The Science of Ghosts

 

Hantologie...

Two weeks ago I was in Taipei for a terrifically stimulating conference titled A Future Slowly Cancelled, mounted by the Taiwanese arts organisation C-LAB. Most of the papers touched upon Mark Fisher's work and notions like lost futures, hauntology, acid communism, etc (including my own keynote speech).

The night before the conference proper kicked off, there was a showing of a 1983 film that amazingly (I ought to have my Hauntological Association membership revoked!) I had never heard of: Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance.  And knock me down with a feather, who should pop up on screen, in a sort of acting role (playing himself), but ol' Jacques Derrida. It's 1983 but he's already talking the kind of ghost talk that would lead to Spectres of Marx, published a full decade later. 

Quick as a flash, I start taking phone pix of Derrida talking about ghosts -  the bright idea occurs to me that I can drop a few of these into the Google slide-show of my lecture just at the points where concepts like mal d'archive and hauntology feature. So it'll be the re-apparition of Derrida on the very same screen he'd appeared on the night before, mediated by the sort of tele-mediamatic technology of the digital era that JD alludes to  in Archive Fever (albeit glancingly so). Levels of image degradation  multiplied: faded made-for-TV video, shakily snapped on a mobile phone from a hasty distance, uploaded to Google, then reprojected in the lecture hall via my Chromebook. A ghost of a ghost of a ghost (of an actual ghost - a man no longer living). As academic wisecracks go, this ought to bring the house down.  (Well, in the event, not quite... )

Here's another scene with Derrida and the "heroine" in it (she's his student, but she... ) 

Jacques looks very debonair and dashing with his plume of fair hair. 

Now what is even more bizarre is that - although they don't share the screen at any moment - another major role in Ghost Dance is played by the young Robbie Coltrane.  Who could have dreamed it - Monsieur Archive Fever and the future-Hagrid, in the same Channel 4-funded art movie.

There's an odd sequence at the end where there's a kind of ghosting of images - the faces of Derrida and other characters appear on a seaside ridge of rock (ever so slightly redolent of the ending - or one of the endings, there are different versions, I'm talking about the TV version - of Videodrome).

Pascale Ogier - tragically soon to be a ghost (she died in 1984 aged only 26, of a heart attack)

 

Here's the whole film for the watching - a poignant flashback to the days when Channel 4 did adventurous and experimental programming. Lost futures, eh? 

There's some wanky overwrought bits, but many striking sequences and it's well worth a view, I'd say. Part of the slim corpus of hauntological cinema.