The Birds Film Analysis

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PAUL CELAN’S POETRY AND ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MOVIE, ‘THE BIRDS’, CASTING A SPOTLIGHT ON THE PORTRAYAL OF TRAUMA

A writer uses words and phrases to describe a scene, whereas, a film - maker uses pictures to depict a scene. Interior monologues and expression of thoughts characterize a literary work. On the other hand, settings, props, costume, looks, gesture and movement of a character formulate the essence of a movie. Inevitable storyline compression in a movie, confines its scope of expression, in contrast to a literary piece, where an author has liberty of thought and expression. Despite all these divergences, a parallel can be drawn

The phrase “trauma” is usually used to delineate experiences that are emotionally afflictive and perturbing, that serve as a severe injury to mind and soul, and that overwhelm people’s ability to grapple the situation, leaving them incapacitated. Trauma is also defined in reference to circumstances that are beyond the realm of normal human experience. It is a stigma that remains for long and shapes one’s course of thought and action. In Remnants of the Song: Trauma and the experience of modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, Ulrich Baer brings into lime light that in his poetry, Celan accounts for an “experience that does not fully enter memory, but dissipates in the mind in the form

In case of Celan, the agent is the Germans, bent on tormenting, torturing and ultimately wiping off the entire Jewish population. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Germany being a racist believed in the superiority of the Aryan race over others. Therefore, according to the Nazi party, the Jews were a problem that needed to be removed. The Jewish people were thus treated as the OTHER and anti – Semitic laws which discriminated against them were introduced. The ultimate remedy which emerged as a result, was the mass killings of the Holocaust, which Hitler called “The Final Solution”. Stanley Kunitz, in his article Paul Celan and the Poetry of the Holocaust points out that Celan’s late poems convey the “tragedy, as well as the hard – won, ever menaced triumph, of a poet deprived of a society in which he can feel at home, and a profoundly religious temperament that cannot identify itself with any creed. It shows a poet projecting his breath into emptiness and feeling it return on the wind or in the snow, charged with a numinous power. Kunitz comprehends the insurmountable stalemate between the German and the Jewish sense of the world and also the impossible weight of Celan’s exertion to speak