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.