The History of Genocide in Cinema

Atrocities on Screen

Jonathan Friedman, William Hewitt, Jonathan Friedman, William Hewitt

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784534226
• eBook ISBN: 9781786720474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The organization 'Genocide Watch' estimates that 100 million civilians around the globe have lost their lives as a result of genocide in only the past sixty years. Over the same period, the visual arts in the form of documentary footage has aided international efforts to document genocide and prosecute those responsible, but this book argues that fictional representation occupies an equally important and problematic place in the process of shaping minds on the subject. Edited by two of the leading experts in the field, The History of Genocide in Cinema analyzes fictional and semi-fictional portrayals of genocide, focusing on, amongst others, the repression of indigenous populations in Australia, the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century, the Herero genocide, Armenia, the Holodomor (Stalin's policy of starvation in Ukraine), the Nazi Holocaust, Nanking and Darfur. Comprehensive and unique in its focus on fiction films, as opposed to documentaries, The History of Genocide in Cinema is an essential resource for students and researchers in the fields of cultural history, holocaust studies and the history of film.

1

Settler Colonialism and Genocide in Australia

Sarah Maddison

University of Melbourne

Jane Mills

University of New South Wales, Australia

The arrival of British colonizers in 1788 saw the decimation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. Within weeks of the First Fleet sailing into what is now known as Sydney Harbor, frontier warfare had erupted in the southeast of the continent, subsequently spreading north and west over the following 140 years. During this period, Australia’s Indigenous peoples were engaged in ongoing violent conflict that belies the common characterization of Australian history as involving a relatively peaceful “settlement.”¹ The invasion and colonization of terra australis saw Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples massacred, dispossessed of land, and contained through legislation that restricted their freedom of movement and association, later also subjecting them to assimilationist policies intent on destroying their languages and social structures, and that allowed for the widespread removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Over many years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were pushed to the margins of Australian society both literally and figuratively, as the colonizing state sought to obliterate their existence in order to legitimize its declaration of the land as terra nullius, thereby justifying the refusal to negotiate treaties with Indigenous peoples or otherwise recognize their existing sovereignty.

The genocidal practices that underpinned this pattern of elimination and legitimation are typical of settler colonial societies. The emerging field of settler colonial studies emphasizes the distinct characteristics of nations with a permanent settler presence (notably Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States), which avoided the “decolonizing gestures” experienced in the extractive colonies in much of the rest of the world.² Settler colonial societies perpetuate an eliminatory logic that seeks to permanently displace the Indigenous populations within their acquired territories, without any intention that the nation as a whole might one day undertake a process of structural decolonization.³ This logic of elimination is inevitably genocidal, but in such a way that genocide cannot be understood as belonging to any particular period of history. Rather, genocide can be seen as intrinsic to the structure and institutions of settler colonial societies. As Patrick Wolfe has famously argued, “invasion is a structure not an event.”⁴

It is in light of this complex engagement with the practice of genocide that this chapter discusses films made by Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers that represent, misrepresent, or ignore the genocidal impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples in Australia. Films explored include those by Indigenous directors Tracey Moffatt (Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy), Ivan Sen (Dust, Toomelah) and Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah), and non-Indigenous directors Charles Chauvel (Jedda), Rolf de Heer (The Tracker), Igor Auzin (We of the Never-Never) and Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence).

Denying the Australian Genocide

The complex logic of settler colonialism has meant that genocide remains a complicated and contested concept in Australian cultural and political discourse. Settler societies like Australia rest on a denial of genocidal practices that allow them to maintain a sense of moral and political legitimacy.⁵ It therefore follows that representations of genocide in Australian feature films also reflect the nation’s deep ambivalence about its relationship with the original inhabitants of the continent. As a result, the filmic representation of genocide has not played a large role in the cultural history of Australia. Indeed, until relatively recently when a new generation of Indigenous filmmakers burst upon the cultural scene, films about any aspect of Australian Indigenous peoples were noticeable by their absence.⁶ Since the inception of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, the Australian film industry largely adhered to an unwritten rule that movies about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and issues were box office poison.⁷ Writing little more than ten years ago, Peter Krausz observed that of over 1000 Australian feature films produced in Australia he could “only identify around 50 films that represent Aborigines in any way at all in the narrative.”⁸ In partial explanation, Chris Healy points to cycles of rememberings and forgettings in white social memory; arguing that “Aboriginal people and things appear and disappear from public culture in strange but definite ways. Aborigines are recognized and identified, then they are overlooked and disregarded.”⁹ Understanding settler colonial logic thus helps to explain the absence or refusal to represent filmically the genocidal impact of settler colonial policies on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, as to do so would be to acknowledge the illegitimacy of the nation’s founding, and the “genocidal morality”¹⁰ that has enabled the settler state to advance its eliminatory logic despite the evident cost to Indigenous peoples. No differently from the majority of Australians, filmmakers have largely found it easier to forget, evade or avoid the topic.

