10.54103/2036-461X/17912
Set in the zone of egregious war crimes against the civilian population of Aleppo and in the biohazard zones of the encroaching COVID-19 epidemic, Waad Al-Kateab’s For Sama and Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath invent documentary approaches that create complex temporalities — modes of cinematic address that engage trauma as a field of experience that has been absorbed within institutional discourses of state power built through crises. Filmed in zones of crises in which hospitals exist in states of exception that generate and guarantee state sovereignty, the traumatic scene of crisis becomes both excess and fragment that documentary form contains and interprets. This analysis draws on Ruth Leys’ ‘genealogy’ of trauma and Lisa Guenther’s notion of the ‘necrobiopolitical rituals’ of state bureaucracy to show that both documentaries illuminate a fundamental split between discourses of medical knowledge and state power within which cinema asserts fluid and shifting temporalities as a mode of engaging events of crisis as history.
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Aleksander Sedzielarz
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Crisis
On the Frontier Between Medicine and State: Traumatic States of Embodiment and Temporality in Waad Al-Kateab’s For Sama and Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath
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2023-01-24
2022-05-17
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
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Cinéma & Cie
Aleksander Sedzielarz
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/17912
99
Wenzhou-Kean University
2036-461X
39
Crisis
en
114
On the Frontier Between Medicine and State: Traumatic States of Embodiment and Temporality in Waad Al-Kateab’s For Sama and Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath
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                                                                                       On the Frontier Between
                                                                                       Medicine and State:
                                                                                       Traumatic States of Embodiment
                                                                                       and Temporality in Waad Al-Kateab’s
                                                                                       For Sama and Wang Nanfu’s In the
                                                                                       Same Breath
                                                                                       Aleksander Sedzielarz, Wenzhou-Kean University

                                                                                       Set in the zone of egregious war crimes against the civilian population of Aleppo and                 Keywords
                                                                                       in the biohazard zones of the encroaching COVID-19 epidemic, Waad Al-Kateab’s For                       Trauma
                                                                                       Sama and Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath invent documentary approaches that crea-
                                                                                                                                                                                           Documentary
                                                                                       te complex temporalities — modes of cinematic address that engage trauma as a field of
                                                                                       experience that has been absorbed within institutional discourses of state power built                    Voice
                                                                                       through crises. Filmed in zones of crises in which hospitals exist in states of exception            Motherhood
                                                                                       that generate and guarantee state sovereignty, the traumatic scene of crisis becomes                      Crisis
                                                                                       both excess and fragment that documentary form contains and interprets. This analysis                       DOI
                                                                                       draws on Ruth Leys’ ‘genealogy’ of trauma and Lisa Guenther’s notion of the ‘necro-                 https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       biopolitical rituals’ of state bureaucracy to show that both documentaries illuminate       org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       a fundamental split between discourses of medical knowledge and state power within
                                                                                                                                                                                           461X/17912
                                                                                       which cinema asserts fluid and shifting temporalities as a mode of engaging events of
                                                                                       crisis as history.




                                                                                       INTRODUCTION:
                                                                                       TRAUMA AND THE DOCUMENTARY
                                                                                       OF PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE
                                                                                         The video installation ‘Serious Games’ (2009) by Harun Farocki shows
                                                                                       relationships between cinema and trauma in a way that has much in common with
                                                                                       the two films considered in this essay. One video screen of Farocki’s installation
                                                                                       is set in a military base where video games are used to train soldiers. Another
                                                                                       screen captures a military clinic where soldiers receive treatment for post-
                                                                                       traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through game-like virtual reality interfaces.
                                                                                       Videos of training and therapy appear in two-channel displays of the subjective
                                                                                       viewpoint of the soldier and the environment in which the games are being
                                                                                       used.
                                                                                         The halving and doubling involved in the four-video installation creates split
                                                                                       chronologies that suggest the simplistic preparation for war and its complex
                                                                                       aftermath as an ongoing but incompatible prologue and epilogue. Farocki’s


