Hiroshima Mon Amour Research Articles

EXPLORING THE INTERPLAY OF MEMORY AND POETRY IN RIVE GAUCHE CINEMA: A STUDY OF MURIEL AND HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

This article examines the interrelations between memory and poetry, focusing on the films Hiroshima mon amour and Muriel, directed by Alain Resnais. It explores how memory and poetry are intertwined in the narrative and formal construction of these films, using logical principles shared between the two fields. The analysis of fragmentation, invention and associationism present in the cinematic narratives, reveals how memory and poetry influence personal identity and artistic creation. These films serve as outstanding examples of how cinema can explore the depths of human consciousness through the conscious use of memory and poetry.

Rupture of Body and Mind in Hiroshima Mon Amour:

Alain Resnais has devised a narrative of fractured identity, trauma, and incommunicability in Hiroshima Mon Amour. With its minimal aesthetics, intricate movement and jettisoned conventionality, the film becomes a new map for theorizations in literary, cultural, and psychoanalytic spaces. This study uses these spaces for a phenomenological inquisition of “rupture” by positioning the subjects of the narrative within them, thus creating a spectrum for identity analysis as well. By delineating the characters as fragments and totalities, it strives to provide a critical reading of trauma and the separation it postulates in the corporeal identity. Kristevan conceptualizations of “abject” and “melancholia,” Freudo-Lacanian postulation of “spatial geometry,” and Kantian “spatiality” are used as modalities for the demarcation of new narratives within literary, social,cultural, and epistemological dialectics. The study further aims to structuralize rupture as generating new cartographies of spatiality while hinging on the film’s narrative framework of storytelling through the body and the mind.

Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images and the Nature of Time

This article explores the affinities between film and philosophy by returning to a shared meditation on death and the nature of time. Death has been considered the muse of philosophy and can also be considered the muse of film-philosophy. But what does it mean to say that to film-philosophise is to learn to die, or a kind of training for dying? Film is an artistic object that reminds us of death’s inevitability; it is a meditation on the transient and finite nature of time. Films as diverse as Mizoguchi’s Tales of Ugetsu, Resnais’s Hiroshima mon Amour, and Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light take an uncanny approach to the subject, expressing the paradoxical coexistence of life and death and of different temporal dimensions. This article explores the philosophical concept of the death-image and time through a Deleuzian approach to cinema, meditating on the flashback, the coexistence of the present and the past, and the emergence of a new type of Lazarean character – one who returns from the dead. The article aims to clarify not simply death’s unquestionable omnipresence in film but also cinema’s role as a contemporary version of the trope of memento mori.

MARGUERITE DURAS E O TESTEMUNHO DO IMPOSSÍVEL EM HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

A couple of lovers meet in Hiroshima in August 1957. He is Japanese. She, a French actress, is in town to shoot a film about peace. Lying in bed in a hotel, she tells everything she saw in Hiroshima, the museums, the images, the survivors, the tracks. To which he replies, emphatically: Tu n'as rien vu to Hiroshima. Thus, she starts Hiroshima Mon Amour, text by Marguerite Duras, written as a script for the homonymous film by Alain Resnais, in which she creates a dialogue between these two characters, marked in different ways by the horrors of war. Her writing reveals the impossibility of talking about catastrophes like the one in Hiroshima – and all one can do is talk about this impossibility. Duras highlights the unavoidable character of the tragedy while, throughout the narrative, her character tries to elaborate on her own war traumas, provoked by the interest of her Japanese lover. Our objective, therefore, is to analyze how Duras' text builds a testimony of the impossible, stretching the limits of literature, and cinema, beyond an attempt at representation. In order to do so, we dialogue with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, whose theories about testimony and literature, or even testimonial literature, help to deepen this reflection.

