Browsing by Author "Smit, Alexia"

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    Act local, think global – The aesthetics of success: race and Beauty in the global south: a reflection on South African women content creators' online performances on YouTube and Instagram
    (2020) Kigundu-Touré, Ivy; Smit, Alexia
    This media creative project explores the experiences of South African women on social media platforms. The idea for this project stems from my personal experiences as an avid consumer and viewer of online content generated by these women. My engagement with YouTube began about ten years ago, when I started to consistently watch YouTube videos. Later, I would go on to consume Instagram posts by digital content creators. However, these consumption choices of mine were not functions of random videos or pictures promoted on these platforms. Rather my consumption was driven by a desire to see women who looked like me - black women. From 2009 onward black diasporic women, and women on the African continent, were suddenly, it seemed, putting out content related to black women's experiences in the world, with themes relating to education, hair, beauty and all other sorts of lifestyle-related topics. I would be lying if I did not mention how the women on YouTube talking about their natural hair drove me to explore a hair routine away from chemicals. Straightening our natural hair and being 'presentable' according to Eurocentric standards were for a long time, a burden into my life. I began consuming their videos whereby the content creators were encouraging the viewers to own their natural hair and most importantly, own whatever hairstyle they seemed to 3 fit. The choice of how we present ourselves seemed to come back to us, and the space in which it was performed felt like a safe, communal one. Six years ago, a black youtuber called Chizi Duru, had cut all her hair to start all over again without any chemicals. The act of cutting off all your hair within the community was labeled 'The Big Chop': an act of rebirth, renewal and resistance for black women. I went along and did the same, following her journey and exploring my own.
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    “Ek sal jou heeltyd dophou.” (I'll be watching you the whole time) Surveillance and the Male Gaze in Films by Black South African Women
    (2021) Smith, Tina-Louise; Smit, Alexia
    In this study I focus on the representation of women in crime films by Black South African women to understand how Black South African women directors represent women onscreen. Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' on the male gaze in Classical Hollywood cinema serves as the springboard for a close textual analysis of Jyoti Mistry's Impunity (2015) and Nosipho Dumisa's Nommer 37 (Number 37) (2018). I set out to determine how Mistry and Dumisa use the camera to represent the women protagonists in the two films, and whether they reproduce, transform, or comment on the patriarchal conventions of representation. This study finds that both directors include aspects of unconventional representation in their films, but that overall, Mistry and Dumisa direct viewers to regard the women onscreen through a heterosexual patriarchal male gaze. Strikingly, in both films, this male gaze is one of surveillance. In Nommer 37 the surveillance of the woman includes the threat of punitive sexual violence, and in Impunity the woman performs her femininity for the benefit of the surveilling male gaze. Through the self-conscious application of surveillance in Impunity, Mistry also implicates the spectator in the violence meted out to the woman. I conclude that while both filmmakers comment on the position of women in society, that by and large, they reproduce patriarchal conventions without offering new ways to regard women onscreen.
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    Hench
    (2017) Steyn, Ronan; Smit, Alexia
    Hench, by being set in the espionage genre, and following the henchman of an evil villain, offers a commentary on the modern working world by serving as a metaphor for the corporate workplace. The film follows a lowly henchman, Hank, who learns to challenge this corporate structure by achieving self-respect, thanks to an unlikely friendship with a James-Bond-esque agent. This creative explication explains how Hench achieves commentary on how large corporate structures operate to maintain control over employees, and the effects this has on individuals. It further highlights the tools and techniques used to formulate Hench into a fully realised feature screenplay.
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    Herald
    (2016) Macleod, Caitlin; Smit, Alexia
    The original idea behind Herald was to create a South African Downton Abbey (ITV and PBS, 2010 -2015). Historical television is currently popular and Downton is appealing because it communicates interesting history, finds comedy in the manners and behaviours of the day and indulges in the visual pleasures of opulent aristocratic society. A historical setting is as foreign and exciting as a fantasy realm but it can still provide a platform to explore themes that are relevant and familiar to a contemporary viewer. Members of local government, military officers and other nobles and wealthy Britons at the Cape lived aristocratic lives not unlike the fictional inhabitants of Downton and yet a wholesale pastiche of the structure of Downton or the conventions of the period drama genre is inappropriate. The racial tensions that have defined the colonial and postcolonial periods of South African history and the Eurocentric, androcentric approach to that history necessitate a new approach. It is with this in mind that I have attempted to create a television miniseries inspired by the traditional period drama and by Downton Abbey specifically, but remoulded by the contexts of past and present day South Africa. I had several main goals in mind for this miniseries: to provide South Africans with entertaining television that tells local stories and, in so doing, encourage South Africans to engage with their own history; to grapple with contentious issues of the present such as race, gender and land, by exploring the past; to place strong black, Malay and female characters at the center of history and give them the agency to effect history; to provide a critique of the British and their actions at the Cape.
