(Audio-)Visual Arts and Trauma
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cover_saravi_pontes_9_Layout 1 27.06.2018 10:58 Seite 1 9 SARAVI PONTES – Beiträge zur internationalen Hochschulkooperation und zum interkulturellen Band 9 Wissenschaftsaustausch (Audio-)Visual Arts and Trauma: Which patterns do (audio-)visual works use to tackle the un- From the East to the West speakable events of trauma? How can we describe the relation- ship between traumatic experience and artistic (audio)visual works? And, are there great differences in the medial forms, in which the arts from the East to the West deal with the rejected experience of the past? This compilation presents the results of the fourth research project between Petro Mohyla National Black t Janett Reinstädler Sea State University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine) and Saarland University s (Saarbrücken, Germany). Including theoretical reflection on e W trauma theory, these papers study examples of (audio-)visual art e Oleksandr Pronkevich h t working through trauma in Eastern and Western Europe, North o and Central America and the Caribbean. The analysed objects of t (eds.) t art embrace films, monuments, photographs, woodcuts and s (graphic) novels, dealing with Stalinist repression, (Post) World a E War II losses, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, the silenced e h t crimes of the Francoist dictatorship, the persecution, humiliation and criminalization of homosexuals in the US and long lasting m o state terror in Cuba or Guatemala. r F : a m u a r T d n a s t r A l a u s i V ) - o i d u A ( universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre SARAVI PONTES – Beiträge zur internationalen Hochschulkooperation und zum interkulturellen Wissenschaftsaustausch Herausgegeben von Astrid M. Fellner, Roland Marti, Christoph Vatter, Elisabeth Venohr Band 9 Janett Reinstädler, Oleksandr Pronkevich (eds.) (Audio-)Visual Arts and Trauma: From the East to the West universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre © 2018 universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken ISBN 978-3-86223-233-8 gedruckte Ausgabe ISBN 978-3-86223-234-5 Onlineausgabe ISSN 2198-0551 gedruckte Ausgabe ISSN 2198-056X Online-Ausgabe urn:nbn:de:bsz:291-universaar-1772 Projektbetreuung universaar : Natascha Magyar Satz: Johanna Gassen Umschlaggestaltung: Julian Wichert Abbildung auf dem Umschlag: George Shanayev: „Sisyphusarbeit“. Papier, schwarze Tinte (2003). Sammlung des Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum (Abdruck mit freundlicher Erlaubnis des Museums, http://chornobylmuseum.kiev.ua/shanaev/#/48/ [01.05.2018]). Herstellung über: readbox unipress in der readbox publishing GmbH http://unipress.readbox.net Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen National bibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar. Contents Introduction Janett Reinstädler and Oleksandr Pronkevich 7 Section 1 “(Audio-)Visual Representations of Trauma in Eastern Europe” Identity and Trauma: Visual Art of Jacques Hnizdovsky Tetiana Shestopalova 17 Andrey Tarkovsky’s The Mirror Through the Lens of Trauma Theory Oleksandr Pronkevich 43 Images of Chernobyl Explosion Liquidators in Audio Visual Art Tetiana Ostapchuk 69 Section 2 “Film and Trauma in Western Europe” Trauma, Cultures of Memory and Childhood in French Postwar Cinema: The Example of René Clément’s Jeux Interdits (1952) Christoph Vatter 97 Haunted by Children. Spanish Trauma, Social Negotiation and the Ethics of Representation in Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s Horror Movie ¿Quien puede matar a un niño? Isabel Exner and Thomas Schmidtgall 115 Section 3 “Trauma and Media in the Americas” The Oniric and the Unspeakable. Cinematographic Representations of Dream and Trauma in Madagascar and La vida es silbar by the Cuban Director Fernando Pérez Janett Reinstädler 139 Guatemala’s National Police Archives as a Place of Traumatic Repression and Recurrence in Contemporary Documentary Cinema Tim Christmann 167 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as a Visual Representation of Trauma Melanie Graham 191 Contributors 213 JANETT REINSTÄDLER AND OLEKSANDR PRONKEVICH Introduction With the beginning of the new millennium, Humanities scholars and students from two universities, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Myko- laiv (Ukraine) and the Universität des Saarlandes (Germany), started an aca- demic exchange with a regular coming and going of specialists, visiting schol- ars, students and teachers. From 2012 on, and sponsored by the East- Partnership Program furthered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), we continued our cooperation in specific three-year