The haunted Soviet landscape and nuclear melancholy in Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Gordon’s There Will Be No Leave Today (1959)

ABSTRACT A haunting past dominates the work of European filmmakers in the post-war period, and this article addresses the hauntological spectre of war in There Will Be No Leave Today, a very early film of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in partnership with Alexander Gordon. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s Hauntology, Julia Kristeva’s abjection and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘out-of-field’ theory as a methodology to examine ideas of haunting and abjection in Tarkovsky and Gordon’s fledgling film in relation to the interconnection between spaces and their histories in the work. It also makes connections with contemporary cinema in Europe and as such explores Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour. I examine how the featured cinematic works compare and contrast with Tarkovsky and Gordon’s own stylistic vision and how the landscape in the films is a space of memory and historical trauma.

Le langage des murs qui enferment dans L'Étranger de Camus et Hiroshima mon amour de Duras

Meursault de L’Étranger et « Elle » d’Hiroshima mon amour sont des personnages tragiques qui, comme poussés par un fatum antique, ont commis un crime, crime de sang ou crime d’amour, pour lequel ils doivent payer. Tandis que le premier est accusé d’insensibilité et condamné à mort parce que la justice voit en lui un « monstre moral », le deuxième est accusé de « collaboration horizontale » et puni par la « justice populaire ». Dès lors, enfermés, dans une cellule pour le premier, alternativement dans une chambre et une cave pour le second, ces deux êtres cherchent les visages et voix d’amours passées. La quête de ces visages et voix d’un monde révolu qui font souffrir les protagonistes par leur disparition va laisser la place chez les deux personnages à un état d’apaisement allant permettre, au héros comme à l’héroïne, de se réconcilier avec leur passé. Tandis que Meursault, qui a changé en prison, va redécouvrir sa mère et finalement comprendre la volonté de celle-ci de reprendre goût à la vie à l’asile de vieillards, « Elle », guérie par le Japonais, va retrouver un équilibre sentimental.

Trauma Narratives in Hiroshima Mon Amour

This paper is based on the film Hiroshima Mon Amour,analyzing it through Vickroy’s trauma narratives.It aims to give an analysis of its plot,characterization,and narrative discourse in relation to the fragmentation,dissociation of the character’s identity,the capacity to produce symbols,and the composition of trauma incarnate.

Too painful to forget, too painful to remember: Ashes of memory in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’sHiroshima mon amour(1959) and Duras’sLa douleur(1985)

This essay threads the striking images of the couple’s embrace at the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour through an examination of the film’s exploration of memory and victim and perpetrator traumas. Duras and Resnais render the lovers almost indistinguishable as, they hold each other, encased in ash. As they embrace, something gently falls on them, encrypts them, isolates them from their surroundings but simultaneously embeds them in their respective histories. If, for Derrida, ash becomes the paradigm for the trace, we can see how this image becomes paradigmatic for memory’s unspooling threads; the film rejects an either/or memory or forgetting when it is a question of traumatic pasts. By re-reading Hiroshima mon amour through the powerful metaphorics of ash and against echoes of the international and dramatic rise in racist discourse, an increased anxiety about nuclear catastrophe, and a return to Duras’s wartime “memoir” La douleur, I show that these texts’ representation of memory and the rotating axes of perpetration and victimization open up larger questions about the trauma of both sides of the culpability line. This reading reveals the fluid border between victimization and perpetration in ways that help explain how both victims and perpetrators are traumatized. Interpreting the film and memoir in this way helps to blaze a path to envisioning an understanding of committing crimes as itself inflicting (self-imposed) trauma. The most optimistic possible implication (one that is completely unlikely) is that if perpetration is also viewed as traumatizing then perpetrators would no longer fling nuclear bombs at the racialized other and expect to sleep well.

O testemunho da catástrofe em Hiroshima mon amour

O artigo busca realizar uma investigação a respeito da possibilidade da memória e representação da catástrofe a partir da obra cinematográfica Hiroshima mon amour (1959), roteirizada por Marguerite Duras e dirigida por Alain Resnais. Partiremos de uma breve introdução acerca do que pode ser definido como literatura de teor testemunhal, que desponta principalmente após as Grandes Guerras Mundiais no século XX, buscando em seguida situar a obra de Marguerite Duras, e o filme especificamente, sob o prisma testemunhal. Finalmente, mergulharemos na questão dos limites de possibilidade e impossibilidade de se testemunhar Hiroshima.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

It’s funny how we can remember events from 60 years ago as if they were yesterday. I was in college when I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour, at the time a path-breaking film of the French New Wave. A French...

