Why District 9?

Johannesburg, South Africa 2010: Wikus van de Merwe is an unimposing clerk working at the large company Multi National United (mnu). He has just been promoted and placed in charge of relocating an alien refugee camp known as District 9 further away from the city. The aliens and their mothership arrived above the city of Johannesburg in 1982, and in 2010 it still languishes above the cityscape. When the ship first arrived, the humans did not know what to do but, when nobody emerged from the ship and it became clear that its inhabitants were in trouble, they were rescued from the ship. The aliens were ill and starving. Put into a refugee camp, they were segregated from the citizens of Johannesburg for health and safety reasons.

In the years following the aliens’ rescue from their dying ship, the camp quickly declined into a slum, where a paraplegic Nigerian warlord called Obesandjo now runs an illegal trade in food, weapons and sex workers. The aliens are abject, slimy, insect-like creatures, who love to eat cat food out of tins. They have been given the derogatory name ‘prawns’, because they resemble the insects Libanasidus vittatus, crickets known as Parktown prawns, endemic to Johannesburg’s wealthy suburbs.

Wikus, overseeing the forced removal of the aliens from this slum, is almost a caricature of apartheid-era Afrikaner masculinity. He speaks with a heavy Afrikaans accent and his hair is conservatively parted. While he is diligent and well-intentioned, he is at heart racist and bigoted, and ultimately deeply afraid of the aliens.

As if fulfilling his fear of the aliens, Wikus encounters an alien substance while he is going from house to house in the camp, gathering signatures from the aliens who consent to being relocated. When he comes across the alien substance in one particularly chaotic dwelling, it sprays into his face by accident, and his transformation begins. He rapidly becomes ill and, when he returns home to a surprise party celebrating his promotion, he vomits a black substance all over the food. He also starts to notice that his body is changing. Soon it becomes clear that he is turning into an alien himself. His right arm and eye completely transform and he even starts to crave tinned cat food.

Wikus is admitted to hospital and becomes a test subject for the mnu personnel who want to harvest his dna, now an amalgam of alien and human dna. They also use him to experiment with alien weaponry, which humans cannot use. Wikus escapes and is forced to find refuge in the camp, where he meets the alien Christopher in the same chaotic dwelling where he originally encountered the alien substance. Together with his young son, Christopher is trying to repair a control module from the alien spaceship, which has been hidden under his shack for years.¹ Christopher promises to help Wikus reverse the dna effects of the alien substance if Wikus helps him retrieve the substance from the mnu who had confiscated it. In this uneasy alliance, they join forces to break into the mnu headquarters to recover the alien substance that is necessary for completing the control module.

Targets of an aggressive pursuit, Wikus and Christopher flee back to District 9. Wikus finds he can use alien weapons and, in a climactic scene, he steals an alien mechanised suit of armour from Obesandjo to fight off the mnu’s henchmen, to enable Christopher and his son to escape. The control module is finally beamed up to the mothership, while Wikus remains on earth, where Christopher has promised to come and find him, to help him return to human form. In the final scene of the film, we see Wikus as an alien, sitting on a waste dump, making a flower out of scrap metal, which he leaves at his wife’s front door.

District 9, part mockumentary, part science-fiction film, is clearly an allegory of apartheid and the racism that was part of that regime, along with the forced removals that were ubiquitous in the government’s enforced segregation between races. Wikus represents the regime’s demise, but also, most significantly, the regime’s hope of subsequent redemption. Much has been written about the film in relation to its allegorical merits. There has also been considerable focus on the character of Wikus and his own journey with abjection, and on the prawns as symbols of racial otherness. I am, however, interested in the other protagonist of the film: Johannesburg itself.

