SCARS AND WOUNDS

SCARS AND WOUNDS

FILM AND LEGACIES OF TRAUMA

EDITED BY NICK HODGIN AND AMIT THAKKAR

Scars and Wounds

Nick Hodgin • Amit ThakkarEditors

Scars and WoundsFilm and Legacies of Trauma

ISBN 978-3-319-41023-4 ISBN 978-3-319-41024-1 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41024-1

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EditorsNick HodginUniversity of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Amit ThakkarLancaster University, Lancaster, UK

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Contents

1 Introduction: Trauma Studies, Film and the Scar Motif 1Nick Hodgin and Amit Thakkar

2 Trauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Stories of Civil Conflict Told by the Living Dead 31Guy Austin

3 Elusive Figures: Children’s Trauma and Bosnian War Cinema 53Dijana Jelača

4 Conferring Visibility on Trauma within Rwanda’s National Reconciliation: Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Disturbing and Salutary Camera 77Alexandre Dauge-Roth

5 Proximity and Distance: Approaching Trauma in Katrina Films 101Nick Hodgin

vi CONTENTS

6 ‘Our Long National Nightmare Is Over’?: The Resolution of Trauma and Male Melodrama in The Tree of Life 127Brian Baker

7 Listening to the Pain of Others: Isabel Coixet’s La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words) 149Erin K. Hogan

8 Australian Postcolonial Trauma and Silences in Samson and Delilah 169Ben Gook

9 Trauma’s Slow Onslaught: Sound and Silence in Lav Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE 195Nadin Mai

10 Flesh and Blood in the Globalised Age: Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado (Born and Bred) and Carancho (The Vulture) 217Fiona Clancy

11 Unclaimed Experience and the Implicated Subject in Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem 243Amit Thakkar

12 Persepolis: Telling Tales of Trauma 267Steven Allen

Index 291

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Steven Allen is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Winchester. He has published widely on representations of landscapes, cultural memory and the body, as well as producing a number of articles and chapters on animation, including ‘Audio Avery: Sound in Tex Avery’s MGM Cartoons’ (Animation Journal, 2009) and ‘Getting Animated—Valuing Anime’ in Valuing Film (ed. Laura Hubner, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His book Cinema, Pain and Pleasure: Consent and the Controlled Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) considers the provocative notion that pain can be pleasurable and includes an exploration of how cinematic scars function in relation to memory. He is co-editor of Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts (Intellect, 2012), an interdisciplinary study of how the other arts frame the spectator’s experience of cinema. His most recent research focuses on Australian cinema and includes ‘The Undead Down Under’ in The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture (eds. Laura Hubner, Marcus Leaning and Paul Manning, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and ‘Australian Animation—Landscape, Isolation and Connections’ in Animated Landscapes—History, Form and Function (ed. Chris Pallant, Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently writing a book about landscapes in Australian cinema and co-editing, with Kirsten Møllegaard, a collection examining narratives of place.

Guy Austin is Professor of French Studies at Newcastle University and the founding director of Newcastle’s Research Centre in Film & Digital Media. One of the editors of the journal Studies in French Cinema, he has written widely on modern French and Algerian cinema, including the

notes on Contributors

viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

books Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press, 1996/2008), Claude Chabrol (MUP, 1999), Stars in Modern French Film (Arnold, 2003) and Algerian National Cinema (MUP, 2012), plus arti-cles for Screen, French Studies, French Cultural Studies, Modern and Contemporary France and Studies in French Cinema. His most recent pub-lication is the edited collection New Uses of Bourdieu in Film and Media Studies (Berghahn, 2016). He is currently co-editing with Sabrina Yu a collection called Revisiting Star Studies for Edinburgh University Press, and working with colleagues at Newcastle and Lancaster on a research project concerning filmic representations and receptions of conflict in so- called ‘post-conflict’ societies such as Algeria, Colombia, Indonesia and Northern Ireland.

Brian Baker is Senior Lecturer in English at Lancaster University, UK. He has published books and articles on masculinities, science fiction and science fiction cinema, Iain Sinclair, literature and science, and in a critical/creative mode. Masculinities in Fiction and Film was published by Continuum in 2006, and a ‘sequel’, Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015. The Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism: Science Fiction was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. He is working on further critical and creative projects concerning masculinity, popular culture and film-making.

Fiona Clancy is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Scholar and PhD candidate at the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork. Having completed her MRes thesis on morality in contemporary Spanish cinema, Fiona’s doc-toral research focuses on the representation of trauma in recent work by Argentine film directors, including Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero and Albertina Carri. Her most recent work appears in an edition on Women and Media in the Twenty-First Century in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.

Alexandre Dauge-Roth is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Bates College. He has published numerous articles on the rep-resentation of the genocide against the Tutsi in literature, testimony, films and documentaries. He published Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History in 2010 with Lexington Books. His work in French and Francophone stud-ies examines testimonial literature as a genre and analyzes social belonging

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix

through historical, political and medical readings of the body. He has explored representations of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa through the works of Koulsy Lamko and Fanta Regina Nacro, and graft and transplant as prominent metaphors for the migrant and the host in the works of Malika Mokeddem and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Ben Gook is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences and an Honorary Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, both at the University of Melbourne. He completed his PhD, also at the University of Melbourne, in Social Theory and Cultural Studies. He is the author of Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 (London, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). He has published in journals including S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, Studies in Social and Political Thought, Limbus: Australisches Jahrbuch für germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft and Memory Studies.

Nick Hodgin is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. His publications include the monograph Screening the East. Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989 (Berghahn, 2011) and the co-edited volume The GDR Remembered (Camden House, 2011). He has published widely on German film, especially on topics relating to East German cinema (on the grotesque, on the role of the worker, on melancholia), as well as essays on the Deep South in film and music. His current projects include an edited volume on the filmmaker Andreas Dresen, work on Cold war documentaries, film and architecture, and British Cinema and masculinities.

Erin K. Hogan is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Maryland Baltimore County where she teaches courses in Spanish litera-ture and film and Latin American cinema. Her current book project focuses on filmic representations of the biopolitics of children in contem-porary Spain and Latin America. Her broader interests include Hispanic cinema and the portrayal of human rights and interculturality, of which the chapter in this volume and ‘A Politics of Listening in Isabel Coixet’s Escuchando al juez Garzón (2011)’ are examples. Dr. Hogan’s scholarship has appeared in Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, International Journal of Iberian Studies, The Comparatist and elsewhere.

