Representation of a Traumatic Event: Diamonds of the Night (1964)

Adapted from A Loaf of Bread, the story of Arnost Lustig, Diamonds of the Night, [Démanty Noci] (1964) is the first feature of Czech New Wave director, Jan Nemec. The film is about two Jewish boys who escape from Nazi transport train and search for some food to live. Through the end they are caught by German home-guards and they prepare to execute them. Yet, by the last scene, the film left its path to the audiences i.e. it is ambiguous since the film does not show what happened in reality;  they may or may not be executed. By the all elements of the film such as the signs and transition of memory, the representations of psychological conditions of Jews who threat to have trauma and both social and personal memory of past, even if  Diamonds of the Night has Bunuelian surrealism in a sense, it can be analyzed by trauma theory (and yes, the examination of whether surrealism has traumatic aspect or not is not subject of this analysis). As Radstone argues that “Nonetheless, the notion of victimhood, the emphasis on history and power(lessness), the anxiety about memory, its ambiguous relation to an inner psychic reality and to an outer, public (or cinematic) representation, all tend to align trauma theory” (195), that is why I’d like to write about this Eastern European after war film which I regard, by means of its theme, as it can be one of the best instances for analysis of trauma theory of screen studies. Also, by having a few dialogues and emphasizing physical and psychological conditions of boys, the film itself shows the effects of Concentration Camps to human life. Thus, it means that the film mentions both personal and social history.

Diamonds of the Night, as a matter of fact, seems to have timeless story but indicates time by means of signs of memory such as letters KL – Konzentrations Lager, (Concentration Camp) – on coats of boys in order to make us to understand goings-on in the film. Like trauma theorists’ expressions that of opening up to the memory of events as personal memories, autobiographies, testimonies of family history, the film makes audiences to recollect memories of events by providing it in a timeless zone in terms of hallucinations or dreams of characters. In this sense, if audiences are not aware of the effects of signs of past like why their hallucinations causes flashbacks, they cannot see the ‘real’ trauma. Thus, signs of past, for Diamonds of the Night, especially their boots and coats with letters KL, provide us to understand their psychological conditions  in the sense that they have traumatic personal history connected social realm or history.

Nemec creates a world that the world of war, death and escaping, in which words has lost their meanings; in this world, the hallucinations of characters shows how traumatic their previous life is.

Since the hallucination of the one of  them is also traumatic event, as Radstone also mentions, it can be said that distinction between psychic time of boy and chronological time seems suspended since that traumatic event links other memories as if they happens at the same time. There may not be any distinction between them. For the memory of traumatic event is different from memory of everyday event, it causes to speculate truthfulness of the recollected events in the understanding of traumatic cinema. However, Diamond of the Night is not the traumatic cinema that approaches the past through an unusual admixture of emotional affect, metonymic symbolism and cinematic flashbacks (214)

Just as flashback of our memories that re-collect past events like fragment, Jan Nemec, by using flashbacks, emphasizes KL and connected it both characters and audiences memory. In this sense, flashbacks of this film, reference to Tourim expressions, in the context of trauma theory, do not appear abrupt flashbacks in films of mass distribution (207).

Also, Radstone comes to point that “Hence, the emphasis on temporality and spatiality but ‘displaced’ in relation to event: “trauma” would then be the name for a referentiality that can no longer be placed in a particular time of place, but whose time-space-place referentiality is nonetheless posited, in fact, doubled and displaced relation to an ‘event’” (200) I believe that trauma theory, rather than limits us to time and space or determinates events in their limited relations in that space and time, it provides to integration of psychological conditions to physical “realm” so that we can take timelessness of some films as a reference point. In order to emphasize true reflections of the events such as Holocaust without using any determined reference point, namely, by not manipulating the traumatic event, the film itself reflects trauma of protagonist with hallucinations and repeated scenes which is not far from realism at the end.

I actually would like to say that it is not easy to evaluate trauma cinema in the context of film itself since it is also about the issue of “who makes a film for what”. At least, in the context of Diamonds of the Night, I do not believe that it makes false memories of true experience which can be easily manipulated in terms of memory. Thus, by being one of the best and different example of  concentration camps film, Diamonds of the Night is not a traumatic cinema but it is the film that can be analyzed by traumatic theory in a sense.

You can watch the whole film via youtube. All part of it exists as related videos. It takes 63 minutes.

And you can also check the book, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,(1967 in English) which is Borowski’s collection of concentration camp stories related to the film in order to understand how traumatic events people have lived.

Sinem Aydınlı

Body and representation

A few days ago I came across a video of Grace Jones song “Corporate Cannibal”. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgMn2OJmx3w

It made me think about the notion of “body” once again. (Although this is a music video not a film, I think its worth thinking on.) It distorts the image in such a fashion that the body becomes something else. It is almost liquified. The distortions are quite shocking at first but as we get used to them, it begins to create another effect. As we normalize the distorted body, we begin to see the synchronizations of the distortions with the beats and this alien, liquified body becomes “familiar”. Yet we still keep our distance to it since we cannot predict its actions. Boldly enough, the images gets closer and closer and at some point we only see fractions of Grace Jone’s mouth or eye. We are aware that there is actually a solid body in front of the camera but this feeling withers away after a while. This “liquified body” begins to represent its own distortion. This represents a realm we cannot experience. Still though we experience the effects of this body and its relation to us. From this point of view the distorted body (accompanied by strange and creepy words such as: “pleased to have you on my plate…your meet is sweet to me…”) looks quite annoying. The image of the body turns back to itself: now it only represents itself. The realm put before us is so sterile that our only reference is the distortion and the distorted body itself.

