MOVIE REVIEW: Have You Heard from Johannesburg?

The Long Story of a Long Revolution

By MIKE HALE

When documenting racist atrocities, one proven tactic is to go long, matching the gravity of your subject with sheer duration. Joining “Shoah” (about 9 hours) and “Eyes on the Prize” (14 hours) in this category is “Have You Heard From Johannesburg,” Connie Field’s seven-film, eight-and-a-half-hour documentary series about apartheid.

What Have You Heard From Johannesburg gives us is a history -- inside and outside the Apartheid regime -- that allows us to see what South Africa's Afrikaners, its Blacks (and its other two "colored" groupings), as well as the world at large, thought and felt about what was going on. It does this via talking heads, but in this case, the same heads often span thirty or forty years. We see many of them as young people and also as aged seniors. We explore Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand; many of the African countries (during the 1960s) as they shake off their colonizers; Scandinavia, Europe and the middle east, including Israel. They're all here, especially the United Nations, the majority of whose members consistently vote against South Africa and its Aparthied regime, only to have the UN's powerful Security Council members continue to shore up the foul regime by voting against the majority membership. One might conclude, as is often true regarding UN actions, that the organization was created to keep power in place and strengthen the status quo.

The history of the subjugation of South Africa’s nonwhites and of their long battle against their white rulers — a struggle frequently undermined, until near the end, by the governments of the United States, Britain and France — certainly deserves the time. And “Have You Heard” (the title comes from the lyrics of the Gil Scott-Heron song “Johannesburg”) presents a vast amount of information that will be new to most American viewers, especially in its early sections.

Setting education aside, however, it’s a tricky business evaluating these documentaries from a cinematic standpoint. Judged as a whole — that is, watched from beginning to end — they don’t really justify their lengthy claim on our attention. There are repetitions large and small. Many images of police brutality and everyday indignities recur from film to film; more egregiously, the 90-minute fifth and sixth parts, which cover the same period from slightly different angles, feel redundant.

Ms. Field (“The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter”) might argue that there’s nothing wrong with that. She conceived the project as a set of self-contained documentaries (originally there were to be just three) that could be seen independently, with no requirement that the viewer watch the entire series. Therefore it shouldn’t matter if there’s significant overlap between a film about economic sanctions and university divestment and one about corporate divestment.

But whether or not you plan to watch the whole series — and why wouldn’t you, if you want to learn about apartheid? — the fact is that the two easily could have been combined into a single film that would have been better at half the length. “Have You Heard” would have benefited from judicious editing throughout: you get the feeling that Ms. Field had trouble choosing among so many eloquent witnesses, so many horrific pieces of old footage.

Film Forum in Manhattan is presenting the series in three separate programs of roughly two and three-quarters to three hours each. Program 1, consisting of three hourlong films, is best. It proceeds chronologically from the institution of apartheid in 1948 through the Sharpeville massacre, the jailing of Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders, Oliver Tambo’s establishment of the A.N.C. in exile, the Soweto uprising, the murder of the activist Steve Biko and the passage of the United Nations arms embargo in 1977.

Heroes are identified, larger-than-life figures now little known to a general American audience: Mr. Tambo; Mr. Biko; the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme; the Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston; the Mata Hari of the anti-apartheid movement, Conny Braam. There are villains as well, some of them still making excuses for apartheid and complaining to Ms. Field’s cameras of how they were misunderstood.

Archival film provides a steady drumbeat of humiliation, horrible violence and transfixing bigotry. A white man on the street looks into a camera and says, “They’ve only just come down from the trees.”

Programs 2 and 3 take the story away from South Africa, recounting the various international campaigns against apartheid — the sports boycotts; the fight within the United States, particularly during the Reagan administration, for economic sanctions; and the corporate divestment campaign. The films here, in addition to covering similar ground, also feel less urgent, farther from the action. The events they depict were essential to the overthrow of apartheid, but after a while the crowds of white people marching through the streets or running onto rugby pitches start to blur together.

The seventh film, “Free at Last,” closes Program 3 by returning to South Africa for the end game, when escalating violence and economic isolation finally led to the release of Mr. Mandela and the end of apartheid.

The use of the title “Free at Last” cries out for a comparison with “Eyes on the Prize,” so here it is. “Have You Heard” gets points for passion and immediacy, in contrast to the somewhat stately “Eyes on the Prize,” but it loses them for its messiness; its literalist impulse to illustrate every point, often with random images not directly connected to the story; and its occasional cheesy luridness. Gunshots are used as transitions between scenes and replace the sounds of the hits and kicks in a rugby match.

Even at the level of average-to-mediocre television, though, “Have You Heard” tells an amazing story. If you don’t know it, or you want reminding, the clumsy storytelling can be endured.

HAVE YOU HEARD FROM JOHANNESBURG

Produced and directed by Connie Field; narration written by Jon Else; directors of photography, Tom Hurwitz and David Forbes; series edited by Gregory Scharpen, with additional editing by Ken Schneider and Dawn Lodgson; music by Marco D’Abbrosio and Todd Boekelheide; released by Clarity Films.