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                          99
      clinic footage reveals the violence of state power manifested retroactively
      in the bodies of soldiers. Meanwhile, media splits experience of events in a
      doubling and halving of time and image. Missing, however, are documents of
      the synchronic moment of the present — the kind of evidence often assumed to
      be at the heart of documentary filmmaking.
         Through exhibiting the complex temporalities of PTSD, Farocki’s video piece
      suggests that trauma is, quite paradoxically, articulated in a future-tense as the
      desire for return to a past before the crisis that caused the trauma. In the fourth
      of four videos in Farocki’s installation, a clinician insists that a traumatised
      soldier must repeat the tragic event in a virtual reality program as treatment.
      In much the same way that the soldier resists repeating the event but is thereby
      made to endlessly re-experience it, Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath (2021)
      and Waad Al-Kateab’s For Sama (2021, co-produced and co-directed by Edward
      Watts) both resist the repetition that is trauma and imagine a return to points
      before painful events had occurred.1 In For Sama, Al-Kateab expresses through
      voiceover the wish that her child would not have been born so as not to become
      an innocent witness to war. For Wang, this desire is expressed through a
      reverse montage in which she imagines ‘how this could have begun differently’.
      In their drive to create a moment-by-moment account of loss and suffering, the
      documentarians thus ultimately disavow attempts to interpret crisis through
      the logic of the present and resist the endless and melancholic return that this
      entails. While it is, of course, impossible to reverse the past, formal shifts in the
      film between cinematic temporalities and subjectivities contain crises past to
      resist the endless circulation spectacles of violence and loss on film. Further,
      by unsettling images of state power predicated on narratives established from
      these images, both filmmakers expose how trauma has become incorporated
      into an ensemble of discursive measures through which the state constructs
      authorised versions of history from crisis.
         As recent documentary films notable for presenting trauma through scenes of
      hospitals, trauma appears quite differently in Wang and Al-Kateab’s films than
      in the cinema of trauma that has been presented in major works on the subject
      — especially those that deal with memory of the Holocaust in the post-war
      era, the trauma of Hiroshima, the experiences of Vietnam veterans, or trauma
      around the events of September 11th in the United States.2 In describing the
      proliferation of media around the events of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan,
      and Iraq, E. Ann Kaplan’s exploration of the ‘empty empathy’ elicited by violent
      images anticipates the dialectics of immediacy and mediation in Wang and Al-
      Kateab’s films.
         Much like the media images that Kaplan discusses, which inhibit a relationship
      with the image that might foster healing, when a viewer attends to violence in
      images of crisis yet does not become deeply involved in what the images capture
      they are faced with the ‘violence involved in the moment itself and the camera’s
      capturing of it’.3 By conducting images of crisis through temporal shifts marked
      by linguistic, visual, and acoustic techniques of prologue and epilogue deployed
      within cinema, Wang and Al-Kateab advance a documentary practice based in



100                               Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
what E. Ann Kaplan calls a ‘context and continuity that […] bring events into our
own lives’ as part of the invention of ‘other strategies for communicating and
understanding trauma’.4 Both films engage a media environment in which the
pain of the traumatised cannot move beyond a moment that reasserts itself as
an unintelligible past within the present — as an impenetrable violence that
endlessly returns as trauma, or what Ruth Leys terms a ‘wound,’ in her analysis
of trauma as an overdetermined cultural construct spanning the sciences,
humanities, and media.5 In resistance to cinema as a repetition of violence
— and also as mothers seeking in filmmaking a form of intergenerational
communication — the films situate a documentarian viewpoint in the future in
order to reassert a time before crisis as a vantage on the present.
   For Sama and In the Same Breath both expand outward from the intimacy of
the mother-child relationship capture globally significant events. Both films also
glimpse an occult logic of state power in tension with the everyday protocols
of hospitals. In Al-Kateab’s documentary, Syria’s authoritarian regime launches
air and ground offenses against civilians and hospitals in Aleppo in the wake of
the civil uprisings in 2012. In Wang’s film, medical personnel and patients try to
interpret the experience of COVID-19-related deaths on a personal and collective
scale as person-to-person transmission of the virus is gradually revealed. In
both films, documentarians track the meaning of crises unfolding historically
and ideologically through what Lisa Guenther identifies as ‘necro-biopolitical
rituals’ in which the dysfunctional bureaucratic management of life and death
is inseparable from the consolidation of state power.6 In this context, Wang
and Al-Kateab establish a cinematic form and structure in which the capturing
of images becomes secondary to the way that images are contained within
temporal logics of prologue and epilogue. Terms of evidence and witnessing are
thereby superseded by a containment of images within a maternal logos that
challenges the ‘assimilation’ of the filmic image of atrocity — a process most
memorably described by the narrator of Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture — in
which most powerful and disturbing filmic images are consigned to collective
neglect as footage of atrocities proliferate in media worldwide.7 Resisting an
already mediated present that becomes incorporated, moment by moment, into
narratives endlessly recirculated by the state — always coercively and, often,
violently — the films neutralise the power of images of the present over the
audience: temporal shifts and the mother’s transubjective address to the child
interrupt the viewer’s fixation on the document.



SUBJECTIVITIES OF TRAUMA:
DOCUMENTS OF LOSS AND SUFFERING
THROUGH MOTHERHOOD AND THE CLINIC
   Interweaving prologue-epilogue tracks create a shifting experience of the
filmic document that keeps traumatizing events in suspension. Wang and Al-


