Living in a permanent wake: The cinematic and affective prisms of mourning in Zulu Love Letter

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how Zulu Love Letter makes grief visible and visceral. I focus on how the visual and aural shape of the film might be said to follow a structure of mourning. I argue that the film, based on its visual grammar of loss and grief, can be said to belong to the genre of ‘mourning films’. Therefore, the kinesic, haptic and even proxemic moments in the film can be said to have strong mournful undercurrents. In all, I argue that Zulu Love Letter does not only lay out a cinematic cartography of mourning; it also provides inklings on how the question of mourning is equally a question of memory and haunting in post-apartheid South Africa.