Psychological trauma as a subject for investigation has its origins in the early 19th century with the observations of the Viennese medical professor, Joseph Frank, and later in that century with the development of a theory of trauma by the leading neurologist of the time, Jean-Martin Charcot, through his work with hysteria and hypnosis at the L’Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris. Charcot was a significant influence on his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet, who were investigating hysteria as well and identifying the phenomenon as a mental illness – dissociative problems that manifest from unbearable experiences (Black and Flynn, 2021, p.122). Freud incorporated some of Charcot’s ideas in the 1893 paper, Studies on Hysteria, co-authored with his colleague Joseph Breuer, which suggested that the dissociative problem of hysteria was related to the memory of psychic trauma and noted the ‘timelapse’ between the cause and the traumatic response (Breuer and Freud, 1995). The ways in which the human brain processes memory was a key focus of Janet’s investigations, and he first wrote about the interrelationship between memory and trauma – how the mind processes traumatic experiences – in L’automatisme Psychologique in 1889 (Janet, 1973). His studies, which focused on the psychological aspects, led him to believe that traumatic, or dissociated, memories, which were beyond the control of the individuals affected, would remain unintegrated with their consciousness and outside their personal autobiographical ‘life narrative’ (Black and Flynn, 2021, p. 124).
It is through addressing the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) suffered by battlefield soldiers as a result of the two World Wars during the 20th century that trauma became a key concept for wider investigation and theoretical development (Ibid., pp.127–129). Cathy Caruth, a founding figure of trauma theory during the 1990s, identifies the years after the Vietnam War (1954 to 1975) as prompting an official acknowledgement of PTSD within the fields of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and sociology (Caruth, 1995, p. 3). As Black and Flynn affirm:
returning Vietnam veterans … reported a delayed onset of symptoms of hypervigilance, nightmares, and extreme emotional responding […] this pivoted the research and clinical communities’ attention back to the source of veterans’ dysregulation and dysfunction, the stress of war. (Black and Flynn, 2021, p. 131, authors’ emphasis)
Social activism led by the Women’s Movement during the 1970s reappraised gender roles, class and race and acknowledged power differentials, which in turn led to the recognition that survivors of gender-based violence and sexual assault were as traumatised by their experiences as if they were combat soldiers (Ibid.). The feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey notes in her 2004 essay, ‘Looking at the Past from the Present: Rethinking Feminist Film Theory of the 1970s’, that “feminist film theory and practice emerged at the end of the economic boom and social transformations that followed World War II […] to create an intellectual and aesthetic challenge to film’s depiction of reality” (Mulvey, 2004, p.1291). As the veteran film artist, writer and academic, Dirk de Bruyn, comments, the emergence in the 1970s of feminist film criticism came at a time “when politics and cinema moved out of the street into the academy and into theory” (de Bruyn, 2014, p.7).
Applying her conceptualisations to the representation of trauma in literary works such as books and films, Cathy Caruth is an important influence on screen studies through her development of trauma theory, along with Soshana Felman and Dori Laub (Radstone, 2007, p.9). Notable for amplifying Freud’s work to reimagine the psychological concept of trauma, Caruth defines the term as “a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind […] a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (Caruth, 1995, pp.3-4). However, she notes that “there is no firm definition for trauma, which has been given various descriptions at various times and under different names” (Caruth, 1996, p.117, emphasis in original). In the Introduction to Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Ibid.), she describes “the ways that the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will” (Ibid., p.2) and places emphasis on the repetitive feature of trauma:
In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. (Ibid., p.11).
Although the traumatic effect on me is not as extreme as Caruth describes, I recognise the surfacing of feelings that otherwise would remain undisturbed. For example, taking a few minutes of Super 8 footage, which was ‘lost’ in the archive, to make Finborough Road, returning to this location and ‘speaking in place’ not only stirred my memories but also ascribed to them a status as being ‘important’. Subsequently, when viewing this film, I reexperience the reveberations and sadness of lost friendships. When this footage existed in my archive as a Super 8 reel, my memories were dormant. Digitisation reenergised the material and gave it a psychic charge, bringing my past to life in a way that intrudes on the present.
Dirk de Bruyn adopts a “phenomenological traumatic reading” (de Bruyn, 2014, p.ix) in his recent book, The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art, to argue that materialist film is an “analogy of trauma” because of its antipathy to the features inherent in mainstream cinema, such as of narrative, symbolism and continuity (Ibid., pp.44). Here, de Bruyn draws on the theories of materialist (or structural) film explicated by the British avant-garde film-makers Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal during the 1970s and the ‘trauma theory’ that has been assimilated within film and media studies during the 21st century. de Bruyn argues that the characteristics of certain experimental films, such as non-linearity, repetition and fragmented consciousness, can “perform and communicate traumatic experience” (Ibid.). Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren, 1943) is an early poetic exemplar of what E. Ann Kaplin identifies as ‘trauma cinema’ (de Bruyn, 2014, p.85). Feminist scholars Kaplan and Janet Walker locate a particular mode of film-making that is allied with the performance of trauma. Walker uses the term, ‘trauma cinema’, to refer both to works that “deal with traumatic events in a non-realistic mode characterized by disturbance and fragmentation of the films’ narrative and stylistic regimes”, and films that portray “world shattering” events (Walker, 2005, p.19). This feeling of ‘out of placeness’ embodied in Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and much of de Bruyn’s film work, can be recognised in the disembodied narrative voiceover in Father-land.
Kaplan considers that cinema ‘performs trauma’ through its inherent capacity to convey “the visual, aura and non-linear fragmented phenomena of trauma – to performing it” (Kaplan, 2001, pp.204-5). She also argues that,
[t]he struggle to figure trauma’s effects cinematically leads to means other than linearity or story fragments, hallucinations, flashbacks are the modes trauma cinema characteristically adopts (Ibid., p.204).
