Open AccessA Body Without a Face: The Disorientation of Trauma inPhoenix(2014) and New Holocaust Cinema
Author(s) -
Olivia Landry
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
film-philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.112
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1466-4615
DOI - 10.3366/film.2017.0043
Subject(s) - movie theater , narrative , embodied cognition , phenomenology (philosophy) , the holocaust , queer , psychoanalysis , aesthetics , psychology , art , visual arts , literature , philosophy , epistemology , theology
This article analyses Christian Petzold's exemplary 2014 film Phoenix, tracking a new development in Holocaust cinema that focuses on phenomenological narratives of embodied experience of trauma. It examines the film through the cinematic representation of the traumatised body. While there is no dearth of scholarly inquiries into the relationship of trauma and the body and how it is mediated through film, these are often more concerned with the way in which the body becomes a projection screen for repressed or collective trauma and less about the lived conditions of individual trauma. The present analysis offers a rethinking of the traumatised body as one beset by the condition of disorientation. As a methodological guide, it turns to Sara Ahmed's pivotal phenomenological study Queer Phenomenology (2006).