ABSTRACT
Two films by Alain Resnais, Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour, are used to reexamine assumptions about how film depicts historical trauma. At first glance, both the subjects of the films (the Holocaust versus the aftermath of the tragedy of bombing of Hiroshima) as well as their chosen genre (documentary versus fiction) appear disparate, yet a closer examination of both their form and their content suggests that they are successive iterations of a singular trauma, with Hiroshima Mon Amour continuing to explore the same questions raised by the horrors depicted in Night and Fog, questions such as one’s capacity to truly see, metaphorically to “know” the experiences of another’s trauma, the veracity of memory, the questionable truth of the visual record, and a concern with the distinctions between living and dead, body and object. In concert with recent questions about the documentary form, all films about the Holocaust are conceptualized as “re-presentations.” In this way, the definition of a Holocaust film can be expanded to include not only films that take the Holocaust as their stated topic, but also those that link to the historical trauma through the repetitive use of iconic imagery associated with more direct representations. By implication, the paper raises questions about the construction of the trauma narrative, its veracity and utility as a therapeutic tool, suggesting that there is never a singular narrative, but rather successive expansions of a network of images that are continually symbolized and increasingly integrated into novel narrative contexts.
