Trauma Translations. Stagings and Imaginations in Film and Theory

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Köhne
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 239406514

Imprinted by cultural and media studies, the research project explores the medial transfer between, first, cultural representations of the past, i.e. filmic trauma and violence histories, second, the changing trauma theory landscape, and third, memory politics and national identity constructions. The project focuses on feature films from a variety of national and representational contexts, as well as, different decades of the 20th and 21st century. The movies in question try to depict historical traumas with regard to content, narration, and aesthetics. They, e.g. deal with the First and Second World War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the War in Iraq, and 9/11.Trauma causes a gap between the traumatizing event and memory processing. It severely interferes with direct and adequate forms of representation and communication. Trauma leads to a communicational and representational vacuum. However, this very specific form of absence creates a whole variety of dreams, images, symptoms, and specters embedded within a particular kind of time structure. The latter can be described in terms of latency, deferred action, and repetition. The most curious aspect about this fact is that the traumatic time structure resembles the specific timeline and narrative strategies of film on multiple levels. Films that deal with trauma develop certain narrative techniques and aesthetics while attempting to translate psychological forms of injury, irritation, suffering, and pain (that can also affect the body in the form of e.g. conversion, performativity) into filmic language. The research project tries to decode and describe this specific filmic trauma language via the introduction of a variety of analytical terms borrowed from practical psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotraumatology, and trauma theories informed by cultural studies such as memory loss, false memory, intrusion, crypta, passing-on, re-enactment, the inversion of perpetrator and victim, téléscopage, traumatic growth, and trigger.This trauma-centered analysis of selected movies will interpret traumatic structures and their representation/visualization via themes such as translation, dissociation, latency, repetition, staging, and imagination. In addition, film can be highlighted as an audio-visual medium that produces a surplus via specific ways of representing, analyzing, and interpreting trauma. This symbolic surplus can be illustrated by certain filmic means such as the backstory wound, flashback, cutback, or split screen. Further, this surplus can provide phantasmatic imaginaries of healing which function as cultural patches (see E.M. Hunter's notion of healing scripts). These filmic patches attempt to close unhealed, traumatic wounds on a cultural level.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants