Terms like "haunting," "conjuring," or even just "appearing" flood my academic vocabulary. I write that sea animals simply appear and disappear, as if their bodies are constantly in an act of disembodiment in the films of Jean Painlevé, or I think about how an image in a surrealist work conjures another which conjures another in an endless play of mental hauntings. I'm drawn to this type of subtlety—brief pulsations on screen or airy references. Ephemerality was one of the words that buzzed in my head from the moment I learned it.
Watching films, I get this same pleasure. Films that brood on tiny flickers draw me in. I'm captivated by small movements amidst the grand cinematic space that the screen conjures. Reviews of the 2016 film Carol called out its uninspiring coldness, a quality that others (including myself), however, found to be subtlety, a radical act of queer love held almost exclusively in gestures and glances. The camera lingers in this type of cinema, showing tortured characters speak and listen, holding their gaze as they blush or giggle or look longingly at the other. The film relishes on these small reveals: we often see what the other character misses, showing us the slippage inherent in any system of subtle signs. This idea of a queer language made by and for queers (the director Todd Haynes is a gay man) stuck with me. Cinema, with its dazzling display in a darkened room, seems to be inherently an unsubtle medium, meant to demonstrate in the clearest terms the existence of another reality. And yet films like Carol exist.
Queer films haunt me and I began to think about other on-screen hauntings that have stuck with me. Two recent indie films about ghosts have forced me to reconsider and begin to theorize these subtle hauntings of the cinema and what they reveal about the medium. While these are creatures that can scream or wail they can also appear and disappear at will, and in Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016) and A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017) they're hardly there. In Personal Shopper, one woman awaits contact from her recently deceased twin brother while A Ghost Story traces the centuries-long haunting of a place by one sheet-covered deceased man. The ghosts are almost entirely silent, manipulating the world around them only through small movements. Their rage—the stuff of horror movies—is largely absent. Instead, both films show scratches on a wall to reveal ghosts, who serve almost as mere markers or witnesses of time rather than as powerful, supernatural beings. We watch as the protagonists watch—watching a spiritual medium herself watching a haunted house for signs or staring at the sighs of a haunting ghost who watches the house he haunts as it changes over centuries.
I kept thinking that this is what cinema can (and should) do: produce these ghosts and the tragedies they share. These stories are told almost entirely through the interplay of edited visuals and sound, the medium specificity that sets it apart from the other arts. So are films that do this the most cinematic? They all seem to make use of the cinema's ability to demonstrate reality, to simply show the world—a world like ours but part of the fantasy of artists. Part of the cinema is its ability to craft special effects, yet these films are largely without them, allowing the dust of an environment and the smallest movements on an actor's face to tell stories. But the dust is planted and the actors can perform the same scene again and again—the atmosphere is created. The power of visuals to mobilize supernatural and even radical concerns through the display of reality seems a profoundly challenging task and, when done right, the key to at least my understanding of great work. Indexing the real and using it to craft larger stories is a poetic task because it means subsuming a flickering candle or snowfall into a narrative and thematic concern that it actually exists entirely apart from.
Perhaps films like these haunt because they remind us the malleability of the world around us, the polyvalent meaning everything can have. They haunt because they are of this world, expanding beyond their diegesis into the material of everyday life from which they, after all, were born.
Film still from A Ghost Story.