60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

hotel rwanda – the challenges of historicising and commercialising genocide 189
spattered son serves as evidence of the murder of one of his neighbours.
The high point of horror in the movie occurs in a fi ctional
scene when Paul and Gregoire (Tony Kgoroge) encounter the victims
of a massacre after being deliberately sent along the ‘river road’
by George Rutaganda. Driving along, their van suddenly seems to
hit an exceptionally bumpy and deeply rutted stretch. Thinking that
they had strayed from the road, Paul gets out of the vehicle only to
fall onto mutilated bodies that had been left lying in their path. Their
grotesque poses and facial expressions frozen in terror are depicted
through the softening eff ect of pre-dawn darkness and swirling fog.
The camera then pans upwards to reveal corpses carpeting the long
stretch of thoroughfare in the gathering light.
An obvious response to Terry George’s defence is that confronting
the reality of the iniquitous violence that transpired in Rwanda does
not have to be ‘pornographic’ or require a resort to tactics of the
‘bloodfest’ genre. Depicting mass violence in ways that do not diminish
its reality for the viewer yet do not denigrate victims or trivialise
the pain of survivors is one of the core challenges movie-makers of
genocide face. Such fi lms will always raise vexing questions about
the ethics of creating entertainment out of mass murder, of appropriate
ways of commercialising atrocity, of how to engage viewers with
visual represenations of unspeakable cruelty without desensitising or
alienating them. Finding a balance between these sorts of tensions lies
at the heart of the making of feature fi lms about genocide (Onstad
2005). The specifi c circumstances of the Rwandan genocide demand
a degree of engagement with human depravity and mass violence
that is lacking in Hotel Rwanda. Terry George gets the balance wrong.
There is too much heroism and too little horror in Hotel Rwanda, too
much romanticism and too little reality.
Exploiting Western guilt
A major theme in Hotel Rwanda, one that is relatively well accomplished,
is the failure of the international community to act, even
when it became apparent early on that the escalating massacres were
not the product of a spontaneous, popular uprising but a planned extermination
of the internal Tutsi population. It seems clear that playing
on Western guilt about Rwanda is part of the movie’s commercial
agenda. It is no coincidence that a key image used to market the fi lm
is of Rusesabagina and the rest of the Milles Collines refugees, nuns
foregrounded, standing in the rain in front of the hotel as the intervention
force and foreign nationals are about to leave, deserting the
Rwandans in their hour of greatest need. The tagline used to promote
the movie: ‘When the world closed its eyes, he opened his arms’.