I have not yet seen the film Tsotsi, but last week I read my page-mate John Matshikiza’s strong reservations about the adaptation of the 1950s novella on which the film is based. Director Gavin Hood modernised the story, setting it in a contemporary South Africa. Matshikiza says much of the drama and authenticity have thus been disowned. The original Tsotsi was set and played against the wretched backdrop of functional apartheid; its resonances were of that time. Hood had chosen to sidestep “the legacies of our past, which continue to haunt us”.
The adaptation of novels for the screen remains an uneasy business. Sometimes they get it right but, more often than not, fine novels are vitiated with all the sensitivity of paint being stripped. I recently watched (for the third time) the film of the EL Doctorow novel, Billy Bathgate. Tom Stoppard’s empathetic screenplay transmuted the book to cinematic essentials, but maintained mood, period and characterisation. Unlike the affectively barren misfortune that was the adaptation of Annie Proulx’s superb The Shipping News.
In the presentation and dramatisation of actuality or history, the hazards are many. Recently released in the United Kingdom is the film Shooting Dogs. A BBC-financed production, it is the fourth feature-length movie placed in the organised and systematic massacres in Rwanda where, in a few terrible months in 1994, nearly a milllion people were killed in the most horrific manner.
Again, I write about a movie I’ve yet to see, but take as my authority the eminently respected historian and reporter, Linda Melvern, author of Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, a dispassionate and meticulously researched book about what happened before and after those terrible months. In a recent edition of United Kingdom Sunday paper The Observer, Melvern published a scathing article about Shooting Dogs headlined, “History? This film is fiction.”
Melvern takes issue with the way the film recounts the massacre at a school, the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO), where, in the early days of the massacre, Belgian peacekeepers were more involved with frenetic evacuation of their expatriates than with the protection of about 2 000 Tutsi people sheltering at the ETO. The film has a BBC journalist and film crew at the school, reporting this to the world. The journalist is the first to use the perjorative “genocide”.
This is illusory. There was never a BBC film crew at the ETO. Nor was “genocide” used until some weeks later. Such misrepresentation of the truth, it would seem, was sanctioned so as to flaunt the BBC in a pivotal, if not courageous, role, which it did not, in fact, play. Melvern also wrote that the depiction in the BBC’s film of the massacre is misleading. Those sheltering at the school were not fallen upon by a “rampaging mob of machete-wielding youths”, as the film would have it. It was far more chilling. Under the orders of the Rwanda military, the 2 000 were force-marched to a nearby gravel pit, there to be slaughtered in cold blood.
Melvern’s article drew a response from the redoubtable BBC correspondent, Fergel Keane, who took issue with her claim that no BBC journalists had been in Rwanda in the early and crucial weeks of the massacre. In fact, early reports did come from a BBC correspondent on attachment to Unicef, and from a BBC reporter who arrived soon after the mass killings began. What is notable is that Keane does not dispute Melvern’s foremost revelation: at the ETO itself, there was no BBC crew. In this regard, Shooting Dogs is fictional.
The crew making the film was to encounter responses that its writer and director, David Belton, apparently failed to anticipate. Arguing that Rwandan people had been “appalled” that the shooting of Hotel Rwanda had been in South Africa and used South African actors — Don Cheadle notwithstanding — Belton elected to film Shooting Dogs at the ETO itself. He used Rwandan extras, including some genocide survivors.
The replaying at an epicentral site of a shocking event, hyped up for the cameras, was not without consequence. Aid workers had to set up trauma counselling for those locals who — on hearing the simulated chants and whistling of the interahamwe and seeing the scything machetes — found themselves propelled straight back into the horror. Pupils from a nearby school had to be hospitalised and sedated. Belton answered this criticism by saying that he had foreseen these problems and had two trauma counsellors and medi-cal staff on hand. A bit like taking a handful of Band-Aids to a pogrom.
These kinds of films are usually marketed as being acts of felicitous social duty, a cleansing of the essentially beneficent human nature by a process of shining light on those occasions where human goodness has all but rotted away. George Steiner’s controversial opinion still obtains: the only morally appropriate response to the horrors of the 20th century is silence. All recollection of history’s horror stories — cinematic, dramatic, literary — however well-intended, run the risk of being exploitative. Sometimes quite creepy, too. Downfall, the recent and much-praised German film of the last bunker days of Hitler, sometimes swings eerily close to nostalgia.
It is a sad day when an institution as powerful and influential as the BBC puts its name to a wilful distortion of fact. And why?