Hotel Rwanda: Memory, Witness, and Departure

[Kire]

Hotel Rwanda
Memory, Witness, and Departure
Alone in its genre, this film asks the ancient question of being our brothers' keeper in a way we might actually hear and respond to.

::: Benjamin Thomas

“Each man is his brother’s Cain.” —Primo Levi

The above quote comes from Primo Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved, written a year before his suicide. It is a guilt-plagued account that faces head-on the assault of traumatic memory that pursues those who live with the difficulty of having survived the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust. Levi strove to make evident a truth to be maintained in any discourse on genocide, which is that the true witnesses to it are dead. It is the dead who have experienced the deepest horror of the genocidal impulse. In a very real way, then, it is only the dead who can testify to genocide because they embody it in their graves. But as Levi points out, where does that leave trauma-ridden survivors as they attempt to get in touch with their past—and come to terms with history?

This idea of trauma implicitly comes to light in Hotel Rwanda through the introduction of a witness to the event, not the portrayal of the event itself. Unlike Schindler’s List’s attempt at historicizing genocide, Hotel director Terry George (Some Mother’s Son, The Boxer, In the Name of the Father) steers clear of attempting the impossible by focusing on an isolated event within the much larger context of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. That event is the true story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina providing asylum for over 1,200 Tutsis and apolitical Hutus from the Hutu militia raging outside the gates of the luxurious Hôtel des Milles Collines.

The film is fraught with tensions that tighten and then eventually unravel within Paul Rusesabagina (amazingly portrayed by Don Cheadle), but the true success of this film lies in its purposeful effort not to showcase gross acts of genocide, but instead to allude to them. The result is a non-didactic film whose visual affect necessarily tugs our emotions in order for the true story and hopefully its lessons to register intellectually. In this way, Hotel Rwanda’s lack of genocidal gruesomeness reinforces the possibility of its true horror, and therefore instates its believability.

In a way, Paul Rusesabagina’s story is that of the traumatized survivor getting in touch with his own history. In Cathy Caruth’s book, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, she identifies the need for the witness to become involved with their historical experience through listening to others and testifying themselves. It is this idea of becoming involved in “a speaking and listening from the site of trauma” that Hotel Rwanda dares you to visit.

More: http://metaphilm.com/philm.php?id=403_0_2_0