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The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization

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.


Dr Michael Elm is 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. His main fields of research are film, trauma and cultural memory studies; German modernity in film and political philosophy; cross-cultural educational theory; and Holocaust studies. His publications include Zeugenschaft im Film. Eine erinnerungskulturelle Analyse filmischer Erzählungen des Holocaust (Berlin 2008), and “The Making of Holocaust Trauma in German Memory: Identity Formation in Germany through the Example of Robert Thalheim’s AND ALONG COME TOURISTS,” in From Rejection to Acceptance: To be Jewish in 21th Century Germany (forthcoming).

Dr Kobi Kabalek holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. The title of his dissertation is: “The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany.” His research focuses on cultural history, historical experience, and memory in Germany and Israel. His most recent publication (with Peter Carrier) is “Cultural Memory and Transcultural Memory – A Conceptual Analysis,” in The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and Beyond Borders (Berlin 2014).

Dr habil. Julia B. Köhne is Guest Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and Privatdozentin for Contemporary and Cultural History at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on cultural studies, media and film theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the history of the body and of military psychiatry. Köhne is the author of Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens, 1914–1920 (Husum 2009), and Geniekult in Geisteswissenschaften und Literaturen um 1900 und seine filmischen Adaptionen (Wien 2014). She edited Trauma und Film. Inszenierungen eines Nicht-Repräsentierbaren (Berlin 2012).

"This excellent volume succeeds at exploring both the intentions of filmmakers who produce images of violence, and the context in which such images are received by diverse audiences. Specialists in film, history, and cultural studies will benefit from its balanced and nuanced examination of the cultural impact of film and the significance of violence, as it is both reflected and refracted on the screen."

Jason Crouthamel Grand Valley State University Film & History, 46:2 (2016)

"The book negotiates fundamental questions in the study of trauma in cinema by intertwining the analysis of film language and style with cultural psychology – both on a national and individual level – thus articulating the motivations and implications of violence and its representation. The interpretive analysis covers a diverse range of film types and genres such as documentaries, avant-garde and mainstream cinema and prompts a reevaluation and interpretation of the horror of trauma in different contexts, nations and periods."

Dr Yael S. Ben-Moshe H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. July, 2015

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-6042-5

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-6042-0

Release Date: 9th September 2014

Pages: 355

Price: £52.99

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