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      Kateab’s films thus affirm that cinema can speak power to manufactured truths
      promulgated by authoritarianism insofar as cinema always exists in plurality —
      involving filmmaker and audience in viewing and interpretation as an ongoing
      and recursive collective experience. The films engage in a continuous process
      of ‘re-perception’ within which the film is always ‘becoming,’ exhibiting cinema
      as system of collective thought in much the same way described by Shohini
      Chaudhuri in her examination of the prismatic conditions of conception and
      reception of films of atrocity.8
         At the end of twentieth century, well before the flux of digital and streaming
      media within which Wang and Al-Kateab have formed as filmmakers, Linda
      Williams had already described the formation of the ‘New Documentary’ of the
      1990s in the wake of the Direct Cinema movement in which audiences were
      inundated by a ‘deluge of images [that] seems to suggest that there can be
      no a priori truth of the referent to which the image refers [but] the moving
      image [had] the power to move […] to a new appreciation of previously unknown
      truth’.9 A decade later, as documentarians engaged the trauma of war within an
      environment of nonstop media coverage of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
      E. Ann Kaplan described an intensification of the media environment discussed
      by Williams as the ‘daily barrage of images that are merely fragments of a
      large, complex situation in a foreign culture about which audiences may know
      very little and that reporters usually omit’.10 Working in the hyperbolic density
      of the media landscape of the twenty-first century, Wang and Al-Kateab are
      embedded in the ‘complex situation’ of their own cultural backgrounds but
      acting as chroniclers interpreting events intergenerationally within and across
      cultures. In the process, they trouble boundaries between self and subject, as
      well as between past, present, and future.
         As the structure of documentary is fused with the subjective states of the
      documentarian — in particular, in the intergenerational bond between mother
      and child — the films capture the process of crisis becoming part of the historical
      record while intervening in trauma as endless repetition. Produced in a context
      of up-to-the minute images of crisis on news media, social media, and streaming
      television, Wang and Al-Kateab resist what Leys describes as ‘the immersion
      in the traumatic scene’ the kind of indulgence in trauma that would preclude
      ‘the kind of specular distance necessary for cognitive knowledge of what
      happened’.11 As chronicles of crises that intersect with their lives and prompt
      them to create the ‘specular distance’ that Leys describes, For Sama and In the
      Same Breath suspend personal images at the source of trauma within separate
      temporal tracks of the film.
         The question of asserting multiple subjective modes in documentary to deal
      with catastrophe is, of course, not a new one. However, most discussions of the
      representation of difficult memories in film have reproduced the contradictions
      that Leys outlines in writing of the traumatic scene as an epistemic site
      constructed in both clinical and cultural theories as a ‘wound’ that eludes all
      forms of knowing.12 In Leys’s account of the episteme of trauma, both the clinician
      or the cultural theorist seek return to an event that initiates forms of traumatized



102                               Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
consciousness but that, by definition, remains out of reach of perception. In a
prominent example of such a cultural theory of trauma, Joshua Hirsch describes
Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog as a response to historical documentary form that
could not fully represent the extreme traumas of the Holocaust. Establishing
parallels with theories of PTSD, Hirsch contends that Resnais established a
‘reflexive’ documentary mode of ‘posttraumatic cinema’ defined by ‘experiments
with retrospective temporal structures’ to struggle with ‘memories that can
neither be escaped nor possessed’.13 For Hirsch, Resnais’ work borrows from
modernist precursors to make the past present by transcribing the ‘temporal
dimensions of history into ‘spatial dimensions’.14 Much like clinical theories
of PTSD that redirect temporal ruptures of memory onto the body, Hirsch’s
notion of ‘posttraumatic cinema’ converts psychic phenomenon into physical
phenomenon.15 Interpreting such a projection of diachronic temporalities onto
synchronic spatiality, Wang and Al-Kateab expand the field of spectatorship
around the traumatic as both a discursive and historical formation.
  Wang and Al-Kateab invent new filmic temporalities to contend with the
ideological disruptions that shape the twenty-first century hospital. The hospital
in both films appears as an unstable institution at the boundaries of the state in
which the filmmakers document suffering and violence that arises from fusions
of capitalism and authoritarianism. The films present contemporary ideological
landscapes in which the ingredients of kleptocracy, nepotism, surveillance,
and populist revisionism have combined to make the regimes in Syria, Russia,
China, and the United States strikingly similar. Al-Kateab’s film is a story of
her family’s survival of Russian military bombings of Syrian civilians under
Bashar Al-Assad’s dictatorship and at the fringes of Russia’s neoimperialist
encroachments. Wang’s film compares China’s ideological apparatus of control
over people and information in the early coronavirus outbreaks to the United
States during Donald Trump’s tacit endorsement of conspiracy theories to
undermine institutions of government and public health. Both documentaries
turn to the hospital as a frontier no longer fully organised within state power.
Hospitals are shown as exceptional zones of ideological autonomy where
documents of crises — fragments of destroyed lives that still appear, at least
momentarily, as individual, and collective, experiences — can escape the master
narratives of power.
  The idea that there is a ‘deeply rooted convergence between the requirements
of political ideology and those of medical technology’ is most fully traced by
Michel Foucault in his examination of medical science as an extension of state
power in modernity. For Foucault, the hospital is built into the modern state as
the site of the implementation of ideological programmes.16 However, for Wang
and Al-Kateab, the hospital is a kludged and overwhelmed space. Hospitals
move towards a ‘juridico-political’ status that Giorgio Agamben ascribes to
concentration camps.17 The makeshift hospitals in the documentaries arise from
the same ‘state of exception and martial law’ as the camp: a boundary space
in which the distinctions between life and law underlying state power are in
ongoing formation.18 Accordingly, instead of being citizens, the people who exist


