He viciously beats his friend, who asks him if he understand the word decency. Nor does he know his real name. Much later he meets some children living in empty sewer pipes, just as he did. A flashback reveals a violent father, and a sick mother — and his name, David.
The DVD offers three endings to the film, and in doing so, Gavin Hood is allowing his audience to ask what do you want to happen to David? Is there hope in the not-so-new South Africa for him? The South African government has an ambitious house-building programme, to bring an end to the squatter camps, but what are the long term solutions for the cities, and for places like QwaQwa?
Can that many people continue to live there? And in what conditions? The film offers a great starting point for looking at projects like this, and considers afresh discussions on gender, justice, development and sustainability. This is an earlier, award-winning short film by Gavin Hood and really captures rural South Africa. The differences in the plots of the two versions 3. Tsotsi hides the baby in the ruins Chapter 4 3.
Tsotsi finds a replacement mother in Miriam Ngidi Chapter 8 3. Interpretations of the major differences 4. The replacement of the apartheid topic 4. The different atmospheres in the two works 4. The missing narrator and its effect on the plausibility and numerous details 4. Apparent commercial reasons for changes in the plot. The novel deals with a young, acrimonious criminal whose life starts to change when he becomes responsible for a baby.
About twenty years later, in , a researcher named Stephen Gray edited the novel for publication and cut about 20 percent from the original manuscript. In , Fugard read the novel for the first time in 20 years and approved its publication.
More than another two decades later, in and , Tsotsi was made into a film, directed by Gavin Hood, which won the Academy Award for the best foreign film in Not just because more than 40 years passed from the original idea until its publication as a film, the original novel and the film version are quite different in many aspects. Although both the novel and the film follow roughly the same structure, the differences offer many enlightening insights.
This paper is going to compare the film version with the original version in the novel in order to analyze and interpret the differences. Some of the major differences revolve around the role of racism, apartheid, politics and social criticism in the two versions, and still others around the different impacts of the two works and the different reasons, purposes and circumstances under which the novel was written and why the film was made.
Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born in near the South African village of Middelburg as a child of a white father of English descent and an Afrikaner mother Afrikaner is a term for a white ethnic group in Africa, mainly descended from northwestern European settlers.
Black people required passes, for example in order to go to work in the cities inhabited by white people. Furthermore, forced removals of black people from their homes and the creation of areas designated for black people only so-called black townships increased. The townships suffered from harsh problems like unemployment, poverty, diseases and crime, while the white authorities hardly did anything to improve the situation.
Some very ruthless criminals, so-called tsotsis the term tsotsi might have derived from the Africanisation of the term zoot-suit, a way of dressing in American gangster films Kaplan in Fugard i , who in many cases robbed, murdered and raped, soon became notorious for their pitiless and extremely violent crimes. In , at the time when the twenty-six-year-old Fugard started to write Tsotsi, he had just moved from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, where he worked as a clerk dealing with violations of passports.
More than most white people in South Africa, Fugard soon became very critical of the apartheid system and its brutality, which he became more and more aware of during his stay in Johannesburg.
Roughly at the same time, Fugard wrote The Blood Knot, his first play that was publicly performed and deals with similar issues as Tsotsi does. Although the novel and the film follow roughly the same structure, there are also many differences. The following subsections of this chapter are going to compare the novel and the film directly and analyze the differences.
In the first part of this chapter some general differences will be pointed out, then, in the second part, the two plots will be compared. Narrators in films usually only exist as voice-overs or short, written remarks in some rare scenes. Of course, the narrator is usually not very necessary in a film because, as a famous adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
For example, when the narrator in the novel describes what a place or a character looks like, the viewer of a film can see that directly. However, the narrator in a novel can provide the reader with important background information, for example about the exact feelings or the thoughts of a character, which a film cannot do so easily. In a film version the viewer has to interpret the acting and the dialogues in order to understand the feelings and thoughts. Although a viewer of a film version does not need as much imagination as a reader of a novel and the picture in the heads of different readers might also differ , he is less well-informed, for example about the exact reasons why a character acts in a certain way.
This is especially true for omniscient third-person-narrators like in the case of Tsotsi. For this reason the plot and the dialogues must sometimes be changed in the adaptation process in order to make the actions of characters appear plausible. When a novel is adapted into a film, the writer of the screenplay and the director have many possibilities to change the atmosphere.
For example they can add happy or sad music, they can add beautiful or unsightly shots of the scenery or they can use different camera angles and effects. Tsotsi shoots her and steals her car. Some time passes before he realizes he has a passenger: a baby boy. Tsotsi is a killer, but he cannot kill a baby. He takes it home with him, to a room built on top of somebody else's shack. It might be wise for him to leave the baby at a church or an orphanage, but that doesn't occur to him.
He has the baby, so the baby is his. We can guess that he will not abandon the boy because he has been abandoned himself, and projects upon the infant all of his own self-pity. We realize the violence in the film has slowed. Tsotsi himself is slow to realize he has a new agenda. He uses newspapers as diapers, feeds the baby condensed milk, carries it around with him in a shopping bag. Finally, in desperation, at gunpoint, he forces a nursing mother Terry Pheto to feed the child.
She lives in a nearby shack, a clean and cheerful one. As he watches her do what he demands, something shifts inside of him, and all of his hurt and grief are awakened. Tsotsi doesn't become a nice man. He simply stops being active as an evil one, and finds his time occupied with the child. Babies are single-minded. They want to be fed, they want to be changed, they want to be held, they want to be made much of, and they think it is their birthright.
Who is Tsotsi to argue? What a simple and yet profound story this is. It does not sentimentalize poverty or make Tsotsi more colorful or sympathetic than he should be; if he deserves praise, it is not for becoming a good man but for allowing himself to be distracted from the job of being a bad man. The nursing mother, named Miriam, is played by Terry Pheto as a quiet counterpoint to his rage. She lives in Soweto and has seen his kind before. She senses something in him, some pool of feeling he must ignore if he is to remain Tsotsi.
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