Download or read book Trauma Cinema written by Janet Walker and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic. Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory. Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison. Her astute and original examination considers the Hollywood classic Kings Row and the television movie Sybil in relation to vanguard nonfiction works, including Errol Morris's Mr. Death, Lynn Hershman's video diaries, and the chilling genealogy of incest, Just, Melvin. Both incest and the Holocaust have also been featured in contemporary psychological literature on trauma and memory. The author employs theories of post traumatic stress disorder and histories of the so-called memory wars to illuminate the amnesias, fantasies, and mistakes in memory that must be taken into account, along with corroborated evidence, if we are to understand how personal and public historical meaning is made. Janet Walker’s engrossing narrative demonstrates that the past does not come down to us purely and simply through eyewitness accounts and tangible artifacts. Her incisive analysis exposes the frailty of memory in the face of disquieting events while her joint consideration of trauma cinema and psychological theorizing radically reconstructs the roadblocks at the intersection of catastrophe, memory, and historical representation.
Download or read book Eco Trauma Cinema written by Anil Narine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological harm are often related, and even symbiotic: the traumas we perpetuate in an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management inevitably return to harm us. Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize the environment or its species, and stories that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Download or read book Trauma and Cinema written by E. Ann Kaplan and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the relation of trauma to transnational modern mass media. The first of its kind, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations provides ten essays which explore the ways trauma works itself out as media — in images in (and as) film, photography, and video — in global cultural flows. The focus of our volume on the matrix of trauma, visual media and modernity seeks to engage and go beyond current tendencies in trauma studies. The book discusses how trauma presented in the media spills over national boundaries and can be found in images across divergent cultures in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and America. From the Holocaust to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, from Taiwan’s colonial experience to the catastrophe of Hiroshima, from attempted annihilation of Australian Aborigines to attempted reconciliation in South Africa, these essays offer the reader a plethora of images of trauma for comparison and contrast.
Download or read book Palestinian Cinema written by Nurith Gertz and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although in recent years, the entire world has been increasingly concerned with the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian relationship, there are few truly reliable sources of information regarding Palestinian society and culture, either concerning its relationship with Israeli society, its position between east and west or its stances in times of war and peace. One of the best sources for understanding Palestinian culture is its cinema which has devoted itself to serving the national struggle. In this book, two scholars--an Israeli and a Palestinian--in a rare and welcome collaboration, follow the development of Palestinian cinema, commenting on its response to political and social transformations. They discover that the more the social, political and economic conditions worsen and chaos and pain prevail, the more Palestinian cinema becomes involved with the national struggle. As expected, Palestinian cinema has unfolded its national narrative against the Israeli narrative, which tried to silence it.
Download or read book The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema written by Michael Elm and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the multifaceted depiction and staging of historical and social traumata as the result of extreme violence within national contexts. It focuses on Israeli-Palestinian, German and (US) American film, and reaches out to cinematic traditions from other countries like France, Great Britain and the former USSR. International and interdisciplinary scholars analyze both mainstream and avant-garde movies and documentaries premiering from the 1960s to the present. From transnational and cross-genre perspectives, they query the modes of representation – regarding narration, dramaturgy, aesthetics, mise-en-scène, iconology, lighting, cinematography, editing and sound – held by film as a medium to visualize shattering experiences of violence and their traumatic encoding in individuals, collectives, bodies and psyches. This anthology uniquely traces horror aesthetics and trajectories as a way to reenact, echo and question the perpetual loops of trauma in film cultures. The contributors examine the discursive transfer between historical traumata necessarily transmitted in a medialized and conceptualized form, the changing landscape of (clinical) trauma theory, the filmic depiction and language of trauma, and the official memory politics and hegemonic national-identity constructions.
Download or read book Shocking Representation written by Adam Lowenstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-22 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors' films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas. Borrowing elements from art cinema and the horror genre, these directors disrupted the boundaries between high and low cinema. Lowenstein contrasts their works, often dismissed by contemporary critics, with the films of acclaimed "New Wave" directors in France, England, Japan, and the United States. He argues that these "New Wave" films, which were embraced as both art and national cinema, often upheld conventional ideas of nation, history, gender, and class questioned by the horror films. By fusing film studies with the emerging field of trauma studies, and drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adam Lowenstein offers a bold reassessment of the modern horror film and the idea of national cinema.
Download or read book Washed in Blood written by Claire Sisco King and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-25 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Smith in I Am Legend. Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Charlton Heston in just about everything. Viewers of Hollywood action films are no doubt familiar with the sacrificial victim-hero, the male protagonist who nobly gives up his life so that others may be saved. Washed in Blood argues that such sacrificial films are especially prominent in eras when the nation—and American manhood—is thought to be in crisis. The sacrificial victim-hero, continually imperiled and frequently exhibiting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, thus bears the trauma of the nation. Claire Sisco King offers an in-depth study of three prominent cycles of Hollywood films that follow the sacrificial narrative: the early–to–mid 1970s, the mid–to–late 1990s, and the mid–to–late 2000s. From Vietnam-era disaster movies to post-9/11 apocalyptic thrillers, she examines how each film represents traumatized American masculinity and national identity. What she uncovers is a cinematic tendency to position straight white men as America’s most valuable citizens—and its noblest victims.