District 9 put South Africa – and Johannesburg – on the global map. As an audience member, watching it in the city where it was shot, I recall the uncanny and unusual feeling of seeing places I recognised. More importantly, the film captured Johannesburg in such a memorable manner. Inwardly I was exclaiming: “That is the Joburg I live in!” In my view, the film captured the gritty, ruinous and ‘real’ character of this dusty metropolis, with its post-industrial character that I had always found captivating and somehow inspiring. This is a city where life is a starkly quotidian affair, where survival and luxury overlap, and where things often seem to be ‘going downhill’, as Rehad Desai says in his documentary film, The Battle for Johannesburg (2010), released the year after District 9. What District 9 captured for me as a viewer is the look of this city: browns, teals and oranges; vistas bleached by the year-round sunshine in the dry blue sky; buildings that date back to a monstrous modernity that is now haunting the city; and a landscape that reminds one that the open ‘veld’ is never that far away.² This film, no less because of how well-known it is, is Johannesburg, or at least a Johannesburg, one worth excavating from the remnants of recent history.

District 9 met with much anticipation, acclaim and academic interest after its release in 2009. It is one of the first Hollywood portrayals of contemporary Johannesburg, and local audiences were, like me, enthralled, fascinated and at times bemused. International audiences were likewise intrigued, regarding this as one of the first fictional depictions of apartheid South Africa on the big screen. While the film had a big impact relative to its small budget and the unknown director Neill Blomkamp, whom it propelled into the international arena, it has not yet been given its rightful place.

Aside from the merits of the film as an allegory of apartheid, and its portrayal of the protagonist Wikus van de Merwe, it should be considered as unique in that it is an important landmark depiction of Johannesburg in contemporary cinema. Its depiction of place is so convincing that this deserves special attention. This book is therefore invested in viewing District 9 as a compelling portrayal of Johannesburg, rather than merely as a film set in Johannesburg, and is thus devoted to studying not only District 9, but Johannesburg in District 9. There are several reasons why this is merited, rather than an analysis of District 9’s plot and characters. First, District 9 portrays contemporary Johannesburg in a style that borrows strongly from the documentary genre, and as such it reflects much of contemporary Johannesburg almost by default. As an imagining of the city that is axiomatic of its time, the film’s portrayal of the city may therefore lead us to consider contemporary Johannesburg and its geopolitics and visual character anew. Second, it makes use of a distinctive visual vocabulary: this is strikingly familiar, because it also reflects much contemporaneous media, as it is not alone in doing so. The style, a ‘visual idiom’, is so well developed in District 9 that I would go so far as to claim that to neglect its importance would be to forego a unique opportunity to study the Johannesburg ‘idiom’ that I call nostalgic dystopia, which emerges at the time. Situating the film within this larger visual idiom points to the importance of the film for understanding a particular post-apartheid moment in visual Johannesburg, and indicates that Blomkamp is not alone in his vision of the city. Since this moment has not yet been the subject of substantial research, it is also an opportunity to explore the city’s recent past from a visual point of view in a new way, drawing out the shared visions and strategies that filmmakers and photographers were using to imagine the city late in the first decade of the 2000s.

A further aspect that is unique to this film is how its use of particularly analogue media forms allows for a media archaeological interpretation of Johannesburg’s visual identity after the transformation of South Africa’s governance following the first democratic elections of 1994.³ District 9’s analogue qualities cast the city’s portrayal back to the apartheid era, and offer new insights into how the city was depicted historically, and how that continues to impact on its current image. Blomkamp’s use of digital cameras to evoke an analogue aesthetic is a quintessential instance of so-called “analogue nostalgia” (Caoduro 2014, Niemeyer 2014), prevalent in film and photography during the years of the transition to digital media from analogue media, but used deliberately by Blomkamp in a self-reflexive manner. The film straddles this transition, and the strategies and effects of negotiating the media change are evident in how it gives form to Johannesburg as a city. Ultimately, this aspect of District 9 also highlights the role media technologies⁴ play in contributing to how cities are portrayed in popular culture, emphasising the importance of studying media and media change even within the context of representations of urban space.

