Trauma and Cinema Cross Cultural Explora

Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name
in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further
information see p. iv.
Edited by
E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang

Hong Kong University Press w w w. h k u p r e s s . o r g
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© Hong Kong University Press 2004, 2008

First published in hardback 2004
Paperback edition first published 2008
ISBN 978-962-209-979-1
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound by
Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose

art explores the complex themes of language across cultures,
has written the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy.
This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and
the distinctive nature of our English-language books published
in China.
“At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing

more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new
way of rendering English words in the format of a square so
they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to
be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot. Western
viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight
erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.”
— Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction 1
From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity
E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang
■ Part One: Trauma and Cross-Cultural Encounters 23
1. This is My History 25
Trauma, Testimony, and Nation-Building
in the “New” South Africa
Sarah L. Lincoln
2. Traumatic Contact Zones and Embodied Translators 45

With Reference to Select Australian Texts
E. Ann Kaplan
3. A World of Sadness? 65
Robert Chi
■ Part Two: Screening War and Terror 91
4. Post-traumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary 93

Joshua Hirsch
vi CONTENTS
5. The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and 123

the Postmodern History Film
Janet Walker
6. Allegorizing Hiroshima 145

Shindo Kaneto’s Onibaba as Trauma Text
Adam Lowenstein
■ Part Three: Traumatic Memory, Narrative, and 163

the Reconstruction of History
7. Hiroshima, mon amour, Trauma, and the Sublime 165

Andrew Slade
8. Encountering Paralysis 183

Disability, Trauma and Narrative
Petra Kuppers
9. To Live 203
The Survival Philosophy of the Traumatized
Zhaohui Xiong
10. Trauma, Visuality, and History in Chinese Literature 217

and Film
Ban Wang
Notes 241
Index 273
Contributors
Robert Chi is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the

State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Joshua Hirsch is Visiting Lecturer in Film and Electronic Arts at

California State University, Long Beach. His book, Afterimage: Film,
Trauma, and the Holocaust, is forthcoming from Temple University
Press.
E. Ann Kaplan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

Stony Brook University, where she also founded and directs The
Humanities Institute. Kaplan has written many books and articles
on topics in cultural studies, the media, and women’s studies, from
diverse theoretical perspectives including psychoanalysis, feminism,
postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Her most recent publications
include Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and The Imperial
Gaze (1997) and Feminism and Film (Oxford University Press, 2000).
She is currently completing a book-length project, Shared Trauma
and Witnessing: Performance, Memory, Translation.
Petra Kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant

College, Rhode Island. Her book, Disability and Performance: Bodies
on Edge will be published by Routledge Press in 2003, and she has
edited a Special Edition of the Contemporary Theatre Review on the
subject of Disability and Performance in 2001. She also explores
intersections between (new) media, live presence and identity politics
viii CONTRIBUTORS
as Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Projects

(www.olimpias.net).
Adam Lowenstein is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies

at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written essays on cinema and
culture in Cinema Journal, Critical Quarterly, Post Script, British
Cinema: Past and Present (Routledge, 2000), and Hitchcock: Past and
Future (Routledge, forthcoming). He is currently completing a
manuscript tentatively entitled Shocking Representation: Historical
Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film.
Sarah L. Lincoln, a South African native, is a doctoral candidate in

English at Duke University. Her interests are in African literature,
critical theory, and representations of social transformation.
Andrew Slade teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University

of Dayton. He is author of “La tragédie, la scène, et l’image: Lecture
d’Othello” in Scène et Image (Series: La Licorne) (Université de
Poitiers, 2000) and is completing a dissertation, The Force of the
Sublime: Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, in the Department of Comparative
Literature at SUNY, Stony Brook.
Janet Walker is Professor of Film Studies at the University of

California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the
Women’s Studies Program. She is the author of Couching Resistance:
Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, co-editor with Diane
Waldman of Feminism and Documentary, and editor of Westerns:
Films Through History. Currently, she is writing a book examining
the film and video representation of catastrophic past events in light
of contemporary psychological theories of traumatic memory.
Ban Wang is Associate Professor of Comparative and Chinese

Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Sublime
Figure of History (Stanford, 1997), Narrative Perspective and Irony
(Edwin Mellen 2002) and Illuminations From the Past (Stanford 2004).
CONTRIBUTORS ix
Zhaohui Xiong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of

Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook. Born in Wuhan, China, she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees
in English and American Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies
University. She has also taught English language and literature in the
English Department of her alma mater.
Introduction
From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force
Field of Modernity
E. ANN KAPLAN AND BAN WANG
Agency in History
The fundamental event of the modern age, Martin Heidegger declares,

is “the conquest of the world as picture.” This description has been
borne out again and again by the much talked-about theory of the
decline of history and politics in the global display of simulacra.
Rescuing a bit of historical lesson from Forrest Gump, Vivian
Sobchack tells us in a volume devoted to the trauma of the modern
event, that this jocular film nevertheless shows that even an
historically absentminded, dimwitted person can be “in history, make
history.” This is due to the fact that “shit happens” all the time, that
falling out of the previous rational appointment and narrative, each
individual is to make up his or her own piece of history by some
self-responsible, self-serving act. Digitally inserting the dramatic hero
into documentary footage featuring real historical figures, the film
affirms the postmodern capacity of digital and visual media in
manipulating and playing tricks on history. Sobchack would like us
to think favorably of a widely dispersed populist readiness for history,
which may be derived from, as well as serve as an antidote to, the
digitally mastered, commercially oriented, widely circulated Disney
images of history. The principle of mainstream media representation,
2 E. ANN KAPLAN AND BAN WANG
however, turns varied and rugged historical trajectories into spectacle.

It is summed up by the motto of the History Channel of US television
that advertises one-stop shopping: “All of History. All in One Place.”
Is this readiness a flight from history or an engagement with it?1
The “readiness” for fragmented and digitized histories implies a
wish for a randomly acquired capacity on the part of the individual
to shape history to his or her liking, as if the ruse of history could
ultimately work, in deus ex machina fashion, toward numerous
rationally reinvented, atomistic narratives and self-understanding,
after myriads of chaos and irrationality in the condition of
postmodernity. The character Forrest Gump in this account would
seem an agent of history, however tossed around he is by external
forces, with a diminished but still valuable ability to master his fate
and do some deconstructive academic work on the side. But the
question arises as to whether this “agent” of history may be able to
exercise agency when the ubiquitous and far-reaching operation of
the digital media, driven by transnational cultural industry, capital,
and the ideological apparatus of the state, is fashioning history in the
image of capital and turning it more and more into a picture to look
at in a moment of mindless distraction.
If the fragmentation of rationally conceived history corresponds
to the breakdown of the sovereign consciousness we have inherited
from the Enlightenment, there is a striking contradiction: in the
alleged decline of history, no transcendent being or consciousness can
be invoked to survey diverse geographies in a single glance and propel
different temporalities in a single direction. Everyone seems obliged
to look at the mirror of his or her own making. In the most venerable
humanistic notion of history represented by Giambattista Vico,
history is a mirror of collective self-design, self-fashioning, and self-
understanding, and in this sense the imaginary mirror is more than
a fitting metaphor. The fashioning of self-image corresponds to the
making of history. 2 Now, the “pre-modern” self-regarding, self-
affirming mirrors that projected lengthened shadows of humanity
were shattered with the advent of modernity, a shattering that has
been viewed as the fundamental trauma for at least the modern
industrial West since the Enlightenment.
Freud is probably the first writer to have brought into focus this
dual breakdown of humanity’s centering in history and consciousness.
FROM TRAUMATIC PARALYSIS TO THE FORCE FIELD OF MODERNITY 3
In an introductory lecture, Freud spoke of three destructive traumas

that had inflicted human self-love and rational knowledge. The first
is the discovery that the earth, the homeland of humans, is but “a
tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness,” a
humiliating blow associated with the name of Copernicus. The second
is the devastating knowledge that God-like and God-creating humans
are but descendents from the monkeys. The third blow c`ue from
the revelation of psychoanalysis, namely that the ego is not the
“master of its own house,” but must content itself with whatever
little it can glimpse from the depths of itself.3
In retrospect and especially after the disasters of September 11,
2001, the trauma of modernity has gone from push to shove. It simply
boggles the mind or risks banalization to run down the list of all the
major traumas of the modern world — all of which came in the wake
of the three fundamental traumas associated with the loss of the
absolute in the experience of modernity. While the twentieth century
witnessed a climax of all the traumatic blows within the frame that
Freud spoke of, the new millennium has run headlong into
unthinkable catastrophes and forebodes more to come.
Freud’s description of three traumas can be further extended to
refer to the self-dismantling forces of modernity in the rapid
generation of science, technology, economic expansion, in the
colonization of the world driven by imperial centers, and in the
tendency of the global mass media to turn history into simulacra.
Much has been written on the links of altered visuality through
technology and modernity.4 Much has also been written on traumas
of various modern events.5 But the links between trauma, visual
media, and modernity are not clear, or not clear enough in a global,
multicultural context. It is therefore the purpose of this volume to
enquire into the multiple connections and problems in this entangled
matrix of modernity, trauma and transnational visual media.
From Traumatic Paralysis to Historical Force Field
The focus of our volume on the matrix of trauma, visual media and
modernity seeks to engage and go beyond current tendencies in
trauma studies. Academic studies and popular opinion tend to focus
on the traumatic event, its impact and the horrifying symptoms of

the victim. This is especially the case in the many observations on
the traumas of September 11. This isolation of a self-contained event
and its trauma ignores the larger issues of systemic proportions and
forces at work over a long stretch of history. There is much asking of
what happened and how, but too few probes into why. The lack of
historical perspective seems to underlie a major tendency that has
varied manifestations in the academic study of trauma. This is the
fixation on trauma as the ultimate limit of representation. Most
influential among literary and film scholars, the work of Cathy Caruth
and her colleagues exhibits a very sophisticated analysis of the inner
workings of trauma. Their predominant view is that “massive trauma
precludes all representation because the ordinary mechanisms of
consciousness and memory are temporally destroyed.”6 It insists on
a “literal registration of the traumatic event” or encounter that is
inaccessible to understanding and imagery. Obsessed with nightmares
and the literal truth of the traumatic impact, this view valorizes a
whole series of features in the traumatic experience: the unthinkable,
lack of witnessing, numbing, the unrepresentable, the absence of
narrative, and failures in language. Quoting Dori Laub, Caruth
proclaims that in traumatic experience history takes place “with no
witness.” It is little surprise that this deconstructive approach has
had a wide appeal for humanists and literary scholars ready to detect
the material impasses in representation and to make use of
deconstructive possibilities — the breakdowns of language and
representation.7
This focus on the irredeemable breakdown in the psyche,
representation, and language can be traced back to the dissociation
model advanced by Freud. One aspect of Freud’s theory of trauma
stresses the split in the psyche’s symbolic function without
considering the configuration of historical conditions. The dissociation
model obviously provides justification for the biological and
neurological approaches that represent the positivistic, scientific
tendency in trauma research. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s 1992
co-edited volume, Testimony, discusses different traumatic events but
stresses the paralyzed state of disconnection in the victim, one
remarkable symptom being the loss of language. Cathy Caruth’s edited
volume, following her Unclaimed Experience, also privileges the
dissociated type of trauma. Caruth describes trauma as a response,

sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or set of events, which
takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts
or behaviors. “The pathology,” she notes, “consists solely in the
structure of the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated
or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated
possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is
precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”8 Van der Kolk and
Van der Hart give a vivid description of the dissociated definition of
trauma in the volume. Working with neuroscientists, they show brain
mechanisms that support the thesis of trauma-induced, dissociated
selves. In their notion of trauma as a special form of memory, the
traumatic experience has affect only, not meaning. It produces
emotions — terror, fear, shock, and above all disruption of the normal
feeling of comfort. Only the sensation sector of the brain is active
during trauma. The meaning-making faculty — rational thought and
cognitive processing, namely, the cerebral cortex — remains shut
down because the affect is too much to be registered cognitively in
the brain. Since the experience has not been given meaning, the
subject is continually haunted by it in dreams, flashbacks and
hallucinations.9
In this theory, then, trauma is a debilitating kind of memory. It
is engraved on the body, precisely because the original experience was
too overwhelming to be processed by the mind. To be repressed, a
memory would have to be cognitively processed, and then forgotten.
Thus trauma is viewed as a special form of bodily memory. The
memory tries to find a way into consciousness, but ends up only
leaking its disturbing and ambivalent traces in the typical traumatic
symptoms of flashbacks, hallucinations, phobias, and nightmares.
This paradigm had much appeal to humanists in the 1990s. By
retreating into a focus on the impasse of the psyche and on the
paralysis of the subject, this approach reveals itself as a symptom of
withdrawal from the social field and is at risk of ignoring the
possibilities of working through and historical change. Dominick
LaCapra challenges this notion of psychic paralysis by examining the
distinction between acting out and working through. The contributors
of this volume stage a similar critique. Acting out is a melancholy
possession of the subject by the repressed past, on the model of the
dissociated self. Dialectically, working through is an attempt of

breakout, not by completely freeing oneself from the trauma, but in
facilitating the subject’s freedom by offering “a measure of critical
purchase on problems and responsible control in action which would
permit desirable change.”10 LaCapra speaks of the fixation on the
paralysis of trauma as stemming from a narrowly therapeutic
framework. This focus, as exemplified by Lacan and Z̆iz̆ek, takes
account of a delusional, immolating ego besieged by fantasies of
dismemberment. “The Symbolic itself often seems to be sucked into
the vortex of the Imaginary and the Real insofar as agency is evacuated
and misrecognition or self-deluded speech becomes the uncontrollable
force radically destabilizing, if not obliterating, the distinctions among
the three ‘orders.’” In this symbolic paralysis, which is also a psychic
breakdown, it is difficult, warns LaCapra, to find “a place for critical,
responsible agency within a noninvidious normative framework.”11
Although dissociation is the more obvious model in his writings,
Freud oscillated between an internal and an external approach. This
oscillation has implications for our understanding of trauma and socio-
historical forces of modernity. Across the range of his work, Freud
alternates between seeing trauma as the result of an external event,
such as a train accident, war, or family abuse, leading to dissociation;
and treating trauma as caused by an internal assault on the ego,
stemming from the Oedipal crisis (including fantasies of sex with
parents or relatives, and narcissistic impulses); or from internalized
loss of a loved one, as in melancholia, and so on. If the first kind of
trauma results in the dissociated self, the latter comes closer to the
phenomena of psychic conflict that characterizes neuroses. Freud
adopted the dissociated view in his early studies on hypnosis with
Breuer, before he understood the talking cure. He picked it up again
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the 1920s in trying to understand
the belated response to the famous train accident (the injured man
left the train wreck apparently unharmed, only to have psychic
symptoms, such as nightmares, emerge unheralded later on). In the
same volume, however, Freud developed the concept of infantile
trauma — something more or less inevitable within at least Western
culture’s nuclear family. Infantile trauma involved both the child’s
terrified reaction to the absence of the mother, and the Oedipal
conflict that came later. It is in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that
Freud develops his notion of how the child deals with loss in his
discussion of the fort-da game as a way the child tries to re-establish
control. At this point, Freud does not link what happens in the
accident to an earlier traumatic absence of the mother.12
Significantly, it is in his reflections on war neuroses that Freud
began to question the difference between an external and an internal
assault on the ego. He showed that the difference in soldiers’ reactions
to similar war traumas might depend on how far the war situation
triggered prior internal conflicts. In war, such internal conflicts
together with intense fear for one’s life or that of close ones, threaten
identity and hence the dizzy panic that ensues. But Freud’s most
significant, and most complete discussion of trauma occurs, not
incidentally, at the end of his life, in Moses and Monotheism, when
Freud was forced to leave his homeland and take up exile in England.
It is not too much of a stretch to conclude that Freud’s renewed
interest in his prolonged concerns with Moses came at a time when
he was personally experiencing the traumas of aging and serious
illness, loss of homeland, and cross-cultural clash (extreme Nazi anti-
Semitism).
Thus, at the end of Moses and Monotheism, Freud repeats his
well-known theories about the etiology of the neuroses, only now in
a way never quite articulated before he specifically includes the issue
of trauma. He links what he calls infant traumata to the latency
phenomenon. But not everyone responds in the same way to similar
experiences, so Freud conceives of a sliding scale and slow series of
developments that result in trauma symptoms. Dissociation is thus
not a sort of cleavage that neuroscience theories infer: it rather
involves a delay in attention to the event, and then a process of
revision of memories linked with fantasy.13 But most important for
our effort to focus on cultural traumatic memory rather than on the
individual, Freud likens the survivor of the train accident to the
“forgetting” of monotheism. Like the latency of the man who walks
away from the train accident apparently unharmed, only later to
develop psychical and motor symptoms, the forgetting of monotheism
occurred in the Jewish religion, only to have it return later as
something insistent. Cultures too can split off what cannot be dealt
with at a specific historical moment.
The shuffling between individual psychic trauma and historical
shocks (suggested by Freud) needs to be read as symptomatic of the

modern process in which the individual is atomized, cut off from an
active role and stripped of agency in history. The rational overhaul
of the fundamental social structures in modern times turned men
and women in capitalist society into self-centered monads pursuing
their self-interest. The rise of the psyche as an object or thing in itself
points to its distance from culture and the consciousness of others.
As the narrowing space of the psyche became fragmented and deprived
of human purpose and interaction, the common good of communities
was surrendered to the hands of ideologues, demagogues, bureaucrats,
and fanatic political forces. This split between individual psyche and
culture, between private and public is very much with us today. The
disassociation model in trauma studies reinforces this split and, with
its insistence on the inaccessibility of trauma, shuts history out from
the psyche. A more innovative approach is to re-insert history into
the psyche, as Freud tried to do, so as to understand trauma as an
historical and cultural phenomenon. This brings us to the inquiry
into what we term “traumatic history” in the context of modernity.
To Represent or Not to Represent: That Is the Question
Fixation on trauma leads to profound doubts about the viability of

historical writing and its vehicles: narrative and image. Narratives
and images designed to represent traumas are viewed with suspicion,
for they seem to have the seductive power to gloss over the
horrendous fact and to distort the literal truth of trauma. As trauma
implies a shattering of a culture’s meaning-making scheme and
representational modes, it is, as many critics insist, beyond the reach
of representation.
Without denying the singularity and the unrepresentable character
of trauma, it is necessary to see that such an emphasis may push
trauma into the mystified circle of the occult, something untouchable
and unreachable. The concept of trauma is considerably impoverished
as a tool of critical historical analysis by being relegated to an
exclusive, ineffable privacy on one hand, and to the mystery of fate
on the other. It also becomes poorer when employed to enflame
identity politics. It is true that some conventions of narrative and
imagery, with their sensationalized, clichéd emotional patterns often

tend to dilute and “forget” the unutterable pain and horror of
traumatic experience. But mainstream narrative or imagistic
interpretations of trauma, however, merit more than a simplistic
negative judgment.
It may be useful, here, to pause briefly to discuss the complexity
of representation of trauma. For, even thinking only of cinema, there
are many different kinds of film dealing with trauma, each of which
performs differently and produces different effects. As essays in our
volume show, scholars have discussed various films in connection
with trauma, beginning most obviously with those about the
Holocaust, but also war movies, horror film, female autobiography and
independent women’s cinema dealing with loss, abandonment and
cross-cultural clash. But, while discussing a specific film, scholars do
not usually isolate and define which films would constitute “trauma
cinema,” or, if they do so, they do not necessarily think about a film’s
impact on the viewer as this may be pertinent to its belonging or not
under the rubric of “trauma film.” 14 We are less interested in
developing a new genre of trauma cinema than in addressing what is
most important about, and defining of, trauma — namely, how it
marks, not the cinema itself but the viewer. We suggest the following
four main positions for viewers of trauma film, according to differing
cinematic strategies.
First, the postion of being introduced to trauma through a film’s
themes and techniques, but where the film ends with a comforting
“cure.” Usually mainstream melodramas, such works posit trauma
(against its reality) as a discrete past event, locatable, representable
and curable (e.g. Hitchcock’s Spellbound or Marnie). Melodrama, at
least in its Hollywood variety, is a symptom of a culture’s need to
“forget” traumatic events while representing them in an oblique form.
In trying to forget and dissolve, the form, in spite of itself, may reveal
what it is that needs to be forgotten, thus betraying the remainders
of trauma. The task for critics is how to read against the grain of
manifest narratives and imagery for symptoms of deeper-lying, latent
processes, not to dismiss them as sheer mindless sensationalism.
Second, the position of being vicariously traumatized (e.g.
Cronenberg’s The Brood or The Fly) — a potentially negative result,
although at crucial moments able productively to “shock” audiences
(as in the case of some Holocaust films). The effect may be negative
if the impact is so great that the viewer turns away, runs from the
images, instead of learning through them. On the other hand, a degree
of vicarious or secondary trauma may shock a viewer into wanting
to know more and perhaps do something about what he/she has seen.
Third, the position of being a voyeur (routine TV news images of
catastrophes such as airplane crashes, deaths of famous people, ethnic
wars and starving people globally; or series like Holocaust); voyeurism
is dangerous because it exploits the victims and secretly offers a sort
of subversive pleasure in horror one would not want to encourage.
Finally, the position of being a witness, arguably the most
politically useful position of the four (e.g. Resnais’s Night and Fog,
Duras/Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, Deren’s Meshes of an
Afternoon or Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries). 15 This position of
“witness” may open up a space for transformation of the viewer
through empathic identification without vicarious traumatization —
an identification which allows the spectator to enter into the victim’s
experience through a work’s narration. It is the unusual, anti-narrative
process of the narration that is itself transformative in inviting the
viewer to at once be there emotionally (and often powerfully moved),
but also to keep a cognitive distance and awareness denied to the
victim by the traumatic process. The victim in the narration bears
witness to the catastrophe, but the viewer becomes the point of
communication that, as Dori Laub and Robert Lifton both argue,
reasserts continuity and humanity.16 It is this triangular structure —
i.e. the structure of the horror, the victim and the listener/viewer —
that witnessing involves and which may promote inter-cultural
compassion and understanding.
The objection to representation in the face of the
unrepresentatable character of trauma has two legitimate concerns
in the history of modernity. One is the aestheticization of politics,
which is a fascist and authoritarian strategy by the modern state to
stage its self-representation and collective identification by borrowing
narratives, myths, techniques, and the mise-en-scène from the cinema
and the culture industry. The traumatic experience of modern wars
and the frenzy of collective mobilization are elevated into a spectacle
for emulation and consumption. This leads to the customary view of
the correlation between fascism and cinema.17 Another concern is
the more recent phenomenon of aestheticization of trauma-ridden

histories and cultures by the transnational culture industry and media.
The tendency is to write them off as being exotic or as representing
a regressive episode in universal history.18 It is obvious that this
aestheticization of the other does not simply render traumatic history
into images, but in its obsession with violence and trauma, it flattens
difference, history, memory, and the body into an abstract, pleasing
mold. The distaste against the aestheticization of modern media
conglomerates in the act of “thinning” down the “thick” traumas of
heterogeneous histories is linked to the still operative divide between
an aesthetics of stark understatement in documentary sobriety and
Hollywood sensationalism; between modernism and postmodernism;
high and low cultures; or in Elsaesser’s shorthand, between Shoah
and Schindler’s List.19
These two legitimate concerns — aestheticization of history and
trivializing media representations — emerge from worries about
showing the supposed closure of meaning in the representation of
trauma. While the obsession with the meaning-defying dimensions
of trauma and mise-en-abîme may offer stark or provocative
aesthetics, such an obsession risks becoming a closure in its own turn,
a fetishized taboo sealing off a domain of non-meaning and nonsense.
It closes down further discussion and exploration by pronouncing an
early death sentence for representation.
As a cultural memory bearing witness to the structure of
domination and violence, the traumatic experience may perform a
critical, demystifying function against sensationalist or ideological
closure. But such cultural memory is being subjected to relentless
erasure by the transnational media driven by the logic of commodity
and consumption. The transnational media, with their soap operas,
talk shows, disaster stories, glamorous geography, and historical
dramas, are erasing traumatic memories of oppression, violence, and
injustice in both metropolitan centers and developing countries. The
culture of consumption now finds in history a new toy, a fashionable
consumer item. This intensifies the shrinking of historical
consciousness by rendering past traumas into spectacles and thrills:
a form of numbing through small doses of daily-ritualized violence.20
Corporate-sponsored globalization is blurring the distinctive traditions
and eroding native cultural heritages. One casualty is a critical
measure of historical consciousness that needs to be grounded in

certain figurations of trauma. Fewer and fewer young people know
much about the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Rape of Nanking or the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. The greater danger is the visual and
aesthetic sanitation of traumatic traces rather than the attempt to
engage traumatic histories by resorting to narrative and imagery, on
which the theory of unrepresentatable trauma would shut the door.
It is a mistake to think that investment in the abysmal,
unrepresentable quality of trauma is the only way to be fair to the
traumatized and injured, or the proper way to remain open-ended and
to defy metaphysical, sensationalist or ideological closure. This view
privileges the epistemological quagmire provoked by trauma and
ignores the practical question of why we need to remember historical
trauma in a broader context, namely, modernity at large. It is equally
misguided to look for a close fit in representation between an image
and an imputed traumatic event. The crucial question, rather, is
whether a culture is able to understand trauma as an episode in a
longer chain of the structural mutations in modern systems that have
accumulated a record of violence, suffering, and misery. It is overhasty
to dismiss representation and narrative on grounds of inadequacy and
failure. History has shown that intensely traumatic periods spawned
more narratives and images, rather than less. For, as the essays in
our volume demonstrate, these are necessary responses to traumatic
events, not the attempt to record them mimetically. Narratives and
images are indexes to the still unfolding traumas of a history — the
history of modernity — that has become synonymous with trauma
and shocks. To come to terms with traumatic memory, and more
importantly, to make a critical use of it to shed light on the
chronically trauma-producing social structures so as to forge the will
to change them, it is necessary that a choice be made between
inadequate telling and relegating of trauma to a mystified silence.21
As trauma consists in the unmaking of the world, the prohibition
against representation blocks the way to the re-making of the world.
While it shatters the culture’s symbolic resources, trauma also points
to the urgent necessity of reconfiguring and transforming the broken
repertoire of meaning and expression. This involves imagining on an
historical and social scale. Traumatic pain, as Elaine Scarry
convincingly argues, is bound up with imaging. The “complete
absence of referential content” of pain also renders it resistant to,

even destructive, of language or any pre-existing representational
form. Imaging, on the other hand, is filled with objects. While the
body in pain suffers the gap between the self and self-extension, and
is thus passive and helpless, it also strains to enter into relation with
the “objectifying power of the imagination: through that relation, pain
will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence
into a self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating
one.”22
Scarry’s remark points to an attempt to close the gap between
private trauma and the community’s attempt to redress that trauma.
To externalize the trauma is not a matter of representation, but a
struggle by the wounded body to first imagine and then create a less
traumatic, less painful environment. What appears to be personal
imagination is social imaginary: for, as we suggested earlier, history
is a process of humanity’s self-fashioning, through creating
institutions, languages, structures, and relations. Trauma is a product
of history precisely because it is man-made and self-inflicted, and
hence can be understood and altered by self-conscious human acts.
These acts for making change, for working through traumas, are
imaginary, because given the depleted and exhausted cultural
resources, little but the imagination is readily available for the
reinvention of new narratives, new social forms.
Hence the need to bestow a new form — narrative or image —
upon the obscure traumatized state through imaging, as well as to
read against the grain of forms like melodrama to discover traces of
historical traumas. Although the pre-existing cultural resources fail
to provide “fitting” objects or images for its representation and
resolution, yet “beyond the expansive ground of ordinarily, naturally
occurring objects is the narrow extra ground of imagined objects.”
The socio-historical imagination is the last resort, the last hope that
is always there, “on an emergency stand-by basis” to provide the
capacity for self-imaging and consequently for creating new sets of
objects in the world.23 The new sets of objects are reflected in the
imaginary re-institution of society that re-asserts the non-traumatic
relation between human action and the world, between individual
and public life, between one nation and another.24 The shattering of
this desirable integrity is manifest in pain, oppression, depredation
and domination, where the body is thwarted by its environment. In

the abyss of trauma, the imagination strains to re-endow the void
with images that “correspond” to the inner, objectless, invisible state.
The imagination’s work is:
. . . [the name] given to the phenomena of pain and the

imagination as they begin to move from being a self-contained
loop within the body to becoming the equivalent loop now
projected into the external world. It is through this movement
out into the world that the extreme privacy of the occurrence
(both pain and imagination are invisible to anyone outside the
boundaries of the person’s body) begins to be sharable, that
sentience becomes social and thus acquires its distinctly human
form.25
Scarry’s argument suggests that trauma is not something that

representation falls short of, not the absolute undoing of the symbolic.
On the contrary, trauma intensifies the urgency of re-symbolization
and reveals the bankruptcy of the prior symbolization. Trauma may
provide opportunities to tap into a driving force that enables new
symbolic expressions.
Cultural reproductions of trauma in the United States, Asia,
Africa and many other parts of the world suggest that it is in the
retelling and especially in visual representation, that traces of trauma
can be preserved and transmitted, however unsatisfactory or even
“improper” that representation may be. The trauma-ridden legend
about Vietnam has established its own reality, however fanciful,
alongside the more “truthful,” or less dramatic account.26 Similarly
in the case of China, the revolutionary cinema in the fifties and sixties
of the twentieth century offered the traumatic plotlines of the
sufferings and oppressions of the Chinese before the founding of the
People’s Republic. The revolutionary-historical film was chiefly
responsible for fleshing out the historical experience of modern China.
Its images and scenarios nurtured collective memory and “hardened”
into the “history” of the Chinese Revolution. Although frequently
in an heroic mode aimed at redeeming a track record of bloodstains,
the ideological narrative could not completely sanitize and write off
the undercurrent of traumatic experiences. The films dealing with
the War of Resistance against the Japanese invasion or the Opium
War are good illustrations. These works have produced and

transmitted more than any other medium the traumatic experience
of foreign aggression and the misery of the Chinese. Sponsored by
Communist ideology, the trauma was invoked to help remember the
wounds and stir up patriotic passion. Yet to a mind less indoctrinated
and more inclined to read against the grain, the films can offer an
occasion to glimpse how traumatic traces of history seep or break
through the triumphant, heroic narrative.
Trauma and History: Highlights of This Volume
The growing interest in trauma bears witness to the repeated blows

manifest in the horrifying events in the modern world. The study of
trauma may confront as well as and evade history. The history of
trauma studies is, as Judith Herman puts it, one of “episodic amnesia”
— periods of intense investigation alternating with periods of
oblivion.27 The ebb and flow of attention to trauma in America attest
to the historical contexts from the Vietnam War, to the feminist
movement, on to the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment and
to the Holocaust, only to come to the fore in the aftermath of
September 11. Trauma research has been important in its attempts
to devise clinical cures and engage in theoretical discourse about the
psychology of trauma.
It is our belief that the humanistic study of trauma needs to initiate
a broader socio-historical understanding of the destructive forces of the
modern world. As we have shown above, as a reaction-formation,
trauma discourse (especially in the popular media) may degenerate into
a signature for victimhood, or an unresolved melancholia mired in
injured narcissism or national pride, a melodramatic scenario for self-
aggrandizement, a paralysis of the mind and the body, and a failure in
language, image, and narrative. The constant attempt to bracket and
personalize the destructive forces of history within psychology,
medicine, therapy, or popular aesthetic forms reveals even more sharply
how irrevocably trauma is bound up with the vicissitudes and
fundamental contradictions of modern history.
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the
will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological
trauma.” 28 This comment by Judith Herman, we might add, also

describes the dynamics of trauma within modern history, which has
been an unending source of traumatic experience. If mainstream
historical narrative is a story of engagement with shocks as well as a
venue of flight from them, so is the history of trauma. Numerous
writers, psychologists, and historians have pointed out the experience
of modernity as traumatic. This truism reasserts that it is modern
history, with its secular dethroning of the sacred and the absolute, its
aggressive technology and military conflicts, its destructive ideological
movements of fascism, totalitarianism, and other fundamentalisms,
its expansive world markets, its imperialist conquest and colonization
of indigenous peoples, its hubris in the conquest of nature, and its
epidemic of homelessness and migration, that has shattered the
ontological anchorage, the inherited ground of experience, and the
intimate cultural networks of support and trust that humans hitherto
relied on for a sense of security and meaningful life.
The interest in a singular event, such as the Holocaust, the
Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War or a horror story of genocide,
seems to go with the periodization of trauma. Such short-term
periodization is consonant with the truncated view of trauma as a
clinical, psychic, and even neurological event, subject to positivist and
scientific scrutiny. To understand trauma historically, however, we
need to move beyond a short period, beyond the positivistic focus on
the events and psychic mechanisms and move on to probe patterns of
crisis and the dynamics of social change from a longer historical
perspective. Thus our point of departure is to deploy modernity as the
framework for configurations of trauma. Our aim is to theorize how
cultures too may be traumatized, how traces of traumatic events leave
their mark on cultures. Modernity was initially a Euro-American
project but it ran into conflict with nonwestern peoples around the
globe. The modern process has plunged different cultures and regions
into painful, bloody paths of modernization, development and
revolution, and forced them to search for alternatives to survive in the
modern world. One aspect of modernity that opens up multinational
and multiethnic traumatic experiences for investigation is the mass
media. Thus the major purpose of this book is to bring together
modernity, the traumatic histories of different cultures, and the
working out of these experiences in cinema and other visual media.
In shifting from the psychic closet to trauma as a concept

descriptive of cultural and historical processes, we seek to illuminate
the two specific fundamental experiences of modernity that closely
relate to traumas of the twentieth century: the catastrophic event as
symptom of deep-lying contradictions of modernity, and the
experience of modernity as living with shocks and suffering. From
the trauma of industrial warfare to the Holocaust, from totalitarian
atrocities to the annihilating speed of modernization that demolished
traditional cultures, from imperialist invasion to colonial subjugation,
the visual media have both represented catastrophic realities and been
part of that reality. The visual media do not just mirror those
experiences; in their courting and staging of violence they are
themselves the breeding ground of trauma, as well as a matrix of
understanding and experiencing of a world out of joint. The visual
media have become a cultural institution in which the traumatic
experience of modernity can be recognized, negotiated, and
reconfigured.
This volume also addresses the experience of modernity in a more
pronounced cross-cultural context of multinational and multiethnic
encounters, and the way this experience is re-enacted and represented
in the image production of nations caught in transnational media
circuits. We explore how the mass media represent national and local
histories and discuss how cinema, photography, and other digitally
executed imagery deliver shocks and disorientation to traditional,
primarily literary cultures. We argue that these forms participate in
coping with traumatic encounters between underdeveloped nations
and Western metropolises. We explore how indigenous media respond
to the leveling effect of global culture and work to preserve traditional
culture and assert national identity in the face of the accelerating
process of globalization.
Most writers in this volume agree in their perception of trauma
as the breakdown of symbolic resources, narrative, and imagery. But
this does not bog them down in the doubting of possibilities of re-
imagining and reconstruction. Rather it spurs them to seek and
discover new ways to generate meaning in traumatic experience, to
invent a language and narrative against the seeming abyss and
darkness of trauma. The first group of essays address trauma in the
condition of cross-cultural encounters, colonialism and
neocolonialism. Sarah L. Lincoln looks at the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and assesses the ways
the trauma of apartheid afflicted victims and perpetrators in different
ways. Drawing on fragments of testimony, personal memory, and
video production, she outlines the violence of the apartheid regime
against the body and psyche of the victims, who were mutilated,
silenced, and isolated from the community. On the other hand, she
also analyzes the phenomenon of “false witnessing,” a traumatic
experience that plagues the perpetrators of barbarous crimes. The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission serves as a witness stand for
the silenced voice of the victims, as well as an occasion for the
perpetrators to work through the burden of their guilt. Thus despite
its complex ethical ambiguity, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission is seen as a positive social agency for reinventing, out
of the unspeakable trauma, a new historical narrative, and for
rebuilding a new community.
E. Ann Kaplan’s essay also deals with results of traumatic racial
conflict, only now in the context of Australia. Like Lincoln, she is
interested in learning how postcolonial cultures can move from
trauma to witnessing, mourning and reconciliation. She argues that
trauma studies provides psychological tools for thinking about inter-
and intra-cultural conflict involving white Australians and the
Aborigines. Such tools aid in understanding how the traumatic past
blocks contact, freezing both victims and perpetrators into locked
positions. Careful not to collapse these two groups — power
hierarchies always enable the perpetrators to retain their positions
— Kaplan turns to independent and alternative film and photography
to study what we can learn about useful models for transcultural
exchange. Her four carefully selected and varied textual analyses show
how creative productions provide one of the few means through which
the oppressed and their oppressors can come to terms with, mourn,
as well as repent and repair remaining psychic wounds and damages
to the social body.
Moving to the troubled issue of Taiwan’s identity in the shifting
relations of geopolitics and global interdependence, Robert Chi sees
A City of Sadness by the Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien as
demystifying the “logic of the treasured national wound that has been
so prominent in modern Chinese history and elsewhere.” Laying out
the film’s concrete process of production and circulation, Chi delves

into the intricate relation between photography and writing, speech
and language, visuality and discourse. In the dialectic interplay
between the written language of Chinese and various local dialects,
between the visual and written, Chi opens up a critical space where
each of these elements may change places and play the role of the
other. This creates a vigilance that guards against a particularism
based on trauma and against a universalism in tune with strident
nationalism and global media circuits. In the process, the essay offers
a heterogeneous picture of local identity tied to non-identity and in
a volatile process of being made and remade.
The second set of essays deals with the familiar modern
phenomena of war, terror, collective death, and catastrophe. Taking
up the large historical events more generally dealt with in trauma
studies, Joshua Hirsch and Janet Walker in their different ways look
at the links between history and memory. Addressing documentaries
about the Holocaust, Hirsch, like Kaplan, is interested in the issue
of vicarious traumatization and the impact of trauma films on
spectators, including a potentially pro-social one.29 In the films he
studies Hirsch sees the trauma discourse less as defined by content
than by the attempt to discover a form for presenting that context
which mimics some aspects of post-traumatic consciousness itself
— to reproduce for the spectator an experience of once again seeing
the unthinkable. Using the three concepts of tense, mood and voice,
Hirsch analyzes four differing Holocaust documentaries to unravel
their varying strategies and varying spectator impacts. He aims to
argue for films that at least attempt to discover a form adequate to
collective trauma, as is the case for Lanzmann’s Shoah, the film his
paper concludes with.
In her analysis of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and of
independent documentaries, Janet Walker revisits many themes found
in earlier papers in the volume, only now from the specific perspective
of what she calls the vicissitudes of traumatic memory. While she
returns us to the relationship between memory and history, Walker
focuses more on psychoanalytic notions of the intermingling of
memory with fantasy. She argues that the appeal of Saving Private
Ryan is the operation of traumatic historical memory in life and film,
so that veterans watching the film re-experience their actions but may
fill the past with deeds not in fact performed. Reviewing briefly the
so-called fraught memory wars, Walker claims that we must find a
way to bear memory’s vicissitudes. Mistaken memories also testify,
albeit in a different voice. Through her analysis of two documentaries,
Walker contends that the most politically effective films are those
that figure the traumatic past as meaningful and yet as fragmentary,
and striated with fantasy constructions.
Adam Lowenstein echoes earlier comments in this introduction
about the need for a discussion that attempts, in his words, “to
imagine and interpret representations in ways that might answer to
the cultural and historical complexity of traumatic events.” He argues
that Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “Jetztzeit” — a risky collision
between past and present, an allegorical moment — best offers the
possibility for “blasting open the continuum of history.” Using Shindo
Kaneto’s Onibaba as his case study, Lowenstein shows how the film
represents Hiroshima in such a way that the customary critical binary
between “realist” and “allegorical” treatments of the atomic bomb
in Japanese cinema is completely recast. Shindo’s film interrogates
how the discourses about Hiroshima and the Second World War
constructed a Japanese national consensus and an identity called
“Japan.” The film also challenges in its technical modalities as well
as historical content the binary between “art” film and popular horror
film that emerges from tensions between desires for a “national
cinema” and for “national identity.”
The third part of this volume deals with the narrative
reconstruction of meaning in traumatic memory and history. All of
the essays seek to find a new narrative that does not forget trauma
but carries its traces forward. Andrew Slade’s essay aligns the classical
motif of the sublime with twentieth century traumas as exemplified
in Marguerite Duras’s work. The sublime does not simply threaten
the body and psyche with total terror and collapse. Death, as
intimated by the sublime, is actually the flip side of life — a will to
life. Slade sees the classical aesthetics of the sublime as a way to
reconstruct a life-sustaining narrative and to re-imagine a working
through that masters traumatic repetitions of paralysis. Slade contends
that the sublime “is one way in which the collapse of the symbolic
world which gives meaning and significance to human lives, may
begin again to gain some critical hold over catastrophic events of
death.” The sublime re-activates, in the collapse of the symbolic

matrix, a different survival kit that remains to continue the meaning
of human life, so that the victims may again gain some force over
the catastrophic events of death.
Zhaohui Xiong’s analysis of Zhang Yimou’s film To Live (1994)
takes issue with the misconception of the ordinary Chinese as passive
sufferers of political violence. The film underscores a hard-won
philosophy of survival, a life-affirming world-view that elevates rather
than degrades the common people on whom historical catastrophes
fall in a seasonal cycle. While Zhang Yimou’s film displays the
destructive effect of history that fragments and disrupts a smooth
narrative, in Xiong’s analysis it also struggles against this traumatic
history by sticking to a more fundamental, down-to-earth truth of
living, as an elementary daily fight against history as the field of death.
Petra Kuppers approaches her topic within very similar theoretical
frameworks as authors in the rest of the volume but addresses a more
unusual kind of trauma. Like others, Kuppers stresses how in
traumatic narrative, the story is not fully there, not fully owned by
discourse and is not within the mastery of the individual. Also like
other authors, Kuppers stresses the meeting places of life and film,
the personal and the public, but she includes also those between a
disabled body, a dancing body, and a body in film. From here, Kuppers
moves toward linking trauma and disability, now not as so often in
commercial films figured as a personal history, but in terms of their
mechanisms: trauma is the block that does not allow full narrative;
in the main film, The Fall, through which Kuppers makes her points,
both the disabled body and the narrative are in constant motion. The
film allows neither its characters nor its spectator to rest peacefully
in one place. The narration recoils, points forward and backward,
distrusts itself. Kuppers concludes that this constant movement
prevents moments of life from being halted, paralyzed or given
meaning. The spectator is kept on her toes. Since this trauma cannot
be cured, it remains a block in the reader which allows a private,
non-readable other to dance.
Ban Wang considers trauma in relation to visual shocks in modern
Chinese literature and film. The motif of visuality has caught much
attention recently in the study of modern Chinese culture and been
assigned a power of demystification in critiquing the dominant
historical narrative. In Wang’s analysis, a project of demystification

was traceable not just in the visual experience of trauma, as Rey Chow
has argued, but in the theater debate of the May Fourth era. It finds
a strong expression in Lu Xun’s seminal reflection on a shock induced,
trauma-ridden historical understanding and aesthetics. Lu Xun’s
approach to rewriting history does not pit traumatic visuality against
an evasive or redemptive literature, but rather works toward a tragic-
traumatic aesthetic that eschews narrative and dramatic enclosures,
characterized by melodramatic catharsis and emotional satisfaction,
in traditional theater and literature. More importantly, in the face of
Japanese invasion, national crisis and social upheavals in the 1930s,
Chinese critics and filmmakers carried the traumatic motif over to
filmmaking. Working with a camera that sought to shatter the
dramatic illusions and clichéd emotional patterns from traditional
as well as Hollywood repertoires, the filmmakers attempted to engage
the traumatic experience of disaster and social disintegration on the
screen. The cinematic devices of the longtake and montage became
politically charged means for engaging historical experience of
disasters, depravations, and war. The longtake immerses the viewer
in a specific photographical reality at the expense of preconceived
ideas and emotion, while montage presents a dialectical, moment-
by-moment, tentative configuration of social reality in flux.
These papers span wide geographical areas and divergent cultures,
but the common theme that binds them is the traumatic experiences
of the modern world and their media representations. If some papers
may emphasize the paralysis in the body, the psyche and narrative,
others seek to find a more positive evaluation of trauma-induced texts.
There is an oscillation, as we noted earlier, between acting out and
working through, between melancholia and mourning, between
deconstruction and reconstruction. The question of trauma’s
implication in modern history elicits a number of answers, but there
is not a definitive conclusion. If the different answers to the common
question of traumatic experience help intensify our readiness to see
trauma-related histories working out in different cultural contexts,
and if these answers contribute to our understanding of, not trauma
per se but the long-term historical, social, and structural factors that
inflict pain on human beings in modern times, we believe that we
will have done a valuable service.
Part One
Trauma and
Cross-Cultural
Encounters
1
This Is My History
Trauma, Testimony, and Nation-Building
in the “New” South Africa
SARAH L. LINCOLN
We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay
the ghosts of that past so that they may not return to haunt us.
That it may thereby contribute to the healing of a traumatized
and wounded nation; for all of us in South Africa are wounded
people.
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
at the opening ceremony of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.1
Since 1995, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

has been engaged in the process of hearing and recording the
testimony of those who suffered under apartheid over the past thirty
years. As a process of speaking “the Truth” about South Africa’s
traumatic past, the Truth Commission (TRC) has come to be seen —
both in South Africa and abroad — as a necessary precondition for
the building of a unified and integrated nation, the “new South
Africa.”
Established by the 1995 “Promotion of National Unity and
Reconciliation Act,” the Commission “provides a historic bridge
between the past of a deeply divided society characterized by strife,
conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the
recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence for
26 SARAH L. LINCOLN
all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex.”2

As such, the Commission has been widely represented as both a
mediator between past and future and as a source of personal and
collective “catharsis”: a way for the country to account for past
traumas and reconcile its divisive history with hopes for a unified
future. On both an individual and social level, the experiences of
apartheid and the frequently violent struggle that opposed it constitute
a profound trauma for all involved, not least because of the silence
and deception that have characterized both experiences for so long.
Through its very public witnessing to individual testimonies and
confessions, a ritualized theater of trauma broadcast live on national
television, the Truth Commission has become a high-profile
enactment of the state’s oft-expressed commitment to “hear” and
legitimate the diversely intertwined histories of its people.
The TRC can be seen, that is, as a ritualized mourning process
— a national memorial service for the victims of apartheid, past and
present, which helps survivors confront their losses and those suffered
by others. As a process of public mourning that acknowledges the
multiple and often contradictory traumas experienced by
communities and individuals throughout the country, the
Commission thus encourages South Africans of all races to engage
their history and imagine a larger, national community based on a
common, though divergent, experience of loss.
This process is, however, not without its cultural risks. The threat
that these narratives, once brought into the “light” of day, will
destabilize the new democracy by reviving racial conflict is a real one.
The TRC has not been a welcome presence in many communities
around the nation, nor has it been met with unmitigated approbation
— in black communities or white. Yet it has retained its commitment
to the painful task of exposing atrocity and suffering, and its
supporters (including deputy Commission chair Alex Boraine)
continue to assert the value of its work to the process of building the
“new” South African nation:
The Truth Commission will give a shared memory to the people

of South Africa . . . It’s not just about politics; it’s about Freud and
Christ, about repressed memory, confession and redemption. It’s
about needing to deal, or not being able to deal, with the past.3
THIS IS MY HISTORY 27
Nevertheless, the process of witnessing to atrocity or listening

to the testimony of others has itself constituted a traumatic event
for many South Africans. The painful and often destructive effects of
being a witness — whether directly or indirectly — have spread
beyond those involved in the Commission itself to affect the
community at large. These “secondary” traumas, however, have
proved (paradoxically, perhaps) to be crucial tools in the process of
forging the new nation. In exposing the inadequacies of existing
cultural resources for dealing with and representing traumatic events,
they have begun to act as a catalyst for the radical transformation of
culture, and a new “South African” identity is being forged precisely
out of this shared experience of a traumatic past. By challenging
cultural certainties and establishing trauma as South Africans’
common heritage — albeit differentially experienced — the
Commission is helping citizens engage and assimilate their difficult
history, and thereby laying the potential foundations for nation-
building in the present and future.
As a communal as well as individual trauma — a socio-cultural
and economic as well as political event — apartheid had profoundly
complex impacts on the lives of its diverse subjects. These effects,
moreover, persist in the “post-apartheid” era in ways that challenge
any straightforwardly historical analysis. Almost a decade after the
nominal end of apartheid, access to housing, health care, education,
employment, and the media remains skewed. To the enforcers and
beneficiaries of the system, those who enjoy its material advantages
even today, and to the millions who continue to suffer its
consequences, the 50-year history of apartheid means something quite
different. Nevertheless, in a society where the process of hearing and
narrating all the “truths” of the past is seen a necessary precondition
of a cathartic present and future, the diverse experiences of those who
actively supported, passively accepted, or defiantly opposed apartheid
cannot be ignored. If whites, especially, are to be a part of the “new
South Africa,” their relationship to the country’s history must be
explored and dealt with.
Robert Jay Lifton’s theory of “false witnessing” — the imposition
of death on others in an effort to ward off one’s own death anxieties
— provides a useful entrée to understanding the brutal violence
imposed by individuals in the service of apartheid. He regards atrocity
28 SARAH L. LINCOLN
as “a perverse quest for meaning, the end result of a spurious sense

of mission, the product of false witness.”4 Lifton’s concept is central
to an analysis of South Africa’s traumatic twentieth-century history.
Lingering cultural memories of the 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War, the
20,000 Afrikaner women and children who died in British
concentration camps, and the devastating economic consequences of
the war served as a powerful rallying point for Afrikaner nationalism
in the 1920s and 1930s. Ritualistic public mourning, re-enactments,
and the passage of traumatic narratives between generations inscribed
the episode as a defining moment in the history of the Afrikaner
“nation” — laying the foundations for the structural racism that
would follow the election of Afrikaner nationalists to power in 1948.
Though the origins of institutionalized racism can be traced to
the earliest days of European colonialism in Southern Africa, the
simultaneous emergence of capitalist modes of production and
Afrikaner nationalism following the 1899–1902 war had important
consequences for the direction taken by formalized apartheid in the
twentieth century. Specifically, the death anxiety underpinning this
nationalist project was combined with a new terror of what G. D.
Scholtz calls “the threatening stranglehold of the Non-White
proletariat”5 to construct a powerful narrative of racial survival — a
narrative that found many willing ears among the country’s white
inhabitants, English-speaking as well as Afrikaans-speaking. As Kali
Tal notes, “much violence can be done by men desperate to define
their world in a coherent manner.”6
Throughout the apartheid years, this narrative was invoked in
the service of policies and strategies that worked to entrench white
power and advance capitalist accumulation — at an enormous cost
to its victims. It also, importantly, helped to distance most of the
white minority from the potentially traumatizing effects of atrocities
committed in their name. In terms of this narrative of racial survival,
the death, brutalization, and exploitation of others became a necessary
and justifiable means to an end. The state’s repeated assurances that
the white community was engaged in an ancient and desperate racial
war — exacerbated by new threats of “Communist” infiltration —
promoted a “day-to-day cordon sanitaire, an existential buffer zone,”
that insulated white South Africans from the uncomfortable realities
on which their privilege was built.7
For active perpetrators of apartheid terror — police officers, army

conscripts, members of state “hit squads” and “counter-terrorism”
units — this narrative had particular significance, as it blunted the
potentially traumatizing effects of the atrocities they committed.
Journalist Stephen Laufer examines the careful language that the state
used to describe its activities:
The conspiracy needed a sanitised phrase with no suggestion of

blood. No suggestion of agony or loss, morality gone AWOL. A
way of talking, planning and carrying out evil which would still
allow the perpetrators to attend church, raise families, sleep
peacefully . . . Keeping control of the language was part of keeping
control of the process.8
Such “sanitized” language and the ideology of racial survival it

subtended enabled members of police hit squads and other state
agencies to assimilate their deeds into a (temporarily) coherent
narrative, effectively delaying their traumatic effects. These atrocities,
in other words, were not traumatic for their perpetrators at the time
that they were committed. It was only later, once this narrative was
discredited and thus lost its explanatory power, that those responsible
for these crimes became traumatized by their experience.
This is, of course, far from a unique phenomenon. Kali Tal argues,
for instance, that for Vietnam veterans, the context of war enabled
them to perform actions that would otherwise be abhorrent to them.
The result is a “psychic numbing” that acts as a delay mechanism,
displacing the traumatic effects of war crimes and allowing soldiers
to continue performing apparently without psychic damage. It is only
once these veterans return to “normal” society and are confronted
with the “traditional world of justice” that they belatedly recognize
the horror of what they have done and thus undergo traumatic
responses. For these men, the restoration of “normality” constitutes
a trauma, since it reveals the hollowness of the narratives that have
sustained them thus far.
This has been one of the Truth Commission’s most compelling
results. Alongside the testimonies of their victims, former state agents
have described — often for the first time — the formerly
“unspeakable” acts that continue to haunt them years after the fact.
Though remorse is not a prerequisite for amnesty applicants, many
30 SARAH L. LINCOLN
vividly demonstrate the personally traumatic consequences of their

former activities in service of the apartheid state.
Describing how he and three other security branch men abducted
and brutally murdered a fellow member of a police hit squad, Captain
Wouter Mentz “faltered, sobbed softly and asked for a glass of water
before he could continue.” Though Captain Mentz has committed
horrific acts of brutality and violence, he only experiences them as
traumatic once his explanatory narratives break down:
Other colleagues say Mentz is the most “sensitive” of the five

security policemen before the amnesty committee this week.
They say he is clearly disturbed, drinks a lot and has undergone
a series of treatments for post-traumatic stress. All this suggests
it is possible he justified his role in the killing of Ngqulunga
because he believed he was about to “sell out” to the ANC.
Later he realised that, in fact, the generals wanted Ngqulunga
dead because the Vlakplaas operative had threatened to tell
investigators from an official inquiry set up by the National Party
government — not the ANC — about covert police operations.
The realisation that he had been hoodwinked into carrying out
the murder probably shattered the policeman’s rationale for the
atrocity.9
The “therapeutic” process that the Truth Commission represents

thus consists in “helping some kind of true witness to take place”:
enabling the perpetrators to recognize, admit to, and ask forgiveness
for, the “perverse” nature of their crimes.10 “True” witnessing, in this
case, would be these men’s admission that they had committed
“atrocities,” and their recognition that they bore some responsibility
as individuals for what they had done. Forced to admit to the falsity
of the narratives that justified their actions, apartheid’s agents
belatedly experience the traumatic effects of their crimes and are
thereby enabled to identify on some level with those they persecuted
— who frequently confront them in the audience at TRC amnesty
hearings.
Many white participants, like Captain Mentz, experience the
disruption of these explanatory narratives as a fundamental
destruction of cultural certainties as well. Apartheid ideology was so
intimately implicated in the construction of white cultural identities
that the collapse of apartheid — and revelations of the atrocities

committed in their name — seriously problematizes the cultural and
personal identities of millions of South Africans: apartheid’s
apparently passive supporters and beneficiaries as well as those who
undertook its “dirty work.”
The victims of apartheid, largely non-white South Africans, are,
of course, in a radically more ambivalent position in relation to past
traumas, in part because the “explanatory” power of the system’s
racial narratives was never available to them. While the perpetrators
of apartheid crimes could rationalize their atrocities in terms of this
narrative, the only explanatory narratives allowed to victims of these
crimes justified the crimes against them by positing them as
“inhuman” enemies of the “legitimate” state. Even those who
justified their suffering as part of a larger collective struggle against
an illegitimate system found that their ideological narratives broke
down under the pressure of the tremendous personal brutality and
violence they experienced. If they remained in the country, they were
as effectively silenced as those who did not participate directly in
the struggle. The “justice” system and state-controlled media colluded
in the government’s efforts to silence apartheid’s victims and
opponents, refusing to acknowledge the devastating results of
entrenched violence for millions of South Africans. In this way, the
crimes of apartheid could often not be witnessed because, in effect,
“nobody” committed them: acts that would ordinarily be
criminalized, and thus placed within a comprehensible narrative of
legality and illegality, became “legitimate” because they were enacted
by the state.
Only one of millions of such examples is the murder of student
activist Sicelo Dlomo, whose mother Sylvia Dlomo-Jele testified
before the TRC in 1996.11 She described how the security police
murdered her son while he was in their detention and then came to
inform her — knowing that she knows that they have killed him —
that they have “found” his body in a field. This officially sanctioned
deception is, for survivors like Mrs Dlomo, one of the event’s most
enduring traumatic effects. Despite the brutality and blatant disregard
for international law its representatives exhibit, the state maintains
its discourse of legality, together with an illusion of an operational
criminal justice system. Political opponents are represented as
32 SARAH L. LINCOLN
“criminals” and the state apparatus as the upholder of “law and

order,” a discursive move that effectively effaces its presence as the
violent enforcer of the illegitimate state. The ingenuity of this
discursive structure lies precisely in the ways that it silences its
opponents. To whom should victims testify when the state is the
enemy, and yet also the representative of “justice”?
For traumatized victims like Sylvia Dlomo-Jele, forced to endure
silent suffering for decades, the process of public testimony restores
their connection with the state and with others in similar
circumstances around the country. By repairing the relationship
between state and individual, the Truth Commission helps to ensure
the survival of the new government. Johannesburg journalist Mark
Gevisser identifies this as one of the Commission’s most essential
roles: “The face of the state [under apartheid] is one of hostility —
the hostility of a police station, a hospital, a morgue when you are
looking for your lost son. ‘It may sound romantically idealistic [he
continues, citing deputy chair Alex Boraine], but if a group of people
appointed by the President of South Africa offer you a cup of tea and
ask you to tell your story, you’re going to be seeing a face of the state
that is sympathetic, reassuring, healing.’”12
Paradoxically, this shared experience of trauma, and the
recognition that the collapse of apartheid has thrown everyone’s
identities into question, can act as a source of identification between
victim and victimizer, and thus as the beginnings of a national
community. As a way of overcoming the historical, cultural, geo-
spatial and linguistic gulfs that separate people in the “new” South
Africa, I want to argue, “trauma shared can serve as a source of
communality in the same way that common languages and common
backgrounds can.”13
Witnessing to trauma is necessarily a dialogic process, one that
presumes the presence of a silent but sympathetic “other” to whom
the testimonial narrative is addressed. It is precisely this presence
that facilitates the process, since it restores the idea of a broader
community from which the survivor has been isolated by traumatic
events. Laub argues that,
To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the

responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator
felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out. It is the
encounter and the coming together between the survivor and
the listener, which makes possible something like a repossession
of the act of witnessing. This joint responsibility is the source
of the reemerging truth.14
Like the psychologist’s couch or the Christian confessional to

which it has been compared, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission depends on the establishment of precisely this sense of
dialogue between those who testify and those who bear witness. Mr
van Eck, an Afrikaner man who lost his family and friends to an ANC
bomb while holidaying on a game farm, expresses this relationship
most vividly. He cannot tell the story of his traumatic past as a
narrative:
“I can deal with it only in the form of questions. Do you know,

you the truth commissioners, how a temperature feels of between
six and eight thousand degrees? Do you know how it feels to
experience a blow so intense that it forces the fillings from one’s
teeth? Do you know how it feels to look for survivors and only
find dead and maimed? . . . Do you know how it feels to look for
your three-year-old child and never, Mr. Chairman, never to find
him again and to keep wondering for the rest of your life where
he was?”15
Mr van Eck can only tell his traumatic story as a dialogue:

questions imply the presence of a listener, and it is this imagined
presence alone that allows him to express his anguish and horror. It
is the establishment of this listener, argues Roberta Culbertson, “that
gives me a sense of what was happening in a way that frames my
actual memories of events, and the remembering itself, that creates
a ‘me,’ finally, rather than a disembodied, confused recipient of
harm.”16 The responsibility of the listener is to enable people like
this man to find their “me,” help them to translate their individual
memories into collective “history,” and thereby to restore their status
as members of a community of survivors.
This responsibility does not come without a price, however. What
Cathy Caruth calls the “contagion” of trauma powerfully infects those
who bear witness to such testimonies.
34 SARAH L. LINCOLN
At Tzaneen, a young Tswana interpreter is interviewed. The man

holds on to the table-top, his other hand moves restlessly in his
lap. “It is difficult to interpret victim hearings,” he says, “because
you use the first person all the time. ‘I sit in front of the mortuary
. . . on a low wall . . . I have to identify my child . . . while I wait
I see liquid . . . slowly coming from under the door . . . down to
a drain at the corner of the building . . . I see it is red . . . I just
walk . . . I think they didn’t find me for a long time. . . .’ I have
no distance when I say I . . . it runs through me with I. . . . After
the first three months of hearings, my wife and our baby left me
because of my violent outbursts. The truth commission provided
counselling and I was advised to stop. But I don’t want to. This
is my history, and I want to be part of it — until the end.”17
This man identifies so closely with the survivors whose words

he translates that it is difficult to tell where his “I” and the witness’s
diverge. Because his presence literally enables listeners to hear the
victims’ testimony, he is an integral part of the witnessing process
itself. By speaking their words for them, the translator in effect
becomes the traumatized witness as well as the listener: he is literally
speaking a traumatic past, a past that is simultaneously someone else’s
and his own. He is traumatized because he experiences the traumatic
effects of the testimony — and because he implicates himself directly
in the history being told through his voice.
Antjie Krog, an Afrikaans-language poet and journalist who
covered the Commission hearings for a Johannesburg radio station,
was warned about this “contagion” by a Commission counselor: “You
will experience the same symptoms as the victims. You will find
yourself powerless — without help, without words.” Krog is “shocked
to be a textbook case within a mere 10 days.” She cannot sleep,
returns to her family where “everything had become unconnected
and unfamiliar,” and she finds that she “can talk about nothing else.
Yet I don’t talk about it at all.”18
For Krog, though, as for many South Africans, hearing survivors
testifying to horrific brutality at the hands of the security forces is
more than secondary trauma: it is also the traumatizing process of
hearing her own history. The horror of the stories she hears is, in
part, her sense that — as a white South African — she is directly
implicated in the atrocities committed on her behalf. “The arteries
of our past bleed into their own peculiar rhythm, tone and image.
One cannot get rid of it. Ever.”19 The horror of Krog’s “heritage,” and
her sense of an indelible collective guilt becomes quite overwhelming:
And suddenly it is as if an undertow is taking me out . . . out

