Tsotsi (South Africa/UK 2005) – A narrativeanalysis

Posted by venicelion on 31 October 2008

Butcher and Aap with Fela – the wounded Boston is in the background

We chose this film as a case study based on five related points, which we explore below:

  • a narrative produced outside Hollywood;
  • a simple narrative structure, but powerfully affective;
  • a consistent approach to the presentation of a specific environment, involving stylised cinematography and music;
  • questions about the narrative resolution;
  • a series of questions about genre and categorisation.

Narratives outside Hollywood
Everyone is familiar with the conventions of the Hollywood film narrative. This isn’t a reason not to study Hollywood – or to take the conventions for granted. Hollywood, as befits the dominant institution in cinema across the world, is highly dynamic and constantly evolving in terms of film narrative. However, it is often difficult to analyse the films you know best. It helps to have some distance from the films we study and one way to do this is to study some films that are ‘not Hollywood’ in order to make comparisons. Often by comparing and contrasting similar films from different systems we notice much more about them than if we looked at only one system.

Tsotsi is in every way a South African story – even though the film is technically a South Africa/UK production, because some of the production finance is from the UK. (Tsotsiwas made on a very small budget of less than US $3 million. Currently the worldwide box office for the film is $9.9 million.)In many ways, Tsotsi is a new kind of South African film, because it is a mainstream film that has been seen around the world (it won the Oscar for ‘Best Foreign Language Picture’ at the 2006 Academy Awards). Previously, important South African stories have been made in the country by British and American producers using British and American stars, often producing films which, apart from the setting, look much like other Hollywood films.

South Africa: Background
The Republic of South Africa is unique on the continent of Africa in terms of its history, its population and its culture. The original inhabitants were largely driven out by the arrival of various groups of people speaking a variety of languages often referred to generically as ‘Bantu’ around the 5th century AD. It’s quite important to realise that southern Africa has always been a region with a diverse population – black South Africans today identify themselves as belonging to one of several ethnic and language groups, such as the Zulu of North Eastern South Africa around Johannesburg and the Xhosa in the South West around Cape Town.

From the 15th century onwards, Southern Africa became the site of colonial and later imperial struggle to exploit the rich agricultural and mineral wealth of the region. The British eventually replaced the Dutch as colonial masters, but not in terms of settlement. When South Africa became an independent nation it was the Afrikaans speaking descendants of the Dutch settlers who were the political majority in the white community and through the creation of apartheid or ‘separate development’, dominated the majority black population. But because of the history of colonial exploitation, South Africa’s population is even more diverse than this history might suggest. The Dutch and the British brought first slaves and then indentured labour (a form of economic slavery) to South Africa from what is now Indonesia and India. In the Cape Region, the intermarriage of slaves and European settlers created a community of what became known in South Africa as ‘Cape Coloureds’. When apartheid ended in 1994 and South Africa held its first multi-racial elections, it became in the new President Mandela’s words, “A Rainbow Nation”. Today South Africa has a population of 47 million. The various black communities make up around 79% of the population, followed by the white community, the Cape Coloureds and the Indian/Asian communities.

Economy and the townships
South Africa is the richest country in Africa, but even after ten years of democracy, it still has massive inequalities in wealth distribution. In blunt terms, there is a rich minority with living standards comparable with North America and Western Europe and a large majority existing on very low incomes. This division is reflected in visible terms by the peculiar building arrangements in South African cities. One of the legacies of apartheid is the concept of the township/shanty town/squatter camp. In the apartheid era, the black population was ‘kept separate’ from the white cities, so that makeshift settlements grew up to house black workers outside the major cities. These became known as townships. The situation was made worse by another apartheid policy which forced black Africans to live in what were called ‘homelands‘ by the white government and ‘bantustans‘ by their opponents. Black South Africans could only own land in the homelands. Since this was the poorest agricultural land, many were forced to live in temporary buildings on the edge of the city where there might be work. The apartheid government also shipped in migrant workers from other countries to work in mining and other industries. These workers too would be housed outside the cities. The result of these policies was the piecemeal development of collections of townships. The most famous of these is Soweto (South Western Township), a huge sprawl of many smaller townships on the edge of Johannesburg which has grown over a period a hundred years and which may now be bigger than the rest of the city with more than 1 million residents. This is the setting for Tsotsi. The film’s three locations are representative of the three areas in Johannesburg – the city centre, the ‘squatter camp’ (one of the least developed township areas) and the suburbs (once white enclaves, now also home to the black middle class). (see the history of Soweto’s development as a home for Johannesburg’s black population.)

