(Amin was obsessed with destroying Israel and claimed to be training forces to invade it.) The simulation is meant to demonstrate the threat that Uganda poses to its enemies, and Amin’s extraordinary strategic genius. One of the film’s classic set pieces, for instance, involves a war game that Amin devised for the Ugandan army, which simulates an invasion of the Golan Heights. Schroeder subtitled the film “A Self Portrait,” and that’s exactly what it is: a self-portrait by a man who has no sense of how he really looks. But throughout, the dictator’s self-aggrandizing ambitions are sabotaged by Schroeder’s careful use of montage and voice-over, which juxtapose Amin’s fantastical claims with the reality of the havoc he wreaked on Uganda, and by Amin’s own self-delusory ravings. The resulting movie, Barbet Schroeder’s General Idi Amin Dada (which was released last year on DVD by Criterion), is a devastating look at despotism in action and a riveting, and strangely entertaining, portrait of Amin.Īmin seems to have imagined that the movie would end up as his version of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s adulatory documentary about Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rallies.
But as you are a man, that possibility does not arise.”) Amin’s hunger for publicity was so great, in fact, that in 1974 he became the first dictator in history to agree to be the subject of an independent documentary film.
(To Tanzanian ruler Julius Nyerere, Amin wrote: “I want you to know I love you very much, and if you had been a woman I would have considered marrying you, although your head is full of gray hairs. And he routinely sent off bizarre telegrams to other heads of state. He specialized in outrageous insults and stunts (such as ordering white businessmen to carry him on a palanquin, just as black Ugandans had once been forced to carry British colonialists).
Amin, as his obituary in the New York Times put it, “reveled in the spotlight of world attention,” and he did all that he could to make sure the spotlight stayed focused on him. He was also notoriously hungry for publicity. Idi Amin, the former Ugandan dictator who died last week, was notoriously brutal and capricious.
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