Programme

University of Glasgow

The Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) exists in popular consciousness as a fundamentally photographic trauma, its remembrance mediated through a finite corpus of perpetrator photographs that journeyed, over half a century, from state secrecy to almost banal accessibility. The transmedia afterlives of this visual archive are nowhere more prolific than in Chinese-language cinema where photography’s indexical authority has been treated as irrefutable “proof” against the long-standing Japanese right-wing denialism. Positioned with this cinematic tradition, I read the 2025 film Nanjing Zhaoxiangguan (Nanjing Photo Studio, dir. Shen Ao), China’s official Oscar submission, as moving beyond the mere re-staging of historical photographs under the “burden of proof” to interrogate instead the apparatus, logistics and spectatorship through which the “photographic violence” in Susan Sontag’s (1977; 2003) sense is produced and materially conditioned. I argue the film literalises Sontag’s theorisation of the camera as “sublimation of the gun” on screen through systematically intercutting “shooting” photographs with “shooting” people. Through this “shooting” metaphor, I trace the violent coming-of-age of Japanese perpetrator-photographer Ito Hideo, whose mastering of the gun parallel his mastering of the photographic art. As a composite figure weaving together historical photographers including combat cameraman Satō Shinjū and, suggestively, future film director Yasujirō Ozu who served in China during the war, Ito’s characterological complexity embodies the coexistence of aesthetic connoisseurship with the mythology of the Samurai warrior, a constitutive contradiction that resonates with Ruth Benedict’s classic yet contested study of wartime Japan The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). The cinematic construction of the photographer figure, as such, represents China’s increasingly sophisticated screen imagination of the perpetrator, one that transcends the monolithic evil imagery pervasive in its earlier post-memorial visual culture. Through a historicised reading of the film and drawing on perpetrator studies, the paper traces the infrastructure and logistics of photographic production depicted in the film as part of the state apparatus of Japanese wartime photo-journalism, thereby revealing perpetrator photography not as a spontaneous act of individual trophy-taking but as a technologically mediated, institutionally embedded, bureaucratically administered, and aesthetically driven practice, one inseparable from the visual pleasure derived from Imperial self-glorification and the aestheticisation of violence. Against atrocity photographs, the film also presents an alternative archive: the Nanjing photo studio’s collection of ordinary family portraits as a direct antithesis. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s ça-a-été, the presentation of the victims’ own photographic archives works as memento mori, re-humanising those otherwise reduced to anonymous bodies in perpetrator photographs. I argue Nanjing Photo Studio moves beyond the “anxiety of proof” that has structured Chinese Massacre cinema, offering instead a reflexive meditation on the photographic medium itself, its production and spectatorship, and, in doing so, dramatising photography’s dual capacity to document and to fail — to witness, and to “witness against” (Braester 2003), history.

Biography. Yuan Liu is a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, fully funded by the China Scholarship Council. His PhD examines intermedial representations of the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) across poetry, visual arts, cinema, and theatre. Yuan holds an MSc in Translation Studies (Distinction) from the University of Glasgow and an MLitt in English Language and Literature from Nankai University, where he received the University-level Best Postgraduate Thesis Award. Yuan’s work has been published in edited volumes by Routledge, including Translation and Diaspora (forthcoming 2026) and Translation Studies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2025), and was presented at multiple high-profile international conferences in UK, Europe, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Yuan has received multiple research grants, including the Chancellor’s Fund, the David & Rhona Nicol Travel Scholarship, ArtsLab funding for ethnographic research, and other conference travel grants. He serves as a peer reviewer for New Voices in Translation Studies and writes theatre reviews for Playtosee.com and Theatralia: Journal of Theatre Studies. As the sole convenor, Yuan organised the Glasgow-Nankai PGR Chinese Studies Research Symposium on “Engaging China: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches” (December 2025) and serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Translation Studies Programme at Glasgow.

Goethe University Frankfurt

This paper examines how images produced during the Yugoslav wars mediate trauma through their movement across documentary, legal, and artistic contexts. While trauma theory has traditionally emphasised testimony, narrative rupture, and belatedness, this study argues that trauma is increasingly structured through the circulation and transformation of images of war. Drawing on the concept of investigative aesthetics (Fuller and Weizman 2021), the paper explores how photographs and moving images shift from documentary records to legal evidence and, subsequently, to aesthetic objects in film and artistic practice. These transitions reshape how traumatic events are perceived and remembered. As images acquire evidentiary status within international tribunals, they become stabilised as facts, yet remain subject to reinterpretation and re-mediation. The analysis focuses on Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason (2023), a performative research film drawing on testimonies, court records, and other archival material from the 2000 Foča rape camp trial. This was the first international case to secure convictions for wartime rape and sexual enslavement as crimes against humanity. The film foregrounds a shift in juridical culture, in which testimony is increasingly supplemented by forensic accounts, pointing to an emergent object-oriented regime grounded in data, matter, and code. (Schuppli 2020, 14) Against contemporary anti-epistemological tendencies (Fuller and Weizman 2021, 23) that risk undermining the evidentiary force of such material, the paper argues for a critical framework that sustains analytical distance while affirming its epistemic and ethical significance. By foregrounding the afterlives of images of war, the paper contributes to rethinking trauma as shaped by mediation, circulation, and cinematic form.

Biography. Asja Makarević is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the research programme AGE-C: Ageing and Gender in European Cinema at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she also completed her PhD. Her first monograph, *Post-Yugoslav Cinema and the Shadows of War: A Study of Non-Representation in Film*, based on her doctoral research, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2025. Her current research focuses on representations of age and gender across film cultures in the German-speaking and post-Yugoslav contexts since 2000. She is interested in the performance and reception of age and gender as culturally coded within and across these territories.

Kocaeli University

On December 28, 2011, thirty-four Kurdish villagers, mostly children, were killed by military airstrikes in Roboski, Türkiye. Dismissed by official narratives as a tragic misidentification of smugglers as militants, the event was followed by a sustained media blackout, state impunity, and the profound absence of a formal apology. This generated a crisis of political and ethical non-recognition, leaving the trauma structurally unresolved. Against this background, Ümit Kıvanç’s documentary Don’t Cry Mother, I’m in that Beautiful Place (2012) emerges not simply as a historical record, but as a critical intervention into the regime of sensibility. This paper argues that the film transcends traditional testimonial frameworks. Instead of attempting a strictly realist depiction, it employs a distinct aesthetic reconfiguration of witnessing to counter the dominant politics of amnesia and denial. By examining the documentary’s formal and affective structures, this study explores how cinematic grammar mediates the unrepresentable void of political violence. Through the deliberate use of experimental visual filters, graphic elements, fractured temporal logic, rhythmic editing, and the jarring juxtaposition of spaces of mourning with mediated scenes of everyday normalcy, the film disrupts dominant regimes of perception and renders the structures of public indifference visible. Furthermore, deliberate framing and camera work reconfigure the mourning families as active political subjects, transforming their intimate grief into a public demand for recognition. To resist the biopolitical reduction of the victims to anonymous statistical numbers, the documentary mobilizes intimate visual and affective details to produce a field of perceptibility in which singular lives insist on being seen. Ultimately, the film repositions trauma as an ongoing ethical confrontation. By refusing narrative closure and redistributing the conditions of visibility and audibility, it transforms the spectator from a distant observer into an implicated witness, rethinking the relation between trauma, mediation, and political recognition.

Biography. Dr. İren Dicle Aytaç holds a BA in Philosophy and a PhD in Radio, Television, and Cinema. She is a faculty member in the Department of Radio, Television, and Cinema at Kocaeli University, Türkiye. She serves as Editor of SineFilozofi Journal and as co-director of the Philosophical Films Festival. Her research operates at the intersection of political cinema, film philosophy, and the politics of aesthetics, with a particular focus on questions of representation and visual regimes.

United States Military Academy, West Point

In contemporary cinema, trauma often becomes legible not through explicit narration but through formal structures that disrupt perception and understanding. This paper argues that Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014), a postwar drama about a Holocaust survivor returning to Berlin, stages trauma as a failure of recognition that destabilizes the conditions of witnessing. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma as belated and unassimilated, I examine how Phoenix produces a mode of spectatorship in which seeing does not guarantee knowing. The survivor’s return does not lead to acknowledgment but to sustained misrecognition. Rather than offering testimony or resolution, Phoenix foregrounds the limits of recognition and the instability of witnessing, revealing trauma as a persistent disturbance that exceeds representation and unsettles the possibility of fully knowing or acknowledging the past.

Biography. Dr. Mark Gagnon is Associate Professor of German and Director of the German Program at the United States Military Academy, West Point. A graduate of West Point and a retired U.S. Army officer, he holds an M.A. in German from the University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. He also earned a Master of Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College. His teaching and research focus on German literature, film, and culture.

