Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
1 2014
JACQUES DE VILLIERS
Near the end of Ken Kaplan’s Pure Blood (2001), two Afrikaner
family members – Eugene and Fanus – give voice to contrasting
opinions about the white person’s place in a changing South
Africa:
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For Kaplan, Pure Blood was a chance “to make a feature film
that reflects the state-of-mind that created apartheid and look
at those people today and what they’re going through”.9 9 Kaplan, ‘Cue Magazine Interview.’
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eugenics: “After all The General did to ensure your blood would
be pure. And in the end you’re just a mongrel, created out of
our hate and perversion.” Much like the vampire of old, The
General’s obsession with purity proves his undoing, tricked and
killed by the ‘truth’ of Eugene and Gertrude’s conspiring incest.
Purity, and with it the notion of fixed identity, is thus shown
up as myth, constructed to serve white power’s ideological and
politically motivated ends.
Eugene’s revelation and Gertrude’s assertion together offer
an extreme example of the way in which the past is frequently
narrativised by disavowing certain events and realities –
visually represented in this instance by an until-now repressed
flashback to Fanus witnessing his biological parents engaged
in an incestuous primal scene. The revelation exposes the very
taboo that must be disavowed by eugenicist and essentialist
discourse, because it is the logical conclusion of both: incest.
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