the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

according to E. Ann Kaplan, consists of cut-up narration, emphasis on circularity, paralysis,
and repetition. 54 These elements assist in conveying the experiential sensations of the
traumatized subject, a subjectivity typified by belatedness, latency, repetition compulsion, and
visceral imaginative re-enactments of traumatic experiences. 55 It therefore literalizes some
aspects of non-representable trauma. Crucially, Kaplan also declares that in trauma cinema,
‘images erupt into cinematic space’ and that ‘the struggle to figure trauma’s effects
cinematically leads to means other than linearity or story’ (for example, flashbacks.) 56
But let us turn specifically to how trauma cinema has been theorized, with particular emphasis
on how this is applicable to contemporary war cinema. Film criticism emerging in response to
Holocaust documentaries and films can provide us with theoretical in-roads for dealing with
the very different traumas of fictional war films. Joshua Hirsch asserts that ‘cinema
constitutes a kind of witnessing to both the outer physical reality of historical events and the
inner, psychological reality of the effects of those events on people’ 57 , and as such, historical
films ‘embody a contradiction within historical consciousness.’ 58 He has also stated that
‘cinema constitutes a kind of witnessing to both the outer, physical reality of historical events
and the inner, psychological reality of the effects of those events on people.’ 59 Additionally,
he outlines the notion of exogenous (caused by external forces, e.g. war) and endogenous
(caused by internal processes e.g. fantasies) trauma. 60 It is argued that what is broadly (and
debatably) named ‘posttraumatic cinema’ 61 is an attempt ‘to formally reproduce for the
54 E. Anne Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema, and Trauma.” Screen 42.2 (2001), 201-205
55 Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience’ in Trauma: Explorations in Memory ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 2-10
56 Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema, and Trauma”, 204
57 Joshua Hirsch, After Image: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 6
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 6
60 Ibid., 8
61 I prefer the simpler term ‘trauma cinema’
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