Part of cinema’s appeal, Robert A. Rosenstone has argued, is that it is able to satisfy an innate desire to see “history unfold
before our eyes” (11). In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), Siegfried Kracauer is skeptical about the potential of historical film. For Kracauer, historical film depends on a claustrophobic alignment of the spectator’s “potential field of vision” with the actual images that appear on the screen. In a film depicting contemporary reality, he argues, the audience is “free to imagine that the camera roams reality itself” because even where the staging of the film might be artificial, it is made to duplicate “real-life surroundings” (78). Kracauer illustrates this phenomenon with the example of Elie Faure’s dream of an impossible documentary about the Passion of Christ. Apart from turning its spectators into “eye-witnesses to the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Agony in Gethsemane,” this documentary would show what a historical film could not: the “seemingly insignificant happenings incidental to those momentous events—the soldiers shuffling cards, the clouds of dust whirled up by the horses, the moving crowds, the lights and shadows in an abandoned street” (78). Kracauer describes this effect created by the attention to arbitrary detail as the illusion of “endlessness”—a notion dialectical by nature as it depends on the capturing of finite fragments that signify a depth to the reality of the scene that the camera is unable to capture. Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002) seems to approach this ideal film; through large-scale reenactment and attention to the arbitrary, it convincingly masks the seams of its artificiality as it recreates the events of the Bloody Sunday massacre. This article will focus on the relationship between the aesthetics of authenticity and its critical readings in terms of trauma, as well as explore the limitations of such an approach. There is no question that a community experiencing an event on the scale of Bloody Sunday will be faced with potentially long-term, traumatic responses, yet when dealing with its representation, the impulse to read the film’s aesthetic construction in this way obscures a deeper ambiguity about its politics of history.