Article

Spaces, memoryscapes and the cinematic imaginary: ghosts and stories

by Cristina Demaria

in Versus n. 119, Traces of Terror, Signs of Trauma, pp.109-129

Abstract (english)

Confronting the debate on the relationship between cinema and
memories of traumatic places, in the fist part the essay focuses
on the aesthetic inter-textual and intra-textual strategies that have
defined a terrorscape built on a cinematic archive. In the second
part it concentrates on a particular case-study – Philip Scheffner’s
documentary film Halfmoon Files, a Ghost Story (Germany 2007)
– in order to argue how this film has intervened in, and tried to
transform, the montage of the visual and sound archive of hidden
and tormented histories by re-interpreting the trauma of colonial
soldiers during the First World War through a documentary miseen-
scène aimed at creating different cartographies of a forgotten
lieu de memoires