Remembering Historical Trauma in Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday

Since the instigation of the peace process in Northern Ireland, issues relating to the commemoration of the political conflict there have moved to center stage in media, political, cultural and academic discourses. This essay locates the film Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002) within the framework of a growing body of literature on historical trauma and memory studies in order to explicate the ways in which it discursively "works through" a historical event of traumatic magnitude. Analysis considers the film's relationship to its historical referent, memorial activity at its contemporary moment of production, and generic modes of address specific to the docudrama.