Erika’s Reviews > Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War > Status Update

The flashback juxtaposes two moments in time; past and present are separate, but at the same time the past inserts itself into the present as a memory.

Like dreams, films work through trauma by restaging it. Horror films in particular, with their shock effects and near-death encounters, might be seen as attempts to thicken the stimulus shield.

Whatever in a person's experience is too poweful or horrible for his conscious mind to grasp and work through, filters fown to the unconscious levels of his psycho. There it lies like a mine, waiting to explode the entire psychic structure.

In my own nerves I recognize the nerves of the world. The nerves of the world are sick.

It is the structuring act of filming itself that simplifies, and thus distorts, war's incoherent jumble of events, noises, smells, spaces, emotions, and memories.

Toppled towers and dead debris are asking the world: Who are the barbarians?

The theater has lost its magic. We do not want a dream, we want reality.

We love as one, we hate as one.

It seems as if movies continued to wage the war that the military had lost.

Films are never organic, unified wholes carrying a single message. Rather, they are fractured entities that must be read, like products of the unconscious, by means of their omissions and silences.