. . . and out. And behind me sinks the country of my skull like
a sheet in the dark — and I hear a thin song, hoofs, edges of
venom, fever and destruction fermenting and hissing underwater.
I shrink and prickle. Against. Against my blood and the heritage
thereof. Will I forever be them — recognizing them as I do daily
in my nostrils? Yes. And what we have done will never be
undone.20
This painful process, however, is as necessary for South African

listeners as for the witnesses themselves. The listeners (especially
white South Africans who must recognize that they are in fact hearing
their history) need to confront — and actively engage — the horror
of apartheid in order to move beyond it. Though many white viewers
remain aloof from the TRC proceedings and continue, incredibly, to
deny stories of horrendous violence and torture enacted in their name,
Krog generously envisions this as “the first step in a process akin to
the stages terminally ill patients experience: denial, rage, bargaining,
depression — out of which acceptance will eventually surface.”21 The
combined weight of victims’ testimonies and perpetrators’ confessions
act as a fundamental challenge to the cultural certainties of apartheid’s
beneficiaries, who are thus forced, however reluctantly, to confront
the painful history upon which their identities are founded. These
narratives constitute what Kali Tal describes as a “crushing blow to
the ‘fictions’ by which they led their lives.”22
Ironically, perhaps, this is one way that the Truth Commission
can provide a basis for a new national identity. By radically
undermining every South African’s belief in a seamless historical
narrative, disrupting cultural fictions, and by asserting a new history
based instead upon the fragments of memory that emerge from oral
testimony, the Commission points to a way forward through, rather
than beyond, the traumas of the past. Dori Laub argues that “survivors
who do not tell their story become victims of a distorted memory,
that is, of a forcibly imposed ‘external evil,’ which causes an endless
struggle with and over a delusion.”23 If the country is not to fall victim
36 SARAH L. LINCOLN
to this delusion, individual memories — however “distorted” — must

be turned into a collective history and thus incorporated into a
narrative of the present.
Although she has become bitterly cynical about any possibility
for reconciliation in South Africa, given what she has heard about
the horrors of the past, Antjie Krog ultimately finds consolation in
simply “knowing,” however incompletely, “what happened”:
A friend who has emigrated is visiting me in the office. She

answers a call. ‘It’s your child. He says he’s writing a song on
Joe Mamasela and he needs a buzzword to rhyme with Vlakplaas.’
She lowers the phone. ‘Who is Joe Mamasela?’
A massive sigh breaks through my chest. For the first time
in months — I breathe.
The absolution one has given up on, the hope for a catharsis,
the ideal of reconciliation, the dream of a powerful reparation
policy ... Maybe this is all that is important — that I and my
child know Vlakplaas and Mamasela. That we know what
happened there. When the truth commission process started last
year, one instinctively realised: if you cut yourself off from the
process, you will wake up in a foreign country — a country that
you don’t know and that you will never understand.24
One way in which the TRC works to “heal” the divided nation
is by restoring the sense of broad community destroyed by apartheid’s
traumatic legacy. Hearing others tell similar stories and adding their
own traumas to the growing collection inserts individual victims like
Mrs Dlomo back into a larger communal narrative of persecution and
suffering, which in turn provides a narrative for coming to terms with
a traumatic past. As she tells us in SisaKhuluma (“We are still
talking”), a video produced by the Centre for the Study of Violence
and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, “that day [when she told the TRC
about her son’s death] it was as if the burden had been taken away
from my shoulders because some other people were listening to what
I was telling them. . . .”25 Recognizing that the traumas of the past
were imposed on a group, and were not just directed,
incomprehensibly, at her individual family, enables Mrs. Dlomo to
free herself of the burden imposed by enforced silence and restores
her identification with others across the imagined community.
This sense of isolation from the collective was, of course, part of

apartheid’s deliberate strategy, centered (like colonial ideologies the
world over) around notions of “divide and conquer.” The total
possession of the individual body by the powers of the state worked
to undermine the communal identities that served as the basis for
mobilized resistance. For communities in which familial and
communal networks are especially valued, this isolation is highly
traumatic: “Kill one person and then the whole family’s dead now,
as we are dead now,” mourns one survivor.26 At the same time, home
invasions, torture, abductions, casual killings, draconian “pass” laws,
forced removals were day-to-day realities for millions of black South
Africans, serving to enforce the power of the apartheid state over the
most intimate details of individual life. These kinds of traumatic
experiences — “violation” rather than just “violence,” as Roberta
Culbertson has argued — undermine conceptions of the self as a
unified and impermeable entity, and thus isolate the individual from
the community: “the destruction of the self is a social act, most
fundamentally pushing the self back into its cellular, nonsocial,
surviving self.”27
Under such pressures (in particular, the omnipresence of death
and the state’s total control over every aspect of the individual’s life),
the imperative to survive became paramount, often overwhelming
social and political considerations. Kai Erikson argues in “Notes on
Trauma and Community” that “trauma damages the texture of
community,” that it is a “blow to the basic tissues of social life that
damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the
prevailing sense of community.”28 In the face of state violence and
the certain consequences of public dissent, many South Africans
withdrew from the realm of direct political action. Sicelo Dlomo’s
mother was among those who feared the results of her son’s political
engagement: when he argues that his death will serve the community
by furthering the cause of the liberation movement, she responds
fiercely “To hell with your Mandela, because I’ll be suffering.”29
The need to protect themselves and their families from the
coercive power of the state thus dissuaded many individuals from
participating directly in anti-apartheid activities — collective
engagements providing explanatory narratives that might in fact cope
with the system’s traumatic impact. In other words, the survival
38 SARAH L. LINCOLN
strategies that prevented many victims from participating in activities,

which opposed the state in fact, often exacerbated the traumatizing
effects of apartheid’s brutality. As for victims of rape and other
violations, the sense that apartheid’s victims could have “done more”
to oppose the system created a sense of false guilt and self-blame in
survivors, displacing responsibility for the trauma from the perpetrator
onto the victim.
By witnessing to the myriad ways in which the system brutalized
its victims around (and beyond) the country, and (importantly) to
countless remarkable stories of endurance and resistance, the Truth
Commission helps survivors work (together) through their guilt —
imagined or real — and celebrate, instead, the power of the collective
commitment that ultimately brought down the apartheid state.
For victims of apartheid violence, “it is not only the moment of
the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; … survival
itself, in other words, can be a crisis.”30 As survivors, they feel a
particular responsibility to the dead, a need to remember and honor
them through a telling of their story. Those survivors who testify
before the TRC are impelled by their responsibility to the dead to
“tell the Truth” of their experiences. Part of the “cathartic” power
of the Commission lies in its public commitment (based on its
original mandate) to hear, represent, and record these “truths” of
apartheid for all generations.
In South Africa, as elsewhere, this is a complicated undertaking.
Traditional standards of historical “truth” are challenged at every turn
by the secretive nature of the apartheid state apparatus and by the
shredding machines that have been hard at work since 1990. Defying
western historical standards, the documentary “evidence” of
apartheid’s horrors is, in many cases, simply absent. In other cases,
the apartheid state’s censorship of the media and deliberate deception
tactics make it difficult to “know” the truth of events. Police hit
squads, like the one to which Paul van Vuuran belonged, “killed
blacks in ways to make it look like the murders were committed not
by the hit squads, but by black revolutionaries of the ANC. That
meant bombs, electrocutions and necklacing — that’s putting a
burning tire around a victim’s neck.”31 Such revelations, naturally,
call into question even “eyewitness” accounts of events under
investigation by the Commission.
For many individuals, moreover, the idea of “truth” itself came

to be associated with pain and death. Torture victims frequently
testify that they were presented with an alternative by their
tormentors: tell the “truth,” or face the horrifying consequences. Even
in cases where victims knew nothing, they would often “confess” to
put an end to their suffering. In short, the truth often became a
manipulation, a source of trauma rather than its catharsis. This, of
course, seriously problematizes the Truth Commission’s role of
uncovering and recording the “truth” of apartheid.
Nevertheless, the Commission’s significance in the broader South
African context exceeds the boundaries of knowable “truth.” The
process of public witnessing undertaken by the TRC constitutes, in
itself, a form of history-making that asserts the radically historical
power of memory. Countering traditional dismissals of individual
memory as a supposedly unreliable historical source, the Truth
Commission has assembled a vast, multivocal public archive of
personal testimonies, insisting that these, too, are worthy of our
attention. The fragmentary narratives acknowledged, recorded, and
legitimized by the Commission are thereby turned into historical
artifacts — fragments, that is, that might ultimately “shore the ruins”
of South Africa’s decimated history.
Dori Laub describes the testimony of a woman, a survivor of
Auschwitz, who relates her memory of an uprising in the camp. She
“remembers” four chimneys exploding, and yet the “historical truth”
of the uprising is that only one was destroyed. Laub’s argument, as a
counter to the frustration that historians feel at the “inaccuracy” of
this woman’s testimony, is that the fact of her testimony is more
central than the historical veracity of her memory. She is testifying,
not to the event itself, but to the “breakage of a framework . . .
Knowledge in the testimony is, in other words, not simply a factual
given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine
advent, an event in its own right.”32
Similarly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has
acknowledged that, despite its name, it may never be possible to
“know” the “truth” of apartheid. In the chairperson’s foreword to the
TRC’s final report, published in 1999, Archbishop Tutu writes: “the
report of the Commission will now take its place in the historical
landscape of which future generations will try to make sense —
40 SARAH L. LINCOLN
searching for the clues that lead, endlessly, to a truth that will, in
the very nature of things, never be fully revealed.”33 He recognizes
that the TRC’s value resides in its re-visioning of history and its
assertion of the significance of oral testimony as historical artifact.
As Walter Benjamin argues, “to articulate the past historically does
not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize
hold of a memory,” and thereby to construct a fiction of a coherent
history out of the fragmentary narratives that individuals provide.34
This is the Commission’s true responsibility.
The video, “SisaKhuluma: We are Still Speaking” opens with file
footage of apartheid violence, and with a survivor of police detention
telling two children the story of past traumas: “Now Lucky and
Georgie . . . ” he begins. This editorial choice is no accident, but rather
expresses the TRC’s perceived significance for the country’s future
as well as its past. The video’s emphasis on transmission, on narrating
traumatic pasts to children, echoes Antjie Krog’s celebration of her
child’s “knowing” Vlakplaas and Joe Mamasela.
This is one symptom of South Africans’ various contemporary
attempts to “wrestle” with their past. The pressing question remains:
how do we — as individuals and as a nation — account for
simultaneous imperatives to remember and to forget South Africa’s
traumatic past? How, especially, do we “remember” apartheid without
reinscribing its divisiveness in the present? Michael Roth argues that
speaking about trauma represents the “translation of memory into
history,”35 and perhaps “telling” the horrors of the past to children
is one way of acknowledging the power of the past in the present,
without being possessed by it. “To commemorate the past is an act
of repossession”:36 by telling the painful truths of apartheid to her
children, Antjie Krog claims this history as hers and theirs as well,
and thereby reaches across the divides of the past to others who share
in that history. Instead of denying or rejecting the painful history of
apartheid, Krog’s “act of repossession” asserts her implication in the
country’s past and thus stakes out a place for herself and her children
in its present and future.
Despite the optimism of its commissioners and many others, the
ambivalence surrounding the TRC at its creation persists today.
Represented as the “middle ground . . . between the Nuremberg trials
and amnesia,”37 the Truth Commission’s approach to dealing with
the nation’s painful and divided past has left many South Africans
dissatisfied — particularly in light of the material and social apartheid
that survives even today. While commissioners argue that granting
amnesty is the only guarantee that the “truth” of past atrocities will
ever be known, and that it is consequently the only possible solution,
victims’ families often feel cheated of the justice they demand. They
feel incredulous that the state should ask them to forgive the
perpetrators of the crimes that destroyed their lives and those of their
communities, especially when the perpetrators do not even need to
express repentance in order to receive amnesty.
Survivors’ disaffection stems in part from a perception that the
needs of the “nation” are being placed before their own. Dullah Omar,
who served as Minister of Justice in the interim government,
recognizes this disaffection, but maintains that “the future cannot
be built on the basis of revenge.” Instead, the process of public
testimony and the construction of a new history will ensure, he
maintains, that “through the community, some sort of collective
justice will have been done.”38
There is, in other words, a tension between individual and
collective needs in dealing with South Africa’s past: “a moral conflict
between justice, as embodied in the justice system, and values such
as truth, reconciliation, peace, the common good underlying this kind
of Commission.”39 Such “common good” requires that perpetrators
of past atrocities are forgiven for what they have done, but this is
difficult when many of these people are not prepared to show remorse
or repentance for their deeds.
Wrapped up in themselves, the former policemen do not make

way for the remorse their victims need to see them feeling if
truth is to beat a path through anger to reconciliation.
Remorse is about opening the heart and the soul to the pain
of others and one’s own pain at having caused it. It is about a
willingness to submit, to let go. These men seem unable to do
so.40
So while the presence of the state as a compassionate and

interested listener to the testimony of victims restores a broken
relationship between individual and collective, the government’s
failure to suitably punish individual perpetrators is seen by many
42 SARAH L. LINCOLN
survivors as a betrayal. Nevertheless, the alternative — prosecuting

individuals for apartheid-era crimes — seems equally unconstructive.
By scapegoating the guilt for apartheid’s horrors on a few public
figures, this strategy effectively indemnifies the millions who were
the complicit, duplicit, scared, silent beneficiaries of apartheid, and
thus fails to engage these subjects in real dialogue about the nation’s
past and future.
Furthermore, punishing the perpetrators of particular atrocities
neglects the traumatic effects of apartheid on all its victims, not only
those who were killed or tortured by members of the security forces.
Millions of people were “relocated,” impoverished, humiliated and
deprived by the system’s policies, and for those crimes it is more
difficult to assign individual blame. For that reason, the Truth
Commission instead demands that individual South Africans, white
and black, passive victims, beneficiaries, and active participants,
present and future, consider their complicities in, and responsibilities
for, the country’s past. “As in Germany, only a thousand daily gestures
will help SA to complete its cathartic mosaic in the decades ahead.
The country needs gestures which shift truth and reconciliation from
being a bureaucratic act to being a matter of the heart.”41
Refusing to prosecute individual perpetrators, and acknowledging
that amnesty is not justice, shifts the responsibility for the traumas
of the past from the few to the many. Instead of a single, Biblical act
of national catharsis, then, individual South Africans are left to
confront their own sufferings and atrocities, and to come to terms,
personally and collectively, with a past that continues to haunt the
present.
Apartheid constitutes what Hayden White describes as a
“modernist event”: it defied the limits of historical knowledge by
being both unobservable and unobserved.42 The events of South
Africa’s past fundamentally problematize Enlightenment ideals of
historical truth, given the many and radical ways in which apartheid
ruptured such truths. This leaves contemporary South African society
with a dislocated traumatic past that cannot easily be assimilated into
a narrative of the present — in part, because the traumatizing effects
of that past persist in the present.
Apartheid can neither be simply forgotten nor easily remembered
without perpetuating its divisive effects in the fledgling nation. South
Africa not only has to come to terms with its agonizingly fragmented
past, then, but must also accept the radically altered vision of history
that it implies. Linear, realist historical narratives have been used
and abused in service of colonial and apartheid regimes even as they
efface their own position within those ideological frameworks. A
singular narrative, told by a single silent voice, cannot capture the
complexities of South Africa’s traumatic past.
Instead, the testimonial history being built by the Truth
Commission is a collection of fragments, often incoherent,
contradictory, and even factually “inaccurate,” but a history
nonetheless. Films like Khulumani and SisaKhuluma represent
history as a set of fragmentary individual narratives, marking the
boundaries of a representation that apartheid defies. Like the survivors
of the Holocaust, fragments of individual memory — rather than a
coherent collective history — are all we have.
“This,” then, “is my history” — not only the testimonies,
representations of the past, but this ongoing process of making and
rethinking “History” as well. While hearing and recording the
testimonies of those who suffered under apartheid may not lead
directly to the “reconciliation” that Archbishop Tutu and so many
others long for, and even if it fails in its efforts to know the “truth”
of South Africa’s past, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is
a necessary performative moment in the building of a new nation.
We are asked to see the Commission as “a facilitating agent for
the mobilization of ‘non-conventional resources” such as social
awareness, collective memory, solidarity, dedication and
commitment; helping to transform the negative social energy
contained in the ‘collective pathologies’ of hatred, fear, guilt and
revenge into the will to contribute to the required processes of deep
change.”43 As a process of public, national, history-making, hearing
these personal testimonies is the first collective act of the “new South
Africa,” its first “historical” moment, and as such provides the first
foundational stone in the construction of a coherent nation out of
the fragments of the past.
2
Traumatic Contact Zones and
Embodied Translators
With Reference to Select
Australian Texts
E. ANN KAPLAN
Recent catastrophic events (such as the September 11, 2001 attacks

on the USA), remind us of the urgency for a focus on transnational
conflict with a view to developing understanding. We need to move
from the pattern of violence, and its ensuing trauma, to producing
translators to mediate across difference. We have to find ways to
transfer difference into something other than trauma. My effort here
may be seen as one act of translation among many, in which I explore
texts representing other acts of translation already underway or
imagined.1
Two distinct stages are involved in acts of translation: the first is
exploring and understanding in what ways transcultural contact can
be traumatic, and how such traumatic contact has been theorized;
the second stage is finding examples for what I will call “embodied
translators,” who provide models for mediating across difference. The
first part of this chapter, thus, looks at contrasting images of contact-
zones in the context of Australian colonization that are traumatic,
while the second part explores images of embodied cultural translators
seeking to mediate difference.
Coined by Mary Louise Pratt in a groundbreaking volume,2 the
46 E. ANN KAPLAN
term “contact-zone” refers to cross-cultural relations that can take

many forms. For Pratt, in her words, the concept of “‘contact-zone’
is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal consequence of
subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures
and whose trajectories now intersect.” Her aim is “to foreground the
interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so
easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and
domination.”3 My interest, however, is specifically in what prevents
harmonious relations in colonial encounters. I turned to trauma
studies as illuminating processes — especially those of traumatic
memory — producing contact-zones that evidence trauma. For
trauma, in its by now well-established sense of events that are so
overwhelming that they cannot be cognitively processed, helps us
understand the mental state of peoples who are victims of traumas
arising from inter- (as well as intra-) cultural contact. 4 The
traumatized only recall the past indirectly because of the blockage
to cognition: Traumatic memory, then, refers to traces of past events
passed on from generation to generation through their indirect recall.
The delayed response to such events, in individuals,5 takes the form
of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors,
which clinicians now know a lot about. When catastrophe affects a
group of people, as in the case of the holocaust, slavery or colonization
(to take three very different examples), one can perhaps talk of
“collective” or “shared” trauma.6 If the events are overwhelming,
groups may “forget” horrendous actions from the past, and simply
split them off from daily consciousness. Yet, although not
“remembered,” as I have argued elsewhere, and as I explain below,
the impact of such actions may evidence itself in cultural symptoms
of varied kinds.7
Psychically, it makes a big difference if the catastrophe is a natural
one, or even an accident, or if it is produced deliberately by humans.
Natural disasters are beyond human control, and accidents happen:
But to understand that fellow humans have deliberately brought about
one’s overwhelming suffering adds to the traumatic effects. It is this
knowledge that haunts intercultural contact particularly in the
context of colonization. When one’s lands have been invaded and
snatched away, one’s culture destroyed (or nearly so), it is as if a deep
wound has been made in the social body. Transmitted from generation
TRAUMATIC CONTACT ZONES AND EMBODIED TRANSLATORS 47
to generation, the wound remains open even if split-off from daily

consciousness. It means that contact between indigenous peoples and
the groups who invaded in the past is inevitably haunted by this past.
The traumatic past, that is to say, shapes the nature of contact.
On the part of the colonizers, there are also blocks to harmonious
contact, although I do not want to equate the situations of the
perpetrators and the victims. As in the case of the victims noted
above, generalization is difficult, but even more important is that
barriers due to a traumatic history are exacerbated by ongoing power
relations: the dominant group exerts its power to keep minorities in
their place. Despite the excellent research of Robert Jay Lifton, Dori
Laub and others (following from Freud’s original theories about the
war neuroses),8 we still do not have enough data about what the
impact of horrendous deeds actually is on the perpetrators: No doubt
the impact varies according to the actual roles individuals played, but
Frantz Fanon’s work in the Algerian clinic (detailed in The Wretched
of the Earth) shows how complex intercultural exchange can be in
situations like the French-Algerian war. Fanon demonstrated that
perpetrators as well as victims may suffer classic traumatic symptoms
because of what they have done to other humans. Many do not suffer
or even have remorse, however. Other, often well-meaning, people
within a nation not directly involved may manifest symptoms like
splitting off knowledge of what their leaders and compatriots have
done, with unhealthy results for the nation (such as a country’s falling
back on tradition, manifesting lack of creativity, workers depressed
or turning inwards, etc.). The issue of “national” trauma (and whether
such a concept is viable) is complicated: national leaders usually deal
with an historical past in which suffering was deliberately imposed
on ethnic minorities in political rather than emotional terms. They
may be fully aware of what was done, but seek to repress public
knowledge so as not to arouse outcry and attribution of blame, to
say nothing (especially these days) of demands for financial
compensation for suffering. [South Africa’s interesting “experiment”
in their Truth and Reconciliation Trials (being used in other nations
now) had mixed results, but at least made perpetrators accountable
for their crimes and in some cases insisted perpetrators meet victims
or relatives of victims murdered.]9 But it is hard to generalize about
these complicated matters.
48 E. ANN KAPLAN
The difficulties of generalizing should not deter us from theorizing

about and speculating on the questions I have raised and will seek to
develop in what follows. Such speculations may inspire studies in
which hypotheses may be tested. Commercial and popular art, such
as Hollywood film in the USA, may emerge at once to conceal
historical events perpetrated by dominant groups, but split off from
public consciousness, while implicitly referring to such events. Kaja
Silverman states that historical trauma is what “interrupt(s) or even
deconstitute(s) what a society assumes to be its master narratives and
immanent Necessity.”10 Hollywood’s melodramas are impelled to
repeat the rent in the dominant fiction occasioned by historical
trauma while at the same time seeking unconsciously to repair that
rent. 11 In other societies, other cultural forms betray traumatic
symptoms, as will be clear in the examples to follow. Meanwhile, as
my examples also show, victims traumatized in the past begin to
make their own art, detailing their experiences and the cultural
residues of colonization.12
We are drawn to art perhaps because art can be a terrain beyond
ordinary ways of thinking (i.e. beyond normal reason, logic, or
strategic thinking by business and government) where something else
can be “known,” or familiar things known in a different register:13
that is, known not only through the work itself, but through a work
being placed, situated, linked to surrounding contexts, to historical
traces, etc. by critics, scholars and activists. As Betty Joseph has
pointed out, scholars who have depended on literary, art and media
texts often feel they are out of touch with the large global events
social scientists (especially ethnographers) address. But following
Raymond Williams and Aihwa Ong, Joseph argues that the literary
may yet have an important role to play. If focussing on the subjective
looks like giving up a class or collective analysis, that is because the
importance of the personal and singular mode as a way of theorizing
one’s relationship to the Other has not been given enough attention,
especially in light of the difficulty of separating the personal mode
from politics. 14 Indeed, what she suggests is that while art is
apparently unique and individualistic, it is deeply communal in its
implications. In this way, it addresses the politics of trauma, including
the trauma of cross-cultural conflict. In art, subjectivity, including
its unconscious aspects, becomes visible as social practice. This aspect
of subjectivity is often overlooked in narrowly political, sociological

or historical accounts. While theory tends to homogenize multiplicity
into monolithic generalizations that cannot capture nuances of
different practices and positions of transcultural exchange, I see
creative productions as islands of specificity that rise up out of the
sea of multiple positionings.
In what follows, I juxtapose four works, produced in differing
contexts, which show the two stages involved in acts of translation
noted above. I am interested first in how contact has been theorized
and represented in inter- and intra-cultural exchange; second in finding
models that show need for translators who are capable of mediating
between communities; and finally in models of “embodied
translators,” as attempts at reconciliation proceed in Australia. Each
artist represents traumatic events perpetrated on their own or
another’s community in unique ways. I will first address texts by
“outsiders” — that is artists not from the nation or the community
being represented; second, I’ll look at texts by “insider” artists to see
what we can learn about psychic barriers to racial and cultural
harmony from their representations; and finally I look at texts that
show people moving between cultures, seeking to “translate” one
culture to someone outside it. Overall, I am concerned to show what
works like these might contribute to community building and
reconciliation through what they imagine. Differences in images and
narratives between “insider” and “outsider” works will emerge from
what follows.
Traumatic Contact-Zones
Indigenization, the différend and Trauma in Werner Herzog’s

Where the Green Ants Dream (1984)
My first example is an “outsider” text by Werner Herzog, a German
filmmaker, who in 1984 went to Australia to make Where the Green
Ants Dream, a film partly inspired by the groundbreaking 1983 Eddie
Mabo land rights case,15 and modeled after an actual case brought
against a mining company wanting to drill on an Aboriginal sacred
site. Where the Green Ants Dream is firmly on the side of the
50 E. ANN KAPLAN
Aborigines who stage a peaceful sit-in on the sacred site the company
has started to mine. The film’s identification with the Aborigines is
mediated through the liberal-minded, decent Australian mining
engineer, Lance Hackett, who gradually comes not only to respect
the Aborigines’ position, but, like the white anthropologist in the film,
“goes native.”
This “going native” (or indigenization) is a very complex kind of
cultural “mingling,”a special sort of “contact zone”: it requires a
complete reversal of identity for the white person, yet does not
overcome the cultural and historical gap that exists between the
cultures. But “going native” is one of the ways in which people
belonging to the historical colonizing group may try to deal with their
unconscious guilt at having taken over someone else’s land. They
simply give up their white identity and their past life, and settle down
amongst indigenous peoples, adopting their ways of being and learning
their language.
Still 2.1 The Aborigines stage a peaceful but determined sit-in to prevent mining on their
sacred site, despite the violent, threatening moves of the company.
The flip side of indigenization is believing that there is utter

incommensurability between Western peoples and indigenous groups.
Anthropologists have sometimes theorized the impossibility of
knowing the other, as well as succumbing to indigenization.16 But
perhaps the most dramatic argument about the impossiblity of
knowing the other was made by Bill Readings in regard to Herzog’s
film. He reads Where the Green Ants Dream as illustrating the
incommensurable difference between the Aborigines and white
Australians. Using Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of le différend to
make his point, Readings argues that, from this extreme philosophical
position, it is impossible for white Westerners to “know” the
Aborigines. An implacable, impenetrable Otherness pertains to them,
and Readings claims it would be desecration even to term the
Aborigines “human,” since this concept is flooded with harmful
Western Enlightenment concepts.17
While I agree that Herzog apparently represents Aboriginal-white
Australian relations in this pessimistic way, as I make clear below I
do not believe this is the only possible form of relationship. Although
Herzog is not a philosopher in Lyotard’s sense, his film does suggest
that the Aborigines must remain “over there” in their uniqueness
and exotic beauty. Lance Hackett, the white Australian engineer, and
the anthropologist called in to testify on behalf of the Aborigines,
are so overwhelmed with guilt at what mining companies and others
have done to the Aborigines, that they cannot return to their prior
existences within white society. They become nomads, displaced
persons. Meanwhile, the Aborigines bring to the present contact over
the desecration of their spiritual site a culturally transmitted but
perhaps split-off knowledge of traumatic historical contact. They do
not want to communicate with whites because the traumatic
historical wound is still open, the destruction too severe.
If Herzog implies that the West should retreat, he does not expect
it to. Indeed, the film is filled with a terrible sadness from its apparent
position that any utopian solution is impossible. These beautiful
people will eventually be extinct, their purity eradicated by the white
settlers, their languages and land taken away.
What might explain Herzog’s vision? Let me turn briefly to the
national and political context for Herzog’s German/US production.
Born in Germany in the wake of the Second World War, Herzog
52 E. ANN KAPLAN
Still 2.2 Lance Hackett tries to prevent violence. He tries to understand the way the Abo-
rigines view the world and the reason for their sit-in.
belongs to a generation educated under the American occupation

of Germany and infused with sadness, perhaps guilt, at the desecration
of six million Jews — that is, at the attempt to completely annihilate
the Jewish people, their history, culture and thought — as well as
to destroy non-Aryan groups (like the Roma), homosexuals and
communists. Herzog became fascinated with the madness of
omnipotent leaders like the Spanish conquistador, Aguirra (see his
Aguirra: The Wrath of God), whom Hitler clearly resembled. He
was also concerned about the decimation of indigenous groups, like
the Australian Aborigines, whose fate seems analogous to that of
the Jews. Perhaps the unutterable sadness in the film arises partly
from the hopelessness that young Germans must have felt (and
perhaps still feel) in the wake of the Holocaust perpetrated on their
land by “their” leaders — their fathers. Herzog’s identification with
the Aborigines is so strong, their integrity and beauty so well depicted,
that some personal connection may have been at the heart of the
film.18
The problem with Herzog’s (and Lyotard’s) pessimistic vision is

that it views peoples and their cultures as passive objects of history
rather than active participants in history. As postcolonial critics have
shown, cultures are adaptive and malleable: both the colonizing
culture and that of the colonized are mutually impacted and changed.
Mingling inevitably takes place, and racial purity is a myth. Herzog’s
vision leads to a melancholy if not despairing notion like that of
Clifford Geertz that mutual understanding is impossible.19
But is such understanding really impossible? What can we learn
from where we are today and changes over the past 20 years? We
should bear in mind Robert J. C. Young’s warning that theories “must
always be reshaped, resituated and redirected according to the specific,
contingent location of the moment.” 20 Theory as activism
presupposes that it intervenes in a particular context against the
politics of its adversary: once that context has passed, Young says,
“the political impact of a strategic intervention is lost” (11). Theories
too have a history and need to be freshly thought out in relation to
specific conditions at a particular moment. If understanding seemed
impossible to Herzog, born in Germany in the post-Nazi, post-
Holocaust era, perhaps recent events, including renewed investigation
of the Holocaust’s senselessness but also of people’s resilience in the
face of it, now require different interpretations.
Psychological approaches, especially trauma theory, offer an
example of new perspectives that might lead to a different conclusion
than Herzog’s very pessimistic one. Rather than reading the
relationship between whites and Aborigines as representing an
incommensurable, irreducible difference, and as entailing the
necessary violence of whites against indigenous peoples, one could
interpret the difficulty of connection that the film shows so well as
resulting from the traumatic history of contact for both Aborigines
and white Australians. Just because the Aborigines do not want to
communicate with white Australians does not mean, as Herzog
believes, that any change is impossible. Indeed, the film shows change
on the part of the engineer: Lance Hackett learns to communicate
with the Aboriginal leaders; indeed, he begins slowly to grasp their
ways of knowing and, in turn, to explain the Aborigines to the vexed,
impatient corporate executives. If Lance and the anthropologist in the
film find their only recourse in rejecting the executives’ corporate
54 E. ANN KAPLAN
mentality is to “go native,” that is because other possibilities (such

as those illuminated in Walking with My Sisters, discussed below)
were not available.
In focusing on the internal states of colonized peoples, and on
the collective nature of catastrophes such as those Aboriginal
Australians suffered, paradoxically perhaps one arrives at a less
pessimistic and more realistic analysis than the philosophical one,
which ignores the psychological: focusing on psychology at least opens
up the possibility for reparation and reconciliation between peoples
from different cultures, however hard it might be. I’ll return to this
point below.
“Ambivalence” and Tracey Moffatt’s Laudanum (1998)

In thinking about my work on Tracey Moffatt, the “insider” artist I
turn to next, I have wondered what is it about this young artist’s
productions that could so have drawn me: I first met Moffatt in 1989
in Australia, and in the past decade or more have returned several
times to her work.21 Perhaps some link to the depth of feeling about
women’s lives in the context of racial trauma within colonization by
people originally British drew me: at any rate, mine is an “outsider’s”
reading of Moffatt’s “insider” work, in some sense perhaps linking
me to Herzog. However, unlike Herzog, I am interested in translation,
that is, in working across the cultural and ethnic differences in the
hopes of dialogue, exchange, ideally, of coming closer. I sensed that
the traumas referenced, and often reversed or overcome in Moffatt’s
narratives, had something to say to me that I could discover through
returning again and again to her work. So, if we compare my
“outsider” critical position to Herzog’s “outsider” artist position, we
find some interesting contrasts. Where Herzog apparently despairs of
any possible non-traumatic contact between the Aborigines and white
settlers, I look for understanding and ultimately reconciliation through
empathy and mourning.
As an Aboriginal woman, brought up by white parents in
Australia, Tracey Moffatt is in a good position to reflect on the legacies
of internal colonialism in Australia. Her first film, Nice Coloured
Girls, as I have discussed elsewhere (Kaplan, 1997), brought past
crimes of white colonizers into the present: Moffat’s very modern
Aboriginal women fleece drunk white “captains” in revenge for the

rape and plunder of their Aboriginal ancestors. In the work I look at
here — her remarkable 1998 series of photographs, named Laudanum
— Moffatt turns to memories of traumatic colonial contact, with all
its complexities. The traces of desires colonialism produced are staged
and mediated, as Moffatt’s images expose a process Homi Bhabha
termed “ambivalence” and Robert Young “colonial desire.” Moffatt
presents images of a Victorian Lady of the House engaging in a
complicated series of perhaps drug-induced interactions with a woman
— apparently her maid. However, interestingly, Moffatt’s images
depict, not an Aboriginal servant, but a person who is perhaps mixed
race or Asian. It is deliberately left uncertain. The meaning of the
series of images is also deliberately left vague: while the images depict
colonial desire or ambivalence, it’s clear that this is being “staged,”
self-consciously “performed” so as to open up a space for meditation
on such relations that perhaps took place historically. Metaphorically,
Moffatt seems to be saying, colonial relations are addictive, like drugs.
In foregrounding sexuality in the master-slave relation — a lesbian
one in this case — Moffatt shows how the hierarchical power relation
is itself incipiently sexual. The structure, that is, paradoxically leads
to intimacy and breeds a transgressive non-normative desire that
dominant ideology would deplore.
The first image sets forth the power relationship between mistress
and servant, only in such an extreme form as to seem a parody. The
imposing sweep of the staircase in the Victorian house places its
strength on the figure of the mistress who has just descended, while
the Asian servant lies prostrate before her, mopping the floor with a
rag.22 The next images suggest both women having orgasms, although
their bodies are not fully in contact. Moffatt sets up the images so
that the viewer is a voyeur (in one image she deliberately plays on
Freud’s theory of the child peeking through the keyhole — a trope
taken up literally in early silent pornographic film).23 An ominous
shot of the outside of the house is followed by a partial image of the
mistress forcing the maid’s head down on a table. This introduces
the theme of sado-masochistic sexual violence which continues
through images that follow. However, these are interspersed with
beautiful images of the maid naked, sleeping, and of scary images of
the mistress as a black silhouette with spiked fingers. One image
56 E. ANN KAPLAN
suggests a lover’s quarrel; the half-naked servant perhaps tries to

appease her mistress by holding out a flower from the vase broken
during the quarrel; the mistress perhaps nurses a wound. The
composition of the frame is such that the servant’s arm leads to the
mistresses’ hand and on up to the portrait on the wall of an elaborately
dressed woman in eighteenth-century costume. As the sequence
continues, it seems that the mistress’ dominant position collapses:
we see her now in her underclothes, and the final image, the same
setting as the opening one, has her half naked on the stair she
descended with such aplomb, and a pillow lies where the servant
originally did, suggesting her departure.
Moffatt’s photographic series powerfully re-evokes past models
of intercultural colonial relations in all their ambivalence and
eroticism — models that remain in the unconscious of some
Australians. The deliberate fuzzy greyness of the photographic
surfaces suggests memory, even ghosts. It’s as if the old Victorian
house is haunted. One thinks inevitably of Toni Morrison’s novel,
Beloved, in which the murdered child returns to haunt her mother.
Is the woman of the house haunted by a past that cannot be put to
rest? Are the images, on the contrary, feeding desires in the present?
It’s not at all clear, nor need it be: images like Moffatt’s, in their
allusive, formal beauty, perhaps function to help work through the
kind of desire the colonial structure produced. And to remind us of
their ongoing interest, their continuing fascination, for all their
traumatic residues.
The fascination is less that of the voyeurism Moffatt seems to be
playing with in some of the photographs, and has more to do with
the sexiness of the power-relationship.24 A dominant-submission
structure continues to underlie much sexuality. Moffatt’s ambivalence
reveals the difference between such a structure being forced (as in
colonialism) and being freely chosen in postcolonialism. She wants,
I think, to allow for both readings at the same time: the repressive
past and a present sexual choice that might recall past repressions
but not be repressive.
Intra-Cultural Contact Zones: Perkins’ Radiance (Australia, 1998)

Another “insider” text, Perkins’ Radiance, also set in a house filled
with secrets of the past, explores the conflicts among three

contemporary Aboriginal sisters — two of whom were taken from
their mother — who come together after long years apart when their
mother dies. Each has had a dramatically different experience as a
result of forced assimilation policies, but the two older sisters are
especially embittered and rivalrous. The film offers insight into
conflicts and divisions within Aboriginal communities and social/
familial relations created by living under white Australian restrictions.
What happens between members of Aboriginal families as a result of
the stolen generations and forced assimilation? The policy of taking
children away from their Aboriginal families reached its height in
the 1950s, and although abandoned under protest in the 1970s,
legacies of this traumatic policy remain today.25 While clearly there
is an historical domino-effect producing the sisters’ trauma, the film
remains focused on the lives of the sisters: it does not try to explain
the mother’s behavior through reference to historical events, or
account for what led to her inability to care better for her children.
This allows Perkins to exemplify three very different routes, perhaps
familiar in Aboriginal communities, that the sisters take. In this way,
Radiance provides a sense of the complex, multiple ways in which
white policies ruined or made intolerable young people’s lives, created
crises of identity, and damaged intra-cultural relations. However, it
is striking that Radiance does not highlight the sisters’ indigeneity
as such: we understand that their situation results from past white
Australian policies, but the traumas are those many families might
suffer.
As the film proceeds, the family’s traumatic past is gradually
unraveled. The structure of the film is like a symphony, building from
a quiet beginning to a tremendous crescendo, and then to a perhaps
utopian but nevertheless pleasing finale. The two older sisters — Mae
and Cressy — resent their mother’s allowing them to be taken away
and put in convents. They are bitter that she never visited them, or
did anything to help them make something of themselves. Nona, the
youngest, was “special” for reasons that only slowly and dramatically
emerge. Indeed, part of the older sisters’ bitterness arises from the
traumatic event surrounding Nona’s birth — namely Cressy’s rape at
the age of 12 by one of her mother’s drunken lovers. Cressy’s mother
kept Nona as her child, and hid her from the authorities so that she
58 E. ANN KAPLAN
was never taken away. However, Nona finally ran away, chasing her
fantasy of her father as a black rodeo Prince — a fantasy presumably
encouraged by her (adopted) “mother” (really her grandmother).
Nona’s trauma is the destruction of the fantasy that has sustained
her through her childhood and young adulthood; Cressy’s trauma was
the rape, followed by giving up her child, and her painful creation of
an opera singer’s career; Mae’s trauma was being left to care for her
mother, relegated to a spinster-like existence as a nurse, while her
mother increasingly became senile and hateful toward Mae. The
mother, assumed by the surrounding community to be a witch, was
vilified and abused by local people, all of which Mae too had to endure.
The mother’s white lover, Harry, set her up in a house, promising to
marry her, but in fact abandoned her to her fate. Mae has long dreamed
of revenge by burning Harry’s house after her mother died.
The force of the film emerges from the dramatic changes that
take place in all three women, gathered for their mother’s funeral, as
truth about the past emerges. As in Moffatt’s photographic series, the
house shapes or represents psychic conflicts and sexual transgression.
However, in Moffatt’s photos, it seems that the level of the id
predominates: the mistress descends the staircase and id takes over.
In Radiance, the domestic space becomes a metaphor for Freud’s
topographic model of the mind — superego, ego and id. The sisters
(mainly on the house’s main floor) struggle to contain the messy, ugly
and repressed memories of what happened beneath the house, where
(as noted) Cressy was raped by one of her mother’s white lovers when
she was twelve. It is this event that (implicitly) encapsulates the
collective trauma spinning down the centuries from white decimation
of traditional Aboriginal life and culture.
Cressy undergoes perhaps the most dramatic change during the
course of the film: She moves from a beautiful and successful but
distant, Westernized woman to finding love for her daughter, Nona,
and identification with her own Aboriginal heritage. It is Cressy who
insists on carrying out Mae’s fantasy of revenge by burning down the
house. The radiance of the title refers at once to this incredible fire,
but also to its impact on the three sisters, finally relieved of the
traumatic burden of the past embedded in the house, radiant with
revenge and relief from the bonds of the past.
Embodied Translators
Land Rights in Walking With My Sisters (Australia, 1997)

While traumatic contact and residues of past colonial encounters still
dominate some Australian communities, other psychic and social
processes are also starting to be experienced.26 The groundbreaking
Australian Government Report, Bringing the Children Home, began
the important process of reparation and mourning by detailing stories
of suffering Aboriginal children had undergone through policies of
forced separation noted earlier. Peter Read and Correll Edwards’
account of their work with the organization Link Up, helping reunite
Aboriginal adults with their birth parents, has done much to change
the climate in regard to white Australian policies.27 Much detailed
information about what Aboriginal people experienced is being
published.
When doing research in Australia in 2000, looking for postcolonial
models for indigenous and white Australian cultural exchange, I
turned to the issue of Land Rights as offering a stage, and a site, that
would show white Australians and Aborigines engaged in intensive
exchange. Land claims proliferated in the wake of the ground breaking
Eddie Mabo decision of 1992, which inspired Werner Herzog’s film
with which I started. This decision reversed the earlier Native Title
Act and allowed claims in certain circumstances. What was this
contact like, I wondered? Why are many of the claimants elderly
women? It soon became clear that fragmentation through forced
assimilation weakened traditional Aboriginal culture, as it was
intended to do, as well as creating personal tragic suffering. Since
Aboriginal women live longer than men, women are the ones being
sought to testify in land claim cases. I was interested in how such
women were treated by the Native Title investigators, by lawyers,
by people in the local community, anthropologists, state governors,
etc and, if a case got to Federal Court, by the judges. I wanted to find
out what white cultural frameworks were imposed on Aborigines in
the process, and how these might confuse or alienate the witnesses.
But I soon realized that I also needed to focus on the nature of
the intercultural exchange. In reports of land rights cases, I found
examples of prejudice and condescension similar to images in Herzog’s
60 E. ANN KAPLAN
film, but there were also more positive examples of exchange in the
service of reparation and reconciliation. I became interested in
mingling now in the sense of the interpersonal relations between
whites and Aborigines in the course of the rights case.
Bronwyn Kidd’s documentary film, Walking With My Sisters,
provides models for ways people are beginning to bridge, or work
within, the traumatic gap between Aborigines and white Australians
noted at the outset.28 In the film, we see the sisters as “embodied
translators,” performing their loss to authorities of various kinds as
they struggle to regain land they claim is theirs. That is, they lead
their legal advisors along the beaches and through the wooded areas
they and their family lived on during their childhood and where their
ancestors for generations had lived. They translate their family’s
culture to the white Australians. Meanwhile, white authorities have
an interesting double role: they at once listen to what the women
have to say and then explain the law and options while the women
listen. It is this doubling in intercultural exchange that shows
reconciliation being performed. Each side has to learn from, and listen
to, the other; yet the process has been initiated by the Aborigines,
and is to serve their ends.
Throughout Kidd’s film, we see images of contact between the
elderly sisters and a variety of white and Aboriginal authorities and
spokespeople in the context of the sisters’ land claim. The film (even
if also an “outsider” view) offers quite different images from Herzog’s
exoticized and idealized ones. The sisters, urban Aborigines, are seen
as people like any others, although with their own specific histories
and situations. The images of contact vary: there is the opening scene
of Yvonne, the sister who is the spokeswoman for the three, taking
the microphone somewhat shyly, at a rally for the sisters, where she
is cheered on by an inter-racial crowd. There is the first meeting with
the white representative from the Native Title Tribunal, who listens
apparently sympathetically to what Yvonne has to say about her
knowledge of the land the sisters are claiming. In later scenes,
Aboriginal advisors help, and white lawyers defend the claim. Inter-
racial groups are seen sitting at tables, deeply involved in discussing
issues the claims engender. In some scenes, white developers and
other interested local groups dispute the women’s claim. In other
scenes, the women are intimidated by the structures within which
they have to speak. At one point, Yvonne, called on to testify, finds

herself speechless, unable to respond. It is clear how utterly alien the
environment is for her, and how intimidating she finds the racially
mixed crowd assembled to hear her. Yet we also see the women
gradually gaining confidence, agency and empowerment through the
process of the case. They use their authority to speak about the
sacredness of land, and gain power through this to win rights lost in
the past.
As in Herzog’s film, an atmosphere of loss and mourning prevails,
only now not in the sentimental manner of Where the Green Ants
Dream. For unlike the Aborigines in Herzog’s film, who remain silent
and are imaged as exotic victims, the three sisters speak directly to
the camera, are dressed and behave like other citizens in the area,
and their emotions are their own, not those of the film director. That
is, Kidd does not use camera techniques that dramatize the sisters so
as to show them to us as victims: rather, we enter the women’s world
as if actually meeting them. The women sadly cross the beaches
where their ancestors fished for food, and tread through the bush
where they camped and picnicked as children. Their faces are worn
with waiting and dashed hopes. The white authorities are empathic
and try to be helpful. They seem to respect the women’s loss and
openly shoulder the blame for what was done to the Aborigines. The
film makes clear that the process is essential for the Australian nation
as a whole to begin to redress the past and move forward, whatever
the current leadership may believe.
These four art works present differing images of Aboriginal
Australians, including a look “askance,” as in Moffatt’s photo series
where the vision takes its power from Moffatt herself reflecting on
colonial power relations rather than from the specific content of the
images. All of the images have historical or current relevance: Herzog
images traditional Aborigines (the images themselves are not so much
the problem as the fact that change is ruled out, with whites and
Aborigines apparently locked in fixed identities); Rachel Perkins
depicts very modern Aborigines, but shows the complexities and
differences between the routes modern Aborigines may take, and their
varying consequences. Kidd shows urban Aborigines but people for
whom traditional frameworks that their ancestors transmitted to
them are still central. Kidd also shows changing transcultural
62 E. ANN KAPLAN
relations, and how some white Australians and Aborigines, performing

as “embodied translators,” are starting to understand one another.
Conclusion
If this essay has focused largely on by now somewhat familiar

indigenous/white Australian relations, I hope its theoretical
framework will stimulate thought about different situations and group
relations in other nations.29 I have called people like the three sisters
in Kidd’s film “embodied translators,” but they face traumatic “gaps”
as they and Australian communities who care struggle with
reconciliation. While the first texts addressed here focussed on the
trauma of colonial and postcolonial contact, the latter explore images
of translators. The sisters’ acts of translation are echoed by my
attempts to translate their acts as represented on film. For we can
learn a great deal about how to transfer difference into something
other than trauma by exploring how such “translators” function to
bridge the gaps produced by crimes of white Australians in the past,
and continuing into the present. The aim is to develop strategies
through which peoples may learn to live together, and acts of
translation (in which someone translates their culture to someone
from somewhere else) may be one such strategy. We also need to think
about how prevailing racial and power hierarchies attempt to
“manage” inter-ethnic relations from dominant, and powerful,
institutional positions. Indigenous and diasporic minority groups seek
to define their relationships to each other within a white Australia
whose histories, with indigenous and with minority groups, is vastly
different, only adding to the complexities of relationships all around.
As Homi Bhabha (and most recently Simon Gikandi) have argued,
and as my examples have shown, the ambivalence of colonial relations
means that people on both sides of that relation are inevitably changed
and implicated.30 No one can “return” to prior selves once the contact
has taken place. In addition, racial mixing has always taken place, so
that the concept of purity is a myth.
Further, exploring traumas of perpetrators and victims does not
entail leveling or excusing crimes. Judith Butler has talked of the need
to clarify the differences between explanation and exoneration.31 We
hesitate to understand because we fear that this will entail

exoneration. While Butler had in mind the terrorists who attacked
the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the problem applies in other cases,
such as the Australian/Aboriginal relations studied here. Explaining
does not entail collapsing the vastly differing traumatic states into
the same, nor does it obviate one’s moral position vis-à-vis those
committing crimes. But it is to argue for the importance of analysis
of both sets of trauma in the service of fully understanding the plight
of victims and the need for reparation.
It is important for those of us in a dominant group but not of it
to realize the psychic impact of the crimes, and the way they proceed
to haunt us and the cultures committing such crimes precisely
because of their dual traumatic impact.
I have argued here that creative productions may be one of the
few means through which communities of both the oppressed and
their oppressors can come to terms with, mourn, repent, and repair
crimes committed. It is the tension among working trauma through,
mourning, translation and reconciliation that I hope to have
illuminated in this discussion of traumatic contact zones and
embodied translators.
3
A World of Sadness?
ROBERT CHI
Among the more pressing influences on the knotty problem of who

and what is to be considered Chinese is the tension between local
conditions and global horizons. 1 It is within this tension that
collectivity — whether understood as national, ethnic, racial,
linguistic, or cultural — fitfully emerges as a lived and shared reality.
During the twentieth century Taiwan was one of the most volatile
sites for such processes, for several reasons. Foremost among these is
the fact that the governments that have ruled Taiwan either have had
their actual center of power elsewhere (e.g., Japan) or, until very
recently, have maintained the state fiction of a sovereign territory in
which Taiwan is but a small and marginal island. The latter kind, that
of the Republic of China (ROC) for instance, has been located in
Taiwan itself for over half a century. During that time it has been in
direct competition with another Chinese government that claims
sovereignty over Taiwan, namely the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The Taiwan question has become even more politically urgent in the
last decade as a result of both the absorption of Hong Kong (1997) and
Macau (1999) by the PRC, and the ever-increasing democratization of
the ROC. Regardless of the ultimate fate of Taiwan, however, cultural
work there will continue to articulate both identity and difference in
relation to a nation. With respect to cinema’s role in simultaneously
reflecting and constructing a Taiwanese society, one work in particular
stands out: the 1989 film A City of Sadness [Beiqing chengshi],
directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien [Hou Xiaoxian].
66 ROBERT CHI
What makes A City of Sadness so important is the sheer volume

of discussion it has generated. This is not to discount its aesthetic
significance within a formalist or connoisseurial history of cinema;
indeed, this too has been one of the reasons for the film’s lasting
impact. But as Qi Longren has suggested, the film itself and the history
of discussions about the film are inextricably entwined in the
problematic that more than any other has dominated the public sphere
and social imaginary of Taiwan in recent years: that of national
identity.2 Elsewhere, I have used A City of Sadness to map out both
a psychoanalytic theory of trauma, as well as how that theory, through
the question of a national cinema, critiques the nation’s dual desire
for narration and identity — that is, the nation’s imperative to speak
and its injunction against difference.3 That analysis assumes that the
film is indeed a traumatic film about a traumatic historical event.
Here, however, I will reframe that analysis to ask just how that
assumption became naturalized in the first place. For the conditions
of public and critical discourses that called for A City of Sadness to
be a traumatic film about a traumatic historical event are themselves
both historical and invested in the production of contemporary
Taiwan as a quasi-nation between local and global registers. Moreover,
what makes A City of Sadness unique, even prophetic, among the
various recent efforts to find a traumatic birth of the Taiwanese nation
is twofold: first, as a public work rather than a hermetic text it
challenges the logic of the treasured national wound that has been
so prominent in modern Chinese history and elsewhere; and second,
it does so by a trick (of) photography that reminds us that in film,
language is never out of the picture. This is not a question of Language
or of “film language” but of actual natural languages such as Chinese
— including its variants in speech and writing. In other words, if we
think of challenges to nationalism, including those that confront the
political narratives of One China and of Taiwanese Independence, in
terms of the differential topographies of people, technology, capital,
media, and ideas, then A City of Sadness adds a crucial sixth mapping:
that of languages.4
A WORLD OF SADNESS? 67
Taiwan in Transition
Before the late seventeenth century, Taiwan was populated and

controlled or partly controlled by a variety of political, military, and
quasi-military powers including the Netherlands, the Ming Dynasty
government of China, local pirates, and what are now called aboriginal
or indigenous peoples. It was not until the Qing Dynasty that China
solidified control of the island. After Japan defeated the Qing navy in
the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, China was forced to cede Taiwan to
Japan. The island thus became a Japanese colony for the next half-
century. Upon the end of the Second World War, Japan returned
Taiwan to a China which had in the meantime seen the fall of the
imperial dynastic system and the shaky rise of the ROC under Chiang
Kai-shek’s [Jiang Jieshi] Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT)
[Guomindang].
The transition period of 1945-49 proved to be one of the most
significant moments in modern Chinese history. Because the
Nationalists were then engaged in the civil war against the
Communists in mainland China, Chiang Kai-shek’s government
devoted little energy to decolonizing Taiwan. Heavy-handed and
corrupt Nationalist administration in Taiwan led to massive inflation,
widespread smuggling, and other social and economic problems. On
the evening of 27 February 1947, government inspectors approached
a woman selling illegal cigarettes in the capital city of Taipei [Taibei].
A scuffle broke out, a bystander was shot dead, and the inspectors
fled. By the next morning protests and rioting had spread throughout
the city. Violence continued throughout Taiwan for several months,
leading to the declaration of martial law. This initial stage is known
as the February 28 Incident or “two-two-eight” in Chinese.
Eventually the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, defeated the
KMT on the Mainland. The latter retreated to Taiwan officially in
late 1949, by which time tens of thousands had already been killed,
wounded, or imprisoned there. With the subsequent Cold War,
including the outbreak of war in Korea and the resulting renewal of
US support for Chiang Kai-shek, the ROC government continued its
strictly right-wing, anti-communist practices of intimidation and
violence. Hence during the White Terror of the late forties and fifties,
several thousand more people were killed or imprisoned. Resistance
68 ROBERT CHI
continued sporadically from both within Taiwan and without,

especially from Taiwanese Chinese in the United States. The 1970s
saw a number of turning points inside and outside Taiwan: the
establishment of a US-based Taiwanese independence movement in
1970; the replacement of the ROC by the PRC in the United Nations
in 1971; the re-opening of diplomatic contacts between the US and
the PRC in 1972 (with normalization in 1979); Japan’s shift of official
diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC in 1972; the death
of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975 and the subsequent rise to president of
his son Chiang Ching-kuo [Jiang Jingguo]; the aging of the original
cohort of Mainland KMT leaders and the Taiwanization of the
bureaucracy; and the formation of the “extra-party” [dangwai] faction
that would eventually become the main opposition to the KMT. The
most significant political incident during this time took place in the
southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung [Gaoxiong], when a
demonstration scheduled for the international Human Rights Day on
10 December 1979 turned into a major antigovernment riot. Some of
the key figures of the Kaohsiung Incident (or “Formosa Incident” in
Chinese, after the dangwai magazine which sponsored the event) were
imprisoned for the next half-dozen years. In the years before his death
in 1988, Chiang Ching-kuo steered the government through increasing
reforms culminating in the lifting of four decades of martial law. After
the KMT announced on 15 October 1986 its plan for dismantling
martial law, the dangwai officially convened an opposition party: the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The first legal two-party elections
were held on 6 December 1986, with the DPP winning one in six of
the open seats in the national legislature (the Legislative Yuan).
Martial law was officially lifted on 15 July 1987.
The 1980s: Culture, Cinema, Hou Hsiao-hsien
During the 1970s Taiwanese society increasingly became a field of

politicized and publicized contention. Economic growth — especially
urban industrialization — and the emergence of a middle class who
had grown up in Taiwan after 1949 contributed to the turbulence of
domestic politics. A major area in which various political, economic,
social, and cultural issues came under debate — sometimes rationally,
sometimes not — was literature. The debates that arose over nativist
literature in Taiwan in the 1970s quickly went from aesthetic
questions to social, political, and economic ones including Taiwan’s
relation to mainland China (independent state? emerging nation?
temporarily estranged province?); foreign — especially American —
neocolonialism; and the social and psychic effects of capitalism. By
1980, however, the nativism debates as such had subsided
inconclusively, despite the fervor that they had generated. For that
fervor was channeled into political debate and action in increasingly
direct ways.
In the 1980s the political ramifications of cultural production
appeared in many forms. One crucial area was mass-market
periodicals. Newspapers in particular had been strictly controlled since
the White Terror in the early 1950s, and with the lifting of martial
law, the ban on unofficial newspapers itself was lifted on 1 January
1988. Newspapers and magazines increasingly critical of the state thus
flourished, like the Independence Morning Post [Zili zao bao] (1988-
99) and Renjian (1985-89). The latter was a magazine, and as such
was able to skirt some of the controls on newspapers even before the
official end of martial law. It was published by the unrepentant
Marxist writer Chen Yingzhen, who had first emerged as a short story
writer in the early 1960s, then had served six and a half years in prison
(between 1968 and 1975) for antigovernment activities, and finally
had become one of the key figures in the nativism debates. Besides
the popular press, a whole range of underground and avant-garde little
theater companies arose, and some of these allied themselves with
the plethora of social movements and special interest groups that took
to the streets regularly. Later, with the spread of inexpensive video
technologies and the proliferation of cable television, documentaries
became the most common form of independent filmmaking, and
many of those short films expressed openly politicized if not
downright political sentiments.
The 1980s also saw the beginnings of alternative formats for the
distribution of commercial films, which eventually included
videotape, laser disc (LD), video CD (VCD), satellite and cable
television, and so on. And with the renewed market dominance of
foreign cinema (including Hong Kong’s), there followed major
transformations in both the distribution of capital and resources in
70 ROBERT CHI
Taiwan’s film industry as well as the conditions, construction, and

nature of spectatorship. One of the ways in which Taiwan’s largest
studio, the government-run Central Motion Picture Company,
attempted to revitalize the industry was by returning to localism,
realism, and fresh talent. At first the renewed localism and realism
of films such as the four-part omnibus In Our Time [Guangyin de
gushi] (Tao Dezhen, Edward Yang [Yang Dechang], Ke Yizheng, and
Zhang Yi, 1982) made for both popular and critical successes. That
film gave rise to the term “New Taiwanese Cinema” (NTC). But given
the pressures of the Taiwanese film market as well as the desire for
innovation, the NTC quickly became the breeding ground of
artistically-inclined individual filmmakers who found themselves
faced with the common dilemma of fighting both domestic
commercialism and its foreign solution, Hollywood.
So by the late eighties the NTC’s leading auteurs — like Hou
Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang — and their colleagues and supporters
were left to lament a situation that has replayed itself repeatedly in
the case of many other new cinemas, as well as other forms of cultural
production: being lauded in the context of a world cinema while
remaining unknown, ignored, or disparaged — not to mention under-
funded — at home. And as in those other cases, what constitutes a
national cinema, indeed what constitutes the nation itself, became
their most fundamental question. The solution often consists not of
a redefinition of the content of the particular national cinema but of
a reconfiguration of the connection between cinema and nation. Just
as the more viable mainland Chinese films are now produced through
offshore financing and facilities rather than the moribund state studio
system, and just as a few of Hong Kong’s headline stars and
blockbuster directors are now finding regular work in Hollywood and
elsewhere, Hou and Yang’s films in the nineties have relied
increasingly on foreign investment, especially from Japan. This is
sometimes reflected on screen in terms of formal aesthetics, plotlines
and settings, characters, casting, and so on. For example, beyond its
story and characters A City of Sadness invokes Japaneseness in
unprecedented ways, some of which are quite indirect: the music was
composed by a Japanese composer, and much of the postproduction
work was done in Japan, resulting in a finished product that could
not possibly have been made using Taiwanese facilities.
By the time Hou’s seventh film, The Time to Live and the Time
to Die [Tongnian wangshi] (1985) was praised by the critics and panned
by the public, the critic and producer Zhan Hongzhi became
convinced that the key to Hou’s success was to exploit the
contradiction between the local and the global: “in selling [Hou’s
films, we] would put the international market first, with Taiwan being
just one part of it, taking a ‘high-end approach.’ In theory, this method
is quite simple and fully feasible; it’s based on the principles of
international trade.”5 Zhan and Hou began discussing this approach
soon thereafter, but it was delayed while Hou completed his next two
films, Dust in the Wind [Lian lian feng chen] (1986) and Daughter of
the Nile [Niluo he nüer] (1987). Meanwhile, and not coincidentally,
Zhan became the main author of the “1987 Taiwan Cinema
Manifesto” signed by fifty-three directors, producers, writers, editors,
critics, and other artists. Despite its tone, the Manifesto turned out
to be more of an epitaph than a prospectus as market and institutional
forces continued to work against the possibility of the NTC as a
coherent movement.
The project on which Zhan was first able to test his “high-end
approach,” as executive producer, was Hou’s tenth film, A City of
Sadness (1989). It is important to note here that Zhan’s simple and
feasible principles of international trade also underlie the ROC’s
approach to foreign relations as it continues to seek diplomatic
recognition as a full-fledged member of the family of nations.
Although it may be hyperbolic to call A City of Sadness the first
Taiwanese film to be targeted for a foreign premiere even before
production began, it undoubtedly marks a crucial turning point in
the history of Taiwanese cinema. Not only was its earliest incarnation
conceived by Hou and his scriptwriters Wu Nien-jen [Wu Nianzhen]
and Zhu Tianwen at about the same time that Zhan was developing
his marketing plan, but the producer and principal investor whom
Zhan recruited was Qiu Fusheng, head of Era International. Qiu had
established his firm as a powerful player in the Taiwanese film
industry in the late seventies and early eighties by purchasing the
videotape distribution rights for foreign films, and later by distributing
foreign films proper. Thus his financial support reflected the extent
to which the remnants of the now-dead NTC had become dependent
upon their own economic competitors for capital, which is to say that
72 ROBERT CHI
they had become fully absorbed into the culture industry that they
had initially viewed with a skeptical eye.6 In the end, the total cost
of A City of Sadness was about thirty million Taiwan dollars (over
one million US dollars), twice its original budget and far more than
was spent on any other Taiwanese film at the time.
Moreover, that alliance suggested that the remnants of the NTC
would also be absorbed into the “nationalism industry”; they would
be nationalized. Thus in 1988 four key figures of the NTC — Hou Hsiao-
hsien, Wu Nien-jen, the director and critic Chen Guofu, and the writer
and producer Xiao Ye — collaborated on an advertisement for the
Ministry of Defense that was shown on television and in theaters. Not
only did this short film openly advertise for the armed forces and their
instrumental role in building the modern nation of the Republic of
China (still the official name of Taiwan’s government), it also took the
form of a music video, one of the most influential forms to emerge in
1980s mass media. (The featured song is “All For Tomorrow”). To some
critics the four men’s participation was a betrayal of both oppositional
politics and alternative cinema. For others it was a stratagem by which
they could enjoy state patronage and legitimation in exchange for a
cleverly ambiguous or even secretly subversive ideological utterance.
For still other observers it was simply a negligible anomaly in the overall
history of the four men’s respective oeuvres. In any event, the most vocal
responses came from the first group, especially on the pages of the
Independence Morning Post. This confluence of the state apparatus
most materially interested in the preservation of sovereignty among
the family of nations — that is, the military — with the culture
industry’s logic of commodification provided the perfect opportunity
for such critics to engage in a broader critique of the NTC’s attendant
film criticism and of the function of cultural criticism overall in the
rapidly shifting and highly contentious years immediately following
the end of Taiwan’s four decades under martial law.
What’s All the Fuss About?
With respect to the national-international context of Taiwanese

cinema, the most significant aspect of A City of Sadness was that it
was universally publicized as being the first film about the February
28 Incident. Just what kind of connection “about” signifies, and for

