Description
Book SynopsisRevisioning War Trauma in Cinema: Uncoming Communitiesuses philosophy and critical theory to examine films that participate in debates concerning trauma and representation. Our book reflects upon films that invent, rather than represent the moment history breaks down. It proposes a 21st century way forward across problems of trauma, inheritance, and representation into exceptional communities of artistic invention.Revisioning War Traumainvolves a confrontation with death and the hole that trauma exposes. We build our subtitle from a play on words, namely the un-coming as a resistance tojouissanceand as a limit to cultural demands. Uncoming also refers to the traumatic departure of figures in the films from their homes and their symbolic places. As always already in the process of departure, characters in the films our book discusses embody the hemorrhaging of imaginary belonging that nationhood compels.The bookuses psychoanalytic theory as a framework and a robust language that allows
Trade Review“The essays in Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema challenge us to re-vision well-known cinematic representations of the Holocaust through the lens of key insights from trauma studies. The authors’ lucid and accessible language renders reading their unsettling analyses an enriching journey into some of the most complex Holocaust films made. Scholars as well as aficionados of cinematic representations will find the authors’ re-visionings both absorbing and exciting.” -- Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey, Professor Emerita, Binghamton University, State of New York University
“On almost every page of War Trauma in Cinema the authors show not only how psychoanalysis speaks to the state of Europe after the Holocaust (and, in the last chapter, the state of America after it’s civil war: death is not just a ‘master from Germany’, as Celan wrote), but how much what was relevant then speaks to the trauma of our reality at this moment. May it be widely read.” -- J. Todd Dean, American Psychoanalytic Association
“Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema is an excellent and extensive intervention into the areas of trauma, film studies, and psychoanalysis. Through brilliant close readings of contemporary films on the trauma of war and its aftermath, Datema and Steinkoler examine the fundamental questions of memory in the face of catastrophe and the possibility of construction—in the psychoanalytic sense—of community in a world in which we are all exiles. The authors’ work is a ‘sinthomatic’ resistance to the violence and narcissism of the injunction of becoming as citizens and subjects, and explores the power of film to see the real differently, an ‘uncoming’ that begets survival creation amid disaster.” -- Alexander Howe, University of the District of Columbia
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Cinema of the Unbecoming Chapter 1: Writing War Reporting Flesh Anonyma: A Woman in Berln Chapter 2: Belonging is Uncanny: Wakolda, or The German Doctor Chapter 3: Phoenix: The After-Death Chapter 4: Austrißized: Woman in Gold Chapter 5: Music as the Last Word: The Lives of Others Chapter 6: Hannah Arendt: Revisioning Pariahdom in Dark Times Chapter 7: Gasping for Death: László Nemes’ Son of Saul Chapter 8: Coppola’s Beguiled: A History Detox Conclusion Bibliography Index
