Start Date
12-1-2012 1:30 PM
End Date
12-1-2012 3:00 PM
Description
This paper examines how Terry George’s film Hotel Rwanda participates in memory reconstruction as a trauma aesthetic, and the complex and problematic negotiation between autobiography, history and fiction involved. Based on the life and testimony of Hotel Manager Paul Rusesabagina, which was later textualised in his autobiography An Ordinary Man: the True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda (2006 ), it narrates how Rusesabagina saved the lives of 1268 Tutsis and moderate Hutu’s from Interahamwe death squads. Lauded for publicising the 1994 Tutsi genocide which was seriously underreported at the time, Hotel Rwanda is criticized for exaggerating Rusesabagina’s heroism, for ignoring the history behind the genocide, trivializing the violence, and undermining the role of other key players in protecting the lives of the hotel refugees.
Using Thomas Leitch’s argument that “Based on a true story” films be treated as adaptations, I argue that the film’s “true story” claim appeals to a transcendent “Master text” that is more reliable than history. But how reliable is the textualised memory of Paul Rusesabagina? How faithful are the screenplay writers to Rusesabagina’s testimony, and to Rwandan history, and how are these deployed in the film text? What “cinematic apparatus” does the director employ to visually reconstruct such a traumatic subject matter into a successful piece of infotainment? I undertake the analysis of Hotel Rwanda using Kamilla Elliot’s literature/film adaptation theory of “De(Re)composition” which sees history, autobiography and fiction merge, decompose and recompose into a new reality. The paper seeks to examine the contestation of Hotel Rwanda’s memory construct of the Tutsi genocide, especially the difference between Hollywood’s “heroic self transcendence” versus communal heroism in recorded accounts at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the artistic and political reinvention of Rusesabagina and its implications for post-genocide reconciliation.
I use Hotel Rwanda, other Rwandan genocide films, books, articles and reviews, and interviews I personally conducted in Kigali in October 2010 as part of my post-doctoral research on “Contemporary Western Representations of Africa in Fiction and Film.” This is an interdisciplinary confluence of history, literature and film studies.
Re-membering the Tutsi Genocide in Hotel Rwanda (2004): Negotiating Reality, History, Autobiography, and Fiction
This paper examines how Terry George’s film Hotel Rwanda participates in memory reconstruction as a trauma aesthetic, and the complex and problematic negotiation between autobiography, history and fiction involved. Based on the life and testimony of Hotel Manager Paul Rusesabagina, which was later textualised in his autobiography An Ordinary Man: the True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda (2006 ), it narrates how Rusesabagina saved the lives of 1268 Tutsis and moderate Hutu’s from Interahamwe death squads. Lauded for publicising the 1994 Tutsi genocide which was seriously underreported at the time, Hotel Rwanda is criticized for exaggerating Rusesabagina’s heroism, for ignoring the history behind the genocide, trivializing the violence, and undermining the role of other key players in protecting the lives of the hotel refugees.
Using Thomas Leitch’s argument that “Based on a true story” films be treated as adaptations, I argue that the film’s “true story” claim appeals to a transcendent “Master text” that is more reliable than history. But how reliable is the textualised memory of Paul Rusesabagina? How faithful are the screenplay writers to Rusesabagina’s testimony, and to Rwandan history, and how are these deployed in the film text? What “cinematic apparatus” does the director employ to visually reconstruct such a traumatic subject matter into a successful piece of infotainment? I undertake the analysis of Hotel Rwanda using Kamilla Elliot’s literature/film adaptation theory of “De(Re)composition” which sees history, autobiography and fiction merge, decompose and recompose into a new reality. The paper seeks to examine the contestation of Hotel Rwanda’s memory construct of the Tutsi genocide, especially the difference between Hollywood’s “heroic self transcendence” versus communal heroism in recorded accounts at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the artistic and political reinvention of Rusesabagina and its implications for post-genocide reconciliation.
I use Hotel Rwanda, other Rwandan genocide films, books, articles and reviews, and interviews I personally conducted in Kigali in October 2010 as part of my post-doctoral research on “Contemporary Western Representations of Africa in Fiction and Film.” This is an interdisciplinary confluence of history, literature and film studies.