Charles Wetzel

ENG 344 SEC 1

Dr. Dreher

1 October 2010

Marriage of Mediums in A Dry White Season

A Dry White Season (1989) illustrates the violence and systematic racism that gripped South

Africa during Apartheid. Through the medium of film, director Euzhan Palcy attempts to simultaneously

entertain and inform the audience. The characters in the narrative exist apart from real people who lived

during the historical period represented on screen; however fictional they may be, they inform audiences

outside of the historical context with the necessary violence and turmoil to appreciate the gravity of real-

world injustice. Through the medium of film, the audience gradually gets more informed and begins to

sympathize with characters in the narrative. This sympathy may carry-over in some capacity to real-world

sympathy, if-and-only-if the film’s informative value is re-affirmed in the minds of audiences conditioned

to entertainment. Palcy introduces the newspaper medium into her film to draw a connection between the

informative capacities of newspapers and film.

The entertainment versus informative conflict is a characteristic of both films and news media.

Characters who well informed know of the Special Branch’s abuse. In the film, the character of Mr. Ben

du Toit (Donald Sutherland) has no first-hand knowledge of the atrocities. His white skin has earned him

privilege in the social dynamism, buffering him from personal experience of abuse. He relies on mediums

to inform him, including conversation with local Africans and the newspaper. Like the main character, the

film audiences not present for the historical events that inspired A Dry White Season must rely on a

medium, a film, to access knowledge. The newspaper and first-hand accounts win over Ben, who then
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pursues the ultimate goal of spreading awareness of Special Branch abuse through newspapers. Palcy

continually highlights the importance of an informed public and its relationship to media.

About 20 minutes into the film, there is a scene in which Donald Sutherland’s character is

arguably reading a newspaper. The camera adopts his perspective, and the audience gets a close up shot

of the front page of a newspaper entitled World with an iconic photograph center frame. For six seconds,

the audience, now directly aligned with Ben du Toit’s point-of-view, experiences a moment of

reinforcement that shapes his character’s motivational development while functioning non-diegetically to

disturb audience entertainment and recall historical relevance.

When examined closely, these six seconds and the rest of the scene reveal important information

of the fictional characters in the narrative while simultaneously disclosing the director’s call-to-action for

the audience. In order to correctly interpret this call-to-action, the audience must first bring some

previously acquired knowledge to the viewing and/or rely on close analysis.

The photograph centered in the frame is of 12 year old Hector Pieterson, shot and dying, as he is

being carried away by a fellow student during the June 16, 1976 student protests in Soweto. Sam Nzima’s

photo helped bring critical attention and motivation to apartheid resistance. This image within the film’s

moving image creates a double-framing effect that adds a certain level of undeniable emphasis on its

importance both internally (narrative) and externally (audience) that interrupts conventional spectatorship.

The information on the newspaper that frames the photo reveals additional aspects of the

historical narrative to underscore the film’s legitimacy. As the six-second close up pans from the top of

the page down to the central photo, the audience is given headlines and subheadings to attribute to the

narrative and the historical photograph. It is important to note the paper’s name, logo, and position –

World is in the top left corner of the page, with white lettering and a red background. A critical audience

would inquire into why this paper was chosen and not another. What is the significance? Surely, this

iconic photograph and event had been picked up by numerous papers, and the audience is not given any

narrative clues as to why this paper should be of special importance. Without prior knowledge, the
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audience would have to resort to a close analysis of the name’s visual qualities. Its positioning in the

corner can be understood as a way of say, “This is what’s happening in this corner of the world.” The red

background stands out as the only color on the black and white front page of the paper. Red, in its

coupling to articles of violence, could reasonably be read as bloodshed, anger, etc. The white lettering of

World denotes the white ownership of the world in which audience is now viewing on screen.

The headline “Police Gun Down Our Children” frames the top of the photo in such a way that the

words “our” and “child” run directly above edge of the top of the photo. This proximity reinforces the

idea that these children are people – people of the community of Soweto, of the community of South

Africa, and of the worldwide human community. Subheadings give the audience the body count and

timeline for the events, but the text that composes the article is illegible and thus of no significance to us

the audience and of no significance to the character Ben du Toit.

As the film cuts back into the narrative, the audience sees Ben examining the paper alone, while

the windows behind him are pitch-black, denoting isolation and timeless pondering. This darkness behind

him and his solitary placement creates a visual representation of isolation that his character feels from

dark events that have happened in the past. The guilt he feels from his uninformed nature begins to isolate

him from his family. When his wife and son enter for brief exchanges of pleasantries, Donald Sutherland

portrays a man who is distanced from his home, his (white) community. When they exit, he does not grab

the paper again and begin skimming the page from left to right; instead, it is evident that his character has

read the paper before and is now digesting it. Based on what has been presented in this scene so far, the

audience knows: (1) When the audience adopts Ben’s perspective, the headlines are legible but the body

copy is not, emphasizing a degree of focus the character and audience now share; (2) it is late night,

bedtime, suggesting that the paper and its relationship to Ben has surpassed general curiosity/novelty; and

(3) his character does not skim/read the lines of copy in the articles from left to right. These three criteria

reinforce that the information displayed on the paper’s front page is not “new” news to Ben or the

audience.
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The significance of this scene and the connection the director makes with the film and newspaper

mediums is heavily underscored with the film’s final imagery. The fictional characters are now

photographed and placed into fictional news articles that exist somewhere beyond the narrative but apart

from historical reality. As the characters’ narrative experiences are transferred to the paper’s front page,

the director connects one informative medium (papers) to the other (films), suggesting a re-presentation

of real time, place, and suffering people. The article may not be a real news article, but it really exists in

the audience’s viewing. The fictional news article functions in the same way the entire film does – to

make the audience re-evaluate their relationship to mediums of human suffering. More specifically, the

director wants the audience to sympathize with the real South African people inspiring the film’s

narrative by adjusting their relationship to the medium of film. Palcy is using the medium of film and

dramatic narrative to inform her audience in way that parallels a newspaper publisher’s goal of selecting

interesting info to present to the public. Both fail to adequately inform audiences if they are

predominately concerned with entertainment. In A Dry White Season, it was necessary for the Palcy to

include iconic imagery to give historical context and legitimacy to a film that aims to both entertain and

inform, while paralleling and reinforcing this dual aim through the informative medium of newspapers.