whom, became the source of the film’s lasting impact on the
contemporary Taiwanese public sphere. In other words, given Zhan’s
master plan for negotiating between art and business, between Taiwan
and the international film market, and between describing his product
and manipulating its reception, the cinematic representation of
history in the film was a result of the very process of its circulation.
A City of Sadness takes place in northeast Taiwan, about twenty
miles outside of Taipei, during the years from 1945 to 1949. At the
center of its large cast of characters are the men of the Lin family:
the patriarch Ah Lu, his oldest son Wen-heung [Wenxiong], his third
son Wen-leung [Wenliang], and his fourth son Wen-ching [Wenqing].
Wen-heung runs the family’s restaurant and club, Little Shanghai,
as well as its shipping company. Wen-leung had been drafted by the
Japanese and sent to Shanghai as a translator during the war. He has
just returned home but is suffering from a temporary bout of madness
or shellshock — perhaps the result of some traumatic war experience.
The Lin family is powerful among local factions, but eventually Wen-
heung and Wen-leung run afoul of a group of Shanghainese gangsters
who, apparently with some support from the newly arrived
Nationalist administration, are engaged in smuggling between Taiwan
and the Mainland. After a series of threats, double-crosses, arranged
arrests, and knife fights, Wen-heung is killed by the Shanghai gang,
and Wen-leung is beaten once more into insanity. At the same time,
the youngest brother Wen-ching is a deaf-mute photographer whose
friends and associates include local intellectuals and a Mainland
journalist sympathetic to the plight of the local population. His friend
Hinoe [Kuanrong], a schoolteacher, introduces him to his sister
Hinomi [Kuanmei], a nurse. Hinomi and Wen-ching fall in love and
eventually marry. In the months after the February 28 Incident,
however, Hinoe flees to the mountains, where he is captured about
two years later by government troops; his fate remains unknown.
Soon thereafter Wen-ching is arrested, and his fate too remains
unknown — but it is safe to assume that they have both been
executed. Throughout all this, the second Lin brother Wen-sen
[Wensen] remains missing in action, also no doubt dead, having been
drafted by the Japanese army to fight in the Philippines before the
film even begins.7
74 ROBERT CHI
Images of violence associated with the February 28 Incident and

its aftermath are thus conspicuously absent from A City of Sadness.
Most of the violent scenes are episodes in the gangster struggles, not
in the story of the Nationalist government’s oppression of the people
of Taiwan. To be sure, there are a few violent scenes that are related
to the February 28 Incident. These include wounded civilians being
pursued up to the doorway of a hospital by an angry crowd;
presumably Taiwanese civilians threatening and beating presumably
Mainlander civilians on and around a train; and soldiers capturing
and perhaps shooting resistance activists in the mountains. But these
scenes, and indeed the whole film, are presented through techniques
that aesthetic criticism has repeatedly foregrounded in discussions
of Hou’s films: static long takes; a camera distant from the main
action depicted; painstaking visual composition and choreography;
concentration on mundane activities and details, especially within a
domestic space; loose, episodic narratives; and the culmination of all
of the foregoing in a kind of sympathetic detachment from the
characters, who are in turn fully ensconced within their world. The
combination of all of these in A City of Sadness makes it an
outstanding example of his oeuvre for the purposes of the
international art-film circuit in which he was by 1989 a familiar and
welcome auteur.8
Nevertheless, the prerelease publicity tended to emphasize the
film’s connection to the February 28 Incident. In Taiwan much of
the press coverage simultaneously consisted on the one hand of
speculation on just how the film would be about the February 28
Incident, and on the other hand of certain high-profile denials that it
was about that event at all. One of the more piquant of these denials
was “Thirteen Questions About A City of Sadness” by the film’s co-
writer Zhu Tianwen. This commentary was prominently featured in
the literary supplement of the Independence Morning Post over the
course of four days, some two months before the film’s premiere at
the 1989 Venice Film Festival and three months before the domestic
release. The first question is: “Is Hou Hsiao-hsien a money tree?”
which it answers in the affirmative but only because Zhan Hongzhi
says so. Having casually dispensed with the question of the market,
the remaining “Questions” then move through the pivot of
“orientalism” — the common charge of selling out to foreign
audiences — to artistic considerations like narration vs. lyricism, and

then to various behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the film itself.
Zhu’s exercise renders the discussion of the film’s context and
contents more complex, even to the point of relativizing her own
commentary by insisting that a script and a film are two entirely
different things. Indeed, the original treatment by Zhu and the full
script by Wu Nien-jen, as published just before the film’s domestic
release, already tiptoe around the February 28 Incident, but the
finished film goes further by omitting some of the script’s more overt
references to it. “Thirteen Questions” also deflects the question of
the February 28 Incident by recounting how the story of A City of
Sadness developed incidentally as the prehistory of an aborted film
set some time after the late 1940s, a film that would have had little
or nothing to do with the Incident. Hou’s main goal, Zhu concludes,
is merely to “capture on film the actions of people under the rules of
nature.”9
Significantly, all of this publicity fit into Zhan’s master plan: not
only was the film first shown abroad, at both the Toronto Film
Festival and the Venice festival, but it actually premiered at Venice
exactly one hundred days after the end of the Tiananmen
demonstrations in Beijing (4 June 1989). It was therefore nearly
impossible for anyone not to think of a Chinese government reacting
violently to its own citizens’ complaints. Meanwhile, besides a
UNESCO special humanitarian award and an award from an Italian
cinema magazine, A City of Sadness captured Venice’s Golden Lion.
It was the first Asian film to win that best picture award in three
decades, the first Chinese-language film ever to do so, and the first
Taiwanese film to win the top prize at any of the three most
prestigious international film festivals — Berlin, Cannes, and Venice.
Along with the nationalistic pride both recorded and generated
by the massive media coverage of this event in Taiwan was a curious
incident involving the ROC’s obsolescent film censorship code. As
per official regulations, the film was sent to the Government
Information Office for approval just before the Venice festival. The
initial review by the usual three-member panel was inconclusive, so
the GIO implemented its unprecedented, preplanned alternative of
handing the film over to a board of seventeen non-government
reviewers ranging from historians to political scientists to film critics
76 ROBERT CHI
to survivors of the February 28 Incident. This ad hoc committee

declared that it was not necessary to censor any parts of the film.
Just after the Venice screening, however, the Taiwanese press reported
that the less-than-two-minute scene of Nationalist soldiers capturing
and possibly killing the resistance activists in the mountains had been
cut before the film reached the GIO, probably during postproduction
in Japan. Eventually Qiu Fusheng took responsibility for the cut,
saying that he made the decision unilaterally at the last minute to
facilitate easy approval, since such approval was necessary before the
film could compete in the Venice festival. When the full version of
A City of Sadness was re-submitted after the Venice festival, it was
again approved without cuts by a reconvened subset of the ad hoc
committee.
Whether the decision to cut the film was based on a genuine fear
that the scene in question was unacceptably incendiary or whether
it was a clever win-win ruse to make it appear as if it might have
been incendiary, the censorship incident had three results. First, it
helped the film’s promoters at Venice bolster the image of the film
as being a courageous depiction of a society oppressed, both then and
now. The thought that even a figure as powerful and as public as Qiu
Fusheng might still be fearful of antagonizing the government —
especially the military — more than two years after martial law had
been officially declared dead underscored the psychic violence to
which Taiwan had been subjected. Second, it assured the rest of
Taiwan that the film was not at all incendiary, or perhaps that it had
little to say about the February 28 Incident in the first place. It thereby
fulfilled the corollary of the domestic side of Zhan’s master plan,
namely, a low-profile approach that relied less on direct advertising
than on echoes and reports of the film’s performance in foreign lands.
Third, however, it also made the censorship review system appear
irrelevant. Because of the prerelease publicity and the hasty
submission of the first version just days before the Venice screening,
the GIO was under enormous pressure to approve the film quickly.
When the second, uncut version was submitted after the Venice
festival, any censoring would have been foolish in light of the
invaluable public relations victory that the film had just achieved.
Thus potentially sensitive films that followed the precedent set by A
City of Sadness passed the GIO review with increasing ease,
encouraging less equivocal and more strident political statements to

be made on film.
In the end, the film’s promoters took full advantage of this
succession of events — publicity abroad, publicity at home, pre-Venice
review, the Venice festival itself, and post-Venice review. For example,
in breaking the story of the film’s Golden Lion award, the China
Times Express [Zhongshi wan bao], a major evening newspaper known
especially for its arts and entertainment reporting, published three
images from the missing scene on its front page.10 Likewise, Qiu had
toned down early, pre-Venice drafts of English-language overseas
publicity literature that included declarations that the government
of Taiwan had pointed the muzzles of its guns at its own people. But
later, after the Venice festival, and in spite of the censorship incident’s
clear suggestion that the film truly was not “about” the February 28
Incident, the final Chinese advertisements in Taiwan pointedly read,
“For 42 years, you could not hear this story, nor could you tell it . . . ”
At the same time, the openness of such advertising copy as well as
the fact that the film had passed the censors not once but twice also
allowed the post-martial law government to appear fully enlightened.
Thus the censorship incident seemed to enable all sides to claim a
victory, and all through the continued absence of the February 28
Incident — an absence made all the more obvious by the fact that
the censorship incident occurred before the film was even shown in
Taiwan.
By the time A City of Sadness opened in Taiwan five weeks after
the Venice festival, it was assured of domestic box office success.
Indeed, it quickly became one of the few unqualified successes of the
flagging Taiwanese film industry of the late eighties. On the first day,
theaters in Taipei were forced to — or were presented with the golden
opportunity to — sell standing-room-only tickets. Whole blocks of
tickets and even entire screenings were reserved by schools, social
groups, business firms, and other organizations. In Taipei A City of
Sadness became the third-highest grossing film of 1989, and the only
Taiwanese production in the top ten. 11 Furthermore, the book
containing the published treatment and script, which are fuller in
narrative than the finished film, was in the top ten on the fiction
bestseller list of the newspaper Min Sheng Pao [Min sheng bao] for
seventeen weeks, beginning with the week of the Venice award and
78 ROBERT CHI
ending a few weeks after its first-round theatrical run. The book was
number one on the list for five weeks, during the first half of that
run. To be sure, the book-buying public and the moviegoing public
may not have been exactly coextensive, but any discrepancy would
merely confirm the significance of the film even in the minds of those
who did not see it. And if those who did see it bought the book in
hopes of shedding light on a film they felt to be opaque, they may
not have been satisfied. Nevertheless, the book’s sales were simply
remarkable: never before had a film script been a bestseller.
Meanwhile, outside the theaters the term “sadness” [beiqing] became
a popular prefix for nouns both political and personal, and sometimes
with an ironic edge. Finally, December 1989 also saw major elections
for the national legislature as well as key municipal offices. It came
as no surprise that opposition candidates quoted the film in their
speeches and broadcast its theme music from their campaign trucks.
Seeing Through Trauma
Xiao Ye’s reaction to the success of A City of Sadness at the Venice

festival sums up the dilemma that the film posed for the more radical
cultural critics of the time:
Basically A City of Sadness continues the style of Hou Hsiao-

hsien’s past works. He describes the activities of one family in
great detail, but this film does not make such sensitive political
demands as rumored. In fact, Hou Hsiao-hsien uses a most calm,
detached, and measured technique to narrate the February 28
Incident. Moreover, this award proves the importance of a whole
complementary publicity campaign, and at the same time it
works through a kind of informal foreign relations channel to
achieve [diplomatic] goals.12
Xiao Ye plainly sees this situation as a cause for celebration. For

others, however, it is precisely the opposite because it makes most
clear the confrontation among aesthetics, publicity, politics, and the
international film market. So following the controversy surrounding
the Ministry of Defense advertisement the previous year, some
viewers were quick to attack A City of Sadness, and once again the
leading organ for such attacks was the Independence Morning Post.
Whatever political significance A City of Sadness might have, it was
felt, remained cryptic at best. Of the two main plot lines, one involves
Taiwanese village gangsters more interested in their own turf, honor
and profit than in colonialism and nationalism and state brutality,
while the other features a deaf-mute photographer who can neither
fully witness nor fully participate in the antigovernment movement.
Even Wen-ching’s photography is limited to studio portraiture and
scenic shots of the countryside. On this view A City of Sadness
actually supports the KMT government of the late eighties by failing
to break the silence surrounding the February 28 Incident, and by
failing to speak clearly.
The issues and positions were laid out most clearly in a series of
articles by the literary scholar and cultural critic Liao Ping-hui [Liao
Binghui]. The first two articles, “The Deaf-Mute Photographer” and
“The Renunciation of History?” were both published in the
Independence Morning Post in the months following the film’s
domestic release. 13 In them Liao links the visual absence of the
February 28 Incident to both Wen-ching and Hinomi’s seeming
muteness as subjects in history. Furthermore, the film shows this to
be a dilemma of public versus private spaces as well as of gender. If
we cannot see the Incident, critiques such as Liao’s seem to suggest,
then we should at least be able to speak it. However, Liao’s third
article, “Rewriting Taiwanese National History,” constitutes a
significantly later and powerful reframing of his earlier commentaries.
He notes that despite normative and celebratory narratives of
economic and democratic development, the February 28 Incident
remains a dark prism through which contemporary Taiwan seems
compelled to pass. It is in this sense that the Incident remains a
trauma in history: “As the phantoms of the Incident are continually
called upon and exorcised, they do not seem likely to go away.”14 By
examining a sequence of different accounts of the Incident, Liao seeks
to clarify not just the particular historical possibilities available to
such accounts at different times or to different constituencies, but
the very “social and historical formation of the public and subaltern
counterpublic spheres in Taiwan.”15 The ambivalence of A City of
Sadness — the deaf-mute photographer, the vacillating between public
and private, the contradictory foreign and domestic publicity, and the
80 ROBERT CHI
very debates that all of these engendered — is thus a symptom of the

public sphere in the early post-martial law years.
In other words, there is indeed something generative about the
film. The public denials that the film is about the February 28 Incident
suggest the duplicity of negation in the psychoanalytic sense: it is a
way to accept intellectually that which is still affectively repressed.
In Freud’s formulation the classic expression of negation would be “I
don’t want to talk about it.” Such an utterance implicitly recognizes
the existence of “it” (or id) while refusing to allow it to be worked
through consciously, via the talking cure.16 This does not necessarily
entail a normalizing recognition based on social knowledge of others,
a recognition that might be voiced as “I have this repression, but it
is OK because everyone has some repression [or even this repression].”
Nevertheless, slipping into the latter position is, in Freud’s essay on
negation, what psychoanalysis as a healing practice encourages. Hence
he worries that psychoanalysis can do away with a repression while
leaving repression itself in place, perhaps even as a necessary and
productive constituent of subjectivity — not to mention of further
psychoanalysis. So where previously it had not been possible to show
the February 28 Incident on screen, it was now impossible to show
it without thereby betraying what made the Incident such a significant
object for public memory in the first place. This is not to defend
martial law nor is it to forecast a simple and infallible sequence of
remembering-catharsis-forgetting. But Qiu Fusheng’s performance of
a fear of censorship and the parallel mixed signals of the publicity
campaign (depending on the target market, the film is/not about the
Incident) suggest that public image — the publicness of circulating
images, the production of a public as a zone of contention out of the
very vicissitudes of circulation — is what was truly at stake.
Thus the most important implication of Liao’s third analysis is
that public spheres are by no means coextensive with nations or
localities. By taking into account the constitutive role of the film’s
international distribution, Liao hints that the domestic correlate of
the latter is precisely the film’s ambivalence. In fact this implication
is clearest in light of the whole sequence of February 28 accounts
that Liao examines, from the foreign New York Times to the different
Chinese and English reports of the same scholars to the Taiwanese
film itself. For this sequence does not just incrementally unveil the
“truth” at a local level; it simultaneously discovers an increasing

complexity and ambivalence in historical representation there. This
suggests that despite the manifest content of such public sphere
debates in Taiwan being national (national history, national identity,
etc.), they are fully entwined in transnational exchanges, even to the
extent that what appear to be incorrect, normative, foreign narratives
can become domesticated and “native” to Taiwan.
We can of course extend the principles of positionality and
historicity even of critical utterances to include academic utterances.
This would then include Liao’s third article itself, published in English
in Public Culture as well as in a Chinese-language collection of Liao’s
essays in Taiwan.17 Moreover, that reframing can be seen as a response
to a post-1989 wave of commentaries on A City of Sadness which
are more academically self-reflexive and which stress the productive
critique that the film sets into motion through its foregrounding of
negation. Indeed, those commentaries themselves were often
responses to the initial round of ideological critiques including Liao’s
own early articles.18 And the fact that state and society in Taiwan
moved quickly toward reconciliation during those same years after
1989 — with what success is perhaps a different question — is no
coincidence. Finally, we would have to account for my own
commentary here in terms of the publicness of cinema as I have been
describing it. The apparent inexhaustibility of A City of Sadness as a
site of critique and contention indeed confirms that there is something
still both traumatic and generative about it, to be endlessly spoken
about in widely divergent ways.
So if that methodological reflexivity seems by now to be a reflex,
something merely academic, there are still several areas that merit
further attention. First, most politically-oriented analyses of A City
of Sadness itself focus on the deaf-mute photographer, the role of
women, and other such heavily freighted figures. Thus analyses that
focus primarily on the social life of the film tend to leave untouched
other significant features of the film as a cinematic text. But analyses
that do attend to other aspects of the film or to broader questions of
aesthetics and auteurial style usually take a formalist-poetics
approach, praising Hou Hsiao-hsien’s innovations in film language.
Although such analyses do find those formal innovations to be
appropriate to context and content — and hence worthy of praise —
82 ROBERT CHI
they generally leave the very question of the social life of the film
unexamined. Second, the power of the visual in all this is likewise a
complex problematic. To be sure, Liao is from the beginning skeptical
of the initial demand to see the February 28 Incident recreated
spectacularly and violently on screen, precisely because it is based
on the facile thought that “seeing is believing.” Such skepticism
accords with the privileging of speaking and hearing as figures for
public engagement — not to mention communicating and working
through trauma. But just how the film negotiates between images
and words depends on a particular, and particularly local, conjuncture
of languages. This is not to reject the ascendancy of the visual in the
time of transnational media flows and “visual culture.” But it is to
ask how languages work with and against such mediascapes as part
of those transnational exchanges out of which public spheres are
produced. If the notion that “seeing is believing” is to be treated with
some skepticism, then the symbolic operations of photography in a
film such as A City of Sadness must be treated so as well.
The Languages of Film
Modern conflicts have demonstrated repeatedly the difficulty of

distinguishing the traumatized from the non-traumatized, and this
is certainly the case in Taiwan. The February 28 Incident effected a
split between Taiwanese Chinese and mainland Chinese who arrived
during the transition period of 1945–49, casting the former as
recolonized victims and the latter as authoritarian oppressors. But the
outpouring of research, memoirs, and social activism since the lifting
of martial law has shown just how complex that traumatic period
was. For example, the short-lived rebellions that arose in the wake
of the February 28 Incident sometimes involved organized groups of
Taiwan’s indigenous, non-Chinese peoples. Indeed, the “ethnically
Chinese” population of Taiwan is not clearly divisible into just
Taiwanese and Mainlanders in the first place; there is also a significant
population of Hakka [kejia] Chinese, and “Mainlanders” itself is a
category that effaces more local group identifications based on home
regions in China. At the same time, the very distinctions between
such quasi-ethnicities have become increasingly suspect as a result
of intermarriage. And the uneasy historiographical relation between

the February 28 Incident and the subsequent White Terror period
further complicates such demographic questions since its victims are
thought of much less in terms of quasi-ethnic identifications than
political commitment. In other words, the deep-seated, Manichean
antagonism between “Taiwanese” and “Mainlanders” is to some
extent an imaginary difference, but one that has real effects.
Part of that imaginary difference is the notion that the relation
between the official Mandarin dialect and the Taiwanese dialect is
an either/or struggle.19 In its extreme versions, this conception is
entangled in the struggle between the two politically opposite
positions on “the Taiwan question”: either the PRC- or KMT-based
unificationist One China position, one of whose elements is the
linguistic unification and standardization which has a history far
predating that of either the PRC or the ROC; or the Taiwanese
Independence position, one of whose elements is the rejection of the
“colonialism” and “totalitarianism” of the KMT (as well as the PRC)
that officially imposed Mandarin on a population of Taiwanese
speakers. Developed during the martial law period, the either/or
dialectal tendency of both positions leads one to overlook the rich
and complex history of Taiwan’s language politics. That is because
both positions tend to favor a reductive conception of total state
control of language primarily through education and media —
including cinema. Among the ways in which this reductionism has
been debunked is the post-martial law effort to recover the rich history
of Taiwanese-dialect cinema during the 1950s and 60s.
A City of Sadness itself challenges this reductionism by including
four different Chinese dialects — Taiwanese, Mandarin, Cantonese,
Shanghainese — plus Japanese. It thereby raises the hermeneutic and
spectatorial problem of a film that very few if any individuals could
understand in its entirety. In other words, A City of Sadness figures
the politics of spectatorship — and hence of nation and identity —
in terms of multilingualism. What the film suggests is simply that
no language or dialect is pure and static in itself. This implies four
things. First, people can think, communicate, and act “in” more than
one language at a time. Languages coexist and co-operate, even in
the same individual. Second, certain groups of people can acquire and
lose languages; more importantly, languages are routinely “known”
84 ROBERT CHI
in varying degrees of proficiency. Third, therefore, multilingualism

is less a matter of knowing (perfectly) many languages than it is of
knowing, recognizing, and respecting that there are many languages
that one does not (perfectly) know. And this is fundamentally a matter
more of aesthetic, sensuous, perceptual experience than of existential
or political alienation. Thus even unintelligible signs, or signs of
unintelligibility, such as lips moving out of sync, actors uttering
sounds they have learned phonetically but do not necessarily
understand semantically, and foreign script all make sense
aesthetically. Fourth, while languages and communities are not always
coextensive or congruent, and while the differential between the two
may become a political question, it is always an aesthetic and ethical
question as well. It is at this level that A City of Sadness clears a
space of signification out of which emerges a call to public
engagement.
This gesture itself has roots in the regional circulations of the
cinemas of Taiwan and Hong Kong, circulations which predate A City
of Sadness by several decades. For the origin of the deaf-mute
photographer is well-known: Hou cast the top-level star Tony Leung
[Liang Chaowei] to play Wen-ching, but Leung is from Hong Kong,
so his Mandarin was unsuitable for the character, and he spoke no
Taiwanese. Unable to solve this problem directly, Hou in one
frustrated stroke rendered Wen-ching a mute. Luckily, one of Hou’s
relatives knew a certain elderly gentleman who at the age of eight
had fallen from a tree and had been left both deaf and mute. Zhu
Tianwen wrote him into the role of Wen-ching, and Hou even
introduced Leung to the notepad-conversing gentleman in order to
help him get into character.20 Significantly, the film goes further,
adding an extra device to Wen-ching’s muteness. In the script he
communicates on paper, with the resulting conversations presented
to us in voiceover by both participants. This certainly would have
been feasible using a different actor to record Wen-ching’s lines, and
given the long tradition of interior voiceovers as well as outright
dubbing, neither the immediacy nor the realism of the film would
have suffered. But this would have drowned out the effect of including
a deaf-mute character in the first place; it would have diminished
the uniqueness of those notepad lines, since there are various other
voiceovers in the film. So whereas the script opts for dubbing, the
film presents the notepad conversations on screen as full-screen titles

on solid black backgrounds, à la silent films.
Written Chinese has for centuries served as a site for national
unification and stability. Indeed, it can be said that written language
is the foundation for any sense of a “Chinese” history and tradition.
The standardization of written Chinese ensures that those who share
no spoken dialect can still communicate on paper. Moreover, in the
early twentieth century the movement to “synchronize” the written
and spoken versions of everyday vernacular Chinese served as one of
the main sites for modernization. This privileged the Beijing-based
version of the Mandarin dialect which, as its Portuguese-derived
English name indicates, was the dialect of officialdom in late imperial
China. Under the pre-1949 ROC government, Mandarin was called
the “national language” [guoyu] — itself a term probably inspired by
Meiji Japanese. 21 (In contrast, in the PRC it is now called
“commonspeak” [putonghua].) As a result, there is no written form
of Chinese that corresponds exclusively to the Taiwanese dialect. But
this is by definition true of all other “local” and hence unofficial
dialects across China as well. In A City of Sadness this gap between
spoken and written Chinese is precisely that of silence, the silence
of Wen-ching’s deafness. For Wen-ching’s interlocutors nearly always
speak in Taiwanese whereas they and Wen-ching must write in a
simple standard written Chinese that, true to form, occasionally bears
traces of an even more laconic classical-style Chinese such as that
often used in newspapers and official documents.
With respect to this problem of writing and speaking, national
language and dialect, Wen-ching’s crucial scene is one of the film’s
most famous. Just after 28 February 1947 he is on a train that has
been stopped by Taiwanese bent on ferreting out and attacking
Mainlanders. One of the Taiwanese gang tests Wen-ching by asking
him in Taiwanese where he is from and where he is going, whereupon
Wen-ching struggles to utter his only speech in the film (“I’m-Tai-
wan-ese”) in Taiwanese. Since Wen-ching’s words come out so
distorted, the suspicious gangster asks him a second time in the
“national language” of colonial Taiwan — Japanese, not Mandarin.
Many commentators treat this scene as the moment when Taiwan’s
allegorical embodiment finally, haltingly, fearfully, merely reactively,
and nearly incoherently identifies himself. But the threat to his well-
86 ROBERT CHI
being comes from fellow Taiwanese themselves, and he is saved only

by the timely entrance from off screen of Hinoe, yet another
Taiwanese. The whole vignette is thus an intra-Taiwanese drama that
nevertheless is articulated as a multidimensional matrix of language
and power involving different forms of language and entirely different
languages themselves. And beyond the Taiwanese-Mainlander
conflict, the background for that drama is the geopolitical conflicts
between Japan and a Mainland-centered China that first lost and then
regained the marginal island of Taiwan. Yet spoken Mandarin and
written Chinese are strikingly absent from all this. Moreover, what
makes the scene even more complex within the film text is that it is
embedded in a flashback, a structure that is both keyed to the notepad
titles and privileged as the site for the display, interpretation, and
cathexis of history.22
The adoption of on screen writing is therefore a practical solution
for the filmmaker, a stylistic choice for the film, and a historical
reality of everyday multilingualism for the people of Taiwan. This is
also true of the film’s two other instances of on screen writing. The
first consists of the opening and closing titles that frame the narrative
historically, beginning with the Japanese defeat and the “return” of
Taiwan to China in 1945 and ending with the KMT defeat and the
retreat to Taiwan in 1949. The second consists of the subtitles that
literally foreground or underline the whole problematic by
continuously transcribing the dialogue, be it into Chinese or into
another language as in foreign-release copies.23 Together these three
variations on screen writing question the role of the nation as a
hermeneutic horizon of reference. That is, if the manifest content of
the public sphere is the question of group identity — specifically the
quasi-national identity of Taiwan — then on screen writing becomes
a political question precisely to the extent that it serves as a site of
suture. That suture, however, is pointedly imperfect; it is both familiar
yet defamiliarizing (subtitles that both render dialogue transparently
comprehensible and call attention to the very foreignness of the
dialogue to begin with), interior and exterior (writing out one’s
thoughts for another), national and colonial (Taiwan’s “return” to
China), and so on. Here I mean suture in the sense of the interface
between the diegetic and the extradiegetic, between the intrinsic and
the extrinsic, and between the fictional and the real: for on screen
writing here tells us what is “really” going on in the film. It is this

interface that is the basis for the social life of the film, a life
constituted in circulation that is both public-making and meaning-
making.
Two anomalous scenes in the film mark the boundaries of this
interface. In the first scene the local gangsters and the Shanghainese
gangsters meet. Instead of writing, they communicate through a
startling relay of oral translation in dialects, from Taiwanese to
Cantonese to Shanghainese. That meeting, however, fails to effect a
lasting peace between the two groups; furthermore, the dialogue in
that scene is particularly striking because what is said is clearly full
of hidden content. Moreover, both factions are dialectally
heterogeneous; indeed, whereas the locals are commanded by the
oldest Lin brother Wen-heung, his sidekick and translator — the
brother of his mistress — is “ethnically” Cantonese. The second scene
takes place after Wen-ching returns from prison. In it he delivers the
personal effects of an executed fellow prisoner to the latter’s family.
Among the effects is a note handwritten on a handkerchief: “You must
live with honor and dignity. Father is innocent.” The handkerchief
is an auratic and material object in two senses. First, it is a trace of
the prisoner; it is his handkerchief, presumably bearing his
handwriting, and possibly written in his own blood. Second, it is
embedded within the diegesis rather than being, as the notepad titles
are, inserted full-screen into the film text on the same level as the
pictorial image. The inscribed handkerchief is not just an image, even
an image of words, but a material object in history. And it is the latter
feature that in fact grounds the common conception and use of
photographs as evidence. So this quasi-title is the closest that the film
comes to the authentic, auratic, testimonial photograph that was the
object of public and publicity-driven desire. To summarize, the first
of these two scenes is a tour de force of actual languages both spoken
and written and both diegetic and extradiegetic (the subtitles that one
feels obligated to read). Despite the fact that the multisensory
multilingualism of the scene is fully justified by the particular history
of languages in Taiwan, it is staged and filmed as a formal exercise
— and it ends up feeling like nothing more than that. In contrast,
the second scene presents writing that is embedded in the diegesis
and structurally identical to the emotionally moving historical
88 ROBERT CHI
testimony expected of film understood narrowly as both a visual

medium and an extension of photography.
Therefore, if on screen writing and photography are the two
primary possibilities of historical representation that the film offers,
their relation is not one of hierarchy, photography over writing, but
of play. Photography is ultimately a red herring. This is not because
Wen-ching’s failure to photograph the Incident is a failure on his (and
by extension Hou Hsiao-hsien’s) part, nor is it because that failure is
a comment on the impossibility of representing trauma. Nor yet is it
because still photography’s referent on the level of cinematographic
style, Hou’s distant, impersonal, and static long-takes, aspires to erase
the notion of a single point of view. All of these are true, but only if
we first take photography simply as an abbreviation for cinema,
second restrict photography to a mechanical and pictorial medium,
and third conclude that A City of Sadness could be “about” the
February 28 Incident only in a pictorial way. The desire to see the
Incident through the motif of photography — indeed, photography
without photographs — blinds us to what is there, what is (also) both
stylistically innovative and repeatedly exhibited. It is the trap “de
nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.”24
A City of Sadness thus tropes writing into photography. But
neither this “writing the nation” nor the gap of silence between
speech and writing, neither the implicit equation of writing and
photography on the grounds that both are traces of the real nor the
strategic ambivalence or even self-deconstructing nature of the film,
are simply a matter of signs in themselves or of universal models.
They emerge from a particular history that is unique to Taiwan, to
the cinematic tradition in which the film belongs, and to the
circumstances of the film’s production, distribution, and reception.
It is certainly true that the heteroglossia of dialects debunks the myth
of national unity as well as the definition of subnational “ethnicities”
as language communities (Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Hakka, etc.). It
is also true that dialects are intimately involved in the production of
locality.25 But on screen writing in A City of Sadness is not therefore
just the tool of the state, the inscription of official history, or the
incommensurate other of speech. Rather, the film shows how writing
can also be the surprising image of speech in the midst of a
mediascape dominated by the visual. The harmonies and dissonances
produced by the distribution, variation, and relations of actual

languages suggests, finally, that the horizons of public engagement
in the wake of historical discontinuities are not limited in scope to
cities, nations, or even regions. For what is ultimately at stake is a
sense of the world as a mapping of all of these.
Part Two
Screening War
and Terror
4
Post-traumatic Cinema and the
Holocaust Documentary
JOSHUA HIRSCH
Of the mass killing of more than ten million people in Nazi

concentration camps and by Nazi mobile killing units
(Einsatzgruppen), there is only one known piece of motion picture
footage, lasting about two minutes.1 It was shot in 1941 by Reinhard
Wiener, a German Naval Sergeant and amateur cinematographer
stationed in Latvia. According to testimony given by Wiener in Israel
in 1981, he had walked into the town of Liepaja one day in August of
that year, carrying with him his 8mm film camera loaded with stock,
as he did whenever possible, in case he saw something he wanted to
film. He was walking in a wooded park when a soldier ran up to him
and told him not to walk any farther, because something “awful,
terrible” was happening there. Asked what it was, the man replied,
“Well they’re killing Jews there.”
Wiener decided to go and see for himself. He came to a clearing
where a group of German soldiers had gathered near a trench to watch
the proceedings. When a truck arrived full of people wearing yellow
patches on their chests and backs, he began filming. He recorded about
two minutes of film, in which one can see people running into the
pit and then shot by a firing squad.
It was several months before Wiener was able to get the footage
developed. By that time, Himmler had outlawed the filming of any
activities related to the extermination of the Jews, which had begun
in June of 1941 with mobile killing actions like the one filmed by
94 JOSHUA HIRSCH
Wiener, and continued with gassing in special extermination camps

starting in December.2
Wiener testified that he did not tell his family what he had
witnessed. In 1942, however, back in Germany, he did tell a few of
his comrades in the Navy. They did not believe him. Certain that
the film would be confiscated if it was discovered at this time, he
had six of his comrades swear an oath of silence, and then showed
them the film. He describes their reaction. “They were depressed. I
was observing their faces and saw how shocked they were. We had
never seen or found out about anything like it in the Navy. The same
happened to me while I was filming, I was shivering all over, I was
that agitated.”
Wiener’s film was buried in his mother’s pigsty until the end of
the war. It was donated to Yad Vashem in 1974.3
Of course, Wiener’s statements, like all statements, are subject
to question. But putting aside for a moment the complex questions
surrounding the German memory of the Holocaust, I remain
interested in Wiener’s story insofar as it demonstrates the role of the
cinema in the transmission of an historical trauma from eyewitnesses
to the public, and, further, insofar as it points the way to a theory of
post-traumatic cinema. After proposing such a theory, this essay will
proceed to examine the movement of traumatic images through a
series of mostly French documentaries dealing with the Holocaust:
primarily The Death Camps (1945), Mein Kampf (1960), and Night
and Fog (1955); it will demonstrate the role of classical realist
narration in The Death Camps and Mein Kampf in counteracting the
traumatic potential of the imagery; and it will argue for the
significance of Night and Fog in originating a new cinematic
discourse, in which modernist narration is aligned to a post-traumatic
historical consciousness.
The Holocaust as a Trauma
Central to our understanding of the Holocaust as a trauma is the fact

of its having lain beyond the Western imaginative horizon.4 The ban
on filming certainly had a strategic function, but Himmler’s
commitment to secrecy seems to have had another motive as well.
POST-TRAUMATIC CINEMA AND THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 95
This is suggested in a secret speech given in 1943 to his immediate

subordinates in the SS, in which Himmler called “the Final Solution”
“the most glorious page in our history, one not written and which
shall never be written.”5 One interpretation of the curious appearance
of the word “never” in Himmler’s speech is that he knew the “Final
Solution” was so unthinkable that even in a future victorious
Germany, it could never be assimilated into any conceivable public
historical narrative. It would have to be committed by an elite on
behalf of the nation, but without the nation’s knowledge. The Third
Reich had a cinema policy of unparalleled ambition, as exemplified
by the structuring of the 1934 Nuremberg Party Congress around Leni
Riefenstahl’s filming of the documentary Triumph of the Will, rather
than the reverse.6 But, for Himmler, the “Final Solution” lay outside
the historical purview of cinema. Thus the traumatic potential of
Wiener’s film is partly attributable to its giving a view of something
deemed so transgressive that it was to disappear from history.
Deception of the victims was crucial to the implementation of
“the Final Solution.” En route to the unthinkable, they were given
explanations that were painful but bearable — bearable, because there
was a precedent for “resettlement” in the Jewish collective memory.
They would not actually see the killing process until the last minute.
At Treblinka, for instance, victims were sent to the gas chamber via
the Himmelstrasse (road to heaven): a path bordered on both sides
by barbed wire fences into which pine branches were woven by a
Camouflage Squad to block the view.7
A key moment in the traumatization of the victims, then, was
the moment of finally seeing the unthinkable. Describing his first
day in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel wrote:
Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic
flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the
pit and delivered its load — little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it
— saw it with my own eyes . . . those children in the flames . . .
I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not
believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people,
children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could
be true. It was a nightmare . . . .8
96 JOSHUA HIRSCH
This is as good an articulation as any of what Freud called “fright”

(Schreck), which, he argued in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is key
to the experience of trauma. Fright, he wrote, is “the state a person
gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it;
it emphasizes the factor of surprise.”9 In the case of an event like
the Holocaust, however, fright goes beyond Freud’s rather understated
notions of ill preparedness and surprise. It’s not that one didn’t know
that one was going to be deported to a camp and gassed, or that one
was going to see babies burned. It’s that such things were literally
inconceivable; they did not fit any imagined possible reality.
Film as Vicarious Trauma
The victims’ experience of suddenly seeing the unthinkable was often

repeated in a muted form in the experience of others who witnessed
the events or their aftermath. Indeed, the diagnostic criteria for Post-
traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) found in the most recent Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders apply not only to the
direct experience of trauma but also to the witnessing of it.10 Some
witnesses, like Wiener, however, not only experienced a shock
themselves, but also made the decision to record what shocked them,
or to continue recording even after the shock, making it possible for
others to witness what they had witnessed — in effect, to violate
Himmler’s ban by keeping the shock in motion. Wiener’s film
functioned as a traumatic relay, transmitting a shock from a specific
scene of victimization to other scenes, scenes of remote and mediated
witnessing by spectators who received the shock in the form of what
I will refer to, following recent work in psychology, as vicarious
trauma.11 If photography, in its ability both to reproduce a moment
of vision and to mechanically reproduce itself and be disseminated
endlessly throughout society and history, shattered the traditional
“aura” of art and replaced it with a new politics of the image, as
Walter Benjamin argued, then one of the effects of this new politics
is the potentially endless reproduction and dissemination of trauma.12
This cinematic relaying of trauma was repeated on a massive scale
in 1945 when Allied camera operators entered the liberated camps,
filmed what they saw, and sent those films back to production offices
where they were edited into newsreels and documentaries, thus

entering into and circulating through the arenas of mass culture and
public historical discourse. The nature of the shock experienced by
the public when it first encountered those images has not yet, I
believe, been fully described, nor has the meaning of that shock for
the public understanding of both cinema and history. Certainly I
would not be the first to characterize this moment as a major
epistemological shift in modern Western history.13
Crucial to the traumatic potential of the concentration camp
footage was the condition of the human body represented in it. Close-
up shots of individuals showed bodies and faces apparently stripped
of everything that the Western imagination associates with
meaningful human existence: individuality, personality, reason,
dignity, kinship. Long shots showed masses of bodies strewn, piled,
stacked, or dumped on the earth — bodies converted into things
(“stacked like cordwood,” the reports said), bodies that no longer had
anything to do with persons.
Also crucial to the traumatic potential of this footage, to its ability
to cause “fright,” was the prior absence of such imagery. The public
had previously been exposed to written reports of concentration camps
and mass killings — which however had vastly underestimated the
extent of the violence — but there had been no footage. Suddenly
there was an inundation of images. The British government, in fact,
heightened the traumatic potential of these images through its policy
of censoring explicit combat footage during the war, and then forcing
first, second, and third run theaters to show widely advertised
concentration camp films without an “X” certificate to prevent
children from attending.14
Perhaps the clearest statement on the relaying of trauma to the
public through photographic imagery is Susan Sontag’s often quoted
description of her initial reaction not to concentration camp films,
but to photographs:
One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate

horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern
revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of
Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a
bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen —
98 JOSHUA HIRSCH
in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply,

instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my
life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve)
and after, though it was several years before I understood fully
what they were about . . . . When I looked at those photographs,
something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only
that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of
my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something
is still crying.15
But I want to guard against a reductive conception of traumatic

relay. It is not a process by which a thing called “trauma” is
mechanically and wholly conveyed via an image from one person to
another. Trauma, first of all, is not a thing, like a letter, that can be
delivered. It is not even an event, not even a genocide, which cannot
in itself be relayed, but which — perhaps this too is unthinkable —
merely happens. Rather, trauma, even before being transmitted, is
already utterly bound up with the realm of representation. It is, to be
more precise, a crisis of representation. An extreme event is perceived
as radically out of joint with one’s mental representation of the world,
which is itself derived from the set of representations of the world
that one receives from one’s family and culture. The mind goes into
shock, becomes incapable of translating the impressions of the event
into a coherent mental representation. The impressions remain in the
mind, intact and unassimilated. Paradoxically, they neither submit
to the normal processes of memory storage and recall, nor, returning
unbidden, do they allow the event to be forgotten.
There is no such thing as a traumatic image per se. But an image
of atrocity may carry a traumatic potential, which, as it circulates
among individuals and societies with common conceptual horizons,
may be repeatedly realized in a variety of experiences of vicarious
trauma.
I also want to guard against the notion that the exact force and
characteristics of traumatic experience are retained as that experience
is transmitted across positions: from victim to eyewitness to spectator.
Some of the more post-structurally inflected writing on trauma and
culture, such as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises
of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, has been
criticized, rightly I think, for erasing important distinctions between
historical experiences in the process of describing trauma as a text-

based contagion.16 The critic, I would prefer to argue, is responsible
to the historical specificity of traumatic experience — whether, for
instance, it takes place in the context of a concentration camp or a
movie theater.
While my definition of the Holocaust as a trauma does ultimately
rest on empirical research on PTSD in individuals, my argument about
vicarious trauma resulting from the viewing of atrocity films remains,
at this point, hypothetical.17 There are, however, two strands of related
research that support such a hypothesis. First is a series of psychiatric
studies carried out between 1962 and the present that have compared
subject responses to a “traumatic” or “stress” film and a neutral film.
The traumatic film most often used was Subincision, an
anthropological documentary showing a painful Australian aboriginal
puberty ritual, described as containing repeated scenes of “extensive
penile surgery, bleeding wounds, and adolescents writhing and
wincing with pain.” Repeat studies have verified that subjects display
significantly higher levels of stress following the traumatic film,
where stress is signaled by physiological symptoms, mood changes,
and intrusive thoughts and mental images. The psychiatrist Mardi
Jon Horowitz has argued that the data support Freud’s theory of a
repetition compulsion following traumatic experiences. While these
studies were not concerned with the specific characteristics of film-
induced trauma (what another researcher called “analogue” trauma)
as opposed to what might be called direct trauma, they do at least
indicate that film viewing can lead to symptoms of post-traumatic
stress.18
The second strand of research supporting a theory of vicarious
film-induced trauma is the study of vicarious trauma in the therapists
and family members of PTSD sufferers. It has been found that such
people, who come into contact with trauma victims over a prolonged
period, can themselves come to suffer from PTSD. According to one
report, a therapist treating a Vietnam veteran experienced a post-
traumatic flashback of one of her client’s memories as if it was her
own.19 The question is, if vicarious trauma can result from prolonged
contact with a traumatized person, can it result from a single exposure
to a filmed representation, which, as an indexical sign, affords an
experience closer to eyewitnessing?
100 JOSHUA HIRSCH
While a hypothesis of vicarious trauma resulting from the viewing

of atrocity films might be better left to psychiatric experts, I would
suggest that this form of trauma is a response to a lower level of
unpleasurable excitation than is direct trauma, because a film would
be perceived by the viewer, barring severe psychological disturbance,
at a degree of existential remove from the self. At a lower level, the
excitation would be easier to defend against, and the effects may not
normally be as severe or long lasting as in direct trauma. But the
effects may include a number of the symptoms of PTSD, such as
shock, intrusive imagery, grief, depression, numbing, guilt feelings,
and loss of faith in humanity.20
The passage from Sontag provides a remarkably clear picture of
vicarious film-induced trauma, which, we might say, Sontag has
simply renamed a “negative epiphany.” There is the lack of
preparedness Freud discusses, Sontag having come across the
photographs “by chance.” Reminiscent of Freud’s notion of traumatic
excitation breaking through a stimulus barrier is Sontag’s formulation,
“Something broke. Some limit had been reached . . . .” There is the
use of the word “cut” to describe the immediate effect of the
photographs, which recalls the indebtedness of the notion of psychic
trauma to an earlier notion of physical trauma. There are the senses
of shock, of numbing, of being forever changed. There is a reference
to belatedness (“though it was several years before I understood fully
what they were about”), that aspect of Freud’s writing on trauma that
has been so stressed by Cathy Caruth. And there is the suggestion of
the post-traumatic deformation of time — its collapsed or circular
structure — in the formulation, “something is still crying.”
Post-traumatic Discourse in Film
As my interpretation of the Sontag passage demonstrates, my interest

ultimately lies less in the realm of empirically verifiable experience
than in the realm of discourse. It is my contention that there exists
a period of time in the life of a society which has suffered a massive
blow — after the initial encounter with a traumatizing historical event
but before its ultimate assimilation — in which there arises a
discourse of trauma. This discourse is made up of texts such as the
above quotations from the survivor Elie Wiesel, the witness Reinhard
Wiener, and the photographic spectator Susan Sontag. Its significance
for my purposes transcends the literal referencing of any particular
experience of trauma or vicarious trauma — of surviving genocide,
witnessing it, or seeing images of it — and lies, rather, in the staking
out, in the languages of various media, of a space common to all these
experiences. One may be traumatized by an encounter with the
Holocaust, one may be unable to assimilate a memory or an image
of mass death, but the discourse of trauma — as one encounters it in
conversation, in reading, in film — gives one a language with which
to begin to represent the failure of representation that one has
experienced.21
When photographic evidence of genocide first appears, it may need
relatively little narrative support in order to cause vicarious trauma.
It would be enough for the image to be presented by a reputable source
(newspaper, magazine, newsreel), to be identified in historical context
(“this is a liberated concentration camp”), and to be authenticated
(“this is an actual photo taken by Allied photographers”). This initial
phase does not last long. Public interest wanes; the images leave the
public sphere and become a specialty interest. Some have discussed
this turn of events in terms of collective numbing.
In the second phase, however, when the images themselves no
longer traumatize, the text — or film in this case — must, in a sense,
work harder. It must overcome defensive numbing. Documentary
images must be submitted to a narrative discourse whose purpose is,
if not to literally traumatize the spectator, at least to invoke a post-
traumatic historical consciousness — a kind of textual compromise
between the senselessness of the initial traumatic encounter and the
sense-making apparatus of a fully integrated historical narrative,
similar to LaCapra’s notion of “muted trauma.”22 The resulting
cinema, exemplified by Night and Fog, formally repeats the shock of
the original encounters with atrocity — both the original
eyewitnessing of the atrocities themselves, and the subsequent
cinematic encounter with the images of atrocity.
As trauma is less a particular experiential content than a form of
experience, so the discourse of trauma in this second phase is defined
less by a particular image content than by the attempt to discover a
form for presenting that content which mimics some aspects of PTSD
102 JOSHUA HIRSCH
itself — the attempt to formally reproduce for the spectator an

experience of once again suddenly seeing the unthinkable. And insofar
as what is historically thinkable is partly constituted by the
conventions of the historical film genre, the instigation of a cinematic
discourse of trauma becomes a question of upsetting the spectator’s
expectations not only of history in general, but also of the historical
film in particular.
Trauma and Narration: Realism and Modernism
The conventional form of the historical film at the time of the Second
World War can be described most broadly as realist. The realist
historical film, in both its documentary and fictional variants,
consisted of an array of formal and rhetorical techniques by which a
film could claim to make the past masterable by making it visible.
The fictional variant of the realist historical film is the older of the
two, and can be traced back to films like The Birth of a Nation (USA,
1915). The documentary variant coalesced in a more piecemeal
fashion, and arguably it was the Second World War itself which
provided the impetus for its coalescence in films like the Why We
Fight series (USA, 1942–1945).
In discussing the narration of trauma in film, I will borrow the
method of analyzing literary narration which Gerard Genette
elaborated in his book Narrative Discourse.23 Adapting this model
to the historical documentary, I propose that tense regulates the
relations among the temporality of the film text, the temporality of
the events recounted by the film, and the temporality of the filmic
evidence, e.g. concentration camp footage. Mood regulates the point
of view of the film on the images and events represented. And voice
regulates the film’s self-consciousness of its own act of narration.
In the realist historical film, tense works to provide the spectator
with a sense of mastery over time, a sense of power to travel back in
time to see the past, or to make the past visible to the present on
command, usually, in the form of a linear chronology. Realism
assumes the omniscient point of view of one who is outside history
epistemologically, emotionally, and morally — one who is free to enter
into history through the image and assume a variety of embedded
points of view, to vicariously see and feel history, on the condition

of being free to return again unscathed to that exterior position from
which one can know and judge the past without being personally
implicated in it. And realism presents the past unself-consciously,
drawing attention to the images, events, and interpretations presented,
and away from the film’s own act of presentation.
Realist narration — mastery over time and point of view, and
unself-conscious voice — renders a highly secondarized representation
of the past, one which is masterable in the way that the French
psychiatrist Pierre Janet argued in 1889 that normal, “narrative
memories,” as opposed to post-traumatic (then called hysterical) ones,
are masterable.24 In the “tense” of narrative memory, one can call
up an image of the past at will, make it present to consciousness,
and insert it into the proper chronology. Narrative memory is
characterized by flexibility of point of view. One’s point of view on
the memory changes depending on the conditions pertaining to a
specific instance of remembering. One can become like an outsider,
narrating one’s own memory as if in the third person. And narrative
memory is relatively unself-conscious. The recall process is largely
unconscious, and does not call a great deal of attention to itself.25
In post-traumatic memory, as opposed to narrative memory, linear
chronology collapses. Time becomes fragmented and uncontrollable.
The past becomes either too remote or too immediate. It remains
inaccessibly in the past (amnesia), or presents itself uninvited, seizing
consciousness (hypermnesia).26 Psychiatrist Henry Krystal describes
the case of a concentration camp survivor who immigrated to the
United States and was serving in the US Army, who experienced “a
‘mental confusion as to the past and present.’”
For instance, on the anniversary of the day on which the patient

had seen a fellow concentration-camp inmate hanged, he had
become uncertain as to where he was and unsure that he was
not still in Auschwitz in danger of further persecutions — despite
the fact that he was in the uniform of an American soldier.
Among the very typical symptoms for concentration-camp
survivors which this patient displayed was a hypermnesia for
certain events, along with memory defects regarding other events
of the period of persecution. Because of the above findings, and
because of massive distortions caused by continuing guilt and
104 JOSHUA HIRSCH
denial, the reconstruction of the persecution period is a slow,

laborious, and painful procedure for both patient and examiner.27
Post-traumatic memory maintains the fixed and inflexible point

of view of the witness to past events. Whereas normal memories
change over time as the rememberer and the conditions of
remembering change, traumatic memories remain as literal recordings
of past traumatic perceptions. Another way of putting it is that, in
normal memory, the “I” that remembers in the present is different
from the “I” that experienced the remembered event in the past. The
point of view has changed. In post-traumatic memory, on the other
hand, the present “I” is invaded by the memory of the past “I”. The
point of view remains that of the witness.28 The case of the therapist
mentioned earlier, who experienced a flashback of her Vietnam vet’s
traumatic memory, demonstrates that this witness’s point of view
can even be transferred to a non-witness via vicarious traumatization.
Post-traumatic memory may not be self-conscious per se. But
insofar as post-traumatic memory is a kind of failure of memory, its
therapeutic treatment requires a degree of self-consciousness which
is uncharacteristic of narrative memory. The failure of memory in
PTSD has been described in two ways. Cognitive psychologists have
identified it as a failure of information encoding, a reversion from
the third and most mature form of encoding — linguistic — to the
less mature forms: sensorimotor and iconic.29
Many therapists who have treated Holocaust survivors describe
the failure of memory differently, in more existential terms. “I have
frequently seen survivors just sit in my office and cry — they are
very puzzled — it doesn’t make any sense to them — they can’t make
any sense out of their experience.”30 “Many survivors refrain from
speech because, perhaps, they no longer believe in words. . . . When
it becomes necessary for them to express themselves, for instance,
during the medical psychiatric evaluation and appraisal toward their
compensation claim, they cannot go through with it. They remain
silent.”31
The trauma victim in treatment does not have the luxury of an
unself-conscious memory. One is faced with troubling questions about
memory itself: Why do I have this kind of memory? How can I live
with this kind of memory? Can I have a different kind of memory?
What role will the traumatic experience have in my life if it becomes

a “normal” memory?
Insofar as post-traumatic narration is a kind of failure of narration
— a collapse of mastery over time and point of view — it too tends
toward a self-conscious voice, toward a consideration of its own failure
to master the past.32
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a form
of literary narration did in fact arise which adopted disorienting time
shifts, extreme subjectivity in point of view, and narrative self-
consciousness. We call it modernism, and Walter Benjamin argued
that it originated as a response to the traumas of urbanization and
industrialization that characterized modern capitalism. 33
Subsequently, modernism arose in the cinema in two waves,
following, not surprisingly, the two World Wars.34
One can find instances of post-traumatic narration in the first
wave of modernist cinema following the First World War, for example
in Menilmontant (1925) and La Maternelle (1932).35 However, it
wasn’t until Night and Fog that a coherent discourse of historical
trauma appeared in cinema. In fact, Night and Fog constitutes a key
link between the genre of Holocaust films, the development of post-
Second World War film modernism, and the appearance of post-
traumatic cinema.36
Once again, however, I want to guard against a reductive argument
— an equation of modernism and post-traumatic cinema. The point
is not simply to classify certain films as modernist and post-traumatic
as opposed to realist. The notion of post-traumatic cinema is
ultimately less useful as a category of films than as the name given
to a discourse which was disseminated across categories, appearing
in many films that blended realist and modernist tendencies. Post-
traumatic films like Night and Fog did not abandon realism, but rather
staged a collision between realism and modernism. It was from the
collision between realism’s discourse of omnipotent representation
and modernism’s discourse of the impossibility of representation that
these films derived their formal and thereby their historical shock
effects.
Of course, not all films about the Holocaust and other historical
catastrophes attempt to invoke a post-traumatic historical
consciousness. There are a variety of reasons to produce a Holocaust
106 JOSHUA HIRSCH
film — pedagogical, ideological, economic, etcetera — many of which

are inconsistent with the project of invoking trauma. Some films
present images with traumatic potential only to formally counteract
that potential by retaining a conventional form of historical narrative.
Eric Santner has called this textual strategy “narrative fetishism,”
which he describes as “consciously or unconsciously designed to
expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative
into being in the first place.”37 This narrative fetishism may be the
price (unconsciously) paid for employing a film language capable of
efficiently communicating a set of historical facts to a mass audience.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that, empirically
speaking, PTSD is not a universal response to catastrophe. Survivors
of even the most potentially traumatizing experiences of genocide and
concentration camps, while suffering a variety of psychological
wounds, did not in every case develop PTSD.38 On what basis, then,
can one argue that this particular psychological response should be
transformed into a universal aesthetic? Why did certain texts adopt
this particular, traumatic response as a model of historical narration?
And why do critics like myself explicitly or implicitly support this
tendency?
Firstly, it was logical for those who felt that a conventional form
of narration was inadequate to represent historical catastrophe to turn
to modernism as an already existing alternative to and revolt against
conventional narration. And modernist narration had an already
existing affinity with post-traumatic consciousness (whether
accidentally or, as Benjamin argued, not). Artists may have thus
indirectly and unconsciously learned from modernism to represent
the Holocaust as a trauma.
Secondly, a post-traumatic historical consciousness of the
Holocaust seems to provide a form of resistance to the tendencies of
avoidance and denial of a catastrophe which, I argue, the West should
and must confront. This form of consciousness fulfills Nietzsche’s
criterion for the most effective form of collective memory: “If
something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that
which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.”39
Not all scholars who discuss the Holocaust as a collective trauma
agree on how that trauma should be represented, however. While
Gertrude Koch and others have praised Shoah as a post-traumatic film,
LaCapra has criticized it for irresponsibly acting out rather than

working through trauma. Geoffrey Hartman worries about the
numbing effects of regular exposure to media representations of
trauma, and prefers unedited testimony as a form of Holocaust
representation that downplays the repetition of trauma. Felman and
Laub, on the other hand, seem to promote a limitless contagion of
trauma, which erases the distinctions between specific historical
experiences. My position is closer to those of Saul Friedlander and
Cathy Caruth: that in order to encounter historical trauma on the
level of the Holocaust, one must be open to experiencing a textually
mediated form of trauma. As opposed to the discourses of narrative
fetishism and efficiency, the discourse of trauma works toward a form
of narration that can speak from the collective space of traumatic
historical experience. It is, as Cathy Caruth has written, “a voice that
cries out from the wound.”40
Holocaust Documentary
The Death Camps

The Wiener film consists of raw film evidence, devoid of narrative
framing. Its traumatic potential is neither supported nor opposed by
narrative rhetoric. The Death Camps, on the other hand, demonstrates
the use of narrative rhetoric to frame potentially traumatic images
and thereby attempt to effect the spectator’s reaction to them.
Produced in 1945 by Actualités Françaises, The Death Camps is
an approximately 15-minute documentary with an image track
consisting exclusively of footage of liberated camps.41 It is close to
the newsreel in form, and I consider it here as typical of the first
wave of documentaries on the camps. The film is structured as a kind
of visual tour of seven camps, one after the other, with each visit
preceded by a title giving the name of the camp. The sound track
consists of a highly didactic, “voice of God” style commentary
providing historical context and assigning blame to Germany. There
is no music.
In terms of tense, The Death Camps presents a collection of
recently shot footage as a suspended moment of historical time —
108 JOSHUA HIRSCH
the liberation of the camps — to be witnessed by the spectator as if

in the present. While of course spectators know that the images they
are seeing on the screen are not taking place in the present, three
factors encourage them to disavow this literal past tense and to
experience the footage as taking place in a kind of figurative present
tense. First is the sense of presence inherent in the cinematic image,
the lack, in any single shot, of the kind of tense markers that can be
used to make individual words denote the past. Secondly, the
commentary encourages the figurative present tense with its own
literal present tense, as in “Here is where the land of horror starts,
here at this dead end shunting, here at this abandoned train.” Thirdly,
classical editing of the footage — moving from camp to camp, and,
within each camp, from long to medium to close shots — creates an
ease of viewing which is conducive to a fantasy of presence.
The classical editing of The Death Camps also supports
omniscience and flexibility of point of view. Effortless movement from
site to site and across boundaries of barbed wire implies the power of
authority looking from outside into the camps, rather than the
powerlessness of the victims or the shock of the liberators. Footage
of each camp is broken down analytically, moving from establishing
long shots, to medium shots of groups of living or dead bodies, to
close-ups of individual bodies and wounds. In one close-up of a corpse,
an unidentified hand reaches into the frame and quickly peels back
the clothing from the corpse’s chest, revealing a bullet hole. The gaze
of the spectator is thus positioned as forensic: objective,
knowledgeable, authoritative.
Along with this epistemological position comes a moral position.
The commentary draws a firm boundary between the positive
morality of the signifying text — a morality which remains external
to the represented world of the camps — and the negative morality
of the signified Nazis, who created and ruled the camps, and who are
condemned by the text.
The voice of the film is relatively unself-conscious, within the
limits of documentary, which is inherently more self-conscious than
the classical fiction film. The Death Camps directs the spectator’s
attention toward the evidence of atrocity and the guilt of the Nazis,
and away from the epistemological, moral, or psychological
problematics of its own acts of representation and rhetoric.
Still 4.1 Classical editing in The Death Camps (1945): long shot
Still 4.2 The Death Camps: medium shot

110 JOSHUA HIRSCH
The Death Camps demonstrates the use of realist narration to

deny the traumatic potential of the witnessing experience, in a way
that is consistent with the then hegemonic attempt among the Allied
nations to limit the public response to the atrocities to a self-righteous
condemnation of Germany, and to limit any personalization of the
witnessing experience or questioning of Allied blamelessness for the
atrocities.42 In its unself-conscious mastery over time and point of
view, The Death Camps attempts to present the image of the liberated
camps as an historical spectacle which poses little difficulty for the
conventional historiographic and forensic discourses by which
Western societies could attempt to comprehend and contain the past.
Mein Kampf
Before turning to the 1955 film Night and Fog, I would like to skip
ahead chronologically to a film from 1960 which exemplifies a second
stage in the development of the realist Holocaust documentary.
Concentration camp footage, after its dissemination in an initial wave
of synchronically structured documentaries like The Death Camps,
came to be recycled in a series of diachronically structured historical
compilation films. One of the most widely distributed films of this
genre was Mein Kampf, made by the German Jewish refugee Erwin
Leiser under Swedish auspices.
The historical compilation film is far more ambitious than the
newsreel type of film in terms of the relationship between image and
narrative. It aims to combine the sensual and emotional power of
cinematography with the explanatory power of the full-fledged
historical narrative. Where The Death Camps attempts to give the
spectator a glimpse of an historical moment by offering a tour of
historical sites, the compilation film promises a visual tour of history
itself. Its figurative present tense is diachronic; history seems present
not simply as a moment in time, but as a pageant unfolding before
the spectator’s eyes at a rate of speed attuned to the dramatic
requirements of the narrative.
In The Death Camps, while the images carry the evidentiary and
emotional burden, it is relatively obvious that in themselves they have
little power of historical explanation, which inheres, rather, in the
commentary. Images of brutalized bodies have profound effects, but
it is only the verbal discourse of and surrounding the film that inserts
those images and effects into an historical narrative, explaining the
identity of the victims and perpetrators, explaining how and why the
violence occurred and how justice is being done.
The division of labor in the compilation film is less obvious, but
not generally different. Historical explanation inheres in the
commentary and in the selection of images, rather than in the images
themselves. But here the attempt is made to present a range of footage
capable of illustrating a full-scale historical narrative. As each step
in the commentary’s explanation is illustrated by an image, the
explanation can appear to inhere in the images themselves. The visible
becomes the true. The compilation film not only adopts certain
techniques of tense and mood from the newsreel — the apparent
presence of the image, the classical editing, the moral binarism —
but adds to these techniques this diachronic, seemingly self-
explanatory, visual narrativity in order to promote an even more
powerful sense of mastery over time and point of view.43
Mein Kampf treats the history and crimes of the Third Reich,
moving more or less chronologically from the purported roots of
Nazism in the First World War to the Nuremberg trials. Like other
compilation films, its visual track presents mostly archival footage,
plus photos and documents. Its sound track consists of a “voice of
God” commentary, source sound accompanying the relatively few
archival shots that have it (German newsreels showing speeches by
Nazi leaders, etcetera), sound added to silent footage (gunfire,
marching bands, etcetera), and a musical score.
While the Holocaust is not the main subject of the film, it receives
specific attention in three distinct segments: an eight-minute segment
on the Warsaw Ghetto, a five-minute segment on concentration camps
and gassing, and the final, three-minute segment of the film, on the
death toll of the Nazi crimes. I will use the middle segment, on
concentration camps and gassing, as an example of the problem of
tense in the Holocaust compilation film. The following are excerpts
from the segment.
1) Commentary: “In Eastern Europe, Himmler sets up huge

concentration camps. They swallow up hundreds of thousands
of people. The healthy become slave workers in branches of
112 JOSHUA HIRSCH
German factories. The others are doomed.” Image: period footage

of deportees on train ramps. Post-liberation aerial footage of camp
barracks.
2) Commentary: “Cross-examined after the war, Höss stated
that in Auschwitz alone, approximately two-and-a-half million
people were liquidated, mostly Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and
Jews.” Image: post-liberation footage of barbed wire and towers
at a camp.44
3) Commentary: “It was Höss’s idea to use the cyanide
compound Zyklon B for the mass extermination of humans.”
Image: post-liberation close-up shot of a Zyklon B can.
4) Commentary: “The condemned were led into gas chambers
that were built to look like ordinary shower baths. First came
the women and children.” Image: period photo showing a line
of naked women and children.
5) Commentary: “The doors were locked and the gas introduced
through ventilators. After twenty minutes at the most, all were
dead.” Image: post-liberation footage of an empty gas chamber.
6) Commentary: “The corpses were burned. Crematoria I and
II in Auschwitz had a capacity of two thousand corpses a day.”
Image: post-liberation footage of ovens filled with bones.
This segment illustrates the way the compilation film can

combine commentary with visual documents originating from
different times (before and after the liberation) and different sources
(German and Allied) in order to give the impression of a seamless
visual narrative.45 But whereas the figurative present tense of The
Death Camps actually allows the spectator to witness, after a fashion,
the liberation of the camps, the figurative present tense of Mein
Kampf smoothes over and covers up a tremendous gap in the
photographic record of the Holocaust: the absolute lack of a
photographic image of the gassing of millions of people. This gap —
the missing image of what was for Himmler unfilmable and for the
victims unthinkable, the image that disappeared forever with the
victims — this gap, rather than being preserved as a gap, or amnesia,
in the image track of the film, disappears into an apparently seamless
chain of shots. Thus in Mein Kampf there are no rhetorical limits
placed on the spectator’s ability to witness the Holocaust as a steadily
unfolding and self-explanatory scenario, no temporal gaps or blockages
of perspective. The spectator is positioned as having visually
accompanied the victims to their extermination, emerging from the

gas chamber to continue watching even as the victims are burned in
the crematorium.
Mein Kampf employed the narrative techniques of the
compilation film to extend and strengthen the spectator’s temporal
and perspectival mastery over the memory of an historical
catastrophe. The traumas of concentration camps and genocide were
thus contained and assimilated into the master narratives of the Third
Reich and the Second World War.
Night and Fog

Night and Fog is significant in a number of ways. It was an important
precursor of the French New Wave; it is one of the most highly
regarded films on the Holocaust; it has been shown to millions of
school children as a tool for teaching Nazism and the Holocaust; it
was one of the first and most influential modernist historical
documentaries, especially in its revolutionary use of the image of the
present to signify the past; and it was, I argue, a founding text of post-
traumatic cinema.
Directed by Alain Resnais, and with commentary written by the
poet/novelist and Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol, Night and Fog
is a 30-minute French documentary on the Nazi camps. Its visual
track consists of 13 black and white compilation film segments, each
of which is framed by a color segment of traveling shots of Auschwitz
shot by Resnais and his crew in 1955. Lacking the kind of source or
added sound accompanying archival footage in Mein Kampf, the
soundtrack of Night and Fog consists exclusively of spoken
commentary and a musical score by Hanns Eisler.
Speaking in 1986, Resnais said of Night and Fog:
Then there was another problem which was the form of the
film: how to treat such a subject? . . . I said to myself: OK, there
have already been many films on the concentration camps.
Everyone has said this is very good but it doesn’t seem to have
had a very striking effect on people. Then since I am a formalist,
perhaps I must ignore my qualms and attempt in the film, despite
its subject, a formal experiment.46
114 JOSHUA HIRSCH
The attempt by Resnais and his collaborators to experiment with

historical documentary form in order to produce a more striking effect
— what I am calling a post-traumatic effect — is most significant in
terms of the film’s representation of time. As such, Night and Fog
draws from a variety of modernist traditions in literature and cinema
which have in common the rejection of the classical linear temporal
structures that dominated historiography in favor of hyper-subjective
and fragmented inscriptions of time.47
This temporal subjectivity becomes apparent from the first
moment of the film: a static, color shot of a field, which then proceeds
to crane slowly and smoothly down, revealing a barbed wire fence in the
foreground, and finally comes to rest gazing out from inside the fence
at Auschwitz. This gesture is repeated in the second and third shots. In
the second, the camera tracks backward to reveal the fence. In the third,
the track is lateral. The accompanying commentary is as follows: “Even
a peaceful landscape; even a field with crows flying over; even a road
with cars, peasants, and couples passing by; even a holiday village with
a fair and a steeple can lead the way to a concentration camp.”48
Still 4.3 The opening sequence of Night and Fog (1955): the camera tracks backward to
reveal a sign of the past
This film about the past begins in the present, with footage whose
very form — in color and tracking — distinguishes it from the whole
body of footage conventionally associated with history: black and
white footage which, if it moves at all, pans gracelessly or is handheld.
While Night and Fog will proceed to image the past directly through
such traditional archival footage, that footage is always framed within
the image of the present. Thus we are dealing here not simply with
the past, but with the relation between the present and the past —
in other words, with memory.
More specifically, the relation between the present and the past
is characterized by the image track in these three opening shots as
one of entrapment. In whichever direction one travels — downward,
backward, laterally — one is pulled from an apparently harmless
present, as if by an irresistible gravitational force, into the black hole
of some terrible memory, embodied in the mute but threatening mise-
en-scène of the past — the wire — which one encounters wherever
one turns. This gravitational relationship between the field and the
wire can be seen as a metaphor for post-traumatic memory, in which
the present is indeed a field of anxiety and hyper-vigilance, in which
one fears that any encountered object may trigger a terrifying memory
of events from which time provides no escape.
At the end of this first color segment is the earliest example of
which I am aware of what might be called a documentary flashback.
This flashback — the transition from a color shot tracking alongside
the Auschwitz fence in 1955 to a black and white shot taken from
Triumph of the Will showing German soldiers marching in formation
at the Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress in 1933 — is presented
formally as a shock. Almost every conceivable formal element of the
two joined shots undergoes a violent reversal at the edit point. Color
turns to black and white; clean footage to aged; an eye level camera
position to one on the ground; a moving shot to a stationary one,
and simultaneously a stationary mise-en-scène (fence) to a moving
one (marching soldiers); from slow, smooth movement (tracking) to
fast, jagged movement (soldiers); from the incantory voice-over of the
first segment to the staccato, “1933”; from a drum roll which is soft,
slow, sustained, low-pitched, and hollow-timbered to one which is
loud, fast, brief, high-pitched, and using a snare. Thus the film’s
movement from the present to the past is not characterized by the
116 JOSHUA HIRSCH
ease of mastery, but by the shock of trauma; one is jolted into the
past, or, alternately, the past intrudes violently on the present.
And yet, at the same time that the past in Night and Fog is
characterized as too insistent, it is also characterized as too remote.
This remoteness becomes apparent in comparing the temporal framing
of archival footage in Night and Fog and Mein Kampf. In Mein Kampf,
the literal past tense of the archival footage — its obviously having
been recorded decades before the production of the documentary —
is disavowed by the figurative present tense of the film’s narrative
form. In Night and Fog, on the other hand, while the tense of the
black and white segments taken by themselves may resemble the
figurative present of Mein Kampf, that figurative present is repeatedly
disavowed by the color segments, which wrest the present tense away
from the black and white segments, reframing them by bringing to
the fore once again their literal pastness. Night and Fog thus
repeatedly enacts a double movement in time: the intrusion of the
past into the present with each flashback, followed by its flight into
the remoteness of memory with each return to the present.
In its use of crosscutting to establish a set of relations between
the present and the past, Night and Fog could be said to apply
Eisenstein’s montage theory to the representation of post-traumatic
historical consciousness. Eisenstein, one of the first great film
modernists, rejected the view (later theorized by Bazin and Kracauer)
of the shot as a window onto reality, in favor of a different kind of
realism. For Eisenstein, reality inhered not in the ontology of the
photographic image but in the structural relations between images.49
Similarly, in Night and Fog Resnais rejects both the notion of the
archival image as a window onto history and the notion of the image
of the present as a window onto memory. He constructs a cinematic
theory of historical consciousness from the montage relations between
the image of the present and the image of the past.
Like this montage historical consciousness, post-traumatic
memory is characterized by montage-like relations of intrusiveness
and remoteness, of vision and blindness, of remembering and
forgetting. PTSD is characterized by a symptomological dialectic of
hypermnesia and amnesia; memories are not mastered, but rather are
experienced as involuntary, hallucinatory repetitions, or, alternately,
are blocked. Accordingly, the black and white segments of Night and
Fog are like hypermnesic or hallucinatory episodes; we see too much.

