LUMINOUS AMBUSH: SEIZING THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF CATASTROPHE THROUGH FILM

Abstract

“There are wounds with which we should never cease to suffer, and, sometimes, in the life of a civilization, illness is better than health” [Ankersmit, “Remembering the Holocaust”]. My book, “Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe” (2016), addresses films that depict 20th century atrocities and focuses on historical experience, not historical truth, and the emotions that still adhere to unresolved traumatic events. Using key concepts and analysis from this book, my goal here is to dem onstrate, through the interpretation of three films, how such historical experiences can be represented. In Yaël Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished” (2010) the filmmaker deconstructs a Nazi propaganda film on the Warsaw Ghetto and brings us into direct contact with the experience of survivors. Rithy Panh in “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” (2003) and Joshua Oppenheimer in “The Act of Killing” (2012), use a technique I call psychodramatic mise?en?scène to incite perpetrators to reenact their genocidal acts. These films, among others, I argue, are capable of triggering moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being.