Township life
Because of the history outlined above, township culture has developed in distinctive ways. In the first half of the 20th century, men outnumbered women 3:1 since they were primarily workers who had left families behind and were accommodated in hostels. There were few civic amenities in the townships and social life was based on the beer hall or shabeen. Men outnumbering women generally means organised prostitution and high crime levels. But the culture also developed positive aspects, including a vibrant musical culture, combining traditional music with imported black music styles from America. Initially the influences were jazz but now it is likely to be hip-hop. Tsotsi uses the current township music culture, known as kwaito throughout the film. One of the main characters is played by Zola, a leading kwaito performer.

Besides crime and music, the main way in which township residents have become famous is via sport, especially football, and the political struggle against apartheid. Not surprisingly, several South African novels, plays and films have focused on township life as the basis for their stories. Outside South Africa, the best known of these have been written by white South African liberals, sympathetic to the residents. The two best known writers in the UK are Alan Paton and Athol Fugard.

Alan Paton (1903-1988) was a Christian who became a teacher and then principal of a Reform School where he instigated progressive policies. In 1953 he founded the South African Liberal Party – a multi-racial party that was later banned by the apartheid regime. In 1948 he wrote his most famous novel, Cry The Beloved Country. This was made into a British/South African film in 1951, starring the African-American actors Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier and then a South African/US film in 1995 starring James Earl Jones.

Athol Fugard (b 1932) is a South African playwright who in the 1970s wrote several plays attacking the injustices of apartheid. One of these, Boesman and Lena, was adapted as a film in 1974 and seen around the world. Another, SizweBansi Is Dead (1972) was performed in several countries. Tsotsi is based on a novel that Athol Fugard wrote in 1970, which has been updated to relate to a post-apartheid South Africa.

The South African film industry
Tsotsi is a relatively unusual film. Putting aside the small UK involvement, it is a South African film, made by South African talent, for both the home market and for export. It is one of a small number of such films released in the last couple of years, marking a change in South African filmmaking.

In the past, filmmaking in South Africa has been split into three separate activities. Because of its range of locations and good infrastructure, South Africa has been used by many Hollywood and ‘international films’ to stand in for other parts of Africa. In such cases, directors and stars have been flown into the country and this has happened even when the story has been distinctively South African. The film Red Dust (UK/South Africa 2004) dealt with the aftermath of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, yet the two stars, ChiwetelEjiofor and Hilary Swank were brought in from the UK and the US.

There has always been a small-scale white South African film industry, often making local comedies and not usually exported. There has also in the past been an ‘exploitation’ film industry making films cheaply to be shown in the townships. This practice was supported with some funding by the apartheid government for a separate black cinema culture. The legacy of apartheid in terms of cinema has been a weak local industry, almost totally subservient to Hollywood. Despite having more cinemas and more admissions than anywhere else in Africa, the South African industry had little real success at home until Tsotsi. Most South African audiences have traditionally preferred Hollywood films.

Narrative Structure
There are various ways of thinking about Tsotsi as a film narrative. In structural terms it is quite straightforward. Writer-director Gavin Hood even says on the DVD that it is a ‘simple’ narrative. Apart from the flashback memories of his childhood that Tsotsi himself experiences early in the film, the narrative structure is linear in terms of time. Everything takes place over four nights. There are brief sequences dealing with the investigation of the abduction of the baby by the police and Boston’s recuperation at the shabeen, but most of the time Tsotsi himself drives the narrative forward.

There are three ‘environments’ in the film and the story moves between the three. They are:

  • the township
  • the city centre (or rather the railway station and its immediate environs)
  • the suburb

Questions of colour, cinematography etc.
The most striking feature of the film is what we might call the ‘colour palette’ with which the cinematographer is working. Most scenes take place either at night or in what appears to be a rosy glow of early morning or early evening. Few scenes are shot in the bright sunlight of mid-day. Shooting at night is always difficult and creating a coherent look for the film across the different environments and natural lighting conditions was the main aim. Tsotsi was featured in an article for American Cinematographer magazine (see Bosley 2006) so we have some good ideas about what was intended and how the effects were achieved.

An expressionist image using lighting to emphasise the state of Tostsi with the baby in his shack.

Director Gavin Hood believed that Tsotsi was essentially an ‘internal story’. Although there are several action sequences, the real story is inside Tsotsi’s head. Ideally we should study Tsotsi and understand how he is beginning to change over the course of the story.

