Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema

Reviews / Votes

"The essays in Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema challenge us to re-vision well-known cinematic representations of the Holocaust through the lens of key insights from trauma studies. The authors' lucid and accessible language renders reading their unsettling analyses an enriching journey into some of the most complex Holocaust films made. Scholars as well as aficionados of cinematic representations will find the authors' re-visionings both absorbing and exciting." -- Ingeborg Majer-O'Sickey, Professor Emerita, Binghamton University, State of New York University "On almost every page of War Trauma in Cinema the authors show not only how psychoanalysis speaks to the state of Europe after the Holocaust (and, in the last chapter, the state of America after it's civil war: death is not just a 'master from Germany', as Celan wrote), but how much what was relevant then speaks to the trauma of our reality at this moment. May it be widely read." -- J. Todd Dean, American Psychoanalytic Association "Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema is an excellent and extensive intervention into the areas of trauma, film studies, and psychoanalysis. Through brilliant close readings of contemporary films on the trauma of war and its aftermath, Datema and Steinkoler examine the fundamental questions of memory in the face of catastrophe and the possibility of construction-in the psychoanalytic sense-of community in a world in which we are all exiles. The authors' work is a 'sinthomatic' resistance to the violence and narcissism of the injunction of becoming as citizens and subjects, and explores the power of film to see the real differently, an 'uncoming' that begets survival creation amid disaster." -- Alexander Howe, University of the District of Columbia "The void trauma leaves in our lives compels us to conceive of a seeing that can undo our blinding by what is known about traumatic events, and by our ready-made interpretations of them. What is needed is a new seeing that seeks to rescue our human powers of reinvention. The films Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema analyzes provide us with just that new 'seeing.' As a unique and compelling approach to trauma (principally but not only the trauma of World War II and the Holocaust) it treats films which have found artistic resources in the absolute destructiveness of what we had thought of as 'community,' and 'humanity.' The chapter on the difficult film, Son of Saul is particularly instructive in this regard. The book is also a timely and courageous way to address the immense and ongoing displacement of peoples all over the world due to war trauma by reaffirming the very qualities that make us all equally human." -- Juliet Flower MacCannell, University of California, Irvine