Scars and Wounds

Film and Legacies of Trauma

Nick Hodgin, Amit Thakkar, Nick Hodgin, Amit Thakkar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319410234
• eBook ISBN: 9783319410241
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines recent cinematic representations of the traumatic legacies of national and international events and processes. Whilst not ignoring European and Hollywood cinema, it includes studies of films about countries which have been less well-represented in cinematic trauma studies, including Australia, Rwanda, Chile and Iran. Each essay establishes national and international contexts that are relevant to the films considered. All essays also deal with form, whether this means the use of specific techniques to represent certain aspects of trauma or challenges to certain genre conventions to make them more adaptable to the traumatic legacies addressed by directors. The editors argue that the healing processes associated with such legacies can helpfully be studied through the idiom of 'scar-formation' rather than event-centred 'wound-creation'.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Trauma Studies, Film and the Scar Motif
• Chapter 2: Trauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Stories of Civil Conflict Told by the Living Dead
• Chapter 3: Elusive Figures: Children’s Trauma and Bosnian War Cinema
• Chapter 4: Conferring Visibility on Trauma within Rwanda’s National Reconciliation: Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Disturbing and Salutary Camera
• Chapter 5: Proximity and Distance: Approaching Trauma in Katrina Films
• Chapter 6: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Is Over’?: The Resolution of Trauma and Male Melodrama in The Tree of Life
• Chapter 7: Listening to the Pain of Others: Isabel Coixet’s La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words)
• Chapter 8: Australian Postcolonial Trauma and Silences in Samson and Delilah
• Chapter 9: Trauma’s Slow Onslaught: Sound and Silence in Lav Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE
• Chapter 10: Flesh and Blood in the Globalised Age: Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado (Born and Bred) and Carancho (The Vulture)
• Chapter 11: Unclaimed Experience and the Implicated Subject in Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem
• Chapter 12: Persepolis: Telling Tales of Trauma
• Index