"This is the best way to go. 

That way, you can see the city lights brighter than ever 

And stars and constellations 

And it's breath-taking 

The star field is just so spectacular 

And one day, I saw something come down to us 

Come down to us"

 (NASA Earth Scientist Melissa Dawson 2012/Burial 2013)

“I saw a UFO once,” Lev announced matter-of-factly while mindlessly prodding a leftover piece of salad on his red serving tray. We were both nineteen and seated at our usual table in the corner of a small dürüm bar in Brussels. The bartender of the place looked uncannily identical to a young Johnny Depp, which was probably the major reason people knew about the bar, because the food was nothing special. Any stranger unfortunate enough to have heard parts of our pretentious and tireless discussions about films must have found us insufferable. However, that one time, Lev led us off our well-trodden path of usual conversation topics. I urged him to continue to talk. He said that one time, he and his mother saw a UFO – she interpreted the apparition as a sign of God – and pointed out that non-Westerners still dare to think mythically. His words pulled away the blanket of habit that had crept over us. I kept silent. The buzzing fluorescents starkly lit the distance between us. It's been two and a half years since Lev and I last spoke, and young Johnny Depp has since quit his job. The newest neighbourhood residents have no idea who he is. 

*

There have never been fewer UFO sightings in Belgium as in recent years, according to the Belgian UFO hotline. This remarkable downward trend has also been recorded for the UK, and The Guardian lays the blame on the democratisation of professional cameras and smartphones: “Part of the reason is that the technology for providing documentary evidence of such matters is now widely available to everybody with a smartphone, and such purported evidence as there is on YouTube looks extremely threadbare.”[1] The lack of proper confirmation has left the broader public uninterested in the subject. UFO enthusiasts are abandoning their flying saucer clubs at a rapid pace and are now looking elsewhere for their weekly portion of conspiracy theories. Aliens can’t seem to fascinate us any longer. 

Even within our popular culture the magic surrounding extra-terrestrial life has been taken over by an alien bore-out. Science-fiction tales used to be full of intergalactic space battles and scuffles with monstrous space creatures, but instead, there has been a turn towards narratives in which humanity is set against an infinite empty universe, existentially alone and dark. Even a new season of The X-Files in 2018 couldn’t bring back the giddiness of old. One of the films that did rake in awards and stellar reviews that year was High Life, a melancholic and existential science-fiction story directed by French filmmaker Claire Denis and a textbook example of the growing cosmic realism movement. “I want to believe” turned into “Oblivion awaits.” Futuristic narratives say very little about what the future truly holds for us, but rather reveal a complex testimony of the time, society, and ideological framework in which they were created. For example, the drawings of Jean-Marc Côté in the En L'An 2000 series betray the almost naive prevailing optimism of progress of the nineteenth century. So, what does the collective wave of cosmic disillusion say about our world view today?

Pioneer of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud once claimed that man has sustained three major narcissistic blows over time: the first one happened thanks to Copernicus' evidence that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. Darwin delivered the second blow when he proved humans have descended from monkeys and were not created in the image of God. The last one was Freud’s own conceptualisation of the human unconscious, which showed us how little deliberate rational thought actually controls our decisions and desires: “[We are] not even master in [our] own house, but … must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in [our] own mind.”[2]  

If he had lived any longer, Freud would almost undoubtedly have added Einstein's theory of relativity and Hawking's work on cosmic singularities, both of which have disturbed and shocked our basic understanding of time and space. They have introduced an incomprehensibly complex image of the universe because of which even our ideas surrounding extra-terrestrial life got stirred up. 

"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” According to Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke spoke these words when Kubrick was researching for 2001: A Space Odyssey.[3] Over time, storytellers have mainly explored the second idea of this dichotomy; exciting stories about unknown life and aliens threatening humanity used to be common in popular entertainment. Even more high-brow literature such as the 1961 novel Solaris, written by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, uses the Other in extra-terrestrial life to reflect on what it means to be human and what our place and meaning is in the larger whole. The exponential growth of cosmic knowledge during the twentieth century aroused the old familiar mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Humanity simultaneously felt a collective childlike enthusiasm as well as a deep fear of what our coming-of-age would bring about. Fiction gratefully exploited this chasm.

But something in our collective underbelly started to gnaw, and the uneasiness has grown into dimensions impossible to ignore any longer. The more we try to uncover, the more we find an endless enigmatic emptiness out there. We realise that acquiring ample cosmic knowledge to understand major parts of our universe will take a terrifying number of human generations and may as well never happen. 

