Enter the Void: Visualizing Psychological Trauma in Film

This section presents Cathy Caruth's seminal definition of trauma from 'Unclaimed Experience' as an event not experienced but simply registered, because experiencing and understanding go hand in hand, yet trauma is always left understood to a certain extent. Among typical reactions is repetition compulsion—an urge to continually return to the traumatic event, paradoxically aimed at achieving preparedness. This is termed 'belatedness.' The traumatic event, while not available to consciousness, imposes itself again in changed forms, creating a slippery quality where repetition becomes a changed form that may not correspond to the original event. This represents how trauma transforms and reappears in different forms over time, always at a degree of departure from the original traumatic moment.

Cathy Caruth argues trauma is fundamentally unassimilated because it occurs too soon and unexpectedly to be fully understood initially. Trauma is not located in the original event but in its return—the haunting repetition that attempts to understand what couldn't be grasped at first. Literature serves as a privileged mode for addressing trauma when other forms become unspeakable. Theodor Adorno warned against aestheticizing trauma, but acknowledged literature must resist this limitation through self-awareness. Literature elevates witness, particularly for events like the Holocaust that lack adequate witnesses due to disbelief and revisionist histories.

This section covers two major works in psychoanalytic literary criticism: Cathy Caruth's 'Unclaimed Experience' and Kaja Silverman's 'Male Subjectivity at the Margins.' Caruth's work establishes that trauma is processed through reliving experiences, presenting a foundational theory in trauma studies. Silverman applies psychoanalysis to queer male experience through film analysis, examining directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Both works demonstrate how psychoanalytic theory intersects with literary and film studies, though they represent different approaches—one theoretical and one more applied to specific cultural texts.

Contemporary literary trauma theory recognizes that trauma disrupts an individual's sense of self and challenges their understanding of society's rules, but literary analysis must move beyond single psychological models (like Cathy Caruth's theory of trauma as unspeakable and timeless) to examine how trauma is represented through various literary techniques including silence, landscape imagery, and nonlinear narratives, while acknowledging that trauma's meaning is shaped by cultural context, place, and the dynamic interplay between personal and collective memory.

This concluding section synthesizes the major themes of the lecture, examining how the language of trauma functions as an absolute eraser and how the philosopher's work mirrors the literary text. The figure of footsteps in ash raises profound questions: how can ashes sustain a print when ashes may disperse and drift away? What would it mean to leave a trace or remainder in that which is itself a remainder? The language of trauma is the language of this absolute eraser, not imaginable in the past or present but always as something missed and about to return. What it means to say that the traumatic event is its future is its repetition as something that returns but also returns to erase its past. It returns as something other than what could ever recognize a singular and new event. Cinders are indeed incubation of the fire lurking beneath the dust. The literary text of Vilhelm Jensen is itself first told within a dream - the dream of Norbert Hanold, which is the dream of returning to Pompeii and seeing Gradiva by chance in the ashes. The philosopher can be said to be dreaming throughout the entire work of Archive Fever, from its first pages where he says 'I dream now he says at the beginning of his work of having the time to submit for your discussion more than one thesis this time will never be given to me.' The philosopher writes his theory within the literary story of Norbert Hanold, duplicating Han's return to Pompeii where the actual sighting of Gradiva takes place through its chance meeting of her or of that something that first passes by his eyes as he stands in the burning streets of Pompeii precisely at midday. The first appearance of Gradiva in Pompeii is marked by a single word set off typographically in a separate line - 'suddenly.' This word proliferates across Jensen's text and into Freud's interpretation, representing the language of the unexpected, of the accident, of fright, of the event marked by trauma - it is also the word of a chance meeting, an encounter that will be in Freud's reading the beginning of a psychoanalytic process of encounter.

Traditional cinema studies approaches include semiotics (focus on codes and signs) and psychoanalytical approaches (focus on spectator's gaze and identification). These approaches privilege the visual, described as an 'oculocentric paradigm' where sight carries connotations of distance and mastery. However, vision is not isolated—neither is hearing. Both senses work in conjunction with other sensors through cross-modal lived experience. Laura Marx describes 'haptic visuality' as opposed to optic visuality, emphasizing the embodied nature of spectatorship and tactile relation to the object. Vivian Sobchak applied existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to film studies, modeling an embodied theory of perception with all senses at its center.

