I explore how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide, intensifying what Berlant refers to as that “unreachable or inarticulable thought” in the process ( 2001: 41). There is, of course, no simple or unifying answer to this question, particularly when it comes to mass atrocities such as genocide, a crime against humanity, that is at the center of the two films I discuss in some detail here. 1 In writing about trauma’s modes of (in)expressability, Lauren Berlant poses a probing question: “When scenes of post-traumatic ineloquence morph into modes of transformative-style rhetoric, does the eloquent form distract from, become a mask for, or intensify the unreachable or inarticulable thought that wants to change the norms of negation?” ( 2001: 41). What we mean by the word ‘trauma’ appears at once to be self-evident and impossible to adequately define, due to the very nature of the overwhelming event that it stands for.

How women’s cinema can avoid conventional narratives and visual trappings of redemption and closure when addressing mass death is one of the central considerations of this essay, in which I analyze the approach of speaking nearby inexplicable trauma through a female perspective. Keywords: women’s cinema genocide trauma Yugoslavia feminism antifascism Minh-ha’s ‘speaking nearby’, I argue for the concept of ‘women’s world cinema’, a kind of cinema that is made by women, speaks to women’s experiences, and/or addresses the spectator as female while also speaking nearby instead of about its subjects in ways that eschew conventional spectatorial alignments and co-optations of traumatic experience. In my analysis of the films as anti-spectacles through the framework of Trinh T.

( Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, 2019, Croatia) directed by Dana Budisavljević, and Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020, Bosnia-Herzegovina), directed by Jasmila Žbanić, both compel us to bear witness to mass atrocities while avoiding the pitfalls of turning suffering into a spectacle, and by sidestepping the predictable cinematic conventions of redemption and closure, both formally and narratively.

The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide.

Film Feminisms by Kristin Hole