Frozen / Chicken / Train / Wreck
Tell us a bit about yourself and your work?
I suppose you could say I’m a filmmaker by profession. Although I never studied it formerly and the main focus of my work is still TV commercials. So I’m never quite sure if I completely qualify for the description. I directed ads for about 15 years in Europe and the UK, and for a short while in the US too, up until about 3 years ago when I returned to SA. I now direct as well as produce through the company I started last year with Tess Van Zyl – Goodcop. We represent some excellent South African filmmakers in commercials and beyond. We’re a future film studio in incubation.
In regards to this book, I should reveal that I have neither a background in design nor journalism but throughout my adult life, I’ve lived with a number of architects and designers, and I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time – mainly drinking - with journalists and photographers. While I find they can talk a lot of crap, they’re also massively entertaining – they are one of the last professions with a love for the formal craft of language and as a result can be very insightful and witty. Through this socialising, I think I’ve become informally inducted into some of these private universes as a fellow traveller, albeit one of an amateur kind, and while I’ve never done anything like this book before, I’ve spent significant time considering making a work like it. The book I suppose is the first attempt to move from being a bar room spectator to more of a formal participant.
What inspired this publication? Many of us who live in Johannesburg see these posters everyday but take them for granted. What sparked your interest in this collection?
I think it was often the sheer elegance of some of the phrasing that I would find in a poster that was just so thrilling and entertaining, and such a great distraction. You just couldn’t help but notice them and their uniqueness seemed so apparent to me. I think I saw them as a kind of journalistic haiku, as silly as that might sound. It was driving the boulevards of JHB on long location-based film shoots on an almost daily basis, reading them day in and day out in fast sequence that made me realise what it might be like to string together 10 or 20 really brilliant ones together. It also seemed that over the last 15 years they had really proliferated. They were becoming a very established and regular ‘element’ of the media landscape, as they began to perform a real function, which was actually advertising the newspapers and their work. Maybe it’s because it’s feels like a strange combination of journalism and advertising that I was attracted to it - a kind of Advertising Reportage? Or is it Reportage Adverstising….?
Either way, seeing them in a combination once I started collecting a large number of them, suddenly made me realise what a publication of a group of them would be like.
The Daily Sun is a really interesting publication. Every day we see newspaper/tabloid posters of some of the most bizarre headlines from them. Frozen Chicken Train Wreck seems like a very interesting story. Have you ever read some of the actual stories behind the headlines?
The Daily Sun, for all the various sins it’s accused of – eg. dumbing down the press and subsequently, the readership of the country along with it - it’s been critical in bringing the actual township experience into a broader, mainstream consciousness; and a lot of that has been brought about by its presentation and marketing, much of which is encapsulated in the instantaneous nature of these posters. Of course they are sensationalist, but that tabloid quality has existed in our Press for over half a century now. Zonk! and Drum were both working within this vernacular in the 40’s and 50’s, and as a result, one could say this is entrenched, to a lesser or greater extent, in our journalism. One may not like the fact that essentially large parts of the population think like the cover of a Heat Magazine, but there’s a very good case to be made for it being somewhat endemic to who we are or where we have come to.
The idea that something as factually dubious or empirically unproven as a “superstition” can now be considered ‘news’ is in itself a very unique phenomenon that the Daily Sun has refined out of the raw landscape as they found it. It’s the apocryphal story as gospel. Deon Du Plessis, who started The Daily Sun - a white Afrikaans male - might be considered severely cynical for this approach, even exploitative, but they are participating in quite a natural African situation I feel. It’s the nature of its story, and the elaboration of that story, that seems to actually be important, not its actuality, it ‘factuality’. I’m aware it’s controversial to say it, but I do think that truth comes from a very different tradition in this society than it does, for instance, in Western Europe. It occupies a slightly different but crucial dimension. You see it in The Daily Sun and you see it, as a result, in these posters.
At the time of collecting I very often don’t get to discover the actual story, probably because I never followed up by reading that paper that day, and so I don’t know most of the stories behind the headlines in the book. Obviously ones like "I SAW MAMA AFRICA COLLAPSE” (Miriam Makeba’s dying directly after coming off stage in Italy), I knew just from reading them, but many were either too oblique or specific for me to guess. The irony about Frozen Chicken Train Wreck is that it isn’t actually a South African story. After we had named the book, one of the publishers googled it, and it turned out to be a story from Texas and was obviously being run on the news agency wires that day. The copy team probably felt it was just very attractive as headline copy on a slow local news day.
At one stage we were actually going to make a glossary at the back of the book, with a thumbnail of each headline and a 2 liner with the actual story as it appeared in the paper. Maybe for another edition?
Frozen Chicken Train Wreck is available through UK publishers Chopped Liver and Ditto Press. The publication will be launched on the 9th November at 44 Stanley Ave with Fourthwall Books in Johannesburg.
www.dittopress.co.uk
www.choppedliverpress.com
www.fourthwallbooks.com