My film 31 Days was created in its entirely from intuitively selected archival footage. While I would not identify the work as ‘trauma cinema’, there is a sense of Kaplan’s hallucinatory flashbacks when the spectator’s mind tries to connect the visual fragments of the past and make sense of the work.
Addressing how trauma in cinema ‘marks’ the viewer, Kaplan and her co-author Ban Wang observe that Meshes of the Afternoon, which depicts the woman protagonist’s ‘stream of consciousness’, positions the viewer as “witness” (Kaplan and Wang, 2004, p.10). They argue that “the position of being a witness … may open up a space for transformation of the viewer for empathetic identification without vicarious traumatization” (Ibid.). Father-land touches the audience with its wistful recollections of lost childhood without creating a bridge to the traumas of the past.
Walker considers audiovisual media have “certain intrinsic properties” (Walker, 2005, p.xix) that suit them for our “need to write histories of trauma and/or traumatic histories with regard to the relationships among experience, memory and fantasy” (Ibid., p.xviii). She writes:
[f]ilm and video texts are always already constructed through processes of selection and ordering, yet they can also reproduce, mechanically or electronically, an actual profilmic or provideographic event (occurring in front of the camera). (Ibid., p.xix)
My Super 8 archive consists of recorded fragments of my past with almost no supporting metadata such as date and place of filming to pin down individual shots or rolls. At the time, I felt no urge to create a coherent narrative of my life on film, no sense of historicity nor any desire for ‘completeness’. I filmed sporadically and while I can locate many of the profilmic events ‘geographically’, I often have little sense of their chronology when viewing the material decades later.
Walker’s concept of “traumatic paradox” embodies the contradictions within the ‘friability’ of our memory’s recall of traumatic events (Ibid., p.4) – our memory of trauma is a mélange of real and imagined occurrences, accurate and ‘false’ recollection, elisions and fantasies. Caruth adds to our understanding of the paradoxical nature of trauma, and its relationship with memory, place and time with her observation that,
[t]he historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that its first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience: since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place and in another time. (Caruth, 1995, p.8)
Walker’s development of the ‘traumatic paradox’ sought to address the latency, the absences and the ‘unreliability’ of memory to provide an alternative to the question of ‘Whose truth and memories are more ‘accurate’? She comments, “the defiant fact that external trauma itself can produce the very modifications in remembered detail that cultural conventions invalidate in determinations of truth” (Walker, 1997, p.806).
It was through the process of making Father-land in Nicosia that I was able to contextualise my childhood. Being in “another place and in another time”(Caruth, 1995, p 8) and through the framework and structured thinking of film production generated memories of childhood that were captured as audio recordings.
Laura U. Marks makes a timely contribution through her intervention into trauma discourse within moving image practices. In The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, And The Senses (2000), she situates her study in what she terms, ‘intercultural cinema’, which is characterised by “experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the still majority white, Euro-American West” (Marks, 2000, p.1). The ideas that Marks elucidates through her discussion of examples of these films were helpful in providing a thematic lens through which to extend my understanding in this research project.
Marks observes that, for many works of intercultural cinema, “the image is barely a beginning, and any extension into narrative must be hesitant, or suspicious. In these works, still or thin-looking images are ultimately the richest” (Ibid., p.42). She explains these “thin images” are what Deleuze referred to as “the absence of image”: a screen that is black or white, under or over exposed, blurred, grainy, or ‘belonging to the past’ – bearing evidence of ‘trauma’ through the marks of its journey in the world, such as scratches, dust and other débris, colour changes and deteriorations – “to bring something new out of the ruins of the image … and call on the viewer to search for their hidden history” (Ibid., pp.42-43).
In her discussion of how trauma becomes encoded in the body, Marks reminds us that,
[t]he cinematic encounter takes place not only between my body and the film’s body, but my sensorium and the film’s sensorium. We bring our own personal and cultural organization of the senses to cinema, and cinema brings a particular organization of the senses to us, the filmmaker’s own sensorium refracted through the cinematic apparatus. (Ibid., p.153)
Drawing on Henri Bergson’s term, she explains ‘attentive recognition’, as, “the way a perceiver oscillates between seeing the object, recalling virtual images that it brings to memory, and comparing the virtual object thus created with the one before us. … Engaging with the freshly perceived object, we recreate it in higher expansions of memory and on deeper strata of reality” (Ibid., p.48). The act of attentive recognition, Marks argues, “is often a traumatic process” because it is participatory: the thin image ‘calls on’ the viewer to bring their own memories into play and create meaning from what they are perceiving on the screen (Ibid.).
Marks observes that, for many works of intercultural cinema has its origins in the lacunae of recorded history. Minoritarian film-makers, therefore, have had to develop new modes of expression. Her theory of ‘haptic visuality’, which operates in a similar way to the sense of touch and triggers other sensory responses in the spectator, explains the novel ways in which intercultural film engages us in a bodily way to communicate a multi-sensory experience and embodiment of cultural memory (Ibid.).
Perhaps my practice as an artist filmmaker shares some of the specificities of ‘intercultural cinema’ established by Marks? My personal Super 8 archive sits in between two cultural knowledge systems – on the one hand, that of cinematic technologies and practices, the cinematic apparatus, and on the other hand, the strictures and rigid controls of the institutional film archive. I make poetic use of ‘thin images’, favouring ‘haptic visuality’ over narrative coherence, and I present the marks of trauma on the surfaces of my 8mm archival images, my ‘memories’ embodied in celluloid, for the viewer to experience and I “call on the viewer to search for their hidden history” (Ibid., p.43) and respond with their own memories to create meaning.