Dijana Jelaca holds a PhD in Communication and Film Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her areas of inquiry include

x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

global cinema studies, transnational feminist theories, critical ethnic stud-ies, trauma and memory studies, and studies of post-Socialism and affect. She is the author of Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post- Yugoslav Cinema (Palgrave, 2016) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (Routledge, 2016). Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Jump Cut and elsewhere. Together with Kristin Lene Hole, she is currently working on a textbook entitled Film Feminisms: Global Perspectives (forthcoming, Routledge). Jelaca teaches in the Humanities Department at the New York City College of Technology.

Nadin Mai received her PhD from the University of Stirling in 2016. Her doctoral research focuses on the representation of post-trauma in the films of Filipino director Lav Diaz, with special emphasis on the director’s use of absence and duration. Now an independent scholar, she is currently working on a monograph on Diaz and is developing a video-on-demand service dedicated to slow, contemplative films. Her work on The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, a website that features book and film reviews, as well as research notes and interviews with filmmakers, is ongoing.

Amit Thakkar is Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University in the Department of Languages and Cultures. His articles and chapters on Spanish and Spanish American film deal with the traumatic effects of per-sonal, historical and national ruptures on the lives of individuals. He has developed the concept of cine de choque, or shock/crash/clash cinema, a specifically Hispanic aesthetic related to the traumatic resonance of car crashes. With Professor Chris Harris (Liverpool) he has co-edited a special issue (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2010) on cultural representations of masculinities and violence in Latin America, as well as the volume Men, Power and Liberation: Readings of Masculinities in Spanish American Literatures (Routledge, 2015). He has also researched the fictional and photographic work of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, on whom he has published a monograph (Tamesis, 2012) and several articles and book chapters.

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Fig. 2.1 The three mental health service users who are the focus of Aliénations (Malek Bensmaïl 2004) 45

Fig. 3.1 Video-memories of trauma (Aida Begic, Children of Sarajevo, 2012) 63

Fig. 3.2 A child’s grave (Ademir Kenovic, The Perfect Circle, 1997) 68

Fig. 4.1 The killer pointing his machete after having read the cockroach kill list. (Kivu Ruhorahoza, Grey Matter, 2011) 86

Fig. 4.2 The killer insulting the trapped cockroach before the rape (Kivu Ruhorahoza, Grey Matter, 2011) 87

Fig. 4.3 Yvan in his red helmet attempting to paint Justine’s portrait (Kivu Ruhorahoza, Grey Matter, 2011) 91

Fig. 5.1 Stull (Barlow Jacobs), the detached observer. Low and Behold (Zack Godshall, USA, 2006) 118

Fig. 6.1 The tree of life and the space of grief (Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life, 2011) 138

Fig. 6.2 The raptor shows mercy in the cosmological sequence (Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life, 2011) 143

Fig. 7.1 Hanna (Sarah Polley) calls to listen to her therapist’s voice, (La vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words, Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005. © EL DESEO, D.A., S.L.U.) 157

Fig. 7.2 Hanna eavesdrops on voicemails left for Josef (Tim Robbins) (La vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words, Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005. © EL DESEO, D.A., S.L.U.) 158

Fig. 7.3 Hanna reveals her physical and emotional scars to Josef. (La vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words, Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005. © EL DESEO, D.A., S.L.U.) 161

List of figures

xii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 8.1 Delilah (hooded) is told to leave a café in Alice Springs where she is trying to sell her artwork to customers. (Samson and Delilah, Warwick Thornton, 2009) 178

Fig. 8.2 Samson and Delilah sniff petrol outside a church in Alice Springs. (Samson and Delilah, Warwick Thornton, 2009) 185

Fig. 9.1 Florentina recites her narrative of self (Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, Lav Diaz, 2012) 199

Fig. 9.2 Florentina sees the Giants (Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, Lav Diaz, 2012) 209

Fig. 10.1 (Foreground, left to right): Robert (Federico Esquerro), Cacique (Tomás Lipan) and Santiago (Guillermo Pfening) form an alternative, masculine ‘family’ based on bonds of solidarity and friendship in the wake of personal trauma. (Nacido y criado/Born and Bred, Pablo Trapero 2006) 223

Fig. 10.2 Sosa (Ricardo Darín) comes to the aid of Vega (José María Rivara) following their botched attempt at insurance fraud, illustrating how danger and risk are artificially generated in a society where flesh and blood have been assigned market value. (Carancho/The Vulture, Pablo Trapero 2010) 231

Fig. 11.1 Only Mario’s head and upper body are visible through the window as the camera remains static within his house (Post Mortem, Pablo Larraín 2010) 254

Fig. 11.2 After the political demonstration, there is an abrupt cut to a shot from behind Nancy’s head as she lies dead on the coroner’s table (Post Mortem, Pablo Larraín 2010) 257

Fig. 12.1 The fictional telling of historical trauma in Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007) 276

Fig. 12.2 Animation’s ability to isolate the victim’s experience of the trauma event in Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007) 282

1© The Author(s) 2017N. Hodgin, A. Thakkar (eds.), Scars and Wounds, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41024-1_1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Trauma Studies, Film and the Scar Motif

Nick Hodgin and Amit Thakkar

N. Hodgin School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UKe-mail: [email protected]

A. Thakkar (*) Department of Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UKe-mail: [email protected]

The scope of trauma studies reaches across societies, extends to histori-cal events and towards remote communities. It encompasses relationships between individuals, peoples and structures of power and oppression. There is now a burgeoning collection of broad surveys and close investi-gations of the occurrence and manifestation of trauma in local, national and transnational contexts. The diversity of topics that come under trauma studies is such that it can cover just about anything related to disaster, abuse, injury or other non-physical circumstances (betrayal, separation, shock revelations, etc.). Indeed, in a 2012 review of Mick Broderick’s and Antonio Traverso’s Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media (2011), Allen Meek identified the need to ask ‘hard questions’ about the usefulness of the lens of trauma if the field ‘is to remain a compelling interdisciplinary area and not an all-inclusive term

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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for a cultural studies preoccupied with catastrophe’ (p. 352). In 2015, a round table discussion involving three leading writers in the field under-lined the urgent need to reassess trauma studies. Alan Gibbs, author of Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (2014), stated of trauma that ‘as its definition stretches, it begins to become less meaningful as a concept’ (2015, p. 917). Stef Craps, whose recent work Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013) has questioned some of the basic assump-tions underpinning trauma studies, argued for the study of trauma ‘as a global rather than a European or Western phenomenon’ (p. 919). In the same vein, Bryan Cheyette, author of Diasporas of the Mind, Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2013), reasserted the objective of that work ‘to make connections across nations, communities and cultures’ (p. 919).