Alev Değim

Struggle for Understanding Deleuze 2

Why is it difficult to read philosophical texts?

Prima facie, this question may seem irrelevant as a means of beginning a response paper for a course such as Film & Genre, but while I was reading the texts taken from Cinema 2: The Time Image by Deleuze, the question above – which is an unceasing one for me – rises up again.

Everyone with a piece good luck of meeting a philosophical text can experience the congested feeling in his/her chest. If the experience is intense enough, it is inevitable to be confronted with such a question and when the question is once asked, it will be very difficult to act as if it is not. So it is expected quite easily that being plausible or implausible, everyone that undergoes the process above has his/her own set of answers.

At this point, I will not list all the answers in my own set, but I want to emphasize one of them. Take the first 13-line of Deleuze’s text with the title Cinema, body ad brain, thought as an illustration. Although I acknowledge – because of their distinctive linguistic styles, vocabularies, and metaphors as a part of their philosophies – the fact that it is more difficult to make sense of texts by 20th century French philosophers such as Baudrillard, Derrida and Deleuze, present text of Deleuze seems to be a plausible illustration for my points.

In that 13-line part of Deleuze’s text, Deleuze does not use any term which is specific to philosophy. If we skim the recurrent words in the text, we see words such as body, thought, life and category with which everyone is familiar in his/her daily life. Although this familiarity with this vocabulary seems to assist the reader in appreciating the text, I argue that this familiarity with these words is a transparent obstacle between the reader and the text. This familiarity is the origin of illusion that makes the reader to think that s/he can easily permeate into the text.

Since – apart from neologism – philosophers do not have distinctive words, they have to make use of the same words that the readers also use, but with different connotations. These different connotations are the building blocks of the obstacles separating the reader from the text, because the readers also have their own sets of connotations stemming from their own history with these words. If the readers do not – at least partially – put their own sets of meanings into brackets before approaching the text – because of the mismatch between different connotations originating from the same words – they would face the transparent obstacle. Since the connotations which a philosopher attributes to a word are the means of embodying his/her abstract thoughts and of conveying his/her vast readings of it, if the reader can manage to uncover connotations some of which are explicit and some of which are immanent in the text, s/he can make the transparent obstacle visible, though s/he cannot completely get rid of it.

In our daily lives, body is not a subject-matter about which we think so much. Perhaps the reason for this lack is the fact that we often think through body. Body along with its extension to life provides the medium that we think through and this close relationship with our bodies may conceal its importance in the manners we think. Anyway almost everybody has own sets of meanings which are related with the words body and life. But Deleuze’s usage of these words may not be match with what others think about them and this situation stands as an obstacle in front of one who wants to understand him. With his/her meanings sticked to a concept, it is not easy for someone to grasp what Deleuze says via this word in his own understanding. So before trying to grasp what Deleuze wants to mean via words such as body and life, I think, beginning from what body and life mean for Deleuze is a more proper way.

Deleuze does not see the body as an obstacle separating thought from itself. What does ‘itself’ mean at this context? Is it thought or thinking or both? What about the body?

The story of body as an obstacle can be traced back to Descartes, even Plato. But the term body is also reminiscent of Spinoza as well as categories of thought being reminiscent of Kant, and life which is of Bergson. I think that Deleuze’s reading of body is immersed in at least Spinoza, Kant and Bergson. So such a sentence as ‘Give me a body then’ can become a formula of philosophical reversal. Reading the body not as an obstacle separating us from thinking but as a force enforcing us to think is the source of the reversal in philosophy.

Life is unthought in the sense that it is what is concealed from thought, argues Deleuze. And the body, I think, is the intersection between one that thinks and life, through which categories of thought will be thrown into categories of life. What are the categories of life then? They are the attitudes of body. Attitudes or postures of body are tiredness and waiting which are related with the before and the after, respectively. I think this relation enables the attitudes of body to become also the categories of life. Although Deleuze talks about three attitudes, namely tiredness, waiting, and despair, later on he states that tiredness is both the first and the last one, because it is tiredness that contains the before and the after simultaneously. A thinking-thing learns what a non-thinking thing is capable of and this is called thinking by Deleuze.

M. Kemal İz

Movement-Time-Image: Struggle for Understanding Deleuze 1

From the titles of two books that Deleuze wrote on cinema, i.e. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), it is not difficult to understand that French philosopher’s main concern in cinema is image. Beginning with Plato, with different connotations such as representation, experience, phenomenon, consciousness, simulacrum, subjectivity etc., image always happens to be one of the main and crucial topics of philosophy.

