ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between film, trauma, and catastrophe through an analysis of Walter Benjamin's concept of natural history. Film preserves an image of life, but it does so by arresting the flow of time. Cinema is inherently bound up with the temporality of death and destruction. The cinematic encounter with death is embedded within organic, biological, or material processes. The image of the corpse is its most extreme representation. The presence or absence of the dead is imprinted in the landscape and the memory in Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1954) and Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985). The dead in the staged Nazi film Theresienstadt are granted an archival afterlife in Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald and in Terezin by Daniel Blaufuks.
