A Duty to Intervene

Abstract

This chapter discusses the increasingly prolific transit between the ideology of human rights, the communication industries, and imperialist structures of legitimacy through an analysis of two films, Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (2004) and Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005). In the cinematic representation of the Rwandan genocide, the film stages the catastrophic events of April 1994 through the relationship between the local hotel manager and the United Nations peacekeeper. Hotel Rwanda enfolds the complex histories and materialities of genocidal violence into a moral tale to be popularly consumed as the “lesson of Rwanda”. In contrast to Hotel Rwanda, the film Caché uses the 1961 slaughter of some two hundred Algerian protestors by the Paris police as the basis for a fictional tale about the colonial return of the repressed in the life of Georges Laurent.