Trauma Processing in Israel’s Contemporary Documentary Cinema

This article investigates a new phenomenon in contemporary Israeli documentary cinema: the processing of war trauma. For the first time since the onset of the Second Intifada, films whose heroes suffer from PTSD are dealing with the processing of past experience. Using case studies, the article analyzes films directed by PTSD victims, which deal with the processing of war trauma, including among others One Battle Too Many (Joel Sharon, 2013) and Closed Story (Micha Livne, 2015). The films’ heroes are seeking to free themselves from the amnesia that is concealing the traumatic events deep within their memory. They manage to locate the repressed memory and then weave the traumatic story anew. The films propose various cinematic strategies for processing trauma, strategies that are meant to demarcate both the subjective traumatic past and the objective safe present and to place a defined aesthetic border between them. The films are analyzed by means of close reading of the cinematic aesthetic and the discussion of trauma in the Humanities. The interweaving of unrealistic and realistic symbolization practices dismantles the classic form of documentary cinema and facilitates an encounter between the viewer and the overwhelming nature of trauma.