Download or read book Trauma Cinema written by Janet Walker and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic. Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory. Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison. Her astute and original examination considers the Hollywood classic Kings Row and the television movie Sybil in relation to vanguard nonfiction works, including Errol Morris's Mr. Death, Lynn Hershman's video diaries, and the chilling genealogy of incest, Just, Melvin. Both incest and the Holocaust have also been featured in contemporary psychological literature on trauma and memory. The author employs theories of post traumatic stress disorder and histories of the so-called memory wars to illuminate the amnesias, fantasies, and mistakes in memory that must be taken into account, along with corroborated evidence, if we are to understand how personal and public historical meaning is made. Janet Walker’s engrossing narrative demonstrates that the past does not come down to us purely and simply through eyewitness accounts and tangible artifacts. Her incisive analysis exposes the frailty of memory in the face of disquieting events while her joint consideration of trauma cinema and psychological theorizing radically reconstructs the roadblocks at the intersection of catastrophe, memory, and historical representation.
Download or read book German Cinema Terror and Trauma written by Thomas Elsaesser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In German Cinema – Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to—as well as a reminder of—Nazism’s hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser—reviving the full meaning of Freud’s Fehlleistung—calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.
Download or read book Shell Shock Cinema written by Anton Kaes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Shell Shock Cinema' shows how classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I & the trauma of Germany's humiliating defeat. Anton Kaes argues that even films which do not depict war reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock.
Download or read book Climate Trauma written by E. Ann Kaplan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.
Download or read book Afterimage written by Joshua Hirsch and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-25 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How films on the Holocaust gave birth to a new cinematic genre.
Download or read book Trauma Dissociation and Re enactment in Japanese Literature and Film written by David Stahl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese literature and film have frequently been approached using lenses such as language, genre and ideology. Yet, despite a succession of major social traumas that have marked, and in many ways shaped and defined much of modern Japan, Japanese fiction and cinema have not often been examined psychoanalytically. In this book, David Stahl conducts in-depth readings and interpretations of a set of Japanese novels and film. By introducing the methodology of trauma/PTSD studies, Stahl seeks to provide a better understanding of the insights of Japanese writers and directors into their societies, cultures and histories. In particular, by building on the work of practitioner-theoreticians, such as Pierre Janet and Judith Herman, Stahl analyses a number of key texts, including Kawabata Yasunari’s Sleeping Beauties (1961), Enchi Fumiko’s Female Masks (1958) and Imamura Sho- hei’s Vengeance is Mine (1979). Consequently, through using concepts of social trauma, dissociation, failed mourning, revenge and narrative memory, this book sheds new light on the psychological aftereffects and transgenerational legacies of trauma depicted in Japanese works. Trauma, Dissociation and Re-enactment in Japanese Literature and Film will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Literature and Cinema, as well as those interested in Japanese History and Trauma Studies.
Download or read book Healing Historical Trauma in South Korean Film and Literature written by Chungmoo Choi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through South Korean filmic and literary texts, this book explores affect and ethics in the healing of historical trauma, as alternatives to the measures of transitional justice in want of national unity. Historians and legal practitioners who deal with transitional justice agree that the relationship between historiography and justice seeking is contested: this book reckons with this question of how much truth-telling from a violent past will lead to healing, forgiving, forgetting and finally overcoming resentment. Nuanced interpretations of South Korean filmic and literary texts are featured, including Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother and literary texts of Han Kang and Ch’oe Yun, whilst also engaging the ethical and political philosophy of Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and others. Also offered is new and extensive research into the hitherto hidden history of thousands of North Korean war orphans who were sent to Eastern European countries for care. Grappling with the evils of history, the films and novels examined herein find their ultimate themes in compassion, hospitality, humility and solidarity of the wounded. Healing Historical Trauma in South Korean Film and Literature will appeal to students and scholars of film, comparative literature, cultural studies and Korean studies more broadly.
Download or read book The wounds of nations written by Linnie Blake and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wounds of nations: Horror cinema, historical trauma and national identity explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state. Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, its analysis ranges from the body horror of the American 1970s to the avant-garde proclivities of German Reunification horror, from the vengeful supernaturalism of recent Japanese chillers and their American remakes to the post-Thatcherite masculinity horror of the UK and the resurgence of 'hillbilly' horror in the period following September 11th 2001. In each case, it is argued, horror cinema forces us to look again at the wounds inflicted on individuals, families, communities and nations by traumatic events such as genocide and war, terrorist outrage and seismic political change, wounds that are all too often concealed beneath ideologically expedient discourses of national cohesion. By proffering a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, horror cinema is seen to offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.
Download or read book Millennial Cinema written by Amresh Sinha and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Download or read book Deeper Than Oblivion written by Raz Yosef and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention. Tracing a long line of films from the 1940s up to the 2000s, the contributors use close readings of these films not only to reconstruct the past, but also to actively engage with it. Addressing both high-profile and lesser known fiction and non-fiction Israeli films, Deeper than Oblivion underlines the unique aesthetic choices many of these films make in their attempt to confront the difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of representing trauma. By looking at recent and classic examples of Israeli films that turn to memory and trauma, this book addresses the pressing issues and disputes in the field today.