The round table discussion ‘Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism’ (Sonya Andermahr 2015) appeared in a special issue of Humanities. It focused mainly on literature and was informed by many of the concerns regarding the limits of trauma studies. The current volume is the result of a process that also began by examining the value and limits of trauma as a concept. For film scholars, trauma has been explored in terms of different genres (war, horror, melodrama and documentary) and through a variety of approaches, including production contexts, recep-tion studies, political implications and social meanings, and such diversity is reflected in the current volume. In considering the growing corpus of trauma-related criticism on film, we initially pondered the adequacy of the term ‘trauma’ when prefixed by the words ‘social’, ‘cultural’, ‘environ-mental’ and ‘economic’.1 We thought, too, about the privileging of the representation of some traumas over others, for example that of the victim over that of the perpetrator, as well as the role of trauma within collective- memory discourses and identity formation. And then there was the con-nection between form, content and reception, specifically the problematic affective power that media portrayals of trauma can have in processes such as vicarious trauma.

Although the founding tenets of trauma studies, such as those pro-pounded by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Cathy Caruth, Kai Erikson, Dori Laub and many others, remain profoundly productive both for previous works and for this volume, we are mindful of Michael Rothberg’s urgent call for trauma theory to begin ‘the process of devel-oping paradigms to match those of its classical, psychoanalysis-inspired predecessors’ (2014, p. xiii). Craps, meanwhile, stresses the need to focus

N. HODGIN AND A. THAKKAR

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on ‘the way trauma is experienced and on the process of healing’ rather than on ‘a single, extraordinary, catastrophic event’ (2015, p. 907). In considering the potential of the scar trope in this Introduction, we argue that whilst ‘traditional’, event-centred trauma theory still has great trac-tion and forms the overall theoretical framework for many of the chapters in this volume, the frequent mentions of scars as representative of ongoing trauma suggest that scars and scar formation may also have some rele-vance to debates which focus on what Rothberg (2009, 2013) has called the ‘multi-directional’ connections, both spatial and temporal, between apparently diverse legacies of trauma.

‘Privileged Traumas’: Which Trauma and Why?There are no rules, no scripts as to what is right and appropriate when choosing which representations of trauma to study. As a guide, however, Rothberg argues that any study of different collective memories should avoid becoming a mere ‘competition of victims’ and instead create a more ‘productive, intercultural dynamic’ (2009, pp. 2–3). The films chosen by contributors to this volume seek to speak for, or of, others, for the voiceless, for the forgotten and overlooked, whether in Rwanda, Australia, Indonesia, Chile or North Africa, including the poor, the disenfran-chised, certain sections of the middle classes, both young and old, men and women, and, indeed, perpetrators as well as victims. Though schol-ars have increasingly turned their attentions to under-represented trau-mas (and this volume includes analyses of films portraying and engaging with traumatised communities that have received little critical attention elsewhere), there remain, of course, traumas that will doubtless never be screened, whether because these have occurred in places where there is insufficient funding to record these histories or because the medium is of less significance than other narrative forms. Notwithstanding such gaps, an intercultural approach can contribute to contemplations of ‘new forms of solidarity’ (Rothberg 2009, p. 5).

In recent years, scholars have argued that one of the issues with pioneer-ing trauma theory texts, such as Caruth’s seminal Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), is that they ‘have largely failed to live up to their cross-cultural ethical engagement’ (Craps 2013, p. 6), and that trauma theory is often too limited in its purview, too ready to employ a Euro-American perspective that universalises in terms of analy-sis and therapy. Trauma, Craps reminds us, ‘is a Western artefact’ (p. 3).

INTRODUCTION: TRAUMA STUDIES, FILM AND THE SCAR MOTIF

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To some extent, though, this is unavoidable. Whilst cultural relativism is an important consideration, neglecting recent traumas for fear of using tools that are considered too Western is a less desirable alternative. Our contributors write from a Eurocentric perspective because these, for now, are the dominant theories, but we mitigate this with localised production contexts. Such contextualization helps to connect traumatising events to processes that move well beyond the geographical borders of a given com-munity. This can offset the problem of what we might call the exoticisa-tion of trauma, that is to say the collecting of different types of Otherness in, as Isabel Santaolalla puts it, ‘a common symbolic space: one in which an agency appropriates a “colonised”, domesticated version of an Other to meet its own needs’ (2000, p. 10). Exactly what those needs are is, however, not always clear. Is the collection of representations of trauma intended to demonstrate a capacity for compassion? Do people exploit the suffering of others to gain ‘perspective’ on their own daily concerns? In doing so, do they create a hierarchy of traumas (Rothberg’s ‘competition of victims’, cited above) or, perhaps worse, establish between them a prob-lematic ‘relational equivalence’ (Luckhurst 2008, p. 161)? And is the col-lection of such material an extension of the desire to tackle anxieties about Otherness by reducing them to ‘a social reality which is at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible’ (Homi K. Bhabha 1994, p. 101)?

