Issue 42
Notebook

From Trauma to Memory: The Visual Translation of Female Bodies in 'The Flowers of War'

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  • Fang Xie,
  • Dongye Lyu,
  • Dody M.H. Chen
Fang Xie
Jiangsu Ocean University
Bio
Dongye Lyu
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou Campus
Bio
Dody M.H. Chen
Wenzhou Business College
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.63700/1381

Published 2026-07-31

Keywords

  • Female body,
  • Collective memory,
  • Trauma narration,
  • Cinematic transduction

How to Cite

Xie, F., Lyu, D., & Chen, D. M. (2026). From Trauma to Memory: The Visual Translation of Female Bodies in ’The Flowers of War’. L’Atalante. Journal of Film Studies, (42), 45–62. https://doi.org/10.63700/1381

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

Creative Commons License

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

Abstract

Taking Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War (2011) as a case study, this article examines how war films translate historical trauma into collective remembrance through the visual construction of the female body. Anchored in the theories of collective and cultural memory as articulated by Assmann (2011), alongside the concept of prosthetic memory established by Landsberg (2004), this analysis employs semiotics of the body and gender studies to conduct a close reading of two distinct positions of female subjects in the film: schoolgirls and prostitutes. The study identifies a three-step “cinematic transduction” of trauma: (1) visualisation, whereby exposure/occlusion, extreme close-ups and disjunctive editing present violence as embodied experience; (2) symbolisation, as female bodies shift from victimhood to an ethical-aesthetic “sublime body”, bearing structures of sacrifice, mutual aid and communal mourning; and (3) ethical communalisation, whereby previously segmented social identities converge in the context of a civilian catastrophe, transforming the female body into a conduit between individual affect and national narrative. In this trajectory, the body serves not merely as a physical entity but as a cultural sign where power, gender and memory intersect. This article thus argues that gendered embodiment operates as a pivotal nexus in the production of national memory, as the film’s visual grammar, especially the interplay of concealment and exposure, re-codes women’s bodies as affective archives and cultural metaphors, enabling traumatic history to become sensorially shareable and narratively durable. The findings thus offer an operational framework for analysing the memory politics and bodily aesthetics of Chinese war films.

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