Why Do Cinema Bear Gaping Wounds?

Abstract

This article delves into the analysis of strategies for portraying traumatic experiences, using the works of German director Christian Petzold, a prominent figure in the “Berlin school,” as a case study. The concept of inconceivability and resistance to any form of mimetic duplication is a recurring theme in discussions of trauma. When applied to cinema, this property of unrepresentability becomes particularly challenging: how can one capture something that persistently resists becoming an image? This predicament leads us to view trauma as a means to think about cinema beyond its visual aspects, to present it not merely as a medium for preserving presence but vice versa — as a framework encompassing elements of absence and silence. Christian Petzold’s cinematography, woven from such figures, makes it possible to rethink the classical and repeatedly criticized allocation of metaphorical power in the realm of representation by shifting the emphasis from dramatization of the action to the rejection of its reproduction in the cinema body, from the instance of the controlling observer to the position affirming the existence of the witness, from trauma as a singular event to traumatic experience as a story recurring through storytelling. The manifestation of trauma’s presence within the cinematic fabric, yet outside the domain of direct representation, is explored as one of the mechanisms of post-memory, as proposed by Marianne Hirsch.