Elke MÖLLER Abstract: Liwaa Yazji’s film Maskoon (Germany/Syria/Lebanon, 2014), internationally known as Haunted, follows nine individuals in the midst of the ongoing civil war in Syria, including a couple trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian man of Palestinian descent who has fled to Lebanon, a man holding out in his Damascus home, a Syrian refugee family temporarily living in an archeological ruin, and another living in what used to be a prison. All present themselves and their narratives in direct address to the camera, creating a sense of intimacy and distance. The thoughts of the protagonists—presented as voice-over or with corresponding footage of the interviews—are contrasted with footage of ruins, rubble, and destroyed physical structures. Refracted through the titular metaphor of ‘haunting,’ the film contemplates how violence and destruction affect one’s relationship to memory, home, and loss, intricately interweaving personal and collective experiences. This contribution explores the (audio-)visual metaphors and narrative images used to make the unfolding crisis of experience ‘thinkable.’ Against the backdrop of findings from trauma theory, this article argues that Haunted produces meaning and generates knowledge about trauma in the making, especially through essayistic methods and aesthetics. Speaking from the perspective of the filmmaker returning to Syria from exile, the film follows a dialogical approach to explore and share in the social realities of its subjects. Following a media-theoretical reading of Max Bense’s “On the Essay and Its Prose” (1948), this article draws on the notion of “essayistic configurations” and “proto-theory” to investigate how the essayistic treatment of trauma bears a potential for challenging cinematic visibility and tellabilty as well as for the conceptualization of trauma and traumatization. Keywords: Maskoon/Haunted, essayism, essay film, dialog, Syria, civil war, trauma, memory, home, haunting DOI: 10.24193/ekphrasis.26.10 |