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    103
                   in the hospital are closer to the ‘protective custody’ that Agamben describes.19
                   As such, the hospitals in these films expose vacillations between biopolitical
                   and necropolitical measures through which the state perpetuates power.
                     By structuring the films around mother-child relationships, both films confront
                   the biopolitical afterlives of crises in its intergenerational and epigenetic
                   effects. For Wang, the narrative of the family’s connection with both China and
                   the United States during the early events of the pandemic forms a point of
                   departure for understanding how, in both societies, bureaucratic mechanisms
                   of power have stripped citizens of agency through negligence and deception.
                   Al-Kateab’s mournfully addresses her daughter in the future in voiceover over
                   the chaotic bombing of an Aleppo hospital as doctors try to work in the rubble.
                   In this scene of a government-sponsored bombing of the hospital — which
                   includes an onscreen X-ray as another layer of film as visible evidence of the
                   traumatised body while the viewer witnesses explosions that endanger the
                   doctors — the filmmaker expresses the wish that all of these events would be
                   undone to spare the children the trauma that will follow [Fig. 1]. The scene thus
                   exemplifies the maternal logos seeking to contain trauma through the plural
                   temporalities of cinema.




Fig. 1
For Sama (Waad
Al-Kateab, 2021)
- screeenshot



                     As clearly shown in Al-Kateab’s footage of the hospital bombing, hospitals
                   in the films upset assumptions of synonymy between discourses of medical
                   authority and state authority. Capturing the hospital at the ideological limit of
                   state authority, each of these films visualises a disruption of medical knowledge
                   in modernity (or a break in what Foucault calls the ‘empire’ of the ‘medical gaze’).20
                   The unsettling of hospital spaces connecting power and knowledge takes place
                   within the larger consolidation of authoritarian power in which trauma becomes
                   a central but overdetermined rhetoric for state projects. Within this rupture,
                   the intersubjectivity of the mother’s address to her child (and her future world)
                   forms a response to the unilateral measures of patriarchal authoritarianism.




104                                            Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
FOR SAMA: VOICE AND IMAGE
   Near the beginning of For Sama, Al-Kateab’s expresses her pain in a voiceover
while also explicating the ethical and rhetorical basis of the project: ‘You are
the most beautiful thing in our life but what a life I brought you into. You didn’t
choose this. Will you ever forgive me? [...] Sama I’ve made this film for you. I
need to you understand why your father and I made the choices we did…what
we were fighting for’. Al-Kateab’s voice plays over a sequence that establishes
the image track as a fragment of the present: a quotidian moment of Al-Kateab
sitting at her desk interrupted booming airstrikes as Al-Kateab grimaces in
fright. The voiceover ends on a slow fade of Sama asleep. Al-Kateab’s voice
gives structure to the chaotic images of her footage. Establishing voice as a deep
and physical connection between mother and child, the sequence demonstrates
Michel Chion’s insight that the cinematic history of voiceover parallels the role
of mother as the first ‘image presenter’.21
   Al-Kateab’s melancholic and reflective tone makes clear that the onscreen
images are now of a place and time that no longer exists. In borrowing the
literary concept of ‘tense’ from Gerard Genette, Joshua Hirsch describes Alain
Resnais’ experimentation with what he terms ‘diachronic present tense’ to situate
past trauma in relation to the present.22 In contrast with this cinematic ‘tense’,
Al-Kateab’s narration punctuates the footage of the destruction of Aleppo but
introduces complex modalities of prologue and epilogue — compound tenses
of language that reroute the film’s images to both past and future. Meanwhile,
the film’s image track captures a lost Aleppo that shifts between fragment and
excess. Present-moment images of Aleppo’s destruction are marked as filmic
excess in which the image of atrocity appears as undigested shock, or at times,
as absurd comedy. As Bashar Al-Assad’s bombings around the hospital intensify
at the midpoint of the film, Al-Kateab’s shaky handheld camera captures an
unexploded ordinance that has landed nearby. The camera captures this
instrument of real violence but the scene is suffused with irony. Confronted
with death, Al-Kateab’s friends speak in apostrophe to the bomb and to death.
They warm their hands on the bomb with a ludicrous word of thanks to Al-Assad
stating that the bombs keep them warm in winter. [Fig. 2]




                                                                                                  Fig. 2
                                                                                      For Sama (Waad
                                                                                       Al-Kateab, 2021)
                                                                                          - screeenshot



