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The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema:
Violence Void Visualization
Edited by
Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek and Julia B. Köhne
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema:
Violence Void Visualization,
Edited by Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek and Julia B. Köhne
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2014 by Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek, Julia B. Köhne and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-6042-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6042-0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contributors .............................................................................................. viii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema
Julia B. Köhne, Michael Elm and Kobi Kabalek
Part I – Horror in Trauma Cinema
Chapter One ............................................................................................... 32
CACHÉ (2005), or the Ongoing Repression of Traumatic Memories
Thomas Weber
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 46
Screening Trauma: Reflections on Cultural Trauma and Cinematic
Horror in Roman Polanski’s Filmic Oeuvre
Michael Elm
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 68
Horror, History and the Third Reich: Locating Traumatic Pasts
in Hollywood Horrors
Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah
Part II – Nazism and War
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 90
Vengeful Fiction: (Re-)Presenting Trauma in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
(2009)
Dania Hückmann
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 108
Narrations of Trauma in Mainstream Cinema: Forgetting Death
in Duncan Jones’ SOURCE CODE (2011)
Daniel Müller
Table of Contents
vi
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 125
Traumatized Heroes: War and Distraction
Kerstin Stutterheim
Part III – Memory and Trauma
Chapter Seven .......................................................................................... 146
Shadows between Memory and Propaganda: War and Holocaust Trauma
in DEFA’s ‘Thaw’ Films
Pablo Fontana
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 163
Thomas Harlan’s Stories of Fathers: About the Precarious Relationship
between Historiography, Memory and Film in WUNDKANAL (1984)
and NOTRE NAZI (1984)
Jeanne Bindernagel
Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 177
Trauma and Fiction – Trauma and Concreteness in Film: Represented
in the Photofilm FIASCO (2010) by Janet Riedel, Katja Pratsche
and Gusztàv Hámos, based on Imre Kertész’s Homonymous Novel
Hinderk M. Emrich
Part IV – Israeli-Palestinian Film: Spaces
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 194
History beyond Trauma: Re-Visualizing the Palestinian Ruin
in PARATROOPERS (1977)
Danielle Schwartz
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 207
The All-Seeing Lens: Panoptical Reality, Televised Trauma and Cinematic
Representations of Urban Paranoia in Haim Bouzaglo’s DISTORTION
(2005)
Isaac (Itsik) Rosen
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 224
Beyond Trauma: Aesthetic Strategies of “Minor Cinema” within
the Liminal Space of Palestine (Ula Tabari, Elia Suleiman)
Peter Grabher
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization vii
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 251
“The struggle for meanings is the struggle to exist”:
Conversation with Peter Grabher
Ula Tabari
Part V – Israeli-Palestinian Film: Experiences
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 272
Transgenerational Trauma: On the Aftermath of Sexual Violence
Suffered by Women during the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema
Sandra Meiri
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 294
The Trauma of the Female Perpetrator and New War Cinema
Raya Morag
Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 314
“From Individual Experience to Collective Archive, from Personal
Trauma to Public Memory”: Accounts of War and Occupation in Israel
Marcella Simoni
CONTRIBUTORS
Jeanne Bindernagel, studied theatre studies, linguistics, and
educational studies at the Universities of Leipzig and Paris. She is a PhD
student in the Department of Theatre at Leipzig University and holds a
scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation. The primary
emphasis of her research is the development of a philosophical term of
hysteria, which includes readings of Sigmund Freud’s case studies
informed by the texts of Gilles Deleuze and current theories of
theatricality. She is working on the history of psychoanalytic aesthetics as
well as filmic and theatrical practices in German and French post-war
societies concerning their conditions of memory, trauma and gender. She
has published and taught on the theatre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, René
Pollesch and Signa, and films directed by Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard
and Thomas Harlan.
Michael Elm, PhD, studied sociology, political sciences and
educational theory at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
He received his doctorate with a thesis on the depiction of Holocaust
testimonies in feature and documentary films. In 2008, he was a research
fellow at the Fritz-Bauer-Institute working on issues of memorial culture
and reception theory of the Holocaust. In this capacity, he co-edited the
conference reader “Witnessing the Holocaust. Trauma, Tradition, and
Investigation.” From 2007 to 2009, he taught sociology, film and cultural
memory studies at Goethe-University. Elm is compiling a book about
“The Modernity of Trauma in German Feature Film.” Currently, he is
working as a long-term lecturer for the German Academic Exchange
Service in the Center for Austrian and German Studies at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev in Beer Sheva. Research fields: Film, Trauma and
Cultural Memory Studies, German Modernity in Film and Political
Philosophy, Cross-Cultural Educational Theory, and Holocaust Studies.
Hinderk M. Emrich, 1968 MD (University of Bern); 1998 PhD
(University of Munich); 1972 “Habilitation” in Molecular Neurobiology
(Technical University of Berlin); 1973-1974 patho-physiological studies at
the Pediatric Hospital, University Munich in collaboration with the
Department of Physiology of Munich; 1975-1978 postgraduate training in
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization ix
psychiatry, neurology and clinical psychopharmacology; 1979-1987
Group and later Department Leader of clinical psychopharmacology at the
Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry; 1991-1992 Fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; from 1992 to 2008 Chair of the
Department of Psychiatry at the Medical School, Hannover. Guest
Professorships at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Philosophical
Psychology) in March 1995; 1995-1997 at the Kunsthochschule für Neue
Medien, Köln; 1996/97 at Ben Gurion University of the Negev
(Philosophical Psychology); 1997-2002 at Universität Witten-Herdecke;
since 1999 at the Deutsche Film-und Fernseh-Akademie Berlin
(Tiefenpsychologie der Medien); since 2002 at Hochschule für Gestaltung
Karlsruhe; since 2008 at Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel.
Pablo Fontana, is PhD candidate in the Department of History at the
University of Buenos Aires, where he teaches Soviet cinema as a source
for historians as the Chair of Russian History. His research interests
include: DEFA Films, memory politics in the cinema of socialist
countries, propaganda techniques and Soviet Union history. He has
recently published the book Cine y Colectivización (Buenos Aires, Zeit,
2012) on the representation of the Soviet forced collectivization of Soviet
cinema between 1929 and 1941. For his PhD thesis, he is at present
researching the representation of the National-Socialist extermination
policy in the East German and Soviet cinema of the ‘Thaw.’
Peter Grabher, is a freelance historian, film activist and works as a
school teacher. He studied at the University of Vienna and the École
Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is a member of the Vienna-based film
group KINOKI. His research focuses on leftist filmmaking in the First
Austrian Republic, the aesthetics of the cinematic essay and film in the
context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Currently he is a PhD candidate,
studying the representation of Israel-Palestine in essay films since 1960.
Dania Hückmann received her PhD from the German Department at
New York University in 2014 where she was a Honorary Fellow at the
Humanities Initiative at NYU and affiliated with the Trauma and Violence
Transdisciplinary Studies program. She received her BA in Comparative
Literature and European Studies from NYU (2002) and her MA in
Comparative Literature from the Free University in Berlin (2007). Her
dissertation Das Versprechen der Gerechtigkeit: Rache im Realismus
offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the way in which revenge poses a
threat to the nascent civil-legal society in German Realism. Her research
Contributors
x
interests include discourses of law in literature and film, narratology, and
representations of trauma and violence, from German Classicism to the
post World War II period. She has published on Jean Améry and
metaphors, Heinrich von Kleist and revenge, Thomas Bernhard’s
Extinction and co-authored an article on 9/11 and the NYU community for
Traumatology.
Kobi Kabalek, holds a PhD from the University of Virginia, studied at
Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel and Humboldt-University in
Berlin. The title of his dissertation is: “The Rescue of Jews and Memory in
Germany, from the Nazi Period to the Present.” Research focus: cultural
history, historical experience, and memory in Germany and Israel. Recent
publications include (together with Peter Carrier): “Cultural Memory and
Transcultural Memory – A Conceptual Analysis,” in: Lucy Bond/Jessica
Rapson (eds.), The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between
and Beyond Borders (forthcoming); “Das Scheitern und die Erinnerung:
Über das Nicht-Retten von Juden in zwei deutschen Nachkriegsfilmen,”
in: Lisa Bolyos/Katharina Morawek (eds.), Diktatorpuppe zerstört,
Schaden gering: Kunst und Geschichtspolitik im Postnazismus (Vienna:
Mandelbaum, 2012); “Unheroic Heroes: Re-Viewing Roman Polanski’s
‘The Pianist’ in Germany and Israel,” in: Vera Apfelthaler and Julia
Köhne (eds.), Gendered Memories: Transgressions in German and Israeli
Film and Theater (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007), 61-82.
Julia B. Köhne, PD, PD, Dr. habil., is guest professor at Humboldt
Universität zu Berlin and Privatdozentin for Contemporary and Cultural
History at the University of Vienna. Her research focus is on cultural
studies, media culture, and film theory in the twentieth and twenty-first
century, the history of the body, and the history of military psychiatry.
Köhne is the author of Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale
Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens, 1914-1920 (Husum,
Matthiesen, 2009). She has edited and co-edited, among others, Splatter
Movies. Essays zum modernen Horrorfilm (Berlin, Bertz-Fischer, 2005,
2006, 2012) (with Ralph Kuschke and Arno Meteling); Filmische
Gedächtnisse. Geschichte – Archiv – Riss (Vienna, Mandelbaum, 2007)
(with Frank Stern, Karin Moser, Thomas Ballhausen and Barbara
Eichinger); Gendered Memories. Transgressions in German and Israeli
Film and Theater (Turia+Kant, 2007) (with Vera Apfelthaler); Trauma
und Film. Inszenierungen eines Nicht-Repräsentierbaren (Berlin, Kadmos,
2012); Zooming IN and OUT. Produktionen des Politischen im neueren
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization xi
deutschsprachigen Dokumentarfilm (Vienna, Mandelbaum, 2013) (with
Aylin Basaran, Klaudija Sabo).
Sandra Meiri, is co-chair of Film Studies in the Department of
Literature, Art & Linguistics, The Open University of Israel. Her studies
concentrate on film and Israeli cinema – gender, feminism, subjectivity,
ethics, and trauma as well as ethics and poetics, film & psychoanalysis and
film theory. She is the author of Any Sex You Can Do, I Can Do Better:
Cross-Gender in Narrative Cinema (Tel Aviv: Migdarim Series,
Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2011), and co-editor of Just
Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011)
and Identities in Transition in Israeli Culture (Raanana: The Open
University of Israel, forthcoming).