Films such as District 9 often suffer from exhaustive interrogations into their allegorical qualities. Valid as these may be, District 9 is more than its social narrative. The city in this movie is so complex that it prompted me to consider whether art historical landscape traditions are at play in how film and photography portray urban spaces. District 9’s Johannesburg is not just a difficult or contradictory place; it is also an urban landscape that ticks many of the boxes of sublime landscapes, because it is so fascinating at the same time. Seeing the city in this novel way unlocks a series of aesthetic repercussions that bring to light deeper and more nuanced aspects of how African cityscapes are imagined and portrayed. In my view, this can lead to further considerations of what difficult cities and ‘hard’ urban landscapes mean beyond first glance, unearthing their potential as possible sites of subversion and transformation.

Johannesburg in the Sands of Time

Johannesburg is an ever-changing movie that no one has quite managed to produce. It is a screenplay in progress. Like movie directors, leaders are thrown up out of the soil of the surrounding area to try to bring a sense of order to what Johannesburg is. […] Johannesburg is an unfinished movie.

matshikiza 2004: 482

While some may say that Johannesburg is an unfinished movie, it may also be thought of as a ruin waiting to be excavated. Swallowed by the sands of history, the city has not yet taken concrete shape, or is perhaps waiting for urban ‘archaeologists’ to unearth its true foundations and brush away the dust of oppression and inequality. In a sense lacking shape, the city has been said to be unimaginable, to be a place that is unmanageable for planners and those who seek to represent it, and even “to have no genre of its own” (Gordimer 1958: 80). Nonetheless, since the end of the apartheid era, artists, filmmakers and photographers have sought to capture the city and its genus loci, as it grew towards the democratic future of the “New South Africa”.⁵ Perhaps it would reveal itself as a new Jerusalem?

Looking back at District 9 and a selection of film, photography and popular media produced since the end of the apartheid era, I am embarking here upon a project of excavating the recent past of Johannesburg’s popular image – one that reveals itself to be quite unlike the utopian formulation of a “New South Africa”, and which, perhaps surprisingly, is consistently dystopian. While many scholars have argued that the city is often portrayed as decaying,⁶ I would venture, considering the yield of some light digging, that in recent years these depictions have become something of a trend, reaching a pinnacle in District 9. This ‘trend’ is evident in several other film depictions, such as Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (Ziman 2008). It also reverberates in popular culture developing around the city’s image, as in the work of a photography studio in the regenerated inner-city district of Maboneng entitled “I was shot in Joburg”, and in the music videos of local pop musicians Die Antwoord, and international musician and record producer Skrillex.⁷ Time and again, Johannesburg is depicted as overwhelmingly dystopian: poverty-stricken, dirty, post-industrial and dangerously violent. Somehow, in spite of this, these depictions are visually compelling and even appear to have an aesthetic allure about them that is incongruous and questionable.

What these portrayals have in common when viewed together seems to be more than just a representation of characteristics of Johannesburg. They share a recognisable set of features that is unique to Johannesburg, depicting the city in a discomfiting nostalgic manner, and encouraging one to recall the city’s fraught past. They foreground historic apartheid-era landmarks, architecture and motifs, and emulate the analogue media that captured the city at the height of apartheid. Furthermore, this visual language emphasises the dystopian elements of the city, its problems of poverty, inequality, urban decay and even ruin. It is in some ways representative of the current state of the country, caught between the ills of the apartheid past and the unrealised ideals of a democratic future. As such, it potentially creates cognitive dissonance for viewers of these depictions: they are both visually attractive, because they spark nostalgic responses to Johannesburg and the past, and repulsive, because they are so drenched in decay, poverty and violence. Viewers might further be left with a feeling of intense conflict, since nostalgia here implies nostalgia for the apartheid-era city and all it stood for. These depictions are indeed problematic on many different levels, and display elements of redundant stereotypes or binaries that may linger in depictions of the city and popular discourse around it. As such, they may reveal thinking that is questionable, contested, or reductive, implying racist, classist, sexist and even anthropocentric biases that should be brought to the surface and critiqued.

