My maternal grandfather and namesake, Daniel Martin, was a Presbyterian minister. Although I don’t share his religious beliefs, I sometimes feel a bit like an itinerant preacher must feel, spreading lessons I have learned as a neurologist who now has Alzheimer’s dementia. So far, I have spoken on at least 40 occasions for interviews on radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and podcasts from around the world, from Dubai to New Zealand. I have also spoken to medical students, graduate students, other physicians, and Alzheimer’s support groups.

This chapter juxtaposes Plato’s Cave Allegory and our visual media. Plato’s detailed text, in which Socrates describes the projection of shadows onto a wall by means of firelight, readily lends itself to a cinematic understanding. Various film theorists, directors, and cinematographers have pointed to this analogy for their own approaches to cinema. Henri Bergson was the first to incorporate the Cave Allegory into his philosophy of the cinematographic mind. The chapter traces such a development from the birth of cinema until today, e.g. in texts by Maxim Gorky, Susan Sontag, and others. Specific films, such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, address the Platonic symbolism of light and shadow as stages of knowledge or enlightenment. Related to this topic is the power of moving images (e.g. in A Clockwork Orange), the question of their truth or reliability (documentaries, “fake news”), and their relation to historical memory (Agnès Varda, Marcel Ophuls).

This chapter focuses on two feature-length documentaries by the Chinese director Wang Bing – He Fengming and Dead Souls – that present the testimonies of individuals accused of being rightists by CCP officials during the Anti-Rightist movement and thereby sent to the Jiabiangou “reeducation through labor” camp. The chapter argues that these two films seek to address the trauma suffered by former rightists who received no official apology nor compensation. Both films describe the marks left by these past events in the minds of witnesses, but they are constructed according to different temporalities. He Fengming renders past events in the present in order to uncover and recognize the problem of the haunting past. Conversely, Dead Souls restores the symbolic separation between the past and the present, thus allowing the audience to face this part of history and engage in a critical reflection on the meaning of morality amid violence.

This chapter focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.

While literary texts rely on words to help readers imagine climate change, film relies on a different narrative toolset of images, motion, and sound, pre-packaging our perception, if not our affective response. In climate change cinema, such pre-packaging has tended toward the dark and disastrous as filmmakers are torn between the desire to forewarn and the need to entertain and make money. It has thus become a critical commonplace that cinematic depictions of climate change offer a spectacle-driven, apocalyptic vision that is at odds with the diffuse experience of climate and the slow violence of climate change. Some critics fear such dark visions might prove detrimental to addressing the issue because people end up disengaging from it. The first part of the chapter explores emotions cued by dystopian depictions of climate doom. The second part turns to two films that have tried an entirely different affective approach – Cyril Dion and Melanie Laurent’s Demain and Damon Gameau’s 2040 – by presenting possible solutions to the climate crisis along with desirable futures, in a mode that is often humorous, witty, and uplifting. The chapter argues that both strategies have their place in climate change cinema, and both can be effective with some audiences.

The great documentarian Humphrey Jennings is credited with helping to create the iconography of “the people’s war,” a period concept that emphasized how people of all social positions pulled together for the collective good. In Fires Were Started, which focuses on a day in the life of an Auxiliary Fire Service substation, a weary and grief-stricken fireman reads aloud from Macbeth’s speech to Banquo’s murderers. Whereas these lines have (somewhat bizarrely) been taken as evidence of Shakespeare’s status as an emblem of national unity, they articulate a strong sense of class grievance as well as skepticism about the collective ideal of the “people’s war.” In this way, Jennings mobilizes Shakespeare to explore the limits of the model of unity with which the playwright was associated. In doing so, Jennings contends that such unity is not given but in constant need of re-attainment.

Chapter six grew out of my curiosity about a term that appears in the preamble of the ICC Statute: unimaginable atrocities. If the court is indeed called to fight "unimaginable atrocities," how is it possible that considerable parts of the same statute are devoted to spell out and, in great detail, how these crimes should be defined? The chapter combines my curiosity about the ICC Statute with my questions about the use of film in legal education. Following Shoshana Felman, I argue that the ICC Statute should be read as pointing to the limits of what can be articulated in legal language. The unimaginable or unspeakable cannot, by definition, be captured in legal categories. However, it is possible to suggest what it means for something to be unimaginable. This is where art, including film, can play a role. The biggest part of the chapter is devoted to films that use reenactments to show what it means not to be able to fully articulate and understand historical trauma. The films, I argue, function as a reminder of the importance of the term used in the ICC preamble: the unimaginable atrocities that point to the limits of what law can articulate and achieve.

Through an examination of Henrique Cirne-Lima and Josué Pellot’s 2010 documentary film I Am the Queen about transgender Puerto Rican beauty queen pageants in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, this chapter discusses how queer diasporic communities in the US navigate family and kinship in light of racial, sexual, and gender difference. Underscoring the importance of decentering conventional notions of kinship while remaining attuned to the way “given” families may in fact link up to “selected” families for purposes of communal sustenance and endurance, the chapter highlights the film’s aim to represent alternative formations of family and kinship as they relate to diaspora and displacement. Ultimately, Cirne-Lima and Pellot’s film offers a vision of the struggle to belong in the context of the loving competition of the beauty pageant while also accounting for the struggles of historically marginalized and maligned communities such as the transgender Puerto Rican women the documentary represents.