In addition, the idea of space exploration has, since very recently, been claimed and tainted by the bleak space capitalism of Elon Musk’s Space X, which has steered the idealist vision of old towards the exit of profound disillusion and melancholia. We are haunted by a nostalgia for a lost future,[4] an idea British cultural theorist Mark Fisher introduced in what can only be described as an oeuvre that was ended way too soon.

So, despite our Hubble telescope, Voyager spacecrafts, and deep yearning for anything that resembles an answer to our shouts into the cosmic void, there is to this day still not one shred of evidence for extra-terrestrial life. Mathematically, we know that we are unlikely to be the only ones out there, so the question is not whether alien life exists, but whether the infinite universe is not too big and our life span not too short to ever discover that other life, let alone communicate with it in any way. What if in this tiny corner of the universe, we are all alone after all? What if it is just us?

The potential ultimate aloneness of our human species in space throws us upon ourselves. The confrontation with the desolate infinite nothingness pushes the main characters of recent science-fiction films such as Gravity (2013), Ad Adstra (2019), Moon (2009), High Life (2018), and Interstellar (2014) into an existential state of reflection on their relationships at home, their past, their traumas, and their mortality. Like the metaphorical ghost from a classic Gothic story, their earthly life haunts them relentlessly. The vastness of space sends Brad Pitt’s character in Ad Astra into such a deep reflective state about his past on earth and his daddy issues galore that several online reviewers renamed the film “Sad Astra” and in doing so, proved how popular and widespread this trope has become. 

Interstellar, however, turns it upside down by staging how the future haunts the past, an appropriate intervention to bring home the recurring theme of time. During his dangerous space mission, main character Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) ends up inside a black hole, where time becomes an overseeable dimension and where he watches, as a voyeur, his own past in which he says goodbye to his family at the start of his present mission. He tries to shout to his former self not to leave, but that’s not how the film’s physics work. 

Yet, with great force and by bending cosmic rules, he manages to push a book off the bookcase into the past, hoping they will interpret this as a sign, but everyone in the room laughs it off through their tears: “It must have been a ghost.” Cooper sees his past self leave and cannot help but witness his own inevitable decision. "Time is a flat circle," says Marty (again McConaughey) in episode five of the dark American crime series True Detective; "Everything we have done or will do, we will do over and over and over again, forever."

We gaze into the emptiness of our universe, but nothing gazes back. We shout and only our own faint echoes answer. That what once was us, returns, yet delayed in time, slightly faded, and therefore estranged and unheimlich. If nothing answers our calls out there, at least we can meet ourselves, even if it is as a flimsy whisper, a haunting spectre. The concept of time in the cosmos is a fickle little thing, which makes circular temporal structures in science-fiction narratives the ideal locus to give rise to ghosts as an existential substitute for the exiled extra-terrestrials. 

The 2016 gem Arrival by Canadian filmmaker Dennis Villeneuve seems to mark this very event when a seemingly unresponsive alien life form arrives on earth. Every person on the planet is in a state of absolute panic while linguist Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is sent to decipher what these extra-terrestrials want for humanity. After an arduous communication process, Banks discovers that both the answer and the question have always lain in her being both within and without time, haunted by “a daughter that is dead before she is even born, staring at her mother both from the past and the future.”[5] The ghost of La Jetée (1962) returns in the most unexpected of places.

Recently I walked by my old regular Brussels dürümbar and saw the ghosts of a former us at the table that has undoubtedly become the meeting spot of a new duo of film students. I, too, was within and without. Lev believes in demons, gods, and aliens, and I don't. "I see ghosts," I told him weeks later. I meant it. He sniffed scornfully after making sure I wasn't cheaply referencing The Sixth Sense. "That's ridiculous," was his reply, "but continue." So I continue.

*

Ghosts inherently float around in the complex veiny structures of our technology as if it were a digital Styx. Of the more than 40 million deceased Facebook users I know one personally. He may be dead, but his profile page is still very much alive: messages of remembered memories, statements of being missed, and "Happy birthday, wherever you are" have been routinely flooding his wall during the past six years. His profile picture is still the same photo taken at his 22nd birthday party. A little over a month later he fell through an unstable roof and to this day I still come across messages he left behind under old photos of mutual friends. His smiling digital ghost roams the cloud, which means that ironically and annoyingly enough, my first-grade teacher, Miss Griet, is right after all when she said that dead people live on in the clouds.