research projects based on each other. Firstly, our scientific exchange was focused on the area of memory studies and cinematic art. The compilation Film and Memory, edited in 2015 by Oleksandr Pronkevich and Christoph Vatter,1 presents the outcome of this prolific start, bringing together literary and culture studies, as well as philosophy and history. The present book is the result of the following three years of investigations, travels, meetings, lectures and discussions, now fo- cused on the relations between (Audio)visual Arts and Trauma. The articles of this compilation document our interdisciplinary exchange which brings to- gether History of Art, Film-, Cultural- and Gender Studies and the genres of Ukrainian and North-American Visual Arts, Russian, French, Spanish and Cu- ban Film, and, in parts, Anglophone and Hispanic (graphic) novels. So, our project embraces very different, multilingual and -ethnical cultures, starting from Eastern Europe and traveling over its centre to finally reach the far West of the Caribbean, Central and Northern America. The subjects of the analyzed objects of art include Stalinist repression, (Post) World War II losses, the Cher- nobyl nuclear catastrophe, the silenced crimes of Francoist dictatorship, or state terror in Cuba or Guatemala and, persecution, humiliation and criminalization of homosexuals in the US. Despite the differences with regard to geography, content and media, the entire corpus we studied, shares one common request: the struggle for finding an artistic expression for traumatic experiences. Due to this setting, our exchange started from a theoretical reflection on trauma theory and scientific considerations on the (im)possibilities of medial representation of trauma in the arts. As a result, we take trauma as a highly disconcerting form, maybe the most disconcerting one of “not-knowing”, that hides behind the non-rememberable, the invisible and unspeakable within a 1 Christoph Vatter and Oleksandr Pronkevich (eds.): Film and Memory, Saarbrücken, univer- saar, 2015. 8 Janett Reinstädler and Oleksandr Pronkevich traumatic experience. As different definitions stress, trauma is caused by an immediate and profoundly violent event which destroys the individual’s sense of stability.2 The symptoms of trauma, defined since the beginning of the 1980s as the “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD), consist of fear, extreme disori- entation and helplessness of the individual, followed by conflicting feelings of revenge, guilt and shame. More than that, a person traumatized will react with often long lasting rejections of the experienced (in Freudian terms: “Ver- leugnung” and “Verdrängung”), which complicates treatment and almost al- ways lasts for a considerable amount of time (“Latenz”). This incapability und unwillingness to remember the trauma, called by Mardi Jon Horowitz “intru- sion” and “denial”, contrasts with the paradoxical necessity to repeat the trau- matising situation over and over again.3 As shown by recent investigations, the traumatic experience can go beyond the individual dimension; it can affect other persons present during the moment of the traumatic incident, or be transferred through narratives or medial images. Trauma can as well influence, even after decades, our relatives, as has been the case, for example, of the grandchildren of former Concentration Camp prison- ers; this phenomenon is called “transgenerational trauma”.4 Besides the indi- vidual trauma, we can also find collective traumas, in which the self-image of invulnerability and sovereignty of a whole group, perhaps a nation, has been damaged (the most famous example of collective trauma, and transferred by mass media, have been the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City).5 As many studies showed, a collective traumatic past has to be treated to restore the integrity of the group. The dealing with conflictive memory is getting es- pecially difficult, if the perpetrators and victims belong to one single group, as it can happen in a family, at work, in a city, a nation. In situations, in which 2 The American psychoanalyst Arnold Cooper defines trauma as “any psychological event which abruptly overwhelms the ego’s capacity to provide a minimal sense of safety and inte- grative intactness, resulting in overwhelming anxiety or helplessness, or the threat of it, and producing an enduring change in the psychic organization”. Arnold Cooper: “Toward a lim- ited definition of psychic trauma.” In: Arnold Rothstein (ed.): The reconstruction of trauma: Its significance in clinical work, Madison, CT, International Universities Press, 1986, p. 44. 3 See Mardi Jon Horowitz: Stress Response Syndromes, New York, Basic Books, 1976.