Surgissements et bombardements d’images : les flash-backs post-traumatiques au cinéma

Sudden Flashes and Bombarding Images: Post-Traumatic Flashbacks in Cinema. This paper investigates how some fiction films from the late 1950s and the 1960s (Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker) attempt to share with their viewers what is known in psychiatry as post-traumatic flashbacks. These films seek to make them experience the effects of post-traumatic flashbacks, by making them viscerally endure, though partially, the shock suffered by the victims of these reliving episodes. How do Resnais and Lumet manage to convey the violence of the assault undergone by victims of post-traumatic flashbacks, through discontinuous editing, sudden flashes and bombarding images? I will address this issue in the wake of the so-called “affective turn” taken by humanities in recent decades, notably under the impetus of the groundbreaking work of Patrizia Lombardo. Keywords: affective turn, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, trauma cinema, modern cinema, flashback, spectator’s experience, Alain Resnais, Sidney Lumet.