The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema - Elm, Kabalek, Koehne (2024)

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The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema. Violence, Void, Visualization.

Julia Barbara Koehne, Kobi Kabalek

2014

This volume explores the multifaceted depiction and staging of historical and social traumata as the result of extreme violence within national contexts. It focuses on Israeli-Palestinian, German and (US) American film, and reaches out to cinematic traditions from other countries like France, Great Britain and the former USSR. International and interdisciplinary scholars analyze both mainstream and avant-garde movies and documentaries premiering from the 1960s to the present. From transnational and cross-genre perspectives, they query the modes of representation – regarding narration, dramaturgy, aesthetics, mise-en-scène, iconology, lighting, cinematography, editing and sound – held by film as a medium to visualize shattering experiences of violence and their traumatic encoding in individuals, collectives, bodies, and psyches. This anthology uniquely traces horror aesthetics and trajectories as a way to reenact, echo and question the perpetual loops of trauma in film cultures. The contributors examine the discursive transfer between historical traumata necessarily transmitted in a medialized and conceptualized form, the changing landscape of (clinical) trauma theory, the filmic depiction and language of trauma, and the official memory politics and hegemonic national-identity constructions.

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Terror films: The socio-cultural reconstruction of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema

Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

Images, 2019

The public discourse in Israel regarding events such as the Holocaust, war, or terror attacks mostly failed to embrace the trauma caused by such events, and to integrate their effects in the collective memory. According to trauma theoreticians, the location of trauma in the discourse is related to the character of trauma as a non-narratable memory, since personal trauma exist in the void, thus marking a missing memory. This paper explores the notion of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema as it was reconstructed during and after the Second Intifada (2000–2008). The paper focuses on feature films reflecting on experiences of terrorist violence, among them Avanim (2004), Distortion (2004), Frozen Days (2006), The Bubble (2006), 7 Minutes in Heaven (2009). These films embrace parallel elements structuring a worldview, in the private as well as the collective sphere, thus shaping the surroundings as a mirror of the self and the subjective traumatic experience as a reflection of a complex social reality. A particular focus of our analysis will also be on aesthetic strategies that cinematically express rupture and distortion of terrorist violence and trauma, especially moments of suddenness and disruption in contrast to duration and circular repetition, elements of a specific temporality of trauma that also shaped the narration and style of recent Israeli war films, such as Waltz with Bashir (2008) or Beaufort (2007).

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The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence, Void, Visualization (BOOK)

Kobi Kabalek

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Trauma in Translation Crossing the Boundaries between Psychoanalysis and Film

Rina Dudai

Projections, 2014

This article examines representations of traumatic memory within the context of psychological and poetic domains by analyzing two films: Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman (2008) and Cache (Hidden) by Michael Heneke (2005). These two films are coping with two events: the Sabra and Shatila's massacre that took place in Lebanon in 1982, and the 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris. In both events the films depict the intersection between privet and collective traumatic memory. Analyzing the texts focuses especially on the arousing stage of the trauma from a long period of belatedness and is used as a model for questions referring to the act of translating the trauma concept from discourse of psychology to the poetic language of film.

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Cinememory: Sexualized Trauma and Coming of Age in Holocaust-Related Israeli Films

Sandra Meiri

2014

Since 1978 Israeli Holocaust-related narrative films have associated the violence experienced during the Holocaust, including sexual violence, with the violence permeating Israeli society. In keeping with Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory”, this paper argues that cinema, as a visual form of artistic mediation, has an especially strong impact on the spectator, because it triggers affective, tactile, and bodily responses. Hence, the efficacy of generating an ethics of remembrance of sexually-related violence, based on cinematic aesthetics, which the author terms here “cinememory”. The paper focuses on a sub-genre of Holocaust-related films: coming-of-age films, which explore in different ways the lasting implications of growing-up in the shadow of sexualized trauma; the unconscious transmission of memories and tactile experiences, related to the ubiquity of sexual violence during the Holocaust.

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Politics of Trauma: Visual Representation in 'La Bataille d'Alger'

Dominique Laleg

Ellicit Journal, Volume 8, No 1, 2024

Focusing on the movie La Bataille d'Alger (1966) the paper explores how postcolonial cinema addresses and processes traumatic events from the Algerian liberation war. By examining its filmic form as well as its production, the paper demonstrates how the cinematographic apparatus partakes in the complex construction of traumatized memory. In order to do so, the paper refers to trauma theory, which underlines the visual and resistant character of the traumatic. While the realism of traumatic memory and recurring flashback images remains an unresolved question in psychiatric research, I argue that the movies aim for realism determines the entire production process, from screenplay, to staging, to editing. This production then causes an ontological confusion between filmic picture and perceptual image. It is further argued that the visual representation produced by this confusion, is used as means of soft power and consolidation of the sole power of domestic political actors in the postcolonial context. Résumé En se concentrant sur le film La Bataille d'Alger (1966), l'article étudie la manière dont le cinéma postcolonial adresse et traite les événements traumatiques de la guerre d’Algerie. En analysant sa forme filmique ainsi que sa production, l'article montre comment l'appareil cinématographique participe à la construction complexe d'une mémoire traumatisée. Pour cela, l'article se réfère à la théorie du traumatisme, qui souligne le caractère visuel et résistant du traumatisme. Alors que le réalisme de la mémoire traumatique et des images de flash-back reste une question non résolue dans la recherche psychiatrique, je soutiens que l'objectif du réalisme du film détermine l'ensemble de sa production, son scénario, sa mise en scène et son montage. Cette production provoque une confusion ontologique entre l'image filmique (picture) et l'image perceptuelle. J'argumente également que la représentation visuelle produite par cette confusion est utilisée comme moyen de soft power et de consolidation de l’autocratie nationale des acteurs politiques dans le contexte postcolonial.

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Review of Deeper than Oblivion. Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. Edited by Raz Josef and Boaz Hagin (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Elena Caoduro

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2014

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Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience

Frederik Le Roy

Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies, 2011

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The Maimed Body and the Tortured Soul: Holocaust Survivors in American Film

Julian Levinson

This paper identifies different techniques filmmakers use to bring the Holocaust to American audiences and illuminates the role of cinema in the production and dissemination of new meanings associated with the event itself. Focusing on "Judgement at Nuremberg" and "The Pawnbroker," it argues that the history of Holocaust representation on film can be charted as a movement from a focus on the wounded body to the wounded psyche. The key to this development is the development of new approaches to the flashback to mimic the effects of traumatic memory.

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Pelin Basci

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The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema - Elm, Kabalek, Koehne (2024)
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