How does one write the history of cinema in a fractured South Africa? In approaching this task, in cooperation with Anna-Marie, I (Keyan) will discuss my own encounter with South African film scholars and film practitioners, in the broader multi-disciplinary context that draws on historical materialism. Our chapter examines various understandings of modernity and the role that cinema was seen to be playing in relation to different constituencies that contested each other during the twentieth century. Our lens is the post-1990 political transition that prefaced new challenges on how to examine South African cinema historically.South African cinema history has been contested since the first newsreels documented the second South African War between 1899-1902. The opposing ideological currents could be felt as the country transited from disparate Boer 1 republics and British colonies after the War, through the formation of Union in 1910, apartheid in 1948 and the post-apartheid era after 1990. Our focus is on periodised approaches to South African cinema studies within these respective periods.Until the publication of The Cinema of Apartheid (Tomaselli 1988), Thelma Gutsche's (1972) The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South 1 Boer meaning 'farmer', a culturally specific term for descendants of the Voortrekkers who migrated to the north during the Great Trek. See Pretorius (2002). 5 NAM intellectuals produced original scholarship that characterised modernity's qualitative essence within the South African context.