Escape from Pretoria review: a film of anti-apartheid nostalgia for apartheid

 

Arclight Films

Review: Escape from Pretoria, directed by Francis Annan

There is something undeniably appealing about prison escape films. Who doesn’t want to watch a bunch of underdogs band together and escape the clutches of their gaolers?

We empathise with central characters whose imprisonment is usually unjust, if not illegal. We cringe, watching them tortured by cruel and psychopathic guards. We feel uplifted as we see – even in this context of absolute abasement – the fabled “human spirit” (whatever this thing is) able to soar above the misery of the situation and, through cunning and ingenuity, set the body free.

They are perfect examples, in other words, of the kind of cinematic escapist fodder that thankfully numbs our brains and bodies to the brutalities of reality.

Escape from Pretoria does its best to exploit both our disposition towards underdogs, and our historical knowledge of the barbarity of apartheid in South Africa.

Based on Tim Jenkin’s 2003 memoir Inside Out: Escape from Pretoria Central Prison, this is the first major feature film from UK-based director Francis Annan. Like so many low- to medium-budget films in the 21st century, it is a transnational production, with the investment (and therefore risk) spread between Australia and the UK. Indeed, it was shot on location in Adelaide and surrounding suburbs, and looks like it.

A film about mechanics

Formally, the film is uninspired. There is nothing notable about its technical construction. This seems to be a perennial problem with so-called “true story” films, which often depend on the interest generated by this label at the expense of dramaturgy and aesthetic quality.

(This, of course, is not always the case – the true story heist film American Animals was one of the most formally engaging films of 2018.)

What is interesting about Escape from Pretoria is the absolutely minor tenor of its narrative. It eschews melodrama and sentimentality, focusing on the mechanics of escape itself. The film goes into great detail in its examination of the design and manufacturing of the tools and technologies Jenkin and his crew use to get free, including nine different wooden keys, and their testing under tense conditions.

In this sense, the film is procedural rather than character driven. This suits the curious nature of the event on which it is based, and there is something refreshing about the narrative’s minimalist approach.

There is something refreshing about the narrative’s minimalism. Arclight Films

It doesn’t labour excessively to depict guards as disgusting demons, or prisoners as paragons of virtue. It doesn’t, in the style of American countercultural prison films like Cool Hand Luke and The Longest Yard, fetishise the eccentricities and idiosyncratic personas of different inmates.

Ex wizard Daniel Radcliffe gives an earnest if forgettable performance as Jenkin, managing to pull off a pretty convincing accent and sweating and frowning in the right places. His fellow escapees are solid, especially Australian Mark Leonard Winter as Leonard Fontaine. Nathan Page, as the particularly unpleasant guard Mongo, endows the role with a quality of Eichmann-esque understatement that stops it from descending into super-villain caricature.

Disappointment at history

Yet, like so much post-apartheid media about apartheid-era South Africa, the film exists as a kind of channel for profound disappointment regarding the African National Congress’s post-apartheid rule.

This is realised in the film’s background echoes of faint nostalgia and in the painfully banal platitudes that end the film, posturing about freedom and democracy, the ANC and Nelson Mandela.

This kind of nostalgia is becoming increasingly difficult to stomach in a post-Marikana massacre context, in which the ANC were implicated in the lethal repression of protests about mine workers’ rights.

---

Read more: Marikana tragedy must be understood against the backdrop of structural violence in South Africa

---

It seems that, in an age of increasing inequality in South Africa, the cultural spirit needs to return to the apartheid era to generate some semblance of hope about the future. In the era the film attempts to document, the name “ANC” was still synonymous with dreams of equality and a prosperous future for many South Africans.

In a current day South Africa of growing inequality – captured in films set in the present (Necktie Youth) and future (District 9) – it is an easy strategy to return to the apartheid era to leverage the emotional investment of the viewer.

In any case, Escape from Pretoria offered an engaging diversion from news about coronavirus and police brutality. It’s the kind of minor, visually uninteresting film one senses would feel like a flop if projected onto a cinema-sized screen. It is better suited to the small screens with which we’re all currently forced to make do.

Escape from Pretoria is now available in Australia through video on demand services.

Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

When religion sided with science: Medieval lessons for surviving COVID-19

 

The biblical book of Ezekiel describes a vision of the divine that medieval philosophers understood as revealing the connection between religion and science. By Matthaeus Merian (1593-1650), CC BY-NC

Faced with a range of serious patient reactions to the COVID-19 disease, doctors and nurses have sometimes struggled to find viable treatment options. But when we examine faith-based responses to the virus, spiritual guidance has proved even more elusive.

