Julia B. Köhne
Humboldt University, Berlin

Since the 1970s, international film cultures have acted as potent communicators and commentators of real trauma histories, theories, and perpetrator research. Films' aesthetic-narrative potential and specific way of shaping temporality (flashbacks, parallel montages, slow and fast motion) provides particularly useful means for staging individual and collective traumas in relation to horrific war scenarios, massacres, and crises. The lecture discusses feature and documentary films that deal with hyperviolent traumatizing events by negotiating interrelations between violent realities and their documentation and fictionalization. How are traumatological concepts like “intrusion/flashback,” “dissociation,” “intrapsychic crypt,” “passing-on,” “perpetrator-victim inversion,” “traumatic memory,” or “post-traumatic growth” translated into cinematic language? Which specific dramaturgical means, audiovisual operations, symbolic ‘surpluses’, and representational limits of international trauma cinema do films apply? To what extent can films influence official national historiographies and shared consciousness?