There is also a sense in which Australian filmmakers have lacked the audio and visual tools to represent the historical and contemporary reality of Indigenous genocide. For many, the vocabulary of genocidal discourse seems inflammatory in the Australian context, at odds with the national narrative of exploration and settlement. But the concept of genocide, defined by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin as “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group”¹¹ is, of course, much wider than the popular understanding of the practice as one of mass extermination.¹² Leaving aside the question of intent, the concept of genocide tends to refer to the destruction of the foundations of life of the national group, including the destruction of language, culture, religion, and social institutions, with the intended aim of annihilating the group.¹³ Indigenous peoples around the world have argued that colonial practices intended to absorb or assimilate a minority group into a dominant group are fundamentally genocidal in intent.

Yet despite this, until almost the end of the twentieth century there was little discussion in Australia of the conflict between European colonizers and the Indigenous peoples, and certainly not in terms of genocide. An exception was the historian Peter Read whose prescient 1981 pamphlet The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 to 1969 used for the first time the now widely accepted term “stolen generations” to refer to the state-sanctioned, forced removal of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children during the twentieth century. Read argued that this policy constituted genocide, which:

… does not simply mean the extermination of people by violence but may include any means at all … At the height of the policy of separating Aboriginal people from their parents the Aborigines Welfare Board meant to do just that.¹⁴

Yet these early claims held little legitimacy within the dominant settler society where, as Tony Barta argued, “most Australians have never seriously been confronted by the idea that the society in which they live is founded on genocide,” despite the fact that “If ever a people has had to sustain an assault on its existence of the kind Lemkin described it would seem to have been over the last two hundred years in Australia.”¹⁵ The settler colonial mentality also explains the refusal to countenance a definition of genocide that includes cultural and assimilatory practices. Indeed, along with other settler colonial nations, Australia had specifically voted against the inclusion of cultural genocide in the UN definition. How could it do otherwise? The colonial project depended upon the destruction of Indigenous land ownership, societal structures and culture precisely in order to succeed.¹⁶ Yet the criterion of “intention” and the actual wording of the crime in the UN Convention contributed to the absence of the word “genocide” from the Australian lexicon for many years. Colin Tatz suggests the very nature of the crime may also explain the reluctance to confront the historical reality:

The degree to which the crime is widely considered abhorrent is indicated by the number of euphemisms used to not-name it – even while the crimes themselves are actually being carried out/put into operation. Almost all historians of the Aboriginal experience – black and white – avoid it. They write about pacifying, killing, cleansing, excluding, exterminating, starving, poisoning, shooting, beheading, sterilizing, exiling, removing – but avoid genocide.¹⁷

Ultimately, however, the reality of this history could not be suppressed, and the political contest over the genocide in Australia made its way onto the nation’s film screens.

Contesting Genocide on Film

The “not-naming” of genocide in Australia ended explosively in 1997 when the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report, Bringing Them Home: The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (hereafter Bringing Them Home) focused the nation’s attention upon genocide as never before. The report concluded that twentieth-century government policies of removing between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, particularly lighter-skinned children, from their families amounted to crimes against humanity and were in breach of international laws prohibiting genocide. As the report argued:

When a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.¹⁸

This first, overt mention of genocide in a government document unleashed a heated and ugly public debate. Indigenous and non-Indigenous politicians, public intellectuals, media commentators, filmmakers and many members of the general public took sides in what became known as the “history wars.”