Negotiating autobiographical truth: Embodying sensation in the narrative screenplay

This article examines how screenwriting adaptations of written material speak of levels of truth-telling within various autobiographical texts. These include literary adaptations by Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and The North China Lover (1992), and the autobiographical filmmaking of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon (1946) and The Very Eye of Night (1958). I argue that descriptions of tactile sensation necessarily remain codified in screenplays, their connotations left hanging even when the filmmaking process often falls short of depicting final truth. What remains is an unresolved problematic perception standing in for an experience. Our own experience of cinema can invariably be one wherein neither words nor images appear, or reappear, as to how they felt for the screenwriter. Is this a wholly negative situation, or merely the continuation of mediation, remediation and the contingent transposition of one medium into another? Drawing on examples from the screenwriting and/or filmmaking of Duras and Deren, I discuss why the screenwriter always writes in personal terms (because the personal is inescapable), and that this is a personal experience of imagination through the writing. Moreover, I test the idea that screenwriting only emerges in a form that we can recognize as truth, through its depictions of tactility and its representations of sensation.

Intertextuality and Mise en Abyme in Nobuhiro Suwa’s H Story and A Perfect Couple. Between European Modernity and Japan

Nobuhiro Suwa, often called “the most French of Japanese directors”, has a complex relationship with European cinematic modernity. His two feature films H Story (2001) and A Perfect Couple (2005) can provide useful case studies, as they were created in dialogue with two key references of that modernity: Hiroshima mon amour (1959, Alain Resnais) and Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1954, Roberto Rossellini), respectively. Both films tend to confront and gloss their previous pairs, but they are also continuations of their concerns and their aesthetical discoveries. The presence of intertextuality elements connecting those films, as well as the use of myse en abyme structures are deeply analyzed in this article to attain a greater understanding on how this process of transcultural dialogue works. Besides, both films exemplify different ways of developing the references on which they are built, namely deconstruction for H Story and reconstruction for A Perfect Couple.

A fifty-two-year love affair: rewatching Hiroshima mon amour after Fukushima

The film Hiroshima mon amour (1959), one of the first major Franco-Japanese co-productions, was released the same year in Japan with the title A Twenty-four-hour love affair. The Japanese title’s emphasis on time presents a move away from the film’s historical and political particularity as well as from the space evoked by the name “Hiroshima.” In watching Hiroshima mon amour after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, the film’s nuclear background, often seen as peripheral to the love story, comes to the fore. This article proposes a post-Fukushima viewing of Hiroshima mon amour that uses the chronotope of the nuclear to analyze the film’s nuclear spatiotemporality and draws parallels to recent Franco-Japanese films about Fukushima. By considering Hiroshima mon amour in the context of Mette Hjort’s definition of “affinitive transnationalism,” this article argues that Alain Resnais’s film can be understood today as an instance of solidarity as well as an opportunity for implicit criticism of Fra...

Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory by Yugin Teo

Reviewed by: Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory by Yugin Teo Amit Marcus Yugin Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xi + 176 pp. Memory is one of the most discussed topics in both fictional narratives and the literary and critical theory of the last decades. The reasons for the fascination of many contemporary writers with memory are almost as variable as the work of memory itself: the intricate relations between memory and history (as well as historical writing); memory as a crucial element for the development, the retention, and the effacement of self-identity; and memory as a fundamental factor in the stream of consciousness. Perhaps more emphatically than any other cognitive process, memory is evidence of the construction (rather than the reflection) of reality by the human mind. Yugin Teo’s book Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory chimes in with this cultural and literary interest in memory. Teo’s approach to Ishiguro’s fictional narratives is basically thematic. Accordingly, his argument is structured on three major (but not necessarily sequential) phases in memory work: forgetting, remembering, and, eventually, a release of the unfortunate consequences of memory. He emphasizes the interrelations between Ishiguro’s insights concerning memory in his fictional writings and the philosophical ideas of Paul Ricoeur, especially in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and The Course of Recognition (2005). Teo’s interdisciplinary approach also extends to film: he compares the (limitations of) representation of trauma and loss in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) with Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982). A major topic of the first part of the book is narrative unreliability, which is linked to the question of the very (un)trustworthiness of memory. Teo claims that the unreliable narrators of some of Ishiguro’s fictional narratives struggle to reconcile past memories with present circumstances and discover that the complicated process of remembering and retelling events leads to a less accurate and less objective version of the past. The distortion of memory results in part from self-deception (see also Marcus 2006). Following Kathleen Wall (1994), Teo claims that no narrator — or any human being — is entirely reliable, coherent, and rational. Self-reflexive readers will recognize not only the narrator’s flawed memory but also the limitations of their own memory, which is impaired by biases, mistakes, and delusions. They will, in turn, realize that they are neither superior to the unreliable narrator nor less susceptible to memory flaws. Such a recognition bridges the cognitive and moral gap between reader and text and causes the reader to empathize with the emotions and experiences of the narrator. However, Teo does not seem to differentiate the reader’s inaccurate memory of the story told by Ishiguro’s narrator — an inaccuracy that is the product of a perplexed and perplexing rhetoric designed by the implied author — from the biased memory any reader (or person) has of events and experiences from his or her own life. [End Page 193] The first part of the book continues with an exploration of another type of forgetting related to a repressed traumatic past, which can only be represented through a fragmentary narrative. The last section of this chapter is devoted to collective and national forgetting. Teo contends that some of Ishiguro’s protagonists (and other characters) distance themselves from accountability and are motivated by the wish to promote a version of history that disclaims the responsibility of a nation for the atrocities it inflicted on others. The second part of the book begins with a discussion of remembering as the recognition of one’s own self through narration. In this respect, too, the fictional narrator may trigger self-reflection in the reader by means of identification and empathy. Recognition, however, does not necessarily alter the narrator’s or reader’s worldview. In this part Teo also discusses testimony, based on Ricoeur’s argument that memory can be challenged but not eradicated. Following Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), he argues that the injunction to forget “becomes absurd as well as reprehensible when it is uttered by — or on behalf of — the perpetrator” (77). This is illustrated by the testimony of the clones...

Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement by Daniel Just

Reviewed by: Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement by Daniel Just Banu Helvacioglu Just, Daniel. Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 217pp. Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement analyzes the political and ethical implications of a particular literary style, characterized by “the aesthetics of blankness” and a narrative strategy of “exhaustion,” “weakness,” and “slowness,” that Daniel Just attributes to Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras. Just’s main argument is built upon two axes, the first of which is an analysis of the historical and political setting in France. The second, larger axis comprises a theoretical exploration of language’s indeterminate nature, the relationship between literary forms and politically charged times, and the prevalent view in the mid-1950s that a strong, stable, centered self was the kernel of communicating meaning and that work was the existential mode of relating to others. Just’s historical and theoretical analyses center on Jean Paul Sartre’s changing convictions. He develops his argument in the context of Sartre’s initial emphasis on committed literature in his seminal 1947 essay “What is Literature?” and in his later singular commitment to political action, and rejection of literary writing as work. The theoretical ramifications of Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, along with Blanchot’s, Camus’s, and Duras’s literary styles, appear “disengaged” in comparison to Sartre’s “committed literature.” Examining the literary responses to Sartre by Barthes, Blanchot, and Camus, Just focuses on the political and intellectual setting of mid-1950s France in the midst of the Algerian War and the role of the French state in the international arena. He also notes the remnants of WWII and the political turmoil of the May 1968 events in France in Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour and Destroy, She Said, respectively. At times drawing on works by Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Bataille, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida, Just’s analysis is based on specific criticisms concerning the dichotomy between “literary intransitivity” and “direct political engagement.” Seen from these critical perspectives, Just unhinges the implied associations of disengaged literature from apathetic isolation, slow narrative style from laziness, and the weakness and austerity in novelistic communication from political escapism. This book’s contribution to literary criticism is two-fold. First, it offers a meticulous reading of these authors’ works in an attempt to analyze both the stylistic and thematic elements and the writer’s political and ethical responsibilities. Second, Just problematizes particular dimensions [End Page 190] of disengaged literature in order to emphasize its critically affirmative tendency in ethical terms and its difference in aesthetically defined politics at a time of political turmoil. In Just’s analytical framework, there is an intrinsic bond between the political and ethical. Yet, theoretical arguments fall short in substantiating the claims on ethics and aesthetics. From passing references, one gets the impression that all claims concerning the ethical implications of disengaged literature are based on an operative definition of ethics as the relationship with self and (the absolute otherness of) the other (as evil). The main argument tends to be too eager to draw an ethical unanimity and a forced aesthetic codification among the authors in question. The organization of chapters and the selection of certain texts over others raise some questions. While each author is covered under two separate chapters, in Chapter 1, Barthes’s theory of exhausted literature stands alone, leaving a crucial question unattended: To what extent is the literary style of Barthes’s autobiographical and travel notes compatible with the other authors’ styles? The sole reference to Writing Degree Zero along with Barthes’s other works on photography and film seems to be instrumental in limiting the theoretical debate not only to Barthes’ disagreement with Sartre, but also to his independent stance in relation to Marxists and Structuralists at the time. Just’s emphasis on historicity, which in one instance is presented as an unfortunate coincidence with the publication of Beckett’s Trilogy novels (35), however, fails to acknowledge Barthes’s independence as an author in his own right as Mourning Diary, Empire of...

‘My Body was Aflame with His Memory’: War, Gender and Colonial Ghosts in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

This article argues that historicising the iconic 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour reveals a different set of meanings that most scholars have overlooked. As France found itself embroiled in the brutal and bloody Algerian War of Independence, many started reflecting on the meaning and aftereffects of the Second World War. Despite its anti‐colonial universalist humanism, Hiroshima remains haunted by colonial ghosts and fantasies of post‐war ‘Asia’ where Asian female bodies are passive and Asian male bodies only echo other European male bodies. Ultimately, sexual and racial differences organise the film's narrative of war and canonises a Eurocentric version of ‘history’. The film's melodramatic love story renders invisible the ways gender and sexuality shape understandings of violence, wars, and violated bodies. Against Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's intentions, the love story allows the remembering and forgetting of a (French) national history that only the female character embodies. Only the French woman stands in for subjectivity, memory and trauma, rendering everything else secondary. Once read as a historical text, the film illustrates the limits and ambivalences of post‐war anti‐colonial humanist political imagination.

