Historical Trauma as a Source of Grotesque in Cinema

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between a historical trauma experienced by a nation and grotesque in cinema. While making it possible to distort and modify subjects, grotesque is closely connected with cinematic time and space, and the historical context becomes a fertile ground for constructing images that are ambivalent and transgressive, ambiguous and polysemantic. Drawing on the case of Metropolis (1927) and Godzilla (1954), the first part of the article looks into the way grotesque helps interpret the global historical upheavals: the Great Depression, World Wars One and Two. The analysis of the world’s internal conflicts results in the emergence of monsters taking on a form that balances on the edge of life and death, reality and fiction.
The second part investigates technological progress as part of historical trauma. The films The Fly (1986) and Total Recall (1990) record the defective exit of the characters beyond the boundaries of their own physicality due to scientific achievements which prove hostile to a human being.
In the conclusion the author argues that any historical trauma is antagonistic to a character. Looked at from the director’s prospective, it is fixed by means of grotesque, which makes it acquire a borderline form: anthropomorphic, zoomorphic or amorphous. The proposed selection of films gives but a rough review of grotesque. However, even such a concise survey sheds light on its interaction with the spatiotemporal continuum, on the one hand, and the experienced trauma reflected in films on the other.
The article can be useful for professional screenwriters and directors, as well as for students studying the basics of drama and a wide range of readers interested in the nature of the grotesque structure. The article is based on the academic research of Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, Natalia E. Marievskaya, Mikhail B. Yampolsky.