The image of the past repeats with a shocking literality, intruding on
the present. The image track takes the lead, the commentary at times
registering its own inability to make sense of the images, as when a
series of shots of brutalized corpses discovered in the liberated camps
is accompanied by the words, “There’s nothing left to say.” The
images continue in silence; the spectator must watch helplessly.
Still 4.4 Night and Fog: the shocking literalness of the flashback renders the commentary
self-consciously mute
With the return of color footage, the image of the past is blocked
by the image of the present; we don’t see enough. With the failure of
visual memory, the commentary must take the lead, attempting to
describe what no image exists to show, or simply pointing out the
failure.
Whereas point of view in the black and white segments of Night
and Fog resembles that of The Death Camps and Mein Kampf in its
externality, the color segments introduce a different, more implicated
point of view — one that is both more internal and less confident.
The extended duration and ceaseless motion of the color Auschwitz
118 JOSHUA HIRSCH
footage, indicative of modernism, eschews an objective historiographic

or forensic gaze into the camps in favor of one that is more
characteristic of the troubled gaze of the traumatized witness. Indeed,
the point of view of the color segments may be thought of as
conflating Cayrol’s own point of view as a survivor returning to the
scene of his victimization (Auschwitz substituting for Mauthausen),
and Resnais’s point of view as interlocutor — the outsider who attends
to the survivor’s memories not as prosecutor or historian but as a
witness to trauma, whose sympathy with the other places him in
danger of vicarious traumatization, and whose decision to relay the
witnessing experience keeps the trauma moving.
The sense of entrapment suggested by the opening three shots
continues after the camera assumes a position firmly imprisoned in
the world of the camp, where no suturing edit provides an escape
from the camera’s melancholy, walking stare at the remnants of
atrocity. The deeper affective knowledge of the camps implied in the
witness’s position, however, does not result in a more confident
epistemological stance. The commentary repeatedly asserts the failure
of the film to capture the past:
The reality of the camps, despised by those who made them,

inconceivable to those who suffered in them — in vain do we
try to discover its remnants. These wooden barracks, these
shelves where three slept, these burrows where one hid, where
one concealed food, where sleep itself was a menace — no
description, no image can restore their true dimension, that of
uninterrupted fear.
Also eschewed is the moral externality of the other two films,

since Night and Fog is at some pains, particularly in its conclusion,
to include the spectator in the broader moral implications of the
Holocaust, as well as, implicitly, later atrocities, such as those
committed by the French against Algerians during the Algerian War
of Independence, taking place around the time the film was made.
Linked to the failure of mastery over time and point of view in
Night and Fog are two forms of narrative self-consciousness. First is
the implicit self-consciousness of the film’s rigorous experimentation
with documentary style, in particular its use of crosscutting and
tracking shots. Second is a tendency toward explicit self-consciousness
in the commentary during the color segments, references to the

projection of the film, to its spoken commentary, or, as in this phrase,
to its filming: “The blood has clotted, the voices have died, the
barracks are abandoned by all but the camera.” It is as if the narration,
confronted with a traumatizing subject, faltered, and in that faltering
suddenly became aware of itself, of the entire apparatus supporting
its activity — became aware, that is, of its body in crisis, like someone
suddenly frightened, whose attention shifts from her external
surroundings inward to her pounding heart, her struggle for breath,
or her burning eyes.
Night and Fog does employ some of the realist narrative
conventions of the compilation film to present direct images of
atrocity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the film transmitted a
significant shock to a percentage of the children who saw it in
school. 50 At the same time, the film attempts to do something
different: to respond at the level of narrative form to the problem of
collective defense against the traumatic potential of the images. Night
and Fog, in other words, employs realism to traumatize the spectator,
but then goes further: it stages a modernist break from realism in
order to model a post-traumatic historical consciousness.
Post-traumatic Cinema After Night and Fog
Night and Fog’s contribution to post-traumatic cinema is not limited

to documentary. In Hiroshima, mon amour (France, 1959), Resnais
extended his experiments with post-traumatic temporality into the
realm of the fiction film. Among films influenced by Resnais’s
experiments are The Pawnbroker (USA, 1965), about a Holocaust
survivor who repeatedly flashes back to the camps, and Istvan Szabo’s
early semi-autobiographical trilogy (1966-1973), which deals obliquely
with his memories of the Holocaust in Hungary.51
Of course realism, as an evolving form, continued to dominate
Holocaust documentary even after Night and Fog. Meanwhile, the
emergence of cinema-verité around 1960 had a profound impact on
historical documentary, both realist and modernist. Chronicle of a
Summer (France, 1960), the documentary for which the term “cinema-
verité” was coined, used location shooting and sound to create a kind
120 JOSHUA HIRSCH
of archive of the present. Prominent in this archive was the presence

of Marceline, a Jew whom the camera follows in one segment while
she walks the streets of Paris, reliving, through monologue, memories
of her deportation to a concentration camp. What Chronicle of a
Summer adds to the image of the present as a signifier of historical
trauma in Night and Fog is the presence of the body; the documentary
representation of historical trauma acquires a face and a voice.
Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) — dealing with
occupied France and French complicity in “the Final Solution” — was
one of the first documentaries to apply the techniques of cinema-
verité to the representation of history in a systematic fashion. Claude
Lanzmann combined this new genre — which I would call “historical-
verité” — with post-traumatic narration in his film Shoah (France,
1985), arguably the culmination of the modernist, post-traumatic
documentary.
Where The Death Camps relies exclusively on images of past
atrocities, and Night and Fog jerks the spectator back and forth
between the black and white image of the past and the color image
of the present, Shoah omits the image of the past altogether,
resuscitating the past instead through uncanny reenactments by
witnesses as well as by the camera itself. The film offers no external
point of view from which to attend to genocide. There is no voice-
over commentary, only Lanzmann himself leading witnesses not to
speak as authorities but, as Ora Avni put it, “to assume fully their
position as subjects.”52 Lanzmann’s own position is implicit: a total
identification not with the survivors but with the dead. And Shoah’s
self-consciousness flows from, among other things, the repeated
collapse of testimony: the survivor Simon Srebnik telling Lanzmann
that what happened at the extermination camp Chelmno cannot be
described; the survivor Abraham Bomba pleading with him to end
the interview; the witness Jan Karski fleeing the room. These
interruptions draw part of the spectator’s attention away from the
represented past and toward the conditions of representation in the
present: the contradiction between the impossibility of representing
historical trauma and the desperate struggle against forgetting.53
Schindler’s List (1993) demonstrates the significance of the
Holocaust film as a field upon which recent struggles over realist,
modernist, and postmodern representations of historical trauma are
being played out. That film coopted certain stylistic tropes of

European modernist cinema and certain motifs of Night and Fog and
Shoah, combining them with classical realist narration to form a
postmodern hybrid: a mainstream cinema which invokes the
modernist discourse of historical trauma only to disavow it altogether,
in favor of a discourse that is more elegiac, monumentalist, even
nostalgic. 54 Since Schindler’s List, Holocaust fiction films and
documentaries have been more popular than ever; the wild acclaim
with which Roberto Benigni and Life Is Beautiful (Italy, 1998) were
greeted by Hollywood indicates that a post-traumatic historical
consciousness of the Holocaust has been the price of this success.55
At the same time, post-traumatic cinema has largely migrated
from the realm of the European art film to the realm of the American
experimental film and video, accompanied by a shift in subject matter
from the Second World War to the histories of racial and sexual trauma
that have claimed the attention of American collective memory since
the 1960’s. A wave of films and videos by the children of the survivors
of historical trauma — exemplified by Rea Tajiri’s History and
Memory (1993), dealing with the internment of Japanese-Americans
during the Second World War — has opened up an alternative to
Schindler’s List: a postmodern narration of historical trauma.56
5
The Vicissitudes of Traumatic
Memory and the Postmodern
History Film
JANET WALKER
Second World War veterans were in the eye of the hurricane that
surrounded the 1998 release of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan
— the first of a recent cycle of movies and books about “the good
war.”1 It is these grizzled survivors who were deployed at special
screenings and press junkets2 to justify the film’s graphic violence in
an era when gratuitous violence is under fire.3 And it is the veterans
to whom the historians bowed as a ceremonial gesture before doing
combat with the film’s historical authenticity: the 22nd SS Panzer
division was nowhere near the front on June 13, 1944; the real key to
America’s victory at Normandy was not a scrappy band of men
making sticky bombs with their standard issue socks, but rather the
36 ground attack squadrons of the US 9th Air Force; it was the
Germans, spread too thin by their simultaneous battle on the Eastern
Front, and not the Americans who were outnumbered on the bridge
at Carentan.4
Veterans have taken note of such departures from historical verity
while still avowing the authenticity of the battle scenes, especially
the Omaha Beach landing sequence near the start of the film. For
example one man, a veteran of a series of conflicts between December
1944 and May 1945 (though not in Normandy), noted that the men
of the fictional Captain Miller’s unit were too closely clumped
124 JANET WALKER
together in the marching formation. But he added that of course they

would have to be, because, otherwise, “they would not be able to
show them having a conversation.”5 Dramatic license is perceived
as being an inevitable filmic feature, but one that by no means
precludes cinematic realism.
It was well publicized that Spielberg put his actors through a ten-
day “boot camp” in preparation for their roles, and that he copied
combat photographs shot by Robert Capa and also Army Signal Corps
footage for the Normandy landing sequence.6 The response has been
that the sequence is “brutal and . . . dead on,”7 “as close to combat as
most of us will get,” “battle as it really was, in all its bloodshed and
brutality, terror and tedium.” 8 “It was chaos,” recalled Sgt. John
Robert Slaughter of the event itself, “There was screaming, and men
drowning, and bullets flying everywhere . . . All that was missing [in
the film] was the odor of cordite and the sickening stench of death.”9
That the July 1998 Newsweek cover story on Saving Private Ryan
would find it appropriate to intersperse G. I. photos and quoted
testimony, including Sgt. Slaughter’s, in amongst production stills of
Tom Hanks and company, suggests that the film was popularly
received as being loudly resonant of things past. And indeed, although
the film is not centered on historical personages as was Schindler’s
List, it is set against the backdrop of World War II. It borrows its
premise from the case of Fritz Niland (a member of the 101st
Airbourne who was removed from combat after three of his brothers
fell in the line of duty), and it features or alludes to real men including
General George C. Marshall and Abraham Lincoln.
But what do we mean when we say that the landing sequence
feels real, that it is the closest thing to being there? What are the
ingredients of the visceral effect described? I submit that realism is a
red herring with regard to understanding Saving Private Ryan. No
amount of discourse on the faithful recreation of troop movements,
weaponry, or costume; nor about fidelity to the actual conditions of
war; nor even classical Hollywood cinema as a facilitator of spectator
identification, can describe adequately what it is about the film’s
narrative and style that speaks to viewers’ experiences of war. This
effect, I argue, comes not from the film’s realism but from its anti-
realism, introduced in the gut-churning landing sequence and reprised
sporadically throughout.
THE VICISSITUDES OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY AND THE POSTMODERN HISTORY FILM 125
One way to specify the nature of this filmic anti-realism might be

with reference to Robert Rosenstone’s criteria for the postmodern
history film.10 In its rapid cutting, spatial discontinuity, and befuddling
alternation between close-ups and wide shots, the Omaha Beach
sequence “utilizes fragmentary and/or poetic knowledge.” In its
inclusions of shots through an obviously wet and sand- or fake-blood-
dappled lens, the sequence draws attention to the camera itself and so
“tell[s] the past self-reflexively.” In its compilation of cinema-verité
style and computer generated imagery, the sequence “intermix[es]
contradictory elements.” For example, a bit of business in which a
bullet pierces the forehead of a soldier and exits the back of his head
in a bloody spray is handled digitally, engineered to look like the famous
Harold Edgerton photograph, An Apple Shot With a Bullet Traveling
at 900 Meters per Second11 ). Finally, the multiple camera perspectives
— we are with the Americans on the beach and then suddenly behind
the German gunsights — are a textbook postmodern feature.
Similarly, we might understand the sequence’s design as a
particularly apt rendition of what Hayden White has termed the
“holocaustal” event.12 The traditional historical event has undergone
a “radical transformation,” White argues. Twentieth-century
catastrophes ranging in scale and scope from the extremes of the
“Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, [and] mass
starvation”13 to the Challenger disaster or the collision of three high-
speed jets in an air show over Ramstein, Germany, were “hitherto
unimaginable.” They are made even more incomprehensible by the
sheer amount of photographic coverage and by its increasing
manipulability. “Modern electronic media,” White writes, “‘explode’
events before the eyes of viewers.”14 It’s not that White sees such
events as unrepresentable, but rather that he sees them as being
unrepresentable in a realist mode:
Our notion of what constitutes realistic representation must be

revised to take account of experiences that are unique to our
century and for which older modes of representation have proven
inadequate.15
For both scholars, the key distinguishing feature of the

“postmodernist docu-drama” (White)16 or the “postmodern history
film” (Rosenstone)17 is not its factual accuracy or inaccuracy nor even
126 JANET WALKER
its modal orientation as a fictional or nonfictional historiograph.

Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s famous explication of postmodern
literature as “historiographic metafiction,” as a literature that
“challeng[es] the seamless quality of the history/fiction . . . join,”18
White and Rosenstone assert that what makes such film or video
communications about historical events what they are, is their ability
to “plac[e] in abeyance” “the distinction between the real and the
imaginary” 19 while still aiming at a vanishing point of truth.
“Postmodern fiction,” clarifies Hutcheon, “does not . . . disconnect
itself from history or the world.”20
These are crucial insights into the fragility, or perhaps one might
even say the abjection, of historiography in an age when the subjective
and reproductive responses to the historical event loom large. But as for
how the join between fiction and history or the imaginary and the real
might be even more fully theorized, I submit that a most promising area
of research is contemporary psychological literature on trauma and
memory. I contend that the opening of Saving Private Ryan is best
explained as being constituted in and through a traumatic aesthetic.
Allow me to begin by psychologizing a fictional character. Captain
Miller is portrayed as being in the early stages of a disorder variously
known — depending on the historical period — as soldier’s heart (the
Civil War), shell shock (First World War), combat fatigue (Second
World War), and post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD (Vietnam).
The first thing we see of Miller, and of the flashback that makes up
the body of the film, is the tremor in his right hand. Later, as Miller
consults a map, the shaking compass he grasps is highlighted by a
close-up followed by reaction shots of the men gathered around. “Are
you alright?” they inquire periodically. Miller himself seems to be
aware of his fragile condition and seems to be employing a self-
administered mnemonic therapy. “Every man I kill the farther from
home I feel,” he despairs. He wonders aloud how he’ll ever be able to
tell his wife “about days like today.” He is therefore in a good position
to advise Private Ryan with the latter’s memory problem of not being
able to call to mind his dead brothers’ faces. “Has that ever happened
to you?” asks Ryan. “You gotta think of a context,” counsels Miller,
to whom it obviously has. “You don’t just think about their faces,
you think about something specific, something you’ve done together.
Now when I think of home I think of something specific. I think of
my hammock in the backyard and my wife pruning the rose bushes

in a pair of my old work gloves.”21
The most pronounced symptom attributed to this fictional
character is the state of dissociative fugue he enters on the beach. As
in real cases where people must find a way to bear events too horrible
to process, so too in this fictional case Miller copes by involuntarily
distancing himself from the events as they occur. As Elizabeth Waites
writes:
Dissociation is a psychobiological mechanism that allows the

mind, in effect, to flee what the body is experiencing, thus
maintaining a selective conscious awareness that has survival
value. The shock of trauma produces states that are so different
from ordinary waking life that they are not easily integrated
with more normal experience.22
As Miller crawls up beyond the water line, the synchronous sound

level is potted down, replaced with a more abstract effect — quieter,
slower, and with a sort of hollow roar — the way things sound
underwater or inside one’s own head. On the visual track, slow motion
is used to enhance the sense of disorientation conveyed audially. Some
of the film’s most grisly effects are sandwiched between the close-
ups of Hanks that begin and end this short sequence (less than two
minutes out of the 24-minute beach battle). We see a man’s leg being
blown off at the thigh, several men running with their bodies on fire,
and a man retrieving one severed arm with the other remaining one.
Miller seems to snap out of it when his medic hails him with the
words, which we don’t hear at first but only see mouthed, “What
next, Sir?” It is as if his identity as the man in charge floods back as
the men look to him for decisive action.
Such alterations of the film’s visual and sonic registers, also
attributed as they are here to Miller’s subjective experience, will
return again near the end of the film in the fight to hold the bridge.
But I find that later sequence less suggestive of psychological than of
direct physiological trauma, since the unusual shots directly follow
an explosion in which Miller’s helmet is knocked off by flying
shrapnel and he is thrown to the ground. In both cases, therefore, the
alterations in the film’s register evoke Miller’s disturbed subjective
state. But the first fugue sequence, like the beach scene as a whole,
128 JANET WALKER
is more invested in conveying an interior state than in dissecting the

physiological cause and effect of traumatic shock.
But Miller is fictional after all, so, although I do believe he is
being portrayed as a PTSD sufferer, that diagnosis is finally less
important than the fact that, above and beyond Miller’s
characterization, it is the film’s aesthetic register itself that mimics
the mental landscape of traumatic memory in the Normandy landing
sequence. No one man — not even Tom Hanks as Captain Miller —
could have seen the full range of what the camera and spectators see,
except if that man were dreaming or remembering traumatically. The
multiple perspectives characteristic of postmodernist form and style
gain specific import if we understand them as the swirling prospects
of psychic interiority. At one moment we are on the landing craft, at
another we are behind the German gunsights, and then we are
underwater where the sound of whizzing bullets persists in muffled
form. Moreover, the subjective first person narration that the film’s
inaugural dissolve seems to promise by preceding the Normandy
landing with a slow dolly in to a close-up of James Ryan’s eyes (as he
stands in the cemetery contemplating, presumably, the momentous
events of his past) is ultimately belied by the fact that James Ryan
wasn’t at the Normandy landing. Our first logical assumption that
the James Ryan we see at the film’s beginning (played as a
septuagenarian by Harrison Young) is a grown-up Captain Miller turns
out to be wrong. The classical rules of character consciousness and
point of view do not apply here.
The diagnostic criteria for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder as
defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-IV) indicate that traumatic events are “persistently re-
experienced” as “recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of
the event” including dreams, flashback episodes, hallucinations,
illusions, and the “feeling of detachment or estrangement from
others.”23 Here is one soldier/poet’s reminiscence:
In all my dreams,
before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me,
guttering, choking, drowning.
Wilfred Owen (World War I)24
As Judith Herman describes, “traumatic memories lack verbal

narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid
sensations [including olfactory and auditory sensation] and images.”25
Such memories tend to be symbolic and fragmentary, as in this
description by another veteran:
I caught a fleeting glimpse of a group of Marines leaving a

smoking amtrac on the reef. Some fell as bullets and fragments
splashed among them. Their buddies tried to help them as they
struggled in the knee-deep water.
Eugene Sledge (World War II)26
This is the explosive landscape of desperation, horror, and singed

body parts that the film presents and the veteran spectators guarantee
as being evocative of their experience. In the film we see “fleeting
glimpses” of groups of soldiers, such as those fallen at the water’s
edge, or those huddled behind the barricades. Short shot length, the
bobbing hand-held camerawork, and the use of extreme close-ups
render the characters, posed “before our helpless sight” as they
“plunge at us,” “guttering, choking, drowning.” Even tiny narrative
incidents, brief set pieces, contribute to the atmosphere of random
carnage, and the sense that the film “gets it right.” For example,
psychiatrist Jonathan Shay writes that lucky escapes were a feature
of the combat experience in Vietnam, as they must be in most wars,
and he quotes one veteran’s story:
One veteran was struck in the flesh of his upper arm by a spent
.50-caliber machine gun bullet. This heavy, high-velocity bullet,
which can be lethal at a range of three thousand to four thousand
yards, was projecting from his skin. He simply pulled it out, and
the corpsman put on a field dressing.27
In the film, a soldier is shown removing his helmet to marvel at his

survival after a bullet had seemingly grazed the helmet. A lucky
incident. Except that this is the soldier who is shot through the
forehead an instant later.
It is my contention that the sequence’s interest lies in its ability
to make manifest, to exteriorize through visual imagery and sound,
and to make collective, what a traumatized individual veteran would
130 JANET WALKER
have perceived, precisely, as a disturbance of experience. As Jonathan

Shay has written, “severe trauma explodes the cohesion of
consciousness.”28 Or, as Cathy Caruth has written, “The historical
power of a trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its
forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting
that it is first experienced at all.”29
If the traumatized veteran experiences in fragmentary form, so
too he remembers through a mind’s eye not subject to the optical
limitations of the single reflex lens. It is to the film’s credit that the
screened images and amplified sounds share memory’s non-realist
mise-en-scène: one may well be in two places at once, time can indeed
slow down, and spoken words go unheard.
The veteran’s testimonials are joined by the testimonials of others
— non-veterans — who give notice that this traumatic representation
may be shared. As one forty-year-old viewer described in an online
communication:
By the end of the Omaha Beach scene, I was feeling distinctly

unwell . . . hundreds of miles from any large body of water, I
had become more seasick than I have ever been when actually
at sea . . .
. . . though of course no film can ever recreate what the men on

that beach must have felt, I do think that now I have at least
some limited inkling of what battle must be.
. . . I listened to and read many veterans’ reminiscences during

the 50th anniversary of D-Day, but despite the wealth of detail,
I understand now that I never really got a sense of what combat
was like . . . The shot from inside the landing boat, of hands
turning the gears to open the landing hatch, and then the opening
of that door onto Hell — I forgot that I was sitting in a movie
theatre.30
People describe going with veterans or discussing the movie with

relatives who are veterans to enhance their understanding of it. For
example, Laurent Ditmann writes as follows:
having read in several popular press articles that Spielberg wanted

to give us unmediated access to the veteran’s consciousness, I
opted to see the film a third time accompanied by such an

individual . . . .
. . . I therefore surmised that a true combat veteran could possibly

“translate” the movie for me.
. . . Having contacted the American Legion and requested input

from any European Theater of Operation veteran with ground
combat experience . . .31
However, at the same time that one acknowledges the shock of

recognition felt by veterans and those to whom they communicate
— the feeling of being transported back to what was — I would
emphasize that the sequence is compensatory. It serves precisely
because it enables a purchase on what could not be fully understood
nor shared publicly at the time. In recognizing their own past actions
in the present of Spielberg’s Omaha Beach sequence, D-Day veterans
practice a radically re-experiential form of memory — one that abides
in an elaborate disjunction between past and present. Ian Hacking
explains that even when past actions are remembered, they may be
remembered differently:
Old actions under new descriptions may be re-experienced in

memory. When we remember what we did, or what other people
did, we may also rethink, redescribe, and refeel the past . . . . in
a certain logical sense what was done itself is modified. As we
change our understanding and sensibility, the past becomes filled
with intentional actions that, in a certain sense, were not there
when they were performed.32
This shift, between what was and the renewable mental impressions
that the mind generates, is redoubled in the case of filmic
representation. The appeal of Saving Private Ryan must be due, in large
part, to its creation of a new theater of operations of traumatic
historical memory in film and in life. Steven Spielberg’s film is about
a grand historical event with thousands of participants, be they
survivors or casualties, so the gist of the memory is true and its
potential for corroboration infinite. More than 10,000 fell that day and
the beach was secured for the Allies. But yet, individual veterans may
remember differently. For example, even as one veteran of the Pacific
132 JANET WALKER
theater drew a distinction between his own memory of a beach landing

and that portrayed in the film, he demonstrated a willingness to accept
the filmically revised version: “I don’t recall in my own experience that
the beachhead and the battlefield were so noisy, but I am certain that
they were.”33 Memory is inherently unstable. Moreover, the film is a
fictionalization. While many of the soldiers under attack suffered
painful injury and death such as is shown in the sequence, the
particular incidents depicted do not reflect any one real incident nor
do the bit players on the beach correspond to certain individuals. The
distance between past actions and present memory widens.
What are the implications of understanding memory as
reconstructive and variable? If our purchase on traumatic memory
owes more to the apt rendition of its altered state than to its literal
correspondence to the past, how far does the film take its project to
render the traumatic mindscape? Can we say, in the final analysis,
that Saving Private Ryan “challeng[es] . . . the seamless quality of
the history/fiction . . . join.” Does it “place in abeyance” “the
distinction between the real and the imaginary?” Is it truly capable
of rendering the vicissitudes of memory? I think not. The film toys
with the mise-en-scène of traumatic memory, but ultimately neglects
some of the more challenging ideas at the intersection of trauma,
memory, history, and the catastrophic event; namely, that history is
open to interpretation and memory is not always what it seems.
Like Captain Miller, we snap out of the fugue state of the film’s
Normandy landing sequence when narrative and stylistic realism
ensue. 34 Moreover, the central conceit of the film, that a war is
FUBAR (“fucked up beyond all recognition”) when many men must
risk their lives for just one man, loses its critical edge by the end of
the film. For in the course of saving Private Ryan, the squad also takes
out an enemy radar and contributes to the securing of a crucial
strategic point — the bridge at Carentan. Thus, the loss of lives, and
the saving of Private Ryan, accrue to a very noble end indeed. For
better or worse (the film is seen, variously, as either laudable in its
grateful, virtuous patriotism, or suspiciously ideological for that same
celebratory flag waving), 35 the film reconfirms the traditional
historical interpretation of Second World War as having been a good
and worthwhile war, without the moral and ethical ambiguities —
or outright atrocities — that characterized the Vietnam War.
And how traumatized is the film’s rendition of memory after all?

It is limited, I submit, by a line drawn in the sand between the
legitimate (if weirdly rendered) memory of the landing sequence to
one side, and mistaken memory to the other. The latter is flirted with
when Miller and Ryan reminisce, but ultimately dropped as a feature
of the narrative. The film detours around the possibility that those
who were there do not remember or remember mistakenly because
they were traumatized, and it invites those who were not there to
identify viscerally and unproblematically with images that present
themselves as genuine memory. There is a certain value in a film
that encourages spectators who were not at Normandy to share with
those who were an historical memory that is presented as being
legitimate (if re-enacted), both in terms of what really took place and
in terms of the socio-political goals for which we fought.36 But I would
argue, nevertheless, that if we are truly to understand the meaning
of history and memory we must venture further into the morass of
traumatic memory than does Saving Private Ryan.
Memory Disordered
PTSD is a complication that can result from of a number of different

situations which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders lists as follows:
military combat, violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical

attack, robbery, mugging), being kidnapped, being taken hostage,
terrorist attack, torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in
a concentration camp, natural or manmade disaster, severe
automobile accidents, or being diagnosed with a life-threatening
illness.37
But while all of these situations are seen as having the potential to
give rise to disturbing dreams, flashbacks, and the like, it is mainly
women’s memories resulting from incestuous sexual assault that have
been subjected to sustained questioning and a climate of disbelief.38
The so-called and much-publicized “memory wars”39 that exploded
in the mid-1990s were the result of allegations voiced by a growing
number of adult women that their fathers had sexually assaulted them
134 JANET WALKER
in childhood and that they, the women, had initially repressed such
memories, only to recover them at a later date. On one side were the
parents of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and their
professional consultants (notably Elizabeth Loftus and Richard
Ofshe)40 who cited instances of implanted and therefore mistaken
memory to refute the validity of repressed and recovered memory.
On the other side were those survivors and researchers (notably co-
authors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis of The Courage to Heal and Judith
Herman) 41 who emphasized the importance for the prospect of
recovery of believing women’s memories and validating their
experiences.
This has been a high-stakes encounter, marked by a great deal of
pain and ruined lives among the civil and criminal legal proceedings
and the proliferation of therapeutic practices. But I believe something
of immense value is beginning to emerge from the fray, namely a
complicated and productive theory of traumatic memory. Apparently
there is such a thing as “pseudomemory” — mental images that present
themselves in a way that is internally indistinguishable from genuine
memories.42 Yet repressed and recovered memory is also a documented
phenomenon. 43 This suggests that traumatic memory has both
veridical and fantastic features (with fantasy being used here to mean
an imagined scene that is the distorted representation of a wish).44
In fact, and with regard to truth, traumatic memory is paradoxical.
“Memory for traumatic events can be extremely veridical,” asserts
Elizabeth Waites.45 Such memories may even be more veridical than
memories for everyday events when it comes to the “gist” of the
memory. 46 But it is also true that real catastrophes can disturb
memory processing. Thus, whereas popular and legal venues tend to
reject reports of traumatic experiences that contain mistakes or
amnesiac elements, contemporary theories of trauma show that such
memory features are a common result of the traumatic experience
itself, and stand, however paradoxically, as a testament to its genuine
nature. Far from belying the truth of an event, a mistaken
construction in memory may be inextricably, but obliquely, connected
to and produced by real, traumatic, events of the past.47
It follows that if women’s memories are sometimes untrue in part
or even in full, then veterans’ memories, and those of survivors of
war, are also subject to amnesia, embellishment, and mistakes that
are among the salient features of memory. In his summary of the

psychological literature on the concept of the flashback, Fred Frankel
questions these studies of flashbacks on the precise grounds that they
take for granted the veridicality of combat trauma memories. He
discerns, in the descriptions of memory that they provide, the
potential presence of confabulated and fantasy elements.48
What do these findings mean for our study of history texts?
Consider the case of Benjamin Wilkomirski, author of the book
Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. This is a book of
“colossal cruelty” wrote Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker, “the
unmediated point of view of a child too young to know much more
of the world than the abomination that engulfs him.”49 The word
Holocaust is never mentioned in the memoir but it is the story of a
Latvian Jew, orphaned as a toddler by the Nazi liquidation of the Riga
ghetto and deported to Majdanek death camp and then to Auschwitz.
The book was published in 1995, translated into twelve languages,
reviewed hyperbolically by Maurice Sendak and Jonathan Kozol, and
granted prizes including the National Jewish Book Award for which
fellow finalists in the category of autobiography and memoir were
Alfred Kazin and Elie Weisel. However, there is a preponderance of
evidence that Wilkomirski’s book is not fact but fiction.50 He is
neither Jewish nor Latvian, but rather the “Swiss-born son of an
unwed Protestant woman” (51), adopted by a Swiss couple with the
last name of Dossekker, which name appears on his passport.
Wilkomorski himself regards the passport as a “legal fiction” and
reasserts the truth of his memories. “To question his identity,” wrote
Gourevitch, is from Wilkomirski’s perspective “to reprise one of his
book’s dominant themes: the plight of a victim who finds that his
memories are doubted and dismissed” (52).
This case of Holocaust memory is the waking nightmare of
Holocaust historians, amateur and professional alike. The possibility
that memories may be untrustworthy makes us vulnerable to the
campaigns of the Holocaust Deniers, and, perhaps even more
importantly, vulnerable to the temptation to rebut false memories
by subjecting them to rigidly binaristic true/false testing as a first
step to casting out the false. But we must resist such dichotomous
thinking, I contend, for it is incapable of addressing the inherent
vicissitudes of traumatic memory.
136 JANET WALKER
Consider a second case of Holocaust memory described by Dori

Laub in Laub’s and Felman’s book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing
in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.51 A woman in her late
sixties testified to researchers from the Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale University that she had seen four chimneys
explode as a result of actions during the Auschwitz uprising. “The
flames shot into the sky,” she recounted, “people were running. It
was unbelievable.”52 Apparently, it was unbelievable. At a subsequent
meeting of historians watching the videotape of this testimony, the
accuracy of the woman’s account was questioned. In fact, only one
chimney, and not all four, had been destroyed. The woman’s account
was discredited. But psychiatrist Dori Laub disagreed:
She was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but

to the very secret of survival and to resistance to extermination
. . . She saw four chimneys blowing up in Auschwitz: she saw,
in other words, the unimaginable . . . And she came to testify to
the unbelievability, precisely, of what she had eyewitnessed —
this bursting open of the frame of Auschwitz . . . Because the
testifier did not know the number of the chimneys that blew up
. . . , the historians said that she knew nothing. I thought that
she knew more, since she knew about the breakage of the frame,
that her very testimony was now re-enacting.53
Some memories are what we’d call true; some are false. But others
are partial, patchy, missing where they might be expected to exist,
and shot through with fantasy constructions. It is precisely the quality
of exaggeration that gives this memory its historical resonance.
Recognizing the pseudomemory for what it is, we come to understand
the event as a “breaking open of the frame.” In other words, the pay-
off in historical knowledge comes from our knowing the difference
between the true memory (one chimney did blow up; there was
effective resistance at Auschwitz) and the pseudo-memory (the other
three chimneys didn’t blow up; the woman’s memory exaggerates;
hyperbole best expresses the fact that resistance at Auschwitz was
resistance against all odds). Pseudomemories also testify, but in a
different voice. Their testimony is most legible when we have
additional information about a memory’s basis in real occurrence.
The indeterminacy of memory is important and challenging. It
is important precisely because it is “set against a background of truth

and falsehood” — lives may be at stake, as in cases where daughters
accuse fathers and suits are filed.54 The indeterminacy of memory is
profoundly challenging because “[I]n the absence of independent
corroboration, no criteria appear to distinguish reliably between
accurate recollections and fabrications and confabulations.” 55
Wilkomirski’s memoir did likely slip its anchor in the solid plane of
historical fact, but the added complication, as in the case of the
witness to the Auschwitz uprising, is that anchors and lines are
molten rather than solidly cast. They are prone to transformation.
Some contemporary research on memory, especially
psychoanalytically-informed research, is explicitly illuminating
with regard to the variability of memory.56 Like Elizabeth Loftus,
psychologist Michael Nash upholds laboratory research results
showing that people are quite capable of entertaining the illusion that
they recall events that did not actually happen. But unlike Loftus,
whose primary interest is false memory, Nash’s research encompasses
the broader implications of the “malleability of human memory and
the fallibility of self-report.”57 According to Nash:
Two broad types of mnemonic errors are possible when adult

psychotherapy patients reflect on whether or not they were
traumatized as children. They may believe they were not
traumatized when in fact they were (false negative), or they may
believe they were traumatized when in fact they were not (false
positive) . . . . it is exceedingly important to realize that the
problem of false positives and the problem of false negatives are
distinct . . . . If patients sometimes report a traumatic event when
it did not happen (a false positive), we are not required to reject
the possibility that patients may fail to remember such an event
when it did occur (a false negative).58
That repressed and recovered memory is a genuine feature of certain

situations is not a fact that can be logically refuted by the
simultaneous existence, in other quarters, of pseudomemory.
This is precisely what Elaine Showalter, in Hystories: Hysterical
Epidemics and Modern Media, fails to see. There, she argues that
“as we approach [the] millennium, the epidemics of hysterical
disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced
138 JANET WALKER
pseudomemories that have flooded the media seem to be reaching a

high-water mark.” 59 Some feminists have taken issue with
Showalter’s book for ostensibly denying the reality of incestuous
assault. But, in fact, Showalter says very clearly that childhood sexual
assault is a crime that cannot be tolerated where it is deemed to have
occurred. The problem is that, apparently, she does not deem it to
have occurred in cases of repressed memory. The logic of the book is
troubling for its casual interspersal of chapters on supposedly
remembered phenomena for which there is absolutely no scientifically
or independently confirmed evidence (alien abduction, satanic ritual
abuse) with the chapter on recovered memory, which has been shown
empirically to exist in some cases as discussed above. To take a
specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress
interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual
abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of
those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women
who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of
time forgotten.60 But Showalter disregards such clinical research in
order to concentrate on the plight of alleged perpetrators of sexual
abuse of children. She writes, “If 5000 people — or five people, or
one — are unjustly accused, that is important. It cannot be factored
in as an allowable margin of error.”61
Showalter’s mistake in my estimation, and I believe it to be a
profound one, is that she does not consider the extreme variability of
memory. Is it an “allowable margin of error” to discount cases of true
incestuous memory because some others turn out to be false? And
what of the “margin of error” that results when one conflates
recovered memories with putative memories of alien abduction? Is
that allowable? Moreover, what of memories that are false in their
specific content, but allude still to a different underlying trauma?
Showalter pays no heed to psychological literature suggesting that
sexual abuse can be an underlying trauma beneath screen memories
of alien abduction and satanic ritual abuse.62 There is a possibility,
broached by Louise Armstrong in Rocking the Cradle of Sexual
Abuse, that it is more psychically comfortable for a woman to invent
a whole satanic cult than to accuse her own father. In dismissing as
false all of the “hystories” in which memory is asserted and plays a
part, Showalter takes the “memory” out of recovered memory,
replacing it in these blanket cases with something akin to

“invention.”
On the other hand, John Kihlstrom, David G. Payne and Jason
M. Blackwell, along with feminist theorists including Ann Scott,
Elizabeth Waites, and Judith Herman among others, have developed
theories of memory that foreground its inherently interpretative or
“reconstructive” nature: as Payne and Blackwell put it, “memory
errors are not bothersome anomalies to be explained away or
minimized [or used to discredit testimony I would add], but rather
they reflect the normal processes by which we interpret the world
around us.”63 These researchers propose that memory be thought of
not as a problem of storage and retrieval of a discrete quantity of
information, but rather as a question of correspondence — and loss
of correspondence — between recollections and actual past events.
Documenting Trauma
There are, I submit, a number of films and videos that go much further
than does Saving Private Ryan in their exploration of the relationship
between traumatic memory and historical truth. Such films represent
catastrophic past events as being both meaningful and yet
indeterminate, as being both genuine (having really occurred) and yet
subject to imaginative reconstruction. I shall draw examples from two
films.
The first is Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human Spirit, a 1998 film
by Laura Bialis, Broderick Fox, and Sarah Levy about Lithuanian-born
Holocaust survivor Judy Meisel. What we see and hear in this film is
Meisel’s life story, as she remembers and narrates it in interviews
shot in the United States and in the European countries where she
spent the war years. Motivated through the device of her return to
Europe, we are given present day footage of the village of Jasvene,
Lithuania, the Kovno ghetto, the Stutthof concentration camp, and
also the city of Copenhagen where Judy found refuge as the war ended.
None of this is unusual in the Holocaust documentary mode, where
visits by survivors to European sites, including camps in various stages
of dilapidation, very often mark the elongating duration between then
and now, and our debt to what Lawrence Langer has called the “ruins
140 JANET WALKER
of memory.”64 In addition, the film provides archival footage of these

places and others. It thus relies on unimpeachable testimony and
reproduces veracious and not mistaken memory.
But the film does elasticize the often doggedly realist conventions
of the Holocaust documentary by adding documentary reenactment
and experimental camera, optical, and digital video techniques to the
more conventional fare of archival footage and testimony meant to
be taken at face value. The film’s pattern is combinatory. Along with
footage generally understood as realist — black and white archival
footage and color shots of Judy’s return to her past haunts — we get
interspersed reenactments (in color and black and white) designed to
evoke the emotional affect of the memories of a little girl from
Jasvene.
What I find most interesting here is not only the use of the
different kinds of footage, nor even the fictive strategies in the context
of a film that seeks entrance into the historical record, but rather a
certain slippage between objectivity and subjectivity that characterizes
the use of the different modalities of the real. The film does provide
the spectator with a context for distinguishing between re-enacted
and archival material (we can be pretty sure Judy’s family in 1930s
did not take home movies, and, even if they had, those movies
wouldn’t have survived; thus we know that the shots of Judy’s
mother’s hands braiding challah and lighting the Sabbath candles are
the filmmakers’ recreation). But the work of the film is precisely to
make connections among these registers — to bring the subjective
elements of personal memory into the light of historical certainty
and public memory. The challah sequences are re-enacted and young
Judy must really have watched her mother make the Sabbath
preparations time and time again. This “both/and” structure with
regard to the question of documentary and fiction is enhanced further
by the Sabbath sequence’s nonrealistic angle of view and its shaky
and editorially fragmented quality. The mother’s hands are thus
another filmic expression of Hacking: “old actions under new
descriptions . . . re-experienced in memory.”
The film makes matters still more complicated in that, while all
of the re-enacted passages intermix objective and subjective truth,
these elements are not intermixed in the same proportions. For
example, a repeated grainy, black and white, hand-held, low-to-the-
ground shot of the bridge Judy crossed when her family was deported
to the Kovno ghetto is simultaneously a document and a fiction: it is
the bridge itself as it looks today, and yet the deliberately low camera
position evokes what the child Judy must have seen as she crossed
the bridge more than 50 years ago. The same could be said for a
passage in the film where we see hand-held shots of the road leading
out of Stutthof: the road exists today, but it is presented within a
sequence that uses odd angles, purposely unsteady camerawork, and
rapid cutting to evoke the teenaged Judy’s amazement when a forced
march to liquidate the camp turned into liberation, since the road
was bombed and the Nazis were scattered. Such shots are
simultaneously document and fiction, imagination in memory made
animate.
And what of the nasturtiums, vividly orange in the color footage,
that precede the sequence in which Judy recalls her incarceration at
Stutthof? The flowers stand for what the child Judy saw, but their
origin is less certain than either the road (which we know to be a
real architectural feature of Stutthof) or the mother’s hands (which
we know to be borrowed for the occasion of the film). Without
extratextual information, the nasturtiums elude assignment along the
continuum between documentary and fiction. Moreover, the
nasturtiums are doubly located as memory images in that they don’t
just stand for what Judy recalls seeing as a child in Jasvene but for
what Judy recalls remembering while incarcerated at Stutthof. What
she remembers for the circumstance of filming, then, is a past time
when memory served the present in a very tangible way: the image
of nasturtiums, she testifies, kept her body and spirit alive.
In offering the story of an actual Holocaust survivor in a form
that encompasses a panoply of fictive elements, Tak for Alt risks
potential attacks on its credibility. If some parts of this film on a
historical subject are confabulated, how can we accept the veracity
of other parts or of the whole? How can we guarantee that this is not
another fiction parading as memoir? By embracing the problem, I
contend, the subjective aspects of the film, expressed through its
fictive elements, may be seen as enhancing its truth-seeking mission
by foregrounding history as a problem of memory and interpretation
as well as one of data collection.
Let’s take another example. Family Gathering (Lise Yasui, 1988)
142 JANET WALKER
also broaches the problem of memory, here in the context of the

injustices that attended the internment of Japanese-Americans in
camps in the interior of the US during the Second World War. In fact,
Family Gathering goes even further than Tak for Alt in its exploration
of the role of personal memory in historiography, for where Tak for
Alt assumes the veracity of Judy’s memories (even while representing
them through fictional strategies), Family Gathering raises the
possibility that memories can feel true when they are not.
After a brief prologue with credits, the film begins, and it also
ends, with the filmmaker’s voice narrating a childhood memory of
her grandfather visiting her home and talking late into the night. As
if to corroborate this spoken account, we see home movie images of
Yasui’s grandparents interacting with their grandchildren. But soon
after our exposure to these images we learn that the memory she
relates is what some would call “false,” but Yasui calls “made up.”
She never actually met her grandfather, and the home-movie images
that she supplied to illustrate the memory were filmed at another
place and time before her birth — with children other than herself.
This is a classic example of what Allison Landsberg would call
“prosthetic memory”: a memory cobbled together from images seen
and other peoples’ stories. 65
But, provocatively, the film does not ultimately disavow this
mistaken memory, even though its status as prosthetic is
acknowledged. The substitute home movie footage is repeated at the
end of the film accompanied by the following words: “And although
my grandfather died before I had the chance to meet him, I’ll always
remember that one evening I stayed up late listening to him talk into
the night.” If she never really met him, what is the meaning of this
reassertion of “memory”? I take it as the affirmation of her right to
a certain history that is simultaneously familial — her own — and
public. While the memory was mistaken, it nevertheless served as
the inspiration for Yasui to make a nonfiction film about her
grandfather’s life as a Japanese immigrant in the United States during
the first half of the twentieth century through the mid-fifties.
More than that, the mistaken memory is the outward symbol of
the deeper memory work of the film. It turns out that at the end of
his life, after founding a farm and business in Hood River, Oregon,
raising nine children with his wife, and then being arrested and
interned until 1946, Matsuo Yasui committed suicide. When the FBI
came to arrest him after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December
of 1941, maps showing the system of locks at the Panama Canal were
found at his home. These had been drawn by one of his children for
a school project, but Yasui was asked to prove that these maps were
not drawn by him. In the film Matsuo’s son Minoru, the filmmaker’s
uncle, states that “It’s impossible to prove a negative fact.” Actually,
with access to school documents and the memorabilia of other local
families, one could prove not the negative fact of who didn’t draw
the maps, but the positive fact of who did. But as it happened, in the
truncated moment of the arrest, such proof was beyond reach. The
film suggests that as Matsuo aged, the abject impossibility of proof
may have loomed large and contributed to his suicide. Yasui explains
in voice-over, “Matsuo grew anxious and fearful, always worried that
he’d done something wrong, sure that the FBI was coming, once again,
to arrest him.”
The film speaks, therefore, to the importance of triangulated
evidence, the need to seek outside corroboration for remembered
personal and public events and the need to apprehend the import and
fantasy element of misremembering. Lise Yasui grew up not knowing
that her grandfather had committed suicide. She found out from her
father only after having worked on her film for a year. Thus, the
untrue memory of her grandfather alive after her birth, which she
filled in from the collateral images of a home movie, resonates with
what must surely have been the collective wish of her older family
members — that the grandfather had lived to enjoy his grandchildren.
The lesson of Benjamin Wilkormirski’s untrue childhood memoir
is not that we must purge ourselves of the technologies of false
historiography. In any case this is becoming more and more impossible
in the digital age. The lesson of Wilkomirski’s memoir and of
traumatic historical representations including Tak for Alt, Family
Gathering, and Saving Private Ryan to a more limited extent, is that
we must read screen representations of historical subjects always with
reference to outside sources. At the same time, we must find a way
to bear the vicissitudes of memory, to comprehend the inevitability
and intrinsic worth of imaginative constructions in memory. I regard
it as a political imperative to take back from the various deniers the
fantasy aspects of so-called pseudomemory. The importance of Tak
144 JANET WALKER
for Alt and Family Gathering, therefore, is that they are two
representative postmodern historical documentaries that foreground
the workings of traumatic memory through a compendium of filmic
strategies. They, along with the contemporary theories of traumatic
memory discussed in this article, radically change what we know of
the relationship between personal memory and public history.
6
Allegorizing Hiroshima
Shindo Kaneto’s Onibaba as
Trauma Text
ADAM LOWENSTEIN
Shindo Kaneto dreams of writing and directing a feature-length film

that transpires entirely during the split second of the atomic
detonation over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.1 Whether or not this
ambitious project is ever completed, Shindo’s dream testifies to a
remarkable artistic commitment that has already produced what is
arguably the most important and undervalued body of work dealing
with the atomic bomb in Japanese cinema. Rather than provide a
detailed overview of Shindo’s long and prolific career as a director/
screenwriter or even a comprehensive analysis of each of his atomic-
themed films (although both of these tasks deserve scholarly
attention), this essay examines Shindo’s horror film Onibaba (1964)
as a means of refiguring how cinematic representations of Hiroshima
are legislated theoretically.2 I focus particularly on the political issues
of victim consciousness, war responsibility, and the construction of
gendered models of Japanese national identity. In doing this, I posit
Onibaba as a trauma text — as a film about historical trauma, and
as a case for rethinking the mapping of relations between film and
the representation of trauma.
The decision to explore these concerns through Onibaba, a horror
film set in fourteenth-century Japan with no explicit reference to
146 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
Hiroshima, may seem somewhat puzzling. After all, Shindo, who was
born in Hiroshima in 1912 but who is not himself hibakusha (“atom
bomb-affected person[s]”), contributes to a number of films that do
address atomic destruction directly — films that reflect the complex
struggle to depict the Japanese nuclear experience explicitly. In 1949,
during an American occupation3 that applied rigid censorship policies
to Japanese films representing the war and particularly the atomic
bomb, Shindo co-wrote the screenplay for director Oba Hideo’s
Nagasaki no kane (The Bell of Nagasaki) based on the popular memoir
of the same name (completed in 1946, but not published until 1949)
by nuclear physicist and hibakusha Nagai Takashi. Although the film
was released in 1950, Shindo had to endure major story revisions
imposed by American censors — the result was a film that could
incorporate Nagasaki only as a backdrop for a tragic romance.4 When
the occupation ended in 1952, Shindo returned to Hiroshima to shoot
Genbaku no ko (Children of Hiroshima, 1952) a drama he wrote and
directed concerning a young hibakusha schoolteacher who returns
to Hiroshima several years after the bombing to revisit the lives of
her former kindergarten students. Again, Shindo encountered
disapproval, only this time the complaints came from one of the film’s
sponsors, the Japan Teachers Union, who felt Children of Hiroshima
was merely a “tear-jerker” without an effective “political orientation”
(the Union subsequently endorsed Sekigawa Hideo’s more didactic
and anti-American Hiroshima [1953]).5 Shindo is also the writer/
director of Daigo fukuryu-maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5, 1958), a fiction
film based on an actual 1954 incident involving a Japanese fishing
boat exposed to deadly radioactive fallout following American nuclear
tests at Bikini Atoll, as well as Honno (Lost Sex, 1966), the story of
a man made impotent by the atomic bomb. In addition, Shindo
continues to work on a long documentary project focusing on
hibakusha experience entitled August 6th.6
Why not focus on these films, rather than “read into” Onibaba
as a Hiroshima allegory? Precisely because the criticism concerned
with Japan’s cinematic engagements of Hiroshima tends to favor
“realist” representations over “allegorical” ones, without a sufficient
sense of what allegory might mean in this particular context. For
example, Carole Cavanaugh’s analysis of Japan’s most canonized
Hiroshima film to date, Imamura Shōhei’s Kuroi ame (Black Rain,
ALLEGORIZING HIROSHIMA 147
1989) (an adaptation of Ibuse Masuji’s novel of the same name), notes
the troubling absence of “an honest reconnection with history beyond
allegory” in most Japanese films that touch on Hiroshima. 7
Cavanaugh echoes previous accounts by David Desser, who comments
that “the number of [Japanese] films which overtly take the bomb as
its subject is less than miniscule . . . the bomb cinema hardly deserves
the name,” 8 and Donald Richie, who laments the fact that a
“responsible attitude toward Hiroshima is seldom seen on the
screen.” 9 Cavanaugh, Desser, and Richie all mention the
phenomenally successful franchise spawned by Gojira (Godzilla,
Honda Ishiro, 1954) as a particularly problematic example of
allegorical treatments of Hiroshima, evidence that Japanese film opts
to “engage in a fantasy of futuristic monsters, at the cost of
confronting the monstrous reality of the past.”10 Richie also takes to
task allegory of a more modernist kind in what remains the most
internationally well-known Hiroshima film, Alain Resnais’s
Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) — a French-Japanese co-production,
incidentally, but a decidedly French film in terms of key production
personnel. Although he praises the film’s various strengths, Richie
asks, “Why Hiroshima? Why not Yokohama, mon amour? The fact
of the atomic destruction of the city has little to do with the film
(though to be sure the fact of wanton destruction does).”11
Before turning to my own refiguration of allegory through
Onibaba, I want to signal an important degree of sympathy for the
impulse to legislate the representation of Hiroshima through terms
such as “honest,” “overt,” and “responsible.” The overwhelming fact
of the atomic destruction itself, along with the intricate and
controversial political issues of war responsibility, victim
consciousness, hibakusha discrimination, and censorship exercised
by both American and Japanese authorities demands that
representation answer to the traumatic significance of the event.12
However, too often a well-intended respect for trauma enables a
reductive legislation of representation itself. The result, paradoxically,
is a closing-down of the very discussion that attempts to imagine and
interpret representation in ways that might answer to the cultural
and historical complexity of traumatic events. In the case of
Hiroshima and Japanese cinema, “realism” trumps “allegory” as the
critical discourse’s preferred representational mode; in other cases,
148 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
such as Holocaust cinema, “modernism” often trumps “realism.”13 I

want to shift such discussions to moments of representation rather
than entire modes, and to conceptualize representation beyond
legislation. In other words, I wish to reinvest allegory with a
complexity that exceeds definitions reducible to realism’s other or
modernism’s weaker ancestor. This is not an evasion of
representation’s connection to discourses of responsibility, but an
attempt to refigure how we interpret that relation. The German-
Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin provides a valuable frame for this
necessarily risky project.
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin posits
the human skull, or “death’s head,” as the allegorical sign animating
the seventeenth century German Trauerspiel, or “mourning play.”14
As opposed to the eighteenth century “symbol” of German
romanticism, which emphasizes the “perfected beautiful individual”
(161), “classical proportion” and “humanity,” the death’s head of
allegory captures “everything about history that, from the very
beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful”. Baroque
allegory represents history as a “petrified, primordial landscape” (166)
of “irresistible decay” rather than the romantic symbol’s intimation
of history as idealized beauty and “the process of an eternal life” (178).
For Benjamin, the baroque mourning play exists within the realm of
spectacle, of metamorphosing image fragments rather than fully
realized romantic symbols of harmonious totality. The realm of the
image, with its connotations of ruin, fragmentation, and death, is the
realm of historical representation.
Indeed, Benjamin’s distinctions between baroque allegory and the
romantic symbol are echoed in his later essay “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” (1940), where he distinguishes between
historical materialism and historicism as methods of inquiry into the
past.15 Historicism, like the romantic symbol, becomes aligned with
depicting history as “eternal” and “universal” (262), and as “progress”
(261), where the historicist merely establishes “a causal connection
between various moments in history” (263). Historical materialism,
on the other hand, “blast[s] open the continuum of history” (262) by
forsaking historicism’s “homogenous, empty time” in favor of what
Benjamin calls “Jetztzeit,” or “time filled by the presence of the now”
(261). Jetztzeit is a risky, momentary collision between past and
present, when one can “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a

moment of danger”. The moment of Jetztzeit, in other words, is an
allegorical moment, an instant in which an image of the past sparks
a flash of unexpected recognition in the present. This moment is
disruptive, unpredictable, and dangerous — it is vulnerable to
appropriation by those who wish to manipulate history to oppressive
ends (255). It must also resist the kind of rationalist narrativizing that
would reinstate the allegorical moment of Jetztzeit within
historicism’s universalist chronicles of history. Benjamin seems to
sense that even historical materialism itself, with its Marxist master
narrative of class struggle as the engine of history, might neutralize
the shock of this allegorical moment. To this end, he insists on a
mystical, theological dimension to Jetztzeit — it is a temporality
characterized by a “Messianic cessation of happening, or, put
differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past”
(263). The Messianic ability to arrest time, to reorganize relations
between past and present, charges each moment with a potential
future inflected by the politics of historical materialism, where the
oppressed past no longer languishes unrecognized. This disorienting
juxtaposition of Messianic theology with Marxist radicalism checks
the totalizing impulses of both modes of thought and preserves the
shock of Jetztzeit. For Benjamin, it is the responsibility of the
historian, above all else, to generate this shock as a means of blasting
open the continuum of history.
What would such an explosion mean in the context of Hiroshima
and Japanese cinema? Recent studies have drawn attention to the vast
political and cultural complexities involved with constructing a
collective memory of the Second World War and the atomic bombings
in Japan. Lisa Yoneyama investigates a pronounced shift in postwar
Japanese cultural representation that covers over Japan’s pre-
Hiroshima imperial aggressions in favor of post-Hiroshima national
victimhood, where national iconic images of the militarized male are
replaced with images of the blameless, self-sacrificing maternal
female. Through such a substitution, Yoneyama explains, “postwar
Japanese womanhood became fully implicated in sustaining the myth
of national innocence and victimology.”16 Central to this myth are
figures such as the Japanese “A-bomb maiden,” a tragic young heroine
suffering from atomic-related illness. Although the “A-bomb maiden”
150 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
came to prominent international media attention in 1955, when

twenty-five young, single hibakusha women were sent to the US for
plastic surgery and medical attention, similar women have continued
to inhabit Japanese literary, televisual, and cinematic renderings of
Hiroshima up until the present day.17 Through female characters such
as the “A-bomb maiden,” Yoneyama claims, “conventional gender
distinctions [become] the ‘other’ of the violent, cataclysmic, and
extraordinary time of structural crisis and liminality.”18 In short,
traditional gender roles are deployed not only to provide a source of
stability in the face of trauma, but to displace Japanese national
responsibility for the trauma itself. In this sense, the figure of woman
enables a historical narrative of forgetting, where victimization
replaces responsibility for aggression. This is exactly the sort of
narrative that must be blasted open, in Benjamin’s terms, and I will
argue that Shindo’s Onibaba begins to perform this work as it
allegorizes Hiroshima.
Between Victimization and War Responsibility
Onibaba tells the story of two nameless peasant women, a mother

