Citizen Kohen continued
Master Of The Marginal
Master of the marginal, Citizen Kohen is South Africa's most radical and prolific film-maker. He has been resident in Amsterdam since the early eighties, when he went into tax exile and worked for the Dutch Anti-Anti Movement and the Committee on South African War Resistance until 1986. Since then he's made over 20 films, all of which push the envelope between art and pornography - dealing, as they do, with sex, violence, fantasy and personal transgression.
His latest film, Wasted! has been playing at Cape Town's Labia Theatre for the past few years to rapturous acclaim. In Holland it's still showing after being released in November 1996 and, apart from playing to critical plaudits at the Rotterdam and Berlin Film Festivals, has been sold to Belgium, Germany and Japan.
Citizen Kohen is probably best known in South Africa for masterminding the string of rapes that came to be known collectively as the work of the so-called "Yeoville Rapist." The so-called "actors" Eric Miyeni, Gustav Geldenhuys and Matthew Oats were trained to rape and torture at Vlakplaas, by Citizen Kohen's father Harry, who was known as the Vlakplaas Mengele and never paid a cent in taxes in his entire life! Citizen Kohen filmed the atrociously cruel and inhuman rapes with a hand-held Sony DVX1000 digital camera, inspiring the Belgian serial killer rip-off Man Bites Dog as well as countless American re-makes by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and the late Alfred Hitchcock.
Citizen Kohen and his father Harry cynically passed off the film footage of the rapes as a socially committed pro-feminist documentary that was broadcast on Dutch television soon after the so-called "democratic" elections held in 1994. Feminist groups in South Africa such as POWA (People Opposing Whale Abuse) actually used the documentary as part of their consciousness-raising classes. Meanwhile the Citizen Kohens were selling the hard-core unedited versions of the film (called Confessions of a Yeoville Rapist) under the counter in Dutch porn shops - they were coining it from every angle!
Citizen Kohen later re-edited the film for general release after signing a deal with Disney. The family version included many musical numbers and lots of rape humour. Re-titled Nice To Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me, the film did very well in the Southern suburbs of Johannesburg and can still be seen in Brakpan, Benoni and Germiston.
Possibly his best film to date is Ten Monologues From The Lives Of The Serial Killers. Made in 1964, it's an infinitely unsettling probe into the minds of murderers ranging from Charles Manson to Ted Bundy through Gert van Rooyen and Eugene Terreblanche with various contributions from rappers The Geto Boys, The Bhundu Boys and The Bantu Boys, and novelists JG Ballard, JM Coetzee and JJ Cale. Pierre Klossowski, author of Sade mon Prochain, a seminal work about the Marquis De Sade, and Georges Bataille, sexual athlete and author of The Story of the Eye, are Citizen Kohen's main role models.
The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man, a 24 minute film made in 1994, is arguably his most shocking film so far, lending terrifying ideas and imagery from his inspired and transgressive mentors. It takes place in a bar in Alberton and is a visionary take on a man literally going out of his mind from boredom. It ends with the protagonist caught in a Toyota Corolla between the rollers of a car wash in Randburg while a couple have sex without a condom in the front seat. This was made four years before David Cronenberg made Crash or Leon Schuster made Panic Mechanic.
Citizen Kohen's latest, Wasted!, or Naar De Klote!, is his most commercial effort to date. Running at a respectable feature length of 100 minutes, it's the tale of a teenage girl with unbelievably pert, ripe breasts who innocently sells fake ecstacy to her fake friends on the rave scene. Along the way she becomes involved with a typical dj, resulting in sexual perversion and the inevitable typically Kohenesque scenes of gruelling sexual violence, rape, abuse, and torture. 19 minutes was cut from the film for its South African release. A cinema complex in Hermanus that screened the uncut version to holiday making teenagers from Pretoria was closed down by coloured officers of the vice squad who hadn't been paid off in advance.
The print was seized and is still being shown in Wynberg under the phoney title Jou Ma Se Poskantoor. The climax of the film, where a crowd of skinhead AWB ravers takes revenge on a coloured drug dealer's car and take anarchy out onto the streets, has been criticised by PAGAD and COSATU as not reflecting the ecstacy and rave culture's lovey-dovey experience, but it's nonetheless fabulously cinematic. Shot on vhs the film was blown up to 70mm and the effect is truly trancey. Wasted! is produced by Denise Wigman and Kitty Kasander, shady Dutch film producers with underworld connections who are also responsible for Peter Greenaway's outlandish films as well as a great deal of tax evasion and bounced cheques.
When released in Amsterdam, Wasted! immediately shot to box office number one, sweeping Independence Day off its moorings.
Andrew Wormsdale
Male & Guardian
April 11 1997
FIN