Incendies: Outsiders (including Postgeneration) Wars (Insiders Conflicts) Denis Villeneuve

Transcription

1 Incendies: Outsiders (including Postgeneration) Views of Civil Wars (Insiders Conflicts) Denis Villeneuve

2 Trauma: Not always a story told verbally or cinematically of healing Narrative therapy vs. silence Dancing and other ritual (e.g. eating) Its Repetition and Chiasmus

3 Trauma & Chiasmus Chiasmus: Far from thrusting forward dialectically, this chiasmus proceeds in reversible and oft-crisscrossing movement, reproducing the transformational generative play of repetition, by which the novel starts in medias res and by which rather than toward which it is driven. It is in this chiasmus that the highly experimental and postmodern venture of City Gates must be situated. e.g. chiasmus between repetition and the search of narrative/ emotional closure; e.g. inadequacy and excess; fragmentariness and the collapse of the narrative voice. My aim here is not to exhaust all the aspects of this chiasmus of inadequacy and excess; rather, it is to be more explicit and specific about how central chiasmus itself, as a trope, is to narrative trauma. (Gana 82)

4 Trauma & Chiasmus event Shock excess of trauma Fragmentation of sensation inadequacy of symbolic order Experi ence* Belatedly as repetition compulsion (of symptoms or to tell stories) As working through representation With available categories and forms For others (postgeneration) to bear witness 1) Realism & historiographic al metafiction 2) Letter & journey

5 Experience = Representation To experience here is precisely to dispose of the traumatic in the realm of the discursive; it is to situate oneself at a safe remove or distance from the event. In short, experience is the transposition of the event to the realm of the subject. Hence the experience of an event is already a representation of it and not the event itself (Alphen qtd in Gana 81).

6 Other Chiasmusi the chiastic oscillation between the survival of trauma and the trauma of survival between having lived through and having missed the traumatic, and between being there and not being there (even though still but not quite there). Between deliberate returns and disembodied returns of traumatic event, between identification and disidentification (1 st and 3 rd person-narrative) Between estrangement, rootlessness and exile on the one hand, and subjectivity and community on the other.

7 Denis Villeneuve 1994 REW-FFWD (short; set in Jamaica) 1996 "Le Technétium Cosmos 1998 Un 32 août sur terre 2000 Maelström 2008 Next Floor 2009 Polytechnique 2010 Incendies 2013 Prisoners 2013 Enemy

8 Discussion Questions 1. Trauma & Representation: Is the incest theme too sentimental? Do you agree that sometimes it s better not to know? (Compare Simon and Jeanne) What do you think about the film s opening, closing scenes, and the bird-eye s view in the film? How does the film deal with the interrelations among event, experience and representation? 2. Major motifs: broken promise and forsaken children 3. characters: What roles do the mathematicians and notaries (Mr. Lebel & Mr. Maddad) play? How about the war lord Chamseddine? 4. City: How is Montreal presented? How is it opposed to the fictional place in Middle East? 5. Globalization: How are ideoscapes and mediascapes (of flows and boundaries) presented in this film?

9 Images of Children opening vs. ending

10 Outsider s View: Opening

11 Outsider s View: Long Shots

12 Outsider s View: Aerial Views

13 By comparison: Montreal is bleak

14 Transitions: 1. 00:12:55 00:14:36 Jeanne s recollection

15 Transitions: Journeys (1) university From Der Om to Daresh, And back to Der Om

16 Transitions: Archival Photos Daresh University

17 Transitions: Journeys to the South(2) the refugee camp in a city called Deressa

18 Transitions: Journeys (2)

19 3. Transition: Prison Scenes Kfar Ryat 3. 1:25: the babies rescued tunnel

20 Transitions: Simon s Involvement 1:16 [radiohead music] 1:20 (Simon s & the notary s roles) the rape scene in the prison 1:25: the babies rescued tunnel

21 Transitions: Visiting the Warlord

22 Final Transition: Final Revelation

23 Final Transition: Final Revelation

24 Ideoscape and its fluidity

25 Ideoscape and its fluidity

26 Ideoscape and its fluidity

27 Lebel vs. Simon Before going to Daresh - We'll get her, and then come back. - Promised. A promise, Mr. Marwan, is sacred for a notary. Upon knowing the brother s identity (1:39) - They are both dead. We open the envelopes, then that's it. - That I will not, Simon. This kind of thing is sacred. (Mr. Maddad): This commit rape. - Luckily, that runs in the family.

28 The Notaries

29 Mathmatics --Welcome to pure mathematics, the land of loneliness. -- that this period is a series of reprisals which fit one another in an inexorable logic, as additions. - One plus one makes two. It can not make one.

30 Chamseddine: Different Versions 00:45 Chamseddine and his men killed all the Christians to avenge the refugees. The children are perhaps at Deressa. 1:52 There was an orphanage in Kfar Kout. I saved the children. I took them with us. Nihad he had a gift. But he wanted to find her mother. he wanted to be a martyr so that his mother should see her picture everywhere on the walls of the country.

31 Chamseddine 1:48 Children will help you, you'll see. - You can not ask me. - Your children are our children, Nawal. Your family is our family.

32 Landscape

33 Destroyed

34 Console yourself because nothing is more beautiful than being together.

35 Course: Main Concepts & Themes

36 Work Cited Gana, Nouri. Trauma Ties: Chiasmus and Community in Lebanese Civil War Literature. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant & Robert Eagleston. NY: Routledge, 2013.