(Otowa Nobuko) and her daughter-in-law (Yoshimura Jitsuko), who
survive in war-torn fourteenth century Japan by murdering stray
samurai and then selling their armor on the black market. When the
younger woman desires to live with Hachi (Sato Kei), a shady fellow
peasant recently escaped from military service, the old woman
immediately recognizes the disastrous implications of this wish — if
realized, it would in effect eliminate the older partner’s means of
survival. In an act of defensive manipulation, the old woman dons a
demon mask stolen from a fallen samurai in order to frighten her
daughter-in-law into staying with her. But the mask is cursed — it
eventually fuses with the old woman’s face, and when it is finally
removed, scars reminiscent of atomic radiation burns disfigure her
skin.
It is not at all surprising to learn that Shindo did indeed base the
make-up design for the brutal unmasking scene of Onibaba on
photographs of maimed hibakusha.19 After all, the old woman, the
“demon hag”20 who provides the film with its title, is at once the
film’s central victim and central aggressor. She is the key that unlocks
the film’s ambivalent presentation of victimization and war
responsibility, as well as the anchor for the film’s recasting of
traditional gender iconography surrounding these issues. Neither
masculinized monster nor feminized victim, but displaying important
attributes of both, she is realized in a bravura performance by Otowa
Nobuko (also Shindo’s wife). Otowa had previously portrayed Takoko,
the hibakusha schoolteacher and “A-bomb maiden”-like heroine of
Children of Hiroshima. Part of the brilliance of Otowa’s performance
as the menacing onibaba is that echoes of Takoko remain. This is
powerfully apparent in the final moments of the film, when the old
woman, trapped beneath her demon mask, confesses to the young
woman that it was she, and not an actual demon, that has been
frightening her away from her lover. The old woman begs the young
woman to help her remove the mask. After offering her unconditional
agreement to the young woman’s terms, the old woman must endure
Still 6.1 “Demon” or “human being”?: The fierce, resourceful old woman (Otowa Nobuko)
of Onibaba. Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material, New York.
152 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
unbearable pain while the mask is shattered. When the old woman’s
face is revealed, the young woman recoils in horror and calls her a
“demon.” She flees from the woman she once recognized as her
mother-in-law, but the old woman pursues her while pleading
desperately, “I’m not a demon! I’m a human being!”
How, then, do we finally categorize the old woman? Is she a
demon or a human being? The film’s conclusion exists between the
two terms, both thematically and cinematically. The young woman
jumps over the deep hole hidden in the reeds where she and her
partner have disposed of the bodies of ambushed samurai. The old
woman, following close behind, attempts the same leap, but we never
learn where she lands. Her jump is repeated and frozen through
overlapping editing and slow motion. Does she clear the hole? Do
we want her to? These are the questions that haunt us after the film
ends — questions central to rethinking discourses of victimization
and war responsibility in relation to Hiroshima.
Onibaba’s release in 1964 falls within the ten-year period (1955-
1965) that James J. Orr defines as “a critical period of common
acceptance” of “the mythologies of Japanese war victimhood.”21
Although Orr emphasizes just how polyvalent the discourse of
Japanese victim consciousness really is — ranging from left-wing
critiques of the militarist wartime government and the postwar US-
Japan security alliance to right-wing adoptions of pacifism as a means
of evading war responsibility — he also asserts that the 1960s in
particular “was an era in which the victim became the hero for Japan
not only metaphorically but in monetary terms as well.” In this era,
government compensation packages “bordered on valorizing . . .
victim experiences as service to the state.” The government’s ability
to mobilize victimhood discourse during these years helped forge an
ideological connection between Japan’s booming economic prosperity
and the contributions of the war dead, resulting in a climate of
“economic nationalism.”22
Onibaba both reflects and refutes the status of contemporary
notions of victimization. On the one hand, the old woman stands in
for precisely those victims “bought” through government gifts of
compensation — she is a hibakusha figure whose son has died in the
war, and she receives a compensatory gift from a government official,
the high-ranking masked samurai who asks her to show him the road
back to Kyoto. However, this “gift” of his mask is not given freely,
but must be stolen through murder. And, of course, the mask’s “gift”
is actually a curse. In this sense, the exchange between the samurai
and the old woman evokes governmental versions of victimhood
discourse only to underscore their hollowness. The old woman lays
bare government hypocrisy by calling the samurai’s use of the mask
a failure. “You just lost and ran from a battle,” she tells the samurai,
“it’s useless for a loser to look strong.” After the old woman tricks
the samurai into plunging to his death in the hole, she removes the
mask and discovers not the beautiful visage promised by the samurai,
but a hideously scarred, hibakusha-like face. “So this is the face of a
samurai general?” she laughs. Onibaba suggests that in regard to the
politics of victimization, things are not nearly as transparent as they
might first appear.
Still, the presentation of the samurai as a wartime government
official whose true identity, beneath the mask, is that of a victimized
hibakusha rather than a militarist victimizer seems to displace war
responsibility even as it questions the governmental politics of
victimhood. Or does it? Onibaba’s class narrative rests on the fact
that the war waged by upper-class samurai has robbed the old peasant
woman of both her son and her ability to farm, leaving her no
alternative but to scavenge off the class that victimized her. This class
narrative echoes contemporaneous views espoused by the Japanese
left that attribute blame for the war to Japan’s ruling class and military
elite. Lisa Yoneyama identifies these views as catalysts for widely
embraced memories of the atomic bombings “shaped almost
exclusively by the perception that ordinary Japanese people had been
the passive victims of historical conditions.” 23 But here again,
Onibaba generates a powerful ambivalence. The disease that evokes
atomic burns in the film may have originated with the samurai, but
it is clearly a contagious affliction, capable of transcending class and
gender distinctions. The film, through its images of repetition and
contagion, insists that neither war responsibility nor war
victimization can be the exclusive province of “ordinary” Japanese
subjects or the “extraordinary” Japanese elite. In fact, the samurai’s
first words to the old woman, “Don’t be afraid. I’m a man, not a
demon,” return with the old woman’s final cry of “I’m not a demon!
I’m a human being!” Similarly, the old woman’s dismissal of the
154 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
samurai’s pain (“serves you right”) recurs later when the young
woman is equally contemptuous of the old woman’s anguish. In this
manner, war responsibility emerges as intertwined between victimizer
and victimized, upper class and lower class, male and female, to
complicate the very notion of demarcating “demons” and “human
beings” in the face of Hiroshima.24
Onibaba’s setting reinforces the film’s challenge to conventional
distributions of war responsibility. Prominent dialogue specifies the
film’s historical moment as the nanbokucho era, a chaotic fifty-year
period during the fourteenth century when two different imperial
courts, a “northern court” in Kyoto and a “southern court” in the
Yoshino Mountains, battled each other for supremacy.25 Hachi and
the old woman’s son, Kichi, are first pressed into service by the
Ashikaga, supporters of the northern emperor, but are later captured
and forced to fight for the Kusunoki, backers of the southern emperor.
As Hachi explains, the sides mean nothing to them as peasant soldiers
— only survival counts. However, this fourteenth century period of
rival emperors has a suggestive relevance for postwar Japan,
particularly in light of John W. Dower’s detection of a remarkable
continuity, rather than a radical break, between the wartime Japanese
militarist regime and the postwar democracy of the American
occupation. The two regimes share much at the level of symbolic
discourse, including the centrality of Emperor Hirohito. In fact, Dower
argues that staunch postwar American support of the emperor, “in
whose name all of Asia had been savaged . . . came close to turning
the entire issue of ‘war responsibility’ into a joke.”26 The “joke” stems
from an impossible erasure attempted by the American occupation
authorities — the “divine” emperor’s wartime association with
Japanese imperialist aggression was expected to vanish in favor of the
“human” emperor’s postwar championing of peace and democracy.27
In this sense, postwar Japan, not unlike fourteenth century Japan,
was ruled by “two” emperors — in the sense of the divided single
person of Hirohito, but also in the sense of the long shadows cast by
General Douglas MacArthur and the American occupation, shadows
that stretch far beyond the occupation’s official end in 1952. If, as
Dower argues, postwar Japan must be understood as a hybrid creature
constructed by “Americanized” Japanese and “Japanized” Americans,
then war responsibility must be similarly understood as a shared
project between the US and Japan. Both countries have contributed

to “official” narratives of the war and the atomic bombings that
simplify or exonerate the roles each nation played in these events.
For example, the previously discussed Japanese narrative of
victimization that refuses to acknowledge connections between
Hiroshima and Japanese wartime aggression, or the American
narrative that celebrates the atomic bomb as “the shining example
of American decisiveness, moral certitude, and technological
ingenuity in the service of the nation.”28 Onibaba’s allegorical
juxtaposition of the two emperors of the fourteenth century with the
double “emperors” of the twentieth century embraces Benjamin’s
temporality of Jetztzeit, when the past and present illuminate each
other in such a fashion that the “official” continuum of history
explodes. “Has the earth turned upside down?” the old woman asks
when Hachi speaks of unnatural war-related occurrences such as the
rising of a black sun and the substitution of night for day. These
images of solar eclipse are also images of atomic destruction, just as
the old woman’s question also pronounces the film’s allegorical
disruption of official narratives of war responsibility.
Woman and Ground Zero
Onibaba begins with a pre-credits sequence that introduces the

landscape. A high-angle shot overlooking a field of swaying reeds
tracks until it comes to rest on a large, dark hole. A cut abruptly
reverses this frame composition, switching to a low-angle shot that
tracks slowly upward from inside the hole. Another cut returns to
the previous high-angle shot. These three shots are accompanied by
a brief written narration: “A hole . . . deep and dark . . . a reminder
of ages past.” One striking effect of this sequence is the animation of
a supposedly barren landscape. The alternation between high and low-
angle shots lends the hole a kind of living presence, the beginnings
of a perspective of its own. The hole is the first “character” we meet
in Onibaba — it is the film’s narrative ground zero.
Of course, the hole might also be imagined as Onibaba’s
allegorical ground zero. John Whittier Treat notes how common it is
for hibakusha accounts to begin with an explanation of the narrator’s
156 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
precise distance from ground zero, “as if that place both permits and
curbs the words to follow.”29 The hole in Onibaba functions similarly
— it is the site of trauma in the landscape that both begins and ends
the lives of the people surrounding it. Hibakusha often divide their
lives into pre-atomic and post-atomic selves; the characters of
Onibaba must also reckon with the hole as a marker of radical life
changes — from farmer to killer, from subject of samurai to predator
on samurai, from “demon” to “human being.” This, however, is not
the hole’s lone purpose in the film. The hole also represents an
important component of Onibaba’s overtly sexualized landscape.
When Hachi “speaks” to the hole directly and confesses his thwarted
desire for a woman, he seems to identify the hole as a sign of
“woman.” The vaginal opening in the earth mirrors his unrequited
sexual desire back to him, just as his words return as echoes from
the hole’s depths. Once again, the conventional iconography of
Japanese victimization presents itself here, with ground zero coded
feminine according to the postwar cultural pattern described above
by Lisa Yoneyama. Yet in this case, the hole has significant
complements in the landscape that invite meanings other than
victimization as feminization. The seemingly endless field of reeds
also includes an anomalous, bare tree with twisted branches. The old
woman “uses” this tree in much the same manner that Hachi “uses”
the hole — she clutches the phallic trunk in a fit of sexual frustration,
while Hachi and the young woman make love. This parallelism
between Hachi and the old woman, drawn along lines of a bisexualized
landscape, complicates claims that the film imagines war solely
through feminine victimization. Instead, the hole as “woman” rhymes
with and matches the tree as “man,” just as the tree hosts the crows
who feed off corpses dumped into the hole. In addition, the cave
belonging to the trader Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), where the women
exchange their stolen spoils for provisions, bears strong graphic and
thematic resemblance to the hole. It is also a “deep and dark” space
where voices echo, and where the specter of death looms. Hachi meets
his demise here, surprised by a looter who has probably killed Ushi
as well. The cave is a male-dominated location for economic
transactions (whose ultimate collapse seems to critique contemporary
“economic nationalism” in Japan), but it suggests more kinship with
the hole than difference. In short, Onibaba’s ground zero exists within
a network of sites that resists tendencies to define a war-ravaged

landscape as either “masculine” or “feminine.”
Onibaba also subverts that aforementioned female icon of
Hiroshima representation, the “A-bomb maiden.” Maya Morioka
Todeschini has demonstrated how the “A-bomb maiden” typically
embodies qualities associated with an idealized (and desexualized)
female youth and beauty, stoic maternal sacrifice, and traditional
Japanese cultural values.30 Although Onibaba’s old woman evokes
the victimized hibakusha, she diverges radically from standard
conceptions of the “A-bomb maiden.” She is neither young nor
beautiful, and she retains a fierce sexuality. She struggles tenaciously
to maintain ties with the young woman, rather than accepting her
departure with silent, sacrificial resignation. The old woman’s
connection to traditional Japanese culture is similarly unorthodox.
As Keiko McDonald explains, her hannya mask originates from Noh
theater and symbolizes the “jealous fury that transforms a woman
into a demon” as well as an “internalized sorrow.”31 The mask’s
association with the old woman, however, does not celebrate the
classical Japanese theatrical tradition — instead, it functions as an
affliction. The mask does not safeguard ancient ways, but inflicts
modern wounds. If the typical “A-bomb maiden” stands for the
enduring beauty and innocence of traditional “Japaneseness” despite
the technological onslaught of the atomic bomb, then the old woman
of Onibaba presents the painful, occluded underside of this image.
The harrowing difference between the two speaks to the trauma of
Hiroshima, not its wishful redemption via an idealized femininity.
Does this grant Onibaba, against all expectation, a feminist
inflection on the representation of trauma? The eminent Japanese film
critic Sato Tadao includes Shindo, along with Mizoguchi Kenji and
Imamura Shōhei, among those directors who participate in “the
worship of womanhood,” a “special Japanese brand of feminism”
where “the image of a woman suffering uncomplainingly can imbue
us with admiration for a virtuous existence almost beyond our reach,
rich in endurance and courage.” For Sato, “one can idealize [these
women] rather than merely pity [them].” 32 I would argue that
Onibaba’s somewhat paradoxical “feminist” stance derives from its
ability to contest this “worship of womanhood” rather than inhabit
it in any straightforward manner. Sato himself admits that although
158 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
Shindo’s portrayal of women was influenced by his apprenticeship

with Mizoguchi, Shindo’s own version of womanhood worship
“revealed itself to be of a different hue.” The difference lay in the
movement from suffering to vengeance, a movement that leads Sato
to suggest that Shindo’s heroines of the 1960s “could have been a
reflection of postwar society, since it is commonly said that in Japan
women have become stronger because men have lost all confidence
in their masculinity due to Japan’s defeat.”33 But Sato’s “reflection”
here should not be confused with Benjamin’s sense of allegory.
Onibaba allegorizes Hiroshima in Benjaminian fashion not by
“reflecting” dominant narratives about Hiroshima, but by disrupting
the desire to map Hiroshima onto the “continuum of history”
constituted by these narratives. In other words, allegory poses
questions about how the “continuum of history” is constructed, how
it attains the authority to explain events such as Hiroshima. In this
sense, Onibaba is not so much a reflection of postwar Japanese society
as an interrogation of how and why the reflections look like they do.
Consequently, Onibaba emerges as a “feminist” film not by reflecting
the narratives of womanhood worship or an ascendant femininity
eclipsing a defeated masculinity, but by questioning the genesis and
validity of these narratives.
Even the film’s title, “demon hag,” gestures toward Onibaba’s
commitment to this work of interrogation. One popular way of
understanding the atomic bomb in postwar Japanese culture was as
an evil spirit, or a kind of demon. For example, Agawa Hiroyuki’s
novel Ma no isan (Devil’s Heritage, 1954), which was influential in
describing the medical effects of atomic radiation to a mass Japanese
audience, represents the bomb as explicitly demonic: “There was
nothing to do but to regard the atomic bomb as an evil spirit which
had appeared in the world in the form of a scientific creation.”34
Another popular way of understanding the bomb, as we have seen,
was as a switch point between Japanese national aggression (coded
masculine) and Japanese national victimization (coded feminine). In
both its title and its content, Onibaba defamiliarizes these two
discourses by combining them unexpectedly. Instead of the passive,
victimized beauty of a self-sacrificing woman, we see the violent
beauty of a resourceful “hag” bent on survival. Instead of an atomic
bomb decipherable only as an otherworldly evil spirit, we see the
ravages of an all-too-human war. And ultimately, alongside “demons,”

we see human beings.
Conclusion
This essay began by urging the revision of what it might mean to

allegorize Hiroshima. By drawing on Walter Benjamin’s sense of
allegory as a mode uniquely equipped to engage traumatic history, I
interpreted Shindo Kaneto’s Onibaba as a representation of Hiroshima
capable of recasting the critical bind between “realist” and
“allegorical” treatments of the atomic bomb in Japanese cinema. The
stakes of this recasting, as I argued, involve the politics underlying
discourses of victimization and war responsibility in postwar Japanese
culture, particularly in regard to how those discourses are gendered.
These discourses, in turn, construct narratives of Japanese national
consensus surrounding Hiroshima and the Second World War, and I
posited Onibaba’s allegorical engagement of the war as an
interrogation of these discourses. In short, I sought to investigate the
place of trauma, of “Hiroshima,” in the desire for a national identity
called “Japan.” I would like to conclude by briefly situating my claims
between this desire for a Japanese national identity and the different,
but related, desire for a Japanese national cinema.35
The need for coherence, for intelligibility, drives both of these
desires. Japan, like all nations, has a need to define itself to its own
citizens and to the world’s citizens, especially in the face of traumatic
events such as Hiroshima that might shatter national definitions. This
essay has demonstrated how Hiroshima becomes scripted into
dominant national narratives, into what Benjamin calls “the
continuum of history,” and how an allegorical representation such
as Onibaba challenges the validity of those narratives. The concept
of Japanese national cinema depends on its own set of dominant
narratives, its own mode of consensus. The calls from critics for
“responsible” Japanese representations of Hiroshima, defined as
“realist” rather than “allegorical,” are symptoms of a desire to define
Japanese national cinema along lines that favor the inclusion of certain
kinds of films and the marginalization of others. Such calls stem from,
and strengthen, a model of national cinema as critical pantheon,
160 ADAM LOWENSTEIN
constructed largely on a small canon of art films fortunate enough to

be exported and a stable of “name” directors recognized as auteurs.
In this model of national cinema, a genre film like Godzilla has little
significance as a representation of Hiroshima, while a film festival-
endorsed art film by a “name” director, such as Black Rain, attracts
much critical attention as a representation of Hiroshima.
This is not simply a problem of expanding the national canon to
include “popular” films as well as “art” films; there is a structural
problem in the very concept of “national cinema” that mirrors
dominant narratives of national history. Certain “national” traditions,
whether based in popular films or art films, become the lens through
which a nation’s cinema is understood to “evolve,” just as the nation’s
history “evolves” in accordance with dominant national narratives.
This trajectory, which often fosters a reliance on illusory national
“essences,” is consonant with the continuum of history rather than
with its blasting open. How might we disrupt this trajectory — what
Benjamin describes as the “homogenous, empty time” of conservative
historicism — in favor of the risky, momentary collision between past
and present that Benjamin finds characteristic of Jetztzeit, when one
can “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”?36
How might we generate the flash that will cast national history, the
history of a particular national cinema, and the relation between the
two into a constellation that denaturalizes their interconnection,
rather than rationalizes it?
Films such as Onibaba are especially crucial to consider in light
of these questions, for they straddle the divide between genre film
and art film that most models of non-US national cinema are built
upon and regulated through. From 1945 up until the 1980s, a nation’s
art cinema was often (but not always) designed for export and thus
doubled as the country’s “national cinema” in terms of international
visibility, while its genre cinema often (but not always) remained a
matter of domestic distribution. Of course, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
reminds us, “many of the films marketed in Britain and America
under the ‘art cinema’ label, and imagined to be somehow different
from ‘commercial’ [or “genre”] films, were in fact . . . mainstream
products in their country of origin.”37 But few of these “popular” art
films manage to interrogate the equation (again, framed with regard
to international visibility) of art cinema = non-genre cinema = national
cinema; in this sense, Onibaba is a notable exception. For example,

the Variety review of Onibaba denotes the film’s art cinema status
in a number of ways, not the least of which is the very existence of
the review in the first place — a fact that signifies the film’s visibility
for international distribution. Other markers include mention of the
art film trademarks of sexual candor exceeding Hollywood norms
(“This Japanese film may be the most nude, sexiest pic to be unveiled
in New York so far . . . may give censors a field day . . . unlike
American screen ways, to say the least”), narrative or stylistic
elements uncommon in Hollywood films (“so-called symbolism”), and
an association with a “name” director (“Kaneto Shindo . . . has turned
out many successful Nipponese dramas [particularly the highly
acclaimed The Island]”). Yet the film’s iconography of demons,
murder, and bodily mutilation align it with the horror genre as well
(“The older woman . . . uses a hideous mask to frighten her away . . .
Music accentuates the more horrendous sequences”).38 This is not
to say that Onibaba is absolutely unique for its era, even as a postwar
Japanese film that engages Hiroshima allegorically — a number of
important films immediately come to mind, in addition to Godzilla,
including Teshigahara Hiroshi’s Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes,
1963) and Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1966), Kobayashi
Masaki’s Kwaidan (1964), Shindo’s own Kuroneko (1968), and earlier
masterpieces such as Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari (Ugetsu, 1953)39
and Kurosawa’s Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being, 1955).
However, Onibaba’s cross-pollination of the horror film with the art
film helps provide the “moment of danger” necessary to illuminate
the collusion between desires for “national cinema” and for “national
identity.” If we, as viewers and scholars, can attend to such
illuminations, we may begin to honor Benjamin’s demand for blasting
open the continuum of history. We may also honor the spirit of
Shindo’s own dream of Jetztzeit, a two-hour depiction of one second
in Hiroshima, whether the film is ever made or not.
Part Three
Traumatic Memory,
Narrative, and the
Reconstruction
of History
7
Hiroshima, mon amour,
Trauma, and the Sublime
ANDREW SLADE
The sublime is an idea belonging to self-preservation.

— Edmund Burke
Trauma ruptures the world of our daily experiences. It is an intrusion

that threatens the body and psyche and affects us in symptomatic
ways. That something happened is certain, what that is, however,
resists comprehension and understanding. The impetus of much
contemporary trauma research in the humanities derives from the
coincidence of survivors’ insistence on the truth of their experiences
and life in a global culture that multiplies traumatic circumstances.
These circumstances pose a radical threat to the fecundity of human
life, to be sure, and also to the very possibility of brute survival. My
aim in this essay is to find a way in which experiences of terror may
acquire forms that will facilitate the necessary thinking through of
their significance to our present and future.
I will argue that the aesthetic of the sublime, as an aesthetics
embedded in the experience of terror and relief from terror, is one
way in which the collapse of the symbolic world, which gives meaning
and significance to human lives, may begin again to gain some critical
hold over catastrophic events of death. I am not concerned here with
private forms of traumatic experience like rape, incest, or other forms
of primarily domestic terror. While the analysis of the sublime is not
to diminish the importance of these events, it also allows me to
166 ANDREW SLADE
maintain a distinction between varieties of traumatic experiences. To

discuss trauma in all of its possible forms of terror indiscriminately
seems an irresponsible undertaking and runs the risk of
misunderstanding the complex differences among experiences. For this
reason, I am adopting the psycho-historical approach to trauma that
Robert Jay Lifton has articulated over the last thirty or more years.
This approach lets us see individual experiences in the context of
broader historical events without taking either their personal or public
value as primary.
In the first part of the essay I articulate what I see as the critical
points of Lifton’s thought about death events and their import for
human life and survival. In the second part I discuss my understanding
of the sublime and its intersection with traumatic experiences. Finally,
I show how figurations of sublime affect in the scenario of Hiroshima,
mon amour by Marguerite Duras become a way of presenting the
terror of the event all the while maintaining a commitment to life
and survival.
Sublime figurations like those we find in Duras’s texts and
scenario do not merely repeat the terrors of trauma, but are a means
of gaining some critical hold on the circumstances and events that
have shaped much of twentieth century life. The aesthetic of the
sublime is thus a means to achieve the working through of traumatic
events that Dominick LaCapra argues is central to thinking about
trauma. Working through is a psychical process that seeks to gain a
critical hold on the disparate images of traumatic experiences, and
thus is the privileged mode of thought about trauma as it moves
beyond the symptomatic repetition of images and offers the subject
some critical purchase on the events that haunt him or her.1
Trauma and Survival
E. Ann Kaplan succinctly summarizes the contemporary

understanding of trauma:
The structure of trauma is precisely that of repeated rupture of

safety and comfort by terror from some past incomprehensible
event. The event possesses one without one having known it
HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, TRAUMA, AND THE SUBLIME 167
cognitively. The event was not processed through language or

mechanisms of meaning.2
In the aftermath of the catastrophic death event a symbolic world

needs to be refashioned. The symptomatic repetitions of the event
menace the effort to render it significant yet the drive for order pushes
us to find a way to ascribe some significance to those events and
circumstances. From the ruins, something new will come about,
something else will happen. The existence of ruins testifies to the
persistence of being, that something remains. The task is to learn to
think the significance of survival among the ruins.
Perhaps the best we can do is to proceed along this line with
caution, vigilance. For the fact that people survive brings us into
intimate contact with events that may never have even touched us.
Robert Jay Lifton has worked on the question of human survival in a
world where humans consistently work to ensure their own demise.
This work has led him to interrogate the psychical structures of
survival, which he has cast in a model of death and the continuity of
life. While there is death, life continues. This simple observation
begins and ends Lifton’s questioning of the how of continuity. Lifton
never dissociates the means and methods of human survival from
the material conditions of history; his studies link him to the
catastrophes of the modern world, Auschwitz and Dachau, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War,
the nuclear arms race. His theoretical, clinical, and political
engagements with this world and the threats it has posed and
continues to pose to human survival render his writings particularly
relevant to the present discussion of psychical traumas and the
consequent efforts to give a figure and form to the history that
produced them. I hope to retain from Lifton’s thought the critical
engagement with the real of history that characterizes his writing
about, and understanding of, human survival.
Lifton articulates a definition of survival that includes the
personal, private and the public dimensions of trauma in terms of
knowledge. Our survival is linked to whatever knowledge we may
have gained from the circumstances of our lives. Survivors seem
marked with special forms of knowledge to which the rest of us do
not have access:
168 ANDREW SLADE
But whatever it is the survivor knows, that knowledge is bound

up with the dialectic between life and death, with dying and
being reborn. In my Hiroshima study I defined the survivor as
one who has come into contact with death in some bodily or
psychic fashion and has himself remained alive. I spoke of a
survivor ethos, thrust into special prominence by the holocausts
of the twentieth century, imposing upon all of us a series of
immersions into death which mark our existence. I would go
further now and say that we are survivors not only of holocausts
which have already occurred but of those we imagine or
anticipate as well.3
According to Lifton, the survivor dwells in the circumstances

inaugurated by the catastrophic event and is bound to his or her status
in a relation of death and rebirth. Furthermore, these circumstances
and the survivor within them elaborate an ethos in which death
touches all of us. Jean-François Lyotard puts the situation elegantly:
“The word survivor implies that a being who is dead or should have
died is still living” [Le mot survivant implique qu’une entité qui est
morte ou devrait l’être est encore en vie].4 The survivor has witnessed
some event of death. From the particularity of survivors, Lifton
elaborates a generalized feeling of survival: a survivor ethos pervades
the century and touches all of us. Not only the victims of catastrophic
events and circumstances, but all of us suffer these events in ways
that we may not even know or understand. The degree of this
suffering, its manifestations, and the manner of its alleviation vary
widely. But variation does not erase the effects of these events.
Because of the history in whose shadows we dwell, our lives have
been marked by undeniable and indelible death. The history we
cannot deny or escape immerses us in death, and survival becomes a
fact of existence. Traumatic events, events of death, lie at the core of
this existence.
This particular critical imagination demands to be thought
through in its own right. According to Dominick LaCapra, we must
engage the events of the past as part of the critical project of working
through the effects of those same events. Repetitive behaviors or
compulsive acting out are the general form of the symptoms that
possess traumatized persons. Following Laplanche and Pontalis,5
LaCapra finds the place of the psychical and historical work of trauma
in the containment of repetition. Here the historian opts for a Freudian

stance toward the traumatic past in which working through becomes
the privileged psychical process that contains the repetitions of
traumatic symptoms and offers “a measure of critical purchase on
problems and responsible control in action which would permit
desirable change.”6 This intellectual work cannot lay the past to rest,
but opens a field in which the future may be so organized as to liberate
humans from the traps of repetition. Contrary to the position I will
develop below, LaCapra finds in the sublime a fixation on the
repetitions of subjects acting out their traumatic past. For him the
turn to the sublime does not coincide with the process of working
through, but illustrates its impossibility. To make this argument, he
follows Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek’s articulation of the sublime from The Sublime
Object of Ideology. According to LaCapra,
The sublime object of ideology itself emerges as the Lacanian

Real — an unsymbolizable limit or unrepresentable kernel of
experience. Indeed, in Z̆iz̆ek the sublime seems to involve
fixation on a radically ambivalent transvaluation of trauma as
the universal hole in Being or the abstractly negative marker of
castration.7
LaCapra understands the sublime primarily from Z̆iz̆ek’s idiosyncratic

presentation, and I find myself much in agreement with LaCapra.
However, it is far too hasty to align the sublime with a fixation on
trauma. While Z̆iz̆ek’s text does point in that direction, I am not at
all convinced that this is the only way in which to understand the
sublime today. Traumatic experiences cast us in the role of survivor
and the sublime is one, perhaps the privileged means of presentation
in aesthetics that gives form to that survival.
If survival is the existential condition of modern life, its psychical
condition is what Lifton calls “psychic numbing.” In the death
immersion characterized by modern traumatic circumstances and
experiences, the psyche unleashes crucial defense mechanisms that
overlap greatly around the issue of feeling and not feeling.8 Numbing
aims at a zero degree of stimulation, a subjective closing off against
terror and death that makes the possibility of continuity in the future
existentially possible. Numbing is thus a defensive stance taken
against a world in which violence threatens annihilation of the self.
170 ANDREW SLADE
This disconnection is accomplished in two ways: first, by the

blocking of images or of feelings associated with certain images,9 and
secondly by a diffusion of images. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno
van der Hart10 have shown that in Pierre Janet’s case history of Irène
a certain context of images would instigate a total re-enactment of
her traumatic experiences — the scene of her mother’s death. They
follow Janet’s division of memory into ordinary and traumatic
memory. Ordinary memory constructs past events according to the
logic of narrative in which one event connects to others in a whole,
integral story. Traumatic memory has no social component; it is not
addressed to anybody, the patient does not respond to anybody; it is
a solitary activity.11 These traumatic memories are the effect of a
psychical dissociation from the traumatic event. The models of
dissociation (Janet) and blocking of images and feelings (Lifton)
demonstrate the psychical distance involved in the response to
traumatic events and their power to disconnect us from the
significance and meaning of our personal histories. These processes
occur in relation primarily to a past event, to something that has
happened already and that cannot be integrated into common,
narrative memory.
A second path that numbing may take, according to Lifton, refers
us to events that have yet to happen to us; he characterizes this path
by absence of images, the lack of prior experience in relation to an
event.12 This second way indicates a numbing with regard to a future,
unforseeable, and unimaginable event. Lifton’s examples include
global, nuclear holocaust and apocalyptic violence perpetrated by the
likes of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which released toxic sarin gas in the
Tokyo subway in 1997.13 This form of numbing has its origins in the
knowledge of past catastrophic events and the impossibility of
imagining such events happening before they happen. It is thereby
an effort to defend the psyche from future terrors.
Numbing defends the psyche from events of death, but only at a
price: “When numbing occurs, the symbolizing process — the flow
and re-creation of images and forms — is interrupted. And in its
extreme varieties, numbing itself becomes a symbolic death.”14 This
symbolic death occurs as the result of a defense against death. Hence,
the threat of (real) death is enough (sometimes) to effect a (symbolic)
death. To better understand and nuance this position, Lifton
differentiates three general levels of numbing. These are 1) “the

numbing of massive death immersion” 2) “the numbing of
enhancement” and 3) “the numbing of everyday life.” The first sort
of numbing, that of the immersion in death takes the form of a
“radical dissociation of the mind from its own earlier modes of
response — from constellations of pain and pleasure, love and loss,
and general capacity for fellow feeling built up over a human lifetime”
(104). Clearly, this form of numbing shares much with van der Kolk
and van der Hart’s discussion of “dissociation” as Janet understands
the term in relation to the case of Irène. Immersion in the death event
and witnessing others die may be enough to jamb meaning-making
forms of inscription in memory. Normal mental processes “shut
down,” and the dissociation of numbing takes over.
The second level of numbing, the numbing of enhancement is a
different kind of psychic process. This form of numbing allows one
to continue to perform the specialized tasks of one’s life. Lifton points
to the “selective, professional numbing of the surgeon, who cannot
afford to feel the consequences of failure” (105). A good surgeon must
be able to disconnect him or herself from the pain of failure if he or
she will continue to be a good surgeon. Artists and intellectuals may,
“block out a great number of influences in order to enhance” their
work, painting, music, writing. This kind of numbing functions in
the service of any number of human achievements and amounts to
an acute focus of attention in a narrow range of feelings and images.
It, nonetheless, disconnects us from those activities and experiences
outside the range of our specializations.
The numbing of everyday life is the most difficult and problematic
of these levels of numbing. Between blocking of painful images of
the past and the absence of images for the future, Lifton proposes
this dimension of numbing in what appears to be a contradictory
fashion. In the numbing of everyday life he says, “the ordinary brain
functions of keeping out stimuli becomes strained by the image
overload characteristic of our time” (105). Neither dissociation from
images nor lack of images, this level of numbing points to a
fundamental principal in all of Lifton’s writing; that is, death and life,
trauma and survival, cannot be simply counterposed. This level of
numbing challenges us to understand the link between the pain of
massive death immersion and the disconnection that characterizes
172 ANDREW SLADE
the difference between the proliferation of images and the place they
occupy in the symbolic order. For Lifton, images are necessary and
important vehicles for meaning in human life. In an interview with
Cathy Caruth he says, “Images and meaning are inseparable.”15 But
the images that bear meaning cannot float unconnected without
extending and exacerbating psychical numbing. The myriad of images
produced in the holocausts of this century require a symbolic context,
an interpretive function, if the numbing of everyday life will be, if
not overcome, limited. Giving a meaning to these images, however
limited that meaning is and in spite of the fact that it is not
necessarily redemptive and certainly not totally adequate to the loss,
opens a route to a possible fecundity in the future. The reflection on
death and the continuity of life serves as the ground of hope for the
future. “We are reflecting on ourselves and our situation in the service
of greater awareness. And in that awareness, even just its beginning,
lies our hope.”16
To write about or to film traumatic circumstances requires that
one approach the core of the event and try to relate it to other
significant events that may be able to withstand its power. The effort
to tell the story of the event bears witness to the desire to re-establish
a significant world. The task of imagining the events and giving them
significant form belongs to the artist. “The artist is the prophet of
forms. And when forms are in radical disarray, the artist suggests
patterns of reordering, even if, in the process, seeming to contribute
to their further disarray.” 17 The art of survival entails not the
representation of traumatic death, but the presentation of an order,
however minimal, that gives form to the images of death. The rift
between traumatic death events and the continuity of life appears to
be so great that nothing can contain their power. It is true that the
terror of Hiroshima or of the gas chambers troubles the limits of
representation. Yet, forms need to be sought and tried in order to
discover means that will secure critical hold on the events. This
undertaking abides as a crucial and unending task.18
The Sublime, Then and Now
The aesthetics of the sublime may provide one way to gain such
critical hold and of furthering the task of understanding. Undoubtedly,

the word “sublime” conjures images of the lonely traveler in awe of
monumental nature, or of the power of violent storms whose
maelstrom threatens the solitary witness. Indeed, the sublime seems
to be inextricable from Romanticism of various forms in which the
individual is transported by torrents of emotion evoked by the
presentation of some terrible, terrifying, monumental, grandiose,
dangerous object. Even Lyotard, whose writing has reinvigorated the
philosophical thinking of this family of affects, has situated the
sublime firmly in line with a Romantic lexicon. In The Inhuman
Lyotard comments, “Obviously the word is from a romantic
vocabulary.”19 Eighteenth century thought catalogues sublime images,
and we find among the instigators of sublime affect, all manner of
beasts, monumental and destructive nature. While thinking about
nature in its terrifying aspects may have been sufficient to provoke
sublime feelings in the eighteenth century, it seems that progress in
terror’s technology renders this perspective anachronistic to our time.
Hence, we must break with those elements of the eighteenth century
that no longer hold true. The point is not to reject the category of
the sublime, but to reconstruct its philosophical, cultural, and
aesthetic import to our age.
In order to illustrate my differences with this romantic
understanding of the sublime, I turn now to a passage from Burke’s
essay to illustrate how I understand the project of linking the
aesthetics of the sublime with the thought of historical trauma. For
Lifton trauma points to a loss of meaningful forms to present human
significance; in the sublime, what is at stake is the inability of the
mind to form the presentations of the world in a comprehensible
fashion. In section VII of A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origins of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke gives a generalized
definition of the sublime:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and

danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is
conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is
productive of the strongest emotion of which the mind is capable
of feeling.20
174 ANDREW SLADE
Terror is the central element of the sublime, but “terror” does not
receive a specific lexical meaning — so long as pain is present, terror
happens. For Burke, pain and pleasure are axiomatic; they are “simple
ideas, incapable of definition” (30). Between pleasure and pain, pain
is the more powerful of the two: “I say the strongest emotion, because
I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those
which enter on the side of pleasure”; terror is the limit case of pain
in so far as “the mind is capable of feeling” it (36). Terror demarcates
a limit interior to pain, beyond which the mind would be incapable
of feeling anything at all. Beyond terror and pain resides death:
But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is

in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there
are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred
to death: nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so,
more painful, is, that it is considered an emissary of the king of
terrors. (36)
At the limit, pain announces the way to death, the king of terror. We
can endure a certain amount of pain at a certain degree of intensity21
and from a certain distance, but not death. For terror to spill over
into delight, the relief from terror that offers the pleasures of the
sublime, it must not come too close, must not threaten us too
intimately. If terror breaches this limit, it becomes anesthetic: “When
danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any
delight, and are simply terrible.”22 Beyond this limit, there is only
death. At the core of the thought of the sublime, the thought of the
death event abides. But we survive beyond this death event and this
may orient our thought simultaneously to a future flourishing without
forgetting (entirely) the death equivalent that marks the past. The
survival of terror opens us to the field of pleasure known to Burke as
delight, although in the modern transformations of terror, it has
become difficult to think of pleasure even long after the event has
happened, as a legitimate feeling. For the working through of
traumatic histories, it becomes necessary to learn to confront our
pleasures in the present with the pain of the past.
The link between trauma and the sublime falls apart here, some
might object. Indeed, for Burke, the boundary between pain and its
relief cannot be breached. Traumatic experiences and death
equivalents never delight us, in spite of the fact that they cease —
that is, some people survive. I do not dispute this; the event as trauma,
its terror, is not where I situate an aesthetic of the sublime. Instead,
the aesthetics of the sublime serves as a support for the existential
fact of survival. The sublime is an imaginative field, a family of affects
(Lyotard) that is linked to a family of figures that serve in the work
of the working through of traumatic events and circumstances.
Historical trauma has produced and continues to produce an immense
body of literary and cultural objects that give form to these events
via linguistic or plastic presentation. These presentations seek an
idiom to articulate the impossible, the unpresentable. My claim is
that we can find this idiom in a reconstructed aesthetics of the
sublime that emphasizes less the elements of the grand, the noble,
the human, and instead focuses on terror and its limit, death: an
aesthetics that renders the inhuman in the human. The aesthetics of
the sublime in this understanding originates in the event of death
and configures the fact of survival. The presentation of sublime images
constitutes the formative, symbolic work of that survival. In the crisis
of forms that trauma inaugurates, the aesthetics of the sublime
becomes the most appropriate means to reconfigure historical losses.
Texts such as Hiroshima, mon amour do not provoke in us a “positive
pleasure” but the complicated feeling of delight, it is the feeling of
pleasure in pain — a pleasure that suffers. For Burke, delight is the
positive feeling that comes from the removal or suspension of terror;
removal of privation causes the positive feeling of delight. “The
affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this
case it certainly is, a sort of Privation.”23 Delight constitutes the field
of feeling, which will allow us to learn to think with pain.
As in trauma, what is at stake in the sublime is a terror of
endings.24 Trauma is the approach of death or its equivalents to a
subject; historical events of a public or private scope foreclose the
subject’s future and scar him or her permanently. In trauma, we
remain, and rightly so, concerned with the terror of death. In the
sublime we begin to consider the pleasures of life in survival. In the
tradition inaugurated by Edmund Burke, the sublime arrives as a
threat held at bay, never consummated, suspended. The terrifying
object or event touches us, but never intimately; if it comes too close,
it will be “simply terrible.” The traumatic event is merely terrible,
176 ANDREW SLADE
painful; it is intimacy with death. The experience of death and pain

through “death equivalents” are not, in themselves, primarily
aesthetic, but become the material conditions for the search for forms
of presentation that the working through of history and experience
requires. The aesthetic of the sublime attempts to find a way to
present the events of terror and death that preserves their terror
without reproducing it. A reproduction of trauma offers no way of
gaining critical hold on the event, what psychoanalytical theories of
trauma, like LaCapra’s, understand as “acting out.” Sublime
presentation through plastic or verbal images preserves the terror of
presentation together with a promise of continuity. Thus Lyotard
stated:
The arts, whatever their materials, pressed forward by the

aesthetics of the sublime in search of intense effects, can and
must give up the imitation of models that are merely beautiful,
and try out surprising, strange, shocking combinations. Shock
is, par excellence, the evidence of (something) happening, rather
than nothing, suspended privation.25
We should add that this art does not merely search for intense effects,
but is born of them. It does not only aim to shock, but is born of the
experience of shock itself: shocked by the fact of survival, art dwells
in the pain and the pleasure of living on after death. Just as we cannot
deny the pain of trauma, we cannot deny the pleasures, however
complicated those are, of survival.
Duras, the Traumatic, the Sublime
Although not a survivor of Auschwitz or of Hiroshima herself, Duras’s

writing dwells under their dark shadow. A child permanently scarred
by the ravages of war and mass murder of the Nazi and the American
kind, she writes the possibility of desire in these shadows. In this
Duras shares the motto of Bertolt Brecht:
Motto
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.26
Duras’s narrations attempt to sing the darkness, to sing the pain, to

sing the crimes we commit, continue to commit, the darkness we
cannot expel from ourselves. Duras’s aesthetic project grapples with
death by attempting to “grasp the death encounter and render it
significant.”27 What Lifton accomplishes in the discourse of psychiatry
and history, Duras pursues in the imaginative field of the novel and
film.
Duras’s narrations escape the traumatic core that energizes them
through a discourse of inventions, lies, memory, and forgetfulness.
Duras’s characters speculate as they remember; they invent the
present rather than repeat the past. The aesthetics of the sublime
permits this in the most comprehensive way because it finds its base
in the undeniable pain of history, all the while seeking respite in new
forms that are adequate to the experience and that can speak the truth
of that experience. While this approach runs the risk of coming very
close to a formalism of the sublime, it is, paradoxically enough, in
this insistence on form that we come closest to historical work.
Traumatic events themselves, while situated in history, occur as
ruptures in it. Only in a recounting do the events become properly
historical, that is, given a meaning, truth value, and context. My
insistence on forms of expression and presentation, what Lifton calls
symbolization, becomes a primary way to write the history of the
process of human survival. The aesthetic of the sublime acknowledges
its insufficiency with regard to determinations about the truth of
history, but its power resides in its ability to present what knowledge
cannot comprehend. Trauma disrupts the truth of experience, and as
Cathy Caruth notes well, it provokes a crisis in truth as a crisis in
correspondence. For at the moment when we are closest to the event,
we cannot judge the truth of that event. Traumatic experiences
cannot, at the time of their happening, be subsumed into categories
that allow us to understand them as experiences. 28 Traumatic
experiences ruin truth. They ruin the predication of truth or falsehood
to propositions. While the sublime will never give us the truth of
the event, it will show us a field where enjoyment may enter again
into life. Trauma indicates an event of death; the sublime includes
an event of death in suspension, a death that does not arrive, a death
that threatens to happen but never happens. After this suspension, a
second movement of life against death, a commitment to survival,
178 ANDREW SLADE
the possibility to enjoy again surges forth. To think the survival of

trauma in the context of broad psychical numbing, we must, as
Maurice Blanchot instructs, “Learn to think with pain” [Apprends à
penser avec douleur].29 To learn to think with pain requires giving a
form to the source of that pain. The sublime becomes a privileged
field for the reconstruction of meaning conferring signs not because
it fixates us to traumatic history, but because it can think the present
with the memory of the terrifying past.
Hiroshima
Following such experiences, whose horror should have, in

principle — but in the end, what is this principle? — left the
world quaking, the desire to put an end to them is more
powerless than it ever was. We live in a darkness without fear
and without hope.
— Georges Bataille 30
In darkness with neither fear nor hope, numbed, the love affair
between a French actress and a Japanese architect simply happens.
The scenario for Hiroshima, mon amour that Duras provided for Alain
Resnais’s film serves as the base for this discussion of the negotiation
of darkness, terror, and the ecstasies of desire. The narration that
characterizes Resnais’s film becomes the hallmark of Duras’s own
narrative style. Her sparse, even bare dialogue, silences, and her use
of indeterminate references work to enthrall readers or hearers of her
words.
Duras’s scenario of Hiroshima, mon amour 31 opens with a
layering of image and text. Ultimately not used in the film, but
retained in the scenario, Duras counterposes the mushroom cloud of
the Bikini island explosion with the image of the naked shoulders of
the lovers in an embrace. With the contradictory images of death and
continuing desire, the first discussion in the film occurs as a reading:
“A man’s voice, flat and calm, as if reciting, says: He: You saw nothing
in Hiroshima. Nothing” (15) [Une voix d’homme, mate et calme,
récitative, annonce: Lui: Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien] (16). To
this enigmatic speech, Duras instructs the second voice, of a woman,
“also flat, muffled, monotonous, the voice of someone reciting,

replies: She: I saw everything. Everything” (15) [Très voilée, mate
également, une voix de lecture récitative, sans pontuaction, répond:
Elle: J’ai tout vu. Tout] (Duras’s emphases, 16). The insistence on the
recitative quality of the speech between him and her continues
through the first part of the film. It indicates the resistance of memory
of the events the film will come to disclose. Recitation serves as a
mechanism of defense against the power of representation that places
the text and the writing in close proximity to the painful images of
death; the bomb on Hiroshima and the death of the German lover in
Nevers.
As “She” approaches the story of her impossible desire for the
German, her enunciations lose their deliberate, read quality. To
present the traumas of impossible desire, desire after the death events
at Nevers and Hiroshima, Duras presents images of the sublime that
grapple with the events of history in the continuity of life. Like
Duras’s other narrations, the scenario of Hiroshima, mon amour falls
apart when one tries to follow the truth of the enunciations.32 It is
uncertain how we are to understand the truth of the text when the
speakers consistently lie: “He: When you talk, I wonder whether you
lie or tell the truth. She: I lie. And I tell the truth. But I don’t have
any reason to lie to you. Why?” (35) [Lui: Quand tu parles, je me
demande si tu mens ou si tu dis la vérité. Elle: Je mens. Et je dis la
vérité. Mais à toi je n’ai pas de raisons de mentir. Pourquoi?. . . ] (41).
This form of discourse interrupts the usual economy of sense and
non-sense. Traumatic events, Caruth claims, provoke a crisis in truth.
This crisis appears in Duras’s texts as the collapse of discursive forms
of knowing. The collapse of the discourse of truth and lies reveals an
option beyond them, the possibility for sublime presentation. This
presentation takes several forms in the film, the presentation of ruins,
of fragments of speech, of natural images of the sublime, and non-
discursive forms of communication, cries, and caresses.
The ruins at Nevers signal the collapse of a vibrant world and at
the same time witness the endurance of desire beyond that
destruction. In the scene showing the illicit lovers’ embrace at the
base of an arch, the conflict of past and present holds our attention.
The spectator knows from the conversations in Hiroshima that this
desire leads to death and not fecundity. The lovers know the
180 ANDREW SLADE
impossibility of their future, yet they hold onto their desire, they
follow it. Their desire becomes a sublime desire which carries death
and madness with it and whose pleasures dwell in the terror of death.
The sublime image of the lovers gives a general model for desire: “She:
At first we met in barns. Then among the ruins. And then in rooms.
Like anywhere else” (48) [Elle: On s’est d’abord rencontré dans des
granges. Puis dans des ruines. Et puis dans des chambres. Comme
partout] (62). The sublime enters in desire among the ruins; desire is
not free, flourishing, beautiful, but ecstatic, devastating, ruinous in
spite of its commitment beyond ruin in the ruins.
The sublime appears in Hiroshima, mon amour also as the ruins
of language, or syntactical fragmentation. Such fragmentation, again,
circulates around desire and love: “He: You give me great desire to
love. She: Always . . . chance love affairs . . . me too” (41) [Lui: Tu
me donnes beaucoup l’envie d’aimer . . . Elle: Toujours . . . les amours
. . . rencontre. Moi aussi. . . .] (53). The fragmentation of her
enunciations signifies a difficult affirmation in the context of the ruins
of desire. She has already suffered the madness of impossible desire,
and goes toward it again, among the ruins of Hiroshima. The sublime
points to an object that is impossible to comprehend (to take together,
to understand in toto). When the enunciation nearly falls apart, the
scenario instructs: “Some extraordinary object, not clearly defined,
passes between them. I see a square frame, some (atomic?) very precise
form, but without the least idea what it’s used for” (41) [Passe entre
eux un extraordinaire objet de nature imprécise. Je vois un cadre de
bois (atomium?) d’une forme très précise mais dont l’utilisation
échappe complètement] (53). Where language fragments, sublime
objects appear as the supplement to the terror of silence that a
fragmenting language imposes. At other times when discourse fails,
other forms of communication intervene to signal terror and relief
from terror. The privileged form of communication is the cries,33
which tend to signal the terror of death in Hiroshima, mon amour.
While she is in the cellar of her father’s house at Nevers, cries become
her connection to the world. Such connections are in fact,
disconnections, for they do not open a path that would offer others a
way to respond. Crying out, she signals only her isolation and solitude.
However, what binds the two lovers together more than any
discursive function is the body. We see the bodies of the lovers in
sublime figurations throughout the film. Desire itself becomes

sublime and this process of forming desire among the ruins is an effort
to give form to traumatic history. If we take as an example her hands
as they grip the Japanese lover and her hands as they cling to the
cellar wall at Nevers, we see the terror of loss and the ecstasies of
survival. These ecstasies, however, remain mixed with pain and
stained by loss. The loss persists as she condenses her dead German
lover and the lover of Hiroshima into one. The question thus arises
whether her desire is committed to the Japanese lover or whether
she remains attached interminably to the dead man of Nevers. In the
end “He” and “She” both appear as interminably bound to their
histories, each one assuming the name of the site of the trauma:
Hiroshima and Nevers. In spite of their desire, in spite of its sublime
power and testament to survival, its ecstasies remain limited and
bound to pain. But is this not also the strength of the aesthetics of
the sublime, that it links enjoyment and terror? It does not hide the
terror or ask us to forget it, but links our pleasure to our pain.
Michael Roth claims that Hiroshima, mon amour is “douée de
memoire” [endowed with memory] because the film remembers that
forgetting happens.34 Writing as a historian committed against
forgetting, he makes a compelling case for the historical argument.
But from the perspective of the aesthetics of the sublime, the film
and scenario (which has been my main object of study here) present
the beyond of forgetting and memory. As interminable desire among
ruins, the film takes us beyond memory and forgetting to consider
the pain and pleasure of living after the catastrophic death event. The
death event at the core of the narration hovers at the limit of
presentation between origin and destination, the thought of history
and possible transformations for a felicitous future. For Lifton, the
thought of the traumatic in history thrusts itself upon us as a
condition that we suffer. In this condition, Duras’s narration unleashes
the aesthetic of the sublime as a critical response to the culture of
death inaugurated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz and
Dachau.
8
Encountering Paralysis
Disability, Trauma and Narrative
PETRA KUPPERS
Cathy Caruth’s explorations of trauma and memory detail trauma’s

status in relation to reference, namely the relationship between
immediate experience and language.1 With this, Caruth intervenes
in “the concern that the epistemological problems raised by
poststructuralist criticism necessarily lead to political and ethical
paralysis.”2 She posits that trauma allows for us
. . . a rethinking of reference [that] is aimed not at eliminating

history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at
precisely permitting history to arise where immediate
understanding may not. (11)
Mediation, distance, repetition — these processes which intervene

in the “immediate understanding” — allow for a different path
towards the “other” and her story. In traumatic narrative, the story
is not fully there, not fully owned by discourse and is not within the
mastery of the individual. In place of the masterful narrative, a new
communication can emerge in and through the sites and bodies of
trauma, a communication in which shared distances, not sameness,
act as points of connection. Caruth analyses the film Hiroshima, mon
amour (Alain Resnais, 1960) as such a narrative of missed immediacy,
of translation, passings and misunderstandings. As she puts it:
184 PETRA KUPPERS
It is indeed the enigmatic language of untold stories — of

experiences not yet completely grasped — that resonates,
throughout the film, within the dialogue between the French
woman and the Japanese man, and allows them to communicate,
across the gap between their cultures and their experiences,
precisely through what they do not directly comprehend. Their
ability to speak and to listen in their passionate encounter does
not rely, that is, on what they simply know of one another, but
on what they do not fully know in their own traumatic pasts. In
a similar way, a new mode of seeing and of listening — a seeing
and a listening from the site of trauma — is opened up to us as
spectators of the film, and offered as the very possibility, in a
catastrophic era, of a link between cultures. (56)
Social history can become obliquely accessible through the halting

narrative of the personal, the physical, the individual, the positing of
gaps in meaningful, but not fully owned places.
In Hiroshima, mon amour, the rupture in the life of the film’s
individuals occurs when they arrive too late: the Japanese man is
absent from the bombing of Hiroshima, the French woman arrives to
find her lover dying. But what happens to places of trauma and the
relationship to time when the trauma is the violent rupture within
one’s body? How can a story be told across the bodily difference of
disability, a difference marked as “tragic” within narrative economy,
and a difference full of social meanings of exclusion? How can a
communication be established across this divide of cultural and
physical difference, allowing a story of pain to emerge without
drowning it out with known references?
This essay tells a story about the relationship between time,
rupture and narrative in a dancing and disabled body, a story that is
made accessible through the medium of film. The body, a woman’s
body, a disabled body, a dancing body, a body in a film, a person —
these are some of the meeting places of the personal and the public
that are touched upon, queried and ruptured in the images,
communications and translations of film.
ENCOUNTERING PARALYSIS 185
Trauma, Disability and Narrative
The over-determination of disability in everyday discourse is easily

underestimated, but the body and its states act as powerful meaning-
carriers in discourse. Caruth’s statement, quoted above, noted a
“political and ethical paralysis” [my emphasis]. Many tropes of
language rely on these physical references of visibility and mobility.
Paralysis (and blindness, and “crippling,” and amputation, and
abortion) — these words resonate beyond the “abstract,” and have
meaning in the order of bodies and the psychic. These meanings are
reiterated in discourse and practice through the use and re-use of their
negative connotation in communication, for instance in film
narrative. This marking of disability as negative within the cultural
narrative economy undermines social attempts to revalue disability,
and to bring disabled people out of the ghetto of abjection.
How can the unknowability and individuality of the physical
and psychic experience of another being be safeguarded against
language’s power to determine and name? To unfix the physical
experience of paralysis from its known parameters without
undermining the psychic and social effects of disability is a task
similar to the dilemma facing feminists in their quest to mobilize
“woman” as an identity category without losing a communal,
identificatory political base. The disruption of disability to an
individual’s life can be (but need not be) physically and psychically
painful, but is most likely painful in its encounter with the social.
The social narrative of disability sees it as negativity, and the social
world excludes disabled people through environmental and attitudinal
barriers. Language and narrative re-present disability as pain and
tragedy. These markers and meanings help to determine the
“knowledge” of disability in the disabled and non-disabled individual’s
psyche and physis. Disability, like trauma, is a concept on the
borderline of the private and public, an experience that is
problematically represented in language.
Trauma and disability therefore articulate related problems in the
referential nature of narrative and language — the inability of narrative
and language to access and express immediate experience. While
trauma studies explores the non-narrational nature of trauma —
holocaust historians have battled against the containment of horror
186 PETRA KUPPERS
in safe structures — disability studies (like identity politics/

representation studies) battles against narrative overdetermination.
Trauma is that which cannot be incorporated because of its
disruptive break, the horrifying immediacy. These become the focus
for memory-work and compulsive attempts at narrativisation. Trauma
is a moment out of flow — a moment out of time, unable to be
smoothly reintegrated into the temporal flow. Trauma exists within
discursive practice on the horizon of narrativity: it is the block which
does not allow full narrative, but which nevertheless sets it (and its
repetition) in motion.
The experience of disability is often figured as a traumatic
personal history, culturally marked as “private” tragedy. Within
literature and film, disability often becomes the symptom of trauma:
like Freud’s hysterical women, disabled actors carry the stigma of their
personal histories as readable signs on their bodies. The symbolic
nature of disability characterises moments of film narrative.3 The
stereotyping of Victorian melodrama and its use of innocent blind
maidens live on in contemporary filmmaking. One carrier of this
narrative device is the little lame boy in the different film and story
versions of The Secret Garden: as soon as he is able to face his
loneliness, his captivity, and grow more “adult” in his relationship
with others, he is able to walk again. As soon as the knot is undone,
the trauma reintegrated and narrativised, the disability can vanish.
Disability can act as a readable sign — it can be used as a
dramaturgical device, a short-hand, in film or performance. The inner
life of a character is expressed in his limp, her “sensitive” blindness,
his muteness. It can provide a recognisable “trauma moment” — a
defining point in a character’s life, open to all to read, and a start to
a good yarn.
Paralysis is the theme of a short film about moving bodies, The
Fall, by Darshan Singh Bhuller. This ten-minute film was first
screened by the BBC in 1991. The Fall can be read as a symptom for
the desire for narrative and narrative’s instability in relation to
“immediate knowledge” of physical history. The film works with
relational knowledges from different kinds of speech: film knowledge
about the conventions of memory and flashbacks, awareness of TV
genres such as docu-dramas or the “fly-on-the-wall” documentary,
and the knowledge of selfhood and body-truth that accompanies the
“common-sense” response to both a disabled body, and to the activity

of dancing.
The Fall is a film in constant motion, not allowing either its
characters or its spectator to rest peacefully in one place. The
narration recoils, points forward and backward, distrusts itself.4 The
film is set up as a relatively conventional narrative:5 we see a woman
in a wheelchair, who is working on a clay sculpture. As she switches
the radio on, she loses her balance and falls backwards. A man in
another room rushes to help her, but while she is on the floor we
hear a radio program, probably about her life, and we see flashbacks
showing moments of it. The first flashback shows a carefree child
dancing with a male adult. Then we see a young dancer exploring
the space by herself, later joined by a male partner. Next we see the
woman as a “broken body” in a back brace, moved to music by the
tender partner, and lastly on her own in a wheelchair, moving herself,
but twisting her face and body in anger. Finally, the man reaches her
and lifts her up again. She looks at a photograph of herself as a non-
disabled dancer. Over the end credits, we see her laughing and moving
in the wheelchair.
The woman in the film is played by Celeste Dandeker, a dancer
who became disabled after a fall. Dandeker is today the highly
successful and visible artistic director of the dance company CandoCo,
which explores the relationship between modern dance and disability
in intelligent and exciting ways. But whether the film’s story is a
“true” story, or even “her story,” is never clear. The knowledge of
Dandeker’s personal history comes to the spectator from outside;
nothing in the film conflates character and actress beyond the
mechanisms of transparent film-narrative. This narrative is
complicated, doubled, over-determined and questioned through
various mechanisms, as a careful textual analysis of its opening shots
shows.
Filming Narrative
The film opens with an evocation of narrativity and the placement

of disability, trauma and therapy. The connection between these
concepts, and the way they are invoked and kept in tension emerges
188 PETRA KUPPERS
out of a shot-by-shot analysis: The first shot is of a wet, glistening