A Rosetta Stone: Nostalgic Dystopia

Considering District 9 in the larger context of comparable portrayals of Johannesburg, I am concerned with the visual idiom of nostalgic dystopia, which I track across key representations from the late 2000s. Like a Rosetta stone, District 9 serves as the key to Johannesburg as nostalgic dystopia, enabling me to unlock other instances of the idiom. One might also say District 9 is the keystone which holds the idiom together, even if this was not the intention behind the making of the film.

‘Idiom’ is a term widely used by scholars from fields such as visual culture studies, art history and aesthetics, albeit in different ways.⁸ The particular term “visual idiom”, which I employ here, has been used in relation to film by Woei Lien Chong (1995: 81), discussing the visual vocabulary or “visual idiom” of the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. It is also sometimes used in relation to the visual arts. Writing about aesthetics and art, Paul Crowther (2009) employs the term in relation to the different artistic disciplines, seeing, for example, both sculpture and painting as idioms within visual art. Earlier writing by Joshua Kind (1964: 38–55), on the other hand, uses the term to identify a “Chicago visual idiom” in the artistic practices of artists in Chicago in the 1950s. In this context, it refers to the characteristics of works by a group of artists of a particular period and place, akin to how a school would be understood (such as the Hudson River School).

Visual culture scholar Moshe Barasch (1997: 28) provides one of the few more detailed explications of the term “visual idiom”, discussing it as a concise visual representation, a “complex configuration” or a piece of “congealed syntax”,⁹ which is only retrospectively identifiable as an idiom. He points out that, as a combination of visual features that “congeal” into a recurrent form like a phrase, a visual idiom is not identifiable at the outset. Rather, it can be reconstructed when looking back on histories of particular representations, extracting their characteristics from the bedrock of representational history, so to speak. Visual idioms in Barasch’s view are not as intentional as the use of iconographic symbols. More often, they rely on a seemingly inconsistent use of visual motifs or elements, which only cohere in retrospect (1997: 35). Further, a visual idiom is often used in a manner that makes it visually distinguishable in style from its context. In other words, it may be a historical quotation or reference, which may be anachronistic to some degree, standing out from contemporary styles of representation.

While scholars afford no consensus on the term, various aspects of these reflections are helpful. In general, I use the term idiom to investigate and analyse a particular visual vocabulary (in the sense Barasch uses it) in the depiction of Johannesburg in District 9 and more broadly during the period in question.¹⁰ The new idiom does not seem to have been intentionally shaped by Blomkamp or any of the other practitioners under discussion here; it must rather be seen as part of an emerging view of Johannesburg that began to evolve after the first democratic elections of 1994. It has become visible in depictions of the Johannesburg landscape over time, in the same way that a spoken idiom evolves spontaneously through the use of certain words and phrases. This idiom then stands on its own as an example of “congealed syntax” (Barasch 1997: 28) and I trace its appearance as a recurring visual vocabulary that characterises District 9 and is used by various practitioners over the timeframe I am discussing – the post-apartheid era, with a focus on the later years of the first decade of the 2000s.

What further interests me in the use of the term idiom is the cultural quality of idioms; that is, how they could refer to visual vocabularies that are particular to a moment and a place (Pinnavaia 2018: 6). In the context of linguistics, Laura Pinnavaia (2018: 7) explains that idioms reside within the minds of the speakers of a language, and that they survive in “lexicographical repositories”. This aspect of an idiom as a shared vocabulary, or in this case as a visual phrase or expressive shorthand, is what draws me to this particular term. This visual cultural understanding of place – in this case, Johannesburg – exists in the minds of the viewers of these images, a notion that is well framed by yet another term that describes cultural understandings of place, namely Rob Shields’ (1991: 1–27) “place-image”.¹¹

