Overview

Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic. Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory. Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison. Her astute and original examination considers the Hollywood classic Kings Row and the television movie Sybil in relation to vanguard nonfiction works, including Errol Morris's Mr. Death, Lynn Hershman's video diaries, and the chilling genealogy of incest, Just, Melvin. Janet Walker's engrossing narrative demonstrates that the past does not come down to us purely and simply through eyewitness accounts and tangible artifacts. Her incisive analysis exposes the frailty of memory in the face of disquieting events while her joint consideration of trauma cinema and psychological theorizing radically reconstructs the roadblocks at the intersection of catastrophe, memory, and historical representation.

Full Product Details

Author:   Janet Walker
Publisher:   University of California Press
Imprint:   University of California Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.590kg
ISBN:  

9780520241749

ISBN 10:   0520241746
Pages:   273
Publication Date:   18 April 2005
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   Out of stock  

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface PART I. THE TRAUMATIC PARADOX Chapter 1. Catastrophe, Representation, and the Vicissitudes of Memory PART II. PERSONAL MEMORY: THE CASE OF INCEST Chapter 2. The Excision of Incest from Classical Hollywood Cinema: Kings Row and Freud Chapter 3. Incest on Television and the Burden of Proof: Sybil; Shattered Trust: The Shari Karney Story; Liar, Liar; and Divided Memories Chapter 4. Strange Bedfellows--Incest in Trauma Documentaries: Daughter Rite; Some Nudity Required; the Electronic Diary Series; Just, Melvin; and Capturing the Friedmans PART III. THE PERSONAL IS PUBLIC HISTORICAL: (AUTO)BIOGRAPHIES OF THE HOLOCAUST Chapter 5. The Last Days Is Not Shoah--Experiments in Holocaust Representation: The March and Tak for Alt Chapter 6. Disremembering the Holocaust: Everything's for You, Second Generation Video, and Mr. Death Conclusion Notes Bibliography Video/Filmography Index

Reviews

A well-researched, elegantly written and original book. Walker offers extremely nuanced and insightful readings that call on her expertise as film historian, feminist theorist and psychoanalytic scholar. The breadth of the book's reach will expand the vernacular of documentary studies in a most significant way. - Michael Renov, author of The Subject of Documentary

"""A well-researched, elegantly written and original book. Walker offers extremely nuanced and insightful readings that call on her expertise as film historian, feminist theorist and psychoanalytic scholar. The breadth of the book's reach will expand the vernacular of documentary studies in a most significant way."" - Michael Renov, author of The Subject of Documentary"""

Author Information

Janet Walker is Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Women's Studies Program. Her other books as author or editor are Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (1993), Feminism and Documentary (with Diane Waldman, 1999), and Westerns: Films through History (2001).

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