Jamia Millia Islamia

Some genocides are well-known, while some remain unacknowledged. The Indonesian Mass Killings of 1965-66 were an army-sponsored genocide resulting in the murder of approximately 1 million citizens who were reported to have an affinity towards communism. The silence around the genocide in both the country and history, despite its long-term effect on a global scale, is a testament to the terrains of the unexplored collective trauma affecting the precarious Indonesian society and psyche, which continues to suffer from the aftereffects but remains incognizant of the origin. The Act of Killing is a 2012 meta-documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer and Catherine Cynn, wherein a local gangster who was active during the Indonesian genocide is posited as the protagonist and asked to enact his activities through the medium of a film. By placing the film as a ‘traumatogenic site,’ I aim to explore the nature of forcefully subdued “traumatic events,” as (re)constructed by the memories of its perpetrator, where it leads, and whether the recall of these memories helps in developing a critical understanding of traumatic history. I will also examine the evocation of affective states (such as dread, melancholia, empathy) that the film may have on the spectator by using Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of ‘affective publics’, and if any resulting empathy converts to prolonged solidarity. Through this paper, I would like to posit how the collective memory of traumatic events is actively and violently manufactured by perpetrators in power. The meta mode of ‘film-within-film’ under which the movie operates shows the ability of cinema to expose the traumatic fissures within the manufactured façade of memories (re)written as historical narratives by those complicit in the gruesome crimes.

Biography. Sameyah Roomi is a research scholar in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests include popular culture, trauma, memory and narrativity, digital and feminist studies.

Karabük University

This paper reconfigures Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) within the framework of trauma and horror studies by foregrounding its performative and affective dimensions. It examines the play as a modern Gothic horror text through the theoretical lenses of Raewyn Connell’s concept of masculinity and crisis, Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopower and bare life. Focusing on key scenes—such as the toxic relationship between Ian and Cate, which reflects the crisis of masculine identity; the escalation of violence and humiliation following the entrance of the Soldier; and the aftermath of the Soldier’s suicide—the paper demonstrates how power, violence, trauma, and horror intersect within the Gothic atmosphere. Furthermore, the study claims that these dynamics can be read as forms of traumatic experience that reconfigure the spectator’s position as an ethical witness. It argues that horror in Blasted (1995) is not merely represented but performed on stage, producing an embodied and affective experience for the audience. Accordingly, trauma goes beyond functioning as a narrative device and operates as both a mediated and performative experience that shapes its impact on the audience. Kane’s theatre reveals a double-edged structure of violence in which the perpetrator becomes the victim and domination ultimately consumes itself. In Blasted (1995), Kane exposes the decay inherent in the existing order and evokes ethical responsibility amidst the ruins, transforming horror into a shocking form of catharsis that reawakens the possibility of renewal. By emphasizing the performative nature of horror, the paper situates Kane’s theatre within contemporary understandings of horror as an experiential and destabilizing aesthetic mode. The paper thus proposes a rethinking of trauma representation and ethical spectatorship by positioning the audience as a form of mediated witnessing. Such an alternative form of life redefines what it means to be human after the collapse of order, turning the stage into a space where destruction and creation coexist.

Biography. Dr. Zeliha Kuruducu is a Lecturer in English Language and Literature. She received her PhD in English Language and Literature in 2025. Her research focuses on contemporary drama, critical theory, biopolitics, trauma studies, adaptation, and performance, with particular attention to the works of Edward Bond and Howard Barker. Drawing on the thought of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, her work explores power, ethics, violence, and resistance in modern and contemporary theatre. She has published internationally and serves on the Editorial Board of The Criterion: An International Journal in English. She is an active member of COST Action CA24137, the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS).

Jamia Millia Islamia

The TikTok star, Italian-Senegalese content creator Khaby Lame, sold his face, voice IDs, and his behavioural patterns to develop AI-based ‘digital twins’ for €896 million. It is a deal through which he wrote off his global rights to generate advertising content, live broadcasts and campaigns in multiple languages and time zones, thereby reducing the time and availability constraints that typically affect creators. It is interesting to note that the digital twin of any human will not only outlive the human on which it is based, but after the death of the person, will not only be stuck in time but will also become the first digital copy of a person that is dead and yet paradoxically, alive. Hence, this paper will attempt to theorise the understanding of death in the age of AI, where, through technological advancements, creators can continue posting content powered and generated with the help of AI, even after their death. This paper will look into how AI not only redefines what it means to traditionally and biologically be laid to rest, but also how death is henceforth removed as a biological category – where digitally the persona and videos can be ever produced. Through the means of this research, I would also look into how the traditional understanding of mourning and grieving changes when the person dies physically but their digital twin remains alive and active through social media, and other forms of digital and mechanised trail. This paper will also study how the presence of the digital twin impacts collective and digital mourning, especially when the person is a public figure and how the death of the person impacts the production of memory, while digitally the person is alive and their digital participation is consumable – endorsing deals, appearing on advertisements and other campaigns.

Biography. Ritika is a PhD Scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research areas include Trauma Theory, Memory Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She runs a submission-based digital collective called While You’re Here Collective (https://www.whileyoureherecollective.com/) that aims at documenting the experience of sexual assault and violence through narrativization.

SUNY Oswego

In search for the facts behind the events of the nightclub “Colectiv,” where, in 2015, a fire ended tragically 64 lives and severely injured 133 other people, investigative journalists found themselves engaged in a much darker and fierce fight. It was revealed that corruption permeated all levels of state government, and it was a high-risk endeavor to peel layer after layer of shady practices and carefully disguised criminal acts. All at the cost of human lives. The case left deep scars in the national psyche and dramatically changed the perception of political elites and the role of government institutions. What was the effect of the “Colectiv” journalistic investigation, its socio-political implications, and the short- and long-term outcomes? How did the exposure of deep corruption modified social perception of institutions? How was social awareness affected in the long month and years of suffering (physical and emotional) after the incident? By focusing on the traumatic outcomes of an event that shook a nation, the author tries to analyze the impact it had on social and political institutions, but also on the ways it engaged the nation, as a collective, in a fight against sophisticated mechanisms of corruption.

Biography. Specialized in interdisciplinary film studies, Dr. Giukin is a French generalist in the Modern Languages & Literatures at SUNY Oswego. Her research focuses on marginal groups, minorities, issues of identity, politics of gender in Eastern European and French cinema.

Sabancı University

In Turkish director Pelin Esmer’s latest film And the Rest Will Follow (2025), a housekeeper at an old hotel in a small town seeks to reinvent herself after a personal trauma by sneaking into the guests’ rooms and appropriating imagined fragments from their life-stories, both to tell her own story and to escape from it. Later, when a renowned director checks into the hotel, which also houses a movie theater and serves as the venue for the annual film festival, she decides to narrate her story to him in several partially contradictory versions, through a series of voice messages. From that point on, the hotel and the film itself become flooded with multiple, often competing stories told, heard, dismissed, repeated, and adopted by a host of characters including the director, each bearing the marks of trauma. The entire process of characters speaking from subject positions that they do not fully occupy and telling stories that they themselves do not fully own culminates in the showing of the director’s short film that reconfigures the peculiar narrative of yet another inhabitant of the town. There is much in this that resonates with Cathy Caruth’s theorization of the relation between trauma and narration in Unclaimed Experience, especially with her reading of the film Hiroshima mon amour. My goal in this presentation is to offer a reading of And the Rest Will Follow that will reconsider Caruth’s and classical trauma theorists’ approaches to narrative, and to suggest how an exploration of the collective dimensions of both trauma and narrative, and of the understanding generated through stories that call for and enable each other might help rethink assertions about the “unnaratability” of trauma.

Biography. I am a professor of comparative literature teaching in the Cultural Studies and Gender Studies programs in Sabancı University, Turkey. I am the author of Deconstruction and the Politics of Criticism (Routledge, 1990) and the co-editor of Relocating the Fault Lines: Turkey Beyond the East-West Divide (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2003). I have published articles on literary theory; political violence, mourning, and memory in literature; the relations between aesthetics and politics; and gender and sexuality in literature. My current research focuses on psychoanalytical and political perspectives on trauma in literature.

