Lunch with The Number
An interview with Manuela Gray, director of The Number
What was the appeal in the subject matter? What alerted you to the “Number gangs”?
The Number gangs and their markings are at the intersection of two aspects of my life and work… As an artist, I have long found fascination in the “brutality”, power and fear that their marks engender. I am also a South African who lives in Cape Town, so they are an issue at the heart of my community. As a tattoo artist I wanted to discover, understand and document what I see as a truly authentic voice in the tattoo history that we have in South Africa, an animated voice of a marginalised people.
How did you get access to the prisoners? What hurdles did you face?
Their organisation is extremely secretive, it goes without saying. As a white woman, I am also perhaps as far from their circle of influence as you could get. So yes, access was a real challenge. It was my work as a tattoo artist that gave us common ground and later my outreach work in their communities (I have formed an NGO that helps train and educate ex-prisoners who are tattooing in their communities).
Can you explain why you chose that particular ending? What did you hope the audience would take from it?
There could be no “conclusion” to our film in the traditional sense. What we offered was a glimpse, a moment and a focus on a very particular aspect of The Number. It felt right to give Turner the ending, as enigmatic as it is. He takes us back to his childhood in his poem… to a time before any of this happened in his life. We loved the power and poetry in his voice and the innocence it evoked. It reminded us of William Blake… whose own ink etchings have always haunted my work.
Can you tell us about your shooting style? Why did you use black and white? Were you inspired by other documentaries or filmmakers?
I collaborated with cinematographer Brendan McGinty in The Number and we were both always drawn to a monochromatic palate. The black ink of their tattoo marks was felt by both of us to be immediately evocative of this palate. Where the film does touch on the politics of “colour”, on what it is for these guys to be “Coloured”, seemed also to work better in a film with no colour. Both Brendan and I were drawn to the rich history of black and white stills photography… the rich documenting of history that these images evoked.
Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I think the inevitable abstraction of the short form worked well for us. At its best, a short film might be like a poem… where a feature is more like prose. This can be liberating, embracing the enigmatic, leaving questions unanswered, not having to tidy up each narrative strand. Maybe like an image of Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank or Diane Arbus it allows us to take a snapshot… and then hand it over, allowing the audience to ask a thousand questions and journey towards their own conclusions.
The Number was shown in International Competition.
