Death, Image, Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and its Aftermath in Photography and Documentary Film by Piotr Cieplak, and: The Faces We Lost dir. by Piotr Cieplak (review)

The distinctions between academic and artist, scholar and commentator, researcher and creator are being blurred at an increasing rate. Filmmaking is one avenue progressively being utilized to complement academic methodologies and potentially reach wider and more varied audiences. Piotr Cieplak is one example of an academic who combines theoretical research with creative work. In 2017, Cieplak débuted his first monograph, Death, Image, Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and its Aftermath in Photography and Documentary Film, along with his first documentary film, The Faces We Lost. While dealing with very similar subject matter and overlapping arguments in many respects, the two mediums with which Cieplak engages allow him to explore details, voices, and arguments in different yet complementary ways.

Death, Image, Memory is clearly the result of many years of researching and working with the Rwandan film industry. Cieplak's analysis focuses on theoretical considerations of the image, the archive, and questions of representation relating to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. His approach to his material is methodical, theoretically rich, and always sensitive to both his subjects and to his belief that his analysis "can offer nothing" to those who suffered through and continue to suffer because of the genocide (3). Throughout Death, Image, Memory, Cieplak reasons that while photos cannot fully represent experiences of genocide nor create fresh memories for those who did not experience this history, they can do other things, and it is accounting for these "other" uses that can yield the most interesting analysis. By blurring the boundaries, traditional functions, and readability of images, Cieplak offers a comprehensive and necessary book exploring multiple sites and collections of memory in and of Rwanda.

In his first chapter, Cieplak discusses contemporary coverage of the genocide and presents some of the key theoretical thematics that recur throughout his book. He examines the various definitions, uses, and theories behind concepts such as evidence and memory, and cites his key theoretical influences, namely Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Cathy Caruth among others.

Chapter 2 highlights photography and the published photobooks of Gilles Peress and Sebastião Salgado, focusing primarily on the relationship between photography and death; the genre of atrocity photography and the ethics of aesthetics; and the ways in which the Rwandan genocide has come to be defined by images of its aftermath. Here Cieplak makes the important case for reading images as having multiple functions: as documents, as bearers of information, and as commodities (59). He distinguishes between Peress and Salgado, explaining that Peress sees himself as an evidence-gathering forensic photographer, while Salgado is more interested in harnessing creative aesthetics to elicit a response in the viewer. These two photographers help illustrate Cieplak's central point about images being essentially multi-layered and multi-functional.

In his third chapter, Cieplak explores "images of before" that are housed in personal archives as well as at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. These sites of collection and exhibition of personal photographs taken before the genocide are framed within questions of individual versus collective memory, and distinctions (or lack thereof) between seeing images as objects of documentation and as devices of commemoration. He concludes this chapter with close readings of two wedding photographs. These personal photographic archives and their connections to larger national processes of remembrance and memorialization are taken up further in his film.

Chapter 4 focuses on Iseta: Behind the Roadblock, a 2008 documentary tracing cameraman Nick Hughes's return to Kigali and his attempts to name both the victims and perpetrators he captured on film at the time—his documentation being the only known footage of violence filmed during the genocide. This chapter considers the evidential, memorial, and representational...