Media theorist and trauma scholar Janet Walker notes that ‘alongside mass-mediated public debates on the history and meaning of various catastrophes, the 1980s and 1990s have seen the development of a trauma cinema’.[27] Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda is one example of such cinema. Before I go on to situate this ‘trauma’ film in terms of the typology of reception based on film types and aesthetics suggested by Ann Kaplan,[28] I propose to explore a different creative representation in it of the motif that recurs throughout this essay of hospitality in the midst of apocalyptic terror. This would help me effectively link the aesthetic and the ethical in discussing the film.
In Hotel Rwanda, ‘hospitality’ is marked in literal terms by making the hotel, Des Mille Collines, the main site of action and refuge, and the hotel manager its protagonist. The film recreates the heroism of a real-life figure, Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the luxury hotel. In the manner of a latter-day Oskar Schindler, Rusesabagina, a Hutu, managed to save not only his family (his wife was Tutsi), but also 1,268 other Tutsis by providing them refuge in the hotel, despite the UN peacekeeping forces’ temporary abandonment of the complex.
Interestingly, both Gil Courtemanche and Terry George in their respective works use the hotel as a distancing device from the madness of genocide, but in very different ways. For Courtemanche, as we saw, the hotel with its poolside shenanigans marked the site of western apathy to and distance from massacres on the streets of Kigali. It is contrasted with the genuine engagement and empathy of the protagonist with the suffering of his Rwandan friends. Courtemanche’s aesthetic investment lies in narrating the full horror of what happened, in not sparing the reader/interlocutor any detail of the monstrous reality of the genocide. In contrast, Terry George in Hotel Rwanda makes the Hotel the site of compassion and hospitality, even as he uses it aesthetically as a framing device to spare the reader graphic details of the massacres. Each time, he offers the viewer just a glimpse of the killings on the streets before quickly moving the camera back to the Hotel and to Rusesabagina’s anxious visage contemplating yet another strategy to protect the hapless Tutsis seeking refuge there.
Paul Rusesabagina, played by actor Don Cheadle, is portrayed as a typical upwardly mobile Hutu Rwandan with social and political connections in the highest places. The Interahamwe leader, George Rutagunda, treats him like a friend and the Hutu General Bizimundu, who led the massacres, is wary of attacking Paul and his Hotel for fear of Paul’s high connections. During the genocide Paul, with great presence of mind, exploits these connections, once even managing to reach the French Presidential office through his Belgian boss in Brussels. He bribes and cajoles Hutu authorities with aplomb and amazing savoir faire to save the Tutsi refugees hiding in his hotel. Initially Rusesabagina keeps up the business-as-usual front for his rich international clientele with great composure. Later, meeting menace with steel nerves and deft calculation, he handles the Interahamwe leaders on terms they understand — bribes and threats — even as he seeks favours from them to feed the refugees. Towards the end of the 100 days, when there are signs of the return of Tutsi rebels, he even threatens to give evidence against General Bizimundu as a war criminal. He shows that hospitality and caring in times of terror is more about ensuring survival through resourcefulness, prudence and cunning than about just being conventionally right and resorting to foolhardy heroics.
Don Cheadle plays the role of hotelier and savoir/saviour with a minimum of histrionics. His understated style brilliantly enacts with minimum fuss the power of the ordinary to do extraordinary things under duress. Cheadle’s acting style is very much part of the aesthetic repertoire adopted by Terry George in making the film. ‘Less is more’ appears to be the guiding principle for the director. As we saw earlier, George shot the bulk of his film in Johannesburg for fear that recreating the horror on the very same streets would be disrespectful to Kigali’s healing process. This sensitivity guides his choice of frames through which he narrates for the world the 100-day shame of Rwanda. Throughout the film the viewer sees the massacres through the eyes of Paul, who himself witnesses everything only through multifarious frames — windows, the back-gate of his home, the Hotel lobby, car windows and, on one occasion, a television screen. And yet, he is hardly a bystander, constantly working, plotting and strategising to save his family and the refugees.
The only occasion on which he actually stumbles over masses of butchered corpses along the river road — undoubtedly the most searing and poetic scene in the film — is shot through a hazy and misty frame that both evokes the twilight horror of his rendezvous with Rutagunda and shields the corpses from the voyeurism of the viewer. Before dawn, Paul goes to meet Rutagunda to request food supplies. Rutagunda obliges but warns him of the imminent death of the Tutsis sheltering in the Hotel. He even asks Paul to hand them over in exchange for the lives of his wife and children. When he does not get a straight response, he tells the driver with quiet menace to take the ‘river road’, for the way would be ‘clear’ there. Only when Paul and his driver encounter thousands of Tutsi corpses on the ‘river road’, do they confront the full horror of Rutagunda’s advice.
Terry George recreates Paul’s horror for the viewer by means of short, sharp and subtle cinematic devices. On hearing Paul’s agonised stifled groan, the viewer has a shadowy glimpse of row upon row of huddled corpses extending to the horizon. The camera then quickly pans to Paul and his driver in their four-wheeler trying to reverse out of that road even as the auditorium is awash with the sound of wheels bumping over dead bodies. Few creative evocations of man’s voracious appetite to kill have been more powerfully depicted than this one. The audience experiences a frisson straight from hell even as the horrific details are visually veiled from it. Terry George persists with his aesthetic stance of protecting the massacred from the gaze of the living when, after a strained moment of silence, Paul warns his driver: ‘You will tell no one about what we saw on this road. No one.’
