Memory Drawn into the Present: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary

2018 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Jonathan Murray
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
International Success

The international success of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) saw this work routinely defined and discussed as the first feature-length example of animated documentary cinema. This chapter analyses Folman’s film and the multidisciplinary body of scholarly response that it has provoked. Much response to Folman’s film evaluates it in isolation and speculates more ambitiously on animated documentary’s possible aesthetic, conceptual and ethical strengths and weaknesses as a distinctive mode of audio-visual practice. This chapter’s analysis of Folman’s film likewise identifies defining formal and thematic characteristics that drive the contemporary turn towards animated documentary filmmaking more generally. This chapter also identifies several main evolving concepts and debates that characterise animated documentary scholarship as a distinctive subset of Animation Studies and Film Studies. Finally, this chapter also identifies other academic disciplines – such as Memory Studies and Trauma Studies – within which significant discussion of animated documentary is also taking place.

What Kind of Studies Is Comics Studies?

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Benjamin Woo
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Page Layout ◽  
Recent Growth ◽  
Comics Studies ◽  
Communications Theory ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literature And Film

Dramatic recent growth in comics research suggests that comics studies has matured as a field, perhaps even constituting an emergent discipline. Yet important questions about the nature of this field and how it relates to established academic disciplines remain unresolved. This introductory chapter examines the genealogy of comics studies and explores the relationship between theory and method as a proxy for the field’s “paradigmatic” status. Four theories of page layout are analyzed as examples of theorization in comics studies. Drawing on Robert T. Craig’s “constitutive metamodel” of communications theory, the chapter ultimately rejects both attempts to retread the path of established humanities disciplines such as English literature and film studies and arguments against disciplinarity as such, calling instead for a dialogic conception of academic disciplines that continually reflects on the differences through which they are constituted.

scholarly journals Cinematic Representation of Chinese-Indonesians’ Trauma in Jason Iskandar The Day The Sky Roared

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
Anton Sutandio
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Different Levels

This research analyzed a contemporary independent Indonesian film entitled The Day the Sky Roared (2015) that was directed by Jason Iskandar. This 10-minute silent film talked about the anxiety of Chinese-Indonesians through the eyes of a mother and her daughter regarding the historical trauma of the May 1998 tragedy. The fact that the film was produced about 17 years after the tragedy suggested the director’s awareness that the trauma remained due to the absence of reconciliation and closure. This research would show how the short film frames the incident and trauma of the Chinese-Indonesians. The research was a combination of trauma studies and film studies that focuses on the visual analysis of the film’s cinematography and mise-en-scene to show the cinematic representation of Chinese-Indonesians’ trauma. The findings show that the portrayal of Chinese-Indonesians still strongly suggests unrelieved psychological discomfort, albeit, at different levels, that is closely related to the traumatic past and the pervasive stereotyping of Chinese-Indonesians. 

Trauma and Memory Studies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyn Ball
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Trauma Research

A focus on trauma’s institutional trajectory in literary and cultural theory serves to narrow the transnational and multidirectional scope of memory studies. While Sigmund Freud’s attempt in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to define trauma in order to account for World War I veterans’ symptoms might serve as a provisional departure point, the psychological afflictions that haunted American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War reinforced the explanatory value of what came to be called “posttraumatic stress disorder,” which the American Psychiatric Association added to the DSM-III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. Multiple dramatic films released in the 1980s about Vietnam conveyed images of the American soldier’s two-fold traumatization by the violence he not only witnessed but also perpetrated along with the ambivalent treatment he received upon his return to a protest-riven nation waking up to the demoralizing realization that US military prowess was neither absolute nor inherently just. Proliferating research and writing about trauma in the late 1980s reflected this juncture as well as the transformative impact of the new social movements whose consciousness-raising efforts inspired a generation of academics to revise secondary and post-secondary literary canons. The publication in 1992 of both Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery as well as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing; In Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, along with Cathy Caruth’s editorial compilation entitled Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and collected essays in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), crystallized a moment when trauma was manifestly coming into vogue as an object of inquiry. This trend was reinforced by simultaneous developments in Holocaust studies that included critical acclaim for Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hour documentary Shoah (released in 1985), the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC in 1993, and, that same year, the international success of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Other key events that propelled the popularity of trauma studies in the 1990s included the fall of the Berlin wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and South African apartheid governments, and Toni Morrison receiving the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for Beloved. The latter additionally bolstered specialization in African American studies as a platform for investigating representations of slavery and its violent afterlives. While some critics fault the 1990s confluence of Holocaust and trauma studies for its Eurocentrism, the research pursued by feminist, multiculturalist, and postcolonial scholars in the same period laid the foundation for increasingly diverse lines of inquiry. Postcolonial criticism in particular has inspired scholarship about the intergenerational aftereffects of civil war, partition, forced migration, and genocide as well as the damage that accrues as settler states continue to marginalize and constrain the indigenous groups they displaced. More recent trauma research has also moved beyond a focus on finite events to examine the compounding strain of the everyday denigrations and aggressions faced by subordinated groups in tandem with long-term persecution and systemically induced precarity. Ultimately, then, the scale of trauma and memory studies has become not only global but also planetary in response to intensifying public anxiety about extinction events and climate change.