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

In June 2019, pop star Madonna released what was possibly her most graphic music video to date, God Control, a blistering 8-minute portrait of gun violence and the ubiquity of mass shooting in American culture. Directed by longtime creative collaborator Jonas Åkerlund, God Control follows Madonna as a disco patron in a 1970s-stylized New York City on the last night of her life. She flees her crowded apartment, where a television broadcasts images of a mass shooting; encounters a group of armed young men who rob her at gunpoint on the streets; and retreats to her sanctuary, a gay disco, where everyone is gunned down in a haunting scene that evokes uncomfortable memories of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida just three years earlier. In this presentation, I argue that Madonna and Åkerlund use an intensified and potentially triggering narrative structure and aesthetic language to punch through the ether of indifference and normalization that so often condenses around such repeated scenes of violence. In this way, the video becomes a showcase of a shared and distinctly cultural trauma whose indexical violence becomes inseparable from its repeated enactments and the culture of deliberate, partisan political inaction in which it unfolds. I also argue that God Control is cinematic in ambition and design, offering familiar nods to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino and scrambling our linear understanding of events by running them in reverse order; is intimately tied to an understanding of performance that is unique to the music-video medium itself and also connected to Madonna’s 2012 live rendition of another provocative song, “Gang Bang”, during her MDNA world tour; and to the digital platforms upon which God Control circulates in the post-MTV media ecosystem, as both cultural chronicle and controversial flash point in the social-media space.

Biography. Drago Momcilovic is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His teaching and research interests include Gothic monstrosity, trauma, posthumanism, and narratives of stardom in contemporary literature, modern cinema, and popular culture, including pop music and television. He has published articles on Madonna and Kylie Minogue, as well as the film Bird Box, gothic music videos, and zombie-themed television shows like The Walking Dead, Black Summer, and Fear the Walking Dead. He is currently working on his first book, tentatively called Music Video Gothic: Monster Narratives in the (Post-)MTV Era.

Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, New Delhi

Based on Razia Butt’s novel Bano (1971) Dastaan is one of the most acclaimed historical dramas in Pakistan directed by Haissam Hussain. Literary documentation of the period of Partition invokes metaphors of madness to explain the seemingly unfathomable dreadful violent incidents. Dastaan limns the characters of the victims of terror and trauma unleashed by the recurrent violence resulting from the India-Pakistan Partition. Bano, the protagonist of the television drama, is the lone survivor of her family and she falls prey to the brutalities of the circumstances of Partition and sacrifices herself to the cause of the creation of an independent nation. The narrative emphasizes on a visible preoccupation with the theme of love, sacrifice, bloodshed, abduction, displacement and death and through narrative analysis this paper attempts to probe how it manifests the theme of psychological trauma. The psychological breakdown of Bano in the end was culminated by the politics of that time and the socio-cultural stigmas that fostered gendered violence and impacted the cultural life and psychological health of the victims. Partition unleashed a political trauma and ideological insanity which divested the protagonist of her personal and collective identity. This narrative is applicable to the backdrop of any country that underwent the unfortunate realities of partition. This paper attempts to study Bano’s experiences, ordeals, and psychological damages caused by the Partition through the lens of trauma theory and tries to gauge the effectiveness of Dastaan as a trauma text documenting an agonizing moment in history.

Biography. Dr. Sarmistha Roy is an Assistant Professor at the School of English Studies in Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, New Delhi. Her areas of research interest include gothic literature, popular culture, gender studies and ecocriticism. She has presented a number of scholarly papers in National and International conferences and her creative writings and research articles have been published in reputed journals.

University of Glasgow

This panel, “Mediating Memory, Testimony, and Representation,” explores how literature, art, and visual media confront the ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic challenges of bearing witness to history. Across diverse cultural and theoretical contexts, from postwar Europe to diasporic Australia and contemporary China. These papers interrogate how acts of remembering, witnessing, and re-creating mediate our understanding of the past and our ethical responsibility to it. These papers offer a multifaceted inquiry into how memory, testimony, and representation intersect across literature, art, and film. They invite us to consider not only how the past is remembered, but also how its remembrance shapes the ethical imagination of the present.

Biography. Keni Li is a China-born researcher and photographer currently based in Glasgow, where she is pursuing a PhD at the University of Glasgow. She previously earned a Master’s degree in the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research explores the intersections of photography, literature, and memory writing, with particular focus on photo-text practices, intermediality, women artists and photographers, and cultural memory. Her artwork has been exhibited in several cities across the UK, the US and Japan. In 2024, she presented the exhibition Memory Photo-booth, funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). She has collaborated with art institutions including the Greek Feminist Autonomous Center and Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. Her recent book chapter, Reinventing Contemporary Exhibition Space: Novels, Domestic Space, and Cinematic Cartography, will appear in Exhibition Matters: Contemporary Displays and Exhibition-Making Practices (Bloomsbury, 2026). A further paper (Janine) will be added to the Collective Trauma panel.

Yuan Liu is a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, fully funded by the China Scholarship Council. His PhD examines intermedial representations of the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) across poetry, visual arts, cinema, and theatre. Yuan holds an MSc in Translation Studies (Distinction) from the University of Glasgow and an MLitt in English Language and Literature from Nankai University, where he received the University-level Best Postgraduate Thesis Award. Yuan’s work has been published in edited volumes by Routledge, including Translation and Diaspora (forthcoming 2026) and Translation Studies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2025), and was presented at multiple high-profile international conferences in UK, Europe, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Yuan has received multiple research grants, including the Chancellor’s Fund, the David & Rhona Nicol Travel Scholarship, ArtsLab funding for ethnographic research, and other conference travel grants. He serves as a peer reviewer for New Voices in Translation Studies and writes theatre reviews for Playtosee.com and Theatralia: Journal of Theatre Studies. As the sole convenor, Yuan organised the Glasgow-Nankai PGR Chinese Studies Research Symposium on “Engaging China: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches” (December 2025) and serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Translation Studies Programme at Glasgow.

Babeș-Bolyai University

This paper examines how trauma is mediated through absence and marginality in post-Soviet war cinema, focusing on the representation—and systematic erasure—of Jewish Red Army soldiers in narratives of penal battalions (shtrafbats). Drawing on a comparative analysis of 60 Jewish veterans’ testimonies from the Blavatnik Archive and close readings of films such as The Battalion (2004), Bastards (2006), and Burnt by the Sun 2, as well as late Soviet works including Gu-Ga (1989) and The Name (1989), the paper interrogates how cinema constructs trauma at the limits of visibility. In The Battalion, the penal unit is framed as a site of collective suffering and moral testing, yet ethnic specificity is subsumed within a universalizing narrative of sacrifice. Bastards displaces historical reality into mythologized figures of expendable youth, transforming marginality into spectacle while detaching it from documented experience. In Burnt by the Sun 2, trauma is mediated through fragmentation and excess, yet Jewish presence remains structurally absent. Across these films, Jewish soldiers are either omitted or relegated to peripheral roles, reflecting a broader reluctance to integrate minority experience into dominant narratives of Soviet heroism. By contrast, archival testimonies reveal practices of strategic silence, identity negotiation, and the uneven articulation of antisemitism, complicating assumptions about both visibility and repression. This disjunction exposes a limit case for trauma theory: subjects whose expendability precludes not only recognition, but also the possibility of stable witnessing. Rather than presenting trauma through testimonial rupture, these films mobilize opacity, narrative discontinuity, and affective distance, positioning the viewer as a witness to what remains inaccessible. The paper argues that post-Soviet war cinema reframes trauma as a problem of mediated invisibility, calling for a rethinking of trauma beyond frameworks centred on testimony and narrative articulation.

Biography. Olga Gradinaru is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania, specializing in film studies and cultural memory in Eastern Europe. She has taught English as a specialised language for seven years and served as editor for Brukenthalia journal, a supplement of Brukenthal. Acta Musei. Her research examines Soviet and post-Soviet narratives, focusing on memory politics, de-heroization, and marginalized figures in cinema. She authored The Soviet War between Idealisation and Demystification (2018) and numerous articles. Olga has completed her research on cinematic portrayals of expendable military subjects with support from the Blavatnik Archive Research Fellowship.

Babeș-Bolyai University

Exploring social and political trauma with cinematic tools and the profound perlaboration of traumatic events with the help of cinematic representations has been a filmmaking instrument ever since the earliest forms of this modern art form. One of the most traumatic episodes in recent Romanian history, the 1989 Romanian Revolution, has become a recurring subject in contemporary Romanian cinema. In my previous works (Pop, Doru. ”An Analysis of Romanians’ Self-Image in Contemporary Cinematographic Representations”, in Metacritic Journal, 1.1, October 2015), I discussed these representations of trauma, using as a base for my explanations three feature films narrating the topic of the Romanian Revolution, Cum mi-am petrecut sfîrșitul lumii (dir. Cătălin Mitulescu), Hârtia va fi albastră (dir. Radu Muntean) and A fost sau n-a fost? (dir. Corneliu Porumboiu), with two other examples from a mockumentary like Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceauşescu (dir. Andrei Ujică) and a docudrama, like Trei zile până la Crăciun (dir. Radu Gabrea). The need to continue these discussions is justified by the production of two recent films, both internationally acclaimed, Anul Nou care n-a fost (The New Year That Never Came, 2024), directed by Bogdan Mureșanu and Libertate (Liberty, dir. Tudor Giurgiu, 2024). My argument is that, unlike previous movies remembering the Revolution, like 12:08 East of Bucharest (Porumboiu 2006), these new productions are not only re-interpretations of the historical traumatic event, ending with the execution of the dictatorial couple and death of more than a thousand people, they provide an example for post-traumatic cinema processes.

