Sunday, April 2, 2023

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. 



8 comments:

Matt M said...

Random facts:
- The musicians credited include 2 King Crimson dudes and a Flying Lizard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cunningham_(musician)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Giles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Muir

- The figure @ 6:20 is the very distinctive Dominique Pinon.

I like the idea of random French philosophers appearing in early 80s UK TV shows. "This week's special guest on The Young Ones: Gilles Deleuze"

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

Yeah the Dave Cunningham soundtrack is another attraction of the film

As is Dominique Pinon

There probably was a late night intellectual salon type program on Channel 4 that had someone of that ilk on - Lyotard. They had seem some pretty highbrow stuff. I don't know much about Channel 4 - it wasn't like an extra BBC 2, ie. run by the government - but clearly wasn't commercially oriented. Where did the funding come from?

Now it's an embarrassment.

Apart

Apart from Gogglebox, which is the best thing on the British box I think, these dismal days, at least judging by what I see whenever I'm over and staying at my mum's.

William said...

Simon - Channel 4 is owned by the UK government.

In the 1980s, Channel 4 was funded by ITV companies paying for the rights to sell the advertising on Channel 4.

You may remember the oddity of ITV programs being advertising on Channel 4, and vice versa. That's were that came from.

These days it sells and controls its own advertising and sponsorship.

Phil Knight said...

Derrida coming tantalisingly close to admitting he believes in ghosts here. It's a bit like Saussure's speculation that printed language could only be properly understood if there was a telepathic component embedded within the text.

Brings back George Hansen's point that Deconstructionism was always a hair's breadth from the occult, due to its anti-structuralismm, its dedication to blurring the boundaries of organising structures.

Early Channel 4 was itself extremely anti-structural, this programme being typical of its bizarre fare. I could never understand why Thatcher allowed it to be created, except for the fact that the Tories are a bit thick and don't understand the political import of cultural production. But it's part and parcel of the weirdness of early Thatcherism, the mixing of the iconography of discipline and orderliness with the dissolution of any kind of social decency.

Rupert said...

A fantastic film, from a wonderful period of Channel 4 music programmes.
There was an album of the music on CD, released by Piano Music as GHOST DANCE, credited to Michael Giles, James Muir, David Cunningham.

Well worth tracking down.

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

Well, that's eerie - the actress who plays the "heroine" Pascale - Pascale Ogier - died not long after this film first aired. She was only 26 and died of a heart attack in 1984. So this film is full of ghosts - Derrida, Ogier, Coltrane.

Robin said...

Have you seen Detectorists? A masterful meditation on the English landscape and (rural / small town) character. Picks up on similar themes to post Brexit visual essay you wrote a couple of years ago, including a lovely theme song that could be a mysterious folk record discovered by Jonny Trunk (but is actually written for the show).

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

LOVE Detectorists, especially the first series.

There was a recent Christmas special isn't there, I haven't seen that yet.

My younger son is a fan too, seems to have activated some English race memory in his otherwise completely American character.

And really like the theme song - and we are also keen in this household that actor who sings it (but isn't in Detectorists). Although he wasn't much cop as Bowie.