![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Using the Holocaust as a transnational trope, and drawing on the theoretical debates on the representation on trauma within Film Studies, this essay will examine the ethical and political significance of traumatic memory in Isabel Coixet's La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words, 2005), a transnational film that deals with the traumatic suffering of a female victim and survivor of the Bosnian genocide. A textual analysis will mainly focus on the generic treatment of melodrama in the film and be related to some extra-textual discourses on the Balkan conflict, to show how the film exemplifies the tendency to tap into the broad imagery of the Holocaust in a productive, intercultural way.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviews for their insightful comments and suggestions. My gratitude also goes to El Deseo, D.A., S.L.U. for their permission to publish the images from the film and to Timothy Bozman, Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, Eva Parrondo-Coppel, Anna Rosenberg and Chiara Tebaldi for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Hilaria Loyo is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and German Studies at the University of Zaragoza where she teaches Film and American Studies. She has published articles on Hollywood film stars, the cultural reception of Marlene Dietrich, and the Carmen myth. She has contributed to book chapters on Hollywood female blondes and film genres in volumes like Wendy Everett (ed.) Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Painbrush to Pixel (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007), and Antonio Balasopoulos et al. (eds.), Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States (Heildelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008). Her latest research project has focused on transnational exchanges, transnational cinema, cosmopolitanism, trauma, and melodrama in the films of Isabel Coixet.
Notes
1 Radstone, “Trauma Theory,” 21.
2 Radstone, “Screening Trauma,” 84.
3 Radstone, Memory and Methodology, 12.
4 Felman and Laub, Testimony; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Caruth, Trauma. Herman Rapaport identifies another group working in the field of trauma studies composed of applied scientists, psychiatrists, and social workers, who approach trauma using a behavioral model of psychology and with healing objectives in mind. Rapaport, “Trauma Archive,” 68–81.
5 For the incorporation of the Holocaust as a constituent of American memory and the emergence of a popular trauma culture crossing US national boundaries, see Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture, here 7–20.
6 Radstone, “Trauma Theory,” 12.
7 Caruth, Trauma, 6.
8 Caruth, Trauma, 8; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4–5.
9 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.
10 Italics in the original. Ibid., 11.
11 Caruth, Trauma, 5.
12 Huyssen, Twilight Memories.
13 Grainge, Memory and Popular Film.
14 An instance of Film Studies scholars’ interest in trauma studies can be seen in the two dossiers published by the British film journal Screen on the relevance of trauma to Screen Studies in the section of “Reports and Debates,” 188–216.
15 Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” 194.
16 Ibid., 201.
17 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 3.
18 Kaplan and Wang, Trauma and Cinema, 9.
19 Radstone, “Trauma Theory,” 24.
20 Testimony refers, in Radstone's words, to ‘a relation of witnessing between the subject of trauma and a listener.’ Ibid., 20.
21 Kaplan and Wang, Trauma and Cinema, 9.
22 Radstone, “Trauma Theory,” 13–9. See also Leys, Trauma.
23 Craps and Rothberg, “Introduction,” 517, 518.
24 Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture.
25 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Rothberg's elaboration of this notion is based on the previous work by Aimé Césaire, Paul Gilroy, and many other authors. Other theories sharing this general transnational and ethical dimension of memory transfer are postulated, for instance, in Marianne Hirsch's notion of ‘postmemory’ in “Family Frames,” and Alison Landsberg's ‘prosthetic memory’ in Prosthetic Memory.
26 Rothberg, Multidierectional Memory, 3.
27 Catic, “A Tale of Two Reconciliations,” 213–42.
28 Some key works on these cultural phenomena include Novick, The Holocaust in American Life; Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust; Shandler, While America Watches.
29 Steinweis, “The Auschwitz Analogy,” 281.
30 Bosnian films like Pjer Zalica's Fuse/Gori vatra (2003) and Days and Hours/Ko amidze Idriza (2004). See Iordanova, “Whose Is This Memory?” for an interesting account of the various films and documentaries about the Balkans, too numerous to be included here.