Biography. Doru Pop is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. His research focuses on Romanian and European cinema, visual culture, media theory, and popular culture. He has held Fulbright and Ron Brown fellowships and has taught Romanian and European cinema at Bard College and Columbus State University. His recent books include *Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen* (Bloomsbury, 2021), *The Age of Promiscuity: Narrative and Mythological Meme Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture* (Lexington Books, 2018), and *Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction* (McFarland, 2014).

Polish Academy of Sciences

Dług (The Debt, 1999) by Krzysztof Krauze is one of the most explicit Polish films about the ‘wild capitalism’ that flourished immediately following Poland’s political transformation. The film tells the story of two friends who decide to start a lucrative business. When the bank refuses to grant them a loan, they decide to borrow the money required to start their business from a former colleague. They soon they discover that they have fallen into a spiral of debt and utter terror. The plot is based on the real events. The director chooses a specific cinematic convention – the subject matter of the film may call for a social realist approach, and it is somehow visible on the visual level. At the same time, however, the narrative relies heavily on the demands of the crime film genre, using suspense, graphic depictions of violence and fear to create an emotional and affective impact on the audience. Filmmakers create a visually attractive cinematic product that can be inscribed in the logic of a new, commercial, ‘Americanised’ type of cinema reflecting the new, post-transition era. The resolution of the plot is, however, a pessimistic one, and the ending is not at all hopeful. In my presentation, I will try to analyse these cinematic and narrative conventions in light of the Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism. On the one hand, the film’s deterministic and fatalistic tone captures the atmosphere of traumatic uncertainty and fear during the times of transition; on the other, serves as a cinematic commentary on the inevitability of the new capitalist order and its logic. I will argue that the open or closed structure of the narrative corresponds with the categories of social realism and capitalist realism.

Biography. Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies, Audiovisual Arts, And Cultural Anthropology at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IS PAN). She is the editor-in-chief of the academic film journal Kwartalnik Filmowy, published by IS PAN. Her book based on her doctoral thesis, Androgyn. Tożsamość, tęsknota, pragnienie (2015), has been awarded the Bolesław Michałek Award as the best film studies publication of 2014-2015. Curator of the British Film Festival in Poznań. She is interested in British social cinema, Irish cinema, and forms of cinematic social realism.

Palacký University Olomouc

Although trauma, grief, and mourning rarely appear in scholarship on Miloš Forman (19322018), his biography invites such readings. Forman lost both parents – members of the anti-Nazi resistance – to concentration camps, spent his childhood with relatives and in an institution for war orphans, and learned only in adulthood that his biological father was in fact Otto Kohn, an architect of Jewish descent who had fled to South America in 1938. His family life was later marked by ruptures and long separations from his second wife, Věra Křesadlová, and their twin sons Petr and Matěj (born 1964), shaped partly by political upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s and partly by Forman’s pursuit of a Hollywood career. The director consistently avoided discussing these painful histories, and even his authorized biographer Jan Novák conceded that many personal details remained unspoken, forcing him to reconstruct or infer aspects of Forman’s emotional life for the memoir Turnaround. Building on a methodology I previously applied to the work of Hugo Haas (“Hollywood Film as Therapy: Hugo Haas, Trauma, and Survivor Guilt,” Jewish Film and New Media, 7:1, 2019), this paper proposes to explore potential traces of unresolved trauma in Forman’s films, especially those based on screenplays he cowrote. A particularly suggestive example is Goya’s Ghosts (2006, co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière), a USSpanish co‑production and Forman’s final feature. Although critically and commercially unsuccessful, the project was deeply personal for Forman and occupied him intermittently for nearly fifty years. Over this long gestation, the film came to absorb themes resonant with his life: the individual’s confrontation with authoritarian power, the collective trauma of war and history’s relentless violence, the body as a site of suffering, and the psychic impact of separation between parent and child. The paper argues that Goya’s Ghosts can thus serve as a revealing lens through which to reconsider Forman’s oeuvre in relation to trauma.

Biography. Milan Hain, PhD, is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Chair at the Department of Theater and Film Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He is the author or co-author of five books, including, most recently, Starmaker: David O. Selznick and the Production of Stars in the Hollywood Studio System (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). His articles have appeared in Jewish Film and New Media, the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Łódź. He’s currently working on an archival study of director Miloš Forman and a project (supported by the Harry Ransom Center Fellowship) on David O. Selznick and his female staff. Friday 4 September Day Two

Babeș-Bolyai University / University of Craiova

This theoretical paper argues that postcinematographic montage can aggregate individual experiences of trauma by turning them into a narrative collective expression. By juxtaposing disparate, yet similar accounts shared on the internet, montage thus acts as a pharmakon, treating database logic as its own remedy — from a stochastic undifferentiation to a narrative structure. Short experimental films such as Watching the Pain of Others (dir. Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2018), Laid Off (dir. Natalie Bookchin, 2009), Swatted (dir. Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, 2018) or Am I Pretty (dir. Jan Proctor, 2017), fragment and assemble testimonial archives from the internet, countering the paradigmatic database logic by creating a syntagmatic form through narrativity. Laid Off observes recurrent discursive strategies through split-screen webcam recordings, in which people filming themselves recount the same experience of being laid off by using the same words. In the desktop essay Watching the Pain of Others, Galibert-Laîné selfreflexively interacts with online testimonies about a seemingly inexistent disease, while Chandoutis narratively integrates video streams to observe a form of digital terrorism. In extremis, Proctor’s short film Am I Pretty is solely comprised of audio archives about online physical validation; without actually showing any bodies, the voices of young teenage girls are superimposed over the same pink background, which becomes a space for mental projection. Whether through visual or auditory montage, such works thus bind scattered, individual experiences and reveal the political force of addressing trauma, evoking what Hito Steyerl sees as the “aura” of a poor image; or, in the case of Am I Pretty, the poor image culminates in the absence of an actual image.

Biography. Mihai-Șerban Ghiță is a filmmaker based in Bucharest, Romania, and a PhD student in philology at the “Alexandru Piru” doctoral school, within the University of Craiova, Romania, in a national cotutelle with the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. A graduate of film directing at UNATC „I.L Caragiale”, Mihai is currently in the fourth and final year of the doctoral programme. Situated at the intersection between a historical approach and the post-narrative, database-driven media, his thesis, “Poetics of Recycling in Postcinema”, studies innovative narrative techniques in postproduction cinema, investigating the status of authorship in the postcinematic media landscape.

LUCA School of Arts

Several years ago, I was entrusted with an archive of 3,000 video reels (two-inch, half-inch, and U-Matic) by the descendants of a controversial American psychiatrist active in the 1960s and 1970s. This highly sensitive collection comprises hundreds of therapy sessions using video as a “feedback technology,” where patients viewed themselves as part of their treatment. More radically, the doctor and patients understood video as a model of consciousness itself, theorizing that the mind, like magnetic tape, could be erased and rerecorded via electromagnetic intervention and electroconvulsive shock. At this clinic, trauma was perceived as a technical error to be fixed. Unlike the psychoanalytic tradition of symbolic mediation, this practice was rooted in the information theory of Claude Shannon and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. In this way, this analog environment offered a proleptic vision of our contemporary digital regime, where information is binary and experience is interchangeable data. Here, trauma is poised twofold on the fulcrum of the analog and digital: first, in the quotidian experiences of the patients, oscillating between different technological mediations; and second, in the material practice of the archivist (or artist) who must to mediate these analog records into the digital for legibility. What, then, are the implications of watching, migrating, and preserving these records? How does digitization redound on the traumatic experiences of the archive? In this talk, I discuss my practice as a historian and filmmaker, reenacting contemporaneous video synthesizers—such as the Rutt/Etra and Sandin Image Processors—to develop an immanent critique of the medium and clinic. Through this, I shift the focus from individual identity to the unstable vibrations of the analog, subverting the logics of psychiatric and archival normalization and proposing an aesthetics of interference as a practice for remediating trauma.

Biography. I am currently a Senior Researcher at LUCA School of Arts, where I teach filmmaking, media history, and artistic research. I hold a PhD in history from the University of Chicago and was trained as a f ilmmaker at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. My research has appeared in Representations and Discourse (forthcoming), and my writing for a broader audience has been published in Documentary Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, and MUBI Notebook. My films have screened widely, including festivals such as Visions du Réel, The Museum of the Moving Image, Chicago International Film Festival, True/False, and DokuFest, where my film was named the best short film.

