Artistic Research
Week 2024

A Practice on the Deconstruction of Trauma in and Through Female-centred Cinema

For her research project ‘novel voyageurism in a memoryscape: a practice on the deconstruction of trauma in and through female-centred cinema’, filmmaker Marlene Dirven delves into the interplay of PTSD, violence, womanhood, relationships, and identity. Her journey began with an inquiry into how music could anchor a cinematic structure before script or images. However, while composing music and creating performance pieces that addressed traumatic memories, Dirven discovered that music and fiction are potent tools for accessing and examining her own experience with violence and PTSD.

Dirven’s research unfolds from two intertwined perspectives: how filmmaking informs her understanding of trauma and womanhood, and how her own trauma and womanhood shape her filmmaking process. This dual approach is embodied in her current project, ‘Five Nights Shomal’. In this fiction film, based on her memories, Dirven employs diverse music composition and screenwriting techniques to articulate her trauma, and how it impacted her sense of identity and relationships. Her practice evolves from the intimate confines of a music room to the collaborative, embodied space of a film set, translating raw emotion into cinematic reenactment.

Simultaneously, Dirven continually reassesses her methods, forging a female-centred filmmaking practice that prioritises feminine perspectives over masculine patriarchal conventions. This methodology is evident in her screenwriting technique of centring a female character arc, composing intuitively, and fostering a fluid, collective directorial approach that incorporates crew input to enhance her vision. Through this practice, Dirven not only deconstructs her trauma but also challenges the male-dominated conventions of cinema.

Before writing the film Five Nights Shomal, I composed its music, based on my memories. I was playing around with wavy melodies with melancholic undertones, and I stuck to this simple, repetitive pattern of 8 bars in A minor. I saw an image of a girl running through a field. The girl’s search for freedom despite environmental constraints deeply stayed with me. I soon notated the tune for string quartet, and knew this would be the theme for Nima and Mado. The main variations I built over the past months of crushed dream, Mado’s theme, the panic attack and Nima and Mado theme are currently being adapted for the screen, for the first time finding a home in cinema. In the screenplay I played with the parallel between love and violence in a female-centred character journey. It can be read as a psychological story with traumatic encounters, but also as a love tale. These two interpretations place the attention on the psychological and the (inter)relational as two distinctive narratives, two separate spaces where the individual can express, reflect and develop as a character to understand her positioning within her environment.

Reenactment on the film set became a site of negotiation, where I could hold the contradictions of my history. Despite my tears and lack of breath, I found beauty in bringing the visceral reality of trauma into a space where it could be touched, examined, and transformed, together with an artistic collective of close friends who understood and respected my reactions. This filmmaking approach allowed me to engage with the notions of musical, verbal and physical reenactment not as a static reenvisioning of the past, but as a dynamic process, a form of storytelling that moved through me as much as I moved through it.