Raya Morag, is an associate professor of cinema studies at the
Department of Communication & Journalism, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Israel. Her research and publications deal with post-traumatic
cinema, trauma and ethics, perpetrator trauma, New German Cinema,
Vietnam war movies, documentary cinema, Israeli and Palestinian second
Intifada cinema and corporeal-feminist film critique. Her current research
is focused on the perpetrator figure and societal trauma in cinema. She is
the author of Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the
Aftermath of War (Peter Lang, 2009), The Defeated Male. Cinema,
Trauma, War (Koebner Series, Jerusalem, and Resling, Tel Aviv, 2011)
(Hebrew) and Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema
(I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 2013). Her work has appeared in
such journals as Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, The Communication
Review, Journal of Film & Video, International Journal of Communication,
and Framework.
Morag is an artistic director of the Documentary Film Section, the
Rabinovich Fund for the Arts, Tel-Aviv. In this role, she is involved in the
full-lifecycle of a project: funding criteria, supervision of directors, script
development/editing through to the final cut. The Rabinovich Fund
contributes considerable support to Israeli feature films, documentaries,
and student films. Since 2008 Morag has written a permanent cinema
column for the prestigious Haaretz newspaper.
Daniel Müller, is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and
American Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. While
working full-time as a research manager, he also lectures on film studies
focusing on genre film. Among his research interests are the convergence
Contributors
xii
of history, popular culture, social psychology, film and cultural theory, and
psychoanalysis as related to film. He recently wrote about “Nostalgia in
H.P. Lovecraft” in the anthology “Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the
1920s & 1930s” (Salem Press, 2013) and “Survival and System in
RESIDENT EVIL (2002): Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”
in: Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe of the
Games and Films (McFarland 2014).
Isaac (Itsik) Rosen, holds an MA and BFA in Film and Television
studies from Tel Aviv University and Sapir Academic College. He is head
of the Practical Engineers Program in the Film and Television Department
at the Camera Obscura School of Art. His research fields include: Urban
Cinema, New Israeli Cinema of the 21st Century, iconography of the
nightmare in Modern and Post-Modern Film, modern horror and
representations of the apocalypse in current world cinema. His work
“Hebrew Horror – The Origins and Destinations of Israeli Horror Cinema”
was recently published in Film and Festivals Issue 26, London, Jan. 2011,
22-25.
Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah, is a PhD candidate in the Department
of History at the University of Maryland and a Research Associate at the
Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution (CRDC)
at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. She holds a Master of
Arts in History from George Mason University, and specializes in
transnational approaches to modern Middle Eastern and Jewish history.
Her work explores themes such as multivocality, popular memory, and
conflict in history.
Danielle Schwartz, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Hebrew
Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is conducting
research about the concept of Realism in Israeli literary and cinematic
criticism. She wrote her MA thesis on images of Palestinian ruins in Israeli
movies at the late 1970‘s in the Cultural Studies program at Hebrew
University, Jerusalem. The research was presented in several international
conferences and is expected to be published in Hebrew as a book. Her
research interests include: Israeli film and literature, cultural and visual
studies, and critical theories. Publications: “De-Historization of the Nakba
in Israeli Cinema,” in: Collected Volume on Israeli Cinema, Ismar
Elbogen Network for Jewish Cultural History (Neofelis Verlag,
forthcoming); “Kotrot Mabat: on Masha – a film by Dana Goldberg,” in:
Ma’aravon 8 (2012).
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization xiii
Marcella Simoni, obtained her PhD from the University of London in
2004. She is now Junior Lecturer in History and Institutions of Asia at the
University of Venice where she has also been Research Fellow in 2006-
2008 and in 2011. She has also been teaching at New York University in
Florence since 2004. She has received various post-doctoral scholarships:
at the Centre de Recherche Francais à Jerusalem (2009-2010), at
INALCO, Paris (2010-2011), and the Alessandro Vaciago Prize of the
Accademia dei Lincei. Simoni has published two books, A Healthy Nation
(Cafoscarina, 2010) and At the Margins of Conflict. At the Margins of
Conflict. Social Perspectives on Arabs and Jews in British Palestine
(1922-1948) (Venezia 2010) and has co-edited three books in Italian. She
has published articles in various European languages in scientific journals,
among them “Middle Eastern Studies,” “Jewish History,” “Passato e
Presente,” “Genesis,” “Medicina & Storia.” She is working on projects
dealing with youth, protest, and conflict in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
the history of conscientious objection in Israel; and non-violent resistance
among Palestinians. She speaks English, French, and Hebrew fluently and
her Arabic reaches an intermediate level, Italian being her mother tongue.
Her latest publication on peace-building in Israel and Palestine can be
found at http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/index.php?issue=5.
Kerstin Stutterheim, PhD, is professor of dramaturgy and aesthetics
at HFF “Konrad Wolf,” Department of Media Theory at Potsdam-
Babelsberg since 2006 and an awarded filmmaker. From 2001-2006 she
was professor of Film and Media at the University of Applied Design,
Faculty of Visual Communication in Würzburg, Germany. 2008-2011, she
acted as the founder-director of the Institute of Art Research at HFF. She
is the author of a book on dramaturgy in film and of several articles in
anthologies and journals – e.g., “Hitler nonfictional,” in: Matchans,
Karolin/Rühl, Martin A. (eds.), Hitler – Films from Germany. History,
Cinema and Politics since 1945. Macmillan 2013; “Gesichtslose
Projektion, inszeniertes Gegenbild. Das Bild des Juden in den deutschen
Wochenschauen zwischen 1933 und 1942,” in: Filmblatt 44 / 2011.
Currently, Stutterheim is editing a book on aesthetics and dramaturgy in
postmodern cinema, Come and play with us (forthcoming), and writing a
book about dramaturgy and film aesthetics in fiction film, documentary,
TV and Games (forthcoming).
Ula Tabari is an independent Palestinian filmmaker living in Paris,
also working as an actress, casting-director, and language coach for actors.
She was born in 1970 in Nazareth and started her studies in theatre and the
Contributors
xiv
visual arts. In 1996, she collaborated with Elia Suleiman in his Chronicle
of A Disappearance where she handled different responsibilities in
production and casting in addition to playing a main role (Adan). Tabari
also worked together with Suleiman on The Arab dream (1997), with
Christophe Loizillon (Les pieds, 1999), Samir Jallal Eddin (Forget
Bagdad, 2002), Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi (Road 181, 2003), Steven
Spielberg (Munich, 2005), and others. Her cinematic work includes her
first long documentary Private Investigation (2002), the fictional short film
Diaspora (2005), and her latest work Jinga 48 (2009). Recently, she played
the role of Zeinab in the first feature of Hiam Abbass, Inheritance (2012)
& Violet in the first feature of Suha Arraf, The three sisters (2012). At the
moment she is preparing the shooting for her upcoming documentary film
entitled My Eyes for My Friend.
Thomas Weber, is a Professor of film and television studies at the
University of Hamburg since 2011 and project leader of “Topics and
Aesthetics of the Documentary Film” as part of the DFG-project: “History
of the German Documentary Film after 1945” (started 2012). Recent
publications include: “The Hybridization of German Documentary
Formats since the 1990s,” in: AVINUS Magazin, Sonderedition Nr. 7
(Berlin 2009); Medialität als Grenzerfahrung. Futurische Medien im Kino
der 80er und 90er Jahre (Bielefeld 2008), Mediologie als Methode (ed.
with Birgit Mersmann) (Berlin, 2008); “Les victimes de l’histoire.
Préalables à un programme de recherche,” in: Fleury, Béatrice/Jacques
Walter (eds.), Qualifier des lieux de détention et de massacre. Questions
de Communication, série actes 5, Metz 2008, S. 229-236.
INTRODUCTION
THE HORRORS OF TRAUMA IN CINEMA
JULIA B. KÖHNE, MICHAEL ELM
AND KOBI KABALEK
This anthology is the product of the international interdisciplinary
conference, “The Horrors of Trauma: Violence, Re-enactment, Nation, and
Film,” that took place at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer
Sheva, Israel, in May 2012. The 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,
(former East and West) German and (US) American film, also examining
broad issues of ‘trauma’ depiction in films from other countries (France,
Great Britain, the former USSR and others).
Contributors to this volume come from Austria, France, Germany,
Great Britain, Israel/Palestine, Italy, the United States of America, and
Argentina. Their research covers a wide array of disciplines including
history, sociology, psychology, Jewish studies, Middle East studies, film
and media studies, trauma (in cinema) studies and gender studies. The
articles are directed toward academic readers of different levels as well as
non-academics interested in interpretations of mainstream and avant-garde
movies and documentaries dealing with the ‘horrors of trauma.’
In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), the film
theorist Siegfried Kracauer analogized the silver screen to the shield of the
ancient Greek mythological hero, Perseus.1 To avoid a direct confrontation
with the petrifying stare of the gorgonian monster, Medusa, Perseus uses
his shield as a mirror. As her horrifying image is reflected in his polished
shield, it is – in this mediated form – no longer deadly. Thus, Perseus is
1 Siegfried Kracauer, “Das Haupt der Medusa,” in: Theorie des Films. Die
Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit, Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke (eds.), vol.
3, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 467-469.
Introduction
2
enabled to decapitate her. Her head becomes a weapon and is put on an
aegis to frighten enemies. The volume, The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema:
Violence – Void – Visualization, follows both aspects of the mythological
tale and its interpretation. Cinema serves as a shield/screen offering
pathways to insight into dreadful scenes of actual horror, cruelty and
violence without petrifying our bodies. As such, film is a powerful and
liberating media because it allows us to ‘incorporate’ unsighted horrific
scenes in our memory, to ‘behead’ or distort the horror it mirrors, and to
influence the discourse about violent events in real life.
This volume examines these functions of cinema within the quadrat:
violence, trauma, nation and self. A variety of films, premiering between
the 1960s and the 2010s, ranging from documentaries and feature films to
independent cinema, will be analyzed. The approach of the volume is to
ask which modes of representation – regarding narration, dramaturgy,
aesthetics, mise-en-scène, iconology, lighting, cinematography, editing
and sound – film holds as a medium to visualize shattering experiences of
violence and their traumatic encoding in individuals or collectives, bodies
and psyches. What historical insights and cultural perspectives does the
medium of film enable in tackling the question of traumatic impact? The
contributors analyze the discursive transfer between first, historical
traumata necessarily transmitted in a medialized or theorized form,
second, the changing landscape of (clinical) trauma theory, third, the
filmic depiction and language of trauma, and fourth, official memory
politics and hegemonic national-identity constructions. Special attention is
given to horror aesthetics and trajectories as a way to re-enact, echo and
question the perpetual loops of trauma in the creative artefact film.
