The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Of Haunted Spaces - the Artistic Research in Film-making
JAR Journal for Artistic Research, 2022
Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.
Topographical Terrors in the Ghost Film: Mediating Space and Place in Robert Wise’s 'The Haunting'
Framing Fear, Horror and Terror through the Visible and the Invisible, 2016
The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place’, is very much at home in the genres of the ghost story/film and mainstream horror. Rumours of wrong-doing and regrettable histories survive even the ruins they dare speak of, and to speak about a haunting is to necessarily and reluctantly discuss lived space. Any ghost story in fact is a story about occupancy, a lived place and its ghost/s, now bereft but not altogether unoccupied (and therein lies the perversity of a ‘filled’ absence). This paper seeks to assess the ways in which narratives of haunted houses are essentially foregrounded by topography and architecture, taking at its premise lived space as being central to a haunting. Using the dialectical approach to space/place as found in Michel de Certeau, this paper redefines the concept of topography (space-chartering) in terms of character-appropriation (or the haunting) of space and how geographic/urban space further opens up into narrative space. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) will be analysed to demonstrate how haunted houses narratives build, sustain and suspend terror through their topography. It will also be argued that occupancy, possession and the vying for haunted space are ambivalent in this film, and that ultimately, spatial interactions are political.
RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages, 2020
NEW DEADLINE - 31st MAY 2020 ------------------------------------------------------- RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages CALL FOR PAPERS Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly – RCL n. 53 (Autumn/Winter) Editors: José Bértolo (CEC, U. Lisbon) Margarida Medeiros (ICNOVA — NOVA U. Lisbon) Throughout the nineteenth century, the camera was believed to be a diabolical machine that could steal human souls. In one of the most notorious texts included in When I Was a Photographer (1899), Félix Nadar famously described how Honoré de Balzac thought that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters”, and that each “Daguerreian operation” would retain one of these spectral layers until the human body of the photographed person amounted to nothing. If on the one hand there was this general idea that photography was a “killing instrument”, on the other hand it was clear from the beginning that photographs also granted new lives to human beings, animals, objects, etc. Being the “perfect” double of what was once seen in the visible world, the photograph becomes the space where that which is no longer alive can continue to exist. With this in mind, Roland Barthes wrote on his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980) that this relatively new and mostly mechanical art form is responsible for the “return of the Dead”. Likewise, Susan Sontag (1977) also posited that “all photographs are memento mori”. The correlation between photography and death is particularly striking in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of spirit photography. Through the extensive use of double exposures, William Mumler, William Hope, and others, demonstrated that photography not only dealt with physical reality, but could also place itself within the realms of imagination, magic and illusion. Like photography, cinema has since its beginnings been associated with spectrality. As early as 1896, Georges Méliès was already directing films such as Le manoir du diable, where editing tricks were used in order to create a supernatural world inhabited by fantastic creatures. At the same time, the supposedly realistic films of brothers Lumière were also being perceived by some spectators as much more than direct and lifelike representations of the world. After watching a Lumière program in 1896, Maxim Gorky famously wrote: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows […] It is not life but its shadow, not motion but its soundless spectre”. In the following decades, film critics, film theorists and philosophers as different as Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-Louis Leutrat explored ghostly metaphors in their inquiries on the nature of film. The prime example of this critical tendency occurs in an interview published in the Cahiers du Cinéma (2001), in which Jacques Derrida, almost a decade past the publication of Specters of Marx, characterized cinema as a “spectral technique of apparitions”. In addition, scriptwriters and directors pertaining to different historical and cultural contexts are evidently interested in stories in which the ghostly, the oneiric and the immaterial play a special part. The exploration of such elements is not limited to German Expressionism, the American Gothic (Film) tradition of the 1940s, or the Italian Giallo, also playing an important role in the works of filmmakers as distinct and unique as Yevgeni Bauer, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tourneur, Kaneto Shindo, Alain Resnais, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Pedro Costa. Borrowing from several important studies on the ghostly published in the wake of the “spectral turn” popularized by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in Spectral America (2004), this thematic issue aims to depart from and contribute to an ongoing debate which shows that many areas of spectrality in art are yet to explore. This special issue aims to reconsider the close link between photography, cinema and the ghostly, bringing together traditional and new historical, theoretical and philosophical approaches. Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics: • The nineteenth century, the emergence of new media, and the ghostly imagination • Photography, memory, and death • Spirit photography • The ghostly in modern and contemporary photography • Key issues related to the ontology of the photographic image: (un)reality, (im)materiality, (in)visibilitiy and the (un)seen • Ghostly metaphors in film writing (criticism, theory, philosophy) • The spectres of digital media and/or film (in photography and/or cinema) • Experience, perception, subjective images and imagination • The representation of dreams and hallucinations • Special effects aiming to enhance the spectral dimension of photography and/or film (e.g. double exposure, superimposition, stop trick, rear projection, acousmatic sound) • Ghostly or haunted media in fiction film (photography, radio, the Internet) • Ghosts across different genres (e.g., horror, melodrama, comedy, war film) • Critical and contemporary approaches to the concept of spectrality The articles can be written in English, French, or Portuguese, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review. They must comply with the journal’s submission guidelines and be sent through the OJS platform until May 10th, 2020. For queries, contact the editors José Bértolo (jlbertolo@gmail.com) and/or Margarida Medeiros (medeiros.margarida@gmail.com). Guidelines for submission and Instructions for authors: http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions Website: https://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/announcement/view/15
Alphaville, 2017
Murray Leeder's exciting new book sits comfortably alongside The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature & Film (Kovacs), Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife (Ruffles), Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Curtis), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Blanco and Peeren), The Spectralities Reader: Ghost and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Blanco and Peeren), The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (Kröger and Anderson), and The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Peeren) amongst others. Within his Introduction Leeder claims that "[g]hosts have been with cinema since its first days" (4), that "cinematic double exposures, [were] the first conventional strategy for displaying ghosts on screen" (5), and that "[c]inema does not need to depict ghosts to be ghostly and haunted" (3). However, despite the above-listed texts and his own reference list (9-10), Leeder somewhat surprisingly goes on to claim that "this volume marks the first collection of essays specifically about cinematic ghosts" (9), and that the "principal focus here is on films featuring 'non-figurative ghosts'-that is, ghosts supposed, at least diegetically, to be 'real'in contrast to 'figurative ghosts'" (10). In what follows, his collection of fifteen essays is divided across three main parts chronologically examining the phenomenon.
