Kinyarwanda and The Redemption of General Butt Naked, seen in tandem, pack a powerful one-two punch. They have a lot in common: both are films about recent African civil wars, both deal with post-conflict reconciliation, and both dare to suggest the possibility of redemption for even the worst offenders.
I saw the films at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and for all their similarities, the audience reaction to each was wildly different. Butt Naked was polarizing at the festival, eliciting some caustic remarks during the post-screening Q&A, whereas Kinyarwanda was a crowd pleaser, taking home the Audience Award in World Cinema. Why such divergent reactions to such similar films?
In this article I want to suggest that part of the answer lies in the fact that Kinyarwanda, unlike Butt Naked, in an ensemble film. Ensemble films are those movies that follow a number of characters more or less equally, like the films of Robert Altman (Nashville, M.A.S.H.) or P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, rather than a single protagonist supported by secondary characters. By putting Kinyarwanda into conversation with concepts from theologian Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion & Embrace we can see why the ensemble form is ideally suited to dealing with the issue of forgiveness in communal settings.
We are reared on movies that feature a single protagonist, and this has perhaps always been the dominant story form – after all, Joseph Campbell’s seminal book on mythology is titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces, not “The Heroes with a Thousand Faces.” Butt Naked sticks to this single-protagonist template. It is a documentary about Joshua Blahyi, a.k.a. General Butt Naked, a notorious Liberian warlord who now claims Christian conversion and works as an evangelist. The film tries to make sense of this complex character responsible for the deaths of 20,000 people(!), and follows him as seeks forgiveness from the families whom he devastated.
Blahyi is not a hero in the conventional sense – he does not engender sympathy in us in the same way that most protagonists do – but this film is unmistakably about him, an individual. This is not intended to be a film about finger pointing – it is about the question of forgiveness – but nevertheless the blame is implicitly laid at Blahyi’s feet. I do not mean that to be a criticism of the movie at all; it is a weighty film about an important figure. But in Exclusion & Embrace, Volf argues that close examination of a community torn apart by injustice reveals that “the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds.” In other words, everybody is to blame to some extent. But in the context of Butt Naked, the sheer enormity of Blahyi’s crimes renders any talk of victims’ guilt utterly absurd. Nobody can root for the guy who killed 20,000 people. To make room for the possibility of embrace, we need a story form that can tell the story of the community, not just the individual.
Films from the Soviet Montage School are about communities. Who is the protagonist in Battleship Potemkin? The Russian people as a whole. Battleship is a powerful film and still resonates today, but it is unlikely that such a radically collectivist type of storytelling would go down well with contemporary Western audiences. It might be that ensemble films serve as a middle ground between collectivist and individualist narratives, a way to tell the story of a community that is more accessible for most viewers than Soviet Montage-style movies.
Kinyarwanda is a narrative film about the Rwandan people’s journey towards healing after the genocide. There is no clear-cut protagonist that dominates the screen time; rather, it tracks with several “co-protagonists” on both sides of the conflict. Writer/director Alrick Brown claims that he chose to write it as an ensemble piece because his prior experience was in writing short films and an ensemble screenplay is like a bunch of shorts woven together. Brown might simply be self-effacing but, either way, his choice to use the ensemble structure is important to the meaning of the film. Why? Because the effect of telling the story from multiple perspectives is that culpability is assigned the community (and even those outside it).
We see a similar dynamic at work in Crash, an ensemble film that messes with our tendency to all-too-neatly label characters as the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” Almost everyone in this film is revealed to contain both flaws and traces of heroism. When police officer, John Ryan (Matt Dillon) comes to the aid of a woman trapped in a burning car, Christine Thayer (Thandie Newton), a woman Ryan has sexually assaulted, we feel uncomfortable. We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of not knowing what side of the good-evil moral axis he falls on. Is he hero or villain? Writer/director Paul Haggis’s choice to use the ensemble structure shifts our focus away from the individual and onto society. It becomes an effective way of portraying systemic, rather than individual, racism.
Unfortunately, the character twists in Crash are a little too neat and repetitious, flattening out the characters and creating a kind of dull symmetry where each character is more or less equal parts perpetrator and victim. Kinyarwanda, on the other hand, does not shy away from portraying some characters in a worse light than others, which is important because Volf insists that “solidarity in sin” does not mean equality of sin. Ultimately, Kinyarwanda’s intricate weave of characters and narratives paints a picture of a community and, as such, it depicts evil as something perpetrated by many, not just the sole domain of a single depraved soul. Kinyarwanda says that (almost) everybody is implicated, though not to the same degree, and that is a crucial nuance that means it is more in keeping with Volf’s vision of reconciliation.
The fact that Kinyarwanda is told from multiple points-of-view necessitates that viewers sympathize with characters from across the spectrum. This is a narrative form that reflects what Volf calls “double vision,” the practice of “seeing both ‘from here’ and ‘from there.’” Double vision is the attempt to walk a proverbial mile in another’s shoes in the hopes of humanizing those who might otherwise been demonized. Double vision is ultimately about making space for our enemies, and it is that process that provides Kinyarwanda with two of its most powerful moments.
The first such moment comes when a child, Ishmael (Hassan Kabera) hears a young Hutu warrior, Emmanuel (Eduoard Bamporiki), talking about “cockroaches,” a derogatory term for Tutsis. The child innocently divulges that he knows the whereabouts of the cockroaches, and Emmanuel convinces the child to lead him and his fellow warriors there. We fear that little Ishmael will lead these would-be killers right to their enemies. They enter the house and the child opens a cabinet to reveal the cockroaches – literal cockroaches. This set-up/pay-off exposes the way dysphemisms, to use Volf’s label, are used as a pretext for hatred.
The second moment comes when a Christian priest, who until this time has been cowardly evading his duties, accepts a Muslim mufti’s hand as a show of solidarity. These two religious figures are able to create space within their own identities for a rival and, as a result, are able to stand in joint opposition to the real evil in their midst. By grounding a story about reconciliation in a multiple-perspectives structure, Brown matches content with form, forcing viewers to consider the events from various standpoints. The result is an unexpectedly hopeful film. Hope is much more important in this movie than blame.
We can practice double vision in watching any film, because movies help us to see things through the eyes of others. The ensemble structure has the potential to heighten the double vision effect, and it is an ideal style for telling collective stories. The Redemption of General Butt Naked and Kinyarwanda are both excellent films, but their different narrative styles raise different questions. The single-protagonist approach of Butt Naked places the blame on the shoulders of an individual, and that makes the notion of forgiveness unpalatable for some viewers. Kinyarwanda is able to better able to pave the way for forgiveness because of its ensemble structure, avoiding setting up a scapegoat by doling out responsibility collectively.