The Cinematic Corpse: Natural History, Catastrophe and Biopolitics
Trauma theory has influenced a substantial amount of film criticism over the past two decades, particularly related to the representation of the Holocaust. This paper turns to Benjamin's conception of natural history as an alternative philosophical frame for understanding film and catastrophe. Trauma theory extends biological conceptions of wounding to include psychological disorders and cultural identifications, thereby participating in a biopolitical understanding of collective life. Benjamin's idea of natural history brushes biopolitics against the grain, re mobilizing images of death and destruction in ways that confound the hierarchies that organize social and species life. Benjamin did not live to witness the revelations of the camps, which required the news media to break the taboos previously placed on images of death and decomposition. The "Nazi Concentration Camps" film, shown at the Nuremberg Trials and in other public exhibitions, included images of bodies, alive and dead, that seemed to no longer be human. These newsreel images quickly disappeared from public circulation but new images of the corpse began to appear in post war cinema. Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1954) included a sequence filmed in the ruins of Pompeii, in which the heroine confronts a disinterred corpse, petrified by the lava flow from Mt Vesuvius. A year later Resnais included sequences from the documentaries of the camps in Night and Fog (1955) In this juxtaposition of a corpse preserved by natural catastrophe and the burned and twisted bodies in the Nazi camps, we can see the dead assume a new significance: petrified in the space between nature and history, the image of the corpse confounds the racial hierarchies that decreed the Jews were "subhuman." Instead the dead, preserved in cinematic images, provoke our astonishment as enigmatic signifiers of a new post natural temporality, also refusing easy assimilation into narratives of collective identity or conceptions of citizenship.