Unspeakable histories : film and the experience of catastrophe / William Guynn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guynn, William Howard, author.

Series:

Film and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historical films--History and criticism.

Historical films.

Psychic trauma in motion pictures.

Catastrophical, The, in motion pictures.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

ix, 251 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2016]

Summary:

In Unspeakable Histories, William Guynn reads seven films depicting twentieth-century atrocities, from the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (2007) to a depraved restaging of the Indonesian genocide by the killers themselves in Joshua Opprnheimer's The Act of Killing (2012). In a new theoretical approach inspired by the work of Frank Ankersmit, Walter Benjamin, and Joseph Mali, Guynn explores the emotional resonance that still adheres to traumatic events and the dimensions experience that historiography leaves untouched; The film medium, he argues, more immediate than language, is capable of triggering moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: making experience speak

Yael Hersonski's A film unfinished (2010)

Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (2007)

Andrei Konchalovsky's Siberiade (2007)

Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1976)

Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

Rithy Panh's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003)

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012)

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780231177962

0231177968

9780231177979

0231177976

OCLC:

936687306