Five years after the publication of Bringing Them Home, Phillip Noyce’s film, Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), brought the Indigenous experience of child removal to the big screen. Set in the 1931, the film tells the real-life story of three young girls of the Mardudjara people living in the Pilbara region of north-western Australia: Molly, her sister Gracie, and their cousin Daisy, aged 14, eight and ten respectively. Because they were considered “half-caste” in the racist language of the day, these children were among the many thousands of Aboriginal children who over a period of 70 or more years were removed from their families. In the film, we see the three girls transported 1,491 miles away from their home to a mission settlement from where, desperately homesick, they escape and follow the fence built to keep rabbits out of western Australia to walk all the way home. The story is extraordinary, extraordinarily moving – and true. It was first published in 1996 in a book written by Molly’s daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara, on which the filmmakers based their film.¹⁹

The film is remarkable in several ways, not least for its creation of a space in popular culture for the Indigenous experience to be seen and heard, although it does not ignore the benign intentions of some government perpetrators.²⁰ It also introduced Australia’s stolen generations to international audiences. Referring to the end of the film in which the real Molly Craig and Daisy Craig Kadibil, now two very elderly women, are filmed on their land and speaking in their language, the esteemed US film critic Roger Ebert made the connection to the Nazi Holocaust:

The final scene of the film contains an appearance and a revelation of astonishing emotional power; not since the last shots of Schindler’s List have I been so overcome with the realization that real people, in recent historical times, had to undergo such inhumanity.²¹

While the word “genocide” is not actually mentioned in the film, it clearly depicts the forcible transference of children of the group to another group along with practices of eugenics and cultural genocide, as the Indigenous characters are forbidden to marry and have children with members of their own race, speak their own language, inhabit their own land, or learn their own cultural practices.

Like the reaction to the Bringing Them Home report, the film’s critical response was loud, angry and frequently racist. Argument raged about whether white colonial settlement had indeed involved genocide and whether the child removal policy was done with or without good intentions. The argument also became mired in the issue of factual accuracy: had writer Christine Olsen and director Phillip Noyce exaggerated or twisted the facts? Opinion was further divided as to whether the film promoted an overly critical view of Australian history that unfairly judged the Australian state as perpetrators of genocide or provided “the approbation of the implementation of genocide [and] justifies the very act by obfuscating the crime as benevolence.”²²

Such debate about the veracity of historical experience is not uncommon to films that depict, discuss or allude to genocide. Take, for example, Manganinnie (John Honey, 1980) that offers a highly romanticized view of the frontier war period of settler history in Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s Land) in the early part of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a white settler family whose father participates in the notorious “Black Line.” This was the human chain of every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, that in 1831 swept across the settled districts in an attempt to corral all members of the Big River and Oyster Cove peoples and confine them in a small area in the south-east corner of the island. When young Joanna (Anna Ralph) becomes separated from her White family, the sole survivor of the massacre, Manganinnie (Mawuyul Yanthalawuy), “adopts” her and together they search for Manganinnie’s people. Upon learning that none have survived, Manganinnie dies.

Based on the novel by Beth Roberts²³ whose stated aim was to “promote g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributing Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Settler Colonialism and Genocide in Australia
• 2 No Good Samaritans: Explaining African Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Popular African Films
• 3 “White Saviors” Unable to Save the “Other” in Hollywood’s Genocidal West
• 4 Genocide as European Empire Building: The Slaughter of the Herero of Namibia
• 5 The Armenian Genocide in Film: Overcoming Denial and Loss
• 6 The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 on Screen: Making Sense of Suffering
• 7 The Holocaust in Feature Films: Problematic Current Trends and Themes
• 8 Slaughter in China on Film: Nanjing and “Saving Asia” through Mutilation
• 9 Bangladesh: The Forgotten Genocide
• 10 Argentina’s Dirty War on Film: The Absent Presence of The Disappeared
• 11 Featuring Acts of Genocide in Chilean Film
• 12 Screening the Killing Fields: The Cambodian Genocide on Film
• 13 “This time we’re going to hit them without mercy”: Indonesian Operations and East Timor’s First Feature Film
• 14 The Guatemalan Genocide on Film: An Ongoing Crisis and Omission
• 15 Cinematic Witnessing of the Genocide in Bosnia 1992–1995: Toward A Poetics of Responsibility
• 16 “Truth” in Films about the Rwandan Genocide
• 17 Stop a Genocide or Act in the National Interest?: A Comparative Examination of Hotel Rwanda and Attack on Darfur
• 18 Adults in Children’s Bodies: Disabling Children in Bahman Ghobadi’s Films
• Epilogue
• Epilogue: Genocide Art or “Kitsch”?
• Notes