Arguably, in recreating the genocide on screen, the maker of Hotel Rwanda invests neither in Coetzee’s minimalist aesthetics nor in Courtemanche’s full-frontal, searing poeticism. Adopting the former would have meant sacrificing the film’s global reach, for how, except through cinematic figuration of extreme suffering and pain, could he have hoped to communicate to the world that another Rwanda should not happen? Again, as Samuel Beckett’s plays demonstrate, minimalism is hardly conducive to a portrayal of the heroic. For the world, Rusesabagina is Rwanda’s Schindler and Terry George intends to portray him as such. Coetzee’s protagonists are heartbreakingly frail, failed humans caught up in a hostile world without redemption. It is also arguable that what Courtemanche could create through the genre of the novel — putting into graphic words and figurative language the kind of pain and violence that humans would be hard put to imagine in reality — Terry George could not risk with a feature film without allowing the representation to slide into the gratuitous and even sado-masochistic pornography. The visual medium, and especially the feature film with its heightened cinematic effects, engages all the senses with an immediacy that words on a page cannot approximate. That is why its apprehension of reality is more immediately confronting than that of a novel.
As the ethnographic film-maker David McDougall notes in The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses, ‘all films and not only “gross” genres are potentially disturbing to the corporeal equanimity of the viewer’.[29] In an extended discussion on the concept of photogenie — that which highlights the film as a technological phenomenon so that a film, far from presenting reality, actually presents us with a strange apparition, a photochemical imprint on the world — MacDougall retrieves the notion of the ‘oneiric’ to discuss tensions that beset the viewing body. The ‘oneiric’ is a perspective ‘suspended somewhere between privilege and paralysis, with all the power to see but an incapacity to act’. This, says McDougall, may be the reason why people feel so disturbed when they see certain kinds of images — especially ones of extreme bodily violence. He adds: ‘People who have witnessed disturbing events often report that they find it much more disturbing when they see them on film. The mechanical vision of the camera is more inhuman, more unrelenting.’[30]
Further, what may just about be bearable in the documentary genre may be totally unacceptable in a feature film melodrama, for the latter carries much more of a burden to intervene creatively and transfigure reality for the audience rather than simply documenting it. It will indeed be a daunting ethico-aesthetic challenge to make Courtemanche’s novel into a film — an attempt that is apparently already under way. Would Hotel Rwanda possibly have been as compelling a feature film if Rusesabagina had not kept his hotel business, an avocation whose demands of diplomacy and cool under fire helped him become a successful saviour? Did his feat help make the movie ‘watchable’, a movie of such a horrific event that might have otherwise defied dramatisation except in gratuitous terms? Does it sanitise the genocide even as it humanises it, so that even while the film asserts the ethical imperative of hospitality towards strangers in dire need till the very end — the film’s last spoken words are ‘there’s always room’ — its generic/aesthetic investment is in making the trauma ‘bearable’ for the viewer rather than trying to get a measure of its real horror?
Hotel Rwanda arguably falls into the category identified by Ann Kaplan as ‘melodrama’, a genre that ‘seals over traumatic ruptures’[31] and ends with ‘comforting closure or cure’.[32] In the context of trauma films, Kaplan identifies three other types of representation and viewership: a) the gratuitous and the horrific, from which the spectator recoils in distress and terror; b) the routine television-like images of catastrophe around the world, against which the viewer is placed as a voyeur; and c) the powerful political scripts on trauma made by ‘independent’ film-makers, where the viewer is addressed as a ‘witness’ and is entreated to intervene.[33]
While Terry George’s representation can be clearly distinguished from the ‘gratuitous’ and the ‘routine-like’, I would argue that Hotel Rwanda goes beyond the conventions of melodrama. Its aesthetic ‘distancing’ in portraying the full horror of the genocide is not merely to make the trauma ‘bearable’ for the viewer and provide ‘closure’, but also to acknowledge the limits to aesthetic representation of the precariousness and terror of life at the end of the millennium. To that extent, it respects and affirms the corporeal vulnerability that appears to have become the face of the ‘human’ in these late modern times. This is the burden of Judith Butler’s argument in Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence in accounting for the dehumanising nature of much contemporary media representations of warfare and violence. She says that such representations make no allowance for the mutual vulnerability of all humans, that they are often brandished as triumphalist icons either of US supremacy or of other radically fundamentalist and dehumanising worldviews.[34] When Paul Rusesabagina commands his chauffeur ‘not to tell anyone’ of the carnage they encounter on the river road, it is precisely this new kind of humanist ethics that he invokes; an ethics that has the full measure of the horror and also the acuity to take a step back from narrating it all. This is a different ethic from the one that argues for the intractability and unrepresentability of trauma. It advocates a meaningful return to referentiality that respects and acknowledges our collective precariousness.