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  • The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization ed. by Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek, and Julia B. Köhne
  • Jason Crouthamel
Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek and Julia B. Köhne, Editors The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014

Historians and film theorists have lately produced path-breaking scholarship on the impact of 20th century traumas on cinema. Anton Kaes, for example, recently explored the Great War’s impact on Weimar cinema and broke ground in revealing how cinema gave expression to trauma and violence for a wounded nation. Films, even those not directly dealing with the war, provided a mirror for a shell-shocked interwar German society reeling from the trauma of total war.13 Similarly, The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema, an interdisciplinary collection of essays edited by Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek and Julia B. Köhne, explores the function of cinema in visualizing violence for traumatized societies. Taking a transnational, interdisciplinary, and cross-genre perspective, this volume focuses on documentary and feature films of the 1960s–2000s to explore two central questions: (1) which modes of cinematic representation enable visualization of shattering experiences with violence?; and (2) what historical insights and cultural perspectives into trauma can be found in film?

The central argument that runs through this collection’s diverse, but cohesive set of essays is that cinematic representations of violence have the capacity to “reenact, reactivate, or reproduce” traumatic situations, thus [End Page 86] playing out ‘trauma’ in a mediated manner, which, by restaging the past, can be culturally cathartic.(3). Unlike any other medium, film can both activate and deconstruct traumatic wounds and transport narratives of trauma into the national psyche. Film preserves and replays trauma in a form that societies can absorb. When traumatic historical and individual experiences are otherwise too devastating for cultures to remember, cinema, especially horror cinema, becomes a site through which individuals and societies can explore traumatic experiences. However, violence in cinema can also potentially impede coming to terms with traumatic history, as images and memories become simplified or appropriated to serve collective national or political agendas.

The first section of the volume focuses on images of horror in trauma cinema. It consists of three essays and explores connections between historical traumas, national wounds, and the depiction of traumatic violence. The first contribution, by Thomas Weber, examines Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), which, Weber argues, employs an aesthetic of stress and alienation that connects to repressed traumatic memories. Haneke’s characters and milieu are symbolically linked to the French Resistance and the Algerian War, forcing the audience to encounter repressed individual and cultural memories. Michael Elm’s essay on films by Roman Polanski, including Rosemary’s Baby (1968), explores similar themes. Elm argues that Polanski’s films, which draw on his own traumatic experiences in the Holocaust, are essentially a reenactment of repressed traumas that are too painful to deal with directly. Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah examines various American horror films like Flesh Eaters (1964) and Blood Creek (2009) to argue that the pervasive iconography of Nazi villains, which symbolize evil in its rawest form, is actually loaded with symbolism that is dynamic and ever-changing, enabling audiences to project and confront diverse individual and cultural interpretations of trauma and evil through images of horror.

The volume’s second section focuses on representations of trauma and horror in a broad range of American films that invite audience to see violence as a coping mechanism, a means of expressing rage and revenge, and the cause of identity loss and memory repression. Dania Hückmann explores fantasies of rage and resistance within the context of the Holocaust as reimagined by Tarantinio’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). According to Hückmann, the Jewish cinema owner Shosanna’s act of revenge against Hitler taps into contemporary cultural fantasies that reflect a desire to restage the trauma of the Second World War. Daniel Müller examines how narratives of individual trauma in Source Code (2011), where the main character’s experience with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by combat in Afghanistan, invites audiences to confront the origins, but also mechanisms of denial and repression, that are played...

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