The Other Lives of Ken Gampu or The Photo-Story as Alternative Biography

Abstract

Using an experimental life-writing approach, the seminar reflects on the South African film actor Ken Gampu (1929-2003)’s picture stories, The Kidnappers (1965) and The Way Home (1965) collectively as an alternative biography of his life in the cinema. It shows that regardless of their flaws, Gampu’s picture stories inscribed an alternative ‘biographical script’ for him, that potentially subverted his marginality in the cinema industry of the 1960s. In their centering of Gampu, the picture stories open the space for reflecting upon popular formats as modes of life-writing. A critical consideration of these modes facilitates a reversal of colonial erasure of the colonised’s agency, and hopefully widens the discursive and archival reach of film studies.