Trauma, Memory and Religion

How can we screen trauma? This question might lead the perception of documentary films about atrocities in the 20th and 21st centuries, like S21 THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE (Rithy Panh, CAMB/FR 2003) about Cambodia, THE LOOK OF SILENCE (Joshua Oppenheimer, ID/DK 2014) about Indonesia or DAS RADIKAL BÖSE (Stefan Ruzowitzky, AT 2013) about Nazi-Europe. A concern that may emerge as we watch films on atrocities is whether these artistic representations perhaps guide the public away from what “really happened”. There certainly is a huge gap between, on the one hand, the immediate experience of the event that lies behind the interpretative screening and, on the other hand, watching the director’s material while neither being a part nor ever having been part of the event. Yet often filmic representations are not intended to show what happened; instead they present case studies to be explored in the present. Often the films contain an inherent critique of genocidal violence and present humanistic perspectives on obedience. Mostly, these films underline the humanity of the victims, seeking to give names, faces and biographies so that they are much more than just numbers. What appears on the screen therefore challenges the audience with a moral question: what would you do

Punishment and Crime. The Reverse Order of Causality in The White Ribbon

This article explores, within a sociological-psychological framework, the problematic moral emotions of spectators evoked by watching the film Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, DE/AT/FR/IT, 2009). As always in Michael Haneke’s films the spectator’s moral system is severely put to the test, upon watching the unimaginable actions people are capable of. At first sight the shown atrocities that remain unpunished seem to cause the spectator’s distress. The real horror, however, lies in the fact the evil occurs within the boundaries of a religious society that hails itself as good and just. The word of God as a moral guide becomes ineffective in this film and in Dogville (Lars von Trier, NL/DK/UK/FR/FI/SE/DE/ IT/NO 2003), a film used as comparison. Both films exemplify that in the end, the most difficult conclusion to process by the spectator is that the worst crime is feeling morally superior and teaching others how to behave. In The White Ribbon this teaching is projected as the punishment that causes the crimes

Punishment and Crime : The Reverse Order of Causality in The White Ribbon

(VLID)255873

Michel Chion's Blessing in Disguise

Michel Chion _The Voice in Cinema_ trans. Claudia Gorbman New York: Columbia University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-231-10822-2 (alk.paper) ISBN 0-231-10823-0 (pbk) 183 pp

Meestal in 't verborgene: Animatiefilm in Nederland, 1940-1945 - M. Peters en E. Barten

Book review of: M. Peters en E. Barten. Meestal in 't verborgene: Animatiefilm in Nederland, 1940-1945. Abcoude (Uniepers), 2000,128 p. (ca. 100 ill.), ISBN 90-682-51-52-

Identification of the Origin of Ultralow Dark Currents in Organic Photodiodes

Organic bulk heterojunction photodiodes (OPDs) attract attention for sensing and imaging. Their detectivity is typically limited by a substantial reverse bias dark current density (Jd). Recently, using thermal admittance or spectral photocurrent measurements, Jd has been attributed to thermal charge generation mediated by mid-gap states. Here, the temperature dependence of Jd in state-of-the-art OPDs is reported with Jd down to 10−9 mA cm−2 at −0.5 V bias. For a variety of donor-acceptor bulk-heterojunction blends it is found that the thermal activation energy of Jd is lower than the effective bandgap of the blends, by ca. 0.3 to 0.5 eV, but higher than expected for mid-gap states. Ultra-sensitive sub-bandgap photocurrent spectroscopy reveals that the minimum photon energy for optical charge generation in OPDs correlates with the dark current thermal activation energy. The dark current in OPDs is attributed to thermal charge generation at the donor-acceptor interface mediated by intra-gap states near the band edges