Film-mediated Body Expression and Personal Narrative: Oral Testimonies of Macedonian Women Facing Violence in the Greek Civil War

Traumatic experience goes far beyond the realm of speech. The body and the mind keep track of everything. But words struggle to describe what the subject has really experienced. The use of film as a documentary medium sometimes allows us to see how the reminiscences of a past that cannot be forgotten are expressed through the body. It transforms the camera into an object of mediation that makes it possible to approach areas of the unspeakable, to elaborate what has remained unresolved, and to give a primary form of representation to what has been frightening in individual and collective history. To speak with the body or through the body, to show a part of one’s history, and to make the scope of the violence suffered heard engages a certain form of listening where the act of testifying joins that of recognizing, of naming and also feeling what happened. For these Macedonian women victims of ethnocidal practices, the full recognition of their trauma often requires body expression, as the body is the primary site of the violence endured. And the role of the film record is to restore aspects of the violence while providing the means to study its present and past significance.