Babeș-Bolyai University

Trauma theory reads broken form fluently and overfull form hardly at all. The field trusts fragmentation and silence on sight, while decoration has to prove it is grieving, and so does fun. This asymmetry has hardened into an aesthetic morality that rarely names itself, visible in kitsch, the form easiest to convict without trial. The case is persuasive: it turns contradiction into prefabricated feeling, makes death beautiful enough to bear, and leaves little doubt about how to respond. Yet it mistakes one outcome for the whole category. Three operations structure my reading. Trauma begins in superposition, with incompatible meanings held at once. Representation makes it legible by collapsing those possibilities into one meaning, while what the selection cannot absorb returns as leak. When kitsch conceals the selectivity of collapse, I describe it as a sealed kitsch: its excess resolves contradiction into a consumable affect and closes the surface over what remains. However, kitsch becomes superpositional when collapse cannot manage that closure. The remainder stays active, and the form’s playfulness, artifice, and beauty never settle the grief they carry. In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (2026), Ida dies and is resurrected as the Bride, while romance, spectacle, and revolt offer recognizable ways of understanding the woman she becomes and the death from which she returns. Yet possession complicates the ownership of her speech, the ink-black tongue carries resurrection’s violence into her new body, and repeated deaths remain within the ending’s promise of happiness. Kitsch gives the wound a form through which it becomes visible and bearable without absorbing what resists it. Seen this way, kitsch offers a way into newer technologies of mourning, where grief is not only represented but prompted, formatted, and sometimes made to answer back. As platforms and AI increasingly shape the forms in which loss can be expressed and encountered, the question becomes what happens to the part of grief those forms cannot contain.

Biography. Teodora Crișan-Matcăbojă is a PhD researcher in film and media studies at Babeș-Bolyai University and an editor of Ekphrasis: Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, the journal co-hosting this conference. She works in trauma theory and psychoanalysis, on questions of aesthetic form: how cinema and television give shape to experiences that resist telling, and what happens to that work of form as generative AI begins to perform it. Her recent research examines the representational limits of machine vision, informed by her other life leading an AI and machine learning team in industry. She co-organizes Rethinking Trauma 2026.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

This theory-based paper examines the representation of urban ruins in Lebanese postwar digital cinema as the material traces of a traumatic past. In a “climate of state-sanctioned amnesia” (Elias 2018), Lebanese visual culture has cultivated an “elegiac aesthetic” (Seigneurie 2011) that resists the state’s attempts to erase the memory of the deceased. Conceptualizing ruins as “visual motifs” (Balló 2000; Balló y Bergala 2016) constitutive of a “post-traumatic urbanism” (Lahoud 2010), this article analyzes a corpus of non-fiction films—Suspended Dreams (Mai Masri, Jean Khalil Chamoun, 1992), Nights and Days (Lamia Joreige, 2007), From Beirut with Love (Waël Noureddine, 2005) and Panoptic (Rana Eid, 2017)— that articulate a “postwar subjectivity” (Westmoreland 2010) driven by the shared imperative to document ruined landscapes as a means of engaging individual and collective memory. This comparative analysis focuses on three key visual strategies used to represent ruined landscapes that ultimately foster a process of historical reawakening. First, it examines the use of tracking shots to navigate war-ravaged Lebanon as attempts to reconstruct a fragmented historical perspective. Second, it analyzes the use of handheld, unstable camerawork to argue that they are a form of embodied inscription, registering the filmmakers’ spatiotemporal disorientation and, sometimes, operating as a somatic index of traumatic return. Finally, it considers the use of double exposures and digital blurring—part of a spectral aesthetic—to evoke the continued presence of those who disappeared during the war. Together, these strategies produce a localized mode of witnessing that recognizes destroyed and abandoned spaces as constitutive of the contemporary post-conflict present. Emerging alongside the digital turn in Middle Eastern cinemas, they reinscribe a new generation of filmmakers within a specific historical experience while confronting the enduring violence of the Lebanese Civil War and the 2006 Lebanon War.

Biography. Fèlix Maisel Licerán is a researcher with a degree in Audiovisual Communication from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He has completed the International Master in Film and Audiovisual Studies (IMACS) at the University of St Andrews and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is currently a PhD student at the Department of Communication at UPF, where he examines the desert as a transnational space in classic and contemporary Arab cinemas, focusing on three key perspectives: colonialism, borders and spirituality. His academic interests also include glitch aesthetics and the visual culture of the nuclear age. Additionally, he collaborates with the CINEMA research group within the framework of the project “Mutations of visual motifs in the public sphere” (MUMOVEP).

University of Turku

Beirut, My City is the final instalment of Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut Trilogy, which chronicles the Lebanese Civil War from its outbreak in 1975 to the 1982 siege of Beirut. The poetic essay film mourns the city’s destruction but also celebrates its defiance and refusal to disappear. My paper approaches the film as a critique of dominant cultural imaginaries of Beirut and the trauma discourses that shape them. For Saab, war appears as a crisis of language and representation. Yet rather than simply reaffirming the impossibility of expressing traumatic experiences, the film experiments with strategies for working through this impasse. My analysis begins with a brief moment in which the voice-over describes the destruction as “the reality of stones beginning to speak.” If stones speak, they do not do so alone. Indeed, Saab brings in a plurality of voices and languages, producing a mode of polyvocal testimony that pierces through the unsayable. A similar logic operates at the level of the image. While Saab condemns the spectacularisation of war, she does not reject image-making as such. It becomes a practice of curation, of selecting images and thereby collectively negotiating what is remembered and what is forgotten. I argue that Beirut, My City invites a rethinking of trauma as a fundamentally collective and material phenomenon. Saab’s focus on marginalised victims of colonial violence aligns her work with efforts to decolonise trauma theory. I place this perspective in dialogue with the concept of “geotrauma,” which extends trauma to encompass both the organic and the inorganic, psychology and geology. By attributing a voice to stone, the film establishes a similar transversal solidarity between suffering bodies and suffering matter. It mobilises geological deep time as a resistant temporality that challenges the event-based model of trauma, instead highlighting the sustained processes of oppression and struggle.

Biography. Aleksi Rennes is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. His ongoing PhD project, currently in its last year, examines the utopian dimensions and potentials of cinematic placemaking in the work of Jean Epstein. Rennes’s broader research interests include early film theory, the philosophy of space, and the interconnectedness between aesthetics and politics.

Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance

This paper examines how trauma is mediated through immersive spatial environments in the work of Belu-Simion Făinaru, a Romanian-born Israeli artist whose installations have been presented extensively in Romania and internationally, including at the Romanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Focusing on a selection of installations exhibited in Cluj-Napoca, Bucharest, and Venice, the paper argues that Făinaru does not represent trauma as a historical event or narrative content. Rather, he constructs environments in which trauma is encountered as a condition of absence, suspension, and perceptual instability. Across these works, domestic objects, emptied libraries, fragmented symbolic forms, and participatory gestures generate spaces that are simultaneously material and elusive, inhabited and uninhabitable, present and withdrawn. These installations operate through what may be understood as an apophatic logic. Echoing the poetics of the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan, whose writing articulates trauma through negation and the limits of language, Făinaru translates this linguistic condition into spatial form. Absence becomes a structuring principle: books are rendered unreadable, voices speak without presence, monuments dissolve into ephemeral gestures, and meaning is persistently deferred. Within these immersive environments, the spectator is no longer positioned as a distant witness to trauma, but becomes implicated in its mediation. In this sense, the work aligns with what Caroline A. Jones has termed blind epistemology (2016)—a mode of knowing grounded in embodied, sensory experience rather than visual mastery or interpretive certainty. Meaning does not precede experience but emerges through it, gradually and incompletely, as the viewer navigates unstable relations between materiality, memory, and space. By shifting attention from representation to immersion, and from narrative to perception, Făinaru’s work offers a model for rethinking trauma in contemporary art as a spatial and experiential process—one grounded in absence, repetition, and the limits of knowing.

Biography. Dr. Emma Gashinsky is a senior lecturer in contemporary art at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where she previously served as Head of the MA Program in Dance. Her research focuses on contemporary art, performance, and the mediation of memory and identity, with particular attention to Israeli and transnational contexts. She has published and presented internationally on topics including diasporic aesthetics, site-specific practices, and the intersections of visual art, theory, and cultural history. Her current research examines immersive environments, material memory, and non-representational approaches to trauma in contemporary installation art.