Several books similarly approach the nexus of ‘trauma,’ horror and
mediatization, for example, Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representation
(2005), Linnie Blake’s The Wounds of Nations and Elisabeth Bronfen’s
Specters of War. Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict. Lowenstein
concentrates on the horror genre and its capacity to visualize traumatically
affected systems by analyzing horror classics like PEEPING TOM (1960),
ONIBABA (1964), LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972), and Cronenberg’s
movies and their link to the Vietnam War, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and other
man-made catastrophes. Just as Lowenstein, who sees cinematic horror as
a vehicle to articulate and communicate the horrors of history in alienated
form, Blake retells the history of violence – from the Second World War
to 9/11 – via filmic artefacts. Exploring the connection between horror
cinema, historical traumata and nation-building, she states that film can be
a multiplier, distributing psychological and academic knowledge about
“traumatic events such as genocide, war, social marginalization or
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 3
persecution.”2 Bronfen’s Specters of the War makes a contribution to
cinematic trauma discourse by stressing the role of Hollywood war films
conducing to circulate the fascination with war as certain ideologies, fears
and fantasies accompany it on a cultural level. The visual material serves
as a looking-glass rendering US-American traumatic war history
perceptible in a certain way that depends on the changing political climate.
Our volume, The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema, deepens the ongoing
debate about ‘trauma’ and cinema by paying special attention to the
circular structure of horror and ‘trauma’ from a transnational and cross-
genre perspective. ‘Trauma’ pervades all genres and national borders.
Traumatic histories travel through a multitude of diverse cinematic genres,
enriching them with horrific narratives. In this volume, ‘horror’ refers to
the intense feelings of fear, shock and disgust that are associated with
‘trauma’ and which the films examined represent as significant moments.
In some cases, these films directly adopt or quote rules of the horror genre,
while in others, reference to this genre is less obvious, though with
markedly similar effect. Horror standards have clearly been an intrinsic
part of the greater film culture since the invention of film. Storing and
communicating parts of traumatic histories – belonging to singular
psyches or the ‘collective unconscious’ – motion pictures from a variety of
national backgrounds succeed in rewriting or re-presenting history,
transcending their ascribed diegeses, as well as narrative frames and
classical interpretative limits. Rather than limit examination of the films
herein to their particular national contexts and sociopolitical milieus, this
anthology shall portray them as flexible carriers of meaning open to
perpetual revision and reevaluation from ever changing interpretative
positionings.
Violence – Void – Visualization
The abovementioned countries, in particular the United States,
Germany and Israel/Palestine, were ‘impregnated’ by different traumatic
experiences, including extreme and overwhelming violence, shock,
concussion, and distress, as they were shaped by atrocity, war, genocide,
catastrophe, and other man-made disasters. Therefore, they have often
been referred to as “traumatized societies,” “trauma cultures,” (E. Ann
Kaplan) and “wound cultures” (Mark Seltzer), or otherwise associated
with the phrases “politics of terror and loss,” and “pathological public
2 Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and
National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
Introduction
4
sphere.”3 Yet it is rarely reflected in-depth that the term and conception of
‘trauma’ was actually transferred from (clinical) psychology onto the
socio-cultural and national spheres. The articles in this volume thus
examine the application of the trauma conception as an analytical tool to
investigate the production of “cultural meaning” (kulturelles Deutungsmuster)4
and meaning-making within the social body in light of the connections
between traumatic structures and films’ diegesis and between trauma
language and film language.5 Subsequently, the filmic ways to adopt,
imitate, transform, process, or ‘work through’ experiences and symptoms
of violence and ‘trauma’ will be discussed in sections referring almost
exclusively to the mentioned countries and societies, while reflecting on
the historical context of catastrophes and individual or governmental acts
of violence connected to them. At the center of this amalgamation stands a
reconstruction of the circular structure of discursive elements comprising
experiences of violence, traumatization and representation.
A psychic trauma is caused when an intense, often extremely violent
situation disables the ability of a consciousness to integrate an experience
within the narrative, linear memory of an individual. The psyche is
overwhelmed by negative impulses and stimuli to a degree that it cannot
react adequately.6 A frequent consequence manifests as a representational
void and lack of memory; ‘trauma,’ it seems, is unrepresentable and
unspeakable. On the level of both the individual and collective, a “trauma
process”7 may take place – usually accompanied by a variable latency
phase – sometimes leading to a repetition of the traumatizing situation on
another level or in a disguised manner (Wiederholungszwang, Sigmund
Freud). As part of the circular structure of violence-void-visualization,
events that traumatized individuals or collectives – after a varying period
of time – appear as medialized objects: a body influenced by the psyche
3 E.g., Ann Kaplan, Traum a Cu lture, Th e Poli tics of Loss an d Terror in Media and
Literature (New Brunswick, 2005); Mark Seltzer, “Wound Culture. Trauma in the
Pathological Public Sphere,” October 80 (1997), 3-26.
4 Elisabeth Bronfen, Birgit R. Erdle and Sigrid Weigel (eds.), Trauma. Zwischen
Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster (Köln/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau,
1999).
5 E.g., Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia:
Tem ple Un ive rsit y Pr ess , 2004); Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust.
History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
6 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: “Trauma,” in: idem (eds.), Das
Vokabular der Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1972), 513-518.
7 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma. A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012),
15-28.
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 5
displaying traumatic symptoms, literature, spoken memories of an eye-
witness, a photograph, or a motion picture. Filmic representation of the
notion of ‘trauma’ will be investigated in this volume concerning their
capacity to reenact, reactivate, or re-produce traumatizing situations (as do
inner-psychic structures of traumatization) in artistic and playful modes.
This is done by use of flashback structures,8 leading to so-called “backstory
wounds” (Michaela Krützen); the bending, shortening, or destabilization of
the intra-filmic timeline; traumatic iconographies; sounds that allegorize
the past, etc. Film thereby repeats and reenacts the experienced event,
causing or actuating ‘trauma’ again and again on a cultural level – albeit in
a transformed, mediatized manner. Apart from its potentially cathartic
effects, the loop of traumatizing events, aims to represent them, the
production of filmic images and restagings of the past in film may in
themselves create recurring patterns of ‘trauma.’
Trauma Theory and Film History
Since its invention, film has been intrinsically tied to the sphere of
traumatic wounds and vice versa. What began in the Grand Café in Paris,
when novice audiences instinctively recoiled from the unsettling images of
the Lumière brothers’ production of L’ARRIVÉE D’UN TRAIN EN GARE À LA
CIOTAT (1895/6), continues today via multiple filmic plots. According to
Lorenz Engell, the shock experienced by these early film spectators not
only became a myth, but also changed the categories of perceptions,
probability, and prospectability for future audiences of film screenings.9
Almost at the same time, the establishment of trauma theory and
psychological and (neuro)psychiatric research on traumatized patients was
founded among medical and other scientific disciplines. John Eric
Erichsen, Jean-Martin Charcot, Hermann Oppenheim, Josef Breuer, Sigmund
8 The term ‘flashback’ is used in psychology to indicate a sudden, involuntarily re-
experiencing of a past event without full awareness or consciousness of what really
happened. Its origin lies in the field of cinema and its narration techniques rather
than in trauma theory. Cf. Maureen Cheryn Turim, Flashbacks in Film. Memory
and History (New York, London, Routledge, 1989).
9 Lorenz Engell, Bewegen Beschreiben. Theorie zur Filmgeschichte (Weimar:
VDG, 1995), 107 et seq. and Anna Martinetz: “Filmdramaturgie und
Traumaforschung. Eine Betrachtung zweier parallel entstandener Disziplinen,” in:
Julia B. Köhne (ed.), Trauma und Film. Inszenierungen eines Nicht-
Repräsentierbaren (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012), 56-75.
9 Thomas Elsaesser, Melodrama and Trauma. Modes of Cultural Memory in
American Cinema (London: Routledge, 2009), 56-75.
Introduction
6
Freud, to name just a few, were among the pioneers and protagonists of
nascent trauma theory of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Post-
catastrophe or post-combat disorders, dubbed “railway spine,” had been
known since the 1860s in relation to railway accidents at that time.
Competing terms to describe the same phenomenon in other contexts such
as war included: “nostalgia,” “irritable heart,” “soldier’s heart,”
“depression,” “demoralization” and later, “neurasthenia”, “combat fatigue,”
and “traumatic neurosis.”10 The terminological chaos and lack of differential
diagnoses often “veiled clinical parallels and hindered practice and
research.”11 The First World War and the widely spread phenomena of
“war hysteria,” “shell shock,” “bomb shell disease,” and “war neurosis”
helped to consolidate the recognition, credibility, and ‘lobby’ of the
diagnosis traumatic disorder. Although there was weighty insecurity
concerning the classification, naming and treatment of what had been
diagnosed as “hysteria virilis,” “simulation,” “cowardice,” “inner
desertion” or simply “NYD[N]” (not-yet-diagnosed [nervous]), military
physicians took up the fight against this disturbing and troublesome
“disease” that seemed to destroy the order, regularity, and authority of the
army corps.12 In the Second World War, military physicians’ insecurities
returned alongside massive and multiple trauma symptoms.13 But it was
not until the Vietnam War that the phenomenon of ‘trauma’ – in terms of
clinical nosology (“post-Vietnam syndrome”), including depression,
flashbacks, delusions, nightmares, panic attacks, sleeplessness, and suicide
– was accepted on a larger scale and with greater consensus.14 Not least,
10 Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions. Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (Princeton, 1995), 13-42; Edgar and Jones, “Post-combat Disorders: the
Boer War to the Gulf,” in: Harry Lee and Edgar Jones (eds.), War and Health:
Lessons from the Gulf War (Chichester, 2007), 5-39.
11 Philip A. Saigh and James Douglas Bremner, “The History of Posttraumatic
Stress,” in: Philip A. Saigh and James Douglas Bremner (eds.), Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder. A Comprehensive Text (Boston/London, 1999), 1-17, here 5.
12 Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 51 et seq. Cf. Julia B. Köhne, Kriegshysteriker.
Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens, 1914-1920
(Husum: Matthiesen, 2009); Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men. War, Psychiatry, and the
Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (Ithaca/London, 2003).
13 See, for example, John Huston’s documentary LET THERE BE LIGHT (USA, 1946)
that claims realism, authenticity, and plausibility, despite its depiction of World
War II veterans in highly subjective, aestheticizing, and fictionalizing perspectives.
14 Eric T. Dean, Shook over Hell: Post Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil
War (Cambridge/London, 1997), 14; for an analysis of the impact of the Vietnam
War on film, see: Raya Morag, Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in
the Aftermath of War (P.I.E. – Peter Lang, Brussels, 2009).
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 7
this was due to better orchestration of the disciplines of social psychology,
psychoanalysis and neurology corresponding to the field of military
psychiatry ultimately involved in the remedy of the problem.