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         Throughout, Al-Kateab’s handheld footage is disconnected and episodic,
      showing the student uprisings in Aleppo and the regime’s violent reprisals and,
      subsequently, showing hospital triage scenes that document state violence.
      Intercalated throughout are the warm emotional moments of Al-Kateab’s life
      — helping friends establish the hospital, marriage, pregnancy, and moving into
      a new house. These contrasts amplify the exceptional shock of images of crisis
      as the film uncannily resembles both home video and frontline war reporting.
      Around a flow of catastrophic and mundane images, Al-Kateab speaks to Sama
      from the future while the images remain in present tense. Prologue and epilogue
      thereby contain the excess of the documented events but not to merely repeat
      them: the maternal logos places their ultimate meaning in Sama’s future in a
      filmic temporality physically embodied by mother and child.
         The image track again and again tests the measures of the mother-
      documentarian to contain the document — to organise and make sense of
      violence through reference to past and future. In a central scene of the deep
      intergenerational connections that will emerge from the crisis, an emergency
      caesarean is performed on a woman who is nine months pregnant and has been
      severely injured in a bombing. What at first appears to be a routine procedure,
      with the steady sounds of the hospital monitoring equipment and instructions
      exchanged between surgeon and nurses, quickly becomes a confrontation
      with brutal sensory violence as a limp newborn is pulled from the cavity of the
      mother’s body. The viewer faces death as a medium closeup shows the child’s
      body, mottled pale blue and chalky white with a moist and twisted umbilical
      cord on its stomach. The still body is gripped by the large hands of a doctor in
      latex gloves attempting resuscitation. We hear the doctor confirm that the baby
      has no pulse. The small body is then peeled from the sheet covering the surgery
      table with the sound of tearing plastic. If the viewer has not yet physically felt
      horror in seeing the presumably dead child manipulated on the table, the sound
      of the body sticking to the hospital equipment — the inert materiality of the
      hospital now one with the body — provokes horror, outrage, and disgust.
         Suddenly, just as the viewer feels the urge to withdraw from the film, the
      baby opens its eyes and emits a small cry — revived. Following this comes a
      moment of ecstasy as Al-Kateab explains in voiceover that mother and child will
      both survive. Her epilogue draws the relentless violence of the present back
      within the structure of the documentary. Affecting a kind of double return, the
      scene reframes the historical relationship between cinema and trauma. Most
      prominently, the scene shows that the film radically differs from the documentary
      encounters with trauma that emerged in the post-WII era. Hirsch describes the
      Lazarus figure that influenced Resnais as a ‘a new literary practice from the
      posttraumatic space’ who has ‘physically returned from the land of the dead,
      while remaining psychologically bound to traumatic memory’.23 In contrast, the
      Lazarean scene in Al-Kateab’s film presents the child violently returning from
      what the audience presumes to be a tragic death but, because the viewer enters
      the scene in media res, the scene is not bound to any memory of a traumatizing
      event. As excess contained by prologue and epilogue, Al-Kateab’s on-the-spot



106                              Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
capture of the image — as well as the fact that child and mother are unnamed
patients in the hospital — decontextualize the violent image from documents of
a specific family or community involved in the Syrian conflict. Much in the way
that the earlier intercut footage of Al-Kateab’s garden is shown flourishing and
then leveled by an aerial bombing, the scene asserts life within the symbolic
economy of wartime. As such, the newborn’s resuscitation transforms an event
in a record of war crimes into a primal scene of the vibrant yet precarious
connection of life between mother and child. Removed from the exchange of
documentary — or evidentiary — value, the charged image resists what Piotr
Cieplak notes as a simultaneity of the ‘evidential and reductive functions of
[...] images’ in his reading Susan Sontag’s work on photographic images of
atrocity.24 Al-Kateab’s image of the child brought back to life instead takes on a
sublime excess of pathos.
   In this way, this central moment of omphalic unity between mother, child,
and audience in the film’s aleatory montage undercuts the necro-biopolitics of
state bureaucracy. As an aesthetic formation that also offers political gestures,
Al-Kateab’s film presents the hospital in twenty-first century zones of crises as
sites of autonomy that interrupt state power. Nonetheless, as Cieplak notes, the
indexicality of film means that images ‘reach into the past’ — as the lives and
events recorded on film are present visual but formed of traces of that which
has existed. This ‘superimposition’ of reality and the past is overtly part of the
cinematography of For Sama as the spontaneous quality of its images enhance
the melancholy of Al-Kateab’s meditations on the destruction of Aleppo.25 The
scene of the newborn suddenly brought back alive in For Sama is haunted by
the quality of the pasts embedded in cinema but in a way that accentuates and
deepens the experiences of a rebirth on film that happens before the viewer’s
very eyes. Thus contained within a maternal logos, the traumatizing event
stands not as document to be witnessed but as an assertion of an exceptional
mode of social and political rebirth.



IN THE SAME BREATH :
DISTANCE FROM THE DOCUMENT
  Beyond basic similarities in the mother-child relationship and the prologic
and epilogic modes of address that they share, In the Same Breath and For
Sama have deeper features of form in common. As noted above, both films
conclude with sequences that elaborate a melancholic wish to return to
the moment before the crisis. In these sequences, filmic memory emerges
phantasmically intensified by indexical return to time and space. Both films
introduce short sequences of CCTV footage in segments that seem to place the
viewer in an objective relationship with crisis. In Al-Kateab’s film, the hospital
security cameras capture a moment in which a hospital filled with doctors and
patients explodes during an aerial strike. Wang’s film contains security camera


