ML 561 Witnessing Trauma: Representations of War in European Cinema
War constitutes the all-encompassing political, social, and psychological trope to construct esthetic products that challenge the ethics of art making. This course examines the esthetic production of war and trauma in European film across the twentieth century by applying trauma and memory theory. If war events represent an indisputable reality, their fictional re-visitation responds, instead, to the demands of constantly renewable forms of understanding and narrativization of past contingencies. The value of fictional representations in cinema beyond their adherence to the historical fact or theories of representation lies in the ethical response of filmmakers to, as Jacques Lacan claims, a need for reordering history. Filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Alain Resnais, and Ken Loach (among others) respond with their engagement to the demands of representation of history and elicit a response from spectators. The course will be conducted in English.