Despite all these questions, which represent aspects of the ‘anxiety of appropriation’ (Cheyette 2013, p. 37), a broad geographical interest need not be simple ‘hop-scotching’ around the globe to collect various objets de désir. It can, as in the case of this volume, respond positively to Broderick and Traverso’s point that there is a tendency for trauma analysis ‘to focus on representation of European and US historical catastrophes’, while ‘relatively scarce critical interest has been committed to media and artistic depictions of third-world disasters, in spite of the fact that the lat-ter often flood global contemporary media and art’ (2011, p. 1). Whilst the current volume contains analyses of representations of trauma in, for example, the Philippines and Rwanda, the aim is not simply to consider only so-called ‘third-world disasters’. The very term ‘third-world’ sug-gests that such disasters belong to another world. In fact, we aim to bring such studies into a collection that is inclusive of those countries where traumatising events have been more frequently represented on film, espe-cially the USA. The aim, to borrow Cheyette’s words, is ‘to enlarge our sense of self and include “other others” in the pantheon of what it is to be human’ (2015, p. 919). In doing so, we engage with Cheyette’s call to


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‘[celebrate] interconnectedness, which is on the side of a new decolonized humanism’ (p. 919), and we ask, is it at least possible to make a space for the emergence of commonalities between diverse types of suffering and the different ways in which films can represent these?

Susan Sontag notes that ‘for a war to break out of its immediate constit-uency and become a subject of international attention, it must be regarded as something of an exception, as wars go, and represent more than the clashing interests of the belligerents themselves’ (2003, p. 37). This con-cern has been pressingly apparent in the treatment by the media of terror-ist attacks in 2016, leading one journalist to ask,

why is it that, when an attack like Brussels or Orlando happens, the world is forced to mourn (quite rightly) and the West becomes the centre of the world’s gravity, yet when the producers of indiscriminate explosions strike in Beirut, Baghdad or Istanbul, it merits fleeting news coverage at best? (Ayton 2016)

Whilst it is inevitable that the Western press will focus on issues within Europe and the USA, it seems that the anguish visited on others, whether as a result of terrorism, war, environmental misconduct or governmental negligence, often fails to register great significance to those within the self- appointed metropolitan ‘centre’ of the world. To compound this situa-tion, and largely for commercial reasons or due to prohibitive local costs of production, there are very few films, for example, of the climate-change- related floods that regularly kill thousands of people in Bangladesh, or those which in 2007 rendered 400,000 people homeless in Ghana. How many films look at the civil conflicts in Somalia, Sudan or Burundi, or the traumatic legacies of colonisation? What of the ongoing suffering of the people of Laos, many of whom continue to fall victim to bombs, 260 million of which were dropped on the country by US forces half a century ago? The tsunami of 2004, and its ‘Boxing Day’ prefix in much Western commentary, is a case in point. The scale of the catastrophe and its massive death toll reawoke an interest in imaging large-scale disasters in big-budget films (which typically befall North American coasts), but the actual tsunami’s traumatic legacies have received far less attention than one might expect. When such tragedies are screened, there is a tendency to exoticise trauma, to frame distant suffering according to Eurocentric experience in order to make it ‘relevant’. This was evident, for example, in the high-profile HBO series Tsunami: the Aftermath (Bharat Nalluri 2006). One review highlights the problems of such representation:


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More than 227,000 people died in the tsunami, the vast majority of them Indonesian. Yet on whom does this Rudyard Kipling salute center? Two British tourist families, a British reporter, a British diplomat and a British aid worker. Oh, and a Thai boy who is rescued by one Brit and lectured to by another. (Robert Bianco 2006)

Slavoj Žižek observes that ‘[p]roperly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political and economic considerations’ (2008, p. 2). This goes some way to explain-ing how and why trauma is so often presented in such a way that, even in well-intentioned narratives, the victims themselves are secondary to their suffering, and in a way that the context of that suffering is decontextual-ized or simply neglected. The current volume allows for the consider-ation of whether the links between different sites of trauma can be about more than the appropriation of the trauma of others, opening up the com-mon ground, or ‘dark matter’, between certain traumatising events in the process. One aspect of this dark matter is the issue of nuanced victim- perpetrator binaries, to which we shall return. Another is the matter of form or what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘the image and its vibrations’ (1994, p. 164).

The image and iTs vibraTions

Form is a major concern in this volume precisely because aesthetic varia-tions testify to differentiated localised conditions for, and register distinct reactions to, trauma-producing events. This is especially important when such events are often spectacularised in public discourse in ways intended to homogenise suffering. In the case of 9/11, as Kaplan notes (2005, p. 13), the state instrumentalised and aestheticized national trauma in the form of a masculinised unified front which was fictitiously assembled in the wake of the tragedy in order to begin a process of humiliation of the perpetra-tors. In commercially-driven cinematic work, meanwhile, the spectacle of trauma, and especially physical violence, is a crucial profit driver, particu-larly where war is the subject matter. James Lewis Hoberman’s assessment of the initial sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) is particularly sobering in this regard:

The extended D-Day sequence that ushers in the movie’s restaging of World War II is a terrifying assault on the audience that goes well beyond the


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mutilation, dismemberment, and carnage of Jaws [Steven Spielberg 1975]. It’s also a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, perhaps the strongest single passage in the entire Spielberg oeuvre. (2007)

In such sequences, the traumatic consequences of large scale massacres for individuals are hidden behind profit-driven concerns for restaging terrify-ing momentous events, which are later labelled ‘virtuoso’ film-making, all of which improves the brand of a particular director or, sometimes, that of a specific actor. Other genres, including horror and science fiction, are equally prone to such spectacularising processes. Spectacularising trauma has become a common practice in cinematic representations of suffering in terms of both the original traumatising action or event (torture, war, rape, abuse) and its aftermath (the legacy), and digital virtuosity makes large- scale disasters easier to stage, more impressive to behold. No more of the staginess of styrofoam props, ketchup-red blood or model cities collaps-ing. The trauma-producing moment, whether the wounding, the explo-sion or the tsunami, can now be re-imaged, reimagined in alarming detail.

