ABSTRACT

In the South African Sesotho-language Western Five Fingers for Marseilles (2018), Tau flees his hometown of Marseilles in the aftermath of a violent incident. Returning after apartheid ended, Tau finds his hometown in ruins at the hands of some of the very individuals—his childhood friends—who were supposed to protect it. Tau seeks to save Marseilles from those who corrupt it and seeks redemption for himself and the town in the process. In this article, we demonstrate that the film borrows genre conventions and iconography from the Western to tell its story of redemption, and in telling this story the film invokes a general disillusionment with contemporary South African politics. Tau’s quest for redemption is as much political as his self-forgiveness is personal, and this redemption is made possible through an atonement for the past to halt the intergenerational violence that characterises South Africa and Marseilles in the post-apartheid era. Marseilles can only be a life-sustaining, generative community in the absence of the violence of colonialism and corruption.

摘要

在马赛的南非塞索托语西五指（2018 年），Tau 在暴力事件后逃离家乡马赛。种族隔离结束后返回，Tau 发现他的家乡在一些本应保护它的人——他儿时的朋友——手中变成了一片废墟。Tau 试图从破坏马赛的人手中拯救马赛，并在此过程中为自己和城镇寻求救赎。在这篇文章中，我们展示了这部电影借用了西方的流派惯例和图像来讲述它的救赎故事，并且在讲述这个故事时，这部电影引发了对当代南非政治的普遍幻灭。Tau 对救赎的追求与他的自我宽恕是个人的一样具有政治意义，这种救赎是通过对过去的赎罪来阻止后种族隔离时代南非和马赛的代际暴力行为而实现的。在没有殖民主义和腐败的暴力的情况下，马赛只能是一个维持生命的、有活力的社区。