Surgissements et bombardements d’images : les flash-backs post-traumatiques au cinéma

Authors

  • Baptiste Villenave Université de Caen Normandie, France

Keywords:

affective turn, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, trauma cinema, modern cinema, flashback, spectator's experience, Alain Resnais, Sidney Lumet

Abstract

This paper investigates how some fiction films from the late 1950s and the 1960s (Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker) attempt to share with their viewers what is known in psychiatry as post-traumatic flashbacks. These films seek to make them experience the effects of post-traumatic flashbacks, by making them viscerally endure, though partially, the shock suffered by the victims of these reliving episodes. How do Resnais and Lumet manage to convey the violence of the assault undergone by victims of post-traumatic flashbacks, through discontinuous editing, sudden flashes and bombarding images? I will address this issue in the wake of the so-called “affective turn” taken by humanities in recent decades, notably under the impetus of the groundbreaking work of Patrizia Lombardo.

Author Biography

Baptiste Villenave, Université de Caen Normandie, France

BAPTISTE VILLENAVE has been a lecturer in film studies at the University of Caen Normandy since 2012, and a member of the LASLAR research team (Letters, Performing Arts, Romance Languages, UR 4256). A former student of the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm, he is the author of the book Le Nouvel Hollywood (1967-1980). A reinvention of the point of view (2022). He has also co-edited two collective works, Le Regard à l’œuvre. Lecteurs de l’image, spectateurs du texte (2014) and L’image, le secret (2020), as well as a journal issue (Double Jeu, n° 11, 2014, American cinema and theater: influences, relations, transfers). He has also published articles and contributions on Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Watkins, Wim Wenders, Alan J. Pakula, etc. His research work is currently focused on the question of formal violence, its nature, its functions and its sensory and emotional repercussions.

Published

2025-01-19

How to Cite

Villenave, B. (2025). Surgissements et bombardements d’images : les flash-backs post-traumatiques au cinéma. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai - Dramatica, 69(2), 95–115. Retrieved from https://dramatica.ro/index.php/j/article/view/324