A Body Without a Face: The Disorientation of Trauma in Phoenix (2014) and New Holocaust Cinema

Abstract

This article analyses Christian Petzold’s exemplary 2014 film Phoenix, tracking a new development in Holocaust cinema that focuses on phenomenological narratives of embodied experience of trauma. It examines the film through the cinematic representation of the traumatised body. While there is no dearth of scholarly inquiries into the relationship of trauma and the body and how it is mediated through film, these are often more concerned with the way in which the body becomes a projection screen for repressed or collective trauma and less about the lived conditions of individual trauma. The present analysis offers a rethinking of the traumatised body as one beset by the condition of disorientation. As a methodological guide, it turns to Sara Ahmed’s pivotal phenomenological study Queer Phenomenology (2006).