Place-images capture how places come to be known through the everyday practices of the people who frequent them, cementing them into shape through ritualistic use. They may not always relate logically to how space is designed and intended to function in urban contexts, or to how its appearance in representations conveys its character. Instead, place-images are often related to (fallacious) stereotypes – the socially maintained reputations of places – and as such are constructed through the collective meanings with which places are associated, regardless of their character in reality (Shields 1991). In his book on marginal places, Shields develops a threefold dialectic that explains how place-images come into being: spatial practices, discursive representations of space, and spaces of representation (or the social imaginary). Lived experiences of places, their social reputations and how they are represented in popular discourse interact with and inform each other to construct place-images.¹²

Furthermore, place-images may combine to form “place-myths” (Shields 1991: 61), which become apparent and coherent only when they appear in everyday discourse. Such myths abound in the case of Johannesburg, and predate District 9’s influential depiction. Apart from its colloquial nicknames, “Joburg” and “Jozi”, it has variously been regarded in vernacular designations as Egoli or “place of gold” in Nguni languages (Wamba 2003: 11, Kruger 2006), Jozi Maboneng or “the city of lights” (Dlamini 2009: 129), “gangster’s paradise” (Parker 2012), a “township metropolis” (Nuttall & Mbembe 2004: 197), and as a mining town (Chipkin 1993).¹³ It has been described as “ugly” (Matshikiza 2004: 481), “uncultured” (Rogerson 2004: 16), “edgy” (Kruger 2006), and “anxious” (Falkof & Van Staden 2020). Nostalgic dystopia – as portrayed in District 9 – is perhaps its latest guise.

A Sublime Topography

One may wonder why Blomkamp and so many practitioners chose to depict contemporary Johannesburg so negatively. Does it document the state of the city objectively, or merely glamorise decay and poverty in creating “ruin porn” or “poverty porn”? Or are there other reasons that this is an effective visual language to describe Johannesburg? The term ruin porn is widely thought to have been coined by Detroit-based photographer James D. Griffioen in the 2000s (Lyons 2018: 4–5).¹⁴ The term could also evoke the related concepts of “war porn” or “disaster porn”, as well as “slum tourism” and “dark tourism” (Whitehouse 2018: 11). All these terms have negative connotations, implying a gratuitous consumption of images of the suffering of others.

Representing nostalgic dystopia so axiomatically, District 9 portrays and exaggerates the dystopian aspects of the city of Johannesburg. The film has also been analysed for its nostalgic portrayal of Johannesburg and the apartheid past, highlighting that depictions like this reveal the nostalgia prevalent in societies that are dealing with national trauma, such as formerly colonised countries and indeed post-apartheid South Africa (Walder 2014). When District 9 was released, Dennis Walder (2014: 153) argues, it immediately evoked the apartheid past for both local and international audiences; thus, even at an allegorical level, it is fundamentally nostalgic (albeit in an ironic sense). The nostalgia evident in District 9 is not unique: I would argue that, like a dystopian quality, nostalgia is also characteristic of an entire stratum of post-apartheid representation, established through particular formal features in these depictions. Nostalgia is also prominent in South African popular and academic discourse, especially in relation to the post-apartheid period.¹⁵ In the international context, nostalgia studies has become an interdisciplinary field of great interest to contemporary film and media scholars, as well as art historians and those interested in cultural studies. It is worth noting that the nostalgia I identify in District 9 resonates with this larger field. Particularly relevant here is the notion of analogue nostalgia.¹⁶

The ubiquitous evocation of the past evident in the idiom of District 9 may be described in general as ironic, since neither Blomkamp, nor the other practitioners under discussion, could reasonably yearn for the overwhelmingly oppressive apartheid regime or colonial past of the country. Nostalgia is very particular in the idiom and has to be approached accordingly to grasp the nuances inherent in the contradictory qualities of this vocabulary.¹⁷ Dystopia is likewise a term that needs qualification here: it is by no means only an imaginary place in District 9, but is rather based on the actual city as dystopia, which was already prevalent in both popular and academic discourse before District 9 was made.

