War Trauma As Screen Memory

Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: War Trauma as Screen Memory 1 1 Yugoslavia’s Wars, Cinema, and Screen Trauma 27 2 Unsettling Empathies: Screen, Gender, and Traumatic Memory 59 3 Happily Sick: Trauma, Nation, and Queer Affect 103 4 Post-Yugoslav Heritage Cinema and the Futurity of Nostalgia 137 5 Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Habitus of Postmemory 183 Conclusion: The Child, the Quiet War Film, and the Power of Alternative Scenarios 219 Notes 239 Bibliography 249 Index 261 Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 Introduction: War Trauma as Screen Memory f there are four words that hold together the edges of this book, those Iare: war, screen, trauma,andmemory. Each of them functions in this book more as an archive of meanings rather than a rigidly defined concept. Often, this book is about challenging standard understandings of each of the four rather than stabilizing their meanings. But more than anything, it is about their relationship in the elusive cultural context broadly defined by the term “post-Yugoslav cinema,” where “post” implies a cultural space that is never entirely “beyond” (Bhabha 1994). The work presented here is the result of a years-long struggle to understand the elusive role of culture in catastrophes and their aftermath. My work is defined by overarching questions that haunt me because of their ethical importance, but also because there are no definitive answers to them. A search for finite answers when it comes to war trauma as screen memory is an always already lost battle. Instead of finite conclusions, there are only fleeting impressions, tendencies, and trajectories than one can detect and try to give temporary coherence to. This, perhaps, might at times be unsatisfying as an analyt- ical exercise for some, but when it comes to traumatic memory and its cultural life, it might be the only way to arrive at a deeper understanding. The analytics of trauma are by default a weak theory, willing to surrender to not knowing as much as knowing (and thus, in many ways, mimick- ing the workings of trauma itself, as an experience that is simultaneously unavoidable and unknowable in equal measure). In the most general sense, I am concerned with the question of how a coping with painful memories takes place through and with culture. Film, to me, was the logical choice for such explorations, both because of my academic training and because of my deep, lifelong affective investment in the medium. Perhaps the scopophilic fascination started when I first watched a film—an earliest memory of viewing, of a film whose name I do not remember as it appears that my memory has privileged the act of spectatorship more so than the content on the screen itself. Almost cer- tainly, a definitive imprint of the relationship between screen and trauma Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 2 DISLOCATED SCREEN MEMORY was laid when I watched Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1979) at seven years old; I did not understand most of it, but some scenes nevertheless stuck with me for years to come, imprinted as image-memories that came to make a lot more sense some years later, when war became my own real- ity. When the film came on my television set again during the Bosnian war years, my teenage self watched it in awe, shocked both by the accuracies of her childhood memories of the film and by the ways in which the film seemed to help me make sense of my own world and the violence that sur- rounded it. The Deer Hunter thus helped me identify early on this dialectic dynamic: that film both constitutes traumatic memory and is constituted by it. Hence, The Deer Hunter acted, for my teenage self, as a repository of difficult memories, both of its own protagonists as well as of the memories I brought to it as I was making sense of my own experience of war. I attempted to apply such tentatively dialectical analytics—of film as both constitutive of and constituted by traumatic memories—to the films discussed in this book. These films were all made during or after the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, by the filmmakers of its successor states, and repre- sent a wide spectrum of approaches to the questions that haunt: how and why does such violence take place, and who are “we” in its wake? In partic- ular, I am interested in trauma as cultural memory, and in the way in which the body of post-Yugoslav films that reflect valances of traumatic memory stage a three-fold repetition. As Raya Morag has claimed in the context of post-traumatic New German Cinema and American Vietnam war cinema, “on the first level, post-traumatic films that relate to the same historical- traumatic event create a body of work in which each additional film is a repetition (additional re-enactment)” (2009: 24). On another level, Morag finds that trauma cinema stages repetitions within each separate cinematic text, and