In 1980, these symptoms were described as “post-traumatic stress
disorder” (PTSD) in clinical manuals (e.g., the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-III, a classification system edited by
the American Psychiatric Association) and were therefore diagnosable
with more ease and professional cognizance. Since then, this definition has
been challenged and altered by various psycho(traumato)logical approaches
that, like Bessel van der Kolk’s psychiatric theory on traumatic memory
processes, oscillate between psychogenic and neurophysiological patterns
of explanation.15 As with psychodynamic and interpersonal lenses unto the
impact of ‘trauma,’ such approaches have been augmented by contemporary
clinical perspectives including neurobiology and neurology. In later wars,
e.g., in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Israel/Palestine and Kosovo, veterans
continued to suffer from “PTSD,” “a loss of ontological security,”16 or
“mild traumatic brain injury” – terms in current use.17 Military health
systems have experimented – and continue to do so – with therapeutic
treatment via hydrotherapy, hypnosis, suggestion, electrotherapy and, at a
later date, via psychotherapy and “Redekur,” psychological self-
management, self-regulation, “neuroimaging” and medication, depending
on the prevailing conjuncture of medical schools and their particular
therapeutic preferences. Often, the therapeutic scheme to reconcile with
‘trauma’ can be described by the triad: stabilization, confrontation and
integration of denied parts of the traumatic memory.
For instance, in 2007, the Veterans Administration, the public medical
organization for army veterans in the United States, adopted a concept by
the Mandatory Palestine-born psychologist Edna Foa. The so-called
“Prolonged Exposure Therapy” was supposed to reduce PTSD symptoms
in more than 80 percent of cases. This cognitive-behaviorist therapy is
based on the idea that a “traumatic memory” is not the enemy of the
patient. Rather, the subject is encouraged to retell his/her story in the
present tense in order to more directly encounter the “traumatic memory”
15 Bessel A. van der Kolk: “Trauma and Memory,” in: idem/Alexander C.
McFarlane/Lars Weisaeth (eds.), Trau matic S tres s – The E ffect s of Over whelm ing
Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (London/New York: Guilford Press, 1996),
279-302.
16 Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 8.
17 Cf. Edgar Jones, Nicola T. Fear and Simon Wessely, “Shell shock and Mild
Traumatic Brain Injury: A Historical Review,” in: The American Journal of
Psychiatry 164:11 (2007), 1-5.
Introduction
8
and ultimately alleviate one’s fear. Foa compares this process with
watching a scary film: “It is hard at the beginning, as if you were seeing a
very scary movie for the first time. But just like a movie, when you watch
it for the tenth time, the fear is forgotten and the movie gets boring.”18
Many other parallels can be drawn between clinical trauma research
and the knowledge of practitioners in the field of traumatology and film
aesthetics and dramaturgy. Revealing the parallel development of the two
fields are the academic termini: “scenic memory,” “screen-spectator-
technique” (Frank W. Putnam), and “psychodynamic imaginative trauma
therapy.” In the latter, traumatic memory fragments are projected onto an
“inner display screen” or “inner stage” watched by the patient like an “old
movie” that can be stopped, fast-forwarded, set to close-up, or switched to
black and white via imaginary remote control. Ostensibly, this enables
self-comfort and allows for control over the interplay between association
and dissociation.19
Film and Trauma Interface
The simultaneous historical development of the two spheres, film and
the symptoms and notion of ‘trauma,’ results not only in their empirical,
heuristic and semantic inseparability, but also in the question of how
traumatic and filmic languages may be telescoped and explored within a
research scenario that concentrates on their synergetic effects. The present
articles not only disclose interconnections between hyper-violent
traumatizing historical events and the development of trauma theory as
discussed rudimentarily above, but the contributors also analyze the
aesthetical, narrative, dramaturgical and diegetic functions of filmic texts
that embody traumatic encodings. Further research questions being
addressed in this anthology include: How can individual and/or collective
wounds be transferred to and popularized by film? How does film
communicate forgotten or repressed traumatic inscriptions, be it on a
national or international level? How does film affect or catalyze the
‘digestion’ and ‘incorporation’ of trauma histories in the official narration
of history and national identities built on the conceptualization (and
illusion) of a “continuous narrative of national progress, the narcissism of
18 Interview with Edna Foa in Haaretz 06.08.2010, “Queen of Broken Hearts,” by
Coby Ben-Simhon, http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/queen-of-broken-
hearts-1.306416, (Accessed April 15, 2013).
19 Luise Reddemann, Psychodynamisch Imaginative Traumatherapie (Pfeiffer bei
Klett-Cotta, 2005), 172.
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 9
self-generation, the primeval present of the Volk”?20 How do the acoustic,
aesthetic, dramaturgical and narrative means of film operate together in
signifying the phenomenon ‘trauma?’ How can the polysemic filmic text
created in this process be decrypted via academic-analytical means? Does
the aestheticized presentation of ‘trauma’ in film undermine or contradict
its historical content and references to real catastrophes?
To address these questions, a diverse selection of films and film
ensembles, from genres such as melodrama, thriller, horror, documentary,
and art-house film, will be explored. All of the nominated films deal with
historical traumata – ranging from the Second World War, the
Holocaust/Shoah, the Nakba, the Paris massacre of Algerian demonstrators
in 1961, and the on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that continue to
haunt affected individuals and communities. Said traumata are mirrored in
the topics, plots, settings, trajectories, figures, mise-en-scène, sound, and
music of the discussed films, with the traumatization of the films’
characters semantically intertwined with the catastrophic issues of the
collective, in particular within the national sphere. In some cases, as in the
depiction of Adolf Hitler in German cinema, a historical figure may be
charged with the traumatic events of an entire nation and thereby
transformed into an icon of evil.21
This volume is based on the credo that film serves as a medium that
activates and deconstructs taboos associated with traumatic wounds in a
unique way – wounds that, because they are sometimes so painful and
incomprehensible, cannot be comprehensively integrated into the psyche
or narrations, history, mythology or ideology of the nation. Within the
notional “dialectic of trauma,” Judith L. Herman casts the oscillation
between traumatic oblivion and intrusion.22 Film can render otherwise
hidden traumatic wounds visible and perceptible, and therefore debatable
and negotiable. Film is capable of visualizing ‘traumata’ because it can
most effectively depict irregularities and anachronisms. Film can transport
images repressed or denied by the social body, forgotten iconologies and
intense flashbacks intruding upon the consciousness back into the social
discourse – albeit in an alienated manner. Traumatic memory fragments
20 Homi K. Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation,” in: Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), The Nation
and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 1 et seq.
21 Michael Elm, “Man, Demon, Icon: Hitler’s Image between Cinematic
Representation and Historical Reality,” in: Karolin Machtans and Martin A. Ruehle
(eds.), Hitler – Films from Germany: History, Cinema and Politics since 1945
(London: Palgrave McMillan, 2012), 151-167.
22 Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from
Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1, 47.
Introduction
10
cannot be easily reintegrated into the individual or national master
narrative, which may be the cause of stress disorders and uncontrollable
anxiety attacks.23 Derived from what trauma theorist van der Kolk says
about “traumatic memory,”24 it can be stated that film translates sensuous
triggers, affects and sudden visceral sensations – such as particular smells
and sounds – into film language, alongside other references to the
traumatizing situation that are not decoded, such as interaction between
the acoustic level and the camera angles, the diegesis with the acting. The
latter transforms the face in close-up into a physiognomic landscape of
affects. The close-up has been described by film theorist Béla Balázs as
the most potent symbolic meaning-maker that abstracts all time-space-
coordinates and causes a standing-still of time. A dynamic room without
limits is thereby created,25 whose aesthetic aptly corresponds with the aim
to signify traumatic structures.
In combination with music, facial expressions alter non-readable traces
of ‘trauma’ into cultural encodings that might be more easily interpretable
and digestible. Thus, film functions as a medium that witnesses,
remembers and is haunted and obsessed by traumatic historical events that
can neither be seen in clear light nor be fully decoded. While film does not
provide an absolute decoding of the traumatic experience, this medium
comes, in a way, close to this goal, if only as a depiction of that which
defies representation.
Film not only stores and replays traumatic energies in a sort of
‘cultural container’ viewed by the public, it oftentimes also processes and
transforms these energies into even more complex cultural material. It
gives them a new, altered shape, a symbolic, more readable form that
might arouse less of a society’s fear than the historical event itself. The
transposed ‘trauma’ comes in the garment of distortion, as translating
traumatic language into film language often implies moments of
deformation, disfigurement, fracture, breakup, dislocation, or transmutation
that are not easy to decipher. ‘Trauma’ obviously does not lose its special
characteristics by switching the medium. Trauma theorist Shireen R. K.
Patell states that there is inherent danger in an “epistemological
23 Anke Kirsch and Tanja Michael et al., “Trauma und Gedächtnis,” in: Günther H.
Seidler, et al. (eds.), Handbuch der Psychotraumatologie (Stuttgart, 2011), 15, 20.
24 Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brief Autobiography of
Bessel van der Kolk,” in: Charles R. Figley (ed.), Mapping Trauma and its Wake:
Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Studies (New York/London: Routledge,
2006), 211-226, here 301.
25 Cf. chapter on the close-up in: Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch: oder, Die
Kultur des Films (Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924), 73 et seq.
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 11
destabilization of the traumatic (non)object/event” because it would be
“unaccountable.”26 The destabilizing powers tend to be passed-on when
‘trauma’ changes its representational medium: from the body to the psyche
or, vice versa, to scripture, images or film. Following Patell, we can also
add that film “conceals the productive intimate tension of mimesis and
diegesis [in an interplay of image and text] […] always relying on the
other as metaphorical support and epistemological buttress […].”27
Film feeds on the phenomenon that individuals or collectives afflicted
by traumatic catastrophes evoke fascination and repudiation, attraction and
aversion in an antagonistic interplay. Film translates tense interactions into
characters and dramaturgical conflicts. Film can be seen as a provisional
patch that is pasted over the traumatic abyss appearing as a result of the
absence of narrative, meaning-making and rational memory. It makes the
spectator forget the forgetting – Cathy Caruth said about a traumatic event
that it was “not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only
belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.”28 Film
has the capacity to build metaphorical and metonymic images that, as a
matter of fact, artificially and temporarily cover old wounds that are pried
open in a delayed manner. By staging its non-representability, film
overcomes and challenges the vision of ‘trauma’ as non-representable and
turns it into an artistic creation. Thomas Elsaesser has argued that in order
to reach an “adequate” level of representation, film needed to invent a
particular “negative performativity,” which is only partly and transiently
achievable.29 Film seems a powerful means to depict the “unresolved
tension” between mimesis and anti-mimesis that Ruth Leys examines in
her fruitful re-reading of the canonical texts of Sigmund Freud and Cathy
Caruth.
As a consequence of Caruth’s interpretation of the role of ‘trauma’ in
relation to history, one could say that shocking, overwhelming trauma-
incidents and people’s constructions and conceptions of the official
version of history tend to overlap in larger areas. Following Caruth’s
thesis, history seems to feed on ‘trauma,’ which affects its course through
traumatic “infections.” Thus, history is reformulated as traumatic non-
26 Julia B. Köhne (ed.), Trauma und Film. Inszenierungen eines Nicht-
Repräsentierbaren (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012), 30.