Through being both an essential part of cinema and crucial topic of philosophy, image is like a capstone by which Deleuze conjoins his views on cinema with his philosophical claims. For Deleuze, cinema undergoing a transformation from the movement-image to the time-image reveals the true nature of time (Trifonova, 2007, p. 221). At this point the question arises: What is the true nature of the time (at least for Deleuze)? Omitting this grand crucial question for a great while, we can go on saying that according to Deleuze, cinema also transforms philosophy via offering a cinematic form such as time-image. In this way he wants to conjoin cinema and philosophy. By the means of time-image, cinema demands a new mode of thinking for both itself and life. Since the couple of movement and time can be seen as essential for the couple of cinema and life, through that new mode of thinking which cinema demands based on the time-image, new perspectives can be developed concerning the becoming in life. But at this point let’s turn two cinematic forms that Deleuze focus on his books, viz. movement-image and time-image.

The roots of the movement-image can be traced back to early cinema, i.e. the pre-WW2 cinema and archetype of movement-image can be found in the Hollywood genre film emphasizing movement and action. This emphasis on movement is important, because in that type of cinema, time is also conveyed through movement. In other words, time is determined and measured by movement. Via camera angles skimming across a visual field, movement is expressed and via this expression of movement, time is presented indirectly, i.e. determination of time based on the movement itself. So “The movement-image is a form of spatialized cinema” says Totaro, which means that as in the everyday life, time is thought as a grand link connecting movements and it used to track changes (Totaro, 1999 and Colebrook, 2006, p. 29).

On the other hand, image-time is a characteristic of modern cinema, i.e. post-WW2 cinema and roots of it can be found in the European modernist or art film. In this type, time is presented directly. So in the movement-image, characters that are situated in a narrative content, perceive the events around them and take action based on these perceptions. But in the time-image, characters cannot react in a direct way. In other words, in the movement-image which time is expressed indirectly, characters react in a direct fashion, but in movement-image, although time is expressed directly, characters do not seem to react in a direct fashion (Totaro, 1999).

For Deleuze, power of cinema lies in this transformation from the movement-image to the time-image. By the means of time-image as a cinematographic form, a new kind of perception, i.e. acentered perception is offered (Trifonova, 2007, p. 227). In our daily life, we perceive things through imposing concepts on them, which suit our interests. But camera as an eye with no interest, i.e. a camera that does not organize images from a fixed point as a human eye, conveys the image in its entirety. “But the cinema is not simply the camera: it is montage” acknowledges Deleuze, and montage reminds me the subjectivity, in other words when the montage is taken into consideration, it is not very difficult to talk about a point of view, but Deleuze responds: “And if from the point of view of human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one” (1989, p. 81). So Deleuze seems to secure the disinterestedness of camera. But these two broad concepts, viz. movement-image and time-image, their realization in cinema and how Deleuze secures the disinterestedness of camera are still puzzling for me.

Colebrook, C. (2006). Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.

Totaro, D. (1999). Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project (Part 1: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image). Off Screen. [On-line]. Available: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze1.html

Trifonova, T. (2007). The Image in French Philosophy. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

M. Kemal İz

Mix of thinking

“Decisions that we can understand as the thinking of the film” said Frampton.


As spectators, we understand those decisions as images from the eyes of directors and producers. We may be aware of these images, may be not. But some people think and re-think on those images with the relation to their own world. If we look the films different than “thinking”, we can always find consciously enjoyed activities.


Do we have to focus in films to think? or there are may be films that have more than we think. The perception and the attention of people changes but always the focused or unfocused person has thoughts about it even film does not match with him/her.


I do not think that every spectator can easily think on a film like they have a film mind. Because we know that there are lots of people that they go films to separate from everyday life but besides them, there are also some people that they can not stop the relation of themselves from the reality of films. In these two circumstances, there are stimulants that the spectator is aware of or not. We know, the stimulating thing is the moving image but we have to examine these two situations in that how do those people think about the images they saw?


The words of Kubrick; “Watching a film is like having a daydream” are suitale for the people who watches film as separate themselves from the world. But all the images we saw, gives us experiences about the film. Experience is series of filtered thoughts and we all experience the life and even the films, differently. Thinking a film needs mental process that a person gained the experience from a film. Frampton clarifies the film experiences that “this is not much more than saying we experience film using the same brain that we use to experience reality” and we can say that understanding the reality is different from the understanding a film. But I do not know how much of the understanding reality is suitable for daydreamers?


But it can not be rejected that films help to create new ways of thinking from the real life. Filmgoers does not need imagination, they experience the films buy their perception on images. Before the cinema industry developed that much, there were lots of books that people tried to improve their imagination skills. By the developments, now we have moving images that may be makes us a bit lazy on thinking written sources, but it improves our perception may be more than imagination.


Absolutely, the perception has a direct relation with our thoughts because it is also related with our mode of thinking while watching. We are always selecting and choosing, so “our thinking chooses a way of joining the film”.


As a conclusion, we have just experiencing films to get meaningful thoughts. Furthermore, the people who feel the film like real life, I believe, they do not have a thought at the end of the film because they never experienced it as a film, they live and feel it.


Pelin Gezginer