Post-conflict cinema: Beyond truth and reconciliation?

Abstract

This essay reflects on the limits of representation by interrogating the extent to which cinema can be a useful medium for dealing with post-conflict situations. The claim is that films depicting such situations are most effective where they do not try to ‘represent’ or re-enact the conflict and its consequences but instead find specific filmic forms that can accommodate radically incompatible realities within the same frame of reference. Taking the case of German films dealing with the trans-generational memory of the Holocaust, the essay discusses different strategies of what the author calls ‘guilt management,’ that is, negotiating the shifting boundaries between perpetrators and victims, in order to initiate an otherwise impossible dialogue.