by Natasha Hone

Created on: February 29, 2008   Last Updated: March 02, 2008

Film can be an important medium for the transmission of historical knowledge and sometimes the knowledge can be accurate. However on other occasion's personal agenda on the part of a director, producer or writer can diminish the historical value of a given film. Often the filmmaker is catering to the audience's expectations about film being a source of both pleasure and entertainment. It has been said by many historians that the Rwandan Genocide bore striking similarities to the mechanisms used during the Nazi Holocaust. We can access many accounts of the holocaust on film, in books, news footage, both primary and secondary sources. However there are far less accounts of the Rwandan Genocide before or after the event. Propaganda was used in the run up to the massacre although due to the lack of televisions in the country radio was enormously influential. A private radio station was set up called RTLM which was unlike the state controlled Radio Rwanda it played relaxed and great music so the messages of propaganda were being pumped out wrapped in a number of attractive wrappings. The Western media failed to cover the massacre it seemed that the western world just turned a blind eye and chose to ignore the situation. As Bernard Koucher (medicines san frontiers) quoted they were more interested in OJ Simpson's gloves than what was happening in Rwanda'.

The subject of poor information in historical films is often bought up by critics and has often been argued in studies of the subject. Robert Rosenstone has argued that visual and written information cannot be compared, he states that historical film must be seen not in terms of how it compares to written history but as a way of recounting the past with its own rules of representation.'
More skeptical historians such as David Herlihy believe that film is a visual medium and although it presents us with a visual aspect of history it doesn't provide us with the whole of history. In some accounts of the Genocide if the viewer had no previous knowledge of the subject it could be seen as to make us believe that it was a result of spontaneous fighting between two ethic groups.

H.Hintjens believes that any adequate account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda must acknowledge manipulation by external forces, domestic pressures and psychological factors. There are many questions that need to be answered so people can understand what occurred. The most important of these being does the film make you understand why so many people

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