Any attempt to go beyond mere spectacle requires an effort on the part of the viewer to engage with context. Gibbs’ call for ‘a greater sensitivity towards the context of the text’ (2015, p. 917) is met in the present col-lection with detailed country-specific, sociopolitical, and sometimes eco-nomic, contexts. The need for context is, of course, partly a result of the formal bind in which the (less spectacular) representation of trauma now finds itself. Like Jameson, Adorno and others before him, Hayden White, in his book Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999, p. 81), advocates for modernist representations (in a discussion on literary mod-ernism) as preferable, arguing that they ‘offer the only prospect for ade-quate representations of “unnatural” events […] that mark our era’. But the view of ‘a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma’ (Craps 2013, p. 46) is some-thing that scholars have questioned in recent years (Craps 2013; Luckhurst 2008). Representing trauma in forms that reject or eschew conventional modes of representation raises the problem of reception. For whom are the films made? If film-makers presuppose a cine-literate audience—regular patrons of festivals accustomed to, or tolerant of, experimental and chal-lenging forms—does that not limit the wider potential impact that such films might have? If these films are socially purposive, driven by a desire to speak for victims, expose perpetrators (or accomplices or bystanders), reveal crimes visited on communities and the legacies of traumatic events,


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perhaps it behoves film-makers to consider how to make trauma films more accessible? Or must they remain caught in their own paradigm, one where the unconventional is increasingly a convention of such narratives? Writing about Holocaust representations, Andreas Huyssen has described his increasing skepticism towards ‘demands that on principle posit an aesthet-ics and an ethics of nonrepresentability, often by drawing on a misreading of Adorno’s post-1945 statement about poetry’ (2005 p. 169).

The balances that need to be made between commercial pressures and the desire to represent trauma are evident in the films chosen by our con-tributors as their primary materials. Many of the films discussed in this volume won film prizes and critical plaudits, and most do adhere to the aes-thetic strategies of which Huyssen and others are suspicious: long running times, non-linear narratives, audiovisual experimentation, self-reflexivity, a preference for open endings rather than neat conclusions. But a reader of this volume will be struck by the impression that, rather than entirely doing away with aesthetic strategies and techniques rooted in modernism, what is required is a balancing act between form and content, and this balance, we argue, creates what Deleuze calls ‘cerebral stimulation or the birth of thought’ (p. 164), a notion to which we shall return below. For example, in Son of Saul (László Nemes 2015), it could be argued that the modernist form, especially the extreme single point-of-view perspective of Saul, aided by shallow focus and the film’s 4:3 frame throughout, means that the circum-stances of this film can only make complete sense to a viewer who is aware of many of the details of the Holocaust and the practices within gas chambers, notwithstanding the intertitle explaining the protagonist’s role as one of the Nazis’ Sonderkommandos (prisoners who work in the gas chambers but are ultimately destined to die in them). Equally, though, content-related uncer-tainties created by that narrow point-of-view perspective, for example the lack of clarification over whether the protagonist Saul really is the father of the boy whose burial he attempts to organise, curtail engagement in ‘crude’, ‘facile’ or ‘empty’ empathy, or in affective identification. Since we do not know if Saul’s son really is his son, we cannot ‘enjoy’ the typical melodramatic father-son trope, and we have no choice but to engage with the visually and aurally restricted perspective of a traumatised individual without recourse to escapist affect. This results in a productive ‘empathic unsettlement’ (LaCapra 2004, pp. 135–6) in which content and form, or what Deleuze calls the ‘vibrations’ of image, combine to create an experience of trauma which is much more likely to provoke reflection than to allow viewers the satisfaction of expectations engendered by commercial, spectacle-oriented film. In very


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different ways, Brian Baker’s and Steven Allen’s chapters in this volume, dealing respectively with the limits of melodrama in representing per-sonal and collective trauma in the USA and the attributes of animation to depict the experience of exile from Iran, directly explore the complex patterns of interaction between what might be called ‘uncommercial’ filmic content and the commercially-driven genres or forms through which that content is conveyed.

Deleuze argues that violence in the sense of excess—or ‘blood-red arbi-trariness’—is only a danger inasmuch as a film deals only with content, ‘the represented’, and not also with the ways in which the represented is inextricably intertwined with form, or with ‘the image and its vibrations’:

When the violence is no longer that of the image and its vibrations [form] but that of the represented [content], we move into a blood-red arbitrari-ness. When grandeur is no longer that of the composition [form], but a pure and simple inflation of the represented [content], there is no cerebral stimulation or birth of thought. (p. 164)

Yet, in intertwining form and content in a way that is meaningful and coherent, the goal pursued is not just cerebral stimulation and the ‘birth of thought’; the stakes are even higher than that. As Meek makes clear, at a time when we are increasingly subjected to images of extreme violence, ‘the price of such exposure may be an emotional and intellectual disen-gagement with the wider world and even a “psychic numbing”’ (2010, p. 5), almost a reversal of Deleuze’s ‘birth of thought’. In this volume, contributors demonstrate the ways in which the films chosen not only deal with the traumatic legacy of physical violence, as the principal con-tent of those films, but also insist on the ‘vibrations’ of trauma through certain formal manoeuvres. In this formula, composition (‘the image and its vibrations’) and content (‘the represented’) work together to provoke Deleuze’s ‘cerebral stimulation’ and thus to avert the possibility of what Meek, cited above, calls ‘emotional and intellectual disengagement’.

The vicTim-PerPeTraTor conTinuum and The imPlicaTed subjecT

Individual responses to trauma-producing events are as diverse as responses to cinematic depictions of those events: they vary according to geographical proximity as well as levels of emotional engagement, and they also depend


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on ‘[i]ndividual psychic organisation’ (Kaplan 2005, p. 4). Thus, almost from the minute they happen, events which cause trauma are dealt with by individuals at various stages of a victim continuum between direct involve-ment (the death of a loved one) and what can be termed indirect, ‘quiet trauma’.2 In her discussion of post-9/11 responses in Trauma Culture (2008), Kaplan includes—as manifestations of this ‘indirect’ trauma—pic-tures drawn on the ground, flowers and/or messages of sympathy left at Ground Zero or American flags in shop windows. For victims of the dictatorships of Southern Cone Latin American countries, such practices are quotidian acts of remembrance which persist for many decades after: as soon as it became apparent that disappearances had occurred during the country’s ‘dirty war’ between the military and the left (1976–1983), the mothers of the disappeared organised regular demonstrations in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, wearing white scarves for peace, holding up photographs of missing loved ones and publicising their names, in a sus-tained protest that lasted until the twenty-first century, at which point they aligned their cause with more general protests against inequality and social injustice.3 The ability of such groups to look beyond their own cause and to seek, to use Rothberg’s term (cited above), ‘new forms of solidarity’ speaks to the urgent need to address the structural violence which under-pins apparently unconnected acts of violence. For example, the resonance of images of 9/11 in the USA extends to Chileans, for whom the date holds a local but politically related significance. For Chileans, this was also the date—in 1973—of the CIA-supported bombing of the presidential palace of the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende, designed to engineer a coup which gave rise to the brutal, seventeen-year dictator-ship of General Augusto Pinochet. What place is there, then, for victims of atrocities in different places, at different times to observe the common threads of their experiences, the links? What are the stakes involved, in terms of advancing awareness of global, structural sources of trauma, if we do not make such observations? These questions are especially press-ing when, as Gibbs remarks, ‘post 9/11, there is a discernible discomfort amongst a large part of the population in accepting responsibility for the government’s actions’ (p. 917), thus raising the possibility of a remit of accountability that goes well beyond that of the perpetrator and that may include the victim.