27 Köhne, Trauma und Film, 32.
28 Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma. Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), 4 et seq.
29 Thomas Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as mourning work,” in: Susannah Radstone
(ed.), Trau ma an d Scree n Stud ies: O penin g the Debat e, Trauma Dossi er, Screen
42, 2 (2001), 193-201.
Introduction
12
representability – in other words, postmodern historiography is replaced
by traumatology.30 This is not considered a conscious and deliberate
process, but rather a result of a decades-long conceptual exchange between
trauma theory and perceptions of reality. Here, history is often substituted
by a model of generation and sequence characterized by traumatization;
‘trauma’ is sketched as a universal, anthropological constant, as cultural
scientist Sigrid Weigel pointed out in her critique of Caruth’s dictum.31
Film can be embraced as an artistic attempt to communicate what can
neither be transformed into a shared experience nor transmitted in an
undisguised manner. As such, film functions like a “prosthetic memory”
(Alison Landsberg), because it is a particularly apt medium to vicariously
experience global catastrophic events:
If the mass media […] can become transferential arenas in which we learn
to wear the memories of such traumas so that they become imaginable to
us, thinkable, and speakable to us, then these mass cultural technologies of
memory deserve our most serious consideration.32
Landsberg states that modernity introduced a “new form of public
cultural memory,” coined “prosthetic memory,” which “emerges at the
interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past,” for
example when attending the movie theater. “In this moment of contact, an
experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into
a larger history […]. In this process […] the person does not simply
apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt
memory of a past event through which he or she did not live. The resulting
prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and
politics.”33 Yet, film does not serve as a cultural machine that produces
immobilizing metaphors – it does not universalize or ennoble powerful,
hegemonic meaning-makings in the context of traumatic public histories.
30 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24.
31 Sigrid Weigel, “Télescopage im Unbewußten. Zum Verhältnis von Trauma,
Geschichtsbegriff und Literatur,” in: Elisabeth Bronfen et al. (eds.), Trau ma.
Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster (Cologne, 1999), 51-76,
here 56 et seq.
32 Alison Landsberg, “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory:
Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique, No. 71, Memories
of Germany (Spring–Summer, 1997), 63-86, here 86.
33 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2004), 2.
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 13
Instead, film can rewrite elements of the past retrospectively and
retroactively without laying claim to an objective truth, instead pointing to
irritations, disguises, and contortions included in this process.
This anthology also offers room for a debate between psychoanalytic,
sociological, political and cultural perspectives on the questions of how
and to what extent the terms of trauma theory and psychotraumatology can
be transferred onto the social sphere,34 as well as how this is reflected in
trauma films. Recent clinical studies have shown that experiences of harsh
violence do not necessarily result in “post-traumatic stress syndrome” or
the collapse of narrative memory. Evidently, the ability of the individual
and societies to cope with immeasurable violence and traumatizing acts
can vary stunningly from case to case, depending on the factor of
resilience. To what extent can this be detected in film? Which meaning
does the filmic medium take on in this process? In which specific films
does the trauma notion turn out to be productive in the revelation and
discussion of social conditions and problems that transcend the question of
‘trauma?’
Horror Cinema and Trauma
Adam Lowenstein states that the pain in cinematic horror “has
everything to do with the world in which we live in” (THE AMERICAN
NIGHTMARE 2000).35 Following Linnie Blake, one can say that horror
films allow international audiences to both reflect on and cope with the
horrors of recent history – from genocide to terrorism, war to persecution,
nuclear catastrophes to natural disasters. Blake considers horror movies a
disturbing, yet highly political and therapeutic genre that capacitates its
audience to deal with the traumatic legacies and horrific incidents of
reality in a productive way, on both an individual and collective level.
34 Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); José Brunner, Holocaust und
Trauma: Kritische Perspektiven zur Entstehung und Wirkung eines Paradigmas.
Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte/Tel Aviv Yearbook for German
History 39, co-edited with Nathalie Zajde (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011); José
Brunner, Die Politik des Traumas: Gewalt, Gesellschaft und psychisches Leiden
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014 forthcoming).
35 Cf. Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National
Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005). The
documentary, THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE (USA, UK 2000), dir.: Adam Simon, an
examination of horror films of the 1960’s and 1970’s, involved artists’ reflections
of the horrific experiences of contemporary society.
Introduction
14
Blake sees horror films as a unique medium to “re-open” national wounds
that have been suppressed, overlooked or only superficially addressed:
[H]orror film […] is uniquely situated to engage with the insecurities that
underpin […] conceptions of the nation; to expose the terrors underlying
everyday national life and the ideological agendas that dictate existing
formulations of ‘national cinemas’ themselves.36
From this perspective, the process of turning ‘trauma’ into film
becomes a productive moment in dealing with haunting pasts.
The horror genre in many cases embodies subgenres like body horror,
hillbilly, supernatural, fantasy, vampire, and zombie movies, each with its
discrete creatures, tropes and various political and social issues. For
example, what is the legacy of the undead as the personification of the
aggressive, consumption-oriented US-American, or that of the Godzilla-
monster as an embodiment of Japanese dread of natural catastrophes?
Thus, as can be seen in the present anthology, popular and cult horror
movies do not necessarily contain distinct figures of horror. In fact, in
contrast to filmic environments set, for example, in the American
backcountry, the ‘horror’ in horror movies may also derive from ‘normal’
milieus, like the familiar nuclear family of white, US-American suburbs,
unalarming, per se, at first glance from the outside.
This volume traces the question: in what way can the term “horror” be
applied as an analytical category to explore the history of “trauma
cultures” and narrations? Can “horror” be seen as an ingredient or an
effect of “trauma” or, conversely, “trauma” as a (horrifying) subject that
recounts the unspeakable horrors of history? Can the “horror of trauma” be
seen as the result or the beginning of the triad: traumatizing event, phase
of non-representability, filmic images or: violence-void-visualization?
Does the filmic horror or display of horror in film initiate, increase or
generate cultural traumas (like a perpetuum mobile)? Are the “horrors of
trauma” rooted in the need to constantly repeat and vary traumatic
figurations on an individual, inner-psychic or cultural/collective level?
Why are filmic horror scenarios a beloved dramaturgical form of trauma
knowledge? How can the interconnections between traumatic and horrifying
histories and their filmic adaptations in horror movies and other film
genres – like melodramas or documentaries – be described? Which narrative
and aesthetic characteristics can be detected as simple representational
practices in national cinema traditions relating to and coping with
36 Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 8-16, 9.
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 15
experiences of ‘trauma’ and horror, as well as actions of terror and
violence? How does the cultural engagement with ‘traumata’ in horror
films affect the question of self-definition and the ‘othering’ of collective
identities? What role does the metamorphosis of ‘traumatic energies’ into
moving images play regarding national ways of self-perception and self-
reflection?
Structure of the Anthology
The first section of the anthology pertains to the nexus between trauma
and horror in movies. The second to fifth sections examine various foci in
the depiction of ‘trauma’ as they appear in four distinct national trauma
(film) cultures, namely the United States, Germany, and Israel/Palestine
and their coproducing countries. What impact have the nations in which
the movies were produced had on the filmic depiction of the
interconnection between traumatic catastrophes and filmic visualization?
What do their interfaces with the notion of ‘trauma’ look like? The
trajectory of such questions as related to these diverse fields can be
demonstrated in the following passages.
I – Horror in Trauma Cinema
The first part of the anthology deals with descriptions of the
interconnections between the logic, powers and horrors of trauma
language and film language. Is there a specific affinity of the film medium
to represent (inner-psychic) structures, especially post-traumatic stress or
psychotraumatological disorders and their specific time structure of
latency, delay and reiteration? Which aesthetic features and narrative
shapes are produced while making a film about trauma notions and
‘trauma nations?’ Which genre-specific characteristics can be found in
melodramas, history movies, thrillers, documentaries, and horror movies
that bear a connection to ‘trauma?’
Since violent experiences are, without a doubt, represented most
strikingly in the horror genre, this section will trace the connection
between historical traumata, the “wounds of nations,”37 trauma depiction,
and horror movies by means of two essays: Thomas Weber’s text on
director Michael Haneke’s CACHÉ (2005) and Michael Elm’s contribution
on Roman Polanski’s film oeuvre. As one might deduce from the topics of
these two essays, in this anthology, ‘horror films’ are not conceived solely
37 Blake, The Wounds of Nations.
Introduction
16
as films commonly associated with the genre of horror, but also include
films that make feelings of horror, persecution and haunting trauma their
main concern. By incorporating the insights of studies that deal with the
“classic” horror genre, new and important understandings of a broad array
of filmic depictions can be gained. Weber’s article is concerned with the
representation of media in CACHÉ within an aesthetic of uncertainty and
alienation linked to precarious, repressed traumatic memoirs in the
cinema. In Weber’s eyes, Haneke not only manages to reorganize
traumatic memories, but also to uncover how they are repressed and
repudiated in and by the social body. He detects the symbolic connection
of CACHÉ’s protagonists and characters to the French Resistance and the
Algerian War. In CACHÉ, Haneke’s fascination with horror is detached
from his personal and national context.
Elm traces Polanski’s characterization of the world as an “uncanny,”
absurd, dangerous and traumatized place. The plots of films like THE
FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and THE
NINTH GATE (1999) can be seen as an acting-out or reenactment of painful,
traumatic experiences (of persecution), drawing also on Polanski’s own
pool of traumatic experiences and cultural critique of Western societies.
The last section of the article investigates the sophisticated narrative and
visual structure of staging the transition process from an authoritarian to a
post-authoritarian regime through the conflict of the main characters in
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994).
Both articles ask what the rather weird and distressing atmospheres and
psychological constellations of figures in these horror movies tell us about
the relation between violence and social trauma in (Western) culture –
decades before mirroring issues like the ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Real life horror echoes in artistic horror.
Concluding the first part of this volume, Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah
examines how Hollywood horror movies such as SHE DEMONS (1958),
FLESH EATERS (1964), BLOOD CREEK (2009), and RATLINE (2011), have
since the 1940s staged the figure of the Nazi in ever-changing ways.
Throughout the previous century, the Nazi villain and Nazi iconography
have become master signifiers that not only denote social deviant
malevolence in its purest form, but can be loaded with diverse and even
antagonistic symbolical contents. In the author’s opinion, horror film plays
a prominent role in the memorialization and fluid rewriting of national
traumata – the Nazi monster is a dynamic sign in the grammar of horror
cinema.
While the tropes of the horrors of trauma and/or filmic horror are
embraced throughout this anthology, the following three sections delve
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 17
into the reverberation of historical and social traumata on diverse national
film cultures.
