“Strange Meeting”: Reading Traumatic Memory in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Derek Jarman’s Film Adaptation (1989) - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Textes et Contextes Année : 2024

“Strange Meeting”: Reading Traumatic Memory in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Derek Jarman’s Film Adaptation (1989)

James Strowman

Résumé

This article offers a comparative reading of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Op. 66 (1962) and Derek Jarman’s eponymously titled cinematographic adaptation (1989). It examines how both of these works represent personal and collective memory by conflating the traumas of the First and Second World War through their inclusion of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry as a literary intertext. I show how the musical composition and the film both function as multi-layered intermedial structures, which not only denounce the carnage of warfare, but also evoke the complex ways in which art, and official commemoration in particular, can mediate traumatic memory. I analyse the tension between commemoration and subversion in Britten’s and Jarman’s artistic strategies through the lens of the sublime, in particular what Kiene Brillenburg Wurth terms an “(an)aesthetics of shock.”

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Dates et versions

hal-04642446 , version 1 (09-07-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04642446 , version 1

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James Strowman. “Strange Meeting”: Reading Traumatic Memory in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Derek Jarman’s Film Adaptation (1989). Textes et Contextes, In press. ⟨hal-04642446⟩
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