A police van veers around a corner, a loaf of bread is placed inside a box, leaves crackle and turn in the ambiguity of words; “In my third life, I learnt about mortality”. Zandile Tisani’s Highlands is a kind of forensic infrastructure, unfixing and unhinging the masculinity and certainty of Johannesburg’s necropolitical reflections through the opening and closing of pores, architectures of light that pull in- and out-of-focus, and the slow movements of water carving rock.
Sun-dizzied camera shots sweep and descend to give Highlands an alien quality of defamiliarisation while the ubiquity of water stands strange and sputnik in its Yeoville towers. Is the ‘clean air’ up there supposed to descend in the same way water does? Are there ways that we can structure our own sermons, self-designate the sacred? And what could that mean in relation to the way a reef is formed, the way boreholes now honeycomb beneath the surface of the city?
Tisani beautifully unsettles what constitutes ‘the documentary’ in a layered interrogation that blurs just where the edges might be. There’s a kind of quiet delirium in obscured hyperrealism, sedition in the spatial rendering of the mysterious narrator who stands somehow beyond the trinity of spirituality, commerce and survival. Dialogues form between soil and skin as the ground moves to meet those who traverse it, those who would both regard and disregard it in the instant of lifetimes.
The experimental format that Highlands engages reclaims the physical space in which it is shot from the violent patina of Hollywood glitz, from the blunt force of linear narrative and the designation of ‘history’; opening up breathing-room for questions that speak incredibly intimately to the complexities of existence within, and to the side-of, JHB as a ‘post-colonial, post-apartheid, modern, African, metropolis’.
Tisani’s Highlands is a co-production between GoodCop Productions and the Encounters Documentary Lab and even if I wasn’t writing about it, I couldn’t only watch it once. Check out the South African kick-back against stasis below. #MbokoLead