Hood and his cinematographer Lance Gewer began with one clear idea. They would not use the hand-held style which had been so successful in the worldwide hit that was City of God (Brazil 2002). In that film, hand-held camerawork and fast cutting was an important element in creating an action-packed gangster film. But it wouldn’t be appropriate for Tsotsi. Instead, Hood and Gewer opted for a fairly static camera, carefully framed and lit scenes in which a relatively small and slow zoom in to Tsotsi’s face could communicate agreat deal about what is going on in his head.

Narrative resolution
Tsotsi is a film that ends hanging in mid air. In the version that was shown in cinemas, Tsotsi is holding is arms raised with the three policemen all aiming their guns at him. What happens next? Does Tsotsi surrender? Is his surrender accepted? Or do the police shoot him? It is a tense situation in which anything might happen. The filmmakers chose this open ending partly because they liked the possibility of audiences leaving the cinema discussing what the ending meant and what should happen to Tsotsi and partly because they had received negative reactions to the other two possibilities that a closed ending would have offered.

All three potential endings are shown and discussed by the director on the DVD. Having the police shoot and kill Tsotsi (after he puts his hand in his pocket to bring out the bottle of milk) was thought by some audiences to be too predictable (which might reflect on the status of the police in South Africa), but by others to be emotionally devastating. If an audience invests heavily in a character, especially one who attempts to redeem himself, then the death of the character comes as a blow.

The second alternative ending is that the police shoot, but Tsotsi is only wounded. The police seem surprised/shocked that someone has actually fired and in that split second, Tsotsi regains his composure and runs for the wall at the side of the road. He vaults over the wall and heads off across the field, heading for the township. This is the sentimental, romantic ending with the implication that he finds Miriam. But, like the ending in which Tsotsi is killed, the filmmakers felt that this was too ‘pat’ – it meant that there would be no discussion of what should or shouldn’t happen.

Genre
Whatever sense audiences make of Tsotsi, it will to some extent depend on how they approach the film. This refers to the concept of categorising or classifying films and, based upon the choice of category, developing expectations of what might happen and how it might be presented. Tsotsi is interesting because it doesn’t clearly suggest any single category. Here are some ideas about how audiences might categorise it or select its genre.

1. foreign language flm
Tsotsi includes dialogue in Zulu and Xhosa as well as Afrikaans and English (in fact most of the film is conducted in a form of criminal slang). Most of the film is subtitled. In the UK, many audiences claim not to enjoy subtitled films. This may be because they find reading subtitles tiring or because they feel they are missing something else while they are reading. But it is also possible that they may be reacting against what they see as the ‘otherness’ – the strangeness – of non-English language cinema. Partly, they may also associate any subtitled film with the notion of ‘art cinema’ – i.e. that the film will be in some way ‘difficult’ or ‘pretentious’ and may offer a character study more than a good story/plot and action. In many cases they will be justified in this view. Tsotsi is in some ways a character study more than a plot-driven action entertainment feature. However, it certainly isn’t a difficult film.

2. drama
One of the important points about genre as a concept is that the term is used differently by the film industry, audiences, critics and scholars and that each of these groups will themselves use different terms to describe a particular category. On the whole, the film industry uses very broad terms such as comedy, thriller or drama. In fact these are just about the only terms that the industry is happy to use (apart from ‘horror’, which is usually reserved for use with younger audiences). The industry itself is wary of putting any potential audience off by referring to popular genre categories such as science fiction, romance etc. They fear that such terms will deter some audiences. Science fiction films sometimes become ‘futuristic dramas’ and romances become ‘romantic dramas’. What does ‘drama’ mean in these circumstances? Perhaps it simply serves to distinguish one group of films from another group – comedies. Dramas are in some way ‘serious’. Although, of course, you will come across ‘comedy-dramas’.Tsotsi is described as a ‘riveting drama’ on the DVD cover, but there are no other pointers to its generic status.

3. adaptation
Tsotsi is certainly ‘serious’ in terms of its overall tone and the importance of the social issues it represents. For some audiences, that seriousness will be a kind of status indicator and it may well be associated with the knowledge that the film is based on a novel by a well known playwright. Both literature and theatre have higher cultural status than cinema amongst certain groups in society and a film which has literary roots automatically draws on this status. For other audiences this link might be a disadvantage if they see the film as being ‘stifled’ or restricted by its origins. If we can think about the original author’s intentions without getting bothered about cultural status it could help us in analysing the film’s narrative to think about how the story is constructed in almost theatrical terms.