More recently, trauma studies has been preoccupied with the trauma of the perpetrator (Morag 2013; Gibbs 2014). Again, however, it is important to nuance the different positions of a perpetrator. If the Sonderkommando


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protagonist of Son of Saul is firmly on the trapped victim end of that par-ticular continuum, then Anwar in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) is his counterpart at the direct perpetrator end, yet even he emerges by the end as a kind of victim, at least, of belligerent discourses of politi-cal hatred during the Indonesian dictatorship. Two studies in this volume deal with the perpetrator from different perspectives, both related to their existence as liminal subjects: Thakkar considers these figures as implicated subjects, representative of nationally ‘unclaimed experience’ in Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem (2010), and Alexandre Dauge-Roth examines them as psychologically entrapped individuals in Kivu Ruharhoza’s Grey Matter (2011). Through very different formal techniques, such films make us

avert our eyes from sights that sear our conscience, and yet, we may feel the ethical impulse to look, and to look closely, in order to bear witness and assume the task of testimony, as part of our humanity, our recognition of the other, and our willingness to acknowledge complicity and accountability. (Elsaesser 2013, p. 85; emphasis added)

In such cases, films seem to ask questions of the viewer regarding their degree of discomfort, their ‘complicity and accountability’, their ability to relate what they see to the potential within all of us to commit acts of violence. In this volume, Dijana Jelaca considers various deployments of the symbolic figure of the child, one of which is the child-as-perpetrator; as a figure that is steeped in innocence and unknowability, the child can certainly facilitate awareness of our own capacity for harm.

Trauma on film is as much about individuals as it is about collectives, and the interaction between them needs always to be acknowledged. Indeed, as Fiona Clancy argues in this volume, ‘once the symbolic order of individuals is destroyed, the destruction of the communal order is essentially a fait accompli’ (p. 220). For that very reason, perhaps, the scope of this com-munal order must be stressed lest the story of the individual be reduced to a throwaway fiction, an exceptional circumstance. If Kaplan and Ban Wang, in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Exploration (2004), called for responses to traumatic experiences more firmly embedded in wider processes, that need for a more globally aware assessment of trauma theory is met not only in their own volume but also in that of Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone: The Future of Trauma Theory (2013). In his illuminating preface to that volume, Rothberg raises urgent con-cerns such as the need to move beyond the victim–perpetrator binary to


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include the ‘implicated subject’, or the ‘bystander’, something on which, among others in this volume, Gook reflects in his chapter on Aboriginal Australians in Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton 2009) and which Hodgin considers in his analysis of films made after Hurricane Katrina. Both Gook and Hodgin suggest that viewers of these films are prompted to reflect on their position not only because they are secondary witnesses of trauma but also because they are, as Rothberg suggests, ‘entwined with and folded into […] histories and situations that surpass our agency as individual subjects’ (Rothberg 2014a, b).

This awareness of greater processes is harder to achieve in commercial films which engage viewers through affective paths and are less concerned with such contextual ‘histories and situations’. Commercially focussed cin-ema can uncover different aspects of national and international trauma, for example the story of Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993). And yet, through its basis in capital exchange and commercial value, it ultimately risks masking and obstructing confrontation with the everyday legacy of trauma. Even if modernist treatments of trauma can also be problematic, for reasons cited above, there is a greater danger in the ‘perfection’ or finalising of trauma in commercially oriented film, through supposedly definitive treatments of it, or due to the tying up of loose nar-rative ends, or even the inclusion of scenes of memorialisation such as that which we see at the end of Schindler’s List. Trauma can easily be packaged according to the desired avenues of circulation of a given story, as Tim Cole has demonstrated in Selling the Holocaust (2000). Whilst audiences are uncomfortable with the child as perpetrator, as discussed above, they are conditioned to accept the child as a perfect victim, like the red-coated girl in Schindler’s List. This is a view that we can also draw from Cole’s analysis of the way in which Anne Frank’s diary was edited by her father to elide her sexual awakening and thus to create the ‘perfect victim’ for 1950’s America: ‘Not only was she young and female but also “innocent”’ (2000, p. 29). The ending was also altered for the play and film so that the last words could be ‘In spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart’ (p. 35). Such instances of ‘perfecting’ and/or supposedly ‘realist’ narrative closure are of course requirements of a commercially- driven cinema in which affirmation assumes primacy over ambiguity or doubt, and this is why words such as ‘working through’, ‘resolution’ and particularly ‘closure’ are often so problematic. For a volume of its kind, these terms are relatively absent in the current work and are used with critical reflection where they are present. We believe that the scar motif is


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helpful in avoiding terms which evoke a teleological process of ‘healing’ that risks underplaying the permanence of the damage done by trauma, and underplaying the insistent but less conspicuous presence of past events in daily life where these do not necessarily manifest in flashbacks or other obvious and more commercially ‘viable’ signs of trauma.

The scar moTif

Trauma is originally ‘wound’ in Greek, but also ‘hurt’ and ‘defeat’, words which are suggestive of the legacies of that wound. Various aspects of what we call scar formation emerged as we worked with contributors, for example the often pressing but somehow incomplete recuperative role of cinema, the separation of the event from the memory of that event to form something new, the effect of such separation on the self and on com-munity, as well as formal considerations. As a result, we have felt the need to consider the potential difference between wound- and scar-focussed approaches for future studies in this field. In order to begin this process, we will consider Caruth’s ‘structure’ of trauma. Caruth’s work has undergone a reassessment by Craps and others who call for a less West-centric focus, as noted above, and even more recently by Joshua Pederson.4 Despite his critique, Pederson’s ultimate call for ‘trauma theorists [to] focus on depictions of experiences that are temporally, physically, or ontologically distorted’ (339) follows quite logically from Caruth’s insistence on the fact that trauma constitutes a ‘breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world’ (1996, p. 4).