clay sculpture of a human head. The meta-genre of narrative allows
us to expect a beginning: a temporal crisis. Tzvetan Todorov divided
narratives into equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium:6 the
clay may point to the solidity of matter, but a matter endowed with
the ability to change (and therefore narrational). This matter is the
unmaking of a form, the change from disequilibrium to fixity, the
becoming of something else. This clay, formally at the beginning,
seems to equate the principle of narrative in general with narrative
in particular: the film will, following conventions, tell the story of a
shaping of a human life. In particular, it tells the shaping of a
particular life, of a young dancer who becomes paralyzed, but moves
through this paralysis.
The enunciating force of the film finds expression in a movement
on screen — two hands appear in the film frame. They enter the frame
and shape the clay head. The clay is shaped by external forces, it is
not the shaper. But neither is the flesh autonomous, non-metaphoric,
and stable in itself. Just as the hands shape the clay, the camera shapes
the images of the hands (and the body, the flesh), and our reading
shapes the video image of hands into shapers. The reference to art-
making, coterminous with the making of narrative, points to the
artifice in the artefact. Making narratives, reintegrating the traumatic
moment, is one therapeutic response to trauma.7 Art therapy can use
various avenues to integrate experience into the psyche, and clay
modeling is one of the methods used. But by referencing (potentially
therapeutic) art making in the framework of the film, The Fall points
to the nature of shaped, worked-on, experience as neither wholly
personal nor wholly public. The structures of meaning always exceed
the personal, with the individual coming belatedly to them, and the
personal always exceeds the public, allowing no full expression. The
film-ness of the film about the moving body inserts a sliver of
difference, of distance to the moving body. The first few seconds of
The Fall remind us of the fall from the Garden of Eden, or a Fall into
Babelian confusion: translation and non-immediacy announce
themselves in the images of making and reading.
The clay head is framed in profile, lights bouncing off its slick,
wet, unformed surface. As the camera tracks gently backwards,
another nose edges into the frame, along with eyes, a chin. Just before
the hands come up to mould the other head, to start the mould of
the narrational agency, a mirror moment is briefly established: a head
of flesh is looking at a head of clay. The new head is female, a quality
not apparent in the first, unfinished head. Here, in the generic clay
head, non-displayed gender reads male: a strange dance of gazes and
display accompany this little dance of heads, camera and sculpture.
The Fall’s initial shots articulate complicated positions: the
woman is the (first) shaper of the sculpture, she is the creator. But
the narrative of a woman artist is contravened by the movement of
the shots: it is the clay head which is first seen looking out, with the
woman’s profile only later encompassed in the frame. Agency, in the
guise of the gaze, moves from the unspecific head to hers, and the
camera surveys them both, clay and flesh head, in profile, retaining
the ultimate hierarchy of filmed object and off-screen spectator. The
heads do not gaze back at the camera, only at each other.
As soon as the hands move into the frame, new meanings are
spawned: the hands that mould the head are thin and wasted. They
are the hands of a disabled woman. The weight of the disability as
traumatic invisibility disturbs some of the possible paths that the
spectator could potentially travel at the beginning of this narrative.
The narrative encounters paralysis — the possibility of becoming
firmly lodged in one reading. Disability denies positivity — the body
signals its (cultural) meaning of tragedy. The making of a head is the
spectacle of the film: it is the woman’s life which becomes moulded
and shaped into a sculpture just as her body acquires a new moulding
— a back brace and a wheelchair. But the initial instability of agency,
of the gaze, of the hands, and the weight of disability haunts the
narratives of the film, as the spectator is constantly denied access to
a “true,” personal understanding of the woman’s narrative. Her body
throughout oscillates between being flesh and being clay — not resting
in either materiality.
Repetitions
Todorov’s disequilibrium is corporeally enacted as the woman reaches

away from her sculpting to switch on the radio. In order to reach the
radio, she levers herself up by holding onto the clay head. She loses
190 PETRA KUPPERS
her balance and her wheelchair falls backwards, with the clay head
falling on her. The fall is cinematically presented through a montage
of repeated slow-motion elements. Somewhere else, a handsome man
looks up, his face slowly contorts in the moment of realization — a
scream “no” rips through the air. High drama is signaled in this
accumulation of signs and codes. Life is all too short, and must be
held back through slow motion to allow us to grasp its significance:
the film announces its presence. The connection between the use of
slow-motion and other technical devices and the mechanics of
signifying time have been usefully described as “the discourse swelling
the time of an event that occupies a considerably shorter time in the
story.”8
A female spectacle accumulates signs and connections. Over-
determination, swelling, and reiteration out of control are the signs
of traumatic experience — a traumatic narrative controls a psyche
by forcing its structure of repetition into psychic continuity. This fall
is the point of trauma in the film. Trauma in the film becomes
doubled, mirroring the public/private character of trauma in language.
A physical trauma has befallen the character in The Fall, and is never
represented in the film — no images of her disabling experience are
shown, as her trauma remains unrepresentable. This woman owns
her story, and we do not know whether her personal life story in turn
haunts her as trauma. The woman playing the character, visibly
disabled, equally shrouds her own story. But their combined presences,
in the film narrative and in the visual image referencing “the actress,”
create a trauma of reading for the spectator. The spectator cannot
access the “truth,” a truth that is layered with the cultural meaning
of disability that insists on the traumatic character of the experience.
The film’s progression offers no way out — images of instability haunt
the meaning-making process of narrative. The narrative as presented
to and created by the spectator is endangered by paralysis, and the
referencing function circles endlessly into nowhere, or just back to
the preconceived knowledges of the spectator. The non-immediacy
of the film-narrative works as the trauma of the spectator.
The fallen body will be the image the film comes back to, again
and again. The traumatic, thick, repeated and reiterated image refers
to physicality on two levels — on physicality in narrative, and on
physicality in sexual difference. The image of falling conjures up the
possibility of injury (and the potential source of disability). At the

same time, formally, the repeated, drawn out moment of falling
signals the femininity of the fallen woman — the representation
becomes “hysteric,” melodramatic, too much — in a word, coded
female. But both of these references are made unstable, as they point
in their ubiquitousness to the artificiality of a story created without
the referent of (body and woman) truth.
Just as the woman of the film is both issuing source of change
(sculptor) and matter to be moulded by (diagetic) life and film, the
effect of the fall reaches me as spectator on two levels. The slow
motion heightens the drama of the fall, and makes me feel with her
the hardness of the floor, the disorientating experience of falling: the
flesh of the fall. In the phenomenological flesh an intersubjectivity, a
knowing is established — a connection which is denied, again and
again, on the representational level. This affectual knowledge is
combined with knowledge of the signifying practice of film as a
semiotic system. As a spectator attuned to the genre of narrative film,
I can read the conventions signaling a break with the “normalcy” of
transparent narrative. Brian Henderson describes how cinema codes
transgressions from straight chronology:
Classical cinema reacts to a tense shift as though to a cataclysm;

the viewer must be warned at every level of cinematic expression,
in sounds, in images and in written language, lest he/she be
disoriented.9
The excessive use of filmic conventions, both on the level of formal

practices (slow-motion) and conventionalist images, conveys this
rupture to the spectator: a glass is shattered twice during the elongated
moment of falling, water runs freely. An audience trained in popular
Freudian analysis can decode this sign — we are witnessing a moment
of epiphany, linked to a release of emotions and acting as a pointer
towards (female) sexuality.10
Genres, categories, conventionally separated aggregations of signs
mix in this build-up to the narrational hub of the short film. The
center of the film, the woman, has reached us as an aggregation of
opposing signs: object and subject of the gaze, maker and made, active
and disabled. The hands which reach up to mould the clay head are
thin, twisted and weak — they are the hands usually shown in
192 PETRA KUPPERS
advertisements to promote charities, hands that are trying hard to

guide a dripping spoon to a desperate mouth, attempting to raise
money in order to “help the disabled.” Their position of agency is
changed, but the meaning of the disabled body as passive,
compensating figure is not easily destabilized. The oppositional
potency of the two introductory images, the artist — self-controlled
and agent — and the disabled — needy, dependent, tragic — give us
no “new narrative,” but point us to the problematic nature of
representation. Both images are well-used in the cinematic genres of
“artist’s biography” and “victim narrative” or “woman’s film.”
The predefined narrational values of these images dislocate the
woman. She is caught between different narratives. She falls from
one discourse set up by the conventional images to the other. The
very excess of imagery and meaning destabilizes the signifying
scenario. The structure of meaning is touched, not the content of any
one of the images by themselves.
Before falling, the woman manages to switch on the radio. Thus
we hear a pleasant female voice, imbued with the privileged position
given to the voice-over in classic cinema at moments of temporal
transgression. The status of this voice-over is hybrid: it is both intra-
diegetic, since its appearance is linked to the radio, and extra-diegetic
as it stands as the privileged source of narrational knowledge at a
moment of shift. This hybrid, transgressive nature of the voice-over
is further underlined by its being female and disembodied. Kaja
Silverman describes the interesting position of a disembodied voice
in an embodied representational scenario:
There is a general theoretical consensus that the theological

status of the disembodied voice-over is the effect of maintaining
its source in a place apart from the camera, inaccessible to the
gaze of either the cinematic apparatus or the viewing subject —
of violating the rule of synchronization so absolutely that the
voice is left without an identifiable locus. In other words, the
voice-over is privileged to the degree that it transcends the body.
Conversely, it loses power and authority with every corporeal
encroachment, from a regional accent or idiosyncratic “grain”
to definite localization in the image. Synchronization marks the
final moment in any such localization, the point of full and
complete “embodiment.”11
The radio voice shifts between the realm of embodied (in the radio)
and disembodied (with its connotation of privileged knowledge). But
since a space for it is opened in the diagetic world of the film through
the woman’s movement of switching on the radio (corporeal
encroachment), the exact nature of its “privileged viewpoint” is made
unstable. Being female further undermines clear distinctions —
disembodied means non-bodied, general, disinterested, which
culturally has been coded “male,” whereas female conventionally
means specific, subjective and individual — not qualities associated
with the neutral position of an interviewer or anchorperson (or a
generic clay head). Equally, the message of the voice-over also shifts
between transparency, that is, the “narrational truth,” linked to a clear
identification of the wheelchair user as “real person,” and artifice,
destabilizing the representation.
The voice tells us about a “successful performance artist, whose
career has been nevertheless fraught with difficulties that most of
us” never encounter. The scene is set for an encounter with the
stereotypes of “tragic” disability, but already made complicated,
unstable, through the use of the word “successful.” The remainder
of the film consists of flashbacks, or snippets of a life, narrated in its
traditional core stages: childhood, adolescence and love, tragic
disruption with the onset of disability, and the journey towards living
with the disability. The flashbacks, presented in black and white,
insert a new level of abstraction or distance between the spectator
and the unknowable woman presented on the screen, nearly drowning
in conventional but excessive markings. The filmic narrative switches
from a transparent, naturalist mode into a new gear — the life stages
are danced.
The Dance of Death: The Paralysis of Body Trauma
Once upon a time, in the history of representation, the body’s

movement through time found a strong and resonant image: the dance
of death. The dance of death and cultural studies’ preoccupation with
the living body can function as two tropes with which to grasp the
mechanisms of paralysis and movement that govern The Fall. Hans
Holbein’s famous sixteenth-century depiction of the dance of death
194 PETRA KUPPERS
paralyzes one moment in time. It is the act of paralyzing the moment

that demonstrates the passing of time. Just as trauma brings personal
pain into the view of narrativity — the block as the preconditon of
the obsessive narrative — the freeze enables the vision of life.
In the dance of death, people are caught by death in the middle
of life, frozen out of their social relationships and material
surroundings. They have to hold the hand of a skeleton that leads
them in a circular dance — the dance of death. Through the act of
freezing and paralyzing, that is, holding in time on the canvas, life
becomes apparent as a journey, a timed enterprise. Time is passing.
Time is running out. But it needs the action of holding life, of
capturing the moment and taking it out, which brings out the timed
nature of life. “Memento mori” is the message of the baroque dance
of death — your life is but a passage, a journey, a timed event, with
an ending waiting for you.
The action taken by the artist in paralyzing an image of a
metaphorical dance of death puts life into a narrative. A beginning,
middle and end are structured into the everyday existence of the
painter’s subjects. Narrative structures the time of life. Narrative
provides the focal points which define life. Points of rupture, trauma,
non-flow are the markers by which we present the flow of time and
its effects.
Attempts to escape from the prison of this narrow view of the
body in art often take the form of celebrating the body triumphing
over narrative. The dance of death is replaced by a dance of life — a
dance of moments, freedoms, flow, expansion. Excess can be seen as
a challenge to the structuring potential of time, specific traumatic
moments and narrative. In some cultural theory, the body becomes a
refuge of individuality, lived experience and value, and asserts itself
in the face of the disembodying effects of structures, external
knowledges, schemes of surveillance.12 To dance on the grave of
logocentrism, binaries and rationality — this is a dream that many
of us may well share.
But is dance the appropriate medium to break through the
narratives of bodies and time? Dance addresses its spectators in
specific ways. One of these relates to its production of affect — when
we see somebody dance, the kinetic energy can translate itself to us,
and moves us. This is part of the authenticity of dance — its appeal
has been read as going beyond traditional narrative and meaning,

relating directly to “the body.” In The Fall, a dance of differing and
competing addresses is enacted. The spectator is faced with competing
and contradictory versions of temporal bodies: bodies whose
relationship to pivotal moments is questioned.
After the halt on the floor, the end of the fall, a memory emerges,
or is presented to us. It is a moment of harmony, happiness, corporeal
and utopian well-being. We see a young white European girl playing
amidst a field of balloons. She is joined by a kind, beaming Indian
man. Together, they proceed to run energetically, taking space and
enjoying their freedom. The girl is lifted up by the man and is twirled
about in an image of childhood joy. The exuberance and kinetic
experience is translated to the spectator through a highly mobile
camera, allowing our senses to join into the new spatial configuration
of an involved camera, entering the space of its subjects’ bodies.
This image of ethnic harmony is followed by one of gendered
harmony in the second flashback. As the radio voice proceeds to the
words “student days, young, independent, Chicago,” we view a black-
and-white, slightly grainy image of a female dancer. Sophisticated jazz
music accompanies the dancer’s movement around classical columns,
as she joyfully fills her space. She is joined by a man, and by the beat
of percussions. They “naturally” dance together, in an image of
pulsating life.
But the authenticity of these danced moments is immediately put
into question — in each instance, the “naturalist” environment of
the frame is replaced with the dreamscape of balloons (in the
childhood scene) or stylized black-and-white photography (in the
romance scene), referencing the generic, representational nature of
these images. The freedom of dance movement, which can affect the
viewer bodily through its translation by the mobile camera, is queried
by the framings and filters distancing us from the images. Instead of
merging with the woman’s memories and entering fully the filmic
path into identification, we are jarred back into the color-stock
“present” of a close-up on the woman’s face, while she still lies on
the floor, her face unreadable, not cueing us into the emotions
potentially evoked by the flashbacks. The fragments of happy dance
bring us back to the “death” of meaning: to the refusal to signify
clearly. This death is positive: it is out of time (the time of repetitions),
196 PETRA KUPPERS
and yet woven into the fabric of the film’s time. It is a death that
allows a becoming, by not cutting us off completely from the bodies
and objects of time. This woman does not allow us to read her body’s
narrative (the story of her life) through traumatic repetition of past
moments. The trauma of incomprehensibility is not understood as
the inner life of the woman, falling into place, instead it is the trauma
of the viewer since this story does not evolve and integrate. The body
of the viewer is implicated in this teasing, frustrating death of
narrative — the flashbacks with their dancerly audience address have
gripped my viewing body and swung it into (inner) motion. Now my
body has to recover from this fall into paralysis opposite the image
of the woman’s face, not giving anything away. The images do not
dance into the set circle of the dance of life. Instead, the positive,
generative paralysis of meaning hovers over interpretations, steps and
stories.
The last two flashbacks seem to show us the time after “the
disability.” We do not hear of any fall, any reason for the physical
impairment, or see any images that could give clues to this traumatic,
disruptive, life-changing event. All we see and hear are the effects —
the radio tells us of “difficult times, restrictions, adjustment.” A new
flashback shows the dancing man from the previous scene, dancing
alone. He is now the originator of movement. As the camera moves,
the female dancer enters the frame, held up by a frame, a brace
encircling her whole torso. She stands stiff, upright, any motion she
makes is broken by the brace’s support, not allowing a full movement
to emerge. The man loosens her brace, takes her out, the brace is
viewed close up, suffused with shadows, a melodramatic dungeon.
The music is tragic and mourning. The woman is moved by her
partner, her head sometimes leaving the frame, while his head remains
in the center of it. She is helpless, immobile, dependent. But the
stability of agency is questioned: the woman moves her hands slightly,
and his larger movements echo the spatial directions of her smaller
dance — again, the relationship and power balance is not clear.
At this point, the flashback ends, and the fall comes full circle
into recovery. The man, now identifiable as the male dancer of the
flashbacks, has arrived, and moves the wheelchair and the woman
up. As he tries to touch her, she shakes her head, but still, no definite
emotion registers on her face. A final zoom moves into a photo on a
desk, of the woman as a young dancer in a modernist dance

company.
To complement this array of images, the credits roll over footage
of the woman, sitting in her chair, dancing with her arms, bending
her body, a definite smile on her lips. Do we see the “real,” pre-filmic,
historical her, a woman breaking through her confinement in the
moment of private dance? Or is she a character, is this still part of
the diegetic universe of the film, still part of the narrative?
Clay, flesh, radio, dance, photos and films: many different media
give testimony to the life of the woman in front of us. Still, we do
not know what her life means to her — what life means to her with
her disability, with her dance, with her partner. Instead, the life is
made paradoxical, caught up in conventions and film “tricks” — the
chronology of who photographed whom when, in what story.
One of the aspects of trauma that fascinates is the enigma of
survival, and the structure of personal and public spheres that reveals
itself in the witnessing of trauma. To quote Cathy Caruth, “the theory
of trauma, as a historical experience of a survival exceeding the grasp
of the one who survives, engages a notion of history exceeding
individual bonds.”13
The film The Fall works on a similar trajectory — the individual
experience of disability as bodily and psychic trauma is shadowed,
veiled and made unknowable. What emerges instead in The Fall’s
multiplying questions and stories, is the story of disability’s
problematic status within representation as a meaning device that fails
to reference and instead injures the individual experience. If personal
pain is unrepresentable, it is the signals of the traumatic rupture in
narrative through narrative overload which can make witnesses out of
spectators — witnesses for the impossibility of knowing, and for the
generative potentials of a paralysis of meaning. In the impossibility of
knowing, a sense of living can permeate graven images.
Dancing
For in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying

together many varieties of error.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
198 PETRA KUPPERS
The Fall is at first glance a redemptory journey through a

biography, with a tragic moment, the fall, which mirrors some
accident in the past, and which now sets up a chain of memories
waiting to be consumed, ordered and worked through. After this
cathartic journey of an individual through her life, she is free to dance
again. But any easy reading is complicated by filmic devices and the
structures of narrative. Many varieties of error are laid together to
allow a new story to emerge — a story of being-not-quite-sure, of
moments when immediate reference breaks down, and a new respect
for the other woman can emerge out of paralyzed fragments of
meaning.
The truth claim of The Fall’s flashbacks is problematic. The
present has the most vivid colours. The flashbacks depict stereotypical
images of a life lived in and through dance. Is this a biography? Is
dance emotion? Is the gaze the privileged site of knowledge, or does
the foregrounding of the clay moulding and the radio point towards
other ways of knowing? The final image of the woman’s liberated
dance occurs over the credits — a nowhere land, precariously lodged
outside the narrative, on a different textual level.
The viewer is forced to reassess her reactions to the film. What
history is presented here? Traditionally, disability signals body-truth
— “the disabled” are defined by their bodies, and these bodies are
not seen as rhetorical devices. So — is the dancer disabled, and fixed
in her disability, or is she different at different times? In particular,
when we see the younger dancer in the black and white footage, we
might well ask who this is — is this her, in old documentary footage?
Is this the actress’s younger self? Would this imply that this story is
really the actress’s biography? Or is this an acting part for her, and
she is not disabled? Is she only faking her disability, and has she also
shot this part? Does someone else dance this part? The temporal
sequence of making The Fall as an account of a life reveals a document
of fakery.
What live dance performance accomplishes through affect is made
problematic in film-dance. In film we do not have the unquestionable
presence of the living body of the performer, both authenticating and
disrupting the performance. The postmodern viewer is surrounded
with a realm of technological simulacra, special effects, digital art,
particularly in TV work, which complicate the consumption of
“representations experienced as perceptions,” to use Jean-Louis

Baudry’s famous phrase. The truth-claim of the dancing body, engaged
in “natural” expression, allowing a “true” inner life to be read on a
“true” physical shell, is subverted by this nagging incongruency
regarding the origin of the various scenes. Thus, the spectator cannot
witness the truth of another person — the other person is a
representation which too often brings to the fore its own artificiality.
Witnessing the other being would re-create a smooth story, a time of
healing, a reintegration of the person witnessed into the social space
of the witnesses. In The Fall, instead, a witnessing of the spectator’s
own trauma is called for — what is witnessed is the impossibility of
narrative emerging out of the encounter with “other” physicality.
Disability becomes unknown. The dance and its affect reference the
bodily, the flesh, even as the representational and narrational
communication highlights the clay. The registers of the “live” and
the “mediated” collide. These problematizations of authenticity
subvert any reading of the woman as a tragic figure, and of dance as
a clear bodily communication.
Beyond all these unclear markers of meaning rests the woman’s
immobile face. Our block is not removed — and we do not even know
about the existence of her trauma. The private resists the most
insistent readings of trauma, the most persistent attempts to
narrativize. She doesn’t let us know. As spectators, we have witnessed
a traumatic moment: a re-enactment, and potential solution, to a
potential earlier fall (from ability). This personal body-story can be
accommodated within the range of cultural narratives available to
us as cultural readers — including the trauma narrative, so proliferated
in post-traumatic stress disorder discussions in the popular media.
Maybe a talking or showing cure will exorcise the block that stands
in the way of us reading the woman. But maybe the block resists —
maybe the horizon of narrativity is itself traversed by the traces of a
private experience that remains out of reach.
Time is manipulated, pleated, folded, twisted in this encounter
of female, disabled, artistic, dancerly, filmic, psychological narratives.
Time as narrative is burst apart by the multivalent images and the
multistranded familiar narratives. Instead of being able to read filmic
images as ordered in sequences, and connected in ways that
Hollywood has taught us to read, the spectator is left with many
200 PETRA KUPPERS
different moments. They do not come together in a clear, univocal

narrative, but create an image of lived experience, of time that
isn’t graspable by sequential and causal rules.
Dance and its privileged position in relation to body-time, true
time, embodiment, direct experience and affect has become unstable
in my reading of The Fall. We have fallen from the grace of a stable
focal point of “real-ness.”
Janet Wolff critiques the vogue for using dance metaphors in
feminist and cultural studies, and reminds us of our mistaken trust
in dance to free us from the narrational and logocentric straitjacket:
Dancing may well be liberating, and the metaphor of dance may

sometimes capture the sense of circumventing dominant modes
of rationality. But my concern about this particular trope is that
it depends on a mistaken idea of dance as intuitive, non-verbal,
natural, and that it risks abandoning critical analysis for a vague
and ill-conceived “politics of the body.”14
In my reading of The Fall, my narrative of falling, dance becomes

just one narrative of bodies in time. From the point of view of a
disabled woman, the “naturalness” of dance is as confining,
constricting and oppressive as the “naturalness” of marriage or
children. The body and its expression become enigmatic. What I find
fascinating about The Fall, about wheelchairs and about dance is their
potential for upset, tilting and falling. It becomes hard to fit together
the individual story of this woman in a film with the wider social
stories surrounding disability and its “traumatic” effects. Instead, the
psychic structure of trauma reveals itself as a narrational tool, as
something that allows a reader to grasp the other. But real access to
her is denied. It is only in the shared acknowledgement of the
disruption of all narrative by the unknowable personal that a
communication is achieved — a communication with narratives as
masks which need to be picked up and discarded, used and recycled,
if any story is to emerge. These “reading scenes,” encounters between
embodied texts and spectators on the edges of the public and the
private spheres can work by oscillating us between narratives, rather
than forcing us to abandon narratives altogether.
The Fall leads on from the dance of death. Instead of halting,
paralyzing the moments of life into elements that demand narrative,

that demand significance, constant movement of meaning keeps us
on our toes. The narratives, frameworks, contexts, images of the film
keep dancing to no measured step. Since this trauma cannot be cured,
it remains the traumatic block in the reader, a block that doesn’t allow
integration into smooth known images, and which allows the
representation of a private, non-readable other woman to dance.
After the Story
How to end without paralysis? This close reading of a film remains

in tension — the film is not seen, its immediacy and affect, mined in
these pages, remain only paradoxically accessible in these words.
Disability as a cultural placeholder of trauma is querying its status
as originator of narrative. The phenomenological, immediate
experience of disability remains covered up, but the covering story
and the narrational knowledges point to their own existence as the
translators of the immediate into the accessible. The images that
dance in these pages are the clay of stories that are formed in the
spaces between the text and the spectator, the text and the reader.
The horrifying disruption of trauma can allow a tentative movement
from the personal to the public — one culture talking to another —
in the acknowledged ignorances, the reflective translations and
repetitions of a story which spins out of the control of both maker
and reader. These uncertainties translate the story of a woman from
an individual story into one about the workings of difference and
sharing.
In Caruth’s reading of Hiroshima, mon amour, the stories of
individuals and cultures are linked into a history through what cannot
be understood. In a similar move, readings of films such as The Fall
can point to failure of language to reference the immediate, the private
in the public realm of language. This failure, though, is only the
beginning of a story, not the end of one. Stories continue to excite
curiosity, and to forge new connections between one person and
another, between disabled people and non-disabled people, between
cultures. In saving stories from paralysis, the future of communication
moves into view.
9
To Live
The Survival Philosophy
of the Traumatized
ZHAOHUI XIONG
“We can speak of the need to master death anxiety as basic to

the human condition, and we can see the modes of symbolic
immortality as providing paths for this mastery.”
— R. J. Lifton and E. Olson
Scholars and artists in China have been concerned about the

representation of Chinese history. Although historical consciousness
has always pervaded literary representation, re-encountering the past
has become an even more obsessive need in the new millennium.
Shortly after the Tian’anmen Incident in 1989 and near the end of a
disastrous century, China saw the further disillusion of socialist
idealism and rapid integration into the “postmodern” world culture.
“Unofficial” aesthetic activities, which emerged and flourished in the
1980s, now took on an altered face. Political radicalism, which had
posed a justice-against-injustice challenge to the official interpretation
of history, now gave way to the trend of reconstructing the national
past through personalized experiences. Communist history, especially
the Cultural Revolution — a devastating time of political fanaticism
and cultural destruction, appears as a major theme in the literature
and cinema that continuously attempt to reverse the monopoly of
ideological discourse. The broad historical concern of justice and
reason remains active in literary and cinematic representation.
204 ZHAOHUI XIONG
However, such concern has largely shifted to the personal level of

experience that no structured narrative of historical progress can
capture. Historical consciousness no longer means searching for a
“straightened view” of the “distorted” history; rather, it is maintained
through the memory and testimony of traumatic experience that
apparently resists any schematized interpretation. The grand narrative
of teleology collapses in the detailed account of everyday tragedy and
pleasures of little people. Experiential histories and accounts of
survival begin to be made against History when the very act of
witnessing and telling the “untellable” helps the disaster-ridden
people move forward from their traumatic experience.
It is against this background that a most conspicuous achievement
was seen in Chinese cinema. The “Fifth Generation” directors
produced thought-provoking works about China’s recent history,
culture and collective identity. These works exhibit a deep
preoccupation with cultural and political turbulence, and carry on
the artistic exploration of historical experience as trauma. With
unprecedented vigor and impact in Chinese and world cinema, these
films have brought intriguing images of China to the international
audience. It is noticeable that the attraction of these new films to
worldwide audiences is often related to their depiction of the brutality
of political movements, especially that of the Cultural Revolution.
Eager to look for signs of authoritarianism from the cinematic
evocation of political oppression and mass frenzy, the audience is often
led, despite the filmmakers’ intention, to a distorted image of Chinese
culture and history. The backwardness of the Chinese tradition seems
an unusual source of fascination and horror; and the passiveness of
ordinary people, often considered as complicit with political
oppression, is apparently what makes them exclusively and
exceptionally “Chinese.”1
In her reading of Zhang Yimou’s 1993 film Huozhe (To Live), Rey
Chow argues that “Zhang gives us an unglorified portrait of the people
— not exactly as the embodiment of evil but, more disturbingly, as a
host for the problems that have beset China’s construction of its
‘national identity’ through political governance.”2 She argues this by
pointing to the lack of active political resistance in the film. I contend
that this reading ignores the striking cinematographic images in the
film that suggest an alternative level of resistance: the refusal to
TO LIVE 205
integrate the shock memory of history into the grand narrative of

rebellion, struggle, and justice. Taking issue with Chow’s reading, I
would argue that the “unglorified” portrait of little people’s survival
philosophy projects an act of bearing witness to the barbarity of
historical events. The shock events in this film, particularly the whole
series of death encounters, highlight the psychological need for
“living” as the path out of historical trauma, whereas the personalized
telling of an “untellable” past builds up a re-enacted memory that
pays tribute to history. Behind what Chow perceives to be the
common people’s “consumption of political oppression,” the film’s
survival theme points to the psychological effort of the traumatized
to master the memory of horror, death and oppression.3
Adapted from Yu Hua’s story of the same title, Zhang Yimou’s
To Live tells the story of an ordinary Chinese, Fugui, who goes through
an unceasing struggle for survival in a time of constant political
turmoil. The protagonist’s story traverses four decades of
contemporary Chinese history, from the eve of the Communist
victory to the end of the Cultural Revolution. A typically “apolitical”
town dweller, Fugui cannot escape the devastating impact of war and
politics on his personal, everyday life. The film’s melodramatic
narrative of the successive losses of innocent lives and people’s
resilience produces an enigmatic power of control over the devastating
forces of politics and history. Fugui’s earnest wish to live, as the title
of the film suggests, struggles against the power of destruction and
death. Bare survival apparently removes him from any effort of direct
resistance to the oppressive forces, and this is perhaps what makes
him appear extremely passive and complicit with oppression.
However, behind the apparent passiveness, the film’s narrative and
imagery project a history that is haphazard, unpredictable, and
overwhelming. As I will show later in my analysis, the shock images
of violence, blood and death are repeatedly used in the film to
highlight historical events which intrude into the mundane life of
the ordinary people. The pain and horror brought by these events are
intensified by the contrast between the constant but abrupt intrusion
of violence and the characters’ inability either to predict or understand
the disaster. The strong sense of incomprehensibility questions the
possibility of active “resistance.” Nevertheless, the strength of this
film lies beyond lamenting the defeat of a shattered people. The telling
206 ZHAOHUI XIONG
of the family story from one generation to another carries the meaning
of survival much further than mere physical existence. The story of
staying alive in the face of death is the act of mastering the death
anxiety and achieving a symbolic immortality. Living, as the basic
form of memory and witness, implies the ultimate resistance to the
unspeakable pain of shock and death.
The overwhelming turbulence of contemporary history is such
that no traditional, objective narrative is able to capture the range
and depth of its devastation. In To Live, historical events are hidden
behind a narrative of death. It is not difficult for the audience to
identify the major events in this film that mark the decades since
the eve of communist victory: the Civil War, the Great Leap Forward,
The Cultural Revolution, and the period of post-Mao reforms.
However, the film offers no explanatory or interpretive narration of
these events and their impact; they are represented by shock images
of horror and death, which in turn have rendered these events
unnarratable. Death is shown as the only describable experience of
Fugui as an individual who is caught up in war and political
campaigns. Each decade since the 1940s, related to each historical
event, sees the loss of a life close to him. Fugui’s brushes with death,
from the hundreds of bodies on the battleground to the execution of
Long’er, from the car accident that kills his son to his daughter’s death
at childbirth, imply an inescapable death anxiety. This anxiety,
however, is always counter-posed by the instincts for living. The
trauma of death and the aspiration of living are the keynotes of his
story. What sees him through the turbulence of history is what Robert
Jay Lifton and Eric Olson call “the life-death imagery (which) endures
and evolves throughout life.”4
If we consider Fugui’s life before he loses his family property to
Long’er in the gambling house as “prehistory,” this loss marks the
very first traumatic moment that pushes him to the edge of life. It is
a moment of shock and death when all the assurance of a secure,
decent life is deprived of meaning. The sudden deadly blow, which
drives him out to the hazard of hunger and all other unpredictable
changes can be interpreted as the trauma of birth (or rebirth) in the
framework of his life story. Life begins at this very moment of death,
when the penniless and desperate Fugui, watching his departing wife
and child, cries in the empty street, “It’s all over. All over.” Just as
TO LIVE 207
birth is “the first experience to activate the child’s innate potential

for death imagery,” Fugui’s downfall, occurring with the disintegration
of his former self, foreshadows each subsequent step that will
“rekindle the death anxiety associated with innate imagery of
separation, stasis and disintegration.”5
The parallel imageries of dying and living are intensified in the
execution of Long’er, which happens a few years after Fugui loses
every penny to him at the gambling house. For Fugui, the loss of
the “landlord status” has earned him an unexpected escape from
death. It is interesting to note the visual and sound effects that
juxtapose Fugui with Long’er. In the original story by Yu Hua, Long’er,
bound and on his way to execution, shouts in despair to the
dumbfounded Fugui: “I’m dying for you!” In the film his horrifying
words, drowned by the slogan shouting of the rally, are unheard but
replaced by the sound of five shots that sends Fugui shuddering on
the verge of collapse, as if he himself were the one being shot. This
ironical intercutting echoes the earlier gambling exchange. The two
incidents, mimicking each other without a rational connection
between them, create a strong sense of absurdity. Historical changes
are projected as whimsical and ironic, with traumatic effects on the
uncomprehending mind. Not only does Fugui experience a “close
call” of death; the unpredictability of life’s trajectories indicates the
collapse of a coherent meaning system. In this sense, the anxiety
of death is not merely concerned with physical disintegration. It is
the breaking down of any meaningful connection between the
individual’s perception and political movements. Fugui’s survival is
not the “consumption of political oppression” as Chow assumes.
Rather, it is the recognition of the inability to consume the
inconsumable. It is the refusal to yield to political oppression by
staying alive, bearing witness to the absurdity of history.
The death anxiety discussed here is by no means ahistorical.
While death itself is a normal fact of human life, the violence of
modern history, with its turbulent events and massive killing, makes
it a particularly traumatic experience. Coping with that experience
involves confronting the death of the meaning system by recapturing
the very reality of rupture. Psychological trauma, as Cathy Caruth
defines it, is the “confrontation with an event that, in its
unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of
208 ZHAOHUI XIONG
prior knowledge — that cannot . . . become a matter of ‘intelligence’

— and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time.”6 In
terms of its quality of incomprehensibility, trauma is largely
unrepresentable in the narrative form of realism. Residing as image
in the submerged memory of a past, trauma “demand(s) inclusion in
any narrative of the development of the present but . . . makes any
narrative seem painfully inadequate.”7 Modern and contemporary
Chinese history may well be an illustration of the unprecedented
human experience of the twentieth century, whose overwhelming
horror and absurdity defy conventional cognitive or narrative
categories. If there is a possibility of working out the truth of this
experience, it is in the cinematic representation of images of trauma
rather than narrative plotlines. To Live can be seen as an effort to
represent the unrepresentable. Instead of accommodating the
historical events into a coherent and smooth narrative, this film
constructs a traumatic memory by re-enacting the moments of
personal experience. Such methods of representation already carry the
theme that bearing witness to trauma is itself an act of survival.
In representing disasters, especially death encounters, this film
produces the unusual effects of shock. History is presented as
disrupted again and again with unforeseeable calamities. Each stage
of the story is marked by an abrupt disaster that disrupts the on-going
life. Both the overnight loss of all his family property and the escape
from execution as a result of that loss occur as shock experience to
Fugui. Instead of a fluent narration of incidents, the story is fractured
by images of disruption. The peace and joy of everyday life is
constantly broken up by the sudden interference of violent events.
The joyful singing and playing of the shadow-puppet show, which
Fugui takes up to make a living, is constantly a site of sudden
confrontation of peace with horror, of life with death. Fugui and
Jiazhen’s wish to make a humble living is ruptured on the very site
of the shadow-puppet play. War breaks in with the image of a knife
that unexpectedly pierces through the white screen of the shadow-
puppet show — a striking shot of the inexpressible abruptness and
brutality of violence. What is going on in the world is completely
beyond the understanding of these common folks; history bewilders,
horrifies and traumatizes them. The news of Youqing’s sudden death
reaches Fugui in the middle of his performance, following another
TO LIVE 209
scene of joyful singing and the reconciliation between father and son.
No less shocking is Fengxia’s death years later, which happens just
after a happy and humorous conversation about the newborn baby.
The abrupt turns in the course of the on-going life convey a striking
sense of absurdity and incomprehensibility. The repeated occurrence
of unexpected violence shows the individual will to be inadequate in
coping with these unpredictable blows.
As a response to the shock, human resourcefulness is reduced to
the simple instincts of survival. For the traumatized, the only way
to work through the death encounter is to stay alive. Reduction and
adherence to the simplest form of existence seems to render these
people totally incapable of political resistance. On the other hand,
the filmmaker also uses the shock effect to highlight the tenacity
and resilience of these common folks. Chow has noted their
“remarkable ability to persist through trying circumstances,” but this
endurance is exactly what she reads as the film’s critique of the
“essentialist survivalism” of the Chinese.8 She cites two episodes
from the film to illustrate Fugui and his wife’s acquiescence in the
oppressive power. In the earlier episode, the town chief tells Fugui
that the big house he has lost to Long’er in the gamble is burned
down, and whispers in regret, “The timber of your house is so good.”
Fugui and his wife Jiazhen, realizing the danger of their connection
with that house, immediately clarify: “No, no, it’s not our timber,
it’s counter-revolutionary timber.” In a later episode, Fugui’s former
sidekick and pal Chunsheng, who is the driver of the car that
accidentally kills Fugui’s son, comes to attend his daughter’s wedding.
Still unable to forgive him, Jiazhen refuses to see him, and asks Fugui
to return his gift. Fugui looks at the gift and answers, “But that is
Chairman Mao.” (Following the fashion of the time, Chunsheng
brought a portrait of Mao as a wedding gift.) In Chow’s reading, such
small incidents as these are instances of the common people’s self-
protection and adaptation to political circumstances as “China’s most
enduring ideology.” “Not only do they adapt to the physical hardship
of life”, she writes, “but they seem equally capable of accommodating
themselves to the ideological manipulations of the state.”9 This view,
however, bypasses the humor and irony that give these episodes a
voice other than acquiescence and accommodation. Calling the timber
“counter-revolutionary,” the speaker is obviously satirizing the notion
210 ZHAOHUI XIONG
of “revolution.” When Fugui reminds Jiazhen that the gift she wants
him to return is Chairman Mao, the dialogue casts a sarcastic light
on a political taboo. Drawing an irrepressible laugh from the audience,
it also discounts the worship of the sacred Leader. Such implicit satire
suggests that the film’s critical thrust is directed not to the act of
survival, but to the grand narrative of revolutionary ideals. Mingling
horror and bewilderment with humor and irony, the language of
survival actively ridicules the power of manipulation. In this sense,
the urge to live is far beyond passive endurance. The tenacity and
resilience are depicted as a quality that not only helps protect these
little people’s humble existence but leads them to work through
traumas of history.
Paradoxically, Fugui’s urge to survive does not succeed in keeping
the physical integrity of life. Incidents of death come one after another.
The sharp contrast between the repeated images of dying and the
continuous belief in “living” shows that the meaning of survival lies
not in the actual preservation of physical integrity, which in many
circumstances is beyond the individual will and control. While
presenting the disintegration of history and its meaning, Zhang Yimou
also tries to patch up the pieces of trauma into an alternative,
symbolic integrity. The film attempts to master the death anxiety
through the symbolic, rather than literal, continuity represented in
Fugui’s frustrated but never yielding faith in living. It projects death
as a twin sister of life, in the sense that a “symbolic immortality”
relates one to what comes before and continues after him, and enables
one to “participate in the ongoing life without denying the reality of
death.”10
Lifton and Olson argue that confronting death, as Freud
discovered, could heighten the vitality of living. The death images of
separation, stasis and disintegration provoke the struggle to affirm
the connection, movement, and integrity of life. They see the need
to master death anxiety as basic to the human condition, and symbolic
immortality as providing paths for this mastery. “It is possible to think
of human life at every moment as moving between two poles: imagery
of total severance (death imagery) and imagery of continuity (symbolic
immortality). Both are present in a kind of balance; neither is able
totally to abolish the other. Death imagery makes the quest for
symbolic immortality more urgent and provides a stimulus for
TO LIVE 211
creative efforts of all kinds. Images of continuity and immortality

make the certainty of death less threatening.”11 Similarly, Fugui’s
survival consciousness by no means denies the fact and certainty of
death: he does not avoid the successive losses of lives of those closest
to him. Through the encounter with and witnessing of death, Fugui
not only stays alive but also values even more his threatened
existence. Telling the protagonist’s survival story, the film is searching
for a higher continuity to overcome the rupture of meaning. The
repetition of “it’s better to live” embodies the repeated struggle with
death and the adherence to the nurturing power of symbolic
immortality.
The use of cultural symbols in this film strongly suggests the part
Chinese tradition plays in the construction of symbolic continuity.
In Yu Hua’s novel, Fugui, after losing all his property to Long’er,
makes a living by working on the land of the new landlord. The
significant change in the film is that Fugui’s livelihood is not farming,
but performing shadow-puppet shows. The striking images of the
antique puppets, with their faded color, delicate pattern and ancient
stories, connect the different stages of a large part of Fugui’s life. As
a means of living, the trunk of puppets accompanies Fugui throughout
the war and the revolution before they are eventually burned as a
“Four-Olds” item.12 The presence of this unchanging “pre-historical”
antiquity, in contrast to the changing present, suggests a cultural
continuity built on a deliberate distance, not without resistance, from
the devastating present reality of war and politics. The puppet show,
as a dramatic performance, is also an act of memory and storytelling
that has witnessed all the political campaigns. Fugui’s witty success
in keeping the puppets from extinction during the Iron Smelting
campaign of the Great Leap Forward and later his sadness at seeing
them burned in the Cultural Revolution reveals not merely the
emotional attachment to an old companion, but a deeper connection
to a symbol and vehicle of survival. It is not by accident that the old
puppet trunk is saved when the puppets are burned — a voice is
preserved to carry the spirit of “living” and “telling” contained in
the trunk. At the end of the story (which is an ending without
closure), long after the old puppets are gone, a flock of lively little
chickens take their symbolic place in the old trunk, echoing Fugui’s
earlier description to his son of a life getting better and bigger, “from
212 ZHAOHUI XIONG
chicken to ox.” This description is repeated to his grandson, though

the vision of the future after the “ox” has changed from
“communism” to “airplane,” following the change in the official
narrative of China’s social ideals.13 This adaptation to the official
discourse of history is again ironical. Although it is arguable whether
Fugui is consciously mimicking the inconsistency of the teleological
narrative of Communism, that grand narrative is already disrupted
and faulted by the shocking events. The subtle play between the
apparent conformity to the official discourse and the satire of that
discourse has created a space for deconstructive narrative.
Symbolically, the surviving puppet box with little chickens becomes
a vehicle of remembering and telling the story of the past and bearing
witness to history. The message of continual existence and testimony
contained in the trunk, the chickens, and Fugui’s storytelling to the
grandson also point to the cultural values which “give support to
individuals in their efforts to master death anxiety by establishing
notions of what it means to live a good and productive life.”14
What further intensifies the symbolic meaning of continuity is
the image of Mantou, Fugui’s grandson. In the novel he is killed when
he overeats in a state of severe hunger, but is made to stay alive in
the film. That the child survives his mother’s death of childbirth is
in itself indicative of biological continuity in the simultaneous
occurrence of death and birth. In the broader cultural sense, this
continuity is more than biological. The traditional Chinese belief in
keeping the blood connection from generation to generation
constitutes what Lifton calls “the bio-social immortality.”15 Family
value, as it is easy to see in the film, is an important support for
Fugui’s survival through the trauma of death and violence.
Throughout the painful losses of both son and daughter, the third
generation keeps up the family tie. Erxi, the son-in-law who is more
intimate with the family than a son, adds to the highly symbolic
family integrity against the continuous disruption and disintegration.
Zhang Yimou’s deliberate preservation of four members of the family
upon the film’s ending is a significant change to the novel, in which
the old, lonely Fugui is the only one who survives to tell the tragic
family story. This adaptation indicates the film’s particular stress on
the Chinese value of family union and continuity in the working-
through historical and political trauma. The family value is a basic
TO LIVE 213
element constituting the strength of the cultural community. Again,

Lifton and Olson’s argument on bio-social immortality may well
explain the film’s implication of cultural support for the victims of
death and trauma. “This (biological) mode of immortality . . . is
experienced emotionally and symbolically and transcends one’s own
biological family to include one’s tribe, organization, people, nation,
or even species. Similarly, the sense of biological continuity becomes
intermingled with cultural continuity as each generation passes along
its traditions to the next.”16
The film depicts family continuity as the strength that makes
the fact of death less threatening. After years of living in confrontation
with death, the sorrow at the death of a loved one is no longer
accompanied with the dread of total severance: near the end of the
story, the family mourning at both Youqing and Fengxia’s graves is
no longer overwhelmed by tears as it was in the earlier scene of
Youqing’s death, at the same site. Although this film might be
subjected to criticism because of its tendency to favor the family as
a refuge against political power, it does hint at the meaning of memory
and testimony embodied in family values. The mourning site is where
memory is passed on to the next generation. As the photos of Mantou
showing the stages of his growth are placed upon his mother’s grave,
the images of life and continuity are again constructed against the
image of death. Mantou’s familiarity with the questions and answers
about his dead uncle and mother, neither of whom he has ever seen,
shows that the story of the past must have been told many times. In
telling the story to Mantou, the inexpressible pain is resolved into a
narrativized memory. History is made when the pain of the past is
both remembered and forgotten. In telling the story to the coming
generation, the bio-social continuity is connected to the task of
witnessing history. To witness is to tell, and to tell one must live.
The telling of the traumatic past, as Shoshana Felman points out,
leads to an “insight into the joint mystery of life and of the need for
testimony. The testimony is, precisely, to the experience of the
narrator’s repetitious crossing of the line dividing life from death.”17
The need for testimony is a continuous pressure to tell. “If words are
not trustworthy or adequate, the life that is chosen can become the
vehicle by which the struggle to tell continues.”18 To live and to tell
the story of survival is in itself a tribute to the resistance of ordinary
214 ZHAOHUI XIONG
people. Between Jiazhen’s question and Mantou’s answer about the

dead, between Mantou’s question and Fugui’s answer about the future,
the narration of dying and living brings about a moment of insight
and quietude, an altered sense of time and a feeling of expanded life
space, in which living attains its simple but ultimate significance,
and “the perception of death is minimized and the threat of extinction
is no longer foreboding.”19
Besides keeping the four members of the family alive to tell and
listen to the story, Zhang Yimou also alters the mode of narrative,
which in Yu Hua’s novel is based on the recollections of Fugui in his
old age. While recollections and flashbacks are generally considered
effective methods of representing the experience of trauma as
fragmented pieces of memory, Zhang’s choice of a narrative in the
normal time sequence has made an open ending instead of a closed
one. The episode at the end is as impressive as the previous one at
the gravesite: the family, who have just come back from the yearly
tribute to the dead, eat their lunch and go on living. This open ending
shows the construction of a path out of the traumatic condition. The
continuity of survival, carried on by generation after generation in
the act of telling and remembering, heals the pain of shock and death,
and rebuilds a meaning against the rupture of history.
Death subjects the individual to violence of history; living
provides a path out of it. The danger of death is real, just as the perils
of all historical disasters. Behind the incomprehensibility of death is
the incomprehensibility of massive destruction brought about by war
and political events. When human life is reduced to the simplest form
of existence, the act of living performs the task of memory and
testimony. Between the narrative of death and the story of living, To
Live attempts to represent the double layer of historical truth: what
crushes memory is disconnected, disintegrated, and inexpressibly
painful historical circumstances; what overcomes disconnection,
disintegration and pain is the simple, tenacious act of survival and
testimony. In this sense, the unheroic sufferings of political
oppression, which tend to be looked upon as passive, imply a different
power of resistance. The seemingly fragile value of bare survival is
rendered into the active meaning of perseverance and witness. The
“negative” is not “backwardness” per se but a move forward, in which
the continuity of living overcomes violence, suffering, and death.
TO LIVE 215
Building a sense of continuity over disruption also shows the

attempt of this film to search for a path out of the difficulty of
representing “modernist events.”20 The scope, scale, and depth of the
events of the twentieth century are as beyond the objective, realistic
modes of representation as they are beyond the imagination of earlier
historians. The very notion of “event” is no longer adequate to
describe the violence and horror in the contemporary world. The heart
of postmodernism, as Robert Rosenstone puts it, is “a struggle against
History.”21 Regarding To Live as the cinematic representation of
contemporary Chinese history, this struggle can be understood as not
only the deconstruction of authoritarian narratives and truth claims,
but also the cultural reconstruction of a “real,” a more fundamental
truth — the humanitarian truth of living over the dismantled History.
10
Trauma, Visuality, and History in
Chinese Literature and Film
BAN WANG
In 1918, the magazine New Youth of the May Fourth New Culture
launched a debate on the reform of Chinese theater. Critics charged
the traditional theater with perpetuating self-consoling, deceptive
melodrama and obsolete emotional narrative structures. The trite
narrative embodying Confucian morality and yielding cheaply
rounded-off emotional satisfaction, they argued, detracted attention
from historical reality and blocked artistic creativity. They called for
a realist theater in the tragic mode, which would seek to cut through
these obsolete narrative protocols and emotional patterns to get at
the “real” stratum of history. The intellectuals seemed to be groping
toward a new form that would come close to the reality “in the
raw.”1 This appeal to the quality of the tragic-realistic was answered
by what I would identify as the traumatic and realistic strain in Lu
Xun’s reflection on history and in the radical filmmaking of the
1930s.
It has been commonplace to see modern Chinese history as
steeped in tragedy and trauma.2 Less well known is the interpretation
of its traumatic shocks as a positive potential for rewriting history
and its links to new forms of visuality conditioned by modern media
technology. Nowhere is the traumatic visual experience of modern
China more poignantly dramatized than in Lu Xun’s experience of
watching a newsreel of Chinese spies being beheaded by the Japanese
while he was in a medical school in Japan. Probably no episode in
218 BAN WANG
modern Chinese culture comes as close as that to a “primal scene”

of well-nigh total visual and psychic collapse, one that has triggered
off so much speculation and controversy in literary history.3 Rey
Chow’s insightful interpretation of the visual violence of this newsreel
has effectively introduced the issue of visuality as a force in modern
Chinese culture. The newsreel showed the Japanese military
beheading Chinese spies working for the Russians during the Russo-
Japanese war (1904), with strong-bodied but apathetic Chinese
onlookers standing around and apparently enjoying the spectacle.
Mediated through film technology and amid the roar of cheers and
contempt from the Japanese in the classroom, the shocking image
launched a “projectile” at Lu Xun in his “unassuming perceptual
security.”4 Chow sees the disruptive visual experience as a Chinese
version of the modern disorientations and shocks analyzed by such
critics as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. The traumatic
violence stems partly from the immediacy of film technology and its
power to disrupt the inherited perceptual pattern and structure of
feeling buttressed by traditional literature and art. The shock of
humiliation and shame also stripped Lu Xun of the confidence in his
identity as a Chinese and spurred him into a sharpened nationalist
consciousness. Instead of trying to come to terms with the traumatic
visual experience, however, argues Chow, Lu Xun and other writers
resorted to writing literature in an attempt to evade the trauma and
to raise nationalist consciousness.
While arguing that literature is “a way to evade the shock of the
visual,” 5 Chow also traces the many ways the media-induced,
disruptive visuality somehow insinuated itself into writing practice
and gave rise to the modernist mutations of a visual kind in literature.
The “snapshot” vignettes of Lu Xun’s short stories, Mao Dun’s
panoramic narratives, and the documentary details of Shen Congwen’s
prose fiction, for example, revealed a filmic visuality that disturbed
the primary coherency of the literary sign and fragmented the
established narrative. 6 In Chow’s analysis of the film Goddess
(Shennü, 1936) directed by Wu Yonggang, the traumatic visual
experience also found its way into the Chinese films of the 1930s.
Despite all these emergent visual disturbances in literature and film,
Chow’s reading expresses skepticism about literary writing vis-à-vis
traumatic visuality, rendering modern Chinese literature into a
TRAUMA, VISUALITY, AND HISTORY IN CHINESE LITERATURE AND FILM 219
paranoiac defense against visual trauma. She sees this literature as

part of the elitist project to exploit the “primitive passions” — the
savage, popular, the primitive — and to assimilate them into the
mainstream nationalist discourse. In contrast, visuality, derived from
trauma but bent on overcoming it, retains its melancholy ties to the
brutalities and repression of women, the oppressed, and the
downtrodden.
The interpretation of a disruptive visuality against this nationalist
literature has its precedents in the theater reform debate sponsored
by the New Youth magazine, as I noted in the beginning of this essay,
and in Lu Xun’s writings on history. The question is whether we can
take visuality to be more traumatic than literature. I turn to Lu Xun’s
reflections on the representation of history to show what is at stake
in the relation between the visual and the literary. For Lu Xun,
literature can be as effective as visual media in addressing traumatic
events and themes. Lu Xun’s perception of a literature that does not
shun trauma may suggest that the primacy of visuality over literature
is overstated. It is not that literature is by nature less direct about
traumatic experience than a visual medium like film, but rather it is
the moralistic mystification and self-deception of traditional literature
that are evasive of history’s traumatic impact. A literary or aesthetic
attitude that derives from trauma rather than covering it up would
be just as illuminating and demystifying as the visual experience of
shock in jolting the audience out of traditional lethargy. In the
following I explore how Lu Xun’s tragic notion of history is linked to
traumatic experience and how close this notion is to the montage
aesthetics in the films of the 1930s.
Tragic Realism in Lu Xun
Among intellectuals advocating the tragic-realistic approach to theater

reform, few were as persistent and thorough as Lu Xun, even though
he did not participate in the debate. While familiar with the insights
of Wang Guowei and Hu Shi as well as the classical Western notion
of tragedy, Lu Xun infused a more unrelenting sense of the tragic into
his understanding of Chinese history. In his book on Lu Xun’s
aesthetic thought, Liu Zaifu hails Lu Xun as the most insightful
220 BAN WANG
Chinese theorist on tragedy.7 Taking a cue from the latter’s passing

remark, “Tragedy is to show the destruction of valuable things to
viewers,” Liu credits Lu Xun’s insight for being consonant with the
Marxist understanding of tragedy in terms of history. Tragedy can be
appreciated by historical materialism not so much as a form of drama
as an objective manifestation of historical necessity. Historical events
cast in a tragic light are the result of the inevitable conflict of
progressive and regressive historical forces. Tragedy figures the
necessary onrush of history and thus embodies the nascent, fledgling,
but inevitably triumphant forces. The progress of history may suffer
temporary setbacks due to the mismatch between the immaturity of
the progressives and the entrenched reactionaries. So suffering and
death are the price of history, but nevertheless reveal the potential
revolutionary forces all the more poignantly as they struggle through
momentary trials and tribulations, only to prevail at the end.8
While he believed in a non-determinist social evolutionism, Lu
Xun’s notion of tragedy seems much grimmer than Liu has presented.
Lu Xun was sensitive to the predicaments of the modern human
individual caught in the maelstrom of history. In Lu Xun’s discussion
the meaning of tragedy is removed from the classical Western notion.
In a number of key works Lu Xun frequently held up The Red
Chamber Dream as a testing stone against works of “round-ism” —
an aesthetic obsession with completeness in happy endings and
emotional catharsis in traditional art and literature. This obsession
served as a screen against unpalatable or unthinkable catastrophes.9
Like Wang Guowei and Hu Shi he also saw the weakness of the
Chinese character and the emotional poverty embedded in the
aesthetic craving for happy endings in traditional narratives, but he
broadened the meaning of the tragic to a much larger domain: the
representation of history.
Lu Xun’s celebrated remark, “Tragedy shows the destruction of
valuable things to viewers,” was made with reference to an incident
in the essay “More Talk About the Collapse of the Tower of Leifeng”
(Zai lun Leifengta de daota). The essay starts with the collapse of a
historical landmark on the West Lake in the city of Hangzhou, the
Leifeng Tower. Quite a few old-style writers lamented the loss of what
used to be perfect scenery. Criticizing this taste for aesthetic
perfection, Lu Xun uses “tragedy” to designate, not the incident of
the tower’s collapse, but an unflinching acceptance of the disaster

without consolation. The cries of lamentation over the fallen tower
reveal a deeply ingrained, diseased mentality that craves aesthetic
completeness, balance and symmetry. Tragedy is an enemy against
this self-consoling aesthetic taste, writes Lu Xun, against this faint-
heartedness that turns a blind eye to catastrophes and disasters.
Taking the fall of the Tower as figurative of destruction and violence
in history, Lu Xun charges that Chinese writers and historians are
always inclined to indulge themselves in the game of revising the
past to make calamities appear in a more tolerable and palatable light.
They are ready to make catastrophes pretty, “patching up the old
patterns in the midst of ruins” (LXQJ 1: 193).
This last phrase points to the self-deceptive aesthetic pattern and
habit that inhere in traditional and modern historical representations.
Lu Xun not only critiques the popular desire for the cheaply gratifying
to the exclusion of the stark reality of destruction, but also extends
the tragic vision to a general examination of history writing. For him
history is not just a written record of the past, not the narration or
explanation of past occurrences. As Wang Hui points out, Lu Xun
looks at history from an intensely subjective viewpoint. The
subjective is not confined to the idiosyncratic or the personal, but
refers to a crossroads in which the individual is compelled to grapple
with external forces and make hard choices. Thus Lu Xun ponders
the existential questions concerning the individual caught in history.10
History is approached not on the register of narrative and
generalizations, but on the level of experience, pain and pleasure.
Historical understanding is a question of how the social and cultural
environment impacts, shocks, and brutalizes the individual human
being, torturing the body and the mind. In the name of the individual’s
pain and sufferings, historical understanding functions as a critical,
negative perspective.
In spite of all the sufferings, Lu Xun notes, one would be hard
pressed to find a straightforward record of suffering and brutality in
mainstream official history. A critical historian thus needs to recover
the body in pain in all its anguished corporeality. The madman in
the story “Diary of a Madman” is a prototype of this historian, one
who not only reads but also acts out the pains and nightmares of
history. As a walking testimony to a degenerate history replete with
222 BAN WANG
atrocities and violence, this historian with diagnostic acuteness is to

read between the lines of traditional records to find what is left unsaid.
His approach is that of a detective, tracing the undersides and secrets
of history. This is a method that Lu Xun himself practiced. Brushing
history against the grain, it consists in the mistrustful probing of
official history against accounts of “unofficial histories” (ye shi) —
those loose, unsanctioned testimonial and personal memories beneath
official historians’ contempt. Lu Xun plays off unsavory accounts in
these “wild” records against the claims or facts in established history.
This reading method zeroes in on the tensions and contradictions
between what was lived and what has been constructed, between
reality and representation.
This reading implies a critical historical consciousness that
refuses to take history at its face value. His two related essays
“Random Remarks After Illness” (Bing hou zatan) and “More Random
Remarks After Illness” (Bing hou zatan zhi yu) bear out this strategy.
In the first essay Lu Xun begins with Mirrors of Sichuan (Shu guijian),
a book of unofficial history that records how Zhang Xianzhong, a rebel
in Sichuan Province in the Ming Dynasty, mutilated and brutalized
human bodies. Lu Xun focuses on an unthinkable procedure of
execution that consists in peeling off the victim’s skin and spreading
it out on the ground. Some victims died right away, but others
continued to suffer unimaginable pain for days and in full public view.
Knowing the anatomy of the human body, Lu Xun is deeply shocked
by the anatomic precision and exacting professionalism in this horrific
procedure. He compares the rigorous execution of punishment with
the poverty of anatomic presentation in Chinese medical literature:
“What is strange about Chinese is that pictures showing the human
body’s interiors are lousy and unpresentable, yet in the sadistic torture
and execution it seems that the ancients already knew intimately
modern [medical] science” (LXQJ, 6:165–6). The numerous gruesome
practices of torture and killing are no news in Chinese history. Yet
what is important for Lu Xun is not that these practices existed, but
the habitual way writers and historians represent and register them.
A compelling example of whitewashing atrocities in history is
the portrayal of the Emperor Yongle’s murder of two of his faithful
councilors and disposal of their families. The Emperor ordered to have
one councilor’s skin peeled off and the other fried in oil. The latter
councilor’s two daughters, well-bred and refined ladies, were sent to

a whorehouse and became prostitutes. More disturbing, however, is
the way writers and historians managed to rewrite the incident. They
made up a happy scenario to show how good fortune befell the ladies
turned prostitutes. The ladies’ inborn talent, in the literati’s account,
allowed them to submit beautiful and melancholy poems to the
interrogator. Getting wind of this, the Emperor, presumably an
admirer of poetic talent, released the ladies and let them marry
respectable scholar-officials. The poems were published and some
doubted their authenticity. Checking other neglected records, Lu Xun
confirms the doubt. The whorehouse at that time, Lu Xun notes, was
hell, where girls were shipped from one military station to another
to be raped. In such a condition, Lu Xun asked, “Could writing a poem
redeem their lives?” (LXQJ 6: 170–2).
This scenario of touching up the pain of history with some poetic
tricks is another example of what Lu Xun calls “playing the elegant
tones in the end of opera”(LXQJ 6: 171). Historians and writers put
up a self-deceptive screen to cover up and make bearable the
unthinkable atrocities. By contrast, wild and unofficial histories are
filled with tragic sufferings. Such histories are not suited to the taste
of the feeble-minded:
It is not surprising that some tenderhearted people do not like

to read unofficial histories, do not want to listen to tales. Some
of the things written there are really far beyond the human realm
and send chills down one’s spine and injure one’s heart beyond
cure. Brutal incidents are everywhere; better not hear about them.
Only thus can one keep one’s body and soul together. This is
also what is called “gentlemen do not go near the kitchen where
animals are butchered” . . . it is only a matter of the refined
taste of a serenely clear mind. (LXQJ 6: 167)
For Lu Xun this refined taste marks the self-deceptive mentality of

the educated elites, who sought to “find ease and delight in the pool
of blood” (LXQJ 6: 170) or in “patching up the old patterns in the
ruins”:
But some Chinese scholar-officials always liked to create

something out of nothing, transplanting flowers onto trees to
224 BAN WANG
make up stories. They not only praised the peaceful reign but
also whitewashed dark ones. The lies about Tie Xuan’s [one of
the councilors] two daughters were just minor things. As to the
major historical events like the burning, massacres and
plundering of China by the Hu Barbarians, someone would still
write poems glorying in the suicide of the heroic woman or the
ravaged lady scribbling edifying poems on the walls. This taste,
this rhyme, seems more exciting and appealing than the burned
down palaces in ruins and the suffering of millions. (LXQJ 6:
172).
The tragic vision, in Lu Xun, aims to tear up this self-deceptive,

illusionist, redemptive representation, which is as much part of
history’s violence as the real events themselves. The historian with
a tragic vision, by contrast, is determined to dwell truthfully on the
pains and sufferings. For critics in the theater reform movement, the
notion of the tragic was used to unmask the self-deceptive patterns
inherent in the traditional, popular narrative of theater and fiction.
Similarly Lu Xun applied the tragic lens to his meditation on Chinese
history. His view exhibits an unflinching and unsentimental
confrontation with the abyss of painful historical reality and eschews
any easy, imaginary, and cathartic resolution. The “tragic” nature of
history and its representation point to an alternative in our relation
to past catastrophes. The gaze on atrocities focuses on the individual’s
existential fate in a history that he or she does not possess. Lu Xun
suggests that tarrying longer and more critically with a tragic past
may help us sort out problems and predicaments in the tensions
between tradition and modernity, individual and society, memory and
history before we rush on to an unknown future.
The Material Turn in the Radical Cinema
One may find links between traumatic visuality and the

representation of history in filmmaking and film discourse. Lu Xun’s
tragic conception of history was tied to the disruption of the inherited
literary and aesthetic patterns and the demystification of their
“whitewashing” capacity. Yet literary self-deconstruction was very
much part of May Fourth culture and as Paul Pickowicz has argued,
was carried over to filmmaking.11 The radical filmmakers of the 1930s