The Ghost in the Cinema Machine
Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media
The main purpose of this paper is to overview the differences between various embodied experiences we, as users, can have when interacting with contemporary visual media. By using the concept of modes of imagination, the author is approaching the problem of media specificity from another perspective. Using the four different "Ghost in the Shell" narratives as a coherent case study, the paper discusses the different modalities in which the most important categories of contemporary visual forms of representation (cinema, animated cartoons, graphic novels and video games) create immersive practice. The assumption is that "cinematic mode" or the "gaming mode" have their own ghost-like "modality", as they bringing the user/ reader/ viewer inside their imaginative world differently. The discussion about modes and modalities is not rejecting the semiotic modes theories, it rather proposes a change of view. Starting with the philosophical intuition of Jacques Derrida, who claimed that what we imagine is never the image that we see, by the fusion of the two fundamental dimensions of any illusion, this author takes into consideration the deep separation between image and imagination. Using the insightful method of "hauntology", the author overviews the most important theories about media specificity and proposes the use of cinematic modalities as experienced by the users of film as fictional world.
The Production of Haunted Space: It's Meaning and Excavation (Full Text)
2013
The production of space is a view of landscape as a process of creating and negotiating social interactions within particular spaces. What remains of past productions are the traces and vestiges, as cultural expressions or 'signs' of these productions. A 'performance excavation' works with what remains of these past productions. Fieldwork involves a recovery of what remains as sensorial materializations of these past productions. This becomes an analysis of archaeological 'haunted' space.
"Aiming to explore the fragile contours of architectural phenomenology in the areas of sensing-experiencing, remembering–distorting and communicating–imagining the space of home, the paper dwells upon the virtual territories of film as a means of visually decoding these ineffable conceptual categories: the “moving images” of home. The new insights to architectural phenomenology discourse lie in film’s making visible of the invisible, as pointed out by film theorists: “cinema disintegrates familiar objects and brings to the fore – often just in moving about – previously invisible interrelationships between parts of them” (Kracauer, 1960); “the film experience uniquely opens up and exposes the inhabited space of direct experience as a condition of singular embodiment and makes it accessible and visible to more than a single consciousness who lives it” (Sobchack, 1991). What this paper calls “moving images of home” are not mere depictions of familiar spaces, but hypostases of these images in which sensorial perception is interwoven with memories and emotional associations, as Bergman puts it: “I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and again experience lights, smells, people, rooms, moments, gestures, tones of voice and objects. These memories seldom have any particular meaning, but are like short or longer films with no point, shot at random”. In this context, the space of the childhood home is taken as a spatial experiential matrix, to which all later understandings of places relate; therefore, the discussion will revolve around two film makers with an acute awareness for the sense of place, Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) and Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), who have both worked extensively on depicting their childhood, while a closer look reveals infusions of these architecturally-situated memories on the spatiality of home places even in their non-autobiographical productions. The paper’s discourse situates the two artists at opposing poles. The Swedish Bergman is renowned for treating the interior of home in films in terms of tensions and emotions translated in big close-ups of the artists’ facial expressions, meanwhile, the Russian Tarkovsky deals with mostly the same existential topics, but has a completely different answer and expresses these domestic atmospheres, emotions and conflicts in terms of architectural, profoundly sensorial characteristics of space. Tarkovsky would say: “juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, relating a person to the whole world – that is the meaning of cinema”. Nevertheless, their films are not characterized by either large open spaces, nor by placeless bodies in anonymous surroundings, instead narratives unfold and are framed in spaces imbued with a sense of home. Therefore, this sense of home, of the familiar, becomes a mediation between the two opposing approaches, and traces a movement from body to space, with all its intricate nuances, a movement reflecting the fundamentals of architectural phenomenology."