Babeș-Bolyai University

As Cathy Caruth observes, literature, alongside visual arts, sociology, history, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, is called upon “to explain, to cure, and to show why it is that we can no longer simply explain or simply cure” (Caruth 1995, 4). Within this framework, contemporary women’s writing intersects with and reinforces a broader cultural understanding of trauma. Although trauma as represented in contemporary women’s writing may be approached through a clinical framework, its central concern does not lie in reconstructing the traumatic event itself or in delineating a traumatic outcome through the profile of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Rather, the emphasis falls on the lived experience of trauma and on writing as a mode of constructing and remembering it, while simultaneously functioning as a therapeutic re-enactment undertaken by a subject in a state of ongoing change. Even though Caruth has been criticized for neglecting the narrative dimension, for aestheticizing trauma, and for emphasizing the failure of trauma to be represented (Wulf, and Weilnböck 2008, 230), I argue that contemporary women’s writing may serve as empirical evidence in support of the theory of cultural trauma. Moreover, it has the potential to inform clinical research and to provide insights that may contribute to the development of curative strategies for self-care. Adopting a comparative approach, I examine the cultural representations of motherhood and relational trauma, as well as the somatic dynamics of the mother–daughter relationship, in contemporary Eastern European women’s writing and visual culture through an analysis of Nora Ikstena’s novel Soviet Milk (Mātes piens, 2015) and its 2023 film adaptation directed by Ināra Kolmane.

Biography. Bio-note: Amalia Cotoi an Assistant Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, where she obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature in 2023. She has co-edited two academic volumes in Modernist Studies and authored more than thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She has also written numerous book reviews published in both literary and academic journals and has received several research fellowships, most recently a fellowship awarded by the James Joyce Foundation in Zürich. Her work focuses on modernism and modernist literature, contemporary literature, critical theory, memory studies, trauma studies, embodied cognition, and gender studies. A further paper (Ligia) will be added to the Technologies of Mourning panel.

UNATC, Bucharest

This article proposes the concept of the Latent Image Field as a way of rethinking the ontology of the cinematic image. Classical film theory frequently grounded the ontology of cinema in the indexical authority of photographic capture. Yet both photochemical practice and contemporary RAW workflows reveal a structural interval between the inscription of light and the stabilization of the cinematic world. The Latent Image Field designates this interval in which a luminous event has already been materially recorded – whether on photosensitive emulsion or as digital sensor data – yet the perceptual regime through which the image discloses its world remains open. Through examples drawn from photochemical film and digital RAW workflows, this article demonstrates how color calibration reorganizes affective and temporal regimes within the same recorded configuration of light. These transformations show that cinema does not merely record reality or time but stabilizes perceptual and narrative worlds from a field of luminous potential.

Biography. Maria Murgu is a Lecturer in the Department of Film and Television Image at the Faculty of Film, National University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” (UNATC), Bucharest, a Research Assistant at CINETic–UNATC, and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest. She holds a PhD in Cinematography and Media and is also trained in art therapy. Since 2004, she has worked as a professional colorist, contributing to Romanian and international award-winning films. Her research focuses on the intersections of film aesthetics, digital cinematography and color grading, visual perception, imagination and the imaginal, art and neuropsychology, art therapy, and creative education.

University of Łódź

While traditional trauma film studies have primarily focused on narrative strategies and cinematic techniques as responses to the problem of representing trauma, this paper shifts the analytical lens toward the role of the viewer in constituting what may be understood as post-traumatic cinema. Rather than drawing on psychoanalytic frameworks, the study is grounded in cognitive film theory and examines how viewers process, interpret, and emotionally engage with films that depict traumatic pasts. Specifically, the paper investigates the interplay between cognitive and affective responses elicited during the viewing experience, emphasizing how meaning is co-produced through perceptual, emotional, and interpretive processes. By foregrounding the spectator’s embodied and psychological engagement, the study reframes post-traumatic cinema not solely as a property of the film text, but as an experiential phenomenon emerging in the encounter between film and viewer. Methodologically, the paper proposes a triangulated approach to the study of cinematic experience, integrating physiological measures (such as biometric responses), self-reported affective data, and cognitive analysis. This multimodal framework enables a more comprehensive understanding of how audiences engage with traumatic representations and allows for empirical investigation of key issues in the field. Ultimately, the paper argues that such an approach can offer new insights into questions of vicarious trauma, the ethics and dynamics of witnessing, and the intermedial and intergenerational transmission of trauma—concerns that remain central to contemporary research in trauma studies and film theory.

Biography. Dr hab. Jakub Gortat is an associate Professor at the University of Łódź, Institute of German Philology, Department of German Studies. His research focuses on German and Austrian politics of memory, the intersections of film, history, and politics in Germany and Austria, post-traumatic cinema, as well as German-Polish cultural relations after 1945. He is the author of two books on the representation of National Socialism in Austrian post-war cinema: Austria’s Difficult Past: National Socialism and the Filmization of Television (1960–1980) (Berghahn, Austrian and Habsburg Studies series) and Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-war Film (1945–1955) (Brill, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik), both published in 2025. His work has also appeared in the Eastern European Screen Studies, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (2024), New German Critique (2024), and Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History (2022).

Polish Academy of Sciences

Reflecting the field’s roots in literary theory, critical discussions of trauma in cinema have often privileged narrative, leading to an overemphasis on trauma as tied to character motivation and backstory. However, framing trauma as a shorthand for character psychology risks flattening its cinematic possibilities. This paper challenges that paradigm by shifting the focus from trauma as something a film depicts to trauma as something a film does, locating it in form and structure. Inspired by Eugenie Brinkema’s radical formalism and drawing on Jill Bennett’s work on affect and images of trauma in the visual arts, I propose a framework for understanding how trauma can be inscribed in the audiovisual fabric of film as an affective dynamic of oscillation. Taking Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2017) as a case study, I explore how trauma emerges not (merely) as narrative content but as an affective and formal oscillation that structures the film’s audiovisual field. Furthermore, I consider how this oscillatory affective dynamic facilitates particular modes of empathic engagement, recreating in the audience an experience structurally akin to that of trauma.

Biography. Film and visual culture scholar, graduate of the Faculty of Psychology and the Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw. Affiliated with the Department of Film Studies, Audiovisual Arts and Anthropology of Culture at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Editor of the academic film journal Kwartalnik Filmowy, former editor of the Polish film quarterly Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu, member of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies. Winner of the XXIII Krzysztof Mętrak Competition for young film critics. She currently works on her PhD thesis on the images of women in popular music.

Babeș-Bolyai University

We investigate how cinema’s language and design can be a medium where viewers can process trauma. This paper proposes a cognitive-constructivist paradigm for film studies that provides humanistic insight through the lenses of predictive processing and embodied cognition, as recent psychology fields of understanding human thinking. We analyze a range of films (Sirat- Oliver Laxe, 2025, La Chimera – Alice Rohrwacher, 2023, Killers of the Flower Moon – Martin Scorsese, 2023, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Radu Jude, 2023), that depict traumatic events or situations either directly or indirectly through form. We identify how cinema combines formal elements in order to direct attention and memory, to foster conditions for aesthetic aggression, that allow transformation. A particular interest of our research is linked to spatial and sound design, that further modulate affect: filmmakers treat sets and locations as tools to encode symbolic meaning, allowing visual motifs and music to cue empathy and reflection. Our findings analyse how such design strategies (e.g. disruptive narrative flow, graphic content applied on metaphorical spaces, layered soundscapes) play a role to regulate or discharge the emotional journey. In this “design of trauma,” viewers can approach painful material with cognitive distance provided by cinematic form. We investigate how cinema functions as a safe space for trauma enabling individual processing and collective witnessing. This contributes to cultural studies by showing how cognitive and design principles in film form facilitate shared meaning-making and resilience.

Biography. Adina Marcu Pașca is a doctoral student in Film Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to cinema and cultural resilience, examining how film form and design influence viewers’ experience. She is interested in transdisciplinary methods that integrate film, psychology, and design thinking to explore cinema as a tool for wellbeing and social reflection. Her broader practice extends to socially engaged cultural interventions, with a focus on reaching out-of-the-bubble audiences and developing artistic and educational contexts that foster critical thinking and perspective shifts.