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    107
      footage from a site of the virus’ initial spread showing patients complaining of
      cold and flu symptoms but unaware that person-to-person spread had already
      been detected by doctors. In both documentaries, these CCTV sequences
      are discolored and distorted — likely resulting from the compression of the
      stored video files. Each is abruptly intercut with point-of-view footage from the
      filmmaker so that they suggest another stratum of the present beneath the live
      footage of the crisis while the film’s prologic-epilogic structure suspends the
      moment of crisis it documents.
         In Wang’s film, fragmentary documents of the initial spread of the virus
      are bound within this confounding documentary structure to lead viewers to
      question that the social crisis of the pandemic is actually reducible to the virus.
      The virus is the ostensible subject of the film — the crisis event that it sets out
      to document — but the pathogen ultimately serves to makes larger systemic
      fissures visible. The documentary gradually builds a case for understanding the
      pandemic as a biopolitical crisis that is bound to ongoing lapses in the social
      contract. This is articulated in Wang’s voiceover comments near the conclusion
      of the film. Viewing the separate but commensurate crises over the pandemic
      in China and the United States, Wang states: ‘We all think ourselves capable
      of separating truth from falsehood but how can we make that distinction
      when misinformation comes from the people we are supposed to trust’. She
      continues ‘I have lived under authoritarianism…and in a society that have called
      themselves free…in both systems, ordinary people become casualties of their
      leaders’ pursuit of power’. Although they come at the end of the film, these
      statements have the logic of prologue: drawing the viewer back to everyday life
      before the virus’ spread was public knowledge. The film thereby shifts the focus
      from the pathogen to the anterior social and political conditions from which the
      pandemic emerged. The prologic effect is strengthened by the film’s final visual
      coda — a reverse timelapse that is appears to unrecord events and transports
      the viewer back to a time before trauma.
         After the images of New Years’ celebrations in Wuhan that begin the film, Wang’s
      voiceover narration is interspersed with Chinese news reports recounting the
      course of the virus as it began to spread. Wang states that she wants to track
      the moment-by-moment development of the early pandemic in Wuhan but she
      does not have access to hospital sites in the locked-down city. Wang tries to
      get closer to the story of the origin of the virus by hiring camerapersons with
      hospital access. Though devised as a practical measure in In the Same Breath,
      this creates a loosening of the presumed connection between the film and the
      subjectivity of the filmmaker that also appears through surrogate cameras in
      Wang’s earlier films, Hooligan Sparrow (2016) and One Child Nation (2019).
      The effect is most intensely explored in the free substitution of filmmaker and
      subject Wang’s documentary that follows a young American man on the streets
      in I Am Another You (2017).
         Handheld footage taken at random from anonymous points of view in the
      hospital in In the Same Breath produces a slippery subject position: as the film
      has shifts from Wang’s camera to one of the surrogates, the viewer becomes



108                              Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
aware of the fact that they are seeing the world through the viewpoint of an
unnamed stranger. This not only brings into question documentary as a direct
kind of representation but also exhibits cinema as what Shohini Chaudhuri
describes as a ‘transsubjective entity that has its own being and becoming’.26
Rather than defined by the specificity of medium, cinema is revealed as a
merging flow of subjectivities. Insofar as Wang’s documentary explicitly marks
film as produced — and consumed by — a plurality of subjects, any presumption
of self-evident connections between the filmic image and a single historical past
dissolves.
   Rather than being gruesome or horrifying, the COVID wards of the hospital
captured by Wang’s camerapersons are quiet and boring. Wang comments with
irony that one cameraperson took a shot of a foot that lasted for five minutes. The
traumatic scene of each patient’s infection has already occurred in hundreds of
disparate private homes before they arrived, and these buildings are dedicated
to the long, slow process of treatment. The camerapersons’ free exploration of
the hospital as a frontline in the crisis leads to chance encounters with patients
who share their stories. After a series of shots of nondescript hospital rooms
and corridors, the impersonal and dissociated point of view of one of Wang’s
camerapersons holds for a moment. The camera swings around to engage a
person who appears onscreen. ‘Then someone caught the camera person’s
attention’, Wang describes in epilogic voiceover while the scenes that follow
show a father awkwardly trying to communicate with his bed-ridden son while
a doctor in a protective suit treats his son. The film becomes situated within
two temporal tracks as we hear the story of the boy’s months-long illness from
the man. He tells of being transferred between hospitals and his son’s case
becoming serious. He begins to cry, wailing, ‘my poor child’, as the camera cuts
to the son being intubated to receive oxygen through what appears to be a tube
cut into his throat. The doctors tell the father that they are looking after him
twenty-four hours a day. The man’s story of his son’s death will become one of
the stories of intergenerational connection and loss in film to follow.
   Against hospital scenes that are both exceptionally alien and utterly familiar,
Wang’s surrogate cameras capture state media filming the hospital in a search
of what Wang calls ‘positive’ stories. Situated within the tedium of long-term
care, the presence of government bureaucracy in the hospital creates a strong
set of contradictions: propaganda reaffirms state power by putting discourses
of the hospital on display while the footage of Wang’s surrogates shows that
state narratives have nothing to do with the day-to-day medical treatment of
the virus. Wang’s own cameraperson is interviewed during this section of the
film and she states that ‘positive’ stories by the state will counter the influence
of ‘imperialist’ reports from abroad — a lapse in logic that reveals political and
medical discourse as separate and mutually unintelligible. The party and the
nation will be presented as prepared and as strong as its medical institutions
but working knowledge of the virus will not inform state propaganda. Further
depicting state power as a closed circuit, a segment of interspliced state TV
footage that follows shows statements by an official that the communist party


