here.”
(From the production notes)
Embedded tourism
SUNNY LAND is an experiment in memory and form, a sometimesfragile experimental set-up of diverse genres and spirals of memory. In its flow and the status of various images, the film resembles Appropriation Art. But from the start, the aim was a fetishistic approach in the invocation of certain current and past kitsch tableaus that reach deeper dimensions: billboards, chaises longue, flower arrangements, palm trees, and especially the pool and the eternal play of inexhaustible water droplets, their changing colors and surface structure, and the images from the past circulating in them.
Why this approach? Because kitsch is the elixir that makes us dream, the surrogate of artificial places like Sun City. We wanted to linger in postcard pictures, sometimes constructing them via Super 8 mm. Our idea was to begin with logic and dramaturgy adapted from an episode of the German version of Love Boat. A holiday cruise ship en route to Sun City, with all its exotic projections and German images of Africa, is hijacked to throw the clichés gently off-kilter. But this didn’t work, and not just in
terms of production technology. Sun City, created in 1979, was not only the “disco of apartheid,” notorious from the 1985 protest song “Sun City,” – with its chorus of, “I ain’t gonna play Sun City,” – but also an imitation Las Vegas in Africa. It became the epitome of the culture of apartheid.
Sun City is a specific image-production site of apartheid modernism. Why was there no focus on such places and thereby on the culture of apartheid? How does Sun City function inside? What desires does it arouse? And how can one extract some history from a supposedly ahistorical site? These were my initial questions, shaped by an active interest in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but also infected by delving into the lasting effects of Communist and Nazi film aesthetics in postwar Germany: the much-discussed problem of the seemingly apolitical Nazi-era entertainment film, which remained extremely popular after fascism – the concealed powerful effects
of images overall.
In the course of time, we realized we didn’t want to transform the endless materials and traces from our research into the ordering schema of historical documentary film. An adequate cinematic approach to the place and its imitations had to take an open, essayistic, documentary-dramatic form. Or an advanced melodrama à la Todd Haynes – but we didn’t have the funds for that. We didn’t have a cent in subsidies. But that may have been our chance.
Gliding from pool to pool
Of course, every film’s production conditions are visible. That’s why many passages are in an “embedded tourism” mode. Producing SUNNY LAND was complicated: a lot of waiting, being stuck or
locked in, and the gradual discovery of the little fenced-in paradise where we lived while shooting. Suddenly the tableau of the garden and the streetlamps become recurrent fixed points and the real set of our film, and the memory site in the claustrophobic micro-paradise in the middle of Johannesburg become speculative. So we decided to combine various fragments. Alongside the tableaus as a leitmotif bracket, we wanted to focus on how Sun City is staged in South African newsreels, but also in
South African television, which first went on air in 1977. We also thought the European representation of Sun City was important, especially the materials that were never broadcast and that slumber in the archives as TV waste. We thus got a glimpse of the staging’s “making of” and we compare present with past sites, as conveyed in images. Sometimes the way one looks at postcards. And then the camera looks out the window or at the pool to take up certain timeless procedures and visual registers of tourism in which we ourselves are involved.
SUNNY LAND is also the attempt to sharpen the view of the structures of apartheid and post-apartheid. That’s what led to the idea of a sequence of faces gliding from pool to pool until the pool becomes the actual leading actor of the film and makes faces visible and even experienceable. In reflections and refractions, we view the (post-)apartheid images, sometimes only as a split-screen monitor display with historical images occasionally colorized in red and blue – hot and cold aggregate states by
turns, so to speak.
Historical indeterminacy
The film takes up so-called glamour images of apartheid, not to revive them but to grasp a certain aesthetic. The economic-political complex Sun City, its specific location in the homeland “Bophuthatswana” that existed from 1977 to 1994, became an issue we intensified in the book "Sun Tropes". In SUNNY LAND, this complex is divided solely into pictures, just like a certain moment in Sun City’s history, the opening of Lost City in 1992 with the Miss World pageant, which is the only temporal marker in the film.
During our research, we kept hearing that Sun City was a glittering place where things were possible that were otherwise banned under South Africa’s puritanical/clerical regime, for example pornography, gambling and licentious dancing. The point of our little melodramatic frame tale of Thato and Hans – a love story, of course – is less the overarching question of the historicity of glamour than of the probably damaged happiness of those who may have experienced the best moments of their lives in Sun City. The love story fictionally reconstructs a world of immediate subjective experience, intoxicated by the high waves of a phony beach and the entertainment program.
The narration of SUNNY LAND is intentionally fragmentary. Many different voices and positions are heard and form an echo chamber of the past and present, wandering through the Sun City complex, but also today’s postcolonial Johannesburg with its gated communities. Apart from that, a photo series by Helen Bodigelo, the only biographical visual thread, is woven through the film. Hans is one voice among many, even if his dominates, always in search of Happenings – all over the world. His observations and impressions are by turns private and analytical, but always blurred. This historical indeterminacy is consciously inscribed into the film. For me, Hans represents the figure of the universal pop citizen with existentialistic melancholy moods who can move on every terrain, is privileged, simply has money or, if he runs out, works as a tennis instructor in hotels, where he has affairs that occasionally lead him to remember what is no longer present. It is a drifting through history.
