Bahar Sarioglu

What can cinematic silence tell us about trauma? My interdisciplinary project explores the role of expressive silences in relation to chronic trauma in Middle Eastern cinemas from 2000 to the present. During this period, references to violent events such as atrocities in refugee camps and state repression of minorities gained prominence in Iranian, Palestinian/Israeli and Turkish cinema, even as official discourses consistently disavowed these violations. Filmmakers such as Bahman Ghobadi, Elia Suleiman, Ari Folman and Özcan Alper often relied on an aesthetic of the oblique to convey suppressed histories of political oppression and its traumatic aftermath.

While existing studies of such films mainly attend to their narrative or visual economy and historical contexts, my project involves a transnationally comparative and historically grounded analysis of the films’ soundscapes. I will draw on film, trauma, memory, postcolonial, and sound studies, and on oral history archives, to show how filmic silences convey the spectre of trauma, which resists narrative integration, manifesting itself in elliptical and fragmented modes of representation. How do filmic silences operate as extreme forms of ellipsis that simultaneously reflect the erasure of memory in the traumatised subject and the lacunae surrounding violent events in official historiographies?  Can silence also be a mode of remembering or resistance?