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      will prevail over the virus through propaganda accounts of journalists.
         While keeping both connections to the past and authorized narratives of the
      crisis in suspension, the film also thwarts the viewer’s desire for a voyeuristic
      witnessing of the hospital as frontline of the crisis. Through narrated prologue,
      which begins as the Wang’s retrospective account of unsuspecting public
      entering a new year amid the suppressed news of early spread of the illness,
      the film anticipates the crisis by alternating between the repetitive messages
      of state media — Chinese and international — and disconnected sequences of
      accounts of the pain of the disappearances of loved ones. Interviews with family
      members of those lost to the virus throughout the film redouble the prologic
      effect on filmic document, as testimonies of bodies of loved ones stand in place
      of records destroyed in the nebulous institutional machine of government
      morgues and funeral homes. Transmitted through a multitude of subjectivities,
      Wang’s recurring passages of prologue and epilogue capture the crisis — but
      not as a traumatising event — as a closed official record with an unpredictable
      and open-ended afterlife among the public.
         An underlying thesis of the film emerges near the last section of the
      documentary through Wang’s collage-like use of the images of Chinese state
      media: the hospital exists in tension vis-à-vis state power but this tension
      provides the state with an instrumentalised set of biopolitical markers to
      eliminate dissent by showcasing a unity of state and subject. Bolstering belief in
      the state through a spirit of competition with its rivals, the documentary replays
      clips of state media with the slogan, ‘China’s system is superior’ (Zhongguo
      de zhidu youshi). Instead of being expressed through medical discourses on
      life and death, state power now primarily engages in necro-biopolitical rituals
      performed at a remove from the hospital. In the documentary, this will later be
      confirmed by the state crematorium being a locus for the expression of state
      power in the signing over of the bodies of the cremated by relatives. In writing
      on the conjoined nature of state and clinic in the establishment of modern state
      power, Foucault writes that ‘as an isomorph of ideology, clinical experience
      offers [the state] an immediate domain of application’.27 Showing the state’s
      ineffective measures to absorb medical discourse, the propaganda imagery
      that Wang incorporates shows medical discourse as no longer isomorphic with
      ideology. The disordered management of crisis instead becomes the field within
      which the state tests and applies power.
         Wang follows the personal story of a small clinic run by Chen Ruzhen in an
      interview that exemplifies the shifting address of prologue and epilogue as
      a mode of presenting a medical worker’s first-hand experience of the crisis.
      Chen recounts unknowingly encountering the virus while caring for neighbors
      working at the Huanan Seafood Market. The CCTV camera footage appears
      here with an effect of high frame rate that is both otherworldly and intimate —
      seemingly taking the source footage out of the flow of history. Wang’s epilogic
      voiceover then tells the viewer that this footage shows a cluster of cases that
      came mostly from the market while the apparition-like bodies and faces recall
      the dead of the virus’ first wave. Chen then describes the period around January



110                              Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
1st, 2020 in the weeks leading up to her husband’s death. She describes him
becoming seriously ill but being turned away from major hospitals in Wuhan. As
epilogue, with both tears and determination, Chen describes that her husband’s
cremated remains stay state custody as her contribution to state propaganda
that establishes the virus’ low death toll.
  The traumatic scene of the death of Chen’s husband is missing from history
and memory: she says that she did not get to speak to him before he died. In
place of the missing documents of his final days, the film shows an insert of a
small photo of Chen’s husband. Onscreen, this simple photographic mediation
stands in solemn contrast with the proliferation of filmic claims on the life and
death of all those who experienced the same fate: no amount of documents, or
other visible evidence, can effectively counter official narratives in which trauma
is encoded as historical progress. As the documentary moves forward through
other stories of those lost in Wuhan, the photograph stands as a stark reminder
of missing documents. Meanwhile, the film moves radically away from gathering
evidence of the crisis. After establishing a filmic structure that contains empty
or reductive images of traumatizing loss, Wang turns towards visualising the
power of bureaucracy over life. Wang’s voiceover sequences in the second half of
the film are both epilogue to the events of the COVID-19 pandemic and prologue
to a future in which responses to the pandemic foreshadow the interconnected
politics of China and the United States in decades to come. Turning to the way that
the trauma of doctors and nurses in both countries mirrors political discourse,
Wang’s voiceover describes trauma that is synchronised with narratives that
the state projects as history. She comments: ‘people emerge from traumatizing
events with even greater patriotic sentiments than before’, as a montage of
older Chinese state television productions shows celebrations after the 2003
SARS outbreak and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Although she is speaking
of mainland China, Wang’s statement is directed equally to narratives in the
United States that have been deepened and affirmed alongside expressions of
trauma — with September 11th as a prime example for both theories of trauma
and political transformations of past two decades. As the film moves to the
United States for its concluding section, Wang’s voiceover meditations leave the
viewer to wonder whether there is a great degree of difference in how those in
power in authoritarian regimes and democratic societies seize power through
trauma.
  Moving from the document of the crisis to tracing the way that trauma is
utilised for political power, the film observes the hospital as a site subsumed by
discourses of trauma in such a way that it becomes reservoir of political affect
tapped by the state. Wang shows footage from rallies for frontline workers in
China in which trauma is absorbed into displays of nationalism. She follows this
with rowdy demonstrations of Americans against measures that they perceive
as taking away their freedom. By matching the sequences, Wang reveals trauma
transformed into nationalistic romanticism in both countries. In segments set
in China, the tears on the face of a young medical worker from Sichuan sent
to Wuhan during the outbreak visualises this romanticism. The viewer cannot