II – Nazism and War
US-American Cinema offers a broad supply of representations of
experiences of violence, horror and ‘trauma.’ From Martin Scorsese’s
TAXI DRIVER (USA 1976) to Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER
(2008),38 recent North-American Cinema opens a wide filmic space for
coping with violence. Almost forty years after the end of the Vietnam War
and more than ten years after 9/11, this section focuses on diverse national
and global ‘traumata’ and their filmic staging mirrored in heterogeneous
American film cultures. Which developments can be described according
to different filmic modes of representation? In the wake of the 9/11
attacks, does the vernacular of “collective trauma” need to be verified?39
Or does it make sense to speak rather about a next episode in the long
“history of violence” that only affects specific groups and classes?
Dania Hückmann concentrates on the nexus between rage and trauma
as presented in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) by Quentin Tarantino. She
shows how the female Jewish protagonist Shosanna, together with her
black collaborator-friend, performs a fictive Jewish revenge against the
perpetrators of the “Third Reich.” Hückmann refers to Sigmund Freud’s
and Josef Breuer’s notion of “revenge” from the end of the 19th century
and compares it to the way in which Tarantino stages female vengeance
within the context of the Holocaust. She shows how INGLOURIOUS
BASTERDS succeeds in reimagining the notion of revenge by presenting its
potential to unleash a fantastical alternative course of historical events
marked not by justice but by resistance.
By analyzing Duncan Jones’ SOURCE CODE (2011), Daniel Müller
traces narrations of individual trauma that originate in amnesia and loss of
identity. This constitution of the protagonist is mirrored in the non-linear
plot of the movie, whereby the exposition is dislocated to a moment that
precedes the narrative, like a backstory wound needing to be diagnosed
and dissolved. The article shows how the film’s focus on the protagonist’s
amnesia as standing at the heart of his trauma contributes to the further
38 Köhne, Trauma und Film.
39 Marike Korn, “Filmic Healing Scripts. (Re)Negotiating the Trauma Paradigm
after 9/11,” in: Köhne, Trauma und Film, 351-363.
39 Elsaesser, Melodrama and Trauma.
Introduction
18
marginalization of the war in Afghanistan, the very event that caused this
‘trauma.’
Kerstin Stutterheim concentrates her article on the topic of traumatized
heroes and the nexus of war and distraction by analyzing SHUTTER ISLAND
(USA 2010) and IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (USSR 1962). She does so by looking
at (the difference between) the explicit story of the filmic texts and the
implicit dramaturgy. The article focuses on the poetic figure of the war
hero presented as an archaic figure and on the open structure of both
movies, whereby they arouse emotionality and a feeling of authenticity.
III – Memory and Trauma
This section of the anthology engages on one hand with ‘trauma’
scenarios in the context of National Socialism and the Holocaust/Shoah
and, on the other, analyzes modes of coping with “histories of violence” in
German movies regarding the Federal Republic and DEFA movies of the
former GDR.40
Pablo Fontana sheds light on the shadows between memory and
propaganda by looking at two examples of DEFA’s so-called “Thaw”
films that premiered in 1965. The term “Thaw” refers to the period in
Soviet history, after Stalin’s death, in which eastern European regimes
experienced cultural liberalization that allowed for a more complex
representation of ‘trauma.’ The article examines the tensions in these films
between attempts to represent individual trauma during the Second World
War and the political instrumentalization of these depictions as part of the
Cold War.
Jeanne Bindernagel focuses on the precarious relationship between
historiography, memory and film language in WUNDKANAL (1984),
directed by Thomas Harlan, son of infamous Nazi director Veit Harlan,
and NOTRE NAZI (1984), featuring Thomas Harlan himself. Bindernagel’s
text shows the films’ inability to engage meaningfully with the
psychological and socio-cultural trauma that lies in the nation’s past and in
individual (perpetrators’) pasts. Through an analytical lens of aesthetics,
40 Thomas Elsaesser, Terror and Trauma. Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD
(Berlin, 2007); Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History,
Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006);
Wulf Kansteiner, The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, co-edited with
Claudio Fogu and Ned Lebow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Wulf
Kansteiner, Historical Representation and Historical Truth (History & Theory
Theme Issue 47), co-edited with Christoph Classen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 19
Bindernagel stresses the films’ potential to depict transgenerational
compulsions of repetition.
Hinderk M. Emrich examines the tension between trauma and fiction
in the photofilm FIASCO (2010), created by the filmmakers Janet Riedel,
Katja Pratsche and Gusztàv Hámos. FIASCO, based on Imre Kertész’s
book, deals with a 50-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz concentration
camp living in the early 1950s. He writes a novel about a hero damned to
relive and repeat his own horrific experiences. Are the visual horrors of
the Holocaust still beyond representation, glued to the often cited “crisis of
representation?” Is there a red line connecting these filmic representations
of violent acts or do discontinuities and asynchronicity dominate?41 Is the
speech of a perpetrator’s trauma (Tätertrauma) concerning German and
Austrian history justifiable and convincing?42 What are the characteristics
of this specific form of ‘trauma?’ Does it abet self-victimization?
IV and V – Israeli-Palestinian Film: Spaces and Experiences
This divided section traces the question how representations of
violence have changed in the face of diverse Israeli wars and military
interventions, e.g., the Yom-Kippur-War, the Lebanon wars, as well as
experiences of violence in the 1948 Nakba and of the on-going Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.
Danielle Schwartz explores the repressed, veiled depiction of ruins of
former Palestinian buildings in Judd Ne’eman’s 1977 canonical movie
PARATROOPERS and in HILL 24 DOES NOT ANSWER (1954), by Thorold
Dickinson. Schwartz detects an ignorance of the filmmakers themselves,
as well as among journalists and scholars reviewing this movie, towards
the significance of the remarkable traces of erased Palestinian lives, homes
and histories of suffering. Instead of seeing filmed Palestinian ruins as
post-traumatic appearances in terms of the Nakba, their context and
history is painted-over by symbolic signification.
41 Anton Kaes has asked this question concerning the impact of World War I on the
visualization of trauma and shell shock: Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and
the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
42 Bernhard Giesen and Christoph Schneider (eds.), Tätertrauma: Nationale
Erinnerung im öffentlichen Diskurs (Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2004); Kurt
Grünberg and Jürgen Straub (eds.), Unverlierbare Zeit. Psychosoziale Spätfolgen
des Nationalsozialismus bei Nachkommen von Opfern und Tätern (Tübingen:
edition discord 2001); Kurt Grünberg, “Schweigen und Verschweigen. NS-
Vergangenheit in Familien von Opfern und Tätern oder Mitläufern,” Psychosozial
20 (1997), 9-22.
Introduction
20
Isaac (Itsik) Rosen examines what he calls “urban paranoia” as
depicted in Haim Bouzaglo’s DISTORTION (2004). The movie sketches
spatial memories of traumatized experiences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
following years of the devastating and terrorizing second Palestinian
Intifada. Amidst the pervasive anxiety of two cities under surveillance, the
film stages the historical reference by depicting both as territories of
traumatization and devastation, as “panoptical labyrinths” and urban
mazes.
Peter Grabher fathoms the liminal space between Israel and Palestine
by taking a close look at films by Ula Tabari and Elia Suleiman.
According to Grabher, both filmmakers struggle to represent traumatic
traces and invent new but still fragile film identities in the face of the
current political situation. Taking into account Gilles Deleuze’s notion of
“becoming revolutionary,” he explores the professional and personal
dilemma of both filmmakers as Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent
residing in Paris. In Grabher’s eyes, Tabari and Suleiman succeed in
creating multi-layered aesthetic strategies, giving their own struggles with
identity unique artistic expression. They respond to ‘trauma,’ but at the
same time transgress the intolerable – inventing or preferring an identity-
position of “becoming” rather than being.
Grabher’s text is accompanied by a spirited conversation conducted
with the Israeli-Palestinian documentary filmmaker Ula Tabari, which
occurred after the premiere of JINGA 48 (2009). It has been condensed for
the present publication, enriching this volume’s spectrum by offering a
perspective from the filmmaking discipline.
Tabari’s documentaries PRIVATE INVESTIGATION (France/Germany
2002) and JINGA 48 imply a search for redefining the given liminal
Palestinian spaces of living, thinking and dealing with issues of the post-
colonial, segregation, terror and war. The conversation lends intimate
insight into Tabari’s challenging work as a filmmaker for, amongst others,
the Arab television channel Al-Jazeera.
The second part of this section explores the category of ‘experiences’
and is based, inter alia, on the following questions: should pre-modern
religious anti-Judaism like modern racist anti-Semitism be seen as a
historically persisting ‘Jewish’ experience of violence? If amalgamated
within the discourse of anti-Israelism, does it make sense to speak of a
‘Jewish-Israeli’ trauma in this context? The Israeli discourse indeed
features references to anti-Semitism that may be considered a political
instrumentalization of this topic. How can the demarcation line between a
shocking, fearful, reality-wise, or instrumental way of processing traumata
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 21
be identified? Which specific forms of filmic modes of “working through”
or mourning (Trauerarbeit, Freud) can be found in Israeli film culture?43
Corresponding with these difficult questions, Sandra Meiri’s article
focuses on the depiction of traumata passed on to the next generation by
Holocaust survivors who experienced sexual violence and Nazi
dehumanization in National-Socialist camps. She examines the Israeli
movie BURNING MOOKI (2008), in which the female protagonist re-enacts
her sexualized trauma within an incestuous relationship with her son. The
film shows how trauma originating in sexual violation during the
Holocaust also severely affects members of the “second generation.”
Raya Morag deals with the trauma of the female perpetrator in New
Israeli Cinema, created from 2007 to 2013, e.g., the documentary TO SEE
IF I’M SMILING 2007. Within this new, pioneering thread of Israeli cinema
– and even before (e.g., the short drama SOB’ SKIRT 2002) – focus is
shifted from the trauma of victims to that of perpetrators, namely Israeli
soldiers traumatized while involved in human rights violations and
atrocities during their encounters with the civilian Arab population. Morag
sees film characters that embody female delinquency as a powerful,
critical, and ethical intervention in the discourse on the ongoing
Occupation.
Marcella Simoni analyzes three documentaries,
WASTED (2007),
CONCRETE (2011), and TESTIMONY (2011), which give attention to trauma
narratives and testimonies of mainly (secular male) soldiers in a context of
violent war operations in Israel, in which (mostly Palestinian) civilians are
involved, hurt or killed. Simoni’s article tries to place a piece in a
traumatic puzzle that offers intimate insight into suppressed, unsettling
facets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These two sections are especially dedicated to the traumatic
repercussions of the Holocaust/Shoah and to the question of a post-colonial
trauma in the ‘occupied territories.’ In relation to Israeli trauma culture,
the Palestinian discourse structurally resembles the latter concerning the
interconnections between experiences of violence, their political
instrumentalization, and social ‘reality.’ To wit, there is a history of
violent experience on both ‘sides’ of this enduring conflict culturally and
43 Boaz Hagin, “‘Our Traumas’: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen
Days,” in: Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin (eds.), Deeper Than Oblivion: Trauma and
Memory in Israeli Cinema (New York and London: Continuum, 2013); Boaz
Hagin, Meiri Sandra et al. (eds.), Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); Raz Yosef, The Politics of Loss and
Traum a in Co ntemp orary Isr aeli Ci nem a (New York and London: Routledge,
2011).
