Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
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Joshua Hirsch
Based on the author's previous work, which posited a posttraumatic form of cinema emerging in France after the Second World War, this article focuses primarily on the representation of the Holocaust in films like Night and Fog, The Pawnbroker, and Shoah. These films not only represented traumatic events, they also developed new aesthetic strategies that encouraged a posttraumatic historical consciousness in the audience. More recent work of the author compares this posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust with the cinematic responses of filmmakers from other cultures to other historical traumas. To what extent are these cinematic responses to trauma influenced by or similar to the posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust, and to what extent do they differ? The article summarizes the posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust, and then compares and contrasts it to two other posttraumatic films: Sankofa (about African-American slavery) and History and Memory (about the Japanese American internment camps). History and Memory – made by Rea Tajiri, a woman – can be used to problematize the relationship between trauma and gender in the other films.
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience
- Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps
- Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable
- On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
- Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
- The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine
- Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir
- “‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
- Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage
- Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
- Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
- Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas
- Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler
- Rezensionen
- Liste der Mitarbeiter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience
- Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps
- Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable
- On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
- Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
- The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine
- Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir
- “‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
- Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage
- Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
- Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
- Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas
- Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler
- Rezensionen
- Liste der Mitarbeiter