In order to further probe why portrayals such as District 9 are so compelling, I am driven to consider the contradictory dynamic evident in the idiom – which has both dystopian and nostalgic elements. This fundamental tension within the idiom holds the promise that there may be more at work within these depictions than visual pleasure and titillation, moving its significance beyond notions of ruin porn or poverty porn. From the outset, therefore, I am interested in asking what its significance may be, and whether it may in fact harbour even the smallest glimmer of critical potential.

The contradictory dynamic or tension of nostalgia and dystopia is reminiscent of the tensions at work in the sublime as an aesthetic category, where viewers of sublime forces of nature are simultaneously attracted and repulsed, as described by Jennifer Peeples (2011), for example, writing on the toxic sublime. Although not exclusively, the sublime is often associated with representations of landscape, and indeed Johannesburg as nostalgic dystopia seems to be such a landscape. It may seem unorthodox to regard a city as a landscape. Cities do have landscape elements and qualities embedded in their topography, however, and they may be regarded as artificial landscapes of a sort. After all, Johannesburg has the unofficial claim to being the largest artificial forest in South Africa.¹⁸

Urban legends aside, the separation between categories of rural (most often designated as landscape) and urban seems tenuous at best in contemporary cities. In addition, contemporary urbanisation is marked by peri-urban space – quasi-rural in character, while at the same time including post-industrial sites (Qviström 2012: 427–437). This is certainly the case in Johannesburg, as I expound later in considering the landscape of the city from the point of view of industry and urban planning. The sublime as an aesthetic category associated with landscape representation has more recently been applied to industrial sites, and provides a fitting lens through which to view these aspects of District 9 and the idiom. In short then, I chisel away at District 9’s portrayal of Johannesburg by framing it within the landscape tradition and the aesthetic category of the sublime.¹⁹

The sublime as a category that is rooted in philosophical aesthetics has been formulated to interpret many different kinds of ‘difficult’ landscapes. These include landscapes that are not beautiful, but are overwhelming and awe-inspiring, as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant argue; those that are artificial or man-made; and even those shaped by industry that are now post-industrial ruins of some sort.²⁰ What these very different landscapes so clearly share is the embedded potential to challenge the viewer’s interpretation of the landscape. In other words, I assume from the outset that District 9’s idiom of nostalgic dystopia has the potential, however unlikely, to challenge or transform how the city is regarded in the popular imagination. I investigate these dynamics embedded in the idiom through the particular aspects of transformation and subversion.²¹ Both of these concepts may be understood in terms of a “freedom to” enact change within or upon a space, or in terms of how it is regarded, as Loretta Lees (2004: 23) frames it in her book The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possibilities. From such a perspective one might also say the idiom has critical potential. The notion of critical potential is also grounded in the category of the sublime, and how contradictory effects evoked in beholding difficult landscapes may prompt the viewer to question entrenched notions of place.

Excavating District 9

In the coming chapters, I analyse District 9 with a particular focus: its portrayal of Johannesburg. In looking back at the recent history of the city, I excavate the artefacts that have shaped its visual identity – its landmarks, its topography, but also the analogue media that have given it its nostalgic dystopian image. To better understand District 9’s Johannesburg I draw on the work of a range of filmmakers and practitioners, studying the features of nostalgic dystopia as it appears across these instances. In addition, I occasionally refer to historical material that predates the 1994 elections, such as artworks or popular visual texts, to provide contextualisation and to infer characteristics of the idiom at work. There may of course also be instances where practitioners use a comparable set of formal features and techniques²² that fall outside the period I have circumscribed, as the idiom is not an absolute entity, but rather an organic reflection of the use of a repetitive visual vocabulary.

As will become evident, beyond District 9 nostalgic dystopia appears mainly in photography and moving-image media, such as film, television, music videos and commercials (which I refer to collectively as popular media). It is rarely evident in paintings or in illustrations of Johannesburg, for example. I surmise that this is because nostalgic dystopia itself has a particular relationship to the act of documenting the city. In other words, part of the visual vocabulary relies on the use of a camera, often evoking analogue cameras.