Guidelines for faith leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encourage groups to clean surfaces and limit meetings or gatherings. But they do not address the emotional effects that COVID-19 victims, and those of us who live in fear of contracting it, might experience.

Religious figures such as Pope Francis have composed prayers for protection from coronavirus. But the idea of prayer as a vital part of any response to COVID-19 might feel inappropriate or even irresponsible to some in a world that often views medicine and religion as polar opposites – one turning to science, the other to God.

As a social historian of the medieval Islamic world, I think and write about the role of religion in daily life. Looking at how people thought about science and religion in the past can inform the contemporary world’s approach to COVID-19.

Plagues – a fact of life

Plagues were a fact of life in ancient and medieval worlds. Personal letters from the Cairo Geniza – a treasure trove of documents from the Jews of medieval Egypt – attest that bouts of widespread disease were so common that writers had different words for them. They varied from a simple outbreak – wabāʾ, or “infectious disease” in Arabic – to an epidemic – dever gadol, Hebrew for “massive pestilence,” which hearkens back to language from the 10 plagues of the Bible.

Fragment from Cairo Geniza held at Cambridge shows handwritten letter from Moses Maimonides. It was discovered in late 19th century. Culture Club/Getty Images

During the time of the jurist and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), who led the Jewish community of Egypt, Fusṭāṭ (Old Cairo) faced a plague so daunting in 1201 that the city’s Jewish population never returned to its former glory.

Divine punishment?

Religious people throughout history often saw plagues as the manifestation of divine will, as a punishment for sin and a warning against moral laxity. The same chorus is heard by a minority today. As a Jewish person, I am embarrassed to read that a rabbi was recently quoted as saying that COVID-19 was divine punishment for gay pride parades.

In “A Mediterranean Society,” Geniza researcher S.D. Goitein describes Maimonides’ reaction to the plague: “Whatever the philosophers and theologians of that time might have said about man’s ability to influence God’s decisions by his deeds, the heart believed that they could be efficacious, that intense and sincere prayer, almsgiving, and fasts could keep catastrophe away.”

But the Jewish community also dealt with disease in other ways, and its holistic response to epidemics reveals a partnership – not a conflict – between science and religion.

Science and religion

In the medieval period, thinkers like Maimonides combined the study of science and religion. As Maimonides explains in his philosophical masterwork “The Guide to the Perplexed,” he believed that studying physics was a necessary precursor to metaphysics. Rather than seeing religion and science as inimical to one another, he saw them as mutually supportive.

Indeed, scholars of religious texts complemented their studies with science-centered writings. Maimonides’ Islamic contemporary, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), is a perfect example. Though an important philosopher and religious thinker, Ibn Rushd also made meaningful contributions to medicine, including suggesting the existence of what would later come to be called Parkinson’s disease.

But it was not only elite scholars who saw religion and science as complementary. In “A Mediterranean Society,” Goitein says that “even the simplest Geniza person was a member of that hellenized Middle Eastern-Mediterranean society which believed in the power of science.” He adds: “Illness was conceived as a natural phenomenon and, therefore, had to be treated with the means provided by nature.”

Tending to one’s inner life

Science and religion, therefore, were both integral to the soul of the Geniza person. There was no sense that these two pillars of thought challenged one another. By tending to their inner lives through rituals that helped them deal with the sadness and trepidation, and their bodies through the tools of medicine available to them, the Geniza people took a holistic approach to epidemics.

For them, following the medical advice of Maimonides or Ibn Rushd was an essential part of their response to plague. But while hunkered down in their homes, they also looked to the spiritual advice of these thinkers, and others, to care for their souls. Those of us experiencing stress, solitude and uncertainty amid the coronavirus pandemic could learn from the medieval world that our inner lives demand attention too.

[Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Phillip I. Lieberman, Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

As the coronavirus rages in prisons, ethical issues of crime and punishment become more compelling

 

A 1970 image of prisoners in cell blocks at Rikers Island Prison. Bettmann / Contributor/Bettmann via Getty Images

Across the United States, prisons and jails have become hot spots for COVID-19. Governments at the state and federal level are being pressed to release inmates before the end of their sentence in order to minimize the spread of the disease.

So far more than 100,000 of them have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 802 inmates and several correctional officers have died.

