Trauma cinema : documenting incest and the Holocaust

Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic.

Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory.

Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison.

Her astute and original examination considers the Hollywood classic Kings Row and the television movie Sybil in relation to vanguard nonfiction works, including Errol Morris's Mr. Death, Lynn Hershman's video diaries, and the chilling genealogy of incest, Just, Melvin.

Janet Walker's engrossing narrative demonstrates that the past does not come down to us purely and simply through eyewitness accounts and tangible artifacts.

Her incisive analysis exposes the frailty of memory in the face of disquieting events while her joint consideration of trauma cinema and psychological theorizing radically reconstructs the roadblocks at the intersection of catastrophe, memory, and historical representation.