ABSTRACT
Traumatic experiences become dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control, instead transferring to the subconscious. This chapter explores the possibilities via a Belgian art-house film, Nanouk Leopold’s Brownian Movement that participates in a broader movement in visual culture engendering new languages of trauma. By eliciting a haptic mode of viewing, one in which trauma is apprehended via sensory and affective engagement, Leopold’s film unsettles traditional channels of identification with film characters and, by extension, any speculation about causal links between their present actions and possible unnarrativized or unnarrativizable pasts. As art historian Jill Bennett maintains, affect is not pre-coded by a representational system that enables us to read an image as ‘about trauma,’ then to experience it as secondary trauma. The autonomic responses induced by affective imagery are, in their instantaneity, outside representation, [and] by the same token, they are not inside trauma.
