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

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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.
References: Kaplan, E. Ann (2001): Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma. In: Screen 42,2 (2001), pp. 201- 205. McIlroy, Brian (1998): Shooting to Kill. Filmmaking and the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland. Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Flicks Books 1998; rev. ed. 2001. Saksena, Ritu (2006): Mapping Terrorism: Amorphous Nations, Transient Loyalties. Ph.D.- Thesis, College Park, MD: University of Maryland 2006. Sharma, Alpana (2008): Paradise Lost in Mission Kashmir: Global Terrorism, Local Insurgencies, and the Question of Kashmir in Indian Cinema. In: Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25,2 (2008), pp. 124-131.
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Section Days 2010 November 3 Natura
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Humanities and Social Sciences (Nov
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Programme Section Days 2010 Novembe
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Friday November 5, 2009: Humanities
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Abstracts
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the ―emergence of multilevel syst
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new learning after reactivation was
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Participants
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Life Sciences Name Abstract Poster
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Tobias Starzak tobias.starzak@rub.d
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