Theatre Academy, Warsaw

Representing sexual violence in performance entails an ethical paradox: to make trauma visible is simultaneously to risk reproducing the very structures it seeks to expose. This paper argues that both writing about and staging sexual violence are inherently implicated in regimes of repetition that may normalize, aestheticize, and even pornographize violence unless their underlying representational frameworks are fundamentally reconfigured. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I conceptualize representation as a reiterative practice that produces, rather than merely reflects, reality. Within this framework, mimetic or literal repetition of sexual violence risks reinscribing dominant narratives while simultaneously framing trauma as a singular, closed event—something that happens once and can be subsequently processed or resolved. Such a model obscures the durational and structural character of violence, reducing it to an isolated spectacle available for consumption. This dynamic is closely tied to what Laura Mulvey identifies as the logic of the gaze, here extended toward voyeurism and the pornographization of violence. The spectator is positioned as a consuming subject, deriving visual and affective engagement from scenes of violation while remaining structurally detached from their implications. In response, I mobilize bell hooks’ notion of the oppositional gaze to argue for a reconfiguration of spectatorship: one that exposes and implicates the viewer rather than offering distance or catharsis. These tensions are examined through contemporary performances such as Rapeflower (Hana Umeda, Komuna Warszawa) and Proces Pelicot (Milo Rau, TR Warszawa), which resist direct representation in favor of fragmentation, testimony, and performative disruption. Rather than reproducing violence, these works destabilize its visibility and challenge the conditions under which it is perceived. Engaging Catherine Malabou’s concept of destructive plasticity alongside Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I argue that trauma cannot be reduced to a single event but must be understood as an ongoing condition of being-with the abject. In this light, contemporary performance emerges as a critical site of mediation in which the spectator is no longer external, but entangled and co-responsible within the structures that sustain violence.

Biography. Antonina Dobrowolska is a theatre researcher and critic affiliated with the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. She collaborates with Polish theatre journals, including Dwutygodnik and Teatr. Her research focuses primarily on the representation of violence on stage, exploring the aesthetic, ethical, and social dimensions of theatrical depictions of violence. Through her academic and critical work, she examines how performance can reflect, question, and challenge experiences of harm and power.

Sabancı University

Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004) presents two young boys who share a single traumatic event but experience its aftermath through radically different ‘symptomatologies’: one reenacts through a series of compulsive sexual repetitions within a queer hustler subculture while the other survives through a complete substitution of an alien abduction narrative for the unbearable realities of the traumatic scene. In this paper, I argue that the film’s dual-subject structure is not merely a visual-narrative device but a cinematic theorization of dissociation itself, which I read through Philip Bromberg’s relational psychoanalytic model of multiple self-states. As a result, I contend that dissociation has always had queering potentials in its psychoanalytical nature and mechanisms. Against the classical Freudian emphasis on repression and the illusion of a unified subject, Bromberg reconceives the self as constitutively plural: a dynamic and non-linear assemblage of dissociated self-states that do not resolve into integration and instead persist in the gaps between one another. This model, I argue, bears structural and political homologies with queer theory’s refusal of a coherent, stable identity as well as with queer temporality’s challenge to linear, cisheteronormative reproductive time. Where normative frameworks pathologize the non-unified self and the non-progressive life narratives as symptoms of psychic damage, Bromberg’s relational model suggest that non-linearity, deferral, and irresolution are not deficits but are rather alternative modes of inhabiting time and selfhood. As I draw on Ann Cvetkovich’s theorization of queer trauma as an “archive of feelings” that operates below the threshold of a catastrophic event, I read Mysterious Skin as a film in which queerness, dissociation, and temporal displacements are structurally co-constitutive of one another. Araki’s formal choices such as fractured chronology, hallucinatory flashbacks, and the film’s insistent withholding of closure, I proffer, cinematically perform what Bromberg calls “standing in the spaces”, which is the act of holding multiple, irreconcilable self-states and temporalities, without resolving them into a master narrative or an incessant pursuit of mastery. As I interpret it, the film does not offer trauma’s resolution, if anything it offers the queer possibilities of “living otherwise” within the remainders and excesses of the traumatic signifiers.

Biography. İlkan Can İpekçi is a transdisciplinary post-doctoral research fellow at Sabancı University. They completed their Ph.D. in gender studies at the same university with a dissertation on queer trauma and the everyday experiences of LGBTQIA+ people in Turkey in relation to their mental health struggles under the dual supervision of Prof. Sibel Irzık and Prof. Sibel Halfon. They hold dual BA degrees in Interpreting and Translation Studies (Eng-Esp-Tur), and Psychology from Yeditepe University where they also completed their M.A. in Social Anthropology. Their work covers feminist queer psychology, critical trauma studies, and transdiagnostic risk factors for sexual and gender minorities.

University of Tokyo

Nancy Huston’s bilingual writing and self-translation lie at the intersection of trauma theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Huston examines how narrative, language, and memory are reconfigured across different linguistic versions of the same text. As trauma lies at the heart of this translation practice, this paper will examine The Story of Omaya, her 1985 novel that describes the sexual trauma caused by rape. This paper will be primarily theoretical for applying psychoanalysis and trauma theory. I will analyse the protagonist’s (Omaya’s) identity, which has been broken and traumtised by sexual violation, by referring to the work of Ronald David Laing. Laing proposed the concept of a false and fuzzy schizoid identity which is applicable to Omaya, who is an actor and adopts various roles and changes her clothing. Reflecting this unstable identity, the story shifts between the first person and third person, using the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘Omaya (she)’. This strategy effectively conveys the effects of trauma on dissociative disorder. The story recounts a trial for assault and battery in the absence of defendants. Omaya is the plaintiff who gives incoherent testimony, providing either too much or too little detail in response to questions from the prosecution. The prosecution often interrupts her testimony and adds the second rape, trivialising her mental distress and treating her as a seductive fallen woman. This absurd trial is described as a play in the novel enabling us to witness and interpret Omaya’s testimony as a performance. Through this performance of collapsing testimony, I will argue that the novel depicts cruelly the difficulties of accusing damage of sexual violence in society.

Biography. My name is Fuka Kimura, a doctoral student specialising in contemporary literary theory at the University of Tokyo in Japan. My research focuses on Anglophone and Francophone literature, paying particular attention to Nancy Huston’s bilingual writing and self-translation, which lies at the intersection of trauma theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism. For my doctoral thesis, I plan to write about Huston’s early 20th century works. Recently, I have become particularly interested in trauma classified as complex PTSD, so I often deal with topics such as the history of domestic violence, the death of family members, self-harm and sexual violence.

Babeș-Bolyai University

The act of mourning is typically associated with internal grief−a profoundly personal experience and an intersubjective affective transfer between the one who departs and the one who remains, rooted in emotional intensity and an authenticity of the expression of loss. In Taryn Simon’s installations, An Occupation of Loss (2016) and Start Again the Lament (2024), the artist invites the audience to immerse themselves in two sound environments, by listening to a series of laments performed by professional mourners from diverse cultural spaces. In these two works, the artist alternately utilizes the live presence of the mourners (An Occupation of Loss) and their digital presence (Start Again the Lament). Positioned between the live and recorded presence of these laments, and between private loss and social drama, Taryn Simon challenges the boundary between deeply private and authentic expressions of grief, and the theatricalized emotion of public mourning. This paper analyzes the installations, tracing the transition from personal experience to a collective co-presence based on the concept of “spontaneous communitas”, as theorized by Victor Turner. The study suggests that it is precisely through the aestheticization and theatricalization of mourning that a state of authentic communitas can be reached − a collective emotional dialogue grounded in an intercultural, collective intimacy. Ultimately, through the dramaturgical strategies of theatricalizing mourning, these two installations achieve a state of vulnerability and affective solidarity. Drawing on Victor Turner’s theories of liminality, this paper analyzes how mourning in installation art functions as a passage from the liminal (archaic, institutionalized rituals of mourning) to the liminoid (the artistic, performative action). The liminoid, as a state of being-in- common through mourning, retains its transformative function for the participants, even within the secularized context of a performative convention.

Biography. Ana Tecar is an associate lecturer at the Department of Theatre, Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca) and a researcher specialised in performance art. She obtained her PhD within The Faculty of Theatre and Film, with a thesis on the representations of intimacy in performance art (Thesis title: The representation of the ‘intimate’ in performance art. The spaces of interiority, limits of the encounter with alterity, 2023). Her pedagogical and research activity is focused on the theatricality and performativity of the 20th and 21st centuries.More specifically, her work explores the structure of temporal regimes in theatre and performance, the dramaturgies of intimacy, and the digital environments in performance art.

DAMU, Prague

Over the course of the last two years, as part of my Master’s in Directing of Devised & Object Theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), I have been working on the creation of three interconnected performative works collectively titled The Spring Trilogy: ● A Girl Named Spring – Part 1: a solo performance conducted entirely through a computer screen. ● A Girl Named Spring – Part 2: a solo physical performance employing sound and objects. ● I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone – Part 3: a multi-performer piece that integrates analogue and digital projections, live-edited sounds, objects, and physical performance. Across the three works, the thematic framework is autobiographical and touches upon the themes of love, queerness, violence, trauma and re-inhabiting one’s body, while the performative format shifts, along with my positioning as author/performer in the piece. This practice-based paper reflects on the process of creating performances that draw from personal material, the role of the performer(s) in an authorial autobiographical work and the methodological strategies that arose in the artistic process, as a response to the challenges of the creating journey.

