Women’s cinema of trauma: Affect, movement, time

TitleWomen’s cinema of trauma: Affect, movement, time
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsDijana1, ddj514@gmail.com Jelača
JournalEuropean Journal of Women's Studies
Volume23
Issue4
Pagination335-352
ISSN13505068
Abstract

This article analyses several notable examples of what the author calls the post-Yugoslav women’s cinema of trauma. These films made by women filmmakers challenge the standard tropes of war, as well as normative approaches to war cinema, by highlighting the intimate affective domain of experience, rather than large-scale narratives and collective emotions. The author focuses on the near-silent short and experimental works of Una Gunjak and Šejla Kamerić (both from Bosnia-Herzegovina), and suggests that they offer insightful formal and narrative ways of rethinking the question of what makes a war film, as well as what constitutes a woman’s experience of war. By arguing for a continued, strategic and locally specific use of the term women’s cinema, the author deploys feminist analytics towards inscribing these filmmakers’ work into the transnational flows of knowledge production about marginalized groups and non-Western geographies.

DOI10.1177/1350506816666891
Short TitleWomen’s cinema of trauma