6 Films About the Collective Trauma

A selection of films about PTSD and social disasters that changed the life of man and of the whole society

Our modernity inherits past experience of total social catastrophes: wars, revolutions, genocides. Throughout the XX century mankind faced with the events that are accompanied by actions so shocking and violent that their interpretation is still ongoing. However, the pathogenicity of social disasters is not just the scale of the horror and pain. The most prolonged effect - is a radical inability to describe what happened using the familiar language and familiar narrative structures. As written by J. Lacan and C. Caruth, "catastrophe, which occurs for a moment before you need to become a part of our experience, which is not like the everyday life with its usual experiences, necessarily gives rise to the inability to talk about what happened." Memories of the disaster are deeply traumatic - repressed, full of silences. And this type of memorization is typical not only for the individual victims; he can work as a collective remembering strategy underlying the national historical or cultural policy. Below are movies that demonstrate different approaches to overcoming cultural "mutism", typical of attempts to say the collective trauma and to understand the social catastrophes. They belong to different genres and cinematic traditions, centration on different subjects (although linked to the description of the title of catastrophes of the XX century - the Second World War and the Holocaust) are intended to prove that only multiple stories provide an opportunity to talk openly about their experiences. To cope with stress you can by Afobazol, Phenibut, Phenazepam, Selank.

1.Il Portiere Di Notte, 1974 (Director - Liliana Cavani)

Story tapes is that 12 years after World War II, a former prisoner of the concentration camp Lucia, who became the wife of the famous American conductor, accidentally meets in Vienna at night porter named Maximilian. As she learns Max SS officer, with whom it has in the camp brutal sexual relationship and who is currently a fugitive from anti-Nazi trials. Meeting provokes the return of the heroes to the memories of his own painful past and acting out in this former sadomasochistic experiences. Failure to recognize themselves in the pathological tested, they are forced to live this experience physically painful pleasure again and again, as if trying to engage permanently in the role of co-dependent and suffering subjects. And so it happens: Friends of Max, the SS in a former life, fearing that Lucia as the victims of Nazism, can be witnessed at the next court, finish with both.

The presence of the film scenes of sexual violence abuse all sorts of Nazi paraphernalia and often allows critics call "Night Porter" an example of erotic psychodrama and even subgenre of Nazi-exploitation. However, the desire to see in the work of Liliana Cavani only image deviations detract from the dignity of the film. Its value is not in the invention of narrative art, suitable for describing a variety of taboos - from the sexual to the politically colored. Cavani shocking as it offers to talk about the horrors of Nazism without using clichés. Instead of appealing to the familiar story, it shows the intimate and tragic history of people, literally mangled catastrophe of Nazism, and not knowing how to get rid of and / or accept. The legacy of the post-war rhetoric and gestures already familiar censure those responsible for the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and pity for the victims of discrimination and destruction are replaced with another approach. Can I be a man of the world, who survived the radical destruction of the human race, and whether we have any mnemonic strategies work with post-traumatic culture, if there is any way to remember the pain of the past, not based on the cliché production is perceived as outrageous?

2.Sophie's Choice, 1982 (Director - Alan J. Pakula)

Historian Dominic LaCapra wrote that there are two strategies to fix the memory of the events that resist memorization: study (working through), and acting out (acting out). Along with "The Night Porter" a film by Alan Pakula can be called the experience elaboration of social catastrophe and trauma, which she had left behind. As work Cavani, "Sophie's Choice" tells the story, "inconvenient" for the conventional understanding of the past. This tape - film adaptation of the novel by William Styron in 1979. So, getting to know them, we meet at a time with verbal and visual strategies of developing injuries language

Germany is Nuremberg Trials, and in Brooklyn Polish girl Sophie, who survived Auschwitz, lives with her lover Nathan. Although Nathan peculiar flash of unmotivated anger, and Sophie painfully tied to her husband and does not want to see the danger of his psychological state, to the outside observer and narrator of a couple looks happy. For this happiness is hiding a terrible truth: Sophie - daughter of a Polish functionary anti-Semitic, Nazi detained for minor offenses. She survived the death camp, thanks to the excellent German language skills - officers confiscated her to perform job duties. Her remorse, but not so much because she survived, while millions died. In Sophie's camp came with their children, and at the stage of selection of its put before a choice: leave alive only one child, the second will be put to death. Sophie chose his son, but with the death of her daughter, and lost the meaning of their own existence. Unable to put up with the price to pay for a perfect moral choice, it dies along with Nathan.