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                     tell if the woman is overwhelmed with pride for the collective effort to fight the
                     virus or if she is experiencing a moment of catharsis, overwhelmed by what
                     she saw in the hospital [Fig. 3]. In a later sequence, Wang will establish that
                     it is primarily the latter, but the unfolding of state power in the rally suggests
                     that it is in fact the combination of pride and catharsis that fuels the state’s




Fig. 3
In the Same Breath
(Wang Nanfu, 2021)
- screeenshot




                     assimilation of trauma into its discourses of power.
                        Near the end of Wang’s film, over a montage of faces of medical professionals
                     that first shows the face of an American nurse in an emotional breakdown and
                     then cuts to grieving Chinese hospital workers, Wang’s epilogic voiceover plays:
                     ‘it was then I realised how vast their trauma was’. The hospital workers are silent
                     but Wang notes that they might ‘crash’ if they begin to talk about their pain. The
                     scene contains the trauma of the events that the film sets out to document but,
                     in doing so, it maintains a distance through which state power can be more
                     fully comprehended. Wang shows that emerging discourses of state power rely
                     on what Leys calls ‘an immersion in the traumatic scene.’ Wang’s film thus
                     reclaims and reframes images that would otherwise become part of a shadow
                     discourse of invisible and unrepresentable trauma foundational to state power.



                     CONCLUSION
                       Wang and Al-Kateab’s films are composed of violence and loss at the root of
                     trauma but both bring into question how states consolidate power in a media
                     environment that proliferates with painful images. Hospitals in both films
                     become sites of knowledge and practice at the periphery — and frontier — of
                     the state that are, variously, assimilated, suppressed, or destroyed. For Sama
                     and In the Same Breath invoke a multitude of temporalities and subjectivities
                     of cinema to offer a plurality of experience to resist the overdetermination and



112                                             Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
assimilation of the document as evidence. Narration of the film around the
mother-child relationship underlies the approach of both filmmakers because it
presents an embodied perception that is oppositional to the authorized version
of events manufactured by the patriarchal state. The logos of the mother
engenders multiple temporalities that invoke times before the child was born,
or can remember, and envision a future that is postscript to the traumatizing
events of the filmic present. In the first instance, prologue and epilogue are ways
of sharing the most important stories of the past with child and the world from
within the myriad memories of the past and hopes for the future. However, the
modes of documentary address that Wang and Al-Kateab invent also intervene
in the establishment of narrative by the state around trauma. Reconstructing
the traumatic scene from within the maternal logos, these documentaries push
viewers to attend to the latent connections between crises and discourses of
power.




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Notes
 1
    Waad Al-Kateab is a pseudonym to protect the filmmaker from retaliation by Al-Assad’s regime.
 2
     Studies of film and trauma referenced here include Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film,
Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture:
The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005),
and Allen Meek, Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images (London, New York: Routledge, 2011).
  3
    Kaplan, 100.
  4
    Ibidem.
  5
    Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9.
  6
    Lisa Guenther, ‘On Pain of Death: The “Grotesque Sovereignty” of the US Death Penalty’, in The Edinburgh
Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP), 395-411 (403-405).
  7
    The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013).
  8
     Shohini Chaudhuri, Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 17-18.
  9
     Linda Williams, ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary’, Film Quarterly
46.3 (1993), 9–21 (10-11).
  10
     Kaplan, 93.
  11
     Ibidem, 9.
  12
     Ibidem, 248-253.
  13
     Hirsch, 41-46.
  14
     Ibidem, 47.
  15
     Ibidem. For clinical theories of trauma and their uptake in cultural theory, see Leys, 83-84; 246.
  16
      Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London, New York:
Routledge, 1973), 38.
  17
      Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2020), 166.
  18
     Ibidem, 166-167.
  19
     Ibidem.
  20
     Foucault, 38.
  21
     Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 49-50.
  22
     Hirsch, 46-47.
  23
     Ibidem, 45.
  24
      Piotr Cieplak, Death, Image, Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and its Aftermath in Photography and
Documentary Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 42.
  25
     Ibidem, 43-44.
  26
     Chaudhuri, 17
  27
     Foucault, 97.




114                                                   Sedzielarz, On the Frontier Between Medicine and State
