During a broadcast on the Rwandan radio RTLM in April 1994, the announcer sent the following message to the airwaves: “I just smoked a joint… It’s time for not a single cockroach to escape. If you catch one, slaughter it after taking a good drag on the joint.” The “cockroaches” were the human beings of the country’s minority Tutsi ethnic group, and the station, which for months played a fundamental role in promoting the message of hatred of the Hutus towards the Tutsis and towards the moderate Hutus, is now the protagonist of the movie Hate Songs. This Spanish production directed by Alejo Levis addresses the genocide in Rwanda of between 500,000 and one million Tutsis, 70% of its population, at the hands of Hutu radicals, and in the face of the passivity of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, established there seven months before.

When 30 years have passed since those massacres, which occurred between April 7 and July 15, 1994; in a cinematographic moment in which after the success of a work as relevant as The area of ​​interest, with the concept of off-screen as a narrative axis, artistic, political and moral ideas are once again developed about the representation of genocides in cinema; in a few days of global nervousness due to the situation in the Middle East; and after on January 26, the Court of Justice in The Hague considered it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, after declaring itself competent to investigate the accusation presented by South Africa and asking the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt the necessary measures to prevent the commission of a genocide against the population of the Strip, let us look back at the exterminations of the 20th century and their transfer to the big screen.

In Hate Songs, a worthy contemporary approach to Rwandan tragedy devised by Levis and starring three Spanish artists, the first thing that catches your attention is the almost total absence of images of the massacres. Just seven seconds of flashes documentaries with the bodies lying in the streets after being hacked to death, during the fierce two and a half minute prologue on a black background with which the film opens, and in which only the voices of the RTLM radio can be heard. “You are all recruited to kill cockroaches: our soldiers, the young, the elderly, and also the women.”

The protagonists are Àlex Brendemühl, as a Belgian sound technician working in Kigali; and Nansi Nsue and Boré Buika, who in an interesting metalinguistic game play a Rwandan actor and actress who rehearse, “in the place where it all began”, a reminder program of the tragedy with reconciliatory intentions, and a script approved by the government current. Among the natives, with very different ideas and backgrounds, nerves and imbalances will arise, while Brendemühl’s role could well be a transcript of the United Nations peace mission, which did little or nothing to prevent the massacres.

The film, which culminates with a phrase from the then president of France, François Mitterrand – “In these countries a genocide is not something that important” –, accused in 2008 by the Kigali government of being aware of the preparations for the massacre, picks up the baton of the dozen and a half titles that have represented the Tutsi extermination in this 21st century of cinema, with two major productions as the main representatives. Hotel Rwanda (2004), by the British Terry George, nominated for three Oscars, focused on the real character of Paul Rusesabagina, manager of a luxury hotel in Kigali who used his contacts to protect some 1,300 people, including Tutsis and Hutus, from death. moderates, who neither developed the genocide as a whole nor visualized the annihilation. AND Always in April (2005), an American production directed by the Haitian Raoul Peck and starring Idris Elba, presented at the Berlinale, which did dare to use some of the executioners as protagonists, with the piles of corpses and with the massacres, including those of the boys from a school shot in their own classroom.

Holocaust

The Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazis has been represented actively and passively: with explicitness and subtlety, with brutality and with poetry. Dozens of filmmakers have contributed his vision to an artistic and social debate that bifurcates between ethics and aesthetics, especially since Claude Lanzmann established terms and limits with his monumental Shoah (1985), and his renunciation of archival images. In a criticism that went down in the annalsJacques Rivette had already destroyed Kapo (1960), by Gillo Pontecorvo, because of an “abject” traveling at the wrong time trying to stylize what should never be embellished. And Steven Spielberg, despite the general prestige of Schindler’s List (1993), was criticized by certain specialists because of the aestheticism of the little red coat in the middle of the black and white, and for its trick with the showers and the gas chambers in its most controversial sequence.

The Cambodian genocide, caused between 1975 and 1979 by the Maoist regime of the Khmer Rouge in the Asian country against its own people, with the aim of “purifying the country”, has in two masterpieces by Rithy Panh the honest and ethical portrait of the horror: the creepy S-21: The Red Killing Machine (2003), which approached it from the documentary, bringing together two of the surviving victims and some of their executioners to reflect on the background and even the ways that led the latter to torture, rape and crime; and The lost image (2013), another documentary, this one about his own (massacred) family, in which he created the absent images using clay figures and dioramas to represent the unrepresentable.

In a similar vein, the Bosnian Jasmila Žbanić also played the off-screen card to narrate the Srebrenica genocide in the formidable What are you doing, Aida? (2020). Not a crime on screen. What did not provide information was relegated from the visualization of another genocide experienced by the rest of the world almost live, among the indolence of the blue helmets Dutch and the apathy of the higher-ups on the phone. Meanwhile, the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire, around the First World War, has its best exponent in the magnificent Ararat (2002), by the Canadian of Armenian origin Atom Egoyan. A film that started from memory and that, from contemporary times, delved into the nature of truth and its representation through art.

When and how should cinema approach genocides? With the clairvoyance of the denunciation in time and place, or with the sediment provided by time and history? From the conviction of explicitness and activism, or with respect for memory and black images? Being aware of the Holocaust, Charles Chaplin declared that if he had known then, in 1940, the magnitude of the crimes that were perpetrated shortly after in the extermination camps, he would not have been able to “make jokes about the homicidal madness of the Nazis.” However, we would have missed The great Dictator. Its beauty, its transgression, its accusation and its pantomime as a tool against dictatorships: “They sweep your brains, they fatten you, they treat you like cattle and like cannon fodder. Do not give yourselves to these inhuman individuals, machine men, with machine brains and machine hearts. Let’s fight for the world of reason”.

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