Co-Producing Futures: The Making of “Hollywood’s” Apocalyptic Aesthetic in South Africa

Abstract

This dissertation explores the presence of “global Hollywood” in South Africa and the social worlds of the Western Cape’s film-service economy; a significant segment of South Africa’s film industry that facilitates the making of movies and TV-series for production companies in the US and UK. With the opening of the Cape Town Film Studios in 2010, a dramatic influx of big-budget film projects from overseas ushered South Africa prominently into an intensifying transnational film-production economy. South Africa’s film-service boom has made visible a trend in big-budget science fiction and fantasy film and TV-series that use southern African locations to “double” as futuristic Euro-American settings, most often apocalyptic or dystopian in tone. This dissertation gives ethnographic attention to the Cape Town-based labor (the set-builders, prop-masters, location-managers, special/visual effects artists, etc.) responsible for building futuristic worlds for these films. By employing a critical and material lens of extraction, it argues that Cape Town’s film-service industry operates as a visual extraction economy, through which—in a dramatic upending of modernization theories—the Global North looks to South Africa to imagine its own anxious future. Contrasting visions of the future are in fact co-produced through this industry. On one hand, global audiences playfully confront collective anxieties about climate change, scarcity, and the spectacular fallout of capitalism; on the other, Cape Town-based filmworkers who build these worlds for digital capture envision a future of industrial growth by which democracy’s promises might be realized.