Strauss & co - 17 February 2018, Cape Town

175 This film explores rites of passage and transitions in male identity through a poignant visual and aural representation of the head shaving “rituals” of young military recruits. Originally conceived as an artwork for a touring museum exhibition, 3SAI: A Rite of Passage is a short, cross-platform, non-narrative documentary in the experimental, non-verbal genre. The film has no plot or script and its content is neither contextualised nor site-specific. It is a poetic sequence of high-quality footage documenting the head-shaving rituals of young recruits at the Third South African Infantry Battalion (3SAI) in Kimberley, South Africa. Combined with evocative landscape imagery, time-lapse and slow-motion cinematography as well as a compelling soundtrack, this presentation of an annual male rite of passage asks us to re-examine these moments of transition in masculine identity, and consider what is captured and what is lost ... Footage was captured using 35 and 16 mm film as well as High Definition video to obtain a high viewing quality and to capture frames in sufficiently high numbers per second to slow down the action to the required level. Saturated-colour ‘documentary’ scenes highlight a depiction of ‘reality’, whilst the mysterious ‘poetic’ scenes are viewed in more desaturated tones. Stereo ambient sounds of razors, liminal spaces and other head shaving paraphernalia are combined in a creative way for an absorbing soundtrack. The film opens on the emptiness of the Gariep Dam – a landscape of the Karoo in the Free State province of South Africa. The image is ambiguous. The ripples on the muddy water look like ripples in desert sand. The image is shattered by the violent jolting sound of a freight-train coupling resonating with a piercing military whistle. We cut to a line-up of young recruits waiting for their obligatory hair shaving at 3SAI. We join the queue. At first we witness a monotonous sequence of indifferent head shavings – the industrial hum of an electric razor – and then gradually the rhythm of a production line which increases in pace and intensity. Suddenly at the peak of this syncopated spectacle we are cast into a twilight realm of slow-time. We break through the military machine and witness a new head shaving in slow motion and in micro-close up format. There is now an intimacy and vulnerability that was not seen before – an altered state, abstracted, de- contextualised and open to interpretation. This then fades back into the contemplative spaces of the Gariep. The work critically engages the medium of film itself in the way it plays with time, changing the possible meanings of an experience as time slows down. What is captured? What is lost? 3SAI: A Rite of Passage is a feature of an internationally touring museum solo art exhibition entitled Transitions . In this exhibition I explore these themes using a variety of different media. The film however, is also independently screened at selected relevant international film festivals and art biennales. Paul Emmanuel