Abstract
Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory attempts to answer the question of what happens to first-hand memories when they are filtered down through subsequent generations. According to Hirsch, postmemories are powerful because they are invested with imagination and creation. Because of the aforementioned attributes Hirsch assigned to postmemory, it follows that postmemory can fill in memory gaps. This raises the unresolved problem of postmemory and the appropriation of the past. This paper investigates how and in what ways films can create instrumental and thus didactic cultural memories by way of looking at the recent very popular and successful film in Greece about the Greek Civil War, Psychi Vathia/Deep Soul (2009) by Pantelis Voulgaris and analyses the ways in which it complicates historical representation. In particular, I focus on the formal and thematic elements of the film and suggest that Voulgaris shows history as transition and offers a didactic postmemory of a fixed horizon.
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Kosmidou, E.R. (2017). Civil Wars and Cinematic Narrative: The Case of Psychi Vathia (Deep Soul, Pantelis Voulgaris, 2009). In: Deslandes, K., Mourlon, F., Tribout, B. (eds) Civil War and Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61179-2_8
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