Marguerite Duras: le cinéma

In 2014 the Centre Pompidou mounted the centenary exhibition Duras Song: portrait d'une écriture. In the library, a Duras space was created. Its outside walls were hung with images and texts about her political commitments and historical positioning. The interior featured her literary, theatrical, and cinematic works, with scenes from her films and from interviews projected at intervals on different wall spaces. The exhibition accompanied a retrospective of her films, which opened with a sell-out screening of La Musica (dir. by Duras and Paul Seban, 1967). This new entry into Duras's work, and vivid appreciation of her filmmaking as well as her writing, is marked too in this excellent Études cinématographiques volume. The first pieces, an Introduction and a further essay, ‘Métissage cinémato-graphique’, by Jean Cléder, and an essay of contextual discussion, ‘Marguerite Duras de la littérature au cinéma’, by Claude Murcia, think through some of the questions about the relation between writing and filmmaking for Duras. An essay by Michelle Royer marks a lovely departure, illuminating the sensory experience of becoming immersed in a Duras film such as India Song (1975). Comparisons with the work of Philippe Grandrieux are fascinating, as are references outwards to Richard Cytowic and to Deleuze. For Royer, Duras ‘demande aux spectateurs de renoncer au désir de contrôler l'expérience spectatorielle et de préférer l'intensité de l'émotion à la démarche rationnelle’ (p. 49). Royer's words remind me of the experience of responding to the seemingly unbidden appearance of Duras extracts, followed by intervals of darkness, in Duras Song. Like the exhibition, essays in the volume are interested, in varying ways, in the relation between history, living, and writing. Najet Limam-Tnani's suggestive piece on autobiography juxtaposes a text from Duras about her love for Gérard Jarlot — their days in a hotel on the banks of the Loire; their sorties at night to find a bar — with the encounters in Hiroshima mon amour (dir. by Alain Resnais, 1959). Intimate and public history inform one another here. In an excellent essay on Les Mains négatives (1978), Césarée (1978), and the Aurélia Steiner films (also discussed by Alice Delmotte-Halter), Didier Coureau reminds us that Duras alluded to the drowning of Algerians in the Seine in October 1961 as she described her own obsessive filming of the river in Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979). These essays dwell on these historical locations and displacements, as they also explore Duras's home spaces, where Sophie Charlin writes about the house at Neauphle-le-Château in Nathalie Granger (1972), and further still on the cinematic spaces of Duras's work. Coureau's piece ends with a section, ‘Vers le noir’, which looks ahead to two final essays, by Laure Bergala and Sébastian Ronceray respectively, on ‘l'image noire’ and the blank/black screen. The latter aligns Duras beautifully with Stan Brakhage. The volume closes with three interviews conducted by Jean Cléder with filmmakers Benoît Jacquot, Bruno Nuytten, and Michelle Porte. There is scant reference to anglophone scholarship on Duras — citation of Leslie Hill, Martin Crowley, Renate Günther, and Laura McMahon would have been welcome — but, this qualm apart, this is a coruscating volume.

The Impact of Photographs in Hiroshima mon amour

Alain Resnais embeds a series of photographs within Hiroshima mon amour that reflect central considerations of the film such as memory, commemoration, and fragmentation. The majority of the photographs found here show the bomb and its effects on human beings, bridging the personal and the political. Their presence also sets up a subtle contrast between film and still photography that resonates with a number of central contrasts within Hiroshima mon amour: between past and present, between a public cataclysm and a personal tragedy, between forgetting and remembering, and motion and stillness.

Introduction: Essays in Memory of Philip Watts

The many echoes linking Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1958) serve as a point of departure for investigation of Haneke’s debt to the earlier film, to its stars (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant), and to the New Wave more generally. The essay focuses on sound—noise, music, and especially the materiality of the spoken word—in order to probe the dissonance between the actors’ familiar voices and their painfully aged faces. It then becomes possible to ask what it means to recognize a voice, and what might be the contribution of voices to our understanding of cinema history.

Persistent recall: War, feminist psychoanalysis and Tracey Moffatt’s Doomed

Abstract In this article, I argue that Doomed (2007), a ten-minute montage of appropriated disaster footage by Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, offers a unique response to the War on Terror. I compare Moffatt’s piece to the traditional critical readings attributed to artistic deployment of found footage, and consider Doomed in relation to art historian Rosalyn Deutsche’s enquiry into what artists can offer in a time of war. Deutsche uses feminist psychoanalysis to champion Silvia Kolbowski’s video After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2008) as an attempt to destabilize the ‘us versus them’ thinking that perpetuates war. In contrast, I focus on how Moffatt turns to Hollywood-produced action scenes as a way to highlight societal and individual compulsions toward repetition and urges to displace internal anxieties and fears onto others. By appropriating disaster footage, Moffatt creates an opportunity for viewers to consider the repeating patterns of this filmic collective unconscious and the futility of our historic attempts to fully repress the drives it satisfies. Doomed suggests that, rather than finding a way out of binary thinking, video art can highlight the fallacy of cinematic catharsis as a way of ‘working through’ these issues. Acknowledging that we may never be able to rid ourselves of aggressive impulses or fear of the other, Moffatt’s video encourages societal self-reflection and renewed awareness that these psychic forces may be at work when next we find ourselves on the brink of war.