Re-telling freedom in Otelo Burning: the beach, surf noir, and Bildung at the Lamontville pool

Abstract

The feature film Otelo Burning (2011) tells the story of black youth ‘tasting freedom’ by surfing waves in late apartheid South Africa and reflects on the emergence of a new national order by drawing Nelson Mandela’s release from prison into its plot. This article situates the film in a genealogy of black-centred representations of Durban beach – including Peter Abrahams’s memoir Tell Freedom (1954), Drum photographer Bob Gosani’s framing of Dolly Rathebe at a Durban beach (1957), Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1983) and the post-apartheid film Jerusalema (2008) – and in relation to international surfing fiction and film – particularly Kum Nunn’s novel trilogy and the films Point Break (1991) and Blue Crush (2002). It focuses on the settings of beach and sea, township and pool and teases out the generic scripts that compose the film. A tension between the attraction of the outlaw figure that informs ‘surf noir’ and the production of the Bildungsheld as normative, ‘responsibilitized’ citizen-subject is found to animate this story of surfing and to direct the questions about freedom that it poses from the vantage point of a democracy itself now coming of age.