The film is full of plot twists, behind which lurk in the key issues: whether a person is in a position to make a choice that would later take, if the conditions their behavior unethical? Can man live, if there was a witness to the destruction of the moral norms, which believed? And survive there really witnesses that have become consumable history?

3.Schindler's List, 1993 (Director - Steven Spielberg)

Oscar-winning drama by Steven Spielberg - film adaptation of the novel "Schindler's Ark," for which author Thomas Keneally received the Booker Prize in 1982. The film is built around the figure of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved Jews during the Holocaust and recognized Israel Institute of Holocaust and Heroism national memorial "Yad Vashem", "Righteous Among the Nations." Selection as the main character a real participant in the events and attempts to recreate the historical chronicles of the time do not have to introduce the viewer into confusion before us is an artistic narrative. It is a place phantasms authors (director and creator of the novel), and it is not necessary to consider their version of events as the document is sufficient to develop the relationship to the past.

Like the previous films, "Schindler's List" a special type of designs memorization. However, unlike these bands, this film is not aimed at the multiplication of questions about how and what humanity should be remembered. On the contrary, it works in accordance with the strategy of the memorial wagering and establishes the canon of artistic description of social catastrophe, consistently responding to the questions: what should be stored in a memory; who is worthy of its carrier; how to relate to their testimonies? For many years, "Schindler's List" was the matrix of art describing the Holocaust, its victims and executioners. Even the film's tagline - "He who saves one life, saves the whole world" (quote from the Talmud) - worked on the creation of ideological fervor, without which since then is hard to imagine the cinema of the disaster. Information that pre-production, production and post-production picture accompanied by charity directed activity (at a fee from the film, he founded the Foundation «The USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education»), also influenced the design of the iconic status of this outstanding film about memory .

However, it is worth remembering: the strategy based on the binary optics conviction, compassion, no longer work today as the only way to remember. They create the reduced picture of what happened and are based largely on the ability to hear is not all the participants of the events occurred.

4.The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 2008 (Director - Mark Herman)

A screen adaptation of the novel by John Boyne (2006) changes the narrative of social catastrophes. Before discussion of the corresponding losses were the prerogative of adults, creating a framework of legal and cultural consequences of their regulation. Although the history of Anne Frank and Tanya Savicheva not the only one of its kind, they served primarily piercing supplement charges that were heard at Nuremberg and subsequent processes.

In the film, Mark Herman offers the viewer to listen to the experiences of the "other" subjects of those events. His characters - children living in a Nazi propaganda and genocide, and not always distinguish in this pathological atmosphere radical "evil," and confront him humanity. The disaster, as well as injury here - a premonition of the inevitable. They still can not remember, but it can not be avoided.

History shows from the eyes of an eight-Bruno, the son of the commandant of the concentration camp. Was brought up by Nazi propaganda, this curious child misses in the rural wilderness. He periodically runs away from home to explore the surrounding area, and during one of the raids met with their peers, Shmuley. He lives behind barbed wire and has a strange striped pajamas - as the viewer can guess, this robe prisoner camp. However, no obstacles not become a hindrance friendship. It ends tragically. Shmuel says that his father was gone, and Bruno decides to help in the search. Having a tunnel, it enters the territory of the camp, disguised in "pajamas" and together with the other taken to study the barracks. At this point, the camp guards sent prisoners to the gas chambers. Boys die, and Bruno's family is left alone with their grief, man-made and irreplaceable.

The film received a number of negative reviews. Critics saw it as an attempt to give up describing the Holocaust as a crime against humanity and replace it with a dubious morally sorrow for the fate of the German Nazis. In my view, this step - movement towards a demonstration of humanity, which may be accompanied, if not historical debate about past events, the discussion of the post-catastrophic.

