Film and Genocide

Preface

7. Genres of “Yet An Other Genocide”: Cinematic Representations of Rwanda 133 madelaine hron Part III: Visual Documentation and Genocide 8. The Specter of Genocide in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War 157 kristi m. wilson 9. GIs Documenting Genocide: Amateur Films of World War II Concentration Camps 170 marsha orgeron 10. Through the Open Society Archives to The Portraitist: Film’s Impulse toward Death and Witness 187 stephen cooper Part IV: Interviews 11. Greg Barker, Director of Ghosts of Rwanda (2004) 205 Interviewed by richard o’connell 12. Nick Hughes, Director of 100 Days (2001) 217 Interviewed by piotr a. cieplak 13. Irek Dobrowolski, Director of The Portraitist (2005) 228 Interviewed by stephen cooper Filmography 237 Bibliography 241 Contributors 255 Index 259 vi contents vii Preface In fact, at the end of the day I believe that people do want to know when there is some major tragedy going on, when there is some unacceptable situation happening in this world. And they want something to be done about it. That’s what I believe. james nachtwey, in War Photographer In recognizing our ability to identify with characters, whether Jewish, German, Kapo, or Communist, we move one step closer to guarding against that which permitted the Holocaust to develop—indifference. Perhaps the beam cast by film projectors can pierce the continuing willed blindness. annette insdorf, Indelible Shadows The idea for this collection began in Buenos Aires as we were researching documentary films about genocide in Latin America during the cold war (referred to as Operation Condor) at the 2007 Second International Meeting for the Analysis of the Social Practices of Genocide.1 During the week-long conference, we toured the infamous ESMA (The Naval Mechanics School) detention center with Daniel Feierstein, Director of the Center for Genocide Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Tres Febrero, Argentina, and heard presentations on topics such as post-genocide Bosnia, the Armenian diaspora in Mexico and public commemoration of the Armenian genocide, the figure of the disappeared person in Argentine cinema and poetry, and resistance to genocidal practices, among others. We noticed, in particular, that leading academics frequently referred to the Holocaust in the hopes of determining patterns in more contemporary, state-sponsored atrocities. The group of scholars, comprised primarily of historians and sociologists, also made passing references to well-known films, such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Hotel Rwanda (2004), and suggested that these films spoke to the phenomenon of genocide in a way that a book could not. In fact, genocide studies has, from its inception, been largely interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophy, literature, theater, and psychology, to name a few approaches. Pioneering genocide scholar Israel W. Charny claimed that the principles of interdisciplinary and ecumenical thinking were central to his work from the outset: “We included psychiatrists and psychologists, educators from the primary level to the collegiate, a rabbi who was also a philosopher and a fine novelist, and a director of theater. . . . The theater director and I, in turn, worked on a project of how to present in the media information about human rights abuses in ways which could help audiences to maintain their involvement rather than turn off their attention with a sense of helplessness.”2 As Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian point out, Charny’s approach to understanding genocide is not only interdisciplinary but also unusually broad and inclusive, leaving it open to criticism on the grounds that it lacks theoretical rigor. As Chorbajian points out, however, “it is important to recognize our current state of theorizing about genocide as the product of a recent, incomplete and evolving process as well as a contested one.”3 Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan indicate a rise in the study of the Holocaust in the last two decades, as well as a parallel increase in the study of a variety of mass murder and human rights abuse cases.4 In several recent cross-cultural, comparatist books on genocide, such as Alexander Laban Hinton’s and Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s edited collection Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation; Adam Jones’s Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction and Evoking Genocide; and Robert Skloot’s The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia, representation plays a fundamental role. Formally incorporating film and photography into genocide studies is a natural next step in the evolution of the field. While we recognize the dangers of oversimplification and...