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Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a documentary highlighting the life and work of one of South Africa's most prominent photographers.
Tuesday evening was the opening night of the seventh edition of the Joburg Film Festival in Sandton where a documentary of world renowned South African photographer Ernest Cole was premiered. Picture: Supplied by the Joburg Film Festival
Tuesday evening was the opening night of the seventh edition of the Joburg Film Festival in Sandton, where a documentary by world-renowned South African photographer Ernest Cole was premiered.
“I wanted to set kind of a tone that allows us to have a look, step back in time to move forward,” Joburg Film Festival curator Nhlanhla Ndaba said to The Citizen.
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The Joburg Film Festival
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a documentary highlighting the life and work of one of South Africa’s most prominent and pioneering photographers.
“I always want to set a tone for the festival…and it becomes a tool for learning, for exchanging ideas, for debate and I think this film is going to set the tone for us.”
The festival kicked off on Tuesday and will run until Sunday, on March 16.
More than 60 African and International feature films and documentaries and 43 short films are expected to be screened throughout the six-day cinematic festival.
Ndaba said he wants those attending the festival to walk away with more curiosity and challenge stereotypes.
“I want them to watch these films and question a lot of things that are happening. I always say documentaries are almost a window to the world. But films show us a reflection of ourselves.”
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is directed by internationally acclaimed, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, who was in attendance on Tuesday night where he conversed with author Bongani Madondo after the screening of the doccie.
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Telling Cole’s story
Peck said he studied Cole’s critically acclaimed book of striking photos, House of Bondage.
Initially published in 1967, the book is an illustrated study of the impact of apartheid on the black people in South Africa.
“His [Cole] political analysis of what he went through, not as a scholar but as a witness and as a human being who grew up in it [apartheid] I had to trust that,” said Peck commenting on the making of the doccie.
US actor LaKeith Stanfield narrates the documentary by reading text written by the late photographer. Peck said that for a large part of the first half of the documentary, Stanfield quotes Cole’s words verbatim.
“[for]The rest of the text, why I say it’s co-writing is because we did our enquiry, we met the most people we could, who are still alive. People who were younger at that time who met him and who crossed [paths with] him,” said the director.
Cole died of Cancer in exile at the age of 49 in 1990, just more than a week after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.
Peck said at least 85 people who interacted with Cole were interviewed for the film. They aren’t shown in the film, but the director only took facts they shared to use in the film.
“Each one gave their experience, moments and the exchange with Ernest. I put aside the anecdotes that I couldn’t use really. I used all the factual information I could gather.”
There’s a part of the documentary which highlights Cole’s struggle with homesickness and being drenched in depression where he speaks about contemplating suicide.
“We found an American woman whom he [Cole] knew in the early 60s who he reconnected with when he was in the hospital in New York. She would call him almost every day. She said he had dark thoughts, he thought about suicide…all his frustration and dark feelings.”
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Cole’s presence in SA
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found also shows Cole’s longing to return home. It also displays how the artist was loved abroad but never celebrated in his homeland.
Ndaba said Cole has always been a constant in South Africans’ lives, at times without his fellow citizens knowing that they’ve encountered his work.
“You go to these museums and see these images but have no idea who the photographer is behind all the striking images.”
“If you look at what’s been happening politically in the past few months with Donald Trump and you watch this film, you would swear this was made like yesterday,” averred the curator.
Speaking about Cole’s style of photography, Peck said he had the temperament for taking some of the most intimate photos.
“He succeeded in what I called ‘the right distance’ to the person he is photographing, as if he had been there all the time- that is an incredible capacity of working quick and still make incredible photos.”
House of Bondage is Cole’s only published work, but thousands of his images were thought to be lost.
However, in 2017, a Swedish bank contacted Cole’s family to request that they hand over the contents of a safety-deposit box in their care.
It contained the almost well-organised professional contents of Cole’s career, including some of his correspondence with funders and friends, but more crucially, 60,000 unprinted negatives of the work he’d made in America, as well as other residue material from the time spent making House of Bondage.
To this day, no one knows who kept the work in the bank.
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