5.The Book Thief, 2013 (Director - Brian Percival)

The film of Brian Percival - and adaptation of the novel about the childhood and adolescence during the Second World War. The main character - Liesel, whose mother-communist rescues daughter, handing her a foster family Germans Hans and Rosa. Growing up, Liesel enter into "Hitler Youth", but did not become "his". First, it violates the norms of respectable German society to save a book from the fire, which destroyed the townspeople "ideologically alien" works. Then it becomes an accomplice to the crime of foster parents, sheltering Kristallnacht in his house Max - Jew, son of man, in the days of the First World ex-brother-soldier her stepfather. Her life looks almost serene atmosphere for the Second World War - even Hans, called, regardless of age, to the front, back home. Eventually, however, foster parents are killed by the time the shelling, and the girl survived and after the war, meets Max.

At first glance, the film looks melodramatic revision of the history of the life of "good Germans." This interpretation makes it impossible to figure the narrator - the Angel of Death, telling about the heroes of the film with the intonations, far from fixing the historical realities. "Thief of books" - a film about a particular accident, which had to go through, and courage, which is to look at the suffering of life. They can not be undone and accept, they become part of the life experience. Let this experience will remain unspoken, but traces of it - affects, emotions - may not be as dire as it was decided to demonstrate in previous cinematic tradition.

A certain naivety of this painting can be dictated by the narrative habits of its creators. The director is known as the author of the series "Downton Abbey" writer worked on the fantasy film "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," the Angel of Death voiced actor "Game of Thrones." However, the ability to work with the methods of representation characteristic of modern mass culture, does not diminish the epistemological potential of the film. Rejecting the familiar principles of storytelling in favor of mythologizing strategies, the authors go on and discharge in the image of the tragedy of disasters. The past - is not only a field of ideological battles over the understanding of the present invention and the material for the memorial types of management, and this is a lesson to learn is that with the help of various mnemonic practices, which should be available to any entity.

6.Inglourious Basterds, 2009 (Director - Brian Percival)

Breaking the chronological order, I would like to dwell on last Quentin Tarantino, who, of course, made not just as a narrative about the war and genocide as a social catastrophe. Combining the intention of both mass and arthouse cinema, the film is a multiple quote from the director's favorite films. He at the same time raises questions about the value of true historical stories about World War II (and alternative readings of the past), and requires the viewer something other than an animal in the perception of the seriousness of the remarks concerning even the most tragic and social upheaval.

Of course, Tarantino is not the ordinary director. He can afford a demonstration group of bloodthirsty Jews who in the film was "lucky" to deal with Hitler. He has the right to make fun of the ideas of tolerance, arguing about the humanity of his "bastards." It does not cost anything to portray the "good" and at the same time, the "bad" Germans are not limited to using simple line mode puppet, executor of the will of the Fuhrer or schemers, machinations by which the outcome of the war depends. For him, there is no choice between the conventional approach to the description of the accident and the responsible offensive in this case, anti-historicism of ridicule. He makes a film for those who are willing to distinguish the experience the fun of recreational practices (in this case from the movie) and not always a pleasant experience the pleasure of finding answers to difficult questions.

The film is Tarantino is not the last in a tradition of discussion, and even a social disaster is unlikely to become a full source for research, for example in the field of Holocaust Studies. But it represents a very important trend: the post-traumatic syndrome, ruling over a society emerging from a terrible catastrophe, does not work with a limited number of images required to pronounce the cultural genres that had previously served as a space for the articulation of processes of grief and suffering. Movies can be free from memorization stereotypes, and any potential viewer must be sufficiently tempted to recognize the art of this right to artistic self-determination.

The injury can be manifested in the cinema in the images of specific events that radically changed the experience of mankind, in the representation of their inevitable and prolonged consequences and effects, as well as a matrix, with which the authors are trying to talk about the responsibility postcatastrophic generations for their common future. The choice of films, which pursue certain strategies, makes the spectator himself. It is only important to remember that regardless of any mentoring tone, the movie will not be able to show how it is possible and necessary to remember. It would only provoke questions and doubts in the conventional view of the world. But doubts have been known at least since Descartes, is a prerequisite of intelligent search.