New Jersey’s correctional facilities have been hit particularly hard. With 29 deaths for every 100,000 inmates, they have the highest COVID-19-related death rate in the nation.

In response, New Jersey has already released more than 1,000 inmates, and Gov. Phil Murphy on April 10, 2020 authorized a case-by-case review of prisoners who are at greater risk. Additionally, the state legislature is considering a bill to authorize release of about 20% of its prison population.

As a scholar who has studied penal policy in the U.S., it is clear that the coronavirus requires Americans to think hard about what is unjust and disproportionate punishment. It is a question that ethicists have tried to tackle for millennia, but has been given added urgency during the pandemic.

Overcrowding, infections and deaths

Social distancing is impossible in correctional facilities and, as a result, so is COVID-19 prevention.

In California, for example, where 109,000 prisoners are housed in facilities with a maximum capacity of 85,000, the infection rate in June for the state’s jails and prisons was about 40 per 1,000 inmates – more than seven times the rate for the state’s population as a whole.

In New York City’s jails, it was was more than 7%, compared to just over 2% for the city’s population.

Inmates fear for their lives. One California prisoner, who is serving an eight-year sentence for causing injury while driving drunk, told the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t deserve a death sentence.”

Overcrowding in prisons: Inmates at the Mule Creek State Prison in a gymnasium that was modified to house prisoners in Ione, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Justice in punishment

Philosophers since Aristotle have debated what justice in punishment requires. For him, punishment is governed by the requirements of what he called “corrective justice.” By this he meant that when someone is injured, the offender should be punished by inflicting comparable harm.

Aristotle‘s idea that punishment is a deserved and proportional response to an offense provides a building block for retributive theories of punishment, which embrace some form of “an eye for an eye” as a way to do justice.

Those theories insist, as 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant noted, that punishment “can never be inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society. It must always be inflicted upon him because he has committed a crime.” In other words, just punishment must give people what they deserve, nothing less and nothing more.

Thus, Kant suggested that the amount of punishment should be governed by a principle of proportionality.

Many contemporary theorists of punishment embrace this idea. As legal scholar Bernard Harcourt recently said, punishment “should be proportional to the amount of harm caused by the offender.”

Prison conditions

To determine whether the risk of being exposed in prison to sickness or death from COVID-19 is disproportionate punishment requires paying attention to prison conditions. One question to ask is whether the harsh conditions of life behind bars are part of a criminal’s punishment or merely a collateral consequence of their sentence.

Throughout most of American history, a criminal sentence was thought to be the full measure of the punishment inflicted – jail and prison conditions, as bad as they might be, were not regarded as part of the punishment.

In 1992, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas observed, in a case brought by an inmate who had been beaten by a guard, that the prohibition on cruel punishment found in the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment did not apply to any “deprivations” or “hardships” during incarceration.

Two years later, Thomas reiterated his view that the overcrowding, disease or violence which are often part of confinement “are not punishment in any recognized sense of the term.”

But Thomas’ view has not prevailed.

In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has held that what happens in jails and prisons is in fact part of an inmate’s punishment and must be considered in deciding whether their treatment is just.

As Justice Lewis Powell said in a 1981 case challenging prison overcrowding, such conditions are part of the punishment and are “subject to scrutiny under the Eighth Amendment standards.”

Those conditions “must not,” he said, “involve the wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain, nor may they be grossly disproportionate to the severity of the crime warranting imprisonment.”

In 2011, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the view that jail and prison conditions were very much part of the punishment. The court upheld a lower court order directing the state of California to reduce the size of its prison population so as to reduce overcrowding and provide better medical treatment for inmates.

Protecting prisoners

A family enters a women’s prison in New Jersey to visit their mother. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

In the coming weeks, courts will be handling a number of pandemic-related cases involving prisoners, and legislatures will be considering proposals to let large numbers of inmates leave confinement.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

As they do so, it is important for them to acknowledge that when the government puts someone behind bars and deprives them of the capacity to provide for their own care and protection it has, what law professor Sharon Dolovich calls “an affirmative obligation,” a duty to act to protect them from harm.

Judges and legislators will need to consider both whether being exposed to COVID-19 in prison is a disproportionate and unjust punishment and also how to discharge the government’s responsibilities to the incarcerated.

Doing so should, I believe, lead them to release as many inmates as possible from the dangers to which COVID-19 is exposing them every day.

Austin Sarat, Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.