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-scene, 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.
About the Author: 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 Erzahlungen 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 phil. habil. Julia B. Kohne 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. Kohne is the author of Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken militarpsychiatrischen 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-Reprasentierbaren (Berlin 2012).