Unspeakable Histories: Film And The Experience Of Catastrophe (Film And Culture Series) - 9780231177962

In Unspeakable Histories, William Guynn reads seven films depicting twentieth-century atrocities, exploring the emotional resonance that still adheres to traumatic events and the dimensions of experience that historiography leaves untouched. Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (2007) revivifies the murder of the Polish officer corps by Stalin's security forces. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) films the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as they restage scenes of killings and torture. Other films include Larissa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977), Andrei Konchalovsy's Siberiade (1979), Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), Ya?l Hersonski's A Film Unfinished (2010), and Patricio Guzm?n's Nostalgia for the Light (2010). Inspired by the work of Frank Ankersmit, Walter Benjamin, and Joseph Mali, Guynn argues that the film medium, more immediate than language, triggers moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being.

• | Author: William Howard Guynn
• | Publisher: Columbia University Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 06, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 272 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0231177968
• | ISBN-13: 9780231177962