therefore, “the repetitive structures that appear within each of the film texts in and of themselves actualize the repetitiveness phenomena” (24). A third form of repetition could be noted, where separate films stage mutual intertextual repetitiveness among themselves—an endemic aspect of the cinematic recurrence of trauma that informs some of my analy- ses in this book. These separate-yet-connected layers of repetition work together to create what Eisner has, in a different context, called a “haunted screen” (2008)—an archive of both visible and invisible ghosts of traumatic memory that inform the meanings of cinematic texts and their contexts. Such films constitute “a technological memory bank” (Kaes: ix) and reflect the fact that memory is not only an organic cognitive process, but also a technology that can be distinctly inorganic (as emphasized, for instance, in Landsberg’s work on cinema as “prosthetic memory” [2004]). More- over, as illustrated in my personal anecdote about The Deer Hunter, in the encounter between the spectator and screen, cinematic memory often takes Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 INTRODUCTION 3 a hybrid shape of inorganic and organic forms mutually intertwined and informative of one another until they can no longer be fully separated. Somehow Cinematic: The Valances of Trauma and their Expressive Forms Tracing the genealogy of the term “trauma” and its study, Ruth Leys notes that “from the beginning trauma was understood as an experience that immersed the victim in the traumatic scene so profoundly that it pre- cluded the kind of specular distance necessary for cognitive knowledge of what had happened” (2000: 9). Thus, while the title of this book signals the process of narrating trauma,1 I remain mindful of the fact that trauma can often be “narrated” only in dislocated, even unfamiliar or ineligible forms that may be haunted by, but never entirely privy to trauma’s deepest aspects. Mieke Bal notes that “narrative does play a role in our understanding of traumatic recall, but the status of traumatic memories is virtually that of the exception that proves the rule” (1999: viii). With ineligibility in focus when it comes to narrative representations of trauma, I hope to incite a rethinking of what constitutes a narration to begin with, rather than dismiss the term as entirely inadequate with reference to trauma. While trauma may not be fully narratable, it unquestionably influences narratives that emerge around it. In that sense, we can speak of narrating around, rather than about trauma. Moreover, the question of whose trauma is being narrated around is one that centrally informs my approaches to trauma in post-Yugoslav cinema. In the most general sense, I consider the valances of trauma that fall into two categories: the trauma of the victim and, more controversially, the trauma of the perpetrator. The latter has been disputed as an experience that could be deemed traumatic (in the work of Ruth Leys, for instance), and I remain aware of the ethical implica- tions of such a denomination. Moreover, Thomas Elsaesser implies that the proliferation of trauma as “the new currency of identity and victimhood, indeed of identity as victimhood” (2014: 7), and its application to both sur- vivors and perpetrators might inadvertently erase the meaning of trauma altogether. Yet, my focus on both victim and perpetrator experiences as traumatic (albeit in entirely different ways) is not geared toward proposing that the two are absolute or only categories, nor that trauma is applicable to just about anyone, but rather as a way to propose an intervention into discursive processes that flatten trauma into a singular or one-sided experience. With the inclusion of perpetrator trauma (overtly present in many films discussed in this book), I echo Michael Rothberg’s suggestion, drawn from LaCapra, that “being traumatized does not necessarily imply victim status” (2009: 90). Moreover, with attention given to perpetrator trauma, Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 Copyrighted material – 9781137515773 4 DISLOCATED SCREEN MEMORY I seek to give due attention to the processes that Raya Morag has described, in the context of Israeli cinema, as “society’s unwillingness to accept that the perpetrator’s trauma is part and parcel of denial of responsibility for atrocities made in its name” (2013: 6).2 In other words, focus on perpetrator trauma as an important aspect of war and postwar experience might bring into intimate focus, rather than conceal, the material dimensions of the institutionalized structures that place an individual in the role of a par- ticipant in mass atrocities in the first place. Such focus, moreover, does not in any way displace considerations of victim and survivor traumas, but rather situates them within the grid of differently articulated frameworks of meaning that the word “trauma” can carry.

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