CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Audiovisual Images in Cultures of Historical Memory:
The Case of War as "Modernist Event"
Organiser: Drehli Andreas Robnik
Keilbach, Judith (Freie Universität
Berlin, Germany) WORLD WAR II AS TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE IN GERMAN DOCUMENTARIES
For several years, various documentaries about World War II have been shown on
German television. Until recently the narration of war was very much the same:
the first years are shown as adventure and as a story of success, Stalingrad is
marked as a turning point and the final years are described as the traumatic
experiences of German soldiers and civilians. In contrast, the Holocaust was a
marginal issue in these documentaries. But the increasing public interest in the
crimes of the Wehrmacht (due to an exhibition in 1995) had its effects: Recent
documentaries connect the Holocaust with the war - and have contributed to a
change in the events that are described as causes for traumatic experiences.
Instead of Stalingrad and rape, now the act of witnessing deportation and mass
execution is marked as a traumatic event for Germans. This new version of
history correlates with Germany's new foreign policy.
Robnik, Drehli Andreas (University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands and University of Vienna, Austria) MEMORIES OF
SURVIVING WORLD WAR II IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS
Fictionalizations of contemporary history and its traumatizing events in US
blockbuster movies suggest fantasms of "survivalism" as a guideline to
the appropriation of the past in Hollywood´s media-culture of memory. Revisions
of World War II in terms of surviving history´s destructive impact feature
prominently in what Michael Rogin understands as the cinematic reconstruction of
American "victory culture". Thomas Elsaesser´s conception of the
blockbuster as a traumatophile time machine that takes part in cultural
practices of therapeutic retroactivity provides a framework for studying
memorial meanings offered by Hollywood´s recent combat movies. It is the
empathic re-experience of bodily suffering in spectacular images that gives a
material base to attempts at making sense of history. In this context, memories
of the Good War and its veterans circulated by the multi-media events
"Saving Private Ryan" and "Pearl Harbor" become meaningful
as appropriations of the discourse of Holocaust survival.
Loebenstein, Michael (University of
Vienna, Austria) PHANTASMS OF THE BALCAN WARS IN FILM
If Marina Grzinics assumption is taken for granted - that South-East Europe, the
phantasmatic construction dubbed "The BALCANS" figures, in
psychoanalytical terms, as the West's symptom, it's Other - it provokes an
investigation into motion picture's and television's figuration of this Other.
The Balcan Wars of the 1990s have been providing European and American audiences
with a fundamental set of dualities: The female victim and her male rapist, the
"hot", ravaging id and the cool, technologically empowered superego of
"humanitarian intervention" are only two prominent examples. In films
about these wars the landscape of former Yugoslavia is transformed in a
fundamental way, becomes the living remainder that history really is,
grotesquely, repeating itself. A remedy? Whose pleasure?
Ries, Marc (Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin, Germany) THE BECOMING-REFLEXIVE OF WAR IN MASS MEDIA
The space of perception opened up by the "war on terror" in
Afghanistan can be conceived of as "reflexive". This war ist part of a
new epoch of conflict within the "second modernity". Because of its
geographical and discoursive penetration of events, media-coverage calls upon a
"structural reflexivity", mostly in the European "inland".
It makes us think about social and political conditions of taking positions
which are imperative for every one´s being connected. Every military act has
now to be legitimated in front of a world public. This process might be
understood as an effect of mass media´s (television´s and the internet´s)
"geo-aeshtetic strategy". The space constructed and perceived through
it is ambiguous and contradictory. It reflects fundamental uncertainties and
breaches of trust which increase in our political systems due to globalising
developments. One aim of geo-aesthetics is to create "reflexive
communities" which, along common horizons of experience, help to prepare a
"differential" (Lefebvre) political space.
Thorsten, Marie (Macalester College,
USA) PEARL HARBOR ACROSS GENRE, TIME AND NATION: JAPANESE AND AMERICAN CRITIQUES
OF BI-NATIONAL WAR FILMS (1960-1970)
The December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor wields such proprietorship to
Americans that it may seem inconceivable that the authorship of such pivotal
memory could ever be negotiated with the former enemy. Nevertheless, two of the
most significant films ever made about Pearl Harbor were the products of
transnational scripting. This paper considers the binational 1970 production
Tora! Tora! Tora! and the 1960 Japanese film Hawai Middouei Daikaikûsen:
Taiheiyo no Arashi (lit., The Sea and Air Battles of Hawaii and Midway: Storm on
the Pacific), released in the U.S. in 1962 as I Bombed Pearl Harbor. The TTT
production literally combined two, mostly parallel national productions while I
Bombed Pearl Harbor utilized equal numbers of American and Japanese
screenwriters. Given their somewhat complex transnational origins and audiences,
it is perhaps inevitable that both films encountered difficulties in
narrativizing the events of Pearl Harbor for national audiences?events that have
been the subject of contested and ambivalent memory for Americans throughout the
postwar period. This paper will reconsider the historical context and ambivalent
status of these binational narratives on Pearl Harbor, and why they have held
limited persuasion in bridging the vast national differences in remembrance.
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