scholarly journals Painful Neutrality: Screening the Extradition of the Balts from Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Lars Kristensen ◽  
Christo Burman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic

Abstract The article deals with the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden in 1946 as represented in Per Olov Enquist’s novel The Legionnaires: A Documentary Novel (Legionärerna. En roman om baltutlämningen, 1968) and Johan Bergenstråhle’s film A Baltic Tragedy (Baltutlämningen. En film om ett politiskt beslut Sverige 1945, Sweden, 1970). The theoretical framework is taken from trauma studies and its equivalent within film studies, where trauma is seen as a repeated occurrence of a past event. In this regard, literature and moving images become the means of reaching the traumatic event, a way to relive it. What separates the extradition of the Baltic soldiers from other traumas, such as the Holocaust, is that it functions as a guilt complex related to the failure to prevent the tragedy, which is connected to Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II and the appeasement of all the warring nations. It is argued that this is a collective trauma created by Enquist’s novel, which blew it into national proportions. However, Bergenstråhle’s film changes the focus of the trauma by downplaying the bad conscience of the Swedes. In this way, the film aims to create new witnesses to the extradition affair. The analysis looks at the reception of both the novel and film in order to explain the two different approaches to the historical event, as well as the two different time periods in which they were produced. The authors argue that the two years that separate the appearance of the novel and the film explain the swing undergone by the political mood of the late 1960s towards a deflated revolution of the early 1970s, when the film arrived on screens nationwide. However, in terms of creating witnesses to the traumatic event, the book and film manage to stir public opinion to the extent that the trauma changes from being slowly effacing to being collectively ‘experienced’ through remembrance. The paradox is that, while the novel still functions as a vivid reminder of the painful aftermath caused by Swedish neutrality during World War II, the film is almost completely forgotten today. The film’s mode of attacking the viewers with an I-witness account, the juxtaposition and misconduct led to a rejection of the narrative by Swedish audiences.

scholarly journals VOICES OF “THE UNHEARD” AND “NEW SINCERITY”: PRACTICES OF GERONTOLOGICAL, PENITENTIAL, ETHNIC, RELIGIOUS EXCLUSION AND THEIR CONCEPTION IN MODERN THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE (PROBLEM STATEMENT)

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-38
Author(s):  
S. N. Ovodova
Keyword(s):  
Memory Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Problem Statement ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Philosophy Of Culture ◽  
Postcolonial Discourse

The article examines the understanding of exclusion procedures in the theory and philosophy of culture. The methodological framework for studying the practices of gerontological, penitentiary, ethnic and religious exclusion in modern culture is determined. The heuristic potential of the decolonial optics and the metamodern approach in the study of exclusion practices in modern culture is revealed, which, in particular, manifests itself in changing the principles of representation of cultural traumas. Replacing the postmodern construction of the narrative about the experience of the traumatized and excluded on the principle of “shock and show” with a metamodern new sincerity allows us to move away from commodification and stigmatization. The article analyses the current trends in the construction of relationships with the Other in postcolonial discourse, decolonial optics, trauma studies, memory studies, and metamodernism.

scholarly journals John Walker’s Passage.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Tegelberg
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
The University