Introduction
22
socially coded and incorporated into the political, national and, last but not
least, film discourse. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam describe their opinions
and views about nations taking on crystalline shape in the form of histories
and anecdotes. In accordance with their thesis, film is the story-teller par
excellence; it transports projected narrative and orchestrates cultural
constellations in a complex way:
Narrative models in film are not simply reflective microcosms of historical
processes; they are also experiential grids or templates through which
history can be written and national identity created. — [In film] time
thickens, takes on flesh.44
Horrific experiences of violence are often used to justify acts of
counter-violence and politically motivated ‘rage’ transferable to both
“sides” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How do Israeli-Palestinian film
productions relate to this circular structure of experiences of violence,
counter-violence and their representation?45
Conclusion
With this anthology, we strive to widen a space for debate on the
numerous ways of representing, staging, articulating and criticizing
‘trauma’ in and via film – traumata deriving from various historical
periods, national contexts, mentalities and directors. We hope that it
contributes to an elucidation of the long and labyrinthine shared story of
historical traumatic experiences, trauma theory, and traumatic film
aesthetics. As explained above, this anthology comprises an up-close
examination of international trauma cinema as a reaction to and critical
reflection upon the violence of mankind. Trauma cinema is not merely a
psychoanalyst’s couch for the masses, but tries foremost to re-form the
history of violence in a post-traumatic context and, second, to wake and
politicize people and communities. In its function as the “eye of history”
44 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (eds.), Multiculturalism, postcoloniality, and
transnational media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 10; Ella
Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2010 [1989]).
45 Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi have done significant research on this question.
Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and
Memory (Traditions in World Cinema) (Edinburgh, 2008 [Tel Aviv, 2005]).
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 23
(Georges Didi-Huberman),46 it – like a huge, often grey mirror – makes
atrocities, wounds and immutable pain visible, reflecting and transforming
their impact and contents into a piece of creative art. David J. Skal put it
this way: “Cataclysmic junctures in history usually stir-up strong imagery
in the collective mind.”47
The compilation of articles at hand demonstrates how diverse films
negotiate historical and social traumata, as well as the aesthetic strategies
involved in illuminating the core issues of societies afflicted by traumata.
As will become clear in the following, trauma cinema destabilizes
reassuring and homogenizing narratives of nationhood, imagined nations
and obsessively constructed identity in a unique way. Film is the
quintessential medium for a proper response to complex social traumata
because in it, the ‘trauma’ or traumatized human beings may scream back
at the viewer to awaken the horror. By reactivating the “horrors of
trauma,” the historically silenced can be heard, revised and reevaluated.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our warmest regards to our English editors,
Alana Sobelman, Yehuda Mansell and Mark Thomas who had the skills,
intelligence and careful attention to review, revise and improve the
‘sound,’ style, and grammar of the articles of this anthology. We would
also like to thank Astrid Istratescu for her diligent transcription of the
conversation between Peter Grabher and Ula Tabari added to this volume.
Last but not least, we would like to express our warm gratitude to the
Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation in Tel Aviv and its team, Dr. Angelika
Timm, Mieke Hartmann and Tariq Habbashi for their excellent
organizational support and generous funding of the conference and
resulting anthology.
Literature on the Interface of Trauma and Film
Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
46 Didi-Huberman, Georges, “Im Auge der Geschichte,” in: Bilder trotz allem.
Translation Peter Geimer (Munich, 2007) [Images malgré tout, 2003], 53-65, here
65.
47 David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (revised edition,
Macmillan, 2001), 114.
Introduction
24
Alexander, Jeffrey C., Trauma. A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2012).
Antze, Paul/Michael Lambek (eds.), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory (New York/London: Routledge, 1996).
Assmann, Aleida, “Three Stabilizers of Memory: Affect-Symbol-Trauma,”
in: Hebel, Udo J. (ed.), Sites of Memory in American Literatures and
Cultures (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2003), 15-30.
Apfelthaler, Vera/Köhne, Julia B. (eds.), Gendered Memories.
Transgressions in German and Israeli Film and Theater (Vienna:
Turia+Kant, 2007).
Auchter, Thomas (ed.), Der 11. September. Psychoanalytische, psychosoziale
und psychohistorische Analysen von Terror und Trauma (Gießen:
Psychosozial, 2003).
Bohleber, Werner, Die Entwicklung der Traumatheorie in der
Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart, 2000).
—. Trauma, Gewalt und kollektives Gedächtnis (Psyche ed. Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 2000).
Bronfen, Elisabeth/Birgit R. Erdle/Sigrid Weigel (eds.), Trauma. Zwischen
Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster (Köln/Weimar/
Vienna: Böhlau, 1999).
Bronfen, Elisabeth, Specters of War: Hollywood‘s Engagement with
Military Conflict (Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Brosch, Matthias/Elm, Michael/Geißler, Norman/Simbürger, Brigitta
Elisa/von Wrochem, Oliver (eds.), Exklusive Solidarität. Linker
Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Berlin: Metropol, 2007).
Brunner, José, Die Politik des Traumas: Gewalt, Gesellschaft und
psychisches Leiden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, forthcoming
2014).
Caruth, Cathy (ed.), Trauma. Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995).
—. (ed.), Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Dallmann, Antje (ed.), Picturing America. Trauma, Realism, Politics, and
Identity in American Visual Culture (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007).
Elm, Michael/Kößler, Gottfried/Fritz Bauer Institut (eds.), Zeugenschaft
des Holocaust. Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung (Berlin:
Campus, 2007).
—. “Man, Demon, Icon: Hitler’s Image between Cinematic Representation
and Historical Reality,” in: Machtans, Karolin/Ruehl, Martin A. (eds.),
Hitler – Films from Germany: History, Cinema and Politics since 1945
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 151-167.
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 25
Elsaesser, Thomas, “Postmodernism as mourning work,” in: Radstone,
Susannah (ed.), Trauma and Screen Studies: Opening the Debate,
Trauma Dossier, Screen 42,2 (2001), 188-216.
—. Terror and Trauma. Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin:
Kadmos, 2007).
—. Melodrama and Trauma. Modes of Cultural Memory in American
Cinema (London: Routledge, 2009).
Elsaesser, Thomas/Hagin, Boaz, Memory, Trauma, and Fantasy in
American Cinema (Ra’anana: Open University of Israel, 2012).
Felman, Shoshana/Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Fischer, Gottfried/Riedesser, Peter, Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie
(München, 1998, 2003).
Freud, Sigmund: “Jenseits des Lustprinzips [1920],” in: Freud, Anna [et
al.] (eds.), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13, (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 9-
45.
Gertz, Nurith, Myths in Israeli Culture (London: Vallentine Mitchell,
2000).
Gertz, Nurith/Khleifi, George, Palestinian Cinema. Landscape, Trauma,
and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P., 2008).
Guerin, Frances/Hallas, Roger (eds.), The Image and the Witness: Trauma,
Memory, and Visual Culture (Nonfictions) (London: Wallflower Press,
2007).
Hagin, Boaz, “‘Our Traumas’, Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in
Frozen Days,” in: Yosef, Raz/Hagin, Boaz (eds.), Deeper Than
Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema (New York/London:
Continuum, 2013).
Hagin, Boaz/Yosef, Raz, “Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and
Israeli Cinema,” in: Yosef, Raz/Hagin, Boaz (eds.), Deeper Than
Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema (New York and
London: Continuum, 2013).
Hagin, Boaz/Meiri, Sandra/Yosef, Raz/Zanger, Anat (eds.), Just Images:
Ethics and the Cinematic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2011).
Hartmann, Geoffrey, Holocaust Remembrance. The Shapes of Memory
(Cambridge, Mass., amongst others: Blackwell, 1994).
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence.
From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books,
1992).
Hirsch, Joshua, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2004).
Introduction
26
Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Jameson, Fredric R., The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the
World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Jones, Edgar/Nicola T. Fear/Simon Wessely: Shell shock and Mild
Traumatic Brain Injury: A Historical Review,” in: The American
Journal of Psychiatry, 164:11 (2007), 1-5.
Kabalek, Kobi, “Unheroic Heroes. Re-Viewing Roman Polanski’s The
Pianist in Germany and Israel,” in: Apfelthaler, Vera/Köhne, Julia B.
(eds.), Gendered Memories. Transgressions in German and Israeli Film
and Theater (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2007), 61-82.
—. “Das Scheitern und die Erinnerung: Über das Nicht-Retten von Juden
in zwei deutschen Nachkriegsfilmen,” in: Bolyos, Lisa/Morawek,
Katharina (eds.), Diktatorpuppe zerstört, Schaden gering: Kunst und
Geschichtspolitik im Postnazismus (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2012), 92-
103.
Kaes, Anton, Shell Shock Cinema. Weimar Culture and the Wounds of
War (Princeton, 2009).
Kantsteiner, Wulf, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and
Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
—. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, co-edited with Claudio
Fogu and Ned Lebow, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
—. Historical Representation and Historical Truth (History & Theory
Theme Issue 47), co-edited with Christoph Classen (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2009).
Kaplan, Elizabeth Ann/Wang, Ban, Trauma and Cinema. Cross Cultural
Explorations (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004).
Kaplan, Elizabeth Ann, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss
in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2005).
Koch, Gertrud, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung. Visuelle
Konstruktionen des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).
Köhne, Julia B. (ed.), Trauma und Film. Inszenierungen eines Nicht-
Repräsentierbaren (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012).
—. Gendered Memories. Transgressions in German and Israeli Film and
Theater (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2007) (with Vera Apfelthaler).
—. Kriegshysteriker. Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken
militärpsychiatrischen Wissens, 1914-1920 (Husum: Matthiesen,
2009).
—. “Let it bleed. Der Konnex von Blut und Trauma in Brian de Palmas
Carrie (1976),” in: Biedermann, Claudio/Stiegler, Christian (eds.),
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 27
Horror und Ästhetik. Eine interdisziplinäre Spurensuche (Konstanz:
UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2008), 50-71.
—. “Splattering Bride. Konfigurationen von Trauma und weiblicher Rache in
Quentin Tarantinos Kill Bill (2003/4),” in: Ballhausen, Thomas/Friesinger,
Günther/Grenzfurthner, Johannes (eds.), Schutzverletzungen. Legitimation
von medialer Gewalt (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2010), 55-110.
—. “Militärpsychiatrisches Theater. Französische Kinematographie der
Kriegshysterie, 1915 bis 1918,” in Borck, Cornelius (ed.), Berichte zur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, vol. 36 (2013), 29-56.
