From Invisibility to Recognition: Archive and Cultural Memory of the Rwandan Genocide

LIOR ZYLBERMAN

The Rwandan Genocide on Film Critical Essays and Interviews

McFarland

Lugar: Jefferson; Año: 2018; p. 80 - 99

Between April and July 1994 ?the fastest genocide in history? (Melvern, 2004) took place in Rwanda: in 100 days an estimated of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. The genocide was not an spontaneous uprising after the attack that caused the death of Juvenal Habyarimana, the dictator-president in charge since 1973, neither a ?tribal hatred? or a pure barbaric violence: it was a carefully planned program of state reorganization that in that time the West refused to recognize as a genocide because nothing could resemble what happened in Rwanda to the Nazi concentration camps. In the next decades, an important number of academic research studied the Rwandan case describing and thinking it as a genocide, but the fact is that one of the ways by which the West knew the facts was through film, both fiction and non-fiction films. As the world became aware of this event, while the consequences of this crime became visible, the films began to create a visual imaginary of the genocide, either through recreating events (in fiction films) or filming interviews on Rwandan soil with survivors and protagonists of the genocide (in documentary films). The films not only succeeded in establishing forms, schemes and visual motifs of representation, but also allowed to put into circulation an interpretation of the genocide. In that sense, the film productions helped to create an archive, considering it as a social body of knowledge about the Rwandan genocide, achieving not only a construction of a memory ?a coherent narrative? but above all a cultural memory.Taking the notion of cultural memory and archive thought by Aleida and Jan Assmann, the purpose of the article is to study how the visual archive of the Rwandan genocide was built. We think that the concept of cultural memory can enrich our analysis because this is a type of memory that is mediated through texts, images, rituals, etc. (Assmann, 2011). In this sense, cinema has become one of the most important contemporary means for the construction and transmission of cultural memory. On the other hand, the dynamics of cultural memory, as an active form of memory, can be understood through a dialogue between the canon and archive. In our paper we will investigate the archive of the Rwandan genocide in the light of that dialogue, which not always is harmonious but sometimes also dissonant.Our analysis will include films such Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold (Daniele Lacourse and Yvan Patry, 1996), 100 Days (Nick Hughes, 2001), Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2005), Kinyarwanda (Alrick Brown, 2011), La Trilogie des Gacaca ( Anne Aghion, 2002-2004-2009), to mention a few titles that, over time, have shaped the audiovisual archive of the Rwandan genocide. Also, we will contemplate the videos testimonies in the archive of to the Shoah Foundation and the Rwanda Genocide Archive website.