Janaína Nagata’s documentary debut resembles a detective investigation. In 2018, the Brazilian film-maker chanced upon an old 16mm reel of what looked like a typical homemade travelogue. Nagata’s film begins with the first 19 minutes of this already edited footage, in which there are glimpses of exotic safari animals, traditional African dance ceremonies and lavish banquets. Under the dissonant notes of an added background score, however, the smiling images turn queasy. Soon, Nagata would discover that this visual relic holds the spectre of apartheid South Africa.
Her excursion into the past plays out almost in real time. Using a split-screen composition, she places scenes from the old reel side by side with her web browser. Like a gleaner, she looks for visual clues – a park sign, a portrait on a wall – which she then feeds into a search engine. In addition to the home movie’s location, the city of Durban, she is also able to identify a couple of faces. Among them is former South African minister Hendrik Verwoerd, infamous as the “architect of apartheid”.
What is most compelling about Private Footage is the convergence of old and new technologies, where archival images, vlogs, and even YouTube ads freely intermingle. For anyone already familiar with South African history, however, watching someone basically get a crash course on apartheid grows repetitive and tiresome. Nagata’s preoccupation with identifying minute details from the footage also ends up limiting her own film’s scope. It shows little interest in widening the focus of the central quest to take in non-visual resources or external sociopolitical contexts, resulting in an intriguing experiment in montage that is short on intellectual heft.