This mental breach is both spatial and temporal. It is a kind of collision between outside and inside but, given that Caruth is following Freud, it is no surprise that it is also a product of belatedness, of latency: ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event’ (1995, pp. 4–5). The breach is both psychological and physical, a fact that is demonstrated in Nadin Mai’s chapter, in this volume, in which post-concussive syndrome affects the eponymous protagonist of Lav Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), who is both physically and psychologically possessed by traumatic events. What might concern Caruth in this case are the ways in which such protagonists ‘carry an impossible history within them, […] they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess’ (1995, p. 5). A further aspect of the structure of trauma is that the


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image or event is re-experienced literally, as a flashback: ‘blankness—the space of the unconsciousness—is paradoxically what precisely preserves the event in its literality’ (p. 8). Another vital feature of this structure is, as Caruth notes, ‘the fact that, for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis’ (p. 9). This ‘crisis of survival’ is explored most directly in this volume in Erin Hogan’s treatment of Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words (2006) in which the key formal fea-ture is not flashback but the acousmatic voice of the trauma victim, a sur-vivor of the Bosnian war. If latency, literality and survival are aspects of a ‘structure’ of trauma, according to Caruth, how might a perspective based on scars differ? The notion of ‘scarring’ is often referenced fleetingly in trauma studies and without any attention to what the word might mean.

The word ‘scar’ is part of the common vernacular for we often refer to people being ‘scarred’ by a traumatic event, though this term can be used too flippantly (just as we hear people claiming to be ‘traumatised’ by occasional inconveniences—a delayed train journey, for example, a shop-ping expedition, etc.). To begin the process of a more serious treatment of scars, it is important to note the relation between mind and body, espe-cially since, within the field of trauma studies, ‘memory is imagined as a wounded body’, and this can ‘[complicate] attempts to understand trauma in terms of cultural production’ (Broderick and Traverso 2011, p. 5). The scar motif is one obvious route by which we can attempt to connect the imagined ‘wounded body’ to processes of memory, but we make no claim that it is uncomplicated, only that it might serve as a heuristic tool. A very useful example of the deployment of scarring is discussed in Luckhurst’s landmark work, The Trauma Question (2008): the photographic collec-tion of Australian artist Tracey Moffatt entitled ‘Scarred for Life’, ‘a series of ten panels of captioned photographs that froze in place a moment of psychic damage, a staging of the traumatic instant at which the intru-sive image would be seared into the mind’ (p. 160). The images, which constitute just one example of what Luckhurst calls ‘aftermath aesthet-ics’ (pp. 154–64), restage these specific traumatising moments whilst the captions elucidate them. One, for example, features a naked man appar-ently beating a girl in a bedroom and the caption reads ‘Heart Attack, 1970. She glimpsed her father belting the girl from down the street. That day he died of a heart attack’ (p. 159; bold type in the original). For Luckhurst, this kind of captioning is a ‘comment on the brutal way that


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the trauma paradigm can fix identity through the singular childhood event, destining the self to reiterate this definitional moment without prospect of resolution’ (p. 160). Making links between these ‘staged reconstructions’ (p. 159) and those of film is not unproblematic but, for our purposes, two key aspects of the ‘structure’ of a scar are important here: the lack of resolution (the series itself is called ‘Scarred for Life’; emphasis added) and the need for explicatory narrative.

Before considering the relationship between film and scarring pro-cesses, understanding certain characteristics of a scar, in strictly medical terms, is useful. Lawrence A. Schachner and Ronald C. Hansen describe scars as ‘the irreversible end stage of many inflammatory and destructive processes’ (Pediatric Dermatology, 2011, p. 80) and, according to Krishan Vij’s guide, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology (2014), scars can then last indefinitely as patches of skin which are ‘tough, white and glistening’ (p. 56). Permanent scars cannot therefore be described as fully healed wounds or indeed as skin itself. John Holliman, in Pathology (1992), asserts that, in a permanent scar, only ‘seventy to ninety percent of the original tissue strength is restored but a scar is never as strong as the origi-nal tissue’ (1992, p. 20). According to Vij, what constitutes ‘strength’ in skin is a moot point, though, since scars can actually be ‘tough’, and one may speculate whether their strength is the skin’s method of ensuring it is not hurt twice in the same place. Be that as it may, scars are a simulacrum of the original tissue. Collagen is a key ingredient of the fibrous tissue that makes up the replacement skin, and these fibrils have to become organ-ised, ‘re-modeled into ordered, structured formations to increase the ten-sile strength of the scar tissue’ (Sussman and Bates-Jensen 2007, p. 38). We can summarise the characteristics of the medical scar in the following terms: it is the result of complex organisation which relies heavily on the work of collagen; once formed, scars can exist for an indefinite period; the permanent scar is not identical to the original tissue but a simulacrum of it. A final point is that, although they share these characteristics, every single scar is unique in its material form, a fact made evident by Vij’s complex but barely exhaustive list of the visual characteristics of scars, all of which vary in colour, strength and elasticity (p. 56).

How might all this apply to the films studied in this volume? The most important aspect, of course, is personal and collective healing, though this is not to be understood as ‘closure’ of a wound: its erasure, and the formation of perfect, new skin. Instead, we are referring to films acting,


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much like scars in their formation, as a present and ongoing process of organised engagement with the original wound in which it is implicitly accepted that what is reproduced is not the wound itself but a simulacrum of it.5 The simulacrum of the wound is what we see represented in the film, and it is this reproduction of the wound—not the wound itself, the original historic event—that is our focus in the present as we watch that film. There is some support from Deleuze in our attempt to shift the focus from the past to a more dynamic, perhaps even multi-directional present. Noting the Stoics’ belief that ‘every sign is a sign of the present’, Deleuze declares, ‘[a] scar is the sign not of a past wound but of “the present fact of having been wounded”: we can say that it is the contemplation of the wound, that it contracts all the instants which separate us from it into a living present’ (2014, p. 102). For our purposes what is most useful here is the principle of the primacy of the present, along with its connectedness to other temporal dimensions. Scars evoke different temporalities: the past (the wound) and the present (the ever-present scar) but the future only inasmuch as these may indeed be scars for life. The traumas suffered in the films studied in this collection are generally permanent, for life, and therefore elude discussions focussed on ‘healing’, where this is understood to be a process of eventual closure.