John Walker’s Passage makes a valuable contribution to contemporary film studies, reflecting on the definitive work of one of Canada’s finest documentary filmmakers. Darrell Varga’s close analysis of Passage (2008) situates the film within John Walker’s prolific body of work and the tradition of documentary filmmaking in Canada. The book attests to the strength and significance of this powerful, provocative, and distinctly Canadian film, and thereby occupies a central place in the University of Toronto Press “Canadian Cinema” series.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Health History ◽  
Traditional Scholarship ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides an overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts feminist theorists have developed to challenge established knowledge. Leading feminist theorists, from around the globe, provide in-depth explorations of a diverse array of subject areas, capturing a plurality of approaches. The Handbook raises new questions, brings new evidence, and poses significant challenges across the spectrum of academic disciplines, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory. The chapters offer innovative analyses of the central topics in social and political science (e.g. civilization, development, divisions of labor, economies, institutions, markets, migration, militarization, prisons, policy, politics, representation, the state/nation, the transnational, violence); cultural studies and the humanities (e.g. affect, agency, experience, identity, intersectionality, jurisprudence, narrative, performativity, popular culture, posthumanism, religion, representation, standpoint, temporality, visual culture); and discourses in medicine and science (e.g. cyborgs, health, intersexuality, nature, pregnancy, reproduction, science studies, sex/gender, sexuality, transsexuality) and contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization (e.g. biopolitics, coloniality, diaspora, the microphysics of power, norms/normalization, postcoloniality, race/racialization, subjectivity/subjectivation). The Handbook identifies the limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women’s and men’s lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

The vernacular as method for memory and time: A philological and cultural exploration of Filipino concepts for Memory Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 833-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn S Martin
Keyword(s):  
Current Trend ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Group Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
Linear Dimensions ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Disappeared

This article proposes the vernacular as a discursive methodological entry point to Memory Studies. A bottom-up approach, this article theorizes memory and time starting from a close-reading of signifiers from the Filipino language, thus allowing its culture to be considered in its own terms first. The first part of the essay examines a set of terms that show equivalences with Western conceptions of memory. The second set of signifiers—( ma)tandà(an), agam, limot/limót and panahon—reveal that they are actually more illustrative of the current trend of movement in Memory Studies; and that they translate more accurately both the non-linear and linear dimensions of time. The third part of the article considers cultural concepts namely, kapwa, utang-na-loob, bayanihan, Manilaner, and desaparesidos, which challenge and enrich Trauma Studies’ Freudian and Holocaust-based history. With a perspective of memory and time from the Global South, this study also demonstrates how one can share space and time with (the wrath of) nature in a society of impunity while emphasising the importance of spirituality, humour, group culture, and hospitality. The existence of the Manilaners and the desaparecidos also shifts the perspective and experience of the Holocaust and the disappeared to a Filipino context.

From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Pascal Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Production ◽  
New Journalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
Live Action

This chapter provides a wide-ranging account of animated documentary cinema’s evolution, one which relates that ongoing history to analogous developments in related fields including live-action documentary, painting, photography and New Journalism. By their overt artificial nature animated documentaries seem to challenge the traditional documentary epistemology. Lefèvre considers the extent to which established Film Studies conceptual and analytical paradigms offer pre-existing tools that contemporary scholars can readily transpose to the study of animated documentary. This essay questions if the animated documentaries still fit in the six categories or modes of documentary film production that Bill Nichols defined: the poetic, the expository, the observational, the participatory, the reflexive, and the performative mode. This chapter highlights many of the critical and conceptual questions which that partially obscured history raises, laying out ten distinct sets of logistical, aesthetic and ideological issues that repeatedly manifest themselves across the history of animated documentary filmmaking.

scholarly journals Memories of cinemagoing and film experience: An introduction

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Kuhn ◽  
Daniel Biltereyst ◽  
Philippe Meers
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Film Experience ◽  
Future Work ◽  
The Relationship

Over the past two decades, the relationship between cinema and memory has been the object of increasing academic attention, with growing interest in film and cinema as repositories for representing, shaping, (re)creating or indexing forms of individual and collective memory. This Special Issue on memory and the experience of cinemagoing centres on the perspective of cinema users and audiences, focusing on memories of films, cinema and cinemagoing from three continents and over five decades of the twentieth century. This introduction considers the relationship between memory studies and film studies, sets out an overview of the origins of, and recent and current shifts and trends within, research and scholarship at the interface between historical film audiences, the cinemagoing experience and memory; and presents the articles and reviews which follow within this frame. It considers some of the methodological issues raised by research in these areas and concludes by looking at some of the challenges facing future work in the field.

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