not only dared to confront the kind of visual violence that Lu Xun
experienced in watching the newsreel I mentioned earlier, but also
attempted to represent collective traumas on the screen as the
Chinese went through the war of Japanese aggression and social
disintegration. In the specific circumstances of the thirties the
filmmakers were faced not only with the dead authority of the
traditional literary sign but the new looming authority of Hollywood
images and narratives. If the rising influence of Hollywood in China
in the thirties signaled a colonizing process of marketing, sentimental
education, and liberal pedagogy in the interest of global capitalism,
Chinese filmmakers had to confront the dual pressures of the literary
and cinematic regimes. I suggest that filmmaking in the 1930s
constituted an attempt to carry over the radical potential of traumatic
visuality into the screening of Chinese history. It developed a film
aesthetic that more effectively registered and engaged the “real” strata
of history in flux.
Confronted with imperial and colonial aggression, filmmakers and
critics were faced with a historical situation fraught with disaster and
danger. In this crisis situation, film production took a new turn and
struggled to cope with the upheavals of war and aggression. Critics
and historians often relate the rise of the radical cinema to the two
key events of Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the
bombing of Shanghai in 1932. As a critic suggested in 1933, the
Chinese cinema took a drastic turn practically under the gun.12 The
two events were the immediate cause of a gathering momentum.
Amid the accumulated traumas of destruction of the traditional
culture, the wars, imperialist aggression, and rule by the warlords,
socially engaged Chinese filmmakers and critics made a realist turn
in the way they thought films should relate to historical reality. The
crisis was a fertile ground for a readiness to confront reality, for
critiquing obsolete cultural forms, and for imagining social change.
The willingness to confront reality manifested itself in the
proliferation of documentaries recording incidents of war, disaster and
suffering; in the critiques of Hollywood influence, and in the rejection
of the remakes of traditional dramas on the screen. There was growing
theoretical reflection on film as an effective medium for engaging
historical experience and revealing social reality.
226 BAN WANG
In the discussions of the cinema’s capacity to engage reality in

the 1930s, the classical theater and Hollywood films were viewed as
negative examples. In the debate on theater reform earlier, the
traditional theater, with its repertoire of conventional plots, its display
of trite feelings, its Confucian ethical framework and happy endings,
was criticized as a venue of escape from a crisis-ridden reality. On
this account what is true of classical theater is also largely true of
classical Hollywood cinema. Leo Lee has shown the strong impact of
classical Hollywood on the Chinese cinema of the thirties and forties.
The hallmark of this cinema, in Lee’s analysis based on Miriam
Hansen’s work, consists in “the interweaving of multiple strands of
action moving toward resolution and closure, a web of motivation
centering on the psychology of individual characters, and the
concomitant effect of an autonomous fictional world offered to the
spectator from an ideal vantage point.”13 Hollywood surely had other
faces, but for our analytical purposes it is instructive to stay with
this generalization. The affinity between classical Hollywood and
classical Chinese theater, if there is any, lies in a similar scenario of
ideological closure, stereotypical fulfillment of desire, confirmation
of conservative assumptions, and wishful smoothing down of real
problems of life-and-death political struggle.
This affinity contributed in no small way to the formation of the
mainstream commercial Chinese cinema. Most Chinese filmmakers
struggling to build the new film industry, including socially engaged
scriptwriters and directors, were schooled in theater and literature,
and were quick to find themselves in sympathy with Hollywood
before the abrupt change in the early thirties. Simply put, the memory
of traditional repertoire was filling the new bottles of Hollywood
melodramatic narratives.
With the deepening of the national crisis, however, there arose a
strong attempt to break out of this complacency with inherited and
borrowed repertoire. Critics and filmmakers were first compelled to
rethink film as a medium independent of theater. While film had for
a long time been thought of as a complement, if not as handmaiden,
to the theater, the situation of emergency forced filmmakers and
critics to see it as capable of purging the narcissistic, residual memory
embedded in the narrative prototype of popular fiction and theater.
To them film became an effective medium for reflecting and engaging
social crises. This realization reveals a deconstructive dimension of

traumatic visuality against cultural authority, which can be elucidated
with reference to the notion of the photographical function of film,
advanced by Walter Benjamin and Kracauer.
Kracauer in his Theory of Film cites a passage from The
Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust to illustrate the way photography
disrupts the habit of perception. The narrator enters his grandmother’s
room after a long absence, unannounced and unexpected. He is
shocked by the eerie strangeness of the grandmother’s appearance in
her unguarded moment. He sees “sitting on the sofa, beneath the
lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following
the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old
woman whom I did not know.”14 The shocking sight is registered as
if by an impartial, emotionally detached camera. It tears off the
emotional halo from the loving eyes of the grandson who might well
have imbued his grandmother’s person with tenderness. The
grandmother’s look, captured as if by the impersonal medium of
photography, is obviously an image of decay and death that defies
emotional consolation and redemption. The sight filtered through the
camera-eye undercuts the grandson’s habitual mode of seeing, which
has been charged, in Miriam Hansen’s words, with “familiarity,
intimacy, and memory.”15
The impersonal camera-eye, not colored by emotion and with a
potential to shock, is what prompted theorists like Kracauer,
Benjamin, and Roland Barthes to dispel the aura surrounding the
culturally “encoded” eye and its cinematic extension. The encoded
eye is charged with “familiarity, intimacy, and memory.” The
photographical eye exerts its power as a “naked” eye, and corresponds
to the punctum in Barthes’s analysis of photography. The punctum
“is that unexpected prick, sting, or cut that disturbed the intelligibility
of the culturally connotated meaning” and “defied reduction to a
code.”16 The cultural code includes the visual code — in the Chinese
case the perceptual habit nurtured by traditional theater and by
canonized fictions of narrative prototypes. The photographical
punctum has a traumatizing power to strip human eyes of their aura
of romance, desire, and narcissism. Shocked out of the culturally
conditioned habit, the viewer is thrown into a direct confrontation
with the “naked” reality.
228 BAN WANG
It is not difficult to see how close the traumatic punctum in

photography is to Rey Chow’s observation of Lu Xun’s experience of
watching the newsreel. It also resonates with the typical description
of traumatic impact and memory that throws into crisis the
established narrative, visual, and perceptual constructs.17 We can go
further and attempt to understand the Chinese filmmakers and critics
as working toward this awareness of a shocking camera. Instead of
psychic shocks, the shocking experience stemmed from the actual
devastations, misery, and life struggle in the countries and cities
against a backdrop of imperialism, colonialism, residual feudalism,
and worsening social conditions. These facts did not need a camera
to be noticed, surely, but film documentation, even the staged mise-
en-scène in feature films, thrust calamities and problems forcefully
into public imagination and consciousness. Filmmaking, critics urged,
should scan a wider social field and cover the disadvantaged,
dispossessed, and downtrodden. Xia Yan, who with many others
represented this radical trend, characterized the principle of
filmmaking as “touching the reality” and “powerful exposé.”18 A
number of powerful films were produced in the spirit of exposé and
with a view to jolt the audience out of complacency with an urban
life of consumption. They include, among others, Three Modern
Women (San ge moden nüxing, 1933), The Night of the City (Chengshi
zhi ye, 1933), Spring Silkworm (Chun chan, 1933), and The Torrents
(Kuangliu, 1933). These films broke with the mainstream films
depicting trivial, idle matters in the daily routine of petty urbanites,
love triangles and emotional entanglement, replete with settings of
coffee shops and dance halls. Turning their exposé to poverty,
oppression, and suffering both in the city slums and the villages, they
considerably widened the visual scope of China’s material conditions
and contributed to the formation of political consciousness in the
viewing public.
It may be objected that this trend turns the “art of film” into a
vehicle of ideology and propaganda. In the context of the crisis
situation, however, it was the dramatic fetishes of Hollywood, coupled
with the obsolete, stereotypical traditional narratives, that proved to
be ideological, for they were selling images of false consciousness
concerning bourgeois lifestyle remote to the majority audience who
could hardly make ends meet. They diverted rather than provoked
attention to the dire consequences of imperialism and colonial

modernity. The turn toward realism brought film into an intense
engagement with a crisis-ridden consciousness about a volatile,
politically charged atmosphere. It not only registered a more complex
and concrete experience of history, but also enriched the aesthetic
function of film.
It is easy to ignore the vibrant aesthetic innovation in these
“social problem” films if we hold that art has little to do with history.
Adorno’s dictum, “Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art
aesthetically misperceived,” should remind us how much a film’s
power hinges on its intimate involvement with the specific socio-
historical circumstances.19 In trying to engage history and social
problems the radical filmmakers were working out a material
aesthetic. This aesthetics derived from the shocking camera that
alienated and shocked the audience equipped with the sensibility
educated by Hollywood cinema.
While the mainstream film tended to produce images of
exoticism, romantic intrigues, and self-satisfaction, the radical film
sought to reveal the hidden and occluded strata of social reality:
prostitutes, drifters, peasants, orphans, the homeless, and wanderers.
These people and their lives were not unknown, of course, but the
film-viewing public seemed to have learned to ignore them. Although
the radical films sometimes used popular and Hollywood story lines,
the camera sought to scrutinize and document the downtrodden of
the society. This naturalistic or documentary strain in laying bare
wretched everyday life conditions attempted to show people, in
Raymond Williams’s words, as “inseparable from their real social and
physical environments.”20 It was a life process under the naked eye,
in a naturalist key.
Critics have pointed to the ideological overdose in the radical film.
An allegorical structure charged with nationalistic issues is said to
frame the psychologically motivated character going through a
narrative of interpersonal interaction. Ma Ning’s pioneering study
shows how, in the film Street Angel (Malu tianshi, 1937), journalistic
writing and elements of popular culture (songs, wordplay, and magic
shows) form an external frame that has the potential to steer the
individualistic melodrama of Hollywood in the direction of social
allegory. One point of convergence between socio-historical reference
230 BAN WANG
Still 10.1 Xiaohong, the singing girl, as image of the down-trodden class in
Street Angel
Still 10.2 The Great Wall as symbol of national aspirations

and personal melodrama is woman’s place in the plot as the object of

sexual desire. In Ma’s analysis the socio-historical significance of war
and disaster in the narrative often overweighs the action-driven
plotline of love and melodrama. The singing girl Xiaohong, for
example, is not only “the virgin over whom the feudal forces and the
lower classes contest, but also Mother China, who is now being
violated by the Japanese invaders.”21
Allegory is both an image on its own and tethered to an abstract
idea for a higher meaning. Put differently, an allegorical representation
implies that our established signs do not refer nicely to real relations
and things, yet we still have to use those corrupt signs. In Fredric
Jameson’s account, national allegory consists in the interpretation of
the individual’s psychic and life trajectory as part of the collective
destiny.22 But the link between the individual and society need not
be as arbitrary as the allegorical link, say, between a lion and the
idea of courage. Rather, to say that the individual story should be
part of the collective whole is to acknowledge the historical condition
of the individual’s separation from community. Socio-historical
references in a film would appear “allegorical” when we accept this
separation as necessary and timeless. References to extrinsic historical
conditions or ideological frameworks would then seem arbitrary and
extraneous to the “proper” individual story. Conventional wisdom
has it that the individual’s story should show a life trajectory of its
own, whose charm is undisturbed by “unaesthetic” didacticism or
politicization. The allegorical separation of the individual from
society, of artworks from historical reality, can also be seen as a
symptom of traumatic rupture between private experience and
cognitive and cultural schemes. Since the existing cognitive
structures, collectively shared and hence social, are unable to integrate
traumatic experience, the individual becomes atomistic and
completely alone, stripped of support networks of meaning and
emotion.23
This disconnection leads to the truncated view that the individual
story in the Hollywood mode is aesthetically appealing, while socially
engaged narratives in Third World cinemas are allegorical and hence
ideological. This is a mystification. The individual story in Hollywood
film is as much part of the collective myth, as much a personalization
of culturally cherished liberal values and middle-class consumptive
232 BAN WANG
lifestyle, and hence the collective destiny of capitalistic modernity

and “democracy.” It is not an exaggeration to say that Hollywood is
the most powerful ideological apparatus of the US as a nation-state
and the promulgator of its “manifest destiny.” Hollywood films,
especially the war films of patriotism, certainly qualify as “national
allegory.” But even a private melodrama can be seen as an allegory
affirming the collective values of a liberal society. Robin Wood sees
the story of the archetypal male and female in Hollywood as
allegorical of “American capitalist ideology.” This nationalist ideology
includes “the right of ownership, private enterprise, personal
initiatives; the settling of the land.”24 In this light Hollywood imagery
is not simply national allegory; in the geopolitical context, it could
be supernational or imperial allegory, as manifest in the national will
to Americanize the globe.
The difference is that a “good” Hollywood viewer is not invited
to perceive an allegorical leap of faith between a full-fledged, “natural”
individual life and its underlying social mythologies. Furthermore,
the mythologies of Hollywood are seen as “natural,” “real,” and hence
normative, whereas the Third World mythologies are seen as merely
mythical and ideological. Yet this shutting out the social,
nevertheless, does not prevent the individual story of Hollywood from
becoming allegorical in a different way. It is an allegory that ties,
arbitrarily, all the heterogeneous strands of individual, gender, class,
racial, and geographical trajectories into an overarching image of
liberal individualism. This big myth, probably the biggest in the
millennium, never tires of telling the story of romance, love, sex,
family, business, adventure, and prosperity. It is an allegory of the
self-made individual prevailing over the social, a mythical prototype
of how an atomistic individual can make his own way through a
tangle of personal relations without support from a community, much
less through public action or social transformation. In the post-
traumatic circumstances since the September 11 attacks, what can
be more collective than the notions of individual liberty? What can
be more political than the “aesthetic,” “linear” narrative of love and
loss?
In the national allegory of Third World cinemas, on the other
hand, the individual story typically aspires to merge into a unity with
the social, so that it becomes a part of communal or national destiny.
The individual fate in this utopian vision does not simply prefigure
historical imaginaries but also points to a deferred union of society
and individual, in the strong sense that “my community is the
objective as well as expressive shapes of myself” and vice versa. In
this context the allegorical gap would be closed if the narrative
presents a transparent unity between individual and social in a
closure. Very few people in our post-romantic, post-utopian,
postmodern age would cherish this scenario. The problem is ours,
not that of the impulse of radical art and film. We would usually
consider this as a cheap formal solution to social problems, because
the solution is tagged on to the irresolvable contradictions revealed
in the narrative. We may also recall Lu Xun’s critique of cheap
catharsis in traditional aesthetics, whose impulse for a satisfactory
closure may also influence film narratives.
Did the films of the thirties jump to an easy closure in some kind
of triumphant nationalism or social justice? It is important to
distinguish ideological hopes in the narrative and the facile realization
of the hopes in a closure. While he addresses the role of the social in
the individual story, Ma Ning does not see a formal solution
prematurely imposed in the radical film. An implicit “material”
approach in his analysis guards against the hasty redeeming of allegory
into a cathartic closure. Instead of trying to “provide the narrative
with a solution in the Western sense of the word,” writes Ma Ning,
the radical film text invited the viewer to “relive those social and
political contradictions unresolved by the text.” This material
function is:
in the mode of actual social experience which the viewer relies

on to form his/her critical judgment — a judgment which
articulates contradictory discourses at a particular historical
conjuncture. The subjective positioning of the text is a process
of constant change. The set of formal contradictions that are
overdetermined by social contradictions turns the text into a
contradictory discursive space.25
Social contradictions, in other words, turn up in the film as irruption

and disruption, and remain in tension with the established discursive
or generic emplotment of what is designed to be a smooth-running,
problem-solving narrative. Thus instead of unifying contradictory
234 BAN WANG
elements into a satisfactory whole, instead of holding up an individual

story as a premature symbolic solution of social problems, the radical
film, in the spirit of material engagement with history, lays bare
history’s complexity, conflict, and myriad options and possibilities.
Montage and the Long Take
This material turn to history brings us to two much debated issues

of montage and the long take in Chinese film discourse. As both
editing technique and theoretical category, montage was introduced
into China in the twenties and thirties.26 Referring to a normally fast-
paced intercutting of shots assembled or “mounted” from
heterogeneous space and time, montage seems to be the very opposite
of the long take, which describes a stationary camera taking a
prolonged look at a contiguous space. But from the perspective of the
material turn to history, the two methods seemed to be touching base.
In response to the historical crisis, both techniques effected an
intensified, engaged relation to external reality.
In its function to effect an intensified engagement with reality,
the long take is a method to immerse the viewer in an “unprocessed,”
stripped-down piece of reality by forcing him or her to stare at it for
a long duration, until the material density and intensity of the space
warp the viewing habit out of shape. It can also be used, of course,
commercially to provide tourist sensations and cheap pleasures, which
would be a different story. A materially driven montage sequence,
on the other hand, disperses the viewer into a shifting quicksand of
interconnected or unrelated images and plunges him or her into a
kaleidoscopic slice of reality. A montaged reality is one that is torn
and fragmented in many contradictory directions, sometimes
bordering on the schizophrenic or carnivalesque, depending on the
specific stance. But it also provokes reflection and ideas.
To see what conjoins montage and the long take in the material
approach to history, it is important to re-assess the representational
capacity in the kind of montage associated with Sergei Eisenstein and
elaborated by Roland Barthes in conjunction with Brecht. Discussions
of montage as a mere technique of intercutting may ignore its value
as a matrix for understanding the representation of history. Chinese
theorists and filmmakers started translating and writing about

montage theories in the twenties, but they seemed more inclined to
accept and use Pudovkin’s notion of montage as an editing strategy,
which was aimed at the construction of a smooth continuity of shots
in storytelling. 27 Pudovkin’s writings on montage were close to
mainstream Hollywood conventions, and were indeed read for years
in Hollywood as a manual — a testament to Chinese filmmakers’
preference for Hollywood even in their reception of montage.28
Eisenstein was averse to Pudovkin’s conception of montage
precisely because the latter aimed at creating a naturalized, smooth
continuous narrative. To Eisenstein montage is much more than a
cinematic device; it is in a privileged position to mimic the volatile
experience of modernity. Barthes links Brecht with Eisenstein in their
common project to produce a “pregnant moment.” The “pregnant
moment” has multiple meanings, but one central point is that a film
erects a meaning but also manifests “the production of meaning.”
To Barthes this Brechtien moment accomplishes “the coincidence of
the visual and the ideal découpages,” and has the allegorical duality
of being both concrete and abstract. We can see a thrust here toward
the linking up of concrete action to the yet-to-be-achieved hopes of
social transformation. The pregnant moment requires intellectual,
reflective distancing rather than empathetic identification and takes
in “the present, the past, and the future; that is, the historical meaning
of represented action.”29
Gilles Deleuze’s elaboration of the pregnant moment in
Eisenstein’s montage brings to the surface the philosophical
implication of Barthes’s observation. Taking issue with the
conventional perception that Eisenstein extracted from narrative
movement certain moments of crisis, Deleuze relates this moment
to an open-ended stream of temporality that is not absorbed by any
preconceived narrative scheme. The classical notion of time sees a
moment or image in film as “the moment of actualization of a
transcendent form.” On this view, the moment does not belong to
itself; it is not singular and pregnant with multiple possibilities, but
is reducible to an overarching stream of narrative or meaning. By
contrast, Eisenstein’s montage does not integrate fragmented
moments; it evidences “the production of confrontation of the
singular points which are immanent to movement.”30 Deleuze, I
236 BAN WANG
believe, is tackling the question of how singular images may or may

not be structured into a narrative whole and elevated into a “higher”
stratum of significance. Clearly he praises Eisenstein’s montage for
keeping images singular and their movement unharnessed to any
transcendent, established scheme, whether philosophical, cultural, or
ideological. But images are on the other hand also determinable in
terms of the internal dynamics of their flow, determinable
contingently and practically, by the actors in history.
Eisenstein’s own reflection on montage points to its
deconstructive and reconstructive dimensions. Eisenstein calls
Pudovkin’s montage “epic.” The “epic” here does not mean historical
scope or narrative breadth but suggests the monistic unity and
continuity of meaning and narrative.31 That is why Eisenstein calls
the reception of Pudovkin’s smooth narrative the “inertia of
perception.” This inertia should be exploded, “dynamized,” in his
words, by splicing common sense reality, by yoking/cutting discrete,
monadic, heterogeneous objects violently together.32 The effect is not
just emotional impact but a visceral, physical blow. Responding to
Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye that “faithfully” records a common-
sense reality, Eisenstein proclaims, “It is not a ‘kino-eye’ we need,
but a ‘kino-fist’.”33 This notion chimes in with Walter Benjamin’s
project to enlist montage in dismantling the teleological narrative of
technological progress and instrumental reason to the open force field
of history. Benjamin considered montage in terms of his “now-time,”
a pregnant moment with a vision of alternatives and contrary to the
empty, homogenous time of capitalist modernity. By splicing,
wrenching objects out of their reified context, the historian/filmmaker
makes assault on the smooth narrative that perpetuates existing social
relations and critiques the fetishized tableau of cinematic spectacles
designed for passive visual consumption. In the perspectives of
Barthes, Deleuze, Benjamin, and Eisenstein, there is a refusal to see
montage integrated and structured into a lineal, preconceived
narrative. These critics see montage as a crucible of trauma, rupture,
and becoming; as an experiment with conflicting options and
ideological positions. It touches history at a moment when it is
shaken with shocks. As Benjamin puts it, it is a dialectic image at a
standstill.34
Although Chinese film discourse did not delve into the materialist
implications of montage theory, the radical films practiced montage

in stunning, innovative ways. Several critics have noted how the
brilliant montage sequence in the opening of Street Angel “mounts”
a series of images from various recesses and corners of the city of
Shanghai.35 In a sequence of fifty-two shots, images of the Shanghai
skyscrapers from unusual angles cut to streets crammed with
automobiles and streetcars, the neon signs of cafés and dance halls
collide with the shots of the crowded surface of a canal. Scrambled
together are images of folk and feudal customs of marriage ceremony
and the European-style brass band and parade. We can also find
heterogeneous sequences in a number of other films. While the
montage of Street Angel is of limited duration, other films presented
a panoramic, montage view of Shanghai, like The Night of the City,
and Twenty-four Hours of Shanghai (Shanghai ershisi xiaoshi, 1933).
These films are extended montages, montages writ large, giving a
widespread exposé of the contrast and conflict in Shanghai’s variegated
strata of urban existence.
Rather than fascinate and mesmerize as commodified simulacra,
these montage sequences scramble the viewing habit schooled in the
conventional coordinates of space and time and challenge the
continuity of common-sense assumptions. They send the viewer on
a dizzying ride that mimics or intensifies the experience of constantly
living on edge, of crisis-ridden modern life in the shadow of
imperialism and colonialism. While they are fraught with grotesque
contradictions between “Chinese feudalism and foreign powers,”36
they also lack a central consciousness designed, as in goal-directed
Hollywood narratives, to navigate the shifting sand of urban life and
to tell an individual story of psychological development and
fulfillment. The subjectivity implied by the montage is a subject on
trial, plunged into a “kaleidoscope with consciousness,” unable to
find an anchor.37
Ma Ning has noted the juxtaposition in Street Angel of the point-
of-view shot, embodied by the central character of the action, with
the free-floating camera movement without an anchoring position.38
If we adhere to montage as an effective way of registering a
contradictory, dialectic reality, it would be hard to claim, as Ma does,
that the Hollywood point-of-view shot synthesized with Eisensteinian
montage in the radical film. The “right” proportion of point-of-view
238 BAN WANG
shots to the “anchorless” montage reveals a tension between the

narrative solution of social problems and the montage’s attempt at
stirring up issues and contradictions. Xia Yan, the representative of
the radical film, points to the political implications in cinematic forms
in an essay on the film The Night of the City. In it he recalls a
montage of Shanghai’s nocturnal scene consisting of cars, skyscrapers
in the districts of the Foreign Concessions, the guests in the dance
halls, and the race dogs. By contrast, there are shots capturing lives
of the prostitutes, the starving, and the oppressed. This montage
sequence sharpens the contrasts, discrepancies, and contradictions of
city life. It is achieved largely through episodic, fragmentary cinematic
exposé. Xia Yan sees montage as carrying the potential to minimize
the elements of Hollywood film and traditional theater, keeping at
bay their dramatic effects and emotional sensationalism.39
If montage traverses the tangle of life-like fragments, the long take
fixates, as if obsessively, upon an opaque, unprocessed slice of reality.
Critics have noted how the tragic power of the film Plunder of Peach
and Plum (Tao li jie) derives from the use of the long take. At the
outset the film depicts the school principal’s visit to his former
favorite student, who is to be executed for a “crime,” which is more
the effect of social injustice than of his own doing. The camera
“stares” for a long time at the “dragging” trip to the prison and the
impenetrable back of the student in the cell during the visit, as if to
ponder why. The film’s other scene portrays the agony and suffering
of the protagonist’s wife after childbirth, as she carries a bucket of
water upstairs and comes tumbling down. In a prolonged shot, the
immobile camera effects, in Huang Ailing’s words, a “relentless siege
of the downtrodden characters.”40 The long take’s material connection
with physical reality is striking. The camera seems to be staring into
an abyss of misery and pain, and seemingly unable to get on with
the story, it records every detail and gesture, soaking up every
perceivable trace, hue and shape. As if haunted by a dream recurrence
of a shocking event, the camera cannot help bearing witness to what
has been out there. The long take thus functions as a metaphor for
the traumatized patient, who, when asked to tell a coherent story, is
repeatedly and helplessly seized by a singular, persistent image.
For the critical historical consciousness, montage and the long
take are more than cinematic devices. If treated formalistically, their
function as signs would simply dissolve the past within a present. In

this light it does not matter if a film engages with historical reality;
it would simply be another fictional piece of entertainment without
historical content. Like the categories of the tragic and traumatic,
these two forms strive to approach actual referents in history with
the awareness that the present form cannot absorb traces of the past.
The past traces are the imprints of history that cannot be neatly
arranged into a preconceived aesthetic pattern. In film theories in
favor of documentary or photographic reality, filmic images have been
understood as bearing indexical traces of reality, because the real
referent is tied to the camera’s “presence” at some point prior to our
reading and appreciation of filmic images. In emphasizing the gap
between past traces and the present film form, film theorist Philip
Rosen articulates the tension between memory and history. The gap
forces the spectator to “read pastness in the image, not only as a past
as a signified . . . but also a past of the signifier, which is in turn that
of a signifier-referent relation as a production.” The awareness of a
real referent assumes a different “when” of the productive process
that cannot be immediately present. “This different when . . . must
be ‘filled in’, ‘inferred’, and ‘provided’ by the subject.”41 Thus to
approach the historical referent, the film viewer must assume some
ongoing productive work in the construction of film text beyond film
viewing. This productive work may be “memory, mental activities,
subconscious investment, rational inference, the effectivity of cultural
discourse” and so on. The point is not to be fixated on a formed
spectacle, but to see a spectacle being formed and produced in the
murky waters of history.
Notes
Introduction
1 Vivian Sobchack, ed., “Introduction: History Happens,” in Sobchack, ed.,
The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event
(New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 1–7.
2 See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1956), 65.
3 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed.
James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 284–5.
4 Walter Benjamin’s work on the modern shock on human perception is
the seminal work that has inspired many contemporary scholars to pursue
the same inquiry. Through a critical survey of a group of French writers
Martin Jay has shown the intimate link between traumatic visuality and
modernity. See Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University
of California Press, 1994). Also see Robert Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning
History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1995).
5 The voluminous literature on the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and
genocide attests to the interest in the traumatic event of modern times.
For useful references see Sobchack, ed. Also see Kirby Farrell, Post-
Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
6 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 2000), 266.
7 Cathy Caruth, ed., “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory
(Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7.
8 Ibid., 4–5.
9 Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The
Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in ibid., 158–82.
242 NOTES TO PAGES 6–13
10 Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca and London:

Cornell University Press, 1994), 209.
11 Ibid., 207.
12 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1961).
13 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage,
1939).
14 Some authors in our volume do address this question specifically. For
example, see Joshua Hirsch’s work in this volume, on “Post-Traumatic
Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary,” pp. 95–123.
15 See E. Ann Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma,” in Screen 42.2
(Summer 2001): 201–5. The essay discusses the ways in which melodrama
can serve to interrupt social narratives that seek to dissociate traumatic
events, despite its conventional form, but goes on to develop a taxonomy
of possible viewer positions for different types of films dealing with
traumatic events that are reproduced here.
16 For a brief introduction to the ideas of Dori Laub and Robert Jay Lifton
see Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, op. cit., 61–75
(Laub); 128–47 (Lifton).
17 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions,” in
Sobchack, ed., 146–53.
18 For an insightful discussion of turning local histories and geographies into
images, see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and
Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996).
19 Ibid., 147.
20 Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture, 17.
21 See books by Michael Rothberg (Trauma and Realism, 2000), and Dora
Appel (Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary
Witnessing, Rutgers University Press, 2001), which take on issues of
representation relevant to our arguments.
22 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 162, 164.
23 Ibid., 166.
24 In Castoriadis’s theory of the imaginary institution of society, history,
the diverse forms of social and cultural forms through time, is the product
of humans’ constant imagining and maintaining of social existence
through the active network of “social imaginary significations that are
carried by and embodied in the institution of the given society and that
. . . animate it.” In this light trauma is a result of the collapse of this
pervasive social imaginary network of significations, and needs to be
redressed through re-imagining and restructuring social-historical domains.
See Cornelius Castoriadis, Worlds in Fragments: Writings on Politics,
Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1977), 7.
NOTES TO PAGES 14–31 243
25 Ibid., 170.
26 See Elsaesser, 146. Recent revisions of the Vietnam war seem to make
use of the trauma of the veterans for a much needed patriotism, but they
show that earlier engagement with the trauma of Vietnam had a critical
value against US interventions.
27 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 7.
28 Ibid., 1.
29 See Kaplan (2001) for how “vicarious traumatization” is one of the possible
viewer positions in some films about traumatic events, and for debates
about the relative benefits of such traumatization.
Chapter 1
1 Cited in David Beresford, “Theatre of Pain and Catharsis,” Weekly Mail
and Guardian (Johannesburg), April 19,1996, http://archive.mg.co.za/
NXT/gateway.dll/PrintEdition/MGP1996/3lv02027/4lv02088/
5lv02137.htm (July 31, 2002).
2 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 1995 (Act 95–34,
26 July 1995), http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/legal/act9534.htm (July 31, 2002).
3 Mark Gevisser, “Four white men and truth,” Weekly Mail and Guardian
(Johannesburg), May 19, 1995, http://archive.mg.co.za/NXT/gateway.dll/
PrintEdition/MGP1995/3lv01556/4lv01668/5lv01697.htm (July 31, 2002).
4 Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 128.
5 Cited in J. Mervis, “A Critique of Separate Development,” in N. J.
Rhoodie, ed., South African Dialogue: Contrasts in South African
Thinking on Basic Race Issues (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 72.
6 Tal, 128.
7 Kadar Asmal, et al., Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of
Apartheid’s Criminal Governance, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1997), 144.
8 Stephen Laufer, “Decades of Soul Searching are to Come,” Business Day
(Johannesburg), November 8, 1996, http://www.bday.co.za/96/1108/
comment/c4.htm.
9 Eddie Koch, “Tears From the Tough,” Weekly Mail and Guardian
(Johannesburg), February 28, 1997, http://archive.mg.co.za/NXT/
gateway.dll/PrintEdition/MGP1997/3lv02663/4lv02664/5lv02727.htm
(July 31, 2002), emphasis added.
10 Cathy Caruth, ed., “An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton,” in Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins
11 Khulumani: We are Speaking, produced by Lauren Segal, Centre for the
Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 1995, videocassette.
12 Gevisser.
13 Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Caruth, ed., Trauma,
186.
14 Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in
Caruth, ed., Trauma, 69.
15 Cited in Antjie Krog, “Overwhelming Trauma of the Truth,” Weekly Mail
and Guardian (Johannesburg), December 24, 1996, http://archive.mg.co.za/
5lv00027.htm (July 31, 2002).
16 Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling:
Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self,” New Literary History 26
(1995): 184.
17 Cited in Antjie Krog, “Unto the Third or Fourth Generation,” Weekly
Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), June 13, 1997, http://archive.mg.co.za/
5lv01697.htm (July 31, 2002), emphasis added, elision in original.
18 Krog, “Overwhelming Trauma of the Truth.”
19 Ibid.
20 Krog, “Unto the Third or Fourth Generation.”
21 Ibid.
22 Tal, 118.
Caruth ed., Trauma, 64.
24 Krog, “Unto the Third or Fourth Generation,” emphasis added.
25 SisaKhuluma: We are Still Speaking, produced by Lauren Segal, Centre for
the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 1996, videocassette.
26 Khulumani: We are Speaking.
27 Culbertson, 179.
28 Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Caruth ed., Trauma,
187.
30 Cathy Caruth, ed., “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” Trauma, 9.
31 “Forgive But Not Forget,” produced by Michael Gavshon, 60 Minutes,
February 16, 1997, videocassette.
32 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub, eds, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60, 62.
33 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, October 29, 1998,
http://www.polity.org.za/govdocs/commissions/1998/trc/index.htm (July
31, 2002).
34 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 255.
35 Michael Roth, The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction
of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 207.
36 Vera Schwarcz, “No Solace From Lethe: History, Memory, and Cultural
Identity in Twentieth-Century China,” Daedalus 120.2 (Spring 1991):
90.
37 Laufer.
39 Wilhelm Verwoerd, “Justice after Apartheid? Reflections on the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” paper delivered at the
Fifth International Conference on Ethics and Development,
“Globalization, self-determination and justice in development,” Madras,
India, January 2, 1997.
40 Laufer.
41 Ibid.
42 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event and the Flight from History,” in
Hana Wirth-Nesher, ed., The Sheila Carmel Lectures (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
University Press, 1995).
43 Verwoerd.
Chapter 2
1 Since the 1980s and 1990s, postcolonial theory has critiqued colonialism
from diverse disciplinary persepctives. But little attention has been paid
to indigeneity or to the differences between colonial nations and “settler”
socities such as Australia, Canada and the US. My project here draws on
both postcolonial studies and indigenous studies but aims to develop
themes by suggesting less used terms (such as “translation”) and
specifically to introduce the idea of “embodied translators.”
2 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), especially pages 6–7.
3 Pratt, 7.
4 For basic theories of trauma, see Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations
in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). But
see work by others in this volume for illuminating discussions of trauma
and traumatic memory, including the introduction to this volume.
5 As Cathy Caruth has noted, the pathology consists “solely in the structure
of the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced
fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one
who experiences it” (Caruth, ed., Trauma, 4–5). I have elsewhere argued
in some depth for the possibility of cultural or collective trauma. See my
essay “Trauma, Aging and Melodrama (With Reference to Tracey Moffatt’s
Night Cries)” in Marianne DeKoven, ed., Feminist Locations (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 304–28.
6 Debates about the concept of “collective” trauma are increasing, and I
return to some of them below. The concept seems useful to me, even if
still imprecise, if one thinks of the collective as a mass of individuals in

varying degrees affected by the catastrophe — not all suffer the classic
symptoms of trauma, some are vicariously rather than directly
traumatized, some suffer from anticipated or fear of trauma. But all have
been deeply affected and their world views altered by the events.
7 See E. Ann Kaplan, “Trauma, Aging and Melodrama.”
8 For more discussion on this point, see essays by Lifton, Laub and others
in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma.
9 See article by David Becker, “Dealing with the Consequences of Organized
Violence in Trauma Work,” in Berghof Handbook for Conflict
Transformation (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict
Management, 2001): 1–21; and paper by David Becker and Brandon
Hammer, “Trauma Work in Crisis Regions — Developing and Assessing
Quality,” read at the Trauma Research Networking Conference,
Wiesbaden-Naurod, June 30 2002.
10 See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and
London: Routledge, 1995), 55.
11 See E. Ann Kaplan, “Trauma, Aging and Melodrama.”
12 As we explain in our introduction, there is a moral imperative to represent
catastrophes in art if the memory of such events is to be preserved, and
their dire results known. That trauma is often termed “unrepresentable”
reflects the difficulty and inadequacy of images and narratives. But the
necessity and importance of approaching trauma in art is seen by the work
that artists’ images and words have inspired in their turn.
13 See introduction for full discussion of the importance of representing
trauma in art, however inadequately.
14 See Betty Joseph, “Globalization and Feminist Accumulation. The Time
and Space of Gendered Work.” Paper read at “Global Feminisms
Conference,” Stony Brook University, March 2002.
15 In 1983, Eddie Mabo filed a groundbreaking land rights claim. After years
of litigation, his claim was honored by the highest court in 1992, and in
1993 the groundbreaking Native Title Act was passed. Subsequent
legislation sought to mitigate the gains, but nevertheless the case set an
irrevocable precedent that Aborigines can claim land in certain contexts.
16 These debates are too complex to review here. See Clifford Geertz, Local
Knowledges: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York:
Basic Books, 1983), James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1986), and my discussion in Looking for the Other:
Feminism Film and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997).
17 Bill Readings, “Pagans, Perverts or Primitives? Experimental Justice in
the Empire of Capital” in Andrew Benjamin, ed. Judging Lyotard. New
York and London: Routledge, 171–80.
18 Perhaps Herzog was unconsciously influenced by Leni Riefenstahl’s
famous photos of the Nuba people, whom Riefenstahl similarly exoticizes.

But Herzog’s larger interest is far different from what I understand
Riefenstahl’s to be: That is, Herzog was, in a sense, “going native” in his
own culture by finding himself the “other” of at least his parents’
Germany. As Ban Wang commented, radical and reflective intellectuals
(like Herzog) may be seen as the “other” of dominant Western culture.
19 See Geertz.
20 See Robert C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Introduction (New York and
London: Routledge, 2001. And see also his earlier Colonial Desire:
Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York and London: Routledge,
1995).
21 Moffatt was editing her brilliant short film, Night Cries, when I met her.
I have written about different aspects of that film several times. Most
recent is my essay, “Trauma, Cinema, Witnessing: Freud’s Moses and
Moffatt’s Night Cries,” published in Kelly Oliver and Steve Edwin, eds,
Between the Psyche and the Social (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowan
and Littlefield, 2001): 99–121.
22 It’s significant that Moffatt chose to feature an apparently Asian rather
than Aboriginal maid. This choice opens her text up to be relevant to
contexts other than specifically the Australian. The structures she studies
pertain far more broadly than simply that of colonialist Australia, and
featuring an Asian maid perhaps connotes the current Australian context
with new Vietnamese immigrants. But it is Moffatt, an Aboriginal
Australian whose imaginary produces these images — an imaginary clearly
already thinking beyond the specificities of her own background.
23 See Noel Burch’s film, Correction Please, where this early voyeuristic
trope is displayed in many of the film clips he includes.
24 As is well known, sexual fantasies for both men and women frequently
involve the subject being forced in sexual interaction. Why such
dominant/submission structures are sexually arousing is an interesting
question which, however, lies beyond my purvue here.
25 See Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound, Australia: Allen &
Unwin, 1999.
26 As Australian scholars note, it is dangerous to talk about any monolithic
collective trauma to the Australian nation as a whole. The nation is made
up of many different groups, each of which deals with Australia’s past in
its own ways. The national leadership may well be perfectly aware of the
crimes committed against the Aborigines, and in no way feel a need for
reparation or reconciliation. Many followers of such leadership would take
up the same position. While this stance might be seen as a form of denial
— as really representing repressed guilt — one cannot be sure. Meanwhile,
many in Australia are in denial because the past is simply too painful to
remember. Others actively seek reparation and healing. But these are
issues too complex to address fully in this context.
27 See pamphlet, Link Up, and Peter Read’s volume, A Rape of the Soul So
Profound.
28 From email exchange with Bronwyn Kidd, I learned that, as a white
Australian, she became interested in Australia’s “invisible people” (her
term) when studying Aboriginal history at the university. She met the
three sisters she interviews in Walking With My Sisters when doing
research for a film about Byron Bay, and she remains in close touch with
those still alive. The perspective, as in Herzog’s film, is on the side of the
Aborigines. The camera respects the sisters’ privacy and keeps its distance.
Yet, Kidd chooses to show the sisters’ strong emotions of both sadness
and occasional joy, and a kind of intimacy clearly developed between
filmmaker and her subjects during the course of the film’s making.
29 New work on relations between Aboriginal and other minority groups in
Australia is already ongoing. The overarching historical and psychic power
of white Australians and the existence of white institutional forms within
which all must live, inevitably affects relations between minority groups.
Thus, knowledge and images of various communities’ relations to white
Australia remain important as we move toward shifting the focus away
from white Australians per se.
30 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994);
and Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture
of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
31 Comments by Judith Butler in talk, “The Ethics of Violence,” presented
at The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, 2001.
Chapter 3
1 All references to Chinese-language sources are in my own translation. I
have generally used the pinyin system of romanization as based on
Mandarin pronunciation. Some of the more well-known Chinese terms
have appeared often in non-pinyin versions, so I have used those versions
throughout, but with the pinyin spelling in square brackets the first time
the item appears in the text. Hence: Hou Hsiao-hsien [Hou Xiaoxian].
2 Qi Longren, “Jiuling niandai Taiwan dianying wenhua yanjiu lunshu —
yi Beiqing chengshi wei li” (A discussion of cinema and cultural studies
in Taiwan in the nineties: A City of Sadness as example), in Chen Kuan-
hsing [Chen Guangxing], ed., Wenhua yanjiu zai Taiwan (Cultural studies
in Taiwan) (Taipei: Juliu, 2000), 319–33.
3 Robert Chi, “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History
in A City of Sadness,” Tamkang Review 29.4 (Summer 1999): 47–84.
4 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), Ch. 2.
5 Li Huiju, “Zhan Hongzhi xingxiao Hou Xiaoxian” (Zhan Hongzhi sells
Hou Hsiao-hsien), Yuan jian (Global Views Monthly) 41 (15 October 1989),
192.
6 Indeed, in addition to film and video distribution, Era has now diversified
into cable television, advance network ticketing, and internet services.
As for film production, Qiu had signed Hou to a six-year contract. So after
A City of Sadness they collaborated as producers of Zhang Yimou’s Raise
the Red Lantern [Da hong denglong gao gao gua] (1991). And Qiu was
also producer on Hou’s next film, The Puppetmaster [Xi meng rensheng]
(1993). Since then Qiu has continued to invest in films, such as the Hong
Kong gangland drama The Mission [Qiang huo] (Johnnie To [Du Qifeng],
1999).
7 In the film the characters’ names are usually pronounced in Taiwanese
rather than in the standard Mandarin dialect, and are spelled here
according to the English subtitled version of the film. The main exceptions
to this are Hinoe and Hinomi, whose names are written in Chinese
characters but pronounced in Japanese (i.e., their names are conceived of
as kanji). This was a common, even necessary, practice during the Japanese
period — especially with the kominka movement of Japanification
instituted in 1937 to solidify Japan’s hold on Taiwan at the same time
that the former was invading China.
8 James Udden, “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Poetics of History,” Cinema
Scope 3 (Spring 2000), 49–50.
9 Zhu Tianwen, “Beiqing chengshi shisan wen” (Thirteen questions about
A City of Sadness), Parts 1–4, Zili zao bao (Independence Morning Post),
11–14 July 1989, all p. 14. The quotation is from the last line of the whole
piece, in the 14 July installment. The whole piece is reprinted in Wu Nien-
jen [Wu Nianzhen] and Zhu Tianwen, Beiqing chengshi (A city of sadness)
(Taipei: San san shufang [Yuanliu], 1989).
10 Zhongshi wan bao (China Times Express), 15 September 1989, 1.
11 Chen Ru-shou [Chen Ruxiu], Dianying diguo (The empire of cinema)
(Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995), 31. However, Chen’s chart — just a list of titles
— is at variance with the more detailed statistics in Zhonghua Minguo
dianying nianjian 1990 (Cinema in the Republic of China yearbook 1990)
(Taipei: Zhonghua Minguo dianying ziliao guan, 1991). The discrepancy
may be due to the inclusion or exclusion of the rest of Taiwan (i.e., besides
Taipei) as well as theater distribution beyond the first run of each film.
The latter figures are based on Taipei first-run sales only and would place
A City of Sadness in second place overall, with a total of NT$66,000,000,
between the first-place film Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade
(NT$91,201,900) and the third-place film Rain Man (NT$62,044,580). The
second-place film in Chen’s list is Jackie Chan’s Mr Canton and Lady
Rose [Qiji], which is in seventh place overall by the Yearbook’s reckoning,
with only NT$37,823,180. Naturally, all of this omits other considerations
like length of run, number of theaters and screens and screenings, locations
of theaters, time of year, audience demographics, and competition from

other films and activities. According to the Yearbook, for example, the
lengths of first runs in Taipei varied widely: Indiana Jones (13 weeks),
Rain Man (111/2 weeks), City (9 weeks), and Mr Canton (4 weeks).
In terms of number of tickets sold, City may have actually trailed
Rain Man; the former’s actual box office figures are probably skewed by
the fact that initial ticket prices for City were higher than normal. The
Taipei Theater Association allowed higher prices for long films: an
additional NT$30 for films over 21/2 hours, and NT$50 extra for films
over 3 hours. City was listed at 2 hours 38 minutes, so the distributor
Scholar Films and Era added NT$40. The press reported the NT$10
overcharge within a week of the 21 October opening, and on 1 November
maximum ticket prices were lowered from NT$120 to NT$110. Scholar
and Era offered to refund the difference to those who had previously paid
the higher ticket price, provided that they presented their ticket stubs or
— and surely this last condition was not meant seriously — provided that
they could recount the story. See Chu Mingren, “‘Piao’ ju fa gou tanxing”
(Tickets flexible, by law), Min sheng bao, 29 October 1989, 10; “Beiqing
chengshi piaojia shuo jiang bu jiang” (A City of Sadness ticket prices to
drop — or not?), Lianhe bao (United Daily News), 29 October 1989, 33;
and “Jiang juqing, keyi tui shi yuan” (Tell the story, get ten bucks),
Zhongguo shi bao (China Times), 2 November 1989, 8.
In any event, even taking its abnormal ticket pricing into account,
A City of Sadness clearly attracted one of the largest audiences of any
film in 1989 — including many who rarely went to the movies, like busy
professionals and the elderly.
12 Quoted in “Sikai fan zhengzhi yishi fuzhou, cong rendao zhuyi guanhuai
chufa” (Tear aside hollow political slogans and begin from humanism),
Zili zao bao (Independence Morning Post), 16 September 1989, 8.
13 Liao Ping-hui, “Ji long you ya de sheying shi” (The deaf-mute
photographer) and “Lishi de yangqi?” (The renunciation of history?), both
in Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua, eds, Xin dianying zhi si (The death of the
new cinema), (Taipei: Tangshan, 1991). The two articles were originally
published in Zili zao bao (Independence Morning Post), 25 November 1989
and 27 February 1990, respectively.
14 Liao Ping-hui, “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28
Incident as Spectacle,” Public Culture 5.2 (Winter 1993), 295.
15 Ibid., 284.
16 Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1961), XIX: 236.
17 Liao Ping-hui, Huigu xiandai — houxiandai yu houzhimin lunwen ji
(Modernity in re-vision: reading postmodern/postcolonial theories) (Taipei:
Maitian, 1994).
18 See Qi Longren. However, although it is now often described as the

embodiment of the initial hasty attacks on A City of Sadness, Mi Zou
and Liang Xinhua’s The Death of the New Cinema remains a milestone
of post-martial law public criticism. That is because a careful retrospective
reading shows that many of the subsequently foregrounded issues were
already suggested in the articles collected in that volume.
19 The Taiwanese dialect is occasionally referred to as the Fujian dialect,
after the province in southern mainland China from which the ancestors
of most of the present-day Taiwanese Chinese hailed. It is also called
the Southern Min [Min nan] dialect, a term that highlights a sort of
regional ethnicity more than a geographical location. Although
“Taiwanese” [Taiwan hua or Taiyu] is the most common term, some
people object that it connotes a certain hegemonic nativism by claiming
to cover the whole island at the expense of other dialects and languages
that are spoken there, such as Hakka and the non-Chinese indigenous
languages.
20 Zhu Tianwen, “Thirteen Questions,” 13 July 1989, 14. Also in Wu and
Zhu, 26–8.
21 Several other key terms designating “national” items do come from
Japanese. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), esp. Appendices.
22 Chi, 59–61.
23 Even the domestic film and video copies that I have seen are all subtitled
in Chinese, as are many other films and television programs in Taiwan.
This is precisely to ensure comprehensibility in the face of possibly
unfamiliar accents, dialects, and languages.
24 The famous last phrase of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue”, in fact a quotation from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise.
25 Liao Hsien-hao [Liao Xianhao], “Nanfang yilei: yi houzhimin shijiao kan
Beiqing chengshi yu Niu peng zhong de yuyan, chenmo yu lishi”
(Southern otherness: A postcolonial perspective on language, silence, and
history in A City of Sadness and China, My Sorrow), Zhongwai wenxue
(Chung-Wai Literary Monthly) 22.8 (1994.1): 59–73.
Chapter 4
1 It will never be known how many were really killed. The ten million
figure is nothing but a tragic approximation. It includes 5,350,000 Jews.
Most of the death figures have been contested, even by serious historians.
It was a representative of the film department of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum who told me that the Wiener film is unique.
Note, however, that the SS did shoot footage of dead Jews in the Warsaw
Ghetto; the footage appears in the film Mein Kampf.
2 The June, 1941 start date of Einsatzgruppe exterminations comes from

Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan,
1990), 438. The December, 1941 start date of gassing comes from Gutman,
462.
3 Yad Vashem is The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance
Authority in Israel. Wiener was interviewed by Ester Hagar. A copy of
the interview transcript, entitled “Mr. Wiener Interviews Re. Libau,” is
held by the film department of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, as is a copy of the film itself. The following citations refer to
the interview transcript: “Well they’re killing Jews there,” (7); “he did
not tell his family what he had witnessed,” (15); “They were depressed
. . .” (17); “Wiener’s film was buried in his mother’s pigsty until the end
of the war,” (19).
4 Throughout this essay I refer to the West as the context of the post-
traumatic cinema under discussion. This is not to exclude non-Western
societies, but rather to acknowledge limits on the cultural significance
of the Holocaust, the influence of European cinema, and my own
knowledge of non-Western cinema.
5 The often cited Himmler quote can be found in Saul Friedlander, Memory,
History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 105, where it is discussed at length.
6 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film, 2nd
revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 102–3.
7 The Camouflage Squad is described by former Treblinka guard Franz
Suchomel in Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text of the
Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 99–100.
8 Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Bantam, 1986), 30.
9 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 12–3, vol. XVIII of The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
10 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington DC: American Psychiatric
Association, 1994), 424–9.
11 Lisa MacCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman, “Vicarious Traumatization: A
Framework for Understanding the Psychological Effects of Working with
Victims,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 3.1 (1990): 131–49.
12 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968),
219–54.
13 On the reaction to the liberation of the camps among liberators and the
public in the US, see Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart:
Americans and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For one argument on the significance
of the films of the liberated camps, see Nicolas Losson, “Notes on the
Images of the Camps,” trans. Annette Michelson, October 90 (1999): 25–

35.
14 K. R. M. Short and Stephan Dolezel, Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness
(New York: Croon Helm, 1988), 43–4.
15 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 20. I
have run across a number of descriptions of reactions to the concentration
camp films, but none as striking as this. While of course the differences
between film and photography are important, I do not believe they
specifically problematize the use of the Sontag quote as a substitute for
the reaction to films.
16 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, eds, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). For
one critique of Felman and Laub, see Dominick LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s
Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Why,’” Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 245–8.
17 For an overview of psychiatric research on PTSD in Holocaust survivors,
see Henry Krystal, ed., Massive Psychic Trauma (New York: International
Universities Press, 1968).
18 The earliest study of film-induced stress of which I am aware is R. S.
Lazarus et al, “A Laboratory Study of Psychological Stress Produced by a
Motion Picture Film,” Psychological Monographs 76 (1962). Following
several studies by Lazarus and colleagues, Mardi Jon Horowitz continued
this strand of research. See his articles “Psychic Trauma: Return of Images
After a Stress Film,” Archives of General Psychiatry 20 (1969): 552–9;
and “Stress Films, Emotion, and Cognitive Response,” Archives of General
Psychiatry 30 (1976): 1339–44, co-written with Nancy Wilner. The quote
describing Subincision comes from page 554 of the earlier Horowitz article.
The term “analogue trauma” comes from Mark I. Davies and David M.
Clark, “Predictors of Analogue Post-Traumatic Intrusive Cognitions,”
Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology 26 (1998): 303–14. Research on film-
induced stress until 1979 is summarized in J. Patrick Gannon, “The
Traumatic Commercial Film Experience: An Extension of Laboratory
Findings on Stress in a Naturalistic Setting,” diss., California School of
Professional Psychology, 1979, 8–14.
19 MacCann and Pearlman, 142.
20 Much of my anecdotal evidence for vicarious trauma induced by viewing
atrocity films relates to Night and Fog. It includes my own childhood
memory of seeing the film at my synagogue; numerous similar stories
told to me by acquaintances; numerous brief references in a variety of
published sources; and even a representation in another film: Margarethe
von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane (1981). In the 1999 film 8mm, the
protagonist could be interpreted as suffering from vicarious trauma
induced by the viewing of a snuff film.
21 I use the term discourse here in the relatively loose sense of an historically
situated set of “utterances” with a common set of referents (the
Holocaust), a common set of signifiers (specific narrative techniques), and

a common signified (trauma). I am not using the term in its Foucauldian
sense. I have found no evidence that this discourse was consciously,
intentionally, or explicitly linked to the psychiatric discourse of trauma
at the point of production or, in most cases, at the point of reception; I
assume that in most cases it was produced in an intuitive or unconscious
manner.
Of course, this kind of argument can easily become teleological. Is
there really a discourse of trauma in these films, or do I see in them only
what I presuppose to be there? By identifying the common signified of
the discourse as trauma, I do not mean to rely on a naïve, positivist faith
in the psychiatric discourse of trauma as a true description of reality, even
if that discourse itself may be somewhat positivist at times. I believe,
however, that the films and moments of films in question were responding
to a common phenomenon which the psychiatric discourse of trauma has
described at least in a more empirical and systematic fashion than can be
found anywhere else.
My concept of a discourse of trauma functions similarly to the
concept of prosthetic memory in Alison Landsberg’s important work, as
well as to Ernst van Alphen’s concept of Holocaust effects. See Landsberg,
“America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a
Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique 71 (1997): 63–86;
and Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in
Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 10.
22 LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s Shoah”, 267.
23 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E.
Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 26–32.
24 I am adapting the term secondarized loosely from Freud’s concept of
“secondary revision,” defined by Laplanche and Pontalis as the
“rearrangement of a dream so as to present it in the form of a relatively
consistent and comprehensible scenario.” See Jean Laplanche and J. B.
Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 412.
25 On Janet’s theory of narrative memory, see Bessel van der Kolk and Onno
van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the
Engraving of Trauma,” in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in
Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 159–64.
26 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines
hypermnesia as: “unusually exact or vivid memory” (William Morris, ed.
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969], 647).
27 Krystal, 30–31.
28 van der Kolk and van der Hart, 163–4, 172–5.
29 van der Kolk and van der Hart, 172.
30 Robert Gronner, quoted in Krystal, 197.