This segment explains two key concepts from the Like Stories of Old video. Indexicality refers to how images serve as indices of what they capture - like footprints being indices of feet. The speaker argues that film's sense of reality was partly linked to film stock's physical capture of reality, which was 'imprinted' on the film, while digital images are converted to data. However, the speaker notes this argument is limited as neither film grain nor digital noise connects to real-world sensory experiences. Haptic visuality refers to how images engage not just eyes and intellect but also evoke sensations of touch, taste, and smell. The speaker explains that when characters eat fruit with good sound design, viewers feel they could do the same. This creates stronger reality - Predator 2 feels hotter than Dune because characters in Dune do not sweat, demonstrating how attention to physical sensations creates more immersive experiences.

Haptic visuality is a concept from film scholar Laura Marks that describes how cinema engages our physical senses beyond just our eyes and ears. The eyes function like organs of touch, creating a two-way connection between subject and object. This concept extends perceptual realism by suggesting that the relationship between viewer and image can be more intimate and sensual than initially assumed. Deep immersion in cinema doesn't arise from a single image but is created over the course of a carefully constructed continuation of shots and scenes. Each shot and scene builds on the previous ones, creating a cumulative effect that transports audiences. This requires attention to all aspects of filmmaking including makeup, wardrobe, set dressing, sound design, and music. The care and intentionality that makes for great and meaningful cinematic experiences extends beyond the actual filmmaking to the structures around it.

Nancy distinguishes between classical vision and somatic vision in cinema. Classical vision positions viewers in a privileged, fixed point from which the entire scene is visible, creating hierarchical structures where viewers cannot move. Somatic vision, emerging in the late 20th century with filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers and Kiarostami, involves a moving gaze where reality is created simultaneously with the act of seeing. In this approach, there is no privileged viewing point because reality is constituted through the very process of looking. The film and viewer's gaze emerge together in a process of becoming, making traditional notions of authorship inapplicable.

Atalante (1935) by Jean Vigo, who died at 29, is one of the most beloved French films, loved by Tarkovsky and Norstein. It explores how love transforms the world and how easily this transformation can be lost. The famous underwater scene represents one of cinema's best expressions of genuine love. Hiroshima, My Love (1959) by Alain Resnais, while associated with the French New Wave, actually began earlier. The film weaves together past, present, reality, and imagination, with French and Japanese music alternating during different narrative moments. This structure models human memory, showing how we are dependent on our past and how we try to either free ourselves from it or extract lessons from it.

Christopher Nolan creates 'intellectual blockbusters' that explore the contradictory sides of human reason and soul. His films follow a classical three-act structure (exposition, rising action, resolution) influenced by Star Wars, but he employs non-linear narrative techniques to create narrative twists. Examples include 'The Prestige' where the opening scene is chronologically near the end, and 'Inception' which uses reverse non-linear structure. He uses cross-cutting/parallel montage to show simultaneous actions in different locations and times, and frame narrative (story within a story) to immerse audiences further. These techniques keep secrets from viewers until the appropriate time, creating engagement and complexity.

Alain Resnais, a pioneering French New Wave director, revolutionized cinema by exploring the abstract nature of human memory and consciousness through innovative techniques including surrealism, stream-of-consciousness narratives, and nonlinear storytelling, demonstrating that memories are inherently subjective, fragmented, and reconstructed through trauma and obsession rather than objective reality.

Inland Empire represents the most nonlinear narrative in David Lynch's LA Trilogy (comprising Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive). Unlike conventional films that can be comprehended in a single viewing, Lynch's films use film as a temporal medium where nonlinear narratives require multiple viewings to understand. This structural complexity does not make the films nonsensical but rather challenges viewers to engage with the material on deeper levels of comprehension.

Christopher Nolan's films are characterized by non-linear narrative structures that present events out of chronological order, creating puzzle-like experiences for viewers. The reviewer explains that Nolan's films can be understood by first viewing the 'big picture' or overall story arc, then piecing together the scattered scenes like a puzzle. This approach requires active engagement from the audience, who must mentally reconstruct the chronological sequence while appreciating the artistic and thematic purposes behind the narrative rearrangement. The reviewer recommends this viewing strategy to avoid confusion and enhance appreciation of Nolan's distinctive storytelling approach.