31 Apart from Coixet's film, Christian Wagner's Warchild (2006), Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering (2006), Andrea Staka's Das Fräulein (2006) also addressed the wounds of the Bosnia war crimes. Ibid., 26.
32 Brownell, “Bosnia Reborn.”
33 Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence,” 564–5.
34 After intense lobbying by human rights and feminist activists, rape was recognized as a war crime by the Hague International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1996. Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 110.
35 The film won three prizes, including the Golden Bear, at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival. Brooke, “Esma's Secret,” 53. Angelina Jolie would later contribute to the current debates on female rape victims with her controversial film In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011). A more recent film, Dobra Zena/A Good Wife (2016, Mirjana Karanovic), deals with the ethical response at the discovery of war crimes during the conflict.
36 Helms, Innocence and Victimhood, 4.
37 Downing and Saxton, Film and Ethics, 13.
38 Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 280, 293.
39 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 18.
40 Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma,” 204; Kaplan and Wang, eds., Trauma and Cinema, 9–10.
41 Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field,” 34–5.
42 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 11–20; Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 50–1.
43 Kaplan and Wang, eds., Trauma and Cinema, 9.
44 Zarzosa, “Melodrama and the Modes of the World.”
45 Zarzosa, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television.
46 Kaplan and Wang, eds., Trauma and Cinema, 9.
47 Rothwell, “Modernising Melodrama”; Vidal, “Love, Loneliness and Laudromats.”
48 Coixet, La vida es un guión.
49 Camporesi, “Ante el dolor de los demás.”
50 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 6.
51 Baker, The Tactile Eye, 84.
52 Martín-Márquez, “Isabel Coixet's Engagement with Feminist Film Theory,” 556.
53 The use of fades-to-black in this opening scene evokes the first images of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995).
54 Marks, The Skin of the Film.
55 Ibid., quoted in Martín-Márquez, “Isabel Coixet's Engagement with Feminist Film Theory,” 555.
56 Ibid., 556.
57 Marks, Touch, xii.
58 Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory, 12.
59 Felman and Laub, Testimony.
60 LCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 41.
61 Italics in the original. Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 58.
62 Italics in the original. Ihde, Listening and Voice, 14.
63 Ibid., 44–5.
64 Marks, Touch, 8.
65 Ihde, Listening and Voice, 126.
66 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.
67 Ibid., 8.
68 Ibid., 142.
69 Italics in the original. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 60; Derrida, Specters of Marx.
70 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 27.
71 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 45–67.
72 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
73 Slobodian, “Analyzing the Woman Auteur,” 168.
74 LaCapra defines melancholia as a form of act out and mourning as a form of working through. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 65–71.
75 Ibid., 71.
76 Slobodian, “Analyzing the Woman Auteur,” 168.
77 Hannah's apparent contradictory behavior, namely her desire to connect while obstructing her efforts to make connections, shows the central relational paradox of torture victims. The film has been seen as an example of the healing power of relationships based on trust and authenticity. Cook, “The Movie The Secret Life of Words.”
78 Leire Ituarte-Pérez draws upon Mary Ann Doane's work on a subgenre of ‘women's films’ centered on a pathological female protagonist in The Desire to Desire. Ituarte-Pérez, “Melodrama y ‘Cine de Mujeres’ español contemporáneo.”
79 Marks, Touch, 13.
80 Rothberg, “Preface,” xv.
81 Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past,” 165.
82 Slobodian, “Analyzing the Woman Auteur,” 172.
83 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.
84 Ibid., 171.
85 Ibid., 181.
86 Ibid., 175.
87 Doane, “Pathos and Pathology,” 14.
88 Coixet devotes her documentary Journey to the Heart of Torture to the work done by the IRCT to help torture victims from all over the world.
89 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 78–9, 85.
90 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 9.
91 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 264.
92 Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence.”
93 Salzmann, “Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing.”
94 Helms, Innocence and Victimhood, 37.
95 Boose, “Crossing the River Dina,” 94.
96 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7.
97 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 148–9.