Abstract
True crime, as a genre, investigates and narrates violent and traumatic events, the effects of which linger in places and bodies. This chapter seeks to explore the connection between true crime and trauma through a discussion of two recent true crime documentaries, The Keepers (2017, dir. Ryan White) and Casting JonBenet (2017, dir. Kitty Green). It argues that both documentaries, in quite different ways, use contemporary footage to show glimpses of the traumatic past in the material places of the present, and use re-enactments to make fragmentary memory visible and material. This chapter concludes that the materialisation of traumatic memory as an important screen presence in true crime documentary reveals the genre’s capacity to meaningfully represent trauma through the experiential memory of place.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bell, MM 1997, ‘The ghosts of place’, Theory and Society, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 813–36.
Berry, M & Sawada, C (eds.) 2016, Divided lenses: Screen memories of war in East Asia, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.
Biressi, A 2004, ‘Inside/out: Private trauma and public knowledge in true crime documentary’, Screen, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 401–12.
Bruzzi, S 2006, New documentary: A critical introduction, 2nd edn, Routledge, Oxford.
Bruzzi, S 2016, ‘Making a genre: The case of the contemporary true crime documentary’, Law and Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 249–80.
Caruth, C 1996, Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
De Lestrade, J 2004, The staircase, streaming video, Canal+ and Netflix.
Francis, M & Hussein, L 2017, ‘Off the record: Reenactment and intimacy in Casting JonBenet’, Film Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 32–41.
Freeman, L, Nienass, B & Melamed, L (eds.) 2013, ‘Screen memory’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1–7.
Goodall, J & Lee, C (eds.) 2015, Trauma and public memory, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Green, K 2017, Casting JonBenet, streaming video, Netflix.
Horeck, T 2007, ‘From documentary to drama: Capturing Aileen Wuornos’, Screen, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 141–59.
Jarecki, A 2015, The jinx: The life and deaths of Robert Durst, DVD, HBO.
Jelača, D 2016, Dislocated screen memory: Narrating trauma in post-Yugoslav cinema, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Kuhn, A 2002, Family secrets: Acts of memory and imagination, Verso, London.
Marks, LU 2000, The skin of the film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses, Duke University Press, Durham.
Murley, J 2008, The rise of true crime: Twentieth century murder and American popular culture, Praeger.
Nichols, B 1994, Blurred boundaries: Questions of meaning in contemporary culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Nichols, B 2008, ‘Documentary reenactment and the fantasmatic subject’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 72–89.
Ricciardi, L & Demos, M 2015, Making a murderer, streaming video, Netflix.
Rothberg, M 2009, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Seltzer, M 2007, True crime: Observations on violence and modernity, Routledge, New York.
Trigg, D 2012, Memory of place: A phenomenology of the uncanny, Ohio University Press, Athens.
Violi, P 2012, ‘Trauma site museums and politics of memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 36–75.
Walker, J 2005, Trauma cinema: Documenting incest and the Holocaust, University of California Press, Berkeley.
White, R 2017, The Keepers, Streaming video, Netflix.
Williams, L 1993, ‘Mirrors without memories: Truth, history and the new documentary’, Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 9–21.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Evans, B. (2020). Screen Memories in True Crime Documentary: Trauma, Bodies, and Places in The Keepers (2017) and Casting JonBenet (2017). In: Hubbell, A.L., Akagawa, N., Rojas-Lizana, S., Pohlman, A. (eds) Places of Traumatic Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52055-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52056-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)