Issue 42
Notebook

Hermeneutics of Ruins: From Traces to the Healing of Collective Trauma in 'Children of the Beehive' and 'Voices in the Wind'

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  • Miguel Muñoz-Garnica,
  • Cora Cuenca Navarrete,
  • Adrián Tarín-Sanz
Miguel Muñoz-Garnica
Universidad Loyola Andalucía
Bio
Cora Cuenca Navarrete
Universidad Loyola Andalucía
Bio
Adrián Tarín-Sanz
Universidad Amawtay Wasi, Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.63700/1377

Published 2026-07-31

Keywords

  • Collective trauma,
  • Memory,
  • Cinema,
  • Japan,
  • Ruins,
  • Institutionalization of forgetting
    • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Muñoz-Garnica, M., Cuenca Navarrete, C., & Tarín-Sanz, A. (2026). Hermeneutics of Ruins: From Traces to the Healing of Collective Trauma in ’Children of the Beehive’ and ’Voices in the Wind’. L’Atalante. Journal of Film Studies, (42), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.63700/1377

Copyright (c) 2026 L'Atalante. Journal of film studies

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The article analyzes how Children of the Beehive (Hachi no su no kodomotachi, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1948) and Voices in the Wind (Kaze no denwa, Nobuhiro Suwa, 2020) use ruins as ethical-formal devices to address the major collective traumas experienced by Japan since World War II. In both films, the ruins not only serve as devastated settings caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Tōhoku catastrophe but also act as traces of a pain that resists being addressed by official narratives. Through a cinematic methodology open to the real and the journey as a narrative motif, the directors propose an ethics of testimony that avoids the aestheticization of trauma, instead offering an “exemplary” and “multidirectional” memory that connects different generations of victims and survivors. In contrast to the institutionalization of forgetting promoted by the Japanese state in the name of modernization and stability, these works construct cinematic spaces of resistance, where the traumatic can be collectively processed, thus laying symbolic foundations for a grassroots healing process.

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