Mick Broderick

Interrogating trauma: Towards a critical trauma studies

In a French arthouse film an Algerian man draws out a large kitchen knife and cuts his own throat. In a short Sri Lankan art video the goddess of destruction, Kali, and a woman soldier surface from the ocean and walk towards a small seaside village. Shaky images of a video documentary bear witness to the muddied streets and flooded buildings of a poor, black neighbourhood of the Southern United States. In a low-budget Australian film written and directed by an Indigenous filmmaker two homeless, petrol-sniffing Aboriginal youths walk aimlessly on the streets of an outback town. We encounter the modern world and its history via depictions of catastrophe, atrocity, suffering and death. During the past 100 years or so, traumatic historical events and experiences have been re-imagined and re-enacted for us to witness over and over by constantly evolving media and art forms. Perhaps due to the ubiquity and multiplication of such images and narratives in modern and post-modern culture, questions about the impulse to behold and depict both the suffering of others and of the self, as well as more general questions about the ontological status of the representation of trauma, have increasingly been raised within intersecting, inter-disciplinary fields of study over the past two decades.

Apocalypse Australis: eschatology on southern screens

Abstract This article considers the historical convergence of Australian cinema and eschatological tropes, including threads from non-secular apocalyptic narratives, the spectre of nuclear war, the ghosts of genocide and the geographical histories of southern catastrophe, cataclysm and survival. It surveys a wide range of Australian screen productions, from Soldiers of the Cross (1900) to These Final Hours (2013), in order to read the runes of antipodean revelation, dystopia and finitude.

Not Reconciled: Grey Matter (Ruhorahoza 2011) and the Lacunae of Post-genocide Rwandan Cinema

Abstract In the two decades following the Rwandan genocide, a small number of feature films have attempted to represent aspects of the traumatic national experience of this mass violence. Apart from a few documentaries, official Rwandan government efforts towards national reconciliation remain largely absent in indigenous feature films, most of which treat their subject matter via conventional, social realist narratives. This essay assesses Kivu Ruhorahoza’s formidable debut production, Grey Matter (2011), and its aesthetic echoes of earlier modernist European cinema’s lacunary evocation of the Holocaust and the trauma of World War Two.

‘There is Still Time … Brother’ antipodean cinema and nuclearism in the mid-to-late Cold war

From the late 1950s to the early 1990s, representations of cold war ‘nuclearism’ featured regularly in Australian and New Zealand cinema. Narrative dramas envisioned a range of scenarios including atomic attacks, nuclear terrorism, global annihilation and post-holocaust survivability. Films also depicted community protest and resistance to nuclear weapons, as well as the questioning of security alliances that rendered antipodean cities primary nuclear targets. This article considers a range of such films within the historical and geopolitical contexts of their production.

“Justice through Strength and Courage”: Captain Midnight and the Military-Industrial Complex

For a generation of baby boomers this introductory announcement, with its high-pitched drawl elongating “Caaaapt’n Miiidnight,” was instantly familiar. Accompanied by the staccato, punctuated beeps of radio telemetry, the rapid montage cut to a rocket-propelled jet fighter hurtling above an elevated runway. The roar of the engine quickly segued to a stirring patriotic theme with a correspondingly slow, inward zoom revealing a domed, high-tech laboratory. This powerful opening sequence was emblematic of the American Century, and it held sway over the imagination of millions of domestic and international television viewers throughout the 1950s and 1960s.1