31 William G. Niederland, “An Interpretation of the Psychological Stresses
and Defenses in Concentration Camp Life and the Late Aftereffects,” in
Krystal, 62.
32 My model of post-traumatic tense, mood, and voice is similar to Laurence
J. Kirmayer’s model of dissociation as a rupture in narrative coherence,
voice, and time. See his article “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma,
Narrative, and Dissociation,” in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds,
Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York:
Routledge, 1996), 181.
33 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, 157–
202. Freud’s theory of trauma is discussed on 162–164.
34 In my understanding of the history of modernist cinema, the first wave,
following the First World War, consisted of German expressionism, the
Soviet avant-garde, French impressionism, early films by Buñuel, Cocteau,
Vigo, etcetera. The second wave began to gather steam after the Second
World War in films like Deren’s and Antonioni’s, and then coalesced in
the French New Wave, followed by a series of other regional movements.
35 See Richard Prouty’s Benjaminian discussion of trauma in Menilmontant,
in “The Well-Furnished Interior of the Masses: Kirsanoff’s Menilmontant
and the Streets of Paris,” Cinema Journal 36.1 (1996): 3–17.
36 This begs the question, how large a role did the Holocaust play in the
development of post-traumatic cinema? I would argue that the Holocaust
was a crucial but not the sole determining factor in the development of
post-traumatic cinema. There were probably many factors, including the
bombing of Hiroshima, the Second World War in general, and, in the
crucial case of French cinema, the Algerian War of Independence.
37 Eric Santner, “History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on
the Representation of Trauma,” in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits
of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard
38 Personal correspondence from Henry Krystal, June 1, 2000.
39 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 61. Original
emphasis.
40 Gertrude Koch, “The Angel of Forgetfulness and the Black Box of Facticity:
Trauma and Memory in Claude Lanzmann’s Film Shoah,” trans. Ora
Wiskind, History and Memory 3.1 (1991): 119–32; LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s
Shoah” 95–138; Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Holocaust Testimony, Art, and
Trauma,” The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 151–72; Saul Friedlander,
“Trauma and Transference,” Memory, History, and the Extermination of
the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 117–
38; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); the Caruth quote

comes from page 2. LaCapra also articulates this view, without, however,
fully endorsing it: “[One] may insist that any attentive secondary witness
to, or acceptable account of, traumatic experiences must in some
significant way be marked by trauma or allow trauma to register in its
own procedures”; LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s Shoah,” 244.
41 A 16 mm print of the English language version of The Death Camps is
available from the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University.
42 Without diminishing the responsibility of the perpetrators and the Third
Reich as a whole, one may argue that Allied nations shared responsibility
for the atrocities through strict refugee quotas, refusal to bomb the rail
lines to Auschwitz, etcetera. For a survey of international responses to
the Holocaust, see David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the
Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
43 For an historical survey of the compilation film, see Jay Leyda, Films Beget
Films (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964). For a more theoretically informed
case study, see Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in
Nonfiction Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
44 It is misleading to place the Jews last in the series since, in terms of
“liquidation” specifically, they were the primary target. The
marginalization of the Jewish genocide in The Death Camps, Mein Kampf,
and even Night and Fog is typical of public discourse on the Nazi camps
until the 1970’s in the US and Western Europe, and the 1990’s in Eastern
Europe.
45 The segment also illustrates the tendency of compilation films to use
documents in a misleading fashion. The photo of naked women and
children is presented as an illustration of gassing. According to Yad
Vashem, however, it actually shows a mobile killing action in Misocz,
Ukraine, in October, 1942, before gassing had even begun. The right side
of the photo does not appear in the film; it shows a mass of corpses on
the ground, typical of mobile killing actions but not of gassing. See Yitzhak
Arad, ed., The Pictorial History of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan,
1990), 194–5. The date is given in Edelheit, 173.
46 Richard Raskin, “Nuit et Brouillard” by Alain Resnais: On the Making,
Reception, and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Aarhus,
Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1987), 52; my translation.
47 Literary influences on Resnais’s experiments with tense were writings by
Marcel Proust, and the French New Novels of Marguerite Duras, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, and Jean Cayrol. Among fiction films, he was influenced
by Delluc’s Le Silence (1921), Carne’s Le Jour Se Lève (1939), Welles’s
Citizen Kane (1941), Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950). On the history of the
modernist flashback, see Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: History
and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1989).
48 The French text of the commentary can be found in Raskin, 72–130. Here
and throughout this essay, when the English translation in the film’s
subtitles seems adequate, I have used it. When not, I have changed it.
49 See Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” Film Form,
ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949),
45–63; André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What
Is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), 9–16; and Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1960).
50 See note 19.
51 The Szabo trilogy is Father (1966), Love Film (1970), and 25 Fireman Street
(1973), all Hungarian. See my article, “Istvan Szabo: Problems in the
Narration of Holocaust Memory,” Journal of Film and Video 51.1 (Spring,
1999): 3–21.
52 Ora Avni, “Narrative Subject, Historic Subject: Shoah and La Place de
l’Etoile,” Poetics Today 12.3 (1991): 513.
53 I disagree with LaCapra’s criticism of Shoah for acting out rather than
working through trauma, articulated in his article “Lanzmann’s Shoah.”
As LaCapra acknowledges on p. 205, the symbolic repetition of trauma is
a necessary aspect of working it through. That may be all we can ask of
a film, and all that we should demand of Shoah. However, even if we
were to insist on making a distinction between films that act out trauma
and films that work it through, I would argue that Shoah fulfilled a key
requirement of working through trauma at the time it was made: it
combated the isolation and silencing of traumatic memory by relaying
the trauma of witnessing from the victims to the public. On traumatic
memory and isolation, see van der Kolk and van der Hart, 163.
54 Schindler’s List quotes Night and Fog in its initial cut from color to black
and white and concluding cut back to color; it quotes Shoah in its use of
the cutting-the-throat sign given by a young bystander to a trainload of
Jews headed for Auschwitz. The Shoah quotation is discussed by Yosefa
Loshitzky in her article, “Holocaust Others: Spielberg’s Schindler’s List
versus Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg’s Holocaust:
Critical Perspectives on “Schindler’s List” (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997), 104–5. On the monumentalist discourse of history,
see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian
Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill: 1949), 12–7.
55 The Academy Award winners for best documentary for both 1997 and
1998 were Holocaust films: The Long Way Home, a traditional realist
compilation film, and The Last Days, produced by Steven Spielberg’s
Shoah Foundation, and typical of contemporary historical documentary
form, combining compilation techniques, cinema-vérité techniques, realist
narration, and the monumentalist tone of Schindler’s List.
56 See Janet Walker, “The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, Historical
Fictions and Cataclysmic Past Events,” Signs 22.4 (1997): 803–25.
Chapter 5
1 Movies include Pearl Harbor (2001) and the HBO mini-series Band of
Brothers (2001); books include Hampton Sides, Ghost Stories: The
Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission (New York:
Doubleday, 2001). “The good war” is Studs Terkel’s ironic term from the
title of his “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York,
Pantheon, 1984). For popular coverage of this “new surge of interest” in
the Second World War see Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today, May 15, 2001,
http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/2001–05–15-war-books.htm.
2 Newsweek reports that a preview screening of Saving Private Ryan to
which World War II veterans were invited was hosted by the History
Channel in midtown Manhattan. Jon Meacham, “Caught in the Line of
Fire,” July 13, 1998, 48–55.
3 In the fall of 2000, eight motion picture industry heads were called to
Washington D.C. to testify at a Senate hearing about what could be done
to limit movie violence, and in particular, about the perceived problem
of violent movie advertising aimed at children. The hearing was called as
the result of a Federal Trade Commission study that was released on
September 11, 2000.
4 Michael Marino, “Bloody But Not History: What’s Wrong with Saving
Private Ryan,” Film & History: Film Reviews, http://h-net2.msu.edu/
~filmhis/ryan.html.
5 This example and the quote from James J. Walsh, retired sergeant, are
drawn from Laurent Ditmann, “Made You Look: Towards a Critical
Evaluation of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan,” Film & History
28.3–4 (1998): 66.
6 This is Steven Spielberg’s claim as quoted in Jeff Gordinier, “Message in
a Battle,” Entertainment Weekly 29, July 24, 1998.
7 These are the words of Doug Hestor, a “first-wave survivor” of the
Normandy landing who went ashore a few miles to the east on Juno beach,
as reported in the Toronto Star and quoted by Phil Landon, “Realism,
Genre, and Saving Private Ryan,” Film & History 28.3–4 (1998): 59.
8 Jon Meacham, “Caught in the Line of Fire,” 50.
9 Quoted by Meacham, “Caught in the Line of Fire,” 50.
10 Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings
of Postmodern History,” in Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of
History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York:
Routledge, 1996), 206.
11 From a personal conversation with Sandra Joy Lee, archivist, Industrial
Light and Magic, October 6, 1998.
12 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Vivian Sobchack, ed., The
Persistence of History. See also, Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment
and the Problem of Truth,” in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits
of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard

13 White, “Historical Emplotment,” 52.
14 White, “The Modernist Event,” 20, 22–3.
15 White, “Historical Emplotment, 52.
16 White, “The Modernist Event,” 19.
17 Rosenstone, 206.
18 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge,
1989), 53–4.
19 White, “The Modernist Event,” 19.
20 Hutcheon, 53–4.
21 This elicits Ryan’s story — to my mind a definite case of gratuitous
violence in the film — of when he and two of his brothers saved a third
brother from having sex with a girl who “took a nose dive from the ugly
tree.” They shared a good laugh when she knocked herself out fleeing
the barn.
22 Elizabeth Waites, M.D., Trauma and Survival: Post-Traumatic and
Dissociative Disorders in Women (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 14.
23 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition
(DSM-IV) (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 428.
24 Wilfred Owen, The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London, 1946), 35. Quoted
in John E. Talbot, “Soldiers, Psychiatrists, and Combat Trauma,” Journal
of Interdisciplinary History XXVII.3 (Winter, 1997), 437.
25 Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books,
1992), 38.
26 Eugene Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Novato, CA
1981), 59–60. Quoted in Talbot, 439.
27 Jonathan Shay, M.D., Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the
Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 140.
28 Shay, 1994, 188.
29 Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of
History,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 187.
30 Kathleen Chamberlain, email posting to the Film & History website: http:/
/h-net2.msu.edu/~filmhis/fature.html. Date accessed: 4 January 1999.
31 Ditmann, 66.
32 Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences
of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 249–50.
33 Benis M. Frank, former Chief Historian of the Marine Corps, email posting
to the Film & History website.
34 Critics before me have noted the disjunction between the Normandy
landing sequence and the rest of the film. See, for example, Vincent Canby,
“Saving a Nation’s Pride of Being: The Horror and Honor of a Good War,”
New York Times, August 10, 1998, section E, page 1, column 5.
35 For two examples of the latter view, see Thomas Doherty, “Taps at the
Millennium: Saving Private Ryan (1998),” in Chapter 11: “Legacies” of

Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999 [1993]), and Tom Carson,
“And the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Rabid Nationalism Goes to . . .
(Saving Private Ryan),” Esquire 131.3 (March 1999): 70.
36 Allison Landsberg would likely deem this an example of the positive effect
that a borrowed or “prosthetic memory” may have. Prosthetic Memory:
The Logics and Politics of Memory in Modern American Culture, doctoral
dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996, UMI Dissertation Services.
37 DSM-IV, 424.
38 After all, these latter memories are private not public, and therefore
difficult to corroborate. Women’s comparatively low social status also
makes their claims easy to disregard. And furthermore, the import of the
claims is such that patriarchal authority would be seriously undermined
were the epidemic proportions of incestuous assault to be recognized by
the general public.
39 Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (New
York: New York Review of Books, 1995).
40 Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchum, The Myth of Repressed Memory:
False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1994); Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False
Memories, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1994). Family Therapy Networker (Katy Butler,
“Marshaling the Media,” March/April 1995, 37) reports that “by the end
of 1994, more than 300 articles on ‘false memory’ had appeared in
magazines and newspapers.”
41 Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women
Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Judith
Herman, op. cit.
42 John Kihlstrom, “Exhumed Memory,” in Steven Jay Lynn and Kevin M.
McConkey, eds, Truth in Memory (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998),
18.
43 See for example, Linda M. Williams, “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A
Prospective Study of Women’s Memories of Child Sexual Abuse,” Journal
of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 62 (1994): 1167, 1170–3; Judith L.
Herman and Emily Schatzow, “Recovery and Verification of Memories
of Childhood Sexual Trauma,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 4 (1987): 1, 2–
5; John Briere and Jon Conte, “Self-Reported Amnesia for Abuse in Adults
Molested as Children,” Traumatic Stress (1993), 21, 23.
44 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973 [Paris, 1967]),
entry for “phantasy,” 314.
45 Elizabeth Waites, 28.
46 Lenore Terr, “True Memories of Childhood Trauma: Flaws, Absences, and
Returns,” in Kathy Pezdek and William P. Banks, eds, The Recovered

Memory/False Memory Debate (San Diego: Academic Press, 1996).
47 This is one of my key points in Janet Walker, “The Traumatic Paradox:
Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events,”
Signs 22. 4 (Summer 1997): 803–26.
48 Fred H. Frankel, “The Concept of Flashbacks in Historical Perspective,”
The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis XLII, 4
(October 1994).
49 See Philip Gourevitch, “The Memory Thief,” The New Yorker, June 14,
1999, 49.
50 This evidence was brought to light initially by Danial Ganzfried.
Gourevitch, ibid.
51 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). I
am borrowing this example and the wording of this paragraph from “The
Traumatic Paradox.” See also a revised and reprinted version of that article
in Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds, Configurations of
Memory (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
52 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Felman
and Laub, 59.
53 Laub, 59–63.
54 Hacking, 250. Actually, it is Hacking’s “claims about a certain
indeterminacy” that are “set against a background of truth and falsehood.”
But I believe the phrase as I have used it is also true to his meaning.
55 John F. Kihlstrom, “Exhumed Memory,” in Truth in Memory, 18.
56 As feminist psychologist Ann Scott writes in the British journal Feminism
and Psychology (“I. Screen Memory/False Memory Syndrome,” Feminism
& Psychology 7. 1 [1997]: 20), “It is [the] capacity to bear uncertainty, while
allowing for a principled engagement with the actual relations of power in
the culture” which a “psychoanalytic perspective can offer and support.”
57 Michael Nash, “Psychotherapy and Reports of Early Sexual Trauma: A
Conceptual Framework for Understanding Memory Errors,” in Truth in
Memory, ed. Steven Jay Lynn and Kevin M. McConkey (New York:
Guilford Press, 1998), 91.
58 Nash, ibid., 91.
59 Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 5.
60 Ann Scott, 19. See also note 42.
61 Showalter, 156.
62 See for example, Louise Armstrong, Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics:
What Happened When Women Said Incest (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1994) and Nash, 98–101.
63 David G. Payne and Jason M. Blackwell, “Truth in Memory: Caveat
Emptor,” Truth in Memory, 53.
64 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimony: The Ruins of Memory (New

Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991).
65 Landsberg.
Chapter 6
I must thank Shindo Kaneto for his graciousness and enthusiasm in speaking
with me, and the extraordinary Yuka Sakano of the Kawakita Memorial Film
Institute for arranging and translating the interview. I am deeply indebted to
my wonderfully generous colleague Keiko McDonald and the Japan Council
at the University of Pittsburgh, who made a vital research trip to Tokyo
possible for me. James Orr gave me the valuable opportunity to test some of
these ideas when he invited me to speak at Bucknell University. Mick
Broderick, David Desser, Tom Gunning, Akira Lippit, and Donald Richie
provided important early encouragement, Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang offered
acute editorial feedback, and Irina Reyn saw me through it all in so many
ways.
1 Personal interview with Shindo Kaneto, 28 August 2000, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. Translation by Yuka Sakano, with additional
transcription by JunkoYamamoto.
2 Throughout the essay, references to “Hiroshima” should be understood
to include the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 as well. In this
sense, “Hiroshima” simultaneously contains a specific reference to August
6 as well as a broader reference to the atomic event as a whole.
3 Technically, the postwar occupation of Japan was an Allied occupation,
but as John W. Dower points out, “From start to finish [August 1945 to
April 1952], the United States alone determined basic policy and exercised
decisive command over all aspects of the occupation.” See Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton,
1999), 73.
4 See Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under
the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992), 63–5. See also Hirano, “Depiction of the Atomic
Bombings in Japanese Cinema During the US Occupation Period,” in Mick
Broderick, ed., Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear
Image in Japanese Film (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), 103–
19, especially 112–5.
5 Donald Richie, “‘Mono no aware’: Hiroshima in Film,” in Broderick, ed.,
Hibakusha Cinema, 20–37; 23; 25.
6 A version of this documentary aired on television in Hiroshima in 1977,
but Shindo refers to the project as incomplete and ongoing in my 28
August 2000 interview with him.
7 Carole Cavanaugh, “A Working Ideology for Hiroshima: Imamura Shōhei’s
Black Rain” in Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh, eds, Word and
Image in Japanese Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 250–70; 252.
8 David M. Desser, “Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, an Ambivalent
Cinema,” Swords and Ploughshares 9. 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1995).
http://www.acdis.uiuc.edu/homepage_docs/pubs_docs/S%26P_docs/
S&P_Sp-Su_1995_docs/desser.html
9 Richie, “‘Mono no aware,’” 30. Although Richie wrote this essay in 1961,
he still stands behind its claims today (personal interview with Donald
Richie, 8 June 2000, Tokyo, Japan).
10 Cavanaugh, “A Working Ideology for Hiroshima,” 252. For a similar
version of this argument that extends to the realms of Japanese disaster
films and anime, see Susan J. Napier, “Panic Sites: The Japanese
Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira,” in John Whittier Treat,
ed., Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 1996), 235–62. For accounts of Godzilla as something closer
to a confrontation of the past than an evasion, see Chon A. Noriega,
“Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When Them! is US,” in Broderick,
ed., Hibakusha Cinema, 54–74, and Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory:
Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 114–22.
11 Richie, “ ‘Mono no aware’,” 35.
12 I will unravel these issues in further detail below, but for a useful
introduction to this terrain, see Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in
History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
13 See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Schindler’s List is Not Shoah: The Second
Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,” Critical
Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996): 292–312.
14 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John
Osborne (London: Verso, 1996), 166. Further references in this paragraph
will be noted parenthetically by the page number.
15 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–
64. Further references in this paragraph will be noted parenthetically by
the page number.
16 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of
Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 38.
17 See Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 201–202 and Maya Morioka Todeschini,
“’Death and the Maiden’: Female Hibakusha as Cultural Heroines and
the Politics of A-bomb Memory,” in Broderick, ed., Hibakusha Cinema,
222–52.
18 Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 210.
19 Personal interview with Shindo Kaneto, 28 August 2000.
20 I am grateful to Keiko McDonald for this translation.
21 James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National

Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001),
6.
22 Orr, The Victim as Hero, 10; 10; 137.
23 Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 11.
24 Indeed, the film’s cinematic and thematic emphases on humans behaving
as animals, even to the point of merging the human and the animal,
underscores this difficulty of distinction. For a provocative meditation
on the human/animal divide in relation to Hiroshima, see Georges Bataille,
“Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” trans.
Alan Keenan, in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 221–35.
25 Conrad Totman, A History of Japan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 161–3.
26 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 27–8.
27 See Dower, Embracing Defeat, 302–18.
28 Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds, “Commemoration and Silence: Fifty
Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan,” in Living With
the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age
(Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 4.
29 John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the
Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ix.
30 Todeschini, “ ‘Death and the Maiden’,” 222–52.
31 Keiko I. McDonald, Japanese Classical Theater in Films (London:
Associated University Presses, 1994), 335 n2.
32 Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, trans. Gregory Barrett (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1982), 78. See also David Desser’s explanation
and expansion of Sato’s claims in Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction
to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), 108–144.
33 Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, 81; 81.
34 Hiroyuki Agawa, Devil’s Heritage, trans. John M. Maki (Tokyo: Hokuseido
Press, 1957), 222. Quoted in James Goodwin, “Akira Kurosawa and the
Atomic Age,” in Broderick, ed., Hibakusha Cinema, 178–202; 194.
Goodwin provides a thoughtful analysis of Kurosawa’s own treatment of
the “demonic” atomic bomb in his late film Yume (Dreams, 1990).
35 The brief discussion below can only begin to touch on issues central to
recent film studies scholarship that have reenergized critical conversation
around how we imagine and mobilize the term “national cinema.” See,
for example, Alan Williams, ed., Film and Nationalism (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2002) and Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie,
ed., Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000). For the Japanese case
in particular, see Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and
Japanese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
36 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261; 255.
37 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Art Cinema,” in Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford

History of World Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 567–
75; 567. Nowell-Smith argues for the existence, since the 1980s, of two
different forms of “international art cinema,” one an “official kind, very
close to the mainstream both in its cinematic values and its distribution,”
and the other characterized by “low-budget independent films coming
from a variety of countries, including the United States, which offer a
different sort of experience” (575).
38 Review of Onibaba, Variety, February 17, 1965.
39 For a fascinating account of Ugetsu and Kwaidan in terms of “structures
of emulsion in post-atomic Japanese cinema,” see Akira Mizuta Lippit,
“Antigraphy: Notes on Atomic Writing and Postwar Japanese Cinema,”
Review of Japanese Culture and Society 10 (December 1998): 56–65; 59.
Chapter 7
1 Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 209.
2 E. Ann Kaplan, “Performing Traumatic Dialogue,” Women and
Performance, nos. 19–20 (1998): 34.
3 Robert Jay Lifton, The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1976): 113–4. Hereafter cited as LS.
4 Jean-François Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Gallilée, 1991), 59. My
translation.
5 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris:
PUF, 1973).
6 LaCapra, 209.
7 Ibid., 206.
8 Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olsen, Indefensible Weapons (New York: Basic
Books, 1982), 103.
9 Lifton and Olsen, 104.
10 Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The
Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Cathy Caruth,
ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), 158–82.
11 van der Kolk and van der Hart, 163.
13 Lifton develops this in his recent work, Destroying the World to Save It:
Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).
15 Cathy Caruth, “An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton,” in Cathy Caruth,
ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 133.

17 Lifton, LS, 113.
18 Much has been written about the possibility or impossibility of
representation of traumatic events of mass death and extermination from
a range of cultural positions. I am arguing in favor of a particular kind of
representation of traumatic events, indeed of the necessity to represent
them. I draw this belief largely from Lifton, as is clear, but also from Jean-
Luc Nancy. See, Jean-Luc Nancy, “La Représentation Interdite,” L’art et
la mémoire des camps: Représenter Exterminer, Le Genre humain 36
(2001):15–39.
19 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans., Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
126. Hereafter cited as Inhuman.
20 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 36.
21 I take the emphasis on “intensity” from Lyotard: “For Burke, the sublime
was no longer a matter of elevation (the category by which Aristotle
defined tragedy) but a matter of intensification” (Inhuman, 100).
22 Burke, 36.
23 Ibid., 33.
24 Inhuman, 126.
25 Ibid., 100.
26 Bertolt Brecht, “Motto,” in Carolyn Forché, ed., Against Forgetting:
Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 27.
27 Lifton, LS, 115.
28 Cathy Caruth, ed., “Introduction,” in Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations
in Memory, 6.
29 Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 219.
30 Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of
Hiroshima,” in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 221.
31 Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, mon amour: Scénario et dialogue (Paris:
Gallimard, 1960). All translations of Duras’s text are taken from
Hiroshima, mon amour: Text by Marguerite Duras for the Film by Alain
Resnais, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961). All
references to Hiroshima, mon amour will be from these editions and the
pages will be cited parenthetically in the text.
32 Lying and inventing narrators are common in Duras’s works. Perhaps the
most striking example is Jacques Hold, who narrates Le Ravissement de
Lol. V. Stein (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
33 Another option for consideration here is laughter. For a well developed
discussion of laughter in Duras’s works, including Hiroshima, mon amour,
see Robert Harvey, “Le communauté par le rire” in Alain Vircondelet,
ed., Marguerite Duras: Actes du Colloque à Cerisy-la-Salle (23–30 Juillet
1993) (Paris: Ecriture, 1994), 197–216. In Hiroshima, mon amour, laughter

is everywhere in the text, though overshadowed by muted cries. Laughter
masks the obscenity of the lovers’ pain; it is their modesty.
34 Michael S. Roth, The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the
Construction of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995),
24 and 211.
Notes to Chapter 8
1 For a longer discussion of trauma, disability and performance, see my
Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (New York
and London: Routledge, 2003).
2 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 10.
3 For a history of these stereotypical uses of disability as a narrative marker
in film, see M. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical
Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1994).
4 As is the making problematic of narrative — see E. Ann Kaplan’s use of
different structuring devices (dialogue, parallelism) to represent a temporal
experience of telling and analyzing in her piece, “Performing Traumatic
Dialogue: On the Border of Fiction and Autobiography,”in Women and
Performance 10,1–2 (1999): 33–58. The making and un-making of
narrative, the refusal to begin and the necessity to plunge are references
in her performative analysis of analyzing trauma in therapy.
5 A synopsis of the film is useful, despite the risk of the synopsis as a
paralyzed form: “In the name of the law, I shall take the calculated risk
of flattening out the unfolding or coiling up of this text, its permanent
revolution whose rounds are made to resist any kind of flattening.” See
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge, ed. (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992), 234.
6 See Tvetzan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
7 The same moment can also be read within the economy of representing
another unrepresentable moment: pain. In her Resisting Representation
(New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Elaine Scarry
investigates the hysteria of pain representations, the impossibility of the
image referencing its signified, in her analysis of advertising for pain
killers. The techniques of cinematic representation and narrativity are
brought into play to point to the absent “body truth.”
8 See Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, eds. New
Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and
Beyond (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 121.
9 See Brian Henderson, “Tense, Mood and Voice in Film,” Film Quarterly
36.3 (Summer): 4–17.
10 See note 7.
11 See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
12 See, for instance, work inspired by Michel de Certeau’s The Practices of
Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1984).
13 See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 66.
14 See Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 70.
Notes to Chapter 9
1 Arguments about “resistance” vs. “complicity” can be found in Rey
Chow’s article “We Endure, Therefore We Are: Survival, Governance, and
Zhang Yimou’s To Live,” from The South Atlantic Quarterly 95. 4 (1996).
1040–64.
2 Ibid., 1047.
3 Ibid., 1047.
4 See Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, Living and Dying (New York:
Prageur Publishers, 1974), 49.
5 Ibid., 49.
6 Cathy Caruth, ed. “Introduction to Part II: Recapturing the Past,” in Cathy
Caruth ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 153.
7 Michael Roth, The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction
of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 205.
8 Chow, 1055; 1047.
9 Ibid., 1055.
10 Lifton and Olson, 75.
11 Ibid., 87.
12 This is a term in the Cultural Revolution that denigrated traditional
custom, mentality, and practices.
13 While communism used to be the political ideal in the Maoist era, from
the early 1980s onward it was replaced by Deng Xiaoping’s more practical
aspirations for Four Modernizations (in industry, agriculture, national
defense, and science and technology). “Airplane” is an image in
interpretation of Deng’s idea of modernization.
15 Ibid., 77.
16 Ibid., 77.
17 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,”

in Caruth, ed., 46.
Caruth, ed., 63.
20 The term is used by Hayden White to refer to events of contemporary
(twentieth century) history, in his article “The Modernist Event,” in
Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and
the Modern Event (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 17–38.
21 Robert Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past,” in Sobchack, ed., 202.
Notes to Chapter 10
1 Hu Shi, Wenxue gailiang zhouyi (Discussions on reform of literature)

(Hong Kong: Yuanliu Press, 1986), 155–69. Also see Jiao Shangzhi,
Zhongguo xiandai xiju meixue sixiang fazhan shi (Aesthetic history of
modern Chinese drama) (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1995), 40–57.
2 Chen Pingyuan’s works attest to the prevailing consensus on the tragic
and traumatic nature of the intellectual and popular culture. He and other
critics have designated an ethos of beiliang, the pathetic or the tragic-
desolate, as the primary quality of Chinese literature. See Chen Pingyuan
zixuan ji (Self-selected works) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe,
1997), 43–59.
3 Just about every recent book to do with Lu Xun has to perform a de rigueur
discussion of this episode of film watching. See William Lyell, Lu Hsun’s
Vision of Reality, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1976), 74–5; Leo Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu
Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 17–9; and Lydia Liu,
Translingual Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 61–
4.
4 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and
Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), 6. Also see part 1 of Chow’s book, 4–52.
5 Ibid., 14.
6 Ibid., 15.
7 See Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei wenxue meixue lunzhu ji (Selected
essays on literature and aesthetics), ed. Luo Xishan (Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi
chubanshe, 1987).
8 Liu Zaifu, Lu Xun meixue sixiang lungao (Essays on Lu Xun’s aesthetic
thoughts) (Taipei: Mingjing wenhua shiye, 1988), 98–9.
9 Lu Xun qianji (Complete works), vol. 1 and vol. 6 (Beijing: People’s
Literature Press, 1980), 1: 237–41. Further references to Lu Xun’s Complete
Works will be given in the text with the abbreviation LXQJ.
10 Wang Hui, Fankang juewang (Combating despair) (Shanghai: Shanghai

remin chubanshe, 1991), 238.
11 Paul Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation and the ‘May Fourth’
Tradition of Chinese Cinema,” in Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds, From
May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1993), 295–326.
12 Wang Chenwu, “The Road of the Chinese Cinema,” in Luo Yijun et al.,
eds, Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan (Chinese film theory: an
anthology), 2 vols. (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1992), 1:137. Also
see Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation and the ‘May Fourth’
Tradition of Chinese Cinema,” in Widmer and Wang, eds., 298–9.
13 Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban
Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 93–119. The quote is from Miriam Hansen, Babel
and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 141.
14 This scenario is evoked by Kracauer in his Theory of Film: The
Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton
15 Miriam Hansen, “Introduction” to Siegried Kracauer, Theory of Film, xxv.
16 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-
Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993), 453. Jay’s quotes are to me the most succinct
summary of Roland Barthes’ notion of “punctum” in the latter’s La
chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, in Oeuvre Complètes (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1995), 1105–97.
17 van der Kolk and van der Hart characterize narrative memory as mental
constructs that integrate experience. Under traumatic conditions,
“existing meaning schemes,” which would include visual and narrative
codes, “may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experience.”
See their article “The Intrusive Past,” in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), 160. Obviously, Barthes’ punctum and Kraucauer’s
photographical realism take advantage of this traumatic moment and turn
it into a critique of the bankruptcy of existing cognitive schemes and
emotional structures.
18 Luo Yijun, et al., eds., 151.
19 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. G. Adorno and R.
Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6.
20 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London and New York:
Verso, 1989), 113.
21 Ma Ning, “The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical:
Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films of the 1930s,” Wide Angle 11.2
(1989): 22–31.
22 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism,” in Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88; The Political Unconscious
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), 79.
23 For a fuller discussion of the dialectic relation between allegory and
symbol, see Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John
Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 159–89. Also see Ban Wang, The Sublime
Figure of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 70–9.
24 Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Theory and Criticism,
ed. Gerald Mast, Marshal Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 476–7.
25 Ma Ning, 29.
26 Lou Yijun, “Preface,” in Lou Yijun et al., eds., 1–27.
27 For an assessment of Chinese appropriation of montage theories, see Lou
Yijun et al., 15–9.
28 Gilbert Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 160.
29 Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisentein,” in Philip Rosen, ed.,
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 173, 175.
30 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson
and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), 5–6.
31 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Meridian
Books, 1957), 45–63.
32 Ibid., 47.
33 Quoted in Perez, 152.
34 I only sketch Benjamin’s notion here. For a fuller appreciation of
Benjamin’s ideas of history and its potential links to Eisenstein’s montage,
see Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–64.
35 Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern, 106–7; Also see Ma Ning.
36 Ma Ning, 24.
37 “A Kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” is a phrase used by Walter
Benjamin to describe the disorienting impact of urban life on human
perception and consciousness. Here I go further to examine consciousness
dissolved in a mess of images. See Illuminations, 175.
38 Ma Ning, 24–5.
39 Lou Yijun, ed., 149–55.
40 Quoted by Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern, 109.
41 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 20–1.
Index
A-bomb: “analogue” trauma, 99

maidens, 149, 150, 151, 157 Anglo-Boer War, 28
Aboriginal Australians: anti-apartheid activities, 37
crimes committed against, 247n. anti-realism, filmic, 125. See also
26; differing images of, 61; in film, realism
50, 51–52, 53–54; and forced apartheid:
assimilation, 57, 59; identification complex impacts of, 27; ideology
with, 52 of, 30; isolation promoted by, 37;
acting out, 5–6; racial survival narrative in, 28;
in Holocaust film, 257n. 53; in survival of, 41; survival strategies
psychoanalytical theory, 176; of in, 37–38; terror of, 29; victims of,
traumatized persons, 168, 169 31, 38; violence of, 18
Adorno, Theodor, 229 archival footage, in Holocaust film,
Afrikaner nationalism, capitalism 140
and, 28 Armstrong, Louise, 138
Agawa, Hiroyuki, 158 art, trauma in, 48, 246n. 12
agency: art cinema, international, 265
in contact-zone, 61; in The Fall, art film, Onibaba as, 161
189; in history, 1–3 artist’s biography, 192
Algerian War of Independence, 118 art therapy, 188
allegory: atomic bomb:
atomic bomb in, 158; Baroque, 148; “allegorical” treatment of, 159; as
and feminism, 157; Hiroshima, evil spirit, 158; in Japanese
146–147, 161; Jetztzeit in, 149; cinema, 145; memory of, 153
national, 231; in radical cinema, atrocities:
231; sexuality in, 155–156; social, of apartheid, 29; in Holocaust
229; of Third World cinemas, 232– documentary, 108; image of, 98;
233; vs. realism, 147–148 rationalization of, 31; South
Allied nations, and war atrocities, African confrontation of, 42;
110, 256n. 42 whitewashing, 222–223, 224
274 INDEX
Aum Shinrikyo cult, 170 Boraine, Alex, 26–27, 32

Auschwitz, 114, 115, 167; brain, effect of trauma on, 5
description, 95; in documentary Brecht, Bertolt, 176, 234
film, 113; footage of, 117; in Bringing the Children Home
Holocaust memory, 136 (Australian Government Report),
Australia: 59
attempts at reconciliation in, 49; Britain, censoring of film in, 97
colonization of, 45; internal brutality, in official history, 221
colonialism in, 54; intra-cultural Burke, Edmund, 173, 175
conflict in, 18; “invisible people” Butler, Judith, 62
of, 248; Native Title Act in, 59,
246n. 15; new immigrants in, cable television, in Taiwan, 69
247n. 22; traumatic past of, 247. CandoCo dance company, 184
See also Truth and Reconciliation Capa, Robert, 124
Commission capitalism:
Avni, Ora, 120 and Afrikaner nationalism, 28;
and Hollywood film, 232;
Barthes, Roland, 227, 234, 235, 236 modernism and, 105
Bass, Ellen, 134 Caruth, Cathy, 4, 33, 100, 107, 130,
Bataille, Georges, 178 172, 177, 179, 183, 197, 201, 207
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 199 catastrophe:
Bell of Nagasaki, The (Sekigawa), 146 collective nature of, 54; narration
Beloved (Morrison), 56 representing, 106; produced by
Benigni, Roberto, 121 humans, 46; and refashioning of
Benjamin, Walter, 20, 40, 105, 148– symbolic world, 167; revisiting,
149, 150, 155, 158, 159, 161, 218, 221; twentieth-century, 125
227, 236 catharsis:
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in art and literature, 220; in
(Freud), 6–7, 96 traditional aesthetics, 233
Bhabha, Homi, 55, 62 Cavanaugh, Carole, 146, 147
Bhuller, Darshan Singh, 186 Cayrol, Jean, 113, 118
Bialis, Laura, 139 Centre for Study of Violence and
bio-social immortality, 212, 213 Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 36
Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith), 102 Chen Guofu, 72
Black Rain (Shōhei), 146, 160 Chen Yingzhen, 69
Blackwell, Jason M., 139 Chi, Robert, 18–19
Blanchot, Maurice, 178 Chiang Ching-kuo, 68
body Chiang Kai-shek, 67
in cinema-verité, 120; dancing, 199; Children of Hiroshima (Shindo), 146
disabled, 184; fallen, 190; narrative China:
of, 194; paralysis of, 193; politics of, dismantled history of, 215;
200; sublime figurations of, 180– filmmaking in, 217, 225; official
181; in traumatic communication, narrative of, 212; revolutionary-
183–184 historical film in, 14–15;
INDEX 275
twentieth-century history of, 208. collectivity, of Chinese, 65

See also People’s Republic of colonialism, 17, 228, 245n. 1
China; Republic of China colonial relations:
Chinese: ambivalence of, 62; intercultural,
“essentialist survivalism” of, 209; 56; sexuality in, 55–56
identification as, 65; modern colonization:
literature of, 218–219; symbolic Australian, 45; barriers to
continuity for, 211–212; written, harmony in, 49; cultural residues
85, 86 of, 48; as cultural wound, 46
Chinese theater, reform of, 217 colonized peoples, internal states of,
Chow, Rey, 22, 204, 207, 209, 218, 54
228 color shots, in Holocaust film, 140
Chronicle of a Summer (French film), commentary, in Holocaust
119–120 documentaries, 108, 110, 111–112,
cinema: 114, 256n. 48
art vs. genre film in, 160–161; communality, and shared trauma, 32
modernism in, 105, 255n. 34; Communist infiltration, in narrative
post-traumatic, 105, 121; radical of fear, 28
Chinese, 228–229; in Taiwan, 65, community: and private trauma, 13;
69; Third World, 232–233; in of survivors, 33
transmission of historical trauma, compilation film:
94 figurative present tense of, 110;
cinema-verité: misleading use of documents in,
emergence of, 119–120; and 256n. 45; realist narrative
postmodern history film, 125 conventions of, 119
City of Sadness, A (Hou), 18, 65, 71, concentration camps:
72–78, 82, 88; filming of liberated, 96–97; public
attacks on, 78–79, 250n. 18; awards discourse on, 112, 256n. 44;
won by, 75; book version, 77–78; recycling of footage of, 110;
commentaries on, 81; cost of, 72; survivors of, 103–104; trauma of,
full version of, 76; Japaneseness in, 113. See also The Death Camps;
70; lasting impact of, 66; plot of, 73; Holocaust
politically oriented analyses of, 81; conflict, transnational, 45
promotion of, 74, 77; silence in, 85; consciousness: character, 128;
success of, 78, 249n. 11; use of in massive trauma, 4; post-
languages in, 83–87 traumatic historical, 116;
close-ups, in Holocaust selective, 127
documentaries, 108, 117 consumption, culture of, 11
cognitive processing, during trauma, contact-zones:
5 ambivalence in, 54–56; concept of,
Cold War, 67 46; embodied translators for, 59–
collective memory, 106; 62; and indigenization, 49–54;
of Second World War, 149 intra-cultural, 56–58
collective numbing, 101 continuity, building sense of, 215
276 INDEX
crimes, of apartheid, 31 Deleuze, Gilles, 235

criminals, political opponents as, 32 desire, and the sublime, 180, 181
crisis: Desser, David, 147
and Chinese filmmaking, 226– dialects, in Taiwanese film, 87
227; patterns of, 16 le différend, 51
critical historical analysis, trauma in, digital media, and history, 1
8 disability:
crosscutting, in Holocaust film, 118 body-truth signaled by, 198;
Culbertson, Roberta, 33, 37 experience of, 186; as invisible
cultural contact, traumas arising trauma, 189; modern dance and,
from, 46–47. See also contact- 187; over-determination of, 185;
zones paralysis, 186; social narrative of,
Cultural Revolution, Chinese, 12, 185; as trauma, 201
167, 203, 206, 211 disassociation model, in trauma
cultures, effect of traumatic events studies, 8
on, 16 disaster, natural, 46. See also
catastrophe
Dachau, 167 disconnection, 170
dance metaphors, 200 disembodied:
dance of death, 193–197, 200 meaning of, 193; voice, 192
Daughter of the Nile (Hou), 71 dissociation, 127;
Davis, Laura, 134 of numbing, 171; psychical, 170
D-Day, 123, 130, 131 dissolve, in Saving Private Ryan, 128
deaf-mute photographer, 79, 84 distance, in immediate understanding,
death: 183
and aesthetic of the sublime, 175, Ditmann, Laurent, 130–131
181; dance of death, 193–197, 200; Dlomo-Jele, Sylvia, 31, 32
and family continuity, 213; of docu-drama, postmodernist, 125
meaning, 195 documentaries:
death camps, public discourse on, Holocaust, 107–119, 140;
112, 256n. 44. See also understatement in, 11. See also
concentration camps historical documentary
Death Camps, The (Actualités Dower, John W., 154
Françaises), 94, 107, 108, 109, 110; Duras, Marguerite, 20, 166, 176–178
images of atrocities in, 120; point Dust in the Wind (Hou), 71
of view in, 117
death events: Eddie Mabo decision, 49, 59
in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 179; Edwards, Correll, 59
and psychic numbing, 169; and ego:
refashioning of symbolic world, in psychoanalysis, 3; and war
167; the sublime in, 177 neuroses, 7
deception, officially sanctioned, 31 Eisenstein, Sergei, 116, 234, 235–237
deconstruction, of authoritarian Eisler, Hanns, 113
narratives, 215 Elsaesser, Thomas, 11
INDEX 277
embodied translators, 45, 245n. 1 “Final Solution,” the, 95, 120

empowerment, in contact-zone, 61 flashback:
Era International, 71, 249n. 6 concept of, 135; in The Fall, 193,
Erikson, Kai, 37 196, 198; in Holocaust film, 115
ethnic harmony, images of, 195 Forrest Gump (Zemeckis), 1, 2
ethos, survivor, 168 forgetting:
evolution, 3 historical narrative of, 150; and
exoneration, vs. explanation, 62–63 historical power of trauma, 130; in
eyewitness accounts, questioning, 38 mainstream melodramas, 9
Formosa Incident, 68
Face of Another, The (Teshigahara), Four Modernizations, 268n. 13
151 “Four-Olds” item, 211
Fall, The (Bhuller), 21, 186; Fox, Broderick, 139
agency in, 189; dance in, 195; Frankel, Fred, 135
flashbacks in, 193, 196, 198; French-Algerian war, 47
narrative of, 187–189; opening of, Freud, Sigmund, 100;
188; repetitions in, 189–193; on death anxiety, 210; on
voice-over in, 192 destructive traumas, 2–3, 4; on
False Memory Syndrome Foundation, fright, 96; on negation, 80;
134 secondary revision concept of,
false witnessing, theory of, 27–28 254n. 24; topographical model of
Family Gathering (Yasui), 141–144 mind of, 58; on trauma, 5; on
family values, 213 voyeurism, 55
Fanon, Frantz, 47 Friedlander, Saul, 107
fascism, and cinema, 10 fright, S. Freud on, 96
February 28 Incident, in Taiwan, 67, Fujian dialect, 251n. 19
72–73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83,
88 Geertz, Clifford, 53
Felman, Shoshana, 4, 98, 107, 136, gendered harmony, images of, 195
213 gender roles:
feminism, in Japanese film, 157 in face of trauma, 149, 150; in
“feminist film,” Onibaba as, 158 Onibaba, 149, 150, 151
fetishism, narrative, 106 Genette, Gerard, 102
feudalism, 228 genocide:
“Fifth Generation” directors, in photographic evidence of, 101;
Chinese cinema, 204 trauma of, 113
film: Gevisser, Mark, 32
atrocity in, 99, 120; compilation, Gikandi, Simon, 62
110–111; Holocaust, 10, 105–106; globalization:
languages of, 81, 82–89; post- corporate-sponsored, 11; and
traumatic discourse in, 100–102; indigenous media, 17
trauma, 9; vicarious trauma in, 9– Goddess (Wu), 218
10, 96–100. See also postmodern Godzilla (Honda), 147, 160, 161
history film Gourevitch, Philip, 135
278 INDEX
Great Leap Forward, 211 history:

ground zero, coded feminine, 156 agency in, 1–3; Chinese, 215, 217;
guilt: as consumer item, 11; and cultural
collective, 35; felt by victims, 38; representations of trauma, 14–15;
in Holocaust documentary, 108 destructive forces of, 15;
disintegration of, 210; from
Hacking, Ian, 131 distorted memories, 36; making of,
Hansen, Miriam, 226 2; meaning and, 20; in media, 1–2;
Hartman, Geoffrey, 107 modern, 16; personal memory in,
Heidegger, Martin, 1, 218 140, 144; process of, 13; and radical
Henderson, Brian, 191 film, 234; represented in
Herman, Judith, 15, 16, 129, 134, 139 filmmaking, 224–227; tragedy in,
Herzog, Werner, 49–54, 59 220; translation of memory into,
hibakusha, 146, 150, 151, 152, 156 40; traumatic, 8, 15, 159, 221;
Himmler, Heinrich, 94–96, 96, 111, unofficial, 223; violence of, 214
112 History and Memory (Tajiri), 121
Hiroshima, 12, 167; History Channel, of US television, 2
allegorical treatments of, 147; Hitler, Adolf, 52
cinematic representations of, 145; Holbein, Hans, 193
discourses about, 20; memory of, Hollywood:
153; in national narratives, 159; and collective myth, 231; and
postwar Japanese cultural historical trauma, 48; influence in
representation of, 149 China of, 225, 226
Hiroshima (Sekigawa), 146 Holocaust:
Hiroshima, mon amour (Resnais), cultural significance of, 252;
119, 147, 175; memories of, 135; and post-
Caruth’s analysis of, 183, 201; traumatic cinema, 105, 255n. 36;
Duras’s scenario for, 166, 178–181; survivors of, 104, 106; as trauma,
resistance of memory in, 178–179 94–96
Hirsch, Joshua, 19 Holocaust Deniers, 135
historical documentary: Holocaust film, 10, 11;
and cinema-verité, 119–120; The Death Camps, 94, 107–109,
experiment with, 114–116 110, 117, 120; Mein Kampf, 110–
historical film, realist, 102. See also 113; Night and Fog, 113–114, 115–
postmodern history film 117, 118–119. See also
historical perspective: postmodern history film
lack of, 4; with tragic vision, 224 Honda, Ishiro, 147
historical representation, in film, 88 Hong Kong:
historical truth, and witness cinema of, 84; and Taiwan
testimony, 39 question, 65
historical writing, doubts about, 8 Horowitz, Mardi Jon, 99
historicism, 148 horror film, Onibaba as, 145, 161
historiography, personal memory in, Hou Hsiao-hsien, 18, 65, 70, 71, 72,
142 74, 78, 81, 84
INDEX 279
Huang Ailing, 238 Japan:

Hu Shi, 219, 220 official postwar narrative of, 154;
Hutcheon, Linda, 126 postwar occupation of, 262
Japanese:
Ibuse, Masuji, 147 national identity of, 145, 159
ideology: Japanese-Americans, internment of,
sublime object of, 169; traumatic 142
experience and, 11 Japanese films, censorship policies
imagery: affecting, 146
computer generated, 125; death, jetztzeit, 20, 148, 155, 161
210–211; Hollywood, 232; trauma Jews:
relayed through, 97–98 in Nazi Germany, 251n. 1
images: Jews, liquidation of, 112, 256n. 44.
of contact, 60; in The Fall, 191; in See also Holocaust
historical writing, 8–9; in Joseph, Betty, 48
Holocaust documentary, 115; and justice system, during apartheid,
intensely traumatic periods, 12; 31
narrational values of, 192;
overload of, 171; politics of, 96; Kaohsiung Incident, 68
and psychic numbing, 171; Kaplan, E. Ann, 18, 166
sublime, 173; symbolic context Kazin, Alfred, 135
for, 172; of trauma, 208; in Ke Yizheng, 70
traumatic memories, 129; Khulumani, 43
traumatic potential of, 98 Kidd, Bronwyn, 60, 61
imaginary, in postmodern history Kihlstrom, John, 139
film, 132 killing:
imagination: mobile killing action, 112, 256n.
in memory, 141; work of, 14 45; in official histories, 222. See
imaging: also Holocaust
self-, 13; and traumatic pain, 12 Koch, Gertrude, 106
Imamura, Shōhei, 146, 157 kominka movement, in Taiwan,
imperialism, 228 249n. 7
incestuous assault: Kozol, Jonathan, 135
denying reality of, 138; Kracauer, Siegfried, 227
recognition of, 133–134, 260n. 38 Krog, Antjie, 34–35, 36, 40
indigeneity, 245n. 1 Krystal, Henry, 103
indigenization, 50, 51 Kuomintang (KMT), 67
infant traumata, 7 Kuppers, Petra, 21
In Our Time (Tao, Yang, Ke and Kuroneko (Shindo), 161
Zhang), 70 Kurosawa, Akira, 161
international law, 31 Kwaidan (Masaki), 161
Jameson, Fredric, 231 Lacan, Jacques, 6

Janet, Pierre, 103, 170, 171 Lacanian Real, the, 169
280 INDEX
LaCapra, Dominick, 5, 6, 101, 107, essays of, 222

166, 168, 169, 176, 257n. 53 Lyotard, Jean-François, 51, 168, 173,
Landsberg, Allison, 142 176
Langer, Lawrence, 139
language: Macau, 65
and failure of representation, 101; Manchuria, Japanese occupation of,
of film, 81, 82–89; Hou’s 225
innovations in, 81; immediate Mandarin language, 85, 86
experience and, 183; in narrative Ma Ning, 229, 231, 233, 237
of violence, 29; and the sublime, Mao Dun, 218
180; in Taiwanese film, 66; and Mao Zedong, 67
traumatic event, 4 Masaki, Kobayashi, 161
Lanzmann, Claude, 19, 120 mass media, and history of trauma,
Laplanche, Jean, 168 16. See also media
Laub, Dori, 4, 10, 32, 35, 39, 47, 98, materialism, historical, 148
107, 136 May Fourth culture, 224
Laudanum (photo series), 54–56 McDonald, Keiko, 157
Laufer, Stephen, 29 meaning:
Lee, Leo, 226 death of, 195; narrative
Leifeng, Tower of, 220–221 reconstruction of, 20; structures
Leiser, Erwin, 110 of, 188; unclear markers of, 199
Levy, Sarah, 139 meaningful life, and modern history,
Liao Ping-hui, 79, 80, 81, 82 16
license, dramatic, 124 media:
Life is Beautiful (Benigni), 121 digital, 1; history in, 1–2;
Lifton, Robert Jay, 10, 27–28, 47, 166, indigenous, 17; Taiwanese mass-
167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 203, market, 69; transnational, 11, 17.
206, 210, 213 See also mass media; visual media
Lincoln, Sarah L., 18 mediation, in immediate
listeners, at Truth and Reconciliation understanding, 183
Commission, 35. See also Mein Kampf (Leiser), 94, 110–113,
Witnessing 113; point of view in, 117;
Liu Zaifu, 219 temporal framing of, 116
Loftus, Elizabeth, 134, 137 Meisel, Judy, 139–141
long shots: melancholia, in trauma discourse, 15
of camp inmates, 97; in Holocaust melodrama:
documentaries, 108, 109 historical trauma in, 13;
long take: Hollywood, 48, 229; mainstream,
in Chinese film discourse, 234– 9, 242n.15; social narratives in,
239; politically charged, 22 242n. 15; Victorian, 186
Lost Sex (Shindo), 146 memory:
Lowenstein, Adam, 20 collective, 106, 149; disordered,
Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Shindo), 146 133–139; extreme variability of,
Lu Xun, 22, 217, 218, 219–219; 138; fantasy elements in, 135;
INDEX 281
Holocaust, 115, 135, 136; Eisenstein’s theory of, 116; in The

imagination in, 141; imaginative Fall, 190; of past and present, 116;
constructions in, 143; politically charged, 22
indeterminancy of, 136–137; mood, in literary narration, 102
malleability of, 137; in massive morality, and Holocaust documentary,
trauma, 4; meaning and, 20; 108–110
mistaken, 20, 142; narrative, 103, Morrison, Toni, 56
270n. 17; ordinary, 170; personal, Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 7
142; post-traumatic, 104; mourning:
“prosthetic,” 142; public, 140; as ritualistic public, 28; Truth and
question of correspondence, 139; Reconciliation Commission as, 26;
as reconstructive and variable, 132; and working through trauma, 63
recovered, 138; and remembering, mourning play, seventeenth-century,
141; victims of distorted, 35 148
memory, traumatic, 5, 19, 46, 126, multilingualism, 84, 86, 87
134, 170, 245n. 5; multinationalism, 17
historical, 131; and historical
truth, 139; in postmodern Nagasaki, bombing of, 167, 262n. 2
historical documentaries, 144; Nanking, Rape of, 12
testing of, 135; vs. normal, 104 narration:
“memory wars,” 133 catastrophe represented by, 106;
Menilmontant (Kirsanoff), 105 elements of, 102; postmodern,
mise-en-scène: 121; post-traumatic, 105; realist,
in postmodern history film, 130; 103, 110; vs. lyricism, 75
of traumatic memory, 132 narrative:
misremembering, 143 class, 153; death of, 196;
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 157, 161 deconstructive, 212; filming, 187–
mnemonic errors, 137 189; in historical writing, 8–9; and
mobile killing action, 112, 256n. 45 intensely traumatic periods, 12; in
modernism, 105 To Live, 214; positing of gaps in,
modernity: 184; time as, 199–200; traumatic,
and altered visuality, 3; colonial, 183, 190; types of, 188
229; contradictions of, 17; narrative fetishism, 106
historical trauma in, 12; history narrativity, trauma within, 186
in, 2; sociohistorical forces of, 6; Nash, Michael, 137
trauma of, 3, 16; traumatic history nationalism:
in, 8 challenges to, 66; economic, 152,
Moffatt, Tracey, 54, 61 156
moment: Native Title Act, Australian, 59,
pregnant, 235; of representation, 246n. 15
148 Nazi camps:
monotheism, “forgetting” of, 7 public discourse on, 112, 256n. 44
montage: Nazi Germany, mass killing in, 93–
in Chinese film, 219, 234–239; 94. See also Third Reich
282 INDEX
negation, in psychoanalytic sense, 80 and politics of victimization, 152–

neocolonialism, 18 153; story of, 150–151, 152–155;
neurophysiology, effect of trauma on, as trauma text, 145; war
5 responsibility in, 154
newsreels: Ophuls, Marcel, 120
Chinese, 217, 218; German, 111; Origin of German Tragic Drama,
visual violence in, 225 The (Benjamin), 148
New Taiwanese Cinema (NTC), 70– Orr, James J., 152
72 Owen, Wilfred, 128
New Youth magazine (Chinese), 219
Nice Coloured Girls (Moffatt), 54 pain:
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 106 of history, 223; of past, 213; and
Night and Fog (Resnais), 94, 105, the sublime, 174
113–114, 115–117; paralysis:
opening sequence of, 114; point of in The Fall, 186; psychic, 5; saving
view in, 117; post-traumatic stories from, 201; of trauma, 6
cinema after, 119–121; shocking past:
literalness in, 117; temporal commemoration of, 40; and
framing of, 116; vicarious trauma historical spectacle, 110; memory
of, 253n. 20 and, 139; pain of, 213; South
Night of the City, The 228, 237 Africa’s, 41; traumatic, 47, 58. See
Nowell-Smith Geoffrey, 160 also history
nuclear arms race, 167 Pawnbroker, The 119
numbing: Payne, David G., 139
collective, 101; levels of, 171; People’s Republic of China (PRC):
psychic, 169, 170 film production in, 70; and
Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress, Taiwan question, 65
1933, 115. See also Third Reich perception, modern shock on,
241n. 4
Oba, Hideo, 146 Perkins, Rachel, 56, 57, 61
Occupation, of Japan, 154–155 perpetrators:
Ofshe, Richard, 134 confessions of, 35; failure to
Olson, Eric, 203, 206, 210, 213 punish, 41–42; impact of
Omaha Beach sequence, in Saving horrendous deeds on, 47
Private Ryan, 123–131, 132 photography:
Omar, Dullah, 41 Barthes’s analysis of, 227; for
One China, political narratives of, historical representation, 88; and
66 language, 66; and perception, 227;
Ong, Aihwa, 48 writing and, 88
Onibaba (Shindo), 20, 154; Pickowicz, Paul, 224
allegorical ground zero in, 155– Plunder of Peach and Plum, 238
159; ambivalence in, 153; as art politics:
film, 160–161; iconography of, aestheticization of, 10; of body,
161; national narrative in, 159; 200; of image, 96; and Taiwanese
INDEX 283
cinema, 78; of victimization, 152– Qi Longren, 66

153 Qiu Fusheng, 71, 76, 77, 80
politics of trauma, and art, 48
Pontalis, J. B., 168 racial conflict:
postcolonialism, 56 traumatic, 18; and Truth and
postcolonial theory, 245n. 1 Reconciliation Commission, 26
postmodern history film: racism, origins of institutionalized, 28
dissociation in, 127–128; Radiance (Perkins), 56, 57
disturbance of experience in, 129– Read, Peter, 59
130; features of, 125–126; multiple Readings, Bill, 51
perspectives in, 128; and realism, cinematic:
traumatic memory, 131–132, 144; allegory vs., 147–148; anti-
virtuous patriotism in, 132 realism, 124–125; and dramatic
postmodernism: license, 125; in historical film,
fiction of, 126; historical trauma in, 102–103; in postmodern history
121; struggle against history in, 215 film, 132; spectator traumatized
postmodernity, 2 by, 119; tragic, 219–224
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder reality, montaged, 234
(PTSD), 126; recollections, 139
diagnostic criteria for, 96, 128; reconciliation:
failure of memory in, 104; film with focus on psychology, 54; and
viewing leading to, 99; origins of, working trauma through, 63. See
133 also Truth and Reconciliation
power hierarchies, 18 Commission
power relations: Record of a Living Being (Kurosawa),
in colonialization, 47; and inter- 161
ethnic relations, 62; sexuality in, Red Chamber Dream, The 220
56 remorse, 41
Pratt, Mary Louise, 45–46 repetition:
Proust, Marcel, 227 in The Fall, 189–193; in
pseudomemory, 134, 136, 137, 143 immediate understanding, 183; of
psyche: traumatic symptoms, 169
and culture, 8; and traumatic representation:
event, 4 historical, 88; of history in film,
psychic numbing, 169, 170 224–227; methods of, 208;
psycho-historical approach, to moments of, 148; realistic, 125;
trauma, 166 reductive legislation of, 147; of
psychology of trauma: trauma, 4, 8, 9; of traumatic
central dialectic of, 15–16; and events, 266n. 18
historical shocks, 7–8; theoretical Republic of China (ROC), 65;
discourse about, 15 censorship code of, 75; foreign
public testimony, effects of, 41 relations of, 71. See also Taiwan
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 235, 236 Resnais, Alain, 113–114, 116, 118,
punctum, photographical, 227, 228 119, 147, 178, 183
284 INDEX
responsibility, discourses of: silence, in film, 85

and filmic representation, 148; for silent film, pornographic, 55
war, 150–155 Silverman, Kaja, 48, 192
Richie, Donald, 147 “SisaKhuluma: We are Still
Riefenstahl, Leni, 95 Speaking” (video), 36, 40, 43
Rosen, Philip, 239 Slade, Andrew, 20
Rosenstone, Robert A., 215 Sledge, Eugene, 129
Roth, Michael, 40, 181 slow-motion, in The Fall, 191
Sobchack, Vivian, 1
Santner, Eric, 106 social change, 16;
Sato, Tadao, 157 and Chinese filmmaking, 225
Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg), 19– “social problem” films, 229
20, 123, 143; Sontag, Susan, 97–98, 100, 101
graphic violence of, 123; landing Sorrow and the Pity, The (Ophuls),
sequence of, 124–131, 132 120
Scarry, Elaine, 12–13, 14 sound track:
Schindler’s List (Spielberg), 120–121, for compilation film, 111; of
124 Holocaust documentary, 113
Scholtz, G. D., 28 South Africa:
Scott, Ann, 139 historical “truth” of, 38; racial
Second World War: survival narrative in, 28;
collective memory of, 149; twentieth-century history of, 28;
discourses about, 20; internment traumatic past of, 40; Truth
of Japanese-Americans during, Commission in, 25–26. See also
142; master narrative of, 113; apartheid
official narratives of, 155; Spielberg, Steven, 19–20, 123, 130,
traditional historical 131
interpretation of, 132 Spring Silkworm, 228
security, and modern history, 16 state, self-representation of modern,
Sekigawa, Hideo, 146 10
self-image, fashioning of, 2 Street Angel (Ma), 229, 237
self-report, fallibility of, 137 Subincision (anthropological
Sendak, Maurice, 135 documentary), 99
sensationalism: sublime, the:
Hollywood, 11; traumatic aesthetic of, 20, 165, 166, 172–
experience and, 11 173, 177; analysis of, 165–166; as
sensations, in traumatic memories, intensification, 266n. 21;
129 romantic understanding of, 173;
Shanghai, bombing of, 225 terror in, 174
Shay, Jonathan, 129, 130 subtitles, 86, 251n. 23
Shindo Kaneto, 20, 145, 146, 157, 161 suffering:
Shoah (Lanzmann), 19, 106–107, 120, in official history, 221; in radical
121, 257n. 53 cinema, 228; South African
Showalter, Elaine, 137–138 confrontation of, 42
INDEX 285
survival: technology:
art of, 172; continuity of, 214; in and altered visuality, 3; and
To Live, 205–206; pleasures of, traumatic violence, 218
176; trauma and, 166–172; tense:
witnessing trauma as, 208 experiment with, 114–116; in
survivors: Holocaust films, 107–108, 110–
in cinema-verité, 120; community 113; in literary narration, 102,
of, 33; concentration camp, 103– 103
104; of historical trauma, 121; terror:
Holocaust, 104, 106, 139; limits of representation of, 172;
knowledge of, 167–168; and and the sublime, 174
trauma research, 165 Teshigahara, Hiroshi, 161
suturing edit: testimony:
in film, 86; in Holocaust film, 118 need for, 213; public, 41. See also
Szabo, Istvan, 119 witnessing
theater:
Taiwan: Chinese, 217; tragic-realistic
and challenges to nationalism, 66; approach to, 219
cinema of, 84, 88; ethnically Third Reich:
Chinese population of, 82; film cinema policy of, 95; master
industry of, 70–72, 77; historical narrative of, 113
perspective on, 67–68; identity of, Third World, cinema of, 232–233
18–19; independent filmmaking Three Modern Women, 228
in, 69; linguistic unification and Tian’anmen Incident in 1989, 203
standardization in, 83; martial law time:
lifted in, 68; mass-market in To Live, 214; manipulation of,
periodicals in, 69; post-martial 199200; narrative of, 194; post-
law years, 80; psychic violence in, traumatic deformation of, 100
76; rulers of, 65; traumatic period Time to Live and the Time to Die,
in history of, 82; US-based The (Hou), 71
independence movement in, 68. Todeschini, Maya Morioka, 157
See also February 28 Incident Todorov, Tzvetan, 188
Taiwan Cinema Manifesto, 1987, 71 To Live (Zhang), 21, 294;
Taiwanese dialect, 251n. 19 humor and irony in, 209–210;
Taiwanese society: shock events in, 205; story of, 205;
literature of, 69; middle class in, visual and sound effects in, 207
68 Torrents, The 228
Tajiri, Rea, 121 torture, in official histories, 222
Takashi, Nagai, 146 torture victims, truth and, 39. See
Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human also victims
Spirit (Bialis, Fox and Levy), 139, tracking shots, in Holocaust film,
143–144 118
Tal, Kali, 28, 35 tragedy, Marxist understanding of,
Tao Dezhen, 70 220
286 INDEX
translation, 245n. 1; traumatic experiences:

act of, 45, 49; and working trauma of apartheid, 37; media
through, 63 representations of, 22
trauma, 5; Treat, John Whittier, 155
analogue vs. direct, 99; as bodily Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl), 95,
memory, 5; cinematic relaying of, 114
96–97; collective, 245n. 6; combat, truth:
128–129; “contagion” of, 33; as disrupted by trauma, 177;
crisis of representation, 98; manipulation of, 39; in meaning
cultural reproductions of, 14; of disability, 190
discourse of, 100–101, 253n. 21; Truth and Reconciliation
documenting, 139–144; films Commission (TRC), South
connected to, 9; and history, 221; African, 18, 47;
Holocaust as, 94–96; infantile, 6; cathartic power of, 38; dialogic
in melodramas, 9, 242n. 15; and process of, 33; as facilitating
memory, 126; muted, 101; and agent, 43; final report of, 39–40;
narration, 102; national, 47; non- healing done by, 36; national
narrational nature of, 185–186; identity provided by, 35; purpose
paralysis of body, 193; of, 25–26; risk of, 26–27; as
periodization of, 16; as product of therapeutic process, 30
history, 13; psychoanalytic theory Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 25, 39,
of, 66; psycho-historical approach 43
to, 166; psychological, 207; Twenty-four Hours of Shanghai,
psychological approaches to, 53; of 237
September 11, 4; shared, 32, 46; “two-two-eight,” 67
structure of, 166–167; and the
sublime, 165, 174; and survival, Ugetsu (Mizoguchi), 161
166–172; theory of, 197;
therapeutic response to, 188 van der Hart, Onno, 5, 170, 171
trauma, historical: van der Kolk, Bessel A., 5, 170, 171
in allegory, 159; destructive, 3; in van Vuuran, Paul, 38
filmic representation, 131–132; Vertov, Dziga 236
Freud’s description of, 2–3; veterans:
language and, 82; in Onibaba, memories of, 134–135; Second
145; postmodern narration of, 121; World War, 123, 130–131;
representation of, 147; Vietnam, 29, 104
transmission of, 94 Vico, Giambattista, 2
trauma, vicarious, 19; victimhood:
anecdotal evidence for, 253n. 20; discourse on Japanese, 152; in
film as, 96; and filmed trauma discourse, 15
representation, 99 victimization:
traumatic event: and Hiroshima, 152; politics of,
crisis in truth caused by, 179; 152–153; and war responsibility,
focus on, 4; 3, 241n. 5; TRC as, 26 150–155
INDEX 287
victims: 142, 149, 155; traumatic

guilt felt by, 38; narrative of, 192; experience of modern, 10;
testimonies of, 35 Vietnam, 14, 167
video technologies: Weisel, Elie, 135
in Taiwan, 69 Wen-ching, 84–85
video technologies, in Holocaust Where the Green Ants Dream
film, 140 (Herzog), 49–50, 51–52, 53–54, 61
Vietnam, trauma-ridden legend White, Hayden, 125, 126
about, 14 White Terror period, in Taiwan, 67,
Vietnam veterans: 83
psychic numbing of, 29; traumatic Why We Fight series, 102
memory of, 104 Wiener, Reinhard, 93–94, 96, 101,
Vietnam War, 167 107
violence: Wiesel, Elie, 95, 101
of apartheid, 37; apocalyptic, 170; Wilkomirski, Benjamin, 135, 137,
of history, 214; movie, 123, 258n. 143
3; of twentieth century, 215 Williams, Raymond, 48, 229
visuality: witness:
media-induced disruptive, 218; in cinema-verité, 120; in Holocaust
and technology, 3 film, 118
visual media: witnessing:
as breeding ground of trauma, 17; false, 27; phenomenon of, 10;
and history, 1; transnational, 3 public, 39; as secondary trauma,
voice: 27; as survival, 208; to trauma, 32;
disembodied, 192; in literary traumatic potential of, 110; at
narration, 102 TRC, 32–33, 39
voyeurism: Wolff, Janet, 200
danger of, 10; and power Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara),
relationships, 56 161
“woman’s film,” 192
Waites, Elizabeth, 127, 134, 139 women:
Walker, Janet, 19 repression of, 219; traumatic
Walking With My Sisters (Kidd), 59, memories of, 133, 260n. 38
60 Wood, Robin, 232
Wang, Ban, 21–22 Woolf, Virginia, 197
Wang Guowei, 219, 220 working through:
Wang Hui, 221 and aesthetic of the sublime, 166;
war neuroses, S. Freud on, 7 and Chinese values, 212–213;
war responsibility: concept of, 5, 6; in Freudian view,
and Hiroshima, 152; official 169; of history and experience,
narratives of, 155; victimization 176; in Holocaust film, 257n. 53;
and, 150–155 and the sublime, 175
wars: Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon),
Second World War, 20, 113, 132, 47
288 INDEX
writing, on screen, 86, 88

Wu Nien-jen, 71, 72, 75
Wu Yonggang, 218
Xiao Ye, 72, 78

Xia Yan, 228, 238
Yad Vashem, 94, 252n. 3

Yang, Edward, 70
Yasui, Lise, 141, 143
Yoneyama, Lisa, 153, 156
Young, Robert J., 53, 55
Yu Hua, 205, 211, 214
Zhang Yi, 70
Zhang Yimou, 21, 204, 205, 210, 212,
214, 294
Zhan Hongzhi, 71, 76
Zhaohui Xiong, 21
Zhu Tianwen, 71, 74
Z̆iz̆ek, Slavoj, 6, 169

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Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name

E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang

© Hong Kong University Press 2004, 2008

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Printed and bound by

Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose

“At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing

■ Part One: Trauma and Cross-Cultural Encounters 23

2. Traumatic Contact Zones and Embodied Translators 45

■ Part Two: Screening War and Terror 91

4. Post-traumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary 93

5. The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and 123

6. Allegorizing Hiroshima 145

■ Part Three: Traumatic Memory, Narrative, and 163

7. Hiroshima, mon amour, Trauma, and the Sublime 165

8. Encountering Paralysis 183

10. Trauma, Visuality, and History in Chinese Literature 217

Robert Chi is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the

Joshua Hirsch is Visiting Lecturer in Film and Electronic Arts at

E. Ann Kaplan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

Petra Kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant

as Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Projects

Adam Lowenstein is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies

Sarah L. Lincoln, a South African native, is a doctoral candidate in

Andrew Slade teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University

Janet Walker is Professor of Film Studies at the University of

Ban Wang is Associate Professor of Comparative and Chinese

Zhaohui Xiong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of

The fundamental event of the modern age, Martin Heidegger declares,

however, turns varied and rugged historical trajectories into spectacle.

In an introductory lecture, Freud spoke of three destructive traumas

From Traumatic Paralysis to Historical Force Field

on the traumatic event, its impact and the horrifying symptoms of

dissociated type of trauma. Caruth describes trauma as a response,

dissociated self. Dialectically, working through is an attempt of

shocks (suggested by Freud) needs to be read as symptomatic of the

To Represent or Not to Represent: That Is the Question

Fixation on trauma leads to profound doubts about the viability of

imagery, with their sensationalized, clichéd emotional patterns often

the more recent phenomenon of aestheticization of trauma-ridden

measure of historical consciousness that needs to be grounded in

absence of referential content” of pain also renders it resistant to,

and domination, where the body is thwarted by its environment. In

. . . [the name] given to the phenomena of pain and the

Scarry’s argument suggests that trauma is not something that

War are good illustrations. These works have produced and

Trauma and History: Highlights of This Volume

The growing interest in trauma bears witness to the repeated blows

trauma.” 28 This comment by Judith Herman, we might add, also

In shifting from the psychic closet to trauma as a concept

neocolonialism. Sarah L. Lincoln looks at the Truth and

the film’s concrete process of production and circulation, Chi delves

death.” The sublime re-activates, in the collapse of the symbolic

historical narrative. In Wang’s analysis, a project of demystification

Since 1995, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex.”2

The Truth Commission will give a shared memory to the people

Nevertheless, the process of witnessing to atrocity or listening

as “a perverse quest for meaning, the end result of a spurious sense

For active perpetrators of apartheid terror — police officers, army

The conspiracy needed a sanitised phrase with no suggestion of

Such “sanitized” language and the ideology of racial survival it