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    Story, in progress: considering new methods for the analysis of ongoing television series
    (2019) Graour, Kristina; Smit, Alexia
    The formal analysis of ongoing television series brings with it many challenges. And despite significant contributions to this area of inquiry, it still remains an aspect of television studies that receives less critical attention than the analysis of a programme’s content. This thesis hopes to make a contribution to the field by developing flexible and comprehensive analytical tools that will allow scholars to analyse television series that are vast and, often, still in the process of ‘construction’. Specifically, I want to define some of the core structural principles that allow a series to engage in what I term ‘coherent expansion’: that is, the process of multiplying narrative elements such as plotlines, characters and settings, while still attempting to retain a coherent formal identity. I will demonstrate that such coherence emerges not from any immovable arrangement of parts, but rather from a systematic ability to rearrange parts. Governing this process are the show’s serial narrative dynamics – a term I develop to define the shifting relations between individual characters and the collective communities they form. Drawing on discussion of narrative form in relation to television as well as literature and film, I examine how theoretically boundless potential is shaped into a bounded spectrum of possibilities for narrative generation in any given series. Although the foundational characteristics of television narrative have long been acknowledged – their reliance on recurring characters, their extended temporalities and, consequently, their exposure to contingency – less attention is paid to how these characteristics come to operate as they do. And it is precisely the question ‘how’ that is the recurring question of this thesis: how characters’ placements within a community helps to define and delimit the identity of each, including delineating the possibilities of character change; how established dynamics between characters and communities allow for the generation of new plotlines; how hierarchies within the dynamics allow a series to adapt to (sometimes unplanned) change; and how the deconstruction of these dynamics can help achieve closure in a series’ finale. Crucially, the concepts developed in this thesis are intended to be applicable across a wide range of television narratives, both episodic and serial, ‘traditional’ and ‘complex’. In doing so, I hope to transcend the discourses around ‘quality’ and ‘complex’ television that sometimes isolate these modes from more ‘simple’ and ‘traditional’ narratives. Instead, I want to trace a kind of structural heritage that runs through television narratives. Using detailed case studies of Cheers, Glee, Orange is the New Black and Mad Men, as well a broad range of other examples, I wish to demonstrate how the same fundamental structural principles can be shaped into a wide array of possible forms.
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    Sunny with a chance: coming of age as coming out and coming into one's own
    (2021) Maharaj, Upasna; Smit, Alexia
    The screenplay (creative production component) follows Sunny, a young South African Indian woman, who relocates to Cape Town to study fine art. She sets her eyes on a significant award, but makes the critical mistake of falling for her greatest rival. Despite facing crippling cultural expectations and biases, Sunny discovers that being different - and loving who she wants to love - is not a crime, but an imperfect truth. The screenplay explores the protagonist's first year at university, complicated by questions of identity, race, gender, sexuality and their intersection with tradition and culture in contemporary South Africa. Taking the form of a coming-of-age Indie drama (with an artistic twist), the main character embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learning, as she confronts these challenges. The reflective creative explication serves as an accompaniment to the screenplay. It is used to expound upon the creative process of writing the screenplay: highlighting key scenes, beats and decisions whilst interrogating the theoretical frameworks surrounding representations of ‘othered' groups - specifically queer womxn of colour - and their perception in society, aided by the lens of personal lived experience. This is followed by a review of the Indie and coming-of-age genres, in which the screenplay operates. The piece acts as a critical reflection intended to contextualise and justify the creative decisions made in the screenplay, so as to provide a means of accessing the larger themes and concerns at hand.