The period between 2008 and 2010, when District 9 was released, was particularly significant in the idiom’s life, since a lot of material pertinent to it and its context was produced then. This may relate to political events in the country at the time. The year 2008 saw widespread xenophobic violence break out in townships and Johannesburg’s inner city,²³ many political scandals and allegations of pervasive corruption, protests over service delivery, and growing fears around crime (Kapstein 2014: 157). In 2009 Jacob Zuma was elected president of the country, amid outrage over his indiscretions, which included charges of corruption and rape.²⁴ Concurrently, 2010 was the year that South Africa hosted the Football World Cup to much acclaim.²⁵ Both the positive and negative events of the time garnered considerable popular media attention and fuelled academic discourse.

Along with District 9, I have selected films and photographs which assist me in analysing District 9’s portrayal of Johannesburg as nostalgic dystopia. At various stages of this book, I consider the films Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (Ziman 2008), Berea (Moloi 2013) and The Battle for Johannesburg (Desai 2010) alongside District 9. These films share much of the idiom’s character with District 9 and enable me to further probe and clarify particular aspects of the aesthetics of District 9. Like Blomkamp who was born in the city and lived there until he was eighteen, each of these directors has a relationship with Johannesburg, with Ralph Ziman growing up in the city, Rehad Desai returning to it after growing up in exile during apartheid, and Vincent Moloi growing up in adjacent Soweto.²⁶ Although representing diverse perspectives, these films all reflect on the city in ways that engage the documentary genre.

In addition, I concentrate on several photographers’ work. I first consider those who are nationally and internationally renowned for their portrayal of Johannesburg, including David Goldblatt (1930–2018), who documented the city for many years throughout his life; Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981) and Patrick Waterhouse (b. 1981), who are known particularly for their project documenting Ponte City (an infamous high-rise apartment building in Johannesburg); and Santu Mofokeng (1956–2020), a member of the anti-apartheid collective Afrapix, active in the 1980s and 1990s. Andrew Tshabangu (b. 1966) is another important photographer who has documented parts of the city. I also consider international photographers Jason Larkin (b. 1979) and Eva-Lotta Jansson, who both documented the mining landscapes, and I briefly refer to the work of emerging photographer Ilan Godfrey (b. 1980) in this regard. In addition, there are groups of young amateur photographers publishing their work online, on Instagram and fashion blogs. These collectives (which I sometimes refer to as fashion bloggers, since many of them have blogs) include I See A Different You; Khumbula (which means “remember” in isiZulu); and the Sartists. Of note here too is the photographic documentation of performances by a visual art collective called avant car guard, whose members, although not photographers per se, use photography to capture Johannesburg in their artworks made in 2007 in a way that employs qualities of nostalgic dystopia. This selection is not meant to encapsulate Johannesburg photography of the period in question: one may think of other notable photographers, such as Mark Lewis, Guy Tillim and Gulshan Khan, who all engage with the idiom to some extent. While their work could also lead to productive research, the selection made here enables me to uncover the salient properties of District 9 and the idiom most effectively for my purposes.

In order to get to the foundations of how District 9 constructs Johannesburg, I am largely concerned with rigorous visual-stylistic analysis, focusing on the formal and generic features of the film and the work of the practitioners outlined above.²⁷ While such a concern with formal features and visual stylistics may be disparaged by those who consider it superficial and insensitive to the socio-politics of representation, pioneering scholars such as Lev Manovich (2017: sp) and David Bordwell (2008: 30) bemoan the fact that formal qualities, such as visual style, the visible implications of the use of particular visual technologies, and the shift to digital film and photography have been largely neglected in the field of media studies in the last few decades. Moreover, they reject the negative labelling of so-called formalist concerns in academic discourse, which implies that such a focus is superficial or frivolous. In addition, excellent arguments have been made for the value of studying formal elements in scholarship on visual media, arguing that this need not be as removed from social or political concerns as is often suggested.²⁸

