Section Days abstract book 2010.indd - RUB Research School ...

BORDER CONFLICTS, TERRORISM AND TRAUMA
IN SCREEN NARRATIVES OF VIOLENCE
Sophie Einwächter
Fakultät für Philologie; Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
e-mail: sophie.einwaechter@rub.de
I am a film scholar with a particular interest in psychological readings. Therefore, when I
analyse screen narratives about political conflicts, I look at them as mechanisms of coping
with issues of national history and cultural trauma. In this context the very act of storytelling
can be considered therapeutic: A strategy to comprehend, and to conquer – at least on a
formal level – what may remain upsetting and elusive in real life. (While political conflicts
linger on for decades with no end in sight, the conventional length of a feature film sets a
formal limit to all representations.)
In a 2001 essay, E. Ann Kaplan has shown how ‘personal and social traumas […] could be
more safely approached or remembered’ in Hollywood melodramas from the 1920s to the
1960s (2001; 202). Kaplan’s label of ‘trauma films’ can also be applied to recent narratives on
terrorism as Ritu Saksena has shown in 2006 referring to examples from Bollywood cinema.
Drawing on both approaches I will address popular films set in the Kashmir region and
Northern Ireland and take a closer look at their representations of the troubled border region.
Here, the borderline is not only the location of opposing claims of power, but also a
demarcation of otherness, where ethno-religious groups and their respective needs of
belonging clash. A place of political struggle and erupting violence, the border region is also a
location of trauma. Its inhabitants become witnesses, victims and some even perpetrators of
terrorist activities. Making films in such regions is a dangerous undertaking and the
production teams shooting on location face a risk no insurance company is willing to back. (In
a recent interview with the journal ISHQ 1 , the Bollywood star Bipasha Basu stated that there
was no insurance for her latest film, LAMHAA, as it was shot in Kashmir during election
time.)
Examples from the films show how the border manifests itself in cinematic portrayals of these
areas of crises: Walls and fences become obvious hindrances as well as metaphors of the
danger of trespassing. The portrayed characters show signs of traumatic stress, while
frequently crossing borders: Former criminals become victims. Fathers, friends and lovers
turn terrorists. A loving wife shoots her own husband...
These motifs further a hybrid quality of the stories’ generic identity: Both Northern Ireland
and Kashmir films possess melodramatic elements as well as typical action genre
characteristics.
There is an overall allegoric dimension to these stories: The trauma of the protagonist can be
regarded a pars-pro-toto testimony of the suffering society. Where territorial claims persist
unsolved, genre and characters remain ambivalent.
[ 1 ] Issue 36, August 2010.