John Trafton

Originally from Southern California, John Trafton received his PhD from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and currently teachings film studies at Seattle University. He specializes in teaching history on film, contemporary film culture, horror cinema, and Los Angeles on film. He has published several works on film history, including The American Civil War and the Hollywood War Film (Palgrave, 2015), and is currently working to complete his next book, Movie-Made Los Angeles: The City of Angels and the Rise of American Film (Wayne State University Press).

FREE STATE OF JONES AND THE NEW CIVIL WAR CINEMA

This paper explores how violence and trauma are orchestrated in Free State of Jones as a way of cinematically refighting the Civil War and contesting previous cycles of Civil War films. American cinema has refought the Civil War on screen throughout film history, affirming Gilles Deleuze’s view that “American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of nation-civilization” (Deleuze 1986, 148). In the twenty-first century, American Civil War cinema evolved into a broader constellation of films, including slavery films and allegorical genre films, that offered new modes of remembering the Civil War and re-evaluating its position in the story of American nationhood and national belonging. Free State of Jones is an exemplar of this new wave of Civil War cinema, foregrounding issues of race and class struggle and using graphic violence to desanitize the prevailing cultural memory of the Civil War. Through engaging with Sarah Cole’s notion of “disenchanted violence,” in which the violated body is not a “symbol of historical transformation and renewal” but rather a gruesome reminder of war’s cruelty, Free State of Jones transmits an accusatory, shell-shocked gaze towards the viewer, suggesting that the war is still being fought and, regrettably, can be lost (Cole 2012, 43).