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    “Tell me about it, Stud”: Queering the Dancing Male Body in Musical and Dance Films of the 1970s and 1980s
    (2021) Kempton-Jones, Jessica; Smit, Alexia
    Heterosexuality is coded on-screen in many musical films from the last century as a “celebratory ideal.” 1 This thesis explores the queer possibilities of the so-called heterosexual male in three films spanning a decade from 1977 with Badham's Saturday Night Fever and Grease (Kleiser, 1978), to 1987's Dirty Dancing (Ardolino). Each of the films I have examined foreground heterosexual romance. However, by looking at the male body in these films I have argued for the ways in which the male, dancing body works against these films' assertion of a narrative heterosexuality. I have shown how these films can be read as queer by the way they highlight the performativity of the male body, and through their camp aestheticism which complicates normative ideas about desire, sexuality and gender. I interrogate claims emerging from work in musical genre theory, which describes the musical as “the most heterosexist of all the Hollywood filmic forms.”2 By examining existing theory on the role of the camp sensibility within musical film I argue that there are ways that the musical films analysed dismiss their narrative heteronormativity and instead mark themselves as queer. The films do this by aligning the performativity of dance with the queer discourse that uses as its cornerstone the notion of the performativity of gender and sexuality. I have argued that these films portray an embattled masculinity coming to the fore within society (and cinema) in the 1970s, into the 1980s. The chapters in this thesis are organised according to the analyses' of the three films. The chapters explore themes of camp aesthetics by understanding camp's tendency to disrupt the clear disparities between ‘being and seeming'.
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    The role of nostalgia in reality television’s representation of rural lives
    (2019) Edwards, Abigail; Smit, Alexia
    This dissertation examines the role of nostalgia in reality television’s representation of rural lives. My study merges a theoretical and critical investigation. I take Alaska: The Last Frontier as my case study and argue that the programme responds to social change and urban living conditions in the United States by creating a nostalgic and idealistic representation of preindustrial American life. While the text is largely reactionary and calls upon a restorative nostalgia that imagines ideal American life as rural, white and heteronormative, the show also exhibits elements of reflective nostalgia, using the Kilcher family’s lifestyle to critique contemporary late capitalist lifestyles. Furthermore, I argue that this use of nostalgia conveys a dissatisfaction with post-industrial and urban life by foregrounding an idealistic settler narrative that implies it is not through progressive reform that America will find its nostrum but through a return to conservative values. The chapters in this thesis examine aspects of contemporary urban life that have drastically changed since the onset of America’s industrial revolution. My first chapter argues that nostalgia can manifest in an individual and potentially, a nation. I also argue that reality television plays a significant role in evoking nostalgia and uses it to respond to the sociological conditions of late capitalist urban life. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between the wilderness and nostalgia. In particular, I consider how the 'frontier myth’ structures the show’s nostalgic representation of rural living. In my third chapter I discuss how Alaska: The Last Frontier evokes nostalgia for a lost sense of kinship and community, reminiscent of a preindustrial revolution American culture. This chapter also uses the condition of anomie to further understand how the seemingly disparate relationship between the urban setting in which the programme is largely consumed and the nostalgia for a sense of family and community that the programme evokes, relate. Chapter 4 argues that the representation of labour in Alaska: The Last Frontier constructs a 'fantasy of wholeness’ and that this process potentially evokes nostalgia for an idealised set of labour relations that are perceived to be lost in the late capitalist age. I present a case study from Alaska: The Last Frontier to show how the programme constructs a 'fantasy of wholeness’ through representing idealised labour relations that are in stark contrast to Marx’s theory on how capitalist labour conditions are experienced. Finally, my fifth chapter reflects on the complex and integral role that nostalgia plays in Alaska: The Last Frontier’s representation of rural lives and discusses how the work I have presented in this thesis may provide a basis for future enquiries.
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    The Transmogrification of St Bunnycrisp
    (2016) Hunter, Catherine Jane; Smit, Alexia
    Into the life of cowardly Poppy comes a scary 6 foot tall talking rabbit whose job it is to give bullies a taste of their own medicine. But Poppy is a good girl, it's Jessica who's mean, who makes Poppy's life miserable, who gave Poppy the stupid rabbit as a 10th birthday present in the first place! But then he was just a soft-toy; not this monster in her closet. Did St. Bunnycrisp get sent to the wrong girl? On the way to finding the answers to these questions Poppy and St. Bunnycrisp become best friends and go on adventures in a parallel fantasy realm. That is until St. Bunnycrisp's fate is threatened by the cruel Icemaiden, and Poppy will have to find the courage to save her friends' lives on her own.