Thato, however, is always only staged – also to underscore the external gaze, for example of European filmmakers, i.e., of us; he is cast for a melodrama that was indeed originally an idea for the film. A young photographer and an aging European performer of love songs traverse the resort Sun City and encounter images and events of apartheid. We improvised scenes with Thato Mathole at the pool for days. We always make the staging conspicuous. In our little paradise, we wanted to turn Sun City into a miniature and to take up classic elements of the soap opera or never-ending telenovela series. So the script was constantly rewritten, in part also enriched with the experiences of tourists who write about Sun City on the Internet.
Viewed through the various foils and levels of SUNNY LAND, “Sun City” finally blurs into a diffuse sign with highly disparate meanings and charges. Our initial aim was to grasp Sun City as an installation of memory, as the other apartheid museum, but what remains in the end is the experience of no longer being able to understand Sun City because it has long since spread across the globe, always taking place somewhere else, itself breathless as an entertainment world of things. “The waves in the wave pool are huge,” Thato repeatedly says. But we no longer know exactly where. Except maybe Hans in Dubai.
Aljoscha Weskott
Between hedonism and documentarism
How can films deconstruct and reconstruct individual images? In a certain way, it’s impossible: film images are always too fast, one sees too much and too little at the same time, except when the image is stopped, which happens a single time in this whole movie: in the “white” beach scene in Cape Town in around 1960. What happens with these “soiled” apartheid images? Each scene haunts the worlds of media and private images, we stage them anew, but in damaged form, questioning them.
The film was made on many detours. The path led from a purely fictional script through documentary research to a semi-documentary reenactment and artistic-experimental construction. One goal was to keep shifting the boundaries between documentation and fiction, but without losing all precision. For me, SUNNY LAND is a film between hedonism and documentarism, fiction and fantasy, artistic experiment and “working through” the past. Sometimes Hans was able to read my thoughts.
Before we began shooting SUNNY LAND, my curiosity was primarily visual: what do places look like – inside and outside, close up and from a distance, then and now – in Sun City, in Johannesburg, like the district Hillbrow, all the parking spaces, advertising signs, fences, and swimming pools. While making the film, I was interested in these individual shots – in part, the film fragments into individual shots – not only when Helen shows her photographic memories from the 1980s, which is one of my favorite scenes.
But there were no “simple” shots of these places; they need contexts, projections, or interpretation. So in a second step came the statements about the various spaces: what are memories, yearned-for places, dream images? We collected, condensed, and derived these audiovisual impressions for more than two years not only through interviews, but also newspaper articles and other sources. When I saw the MTV video by Artists United Against Apartheid singing, “I ain’t gonna play Sun City” on YouTube after our first research trip, I was sobered by this skillful staging of the dominant view of Sun City, and equally by the fact that not many people in today’s South Africa are interested in Sun City.
The crackle of the archive images
In SUNNY LAND, some passages in the archive images “crackle,” threatening to break, dissolve, and disappear, thereby showing the fragile status of memories themselves. Their flickering can trigger a visual shock, thereby opening new spaces for thought. Who can or wants to recall the old apartheid pictures? Why tell this story at all, rather than another about the anti-apartheid resistance that condemned Sun City? And yet the two stories are connected: Sun City is also the setting of a Miss World pageant and of a successful strike by its employees.
At first, the fragility and low quality of the archive shots bothered me, but there and in the Super 8 mm footage the graininess and materiality of the film medium itself are palpable, which reconciled me – an old-fashioned analogue photographer – with the images. Another reason to keep this material was its contrast to the hegemonic images of these places; today, Sun City has its place in the list of the seductive high-gloss worlds of gated communities and luxury hotels where everything seems lovely and completely “normal.” That’s why the failure and the destruction of the beautiful surfaces in the archive materials interested me. That’s a starting point for the ongoing discussion of the aesthetic of images versus the politics of images – also, and especially, of images one captures oneself.
For me, from start to finish, SUNNY LAND is a collage, a collision of formats, a confusion of voices, doubling, sometimes dissonance – for good reason: this was the only way we could go to Sun City and beyond on an experimental hunt for traces. While shooting, we repeatedly experienced the unequally distributed power over images and depictions, corporate images, video surveillance, and prohibitions against filming. The film doesn’t simply reconstruct Sun City’s history, it also opens up connections to today’s South Africa: Johannesburg’s hotspot Hillbrow and the pocket paradises – Sun City imitations!? – of the middle class. European projections about Africa also play a role – hey, there’s the elephant!
Every film has many pictures never taken or lost on the cutting room floor. Among the first are locations like the “cultural village” on the Sun City grounds, where “authentic” Africans “live” in a kind of open-air museum – a self-contradictory installation of post-apartheid society; among the excised tableaus is  he close-up of an automatic lawn sprinkler that, to the beat of a timer, rises out of the ground, sprinkles water for a few minutes, and then disappears into the ground again – almost invisible.
Marietta Kesting