When Karen Henderson first taught “War Atrocities on Film,” a course at UTC, most of the students knew about the Jewish Holocaust in World War II and had some idea of what happened during the Vietnam War.
But they were unfamiliar with the Bosnian War and the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990’s, and even the name Abu Ghraib, the prison where Iraqi prisoners were tortured by the U.S. Army and CIA in the early 2000’s, didn’t ring a lot of bells.
They knew about all of them by the end of the semester.
“Their eyes were opened; they really had no idea,” says Henderson, a film lecturer at UTC. “They were all quite disturbed by what people do to other people and have done to other people, really, for no other reason than they could.”
She’s hoping a similar eye-opening experience happens in January when she starts teaching the course again. Among the films she will screen are Hearts and Minds, a documentary about the Vietnam War, Sometimes in April, a feature film set in Rwanda during the genocide, and Shot Through the Heart, a feature about the Bosnian War.
“I’m really interested in movies about the human condition; I’m really interested in movies that make us better people,” Henderson says. “I’m interested in movies as art, and in movies that have the power to change people for the better.”
Despite its title, the course isn’t only filled with films. There also are books to read such as Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide — “That’s continually an atrocity done in all conflicts,” she says — and the Vietnam War-focused Kill Anything That Moves.
Students also keep a journal to record their personal thoughts across the semester.
“I don’t grade for sentence structure or spelling or anything. It’s just a place to regurgitate,” Henderson says.
She stresses that she comes at the subject of wartime atrocities through the eyes of a film lover, not a historian. To that end, when students write the class’s research paper, they must discuss filmmaking elements of the movies, not just the subject matter. They examine cinematography, plot, screenplay, sound and critical response, among other things.
But she also wants students to understand the causes of the atrocities, what actually happened and how humans can so casually kill, rape and maim others, even people they already know. Sometimes, those reasons aren’t clear.
“In Rwanda, people that used to be neighbors, now they’ve got machetes and they’re just going around hacking their neighbors,” Henderson says.
Her hope is that, once they’ve taken the class, students have broadened their horizons, even if those horizons lie on unpleasant beginnings.
“I just hope the students, for the rest of their lives, they will have their ears up a little bit more when they’re listening to the news and care about humanity,” she says. “Hopefully, we can see as all human life as being valuable.”
