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Berenike
Jung
Biography
Berenike Jung is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Southampton. Before arriving in Southampton, she taught and worked at the University of Tübingen, King’s College London and the University of Groningen and has lived and worked in France, the United States, Chile, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.
She received her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2016 and published her monograph The Invisibilities of Political Torture The Presence of Absence in US and Chilean Cinema and Television with Edinburgh University Press in 2020. She co-edited Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain (Routledge, 2019) with Stella Bruzzi.
Her research examines how audiovisual media engage with political violence, trauma, and cultural memory; global and transnational cinemas of the Global South, especially Latin America; decolonising approaches to film education, and aesthetics of digital audiovisual cultures such as TikTok. Her recent work on Latin American cinema includes the article “Rich feelings: affective histories, class debt and care as ethics in Chile ’76, Los Perros, Azor” (Transnational Screens, forthcoming).
The Presence of Absence and the Limits of Representation: Political Torture and Ethical Questions of Audiovisual Mediation
How can we show and speak to experiences of suffering that seem to resist representation? What is at stake ethically when we represent political violence through audiovisual media? This keynote takes as its starting point ethical questions around the mediation of political torture in cinema and television. Torture is “limit case”: a form of political violence that at once demands witness and defies representation, and that is often displaced onto recurring visual and narrative tropes.
Drawn from my research on cases in Chile and the United States, I trace how audiovisual texts negotiate the tension between evidence and unreliability and between visibility and absences, made perceptible through sensory registers such as off-screen sound and other non-visual forms of address. Examples range from Fernando Guzzoni’s Carne de perro (Chile, 2012) and Manuela Martelli’s Chile ’76 (Chile, 2022) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (USA, 2012), Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure (USA, 2008), and the more recent Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (Iran, 2025), which explores the psychological aftermath of torture through a story of uncertain recognition and moral ambiguity.I will use these films to think through assumptions surrounding spectatorship and the limits of representation as a political strategy.