Film, healing and the body in crisis: a twenty-first century aesthetics of hope and reparation

Abstract

Throughout its history, the filmic medium has invariably operated as a virtual ‘looking-glass’ and recuperative space in which cultural crises can be safely negotiated, reconciled or reworked. This essay is concerned with the question of how the filmic medium might resemble an object of hope, especially when brought into contact with object relations theory, and its meaning in the context of recent developments in film theory which have sought to question cinema's ontological status and the epistemology of moving image culture. This essay considers how trauma is embedded in the very fabric of the image, specifically questioning the implications of acts of hopefulness and embodied gestures of mediation and reconciliation in film. A specific sense of embodied recovery, recuperation and futurity emanates from the films discussed in this article. Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir/Vals Im Bashir (2003) and Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces/Los abrazos rotos (2009) serve to raise questions about healing in contemporary cinema and invite the excavation of what I call cinema's ‘hopeful’ gestures, of which a framework of embodied film theory is most relevant.