Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa

A journey into the newly labelled 'ZAxploitation' business that, strangely, boomed in the 1970s and 80s, during the apartheid era of South Africa.
This is the first book to analyse the emergence and growth of what is now being spoken about, albeit retrospectively, as 'ZAxploitation' and its legacy, as a loose genre of B-cinema, within the apartheid era. In this book I intend to use a comparative framework to indicate that, despite being marginalised in international politics (as with the famous cultural boycott and sporting ban), South African cinema in the 1970s and 80s frequently drew on foreign counterparts to construct a prolific and generically rich 'B' cinema. Part of the perverse and yet fascinating background to this trend (if one can loosely refer to it as such) is that some of these films carry the generic tropes of a more multicultural cinema, including American blaxploitation, Hong Kong kung-fu and Italian spaghetti westerns. The identity politics of this cinema, therefore, are not necessarily what one may expect.