Biography. Isavella Kasimati (b.1995, Athens) is an actress, writer and director. Currently based in Prague, she is completing a Master’s degree in Directing of Devised & Object Theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU), following earlier studies in Psychology (Panteion University & University of Warsaw) and Performing Arts (DIPETHE Patras). Isavella’s work is rooted in the genre of auto-fiction and explores how intimate stories can be reimagined and reconstructed through diverse artistic languages (dance, film, text, object theatre, multimedia). Her research revolves around developing performative strategies that transform autobiography into collective resonance, creating bridges between personal memory and shared experience. In her process, body, sound, senses and emotion are central, in the continuous search for sensitivity as an act of resistance.

Lusófona University

This research explores the interrelation between methodologies of artistic reenactment of war induced trauma and contemporary hybrid film. It examines how this practice reflects today’s cultural processes and its potential to communicate traumatic past and empower the survivors. The three main elements of this study are discourse research, film case studies, and practice-based artistic research. The latter is an autobiographic hybrid film exploring psychological traumas caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Moments When We Freeze” combines elements of documentary and fictional filmmaking in an attempt to tell a story of one broken Ukrainian family, who hasn’t yet lost their love for each other, their sense of humor, and the desire to be connected. We find that trauma, as an event often lacking acknowledgment and proper processing, finds in reenactment a platform for exposure and potential healing. Film camera serves as an empathetic companion, bearing witness and providing necessary support for the survivor. Through this, hybrid film becomes both an external memorial and a transformative medium, facilitating the integration of the traumatic experience into consciousness and supporting healing. In this way, artistic reenactment offers a means to memorialize, work through, and ultimately heal historical and personal traumas, paving the way to reclaim and ‘uncancel’ our future.

Biography. Born in Donetsk, Ukraine in 1991, Anastasiya is a multidisciplinary artist and activist, specialising in hybrid filmmaking. Her PhD focus was the artistic reenactment of trauma as a cinematic method. Her latest work investigates the visuality, ritualism, and digitality of memory, as well as hybrid documentary as an archival and transformative practice.

Alliance University, Bangalore

The late-socialist noir aesthetic conveys a sense of suspended, non-narrative ambient anguish that appears unable to formally verbalise the disintegration of the Soviet Union yet is intuitively conscious of its imminent collapse. Key films of Soviet rock cinema, such as Assa (Sergei Solovyov, 1987) and Igla (Rashid Nugmanov, 1988), are highly stylised affective structures that communicate feelings through visual arrangements and musical compositions rather than character development or storylines. The unapologetic coolness of their protagonists offers a compelling vision of the irrepresentability of a socio-political trauma that continues to haunt Eastern Europe, intensified by the magnetic presence of rock star Victor Tsoi, whose very image on screen embodies the newly dominant mood of the “end of history.” In some sense, these pictures anticipate both the exhaustion of the USSR and the attraction of the “Wild Nineties,” concealed like Gramscian monsters in the chiaroscuro of the Gorbachevian interregnum. Similar to the agonising state of the communist world, their plots lack a definitive closure; they feature drifting spectral figures, stuck between conflicting ideologies, identities, and histories whose lines resemble song lyrics. This results in an impression of emotional flatness and narrative opacity, which Tsoi himself enacts through his silence, stillness, and detachment, symbolising the pre-collapse trauma of a zombie system—one that is already dead but continues to run, despite its utter lack of meaning. This paper contends that the rock turn in Soviet cinema may be considered a novel framework for reinterpreting socio-political trauma, beyond its traditional understanding as a response to historically identifiable events. Relying on the works of Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Jacques Lacan, and Alexei Yurchak, I postulate that in these movies, trauma functions not as content or testimony but as a structural absence that reconfigures the temporal and emotional environment of the late-socialist era. In this situation, the audience is invited to plunge into the fading Soviet social world where meaning has been dissolved but new symbols have not yet reshaped subjectivities. This establishes a unique aesthetic regime in which rock is not only a conduit for emerging subcultures but also a metaphor of the growing tension between emancipation and commodification, mirroring the fragmentation of communist reality and the illusion of a capitalist future operating as an instrument of erotic seduction.

Biography. Dr Julien Paret is the Director of the Alliance Centre for Eurasian Studies and the Head of the Department of Political Science at Alliance University (Bangalore, India). He is an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in political science and cultural studies. His research investigates the convergence of ideologies and cultural productions, analysing how discourse and symbols in films, series, games, and other media shape and reflect societal values, dominant ideas, and power structures.

Chongqing University

This paper examines Xie Fei’s Black Snow (1990) as a key example of how late-1980s Chinese cinema developed a noir-inflected language for registering the social and affective disruptions of the reform era. Emerging in a moment of intellectual liberalization and aesthetic transition, the film departs from the propagandistic certainties of the previous decade and turns instead toward desire, alienation, and existential dislocation as central cinematic concerns. In this sense, Black Snow offers not simply a portrait of marginal urban life, but a non-testimonial form of trauma writing grounded in the textures of everyday estrangement. The protagonist, Li Huiquan, embodies what Giorgio Agamben terms bare life—an existence stripped of political value and exposed to exclusion without effective legal or moral protection. His drifting through Beijing’s alleys and peripheral spaces unfolds within a condition of extraterritoriality, suspended between the urban and the marginal, legality and abandonment. By situating this desolate figure at the decaying edges of the socialist metropolis, Xie Fei visualizes the social trauma of a reforming modernity marked by estrangement, stalled mobility, and the erosion of collective belonging. Formally, Black Snow translates this condition into a distinct sensory regime. Through raw realism, hand-held cinematography, on-location shooting, and trailing long takes, the film enacts an aesthetics of sensation that fuses corporeal immediacy with documentary intensity. Jiang Wen’s performance lends Li a hard-boiled stoicism that intensifies the tension between masculine toughness and existential vulnerability. Rather than presenting trauma through spectacle or explicit testimony, Black Snow registers it through urban drift, fractured social rhythms, and the slow disintegration of everyday attachment. The film thus reveals noir not merely as a genre idiom, but as an aesthetic of marginality through which late-socialist rupture becomes visible and affectively legible.

Biography. Weixu Xu is an MA graduate in Film Studies from Meishi Film Academy, Chongqing University. His research focuses on Hong Kong and Chinese-language cinema, film noir and neo-noir aesthetics, post-socialist visual culture, and the philosophical analysis of film form. He is particularly interested in questions of affect, sensation, urban space, and marginal subjectivity in East Asian cinema. His recent work examines how noir-inflected aesthetics register social rupture, trauma, and precarious forms of life in reform-era Chinese cinema.

University of Padua

Audiovisual engagement with the Chornobyl disaster began in the immediate weeks following the 1986 nuclear accident, as filmmakers entered the contaminated zone to document its effects. Despite the proliferation of film and television productions on the catastrophe, sustained scholarly attention – particularly in relation to questions of memory and cultural trauma – has emerged only in the past decade (Briukhovetska, 2016). Existing studies have further focused on narrative devices through which radiation – the “invisible enemy” (Alexievich, 1997) – is rendered intelligible (Lindbladh, 2019). Forty years after the Chornobyl accident, this paper rethinks nuclear trauma by shifting the focus from narrative to visual and material analysis, arguing that trauma emerges from the impossibility of directly perceiving the danger. Drawing on a selected corpus of late and post Soviet film and television productions set in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the paper identifies a range of cinematic strategies – including temporal distortion and perceptual disorientation – through which audiovisual texts attempt to render contamination perceptible despite its resistance to representation. Against this backdrop, particular attention is devoted to Černobyl’: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (Volodymyr Shevchenko, 1986), an early documentary shot in the loci of the disaster. Rather than representing radiation through visual devices, the film renders it perceptible through disturbances of the image itself. Moments of damaged footage – visual and sound degradation explicitly framed in the voice-over as effects of radiation exposure – are integrated into the film’s discourse as meaningful traces. Drawing on André Bazin’s notion of the photographic image as an imprint of reality, the paper argues that Shevchenko’s documentary exposes a condition of cinematic indexicality in which the recorded event interferes with the material process of inscription. In this sense, nuclear trauma does not emerge as a narrative construct, but as a trace made visible through the disturbance of the image, where the limits of representation become perceptible.

Biography. Claudia Fiorito (claudia.fiorito@phd.unipd.it) received her PhD in Film Studies from the University of Padua in 2025, with a dissertation on the transnational circulation of Soviet science fiction cinema. Her work focuses on Cold War film cultures and the movement of films across ideological and industrial contexts, alongside a sustained interest in the afterlives of the Chornobyl disaster in film and television. She is the author of Caught in a “Mousetrap”: The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in Film and Television (1990–2021) (Studia Rossica Posnaniensia, 2024) and has organised and contributed to academic and public events on Ukrainian cinema.