Lost time : disillusionment in Christiaan Olwagen's Johnny is nie dood nie (2017)

Abstract

The film Johnny is nie dood nie uses temporal strategies on various levels to express disillusionment as a theme. These temporal strategies include interjected memories (flashbacks), dreams and ontological overlaps between “reality” and fiction, and between present and past. These strategies entail a manipulation of time narrated and are interpreted in Genettian terms as the discourse time of a story. I argue for a conceptualisation of time as subjective and existential. How time is conveyed as such is salient to the construction of disillusionment as a leitmotif in the film through characters’ experiences of time, and the cinematographic and narratological manipulation of time for the viewer to interpret. Disillusionment, being predicated on past hopes and present discontent (as well as future hopes and its discontents) depends on the passage of time and the notions of memory and anticipation, both expressions of subjective time. Interjected with layers of flashbacks and dreams, the film relates a narrative unfolding of events in 2002, but this unfolding is peppered with memories and hauntings from 1989 and some references to 1987 and 1988. The film’s non-chronological movement through time brings the past and present into sharp focus: smashed hopes, idealised memories, and deeply disturbing dream content co-exist side by side. The characters’ disillusionment in the film is contextually related to real events - the Voëlvry movement, student days, and most poignantly: South African realities of the time, and the reaction of some members of the Afrikaner youth’s emerges from their disappointment in their expected future as they realise their future ideals have failed to actualise. Voëlvry was the voice of a generation of disillusioned Afrikaners (in the late 1980s) who anticipated a better future and again experienced disillusionment years later as their expectations of the future collapsed and failed to actualise. Between their first and second disillusionment is thus time spent in anticipation – a lost time of hopes and dreams. To explore these temporalities as constructive of the theme of disillusionment, this study presents an interpretation of Lise’s dream, in which present and past - and also personas, notably Johnny’s - conflate in disturbing ways that also have a bearing on the present. Further interpretations explore the character of Johnny with reference to the figure of Johannes Kerkorrel (the nom de plume used for the Afrikaans singer and songwriter Ralph Rabie), since Johnny’s character conflates with Kerkorrel’s on many levels in the film, most notably in terms of disillusionment and (eventual) suicide. The conflation of reality and fiction, past and present, and dream and wakeful state occurs through temporal augmentations brought about by music, conversations, flashbacks, and

contextual knowledge. Lise’s dream and Johnny’s character and suicide are arguably the film's most poignant manifestations of disillusionment and thus the focus of investigation in interpreting the theme.