Two takes on the scar motif in literature are also of interest: those of David Der-wei Wang and Lisa Woolfork. Both refer to the relationship between visible scars and the wound narratives that created them. Der- wei Wang considers Chinese literature from the mid-twentieth century, especially what he terms ‘scarred discourses’ which focus on physical scars brought about by national conflict. These can be both ‘physical evidence’ and ‘textual memento’ of a given violence: ‘Upon examination of one’s scars, memories are brought back and an implicit narrative takes shape’ (2004, p. 148). For Woolfork’s study (2009) such implicitness cannot be taken for granted. She explores the relationship between Catholic stigmata and slave literature. In the analysis of one novel, she focuses on the func-tion of ‘touching scars’, concluding that ‘scars can start a story but not fully narrate it’ (p. 61). Thus, narrative is key to our understanding of the simultaneous separation from and connection to the original wound: ‘Even if one touches another person’s scars [in our case, even if one views the depiction of scars in the form of films], the gesture does not fully render the wound’s story, which must be supplemented by further explica-tion’ (Woolfork, pp. 62–3). Although literature and film represent differ-ent challenges in the representation of trauma, narrative is vital to both.


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We posit that the films in this volume refer less to processes of healing, or ‘working through’, in which narrative linearity is always implied and an eventual point of closure hinted at, than to the resulting damage—the scars—caused by the legacies of trauma, without recourse to simplistic offers of closure or even, in some cases, precise points of origin. That lack of closure is by now axiomatic, but predictable unpredictability ought not to mitigate the potential power of these films, even if the form is recognized, the devices familiar. The intense focus on the present, the legacy, does not block contemplation of other temporalities: it unlocks them. Thus, the films studied in this volume can be seen to be part of the scar-formation process in that they work ‘with’ the original trauma in an ongoing process (rather than working ‘through’ it towards closure or healing); but they also perform the job of representing, or narrating, the historical links between scars in present-day society and the original trauma in the past.

In Guy Austin’s chapter, the first in the volume, a pertinent question is raised in the context of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s attempts at what Austin calls the ‘magicking away’ of the distress of the post-civil-war period through a series of amnesties in Algeria. On the one hand, there is a need to resist such narratives of ‘national forgetting’ by recalling that period; on the other, how can film counteract other official narratives which focus too much on the past, such as those of the postcolonial Algerian state, with films which focus instead on the everyday legacy, the scar:

one thinks of the postcolonial Algerian state persistently seeking to legiti-mise itself by recalling the horrors of the colonial occupation and the mar-tyrs of the war against France, while ignoring what [Ann] Cvetkovich would call the ‘everyday weariness’ of the present: in other words, recalling past wounds while ignoring present scars. (p. 35)

Austin discusses how ‘agreeing to forget’ distinguishes present views of the past from the ‘hypermnesia or obsessive remembering’ of previous years. His chapter analyses the function of recent Algerian documentary cinema as a new ‘cultural symptom’ of injustice that engages with the trau-mas generated by the civil conflict of the nineties. It explores the ‘struc-ture of injustice’ that these films address, their various mobilisations of the trope of the living dead, and their contribution to our understanding of Algeria as a traumatised and largely dysfunctional postcolonial nation state. Algeria he says, ‘is a place without a voice where nobody moves,


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nothing comes, nothing goes’ (p. 40). He relates this to Ann Cvetkovich’s ‘everyday weariness’, noted above, and also to the ‘stuckness’ of depres-sion, a condition that saps, enervates—and one that is all too common to the protagonists of many of the films discussed.

In another treatment of the filmic representation of civil war, Jelac a considers the ways in which the child, as both a literal and symbolic fig-ure, has haunted many works of cinema about the Bosnian war, and par-ticularly films about the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996). Jelac a examines some of the most prominent and cinematically challenging representa-tions of Bosnia’s war children in films such as Djeca (Children of Sarajevo, Aida Begic 2012) and Savršeni krug (The Perfect Circle, Ademir Kenovic 1997), especially in their connection to the figurative child, a symbolic figure whose meanings extend well beyond any one real child, and ulti-mately connect to the repressed unconscious of adults. In many ways, the child has become one of the defining symbols of cinema about the Bosnian war. Has the child’s trauma become ‘merely’ emplotted into constitutions of concretely defined ethno-national identities, or is it, to borrow from Derrida, always already a symbol of a larger struggle between identity and its discontents? In either case, the relationship between the wounds of the past and scars of the present cannot be traced in any uncomplicated, linear fashion. Jelac a makes a pertinent distinction between witnessing of past events by children and the subsequent resolv-ing of the ‘dilemmas of bearing witness’, especially when the original traumatic events have different characteristics to those of the resulting scars, the latter being harder to pin down. ‘The Child’s suffering’ she proposes ‘might have initially been brought about because of her ethnic identity, but its reverberations and tragic proportions always escape a firm referential emphasis […]’ (p. 73).

Dauge-Roth points to reflexive experimentalism in his study of Grey Matter, the film on which he focuses in his chapter on the representa-tions of the Rwandan genocide. Ruhorahoza’s debut film marks a radical departure from ‘the constraints of historical realism that have dominated cinematic representations of the genocide’ in Rwanda. Breaking with such realism, Ruhorahoza favours a symbolic and haunting huis clos that drama-tizes the loneliness of survivors and perpetrators who are each respectively trapped in mental prisons, be they the result of ideological constructs or of traumatic violence. While one survivor finds a way to overcome his men-tal entrapment, his sister and a genocide perpetrator end up in the same mental institution. Ultimately, Dauge-Roth argues, Grey Matter explores


SCARS AND WOUNDS

Documents