6 Credits | Dr. Esther Yau
The 20th century was celebrated for achievements in technological progress, rapid urbanization, and massive production. It was remembered also for the world wars, several holocausts, deracination, impoverishment, and domestic violence that terminated the promises of utopia, the reign of reason, and the prospect of infinite progress. The series of unprecedented traumas reported in media and written about in testimonials and memoirs have motivated filmmakers to turn cinema into a medium of popular cultural memory. Films become innovative and reflexive in their search for forms to represent the traumatic experiences of modernity, to mediate the past and the present/future, and to find meanings in the embodied memories of their subjects. This course will explore the representation and representability of trauma and memory on film. Acclaimed postwar French films together with notable Chinese-language films will be examined along with more recent European and American titles in a transcultural inquiry. Students will gain an understanding of the forms of film that convey and complicate trauma, pain, mourning, testimony and forgetting. Close study of notable films will attend to their auditory-visual, narrative, and cultural dimensions, to examine a transnational film culture that has brought to light the complexities of modernity and remembering.
Prerequisite: CLIT1008 or CLIT2007 or CLIT2025 or CLIT2061 or CLIT2065 or CLIT2074.
Assessment: 100% coursework.