Scars and Wounds: Film and Legacies of Trauma

307 Pages·2017·4.218 MB·English

by  Nick Hodgin, Amit Thakkar (eds.)

SCARS AND WOUNDS
FILM AND LEGACIES OF TRAUMA
EDITED BY NICK HODGIN AND AMIT THAKKAR
Scars and Wounds
Nick Hodgin • Amit Thakkar
Editors
Scars and Wounds
Film and Legacies of Trauma
Editors
Nick Hodgin Amit Thakkar
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-41023-4 ISBN 978-3-319-41024-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41024-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956386
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C
ontents
1 I ntroduction: Trauma Studies,
Film and the Scar Motif 1
Nick Hodgin and Amit Thakkar
2 T rauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Stories
of Civil Conflict Told by the Living Dead 31
Guy Austin
3 E lusive Figures: Children’s Trauma and 
Bosnian War Cinema 53
Dijana Jelača
4 C onferring Visibility on Trauma within Rwanda’s
National Reconciliation: Kivu Ruhorahoza’s
Disturbing and Salutary Camera 77
Alexandre Dauge-Roth
5 P roximity and Distance: Approaching Trauma
in Katrina Films 101
Nick Hodgin
v
vi CONTENTS
6 ‘ Our Long National Nightmare Is Over’?:
The Resolution of Trauma and Male
Melodrama in The Tree of Life 127
Brian Baker
7 L istening to the Pain of Others: Isabel Coixet’s
La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words) 149
Erin K. Hogan
8 A ustralian Postcolonial Trauma and Silences in Samson
and Delilah 169
Ben Gook
9 T rauma’s Slow Onslaught: Sound and Silence in Lav
Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE 195
Nadin Mai
10 F lesh and Blood in the Globalised Age: Pablo
Trapero’s Nacido y criado (Born and Bred)
and Carancho (The Vulture) 217
Fiona Clancy
11 U nclaimed Experience and the Implicated
Subject in Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem 243
Amit Thakkar
12 Persepolis: Telling Tales of Trauma 267
Steven Allen
Index 291
n C
otes on ontributors
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
vii
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 Jelacǎ 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). Jelača 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.