Scars and Wounds : Film and Legacies of Trauma

Annotation 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' Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction: Trauma Studies, Film and the Scar Motif....Pages 1-29 Trauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Stories of Civil Conflict Told by the Living Dead....Pages 31-52 Elusive Figures: Children’s Trauma and Bosnian War Cinema....Pages 53-76 Conferring Visibility on Trauma within Rwanda’s National Reconciliation: Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Disturbing and Salutary Camera....Pages 77-100 Proximity and Distance: Approaching Trauma in Katrina Films....Pages 101-126 ‘Our Long National Nightmare Is Over’?: The Resolution of Trauma and Male Melodrama in The Tree of Life ....Pages 127-148 Listening to the Pain of Others: Isabel Coixet’s La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words) ....Pages 149-167 Australian Postcolonial Trauma and Silences in Samson and Delilah ....Pages 169-194 Trauma’s Slow Onslaught: Sound and Silence in Lav Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE ....Pages 195-216 Flesh and Blood in the Globalised Age: Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado (Born and Bred) and Carancho (The Vulture)....Pages 217-241 Unclaimed Experience and the Implicated Subject in Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem ....Pages 243-266 Persepolis: Telling Tales of Trauma....Pages 267-289 Back Matter....Pages 291-299