Abstract
Johannesburg today is a large, sprawling, cosmopolitan city that functions as the economic hub for South Africa and for the southern African region. Johannesburg has far-reaching tentacles that have extended in all directions, but particularly east and west along the gold reef and north towards the city of Pretoria. In 2011, the population for the metropolitan municipality of Johannesburg was just under 4.5 million people, but the municipality is surrounded by two other metropolitan municipalities, which blurs the boundaries of the urban area. In reality, the greater urban area of Johannesburg has just less than 8 million people. The majority of residents (76.4 %) are black African, 12.3 % are white people, 5.6 % are coloured people and 4.9 % are Indian/Asian (2011 Census, Statistics SA).
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Notes
- 1.
Seventy per cent of those employed in the film industry are based in Johannesburg and several of the large media enterprises such as Endemol, Primedia and Sasani are also in Johannesburg (Visser, 2013).
- 2.
A.k.a. Gangsters’ Paradise.
- 3.
This book focuses on feature films, although it is not the only medium to showcase images of Johannesburg and was certainly not the first. Particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, Johannesburg features more regularly in the newsreel African Mirror (Sandon, 2013) and is central to the imagery generated around the 1936 Empire Exhibition (Kruger, 2013). The intention with this chapter is not to undermine the influence of these other media in Johannesburg, but to focus specifically on feature film.
- 4.
African Mirror was the dominant commercial newsreel in South Africa, producing weekly content to be screened in cinemas before feature films, for most of the twentieth century (Sandon, 2013).
- 5.
The literal spelling out of the location may be interpreted as being for the benefit of an international audience, in reality many white South Africans, even those residing in Johannesburg, at this time would not have visited Soweto and would be unable to recognise the township from the ‘establishing shots’ of the film.
- 6.
The first modern cinema, perhaps, because there were two cinemas listed in Soweto in 1980, though the nature of what these cinemas screened is unclear (Morris, 1980).
- 7.
Soweto is the large area south west of Johannesburg’s centre that was established as an area for black residents of the city and became the main place for forced removals when the Group Areas Act was enforced. Soweto’s districts or townships were further segregated according to language or ethnic origins to promote further divisions.
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Parker, A. (2016). Johannesburg the Divided City. In: Urban Film and Everyday Practice. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55012-5_2
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