—. “Ein träumender und ein traumatisierender Computer. Repräsentationen
des Unbewussten in Donald Cammells Demon Seed (1977),” in:
Braun, Christina von/Dornhof, Dorothea/Johach, Eva (eds.), Das
Unbewusste. Krisis und Kapital der Wissenschaften. Studien zum
Verhältnis von Wissen und Geschlecht (Bielefeld, 2009), 414-440.
—. “Verstellte Sichten. Die falsche Fährte als Weg in den eigenen Tod in
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973),” Maske und Kothurn.
Internationale Beiträge zur Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft
an der Universität Wien, vol. 53, issue: Falsche Fährten. Von
Täuschungen und Enttäuschungen in Film & Fernsehen (Vienna,
2007), 81-97.
LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust. History, Theory,
Trauma (Ithaca, NY, amongst others: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Lacan, Jacques, “Tyche und Automaton,” Lacan, Jacques: Die vier
Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse (Weinheim/Berlin: Walter, 1987),
59-70.
Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia UP,
2004).
Le Roy, Frederik/Stalpaert, Christel/Verdoodt, Sofie (visiting eds.),
“Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film,” arcadia.
International Journal of Literary Culture (Berlin, 2010), vol. 45, issue
2, 249-427.
Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000).
Lowenstein, Adam, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma,
National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia
University Press., 2005).
Luckurst, Roger, The Trauma Question (London, New York, Routledge,
2008).
Introduction
28
Milch, Wolfgang/Hartmann, Hans P./Kratzsch, Siegbert, Terror, Gewalt
und Trauma. New York, 11. September 2001 (Frankfurt am Main:
Brandes und Apsel, 2002).
Morag, Raya, “The Living Body and the Corpse – Israeli Documentary
Cinema and the Intifadah,” Journal of Film & Video (Fall/Winter,
2008).
Morag, Raya, Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the
Aftermath of War (Brussels: P.I.E. –
Peter Lang, 2009).
Prince, Stephen R., Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Radstone, Susannah, “Trauma and Screen Studies: Opening the Debate,”
Screen, vol. 42/2 (2001), 188-193.
Ram, Uri, Israeli Nationalism: Social conflicts and the politics of
knowledge (Abingdon/Oxon: Routledge, 2011).
Rothe, Anne, Popular Trauma Culture. Selling the Pain of Others in the
Mass Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
Sachsse, Ulrich: Traumazentrierte Psychotherapie (Stuttgart/New York,
2004).
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,
Mourning, and Recovery (Picador, 2003).
Seidler, Günter H./Eckart, Wolfgang U. (eds.), Verletzte Seelen.
Möglichkeiten und Perspektiven einer historischen Traumaforschung
(Gießen, 2005).
Seltzer, Mark, “Wound Culture. Trauma in the Pathological Public
Sphere,” October 80 (1997), 3-26.
Shohat, Ella, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989, new edition 2011).
Stern, Frank/Moser, Karin/Ballhausen, Thomas/Eichinger, Barbara/Köhne,
Julia B. (eds.), Filmische Gedächtnisse. Geschichte – Archiv – Riss
(Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2007).
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(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
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Alexander C./Weisaeth, Lars (eds.), Traumatic Stress – The Effects of
The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema 29
Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (London/New
York: Guilford Press 1996), 279-302.
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Conflicts (Charlottesville: Pitchstone Pub., 2006).
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Cinema (London: Routledge, 2011).
PART I
HORROR IN TRAUMA CINEMA
CHAPTER ONE
CACHÉ (2005), OR THE ONGOING REPRESSION
OF TRAUMATIC MEMORIES
THOMAS WEBER
This essay will explore the cinematic representation of trauma in the
context of Michael Haneke’s film, CACHÉ (France, 2005). I will focus on
the relationship between the individual experience and a collective
memory of history created by cinema as a lieu de mémoire.
My argument will consist of four central points. First, I would like to
depict the representation of media in Haneke’s film as a kind of aesthetic
of alienation. Second, I try to reconstruct a historical development of the
aesthetic of precarious memoirs in the cinema. Third, I analyze the
mechanism of repression of traumatic memory in CACHÉ as an ongoing
societal repudiation. Fourth, I locate this mechanism in the context of a
new aesthetic of the cinema, which deals with the uncertainty of the
relation to the audience.
Three advance remarks are needed: (1) The meaning of the notion of
trauma has been marked by a certain shift in the last decades. Trauma as a
notion was first applied in a medical and later a psychological context, but
since the opening of debate regarding the victims of the Holocaust, and
especially the Vietnam War, the term has been broadened as a cultural
depiction of precarious experiences of historical forms of violence (i.e. not
individual experiences; e.g., of an accident). Since the 1990s, the term
trauma has been used in the contexts of history, memory, and testimony in
the arts, cinema and literature, as Susannah Radstone has demonstrated.1
(2) If we talk about the representation of collective trauma, we have to see
* I would like to thank Rebecca M. Stuart for translating the text from the German
language into English.
1 Susannah Radstone, “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics,” Paragraf 30:1
(March 2007), 9-29.
Caché (2005), or the Ongoing Repression of Traumatic Memories
33
that in films, it is mostly shown as an individual trauma. Contrary to
written history, which is able to represent an abstract dimension of history,
film as a medium is not fit to do so because it always observes individuals.
Thomas Elsaesser, for example, attributes to the cinema the ability to give
a daily life history a form, text and voice.2 (3) Via its sensual qualities, the
representation of history in cinema is always concrete and turns into a kind
of history from below. History becomes a narration of individual stories
and after World War II, it comes across as the story of a subject, which
means it is narrated by a single protagonist in a subjective focalization,
who is sometimes disturbed in a certain way to indicate traumatic
experiences.
The focus of these films is on the victims in the first decades after
World War II—on the survivor as witness. But in recent years we can
observe a certain change of perspective or, in other words, a shift from the
trauma of the victims to the trauma of the perpetrators. We can observe
another shift or better yet, an ongoing transformation of our media system
marked by the multiplication of media and the mutual remediatization of
everything; even traumatic memories become media events. Subjective
forms of narration are part of the new conventions of “the society of the
spectacle,”3 which creates a kind of immersion but also a repression of
traumatic experiences and a dulling of social problems and collective
traumata, or simply a repudiation of the problems of the individual to be
accepted by society.
Observing the transformations of the cinematographic representation of
trauma is also to look at certain artistic practices, which reflect not only
the aesthetic dimension of the representation, but also the relation between
a certain aesthetic of a medium and the relation of the audience to the
media. This shift is not necessarily linked to a change in political interests,
but to a change in our media situation. We see a reflection of this situation
in film itself, for example, in recent films by filmmakers such as Gaspar
Noé or Michael Haneke. This leads me to a discussion of Haneke’s film
CACHÉ.
The Mediatized View
The film CACHÉ—in English entitled, HIDDEN—opens with a memorable
five-minute sequence (see Fig. 1.1).
2 Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD
(Berlin: Kulturverl, Kadmos, 2007), 198.
3 Guy Debord, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (Berlin: Tiamat, 1996 [1967]).
Chapter One
34
Fig. 1.1 CACHÉ 00.00.09
It is a static shot of a family house in Paris; the camera does not move.
It is only when we see passers-by moving through the frame that it
becomes clear we are watching moving pictures. Here, Haneke is throwing
his audience a red herring, as is made apparent from the soundtrack. First
we hear what we expect from the shot—street sounds and the twittering of
birds. Then, suddenly, two voices are heard off-camera. The first says,
“And?” as if to ask what the shot is intended to tell us. The second voice
answers helplessly, “Nothing.”
The two sound planes indicate a shift in perspective that is intensified
by the director’s use of media difference (00.04.20). The frames begin to
move faster and there are “streaks” of the kind seen when fast-forwarding
a videotape (see Fig. 1.2).
This disruption of images introduces the difference between film and
video. The film later cuts to an interior scene (00.05.03), where we see
Anne and Georges Laurent talking about the video. They are a happily
married couple who live with their 12-year-old son in a middle-class
neighborhood of Paris. She works for a large publisher; he is the presenter
of a popular literary TV show about newly released fiction. To the
audience, Haneke poses the question: why are the two worried about the
anonymously delivered videotape, which shows nothing more than the
exterior of their apartment? It is no accident that the opening scene is
reminiscent of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (France/USA, 1997), which
also deals with the way in which media attributes a balance of power.
Caché (2005), or the Ongoing Repression of Traumatic Memories
35
Fig. 1.2 CACHÉ 00.04.20
In Haneke’s hand, the story quickly takes a completely different turn
towards a suppressed chapter in French history mirrored in the personal
fates of the protagonists. What might at the beginning seem like a
promising thriller or police procedural remains in CACHÉ a persistent state
of disturbing, ambiguous suspense. And despite the couple’s forensic
investigation into the origins of the video, the situation remains unresolved
right until the end of the film. Under Haneke’s direction, this becomes a
subtle study of the abyss faced by a family trying with all available funds
to protect its putative arcadia.
CACHÉ begins at the point at which conflict breaks out behind the
bourgeois facade of the protagonists, a conflict with origins in historical
events and believed long since forgotten and, ultimately, repressed. But
Haneke does not depict it as the reemergence of repressed material—not
as individual, subjective memories of historical events. Rather it is an
additional act of repression of a suppressed chapter in recent French
history—the massacre in Paris on October 17, 1961, at the height of the
Algerian War, when as many as 200 Algerian demonstrators were beaten,
shot, murdered by police, or thrown into the river Seine.
Chapter One
36
Film as a Model for Cultural Memory
Haneke takes a rather late turn toward historical subjects, with such
works as CACHÉ and his 2009 film, THE WHITE RIBBON (France). But the
director seems less interested in the historical events themselves—or the
shape of individual memories—than in collective forms of repression.
Thus he dispenses with a common tendency towards ‘memory cinema,’
which has become characteristic of modern film. Elsaesser and Malte
Hagener4 argue that, in modern cinema, the film’s characters are also
observers; that is to say, they are the vehicles for a certain point-of-view
and perspective. But in the films of a recently established ‘second modern’
period, which includes filmmakers such as Haneke or Noé, this appears to
be changing; the films no longer plumb the depths of the victim’s or
perpetrator’s perspective, but rather that of the audience to the onscreen
depiction.
If we compare closely the aesthetic of the cinema before and after
World War II with the representation of traumatic experiences, we see
completely different approaches. As late as the early 1930s, traumatic
historical events were portrayed in a very specific way. As one example,
we can look at WESTFRONT 1918 (Germany, 1930), directed by G.W.
Pabst and considered by the conservative powers of the era to be a
provocation. The film deals with the subject of World War I by showing
four simple soldiers who are brought to a field hospital either dead,
severely injured or mentally confused. In what is undoubtedly the most
vivid scene in the film, the ‘field