It is the predominant existing focus on District 9’s allegorical and socio-political significance that led me to the conclusion that a visual focus would not only be advantageous, but is sorely needed in District 9’s case. My approach in this is also indebted to David Bordwell’s historical poetics.²⁹ I am inspired by his method to examine representations of Johannesburg not only in terms of how they appear, but also to understand how they are made, what techniques were used, and the (generic) conventions and strategies that informed their making. In delving into the visual-stylistic characteristics of District 9, I also draw on approaches followed in the field of media archaeology, which is inspired by Foucault’s use of the term archaeology. Such approaches see media history as non-linear, and importantly consider contemporary (digital) media by looking at media from the past (Elsaesser 2016: 17–45), apt for studying District 9, because the film is so engaged with media from the 1980s, which it emulates using digital techniques.³⁰

I approach District 9 in two ways: from the perspective of how it portrays Johannesburg, employing media in a particular manner, here with a focus on techniques and media technologies, and also from the perspective of which type of city it portrays in its focus on dystopian locations and landmarks. Here I consider the foregrounded characteristics of the urban landscape itself.

A Map to the Site

This book is divided into three parts, each made up of shorter chapters. Part 1 charts current views on depictions of post-apartheid Johannesburg, to probe the recurring concepts that arise, and to consider their usefulness for better understanding District 9 and Johannesburg. I also draw attention to neglected aspects of District 9 and representations of the city more generally. In Chapter 1, I identify the concepts of dystopia, nostalgia and the sublime in prevailing discourse on District 9, looking to inflect these terms in particular ways that make them unique to their appearance in the film and also in the nostalgic dystopian idiom. Chapter 2 considers the concepts that inform both how Johannesburg is depicted in the film, and which aspects of the landscape are foregrounded. These concepts include analogue nostalgia and the post-industrial sublime, both of which are important in the analyses that follow in subsequent parts of the book.

Part 2 follows with the visual analysis of the film, and the formal features of depictions of the city. The chapters in Part 2 investigate the role of media technologies in shaping the image of the city in the film, broadly addressing the ‘how’ question: how is media used to construct Johannesburg in District 9? This focus on media is concerned with what I call analogue aesthetics, which is at work here. Taking into account the impact of historical media in contemporary contexts, Chapter 3 investigates the role that analogue media has played in how both District 9 and its idiom represent Johannesburg, by looking at the mockumentary qualities of the film and the documentary qualities in other depictions. Chapter 4 considers analogue nostalgia in the work of amateur photographers who represent different perspectives on using this nostalgia to create an image of the city. Chapter 5 considers the aspects of the science fiction genre that dovetail with District 9’s analogue nostalgia, considering the traces of 1980s science-fiction films in its generic construction.

Part 3 addresses the role of sublime landscape conventions in shaping the city’s appearance in depictions. Through visual analysis, I investigate how the features of the city itself, its geography and topography, have shaped its representation. In other words, this is the ‘what’ question: what is represented to give Johannesburg this particular appearance in District 9? Here I am concerned with sublime landscape conventions that appear latent in District 9, as well as many other contemporary depictions. These features appear mainly in the character of the city in decay or ruins, evidencing what I call ruin aesthetics. Chapter 6 is an exposition of the role of mining landscapes in nostalgic dystopian depictions of the city, considering them as difficult post-industrial sublime landscapes that articulate a new relationship between humankind and the environment. Chapter 7 considers urban ruins in the inner city and the townships as possible sites of sublime experiences as well. Here particular buildings and the inner-city suburb of Hillbrow are considered as sites where entropy might point towards a breaking down of oppressive planning regimes. Chapter 8 focuses on urban decay as a register for white anxiety. Here District 9’s protagonist Wikus van de Merwe and the township landscape he finds himself in for much of the film are seen as on the brink of painful and necessary transformation, which marks the collapse of apartheid’s hegemonic whiteness. In conclusion, I revisit District 9’s nostalgic dystopia to consider what may be learned from its portrayal of Johannesburg.