ABSTRACT
Trauma is outside memory, and outside history. It is the unrepresentable, and thus it is 'The unrememberable and the unforgettable'. This chapter explores some of the ways in which film as a mode of representation 'remembers' trauma and suggests that it does so not only as a repeated return to the unremembered but also by instituting a forgetting which enables trauma to pass into memory and thus some level of resolution. It focuses on two films: an early, silent documentary about 'shell-shocked' soldiers in the First World War, War Neuroses, Netley 1917 and Seale Hayne Military Hospital, 1918 and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour. Hiroshima mon amour is a document of remembering through filmed actuality and fiction in which the film's remembered is both personal history and public history. Hiroshima mon amour presents both a contamination of trauma and sexuality, and a positing of trauma as an issue of the unrepresentable.
