Understanding Hotel Rwanda: A reception study

Abstract

This study focuses on the movie Hotel Rwanda (2005), which depicts the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and tries to capture how viewers remember the film and how they interpret the actual events. It aims to reconstruct what (e.g. actors, events, motives, causes) is remembered by whom (e.g. age, sex, education) and in what way (e.g. context, dramatization). One important finding is that it is much less the movie’s narration and pictures that shape the interpretation and knowledge of the event as it is the background and personality of its audience that determines how viewers understand the events, what they remember and how these memories are constructed.

Halbwachs’ studies in collective memory: A founding text for contemporary ‘memory studies’?

“…As we have seen, Halbwachs deals with collective memory from a micro-sociological, interactionist and relational perspective, which, in keeping with an empirical, modern approach, would overcome the dominant and reifying approach. 10 In addition to this, his work offers ways to address the enigmatic black box of ‘reception’ that continues to haunt contemporary studies (Gudehus et al, 2010b; Kansteiner, 2002; Schwartz and Schuman, 2005). From this perspective, memory is no longer seen as the reception of a narrative produced independently of its social environment.…”

Memory studies - kohti tutkimusalueen vakiintumista

“…Jos medioitumisesta on usein puhuttu teoreettisella tasolla tai tarkasteltu tekstuaalisesti, työryhmä tarkasteli kysymystä empiirisen vastaanottotutkimuksen avulla, tosin vasta alustavassa tutkimuskokeilussa. (Gudehus, Anderson & Keller 2010. ) Audiovisuaalisen median erityisyyttä muistiteknologiana on käsitelty artikkeleissa, jotka analysoivat (audio)visuaalisen median ilmaisumuotoja ja -mahdollisuuksia.…”

Interpretative cooperation with biographical texts: A semiotic approach to analyzing collective memory

“…The fact that the memories were transmitted in a communicatively cooperative manner allowed all generations to remain unaware of the generational discrepancies in perception and to achieve the impression that there was only one definitive shared understanding of the past (see also Tschuggnall and Welzer, 2002; Welzer, 2010). Another example is a recent article on the reception of the film Hotel Rwanda (Gudehus and Anderson, 2010). The authors argue that “reception research at the microlevel, specifically at the point of actual reception, is indispensable for theorizing [historical] macro-phenomena and has not yet been addressed satisfactorily” (Gudehus and Anderson, 2010: 359).…”

“…Another example is a recent article on the reception of the film Hotel Rwanda (Gudehus and Anderson, 2010). The authors argue that “reception research at the microlevel, specifically at the point of actual reception, is indispensable for theorizing [historical] macro-phenomena and has not yet been addressed satisfactorily” (Gudehus and Anderson, 2010: 359). Drawing on analysis of interviews with people who have seen the film, they constructed two idealized types of modes of reception of the narrative document: emotional and factual.…”

“…Drawing on analysis of interviews with people who have seen the film, they constructed two idealized types of modes of reception of the narrative document: emotional and factual. The former comprises a moral and evaluative stance toward the events represented, the latter is rather more “reflexive in the face of the possibility of narrating history” (Gudehus and Anderson, 2010: 358). However, because of their small and nonsystematic sample, they could not relate these two reception modes to sociodemographic variables.…”