From Breaker Morant to Verraaiers: Ideology within filmic representations of the Anglo-Boer War

From Breaker Morant to Verraaiers: Ideology within filmic representations of the Anglo-Boer War

ABSTRAC / SAMEVATTTING

The Australian produced Breaker Morant (1980) and the South African film Verraaiers [Traitors] (2012) are based on apparently true and similar incidents that occurred on the opposing sides during the Anglo-Boer War. In Breaker Morant, Australian soldiers under British command are arrested and stand trial for murdering Boer prisoners and a civilian. In Verraaiers a prominent field cornet and his sons are put on trial for treason. Both films constitute strong anti-war statements whilst communicating the continuing significance of the Anglo-Boer War to the national histories of their respective countries of origin, but in diverse ways and with different objectives. Breaker Morant was profitable at the time of its release, continues to be regularly screened on television, and is regarded as a film classic seminal to the Australian New Wave. Verraaiers was produced in a post-1994 South Africa and differs significantly from earlier Anglo-Boer War films. The paper gives a brief analysis of Breaker Morant and explains its success (in terms of the contextual social dynamics that justified its production) as contrast to an in-depth analysis of the more complex historical and contextual social forces to which Verraaiers is a response, and which account for its failure at the box office despite the existential importance its message for the future of South Africa.

 

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