It’s a work of nonfiction, but there’s an element of the fantastical to “Drummies”—less Ken Burns and more docu-dream.
In 2018, the South African director Jessie Zinn saw something she knew to tuck away in her mental archive, for later. It was a Photo Booth, on newyorker.com, featuring images by the photographer Alice Mann. The pictures were of young female drum majorettes in Cape Town who are bewitched, bedazzled, and bedecked—in glossy, shimmery jewel tones and towering, fuzzy busbies and the type of boots Nancy Sinatra could walk miles in. Some of the girls are carrying flags, others maces. But all look as if they can—and do—rule the school. “They were emanating such a sense of power and strength, and just this incredible sense of personal ownership over the image,” Zinn told me. She had known of drum majorettes—or drummies, as they’re known—growing up, but she hadn’t really understood them until this moment. For Zinn, as an artist and filmmaker, the mission was always twofold: portray South African women and girls in a truthful yet empowering way. And Mann’s series was this goal made incarnate.
But that was 2018.
After the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted Zinn’s time at Stanford’s film school, sending her back home and allowing her to finish her education remotely, “later” finally arrived. She plucked the memory of Mann out of the mental archive and created the documentary short “Drummies.” The film follows a group of tween and teen drum majorettes from Groote Schuur Primary School, in Cape Town, as they use their sport to navigate different facets of their lives. It’s a work of nonfiction, but there’s an element of the fantastical to “Drummies”—less Ken Burns and more docu-dream. It opts for voice-overs in select instances in lieu of talking-head interviews, vibrant cinematography in lieu of rawness. The camera shots are meditative, as if Zinn were a portraitist trying to capture the still being of these girls.
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Zinn had recorded sit-down interviews with her subjects. Yet, seeing the footage of two of the drummies lying atop a ruffled pink bed, cell phones in hand, having a conversation with each other—a scene that is about forty seconds of the short’s final cut—she came to a realization that would ultimately mold the entirety of what “Drummies” would become. “These girls are—in their mind, in this film, in this moment—the main characters in their own film,” Zinn recalled thinking. “It’s like this coming-of-age teen film.” To make a documentary any more aesthetically clinical than necessary, she concluded, would be a disservice to how the drummies envisioned themselves within their time and place: as stars.
Despite the film’s feeling of reverie, there is no suspension of reality, no divorcing the beauty of girlhood from the tragedies of being a girl. “Drummies” is shaded with loss, generational trauma, and just the desire to get out, leave home, never look back. There’s also the irony inherent to being a teen: of being the protagonist of your own world while also being unsure of how to take up space in this world. The girls possess an inevitable self-consciousness when standing in front of a ring light and making a TikTok, trying to appease the social-media gods. This contrasts with their almost total lack of awareness while the camera is rolling, when they are unabashed, brassy, fully themselves.
And then, of course, there’s COVID.
“A lot of them were in their final year of primary school, where they were meant to be doing all these events, aside from being a drummie,” Zinn said. “They were really upset a lot of the time, and really frustrated.” These unprecedented limitations are a fixture throughout the short. The girls talk about the absolute idiocy of having a Zoom “assembly,” or how hard it is to make new friends under COVID restrictions. At one point, South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, interrupts the otherwise all-female universe of “Drummies” to announce that the country has surpassed a million COVID cases. “Infections are on the rise in part because, as humans, we are social beings,” he says.
“In our country at this moment, a teen-age girl like me is actually living in fear right now,” a drummie later remarks. “But when I have that mace in my hand no one can hurt us. No one can touch us.” In the final scene—a series of shots most resembling Mann’s photography—the drummies, costumed in hot pink, silver, and black, toss their maces in choreographed unison. Some are smiling; others are defiant. All are firm in their power, in their truth. They can’t be touched, or, rather, they won’t be—not on their turf, and not in their world.
Sourse: newyorker.com
