In Unspeakable Histories, William Guynn focuses on the sensation of encountering past events through film. Film is capable, he argues, of triggering moments of heightened awareness in which the barrier between the past and the present can fall and the reality of the past we thought lost can be momentarily rediscovered in its material being. In his readings of seven exceptional works depicting twentieth century atrocities, Guynn explores the emotional resonance that still adheres to traumatic historical events. Guynn considers dimensions of experience that historiography leaves untouched. Yaël Hersonski's A Film Unfinished (2010) deconstructs scenes from the Nazi propaganda film Das Ghetto through the testimony of ghetto survivors. Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (2007) revivifies the murder of the Polish officer corps (in which Wajda's father perished) by Stalin's security forces during the Second World War. Andrei Konchalovsky's Siberiade (1979) reimagines the turbulent history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of an isolated Siberian village. Larissa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977) evokes the existential drama Soviet partisans faced during the Nazi occupation. Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light (2011) examines the vestiges of human experience, including the scattered remains of Pinochet's victims, alive in the aridity of the Atacama Desert. Rithy Panh's S-21 (2003) reawakens events of the Cambodian genocide through dramatic confrontation with some of its executioners, and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) films the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as they restage scenes of killings and torture. Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, Frank Ankersmit, Joseph Mali, and Simon Schama, Guynn argues that the film medium, more immediate than language, is capable of restoring the affective dimension of historical experience, rooted in the deepest reaches of our minds.

Product Description: Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story...read more

Product Description: The links between cinema and war machines have long been established. This book explores the range, form, and valences of trauma narratives that permeate the most notable narrative films about the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Product Description: Filming the Body in Crisis engages with the subject of reparation as a vital element of film experience in the 21st century. It explores this in two ways: first, in the context of the thematic presentation of the healing mind and body on screen and, second, as an affective attribute of the image itself in which a 'healing' body is registered at the level of reception...read more

Explores the affective toll of Taiwan's geographical and political proximity to China through a critical analysis of contemporary Taiwanese film and culture. It examines the complex, precarious relationship between the sovereign state of Taiwan and China in order to consider what this might mean global anxiety around the growing power of China.

Presents a clear treatment of the design and analysis of linear regression experiments in the presence of prior knowledge about the model parameters. Develops a unified approach to estimation and design; provides a Bayesian alternative to the least squares estimator; and indicates methods for the construction of optimal designs for the Bayes estimator. Material is also applicable to some well-known estimators using prior knowledge that is not available in the form of a prior distribution for the model parameters; such as mixed linear, minimax linear and ridge-type estimators.

Product Description: Tracing the rise of extreme art cinema across films from Lars von Trier's The Idiots to Michael Haneke's Caché, Asbjørn Grønstad revives the debate about the role of negation and aesthetics, and reframes the concept of spectatorship in ethical terms.

Product Description: Civilized Violence provides a social and historical explanation for the popular appeal of cinema violence. There is a significant amount of research on the effects of media violence, but less work on what attracts audiences to representations of violence in the first place...read more

Product Description: During the past one hundred years or so, the depiction of traumatic historical events and experiences has been a recurrent theme in the work of artists and media professionals including those in literature, theatre, visual art, architecture, cinema, and television among other forms of cultural expression and social communication...read more

Product Description: This volume addresses the relation of trauma to transnational modern mass media. The first of its kind, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations provides ten essays which explore the ways trauma works itself out as media ― in images in (and as) film, photography, and video ― in global cultural flows...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance examines how contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s texts on stage and screen engage with violent events and histories. The book attempts to account for – but not to rationalize – the ongoing and pernicious effects of various forms of violence as they have emerged in selected contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s texts, especially as that violence relates to apartheid, colonization, racism, homophobia and war...read more

It may be said that every trauma is two traumas or ten thousand-depending on the number of people involved. How one experiences and reacts to an event is unique and depends largely on one's direct or indirect positioning, personal psychic history, and individual memories. But equally important to the experience of trauma are the broader political and cultural contexts within which a catastrophe takes place and how it is "managed" by institutional forces, including the media. In Trauma Culture, E. Ann Kaplan explores the relationship between the impact of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations. Arguing that humans possess a compelling need to draw meaning from personal experience and to communicate what happens to others, she examines the artistic, literary, and cinematic forms that are often used to bridge the individual and collective experience. A number of case studies, including Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Marguerite Duras' La Douleur, Sarah Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, and Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries, reveal how empathy can be fostered without the sensationalistic element that typifies the media. From World War II to 9/11, this passionate study eloquently navigates the contentious debates surrounding trauma theory and persuasively advocates the responsible sharing and translating of catastrophe.