What is traumatic memory and what is post-traumatic cinema? What are collective memory and trauma? Why and how we choose to remember and to forget catastrophic events? Can traumatic memories pass from one person to another, from one generation to the next? How can one represent the unrepresentable? The seminar will address those questions, critically examine the ways in which cinema seeks to cope, often "solve,” past traumatic memories haunting our culture. The seminar will investigate and trace post-traumatic structures in both documentary and fiction films, and will deal with issues such as Hollywood and trauma; trauma and crisis of representation; testimony and memory; postmemory and prosthetic memory; nostalgia and melancholy, analyzing films such as Spellbound by Hitchcock, Testimony by Elkabetz, Night and Fog by Resnais, Forest Gump by Zemeckis, and many others.