The internet never forgets. This platitude flashes on and off like a metaphorical neon sign every time a conversation broaches the theme of online privacy. The moralising horror stories of videos of drunken parties ruining a job application ten years down the road are retold as if they were modern oral myths. In 2018, Jihad Van Puymbroeck, a young new employee of the Flemish broadcasting company VRT, suddenly found herself in the eye of a relentless media storm when right-wing news site SCEPTR dug up six-year-old tweets of hers to help state their argument that the national broadcast is allegedly too ideologically biased in its political reporting. Some people called for her resignation and wanted her to answer for mundane digital statements she had made when she was not yet a public servant or even an adult. Similar cases served as a motivation for Google and the European Union to team up and find a solution to protect individuals against the disadvantages constant access to all information may have. They came up with the controversial “Right to be forgotten” in 2014, according to which users can request certain search results linked to their names to be removed from online search engines. The internet forgets a bit if you ask nicely.

No, the internet does actually forget. Like anything that is subjected to time, the worldwide web does not escape entropy. It may seem that Google, Facebook and Apple together remember all possible data, but it is only a matter of time before all of it is lost again. For example, it's genuinely hard to find anything online today that is over twelve years old, with the exception of some extremely popular segments that are still being shared and mirrored. But the fan websites from the 1990s, personal blogs, and family videos from before 2010 have almost all irrevocably disappeared. Hyperlinks in old internet forum posts lead nowhere, and the new generation of internet browsers can’t support ancient programming languages any longer. Websites and data, as if they were the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat decades after the Chernobyl disaster, are claimed by chaos. Servers and server owners go bankrupt, hard drives crash, pixels and bytes get lost. 

When I migrated my personal files from one computer to another one the other day, an irregularity occurred when transferring a scanned photo of my mother and baby me laughing together. It is now a glitch, in which more than half of the photo has been lost and replaced with an unnatural digital green. Panta choorei. I wash my hands in the slow-flowing Lethe of digital entropy.

When French philosopher Jacques Derrida combined the words haunting and ontology to form the neologism “hauntology” in his book Spectres de Marx, he used the idea of the ghost to focus on a phenomenon that in the words of Colin Davis is “neither present, nor absent, neither dead, nor alive”[6] – which inspired Mark Fisher more than a decade later to broaden the definition of the word and eventually link it to the idea of being haunted by a lost future. Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the phantom. In one interview in the non-linear film Ghost Dance (1983) Derrida even refers to himself as a ghost because the interview is being filmed. He recognises that his appearance on film is an interference in time and this image of him is now cut loose from him as a person. 

This is the ghost he talks about and links theoretically to the medium of film: “Le cinema est un art des fantômes. C’est un art de laisser revenir les fantômes”.[7] If cinema is inherently a disturbance of time and space, the internet is basically a place of non-time, according to Mark Fisher.[8] Images and words return again and again, even beyond the existence of the person represented, often losing parts of itself, context and subjectivity, becoming a ghost of a ghost. We can only hope for the bliss of entropic oblivion. 

The Twitter profile picture of Thomas Blondeau, a Flemish writer who died suddenly in 2013, still maintains firm eye contact with any internet user who comes across his profile. The four tweets he sent into the world the day of his death are still right there under his photo, in hindsight almost prophetic in their nature now that we know what was about to happen. Famous last words. Lost future. He seems both as far away and as close as is any living stranger in the world behind their screen. For a moment I cherish the illusion that the technology has forged an unforeseen bridge through time and that someone can tweet him to drop by the hospital. Time is a flat circle, Marty says in True Detective. Blondeau's death continues to happen endlessly, every day, every time someone reads those four tweets.

Collectively, humanity has already achieved great feats of knowledge, but time is a problem we have not yet resolved. Time remains this unavoidable propulsion. That this drive would be forward or somehow towards a target is a delusion. Time pushes without direction, but always away from what has happened. It was a quarter past two during a warm June night and my father woke me with a long sigh. My responding silence got lost in the poor telephone connection. The cleft apart phonemes of our silent conversation still vibrate there at the frequency of the unspeakable, like a glitch in the air that is hard to notice. I floated in the dark and looked into the infinite universe, with somewhere the moon reflecting a weak light. La nuit sera noire et blanche. I counted the individual minutes. Every moment brought me noticeably further away from her. I panicked and searched for a way to put my heels in the mud. How to stop the unrelenting progression of time so that the distance between her and me would, at least, not increase. But minutes passed, then weeks, kilometres and years. It is the grief for my mother that made me understand why a light year is not a unit of time, but a unit of distance.

*

When Uri, son of writer David Grossman, passed away during his military service in the Israeli armed forces, his father couldn’t escape what he would call “the gravity of grief”[9] and wrote his genre-defying book Falling Out of Time. The ex-partner of a dear friend of mine lost his own young son and read an excerpt from the book: “In August he died, and / when that month was over, I wondered: / How can I move / to September / while he remains / in August?”[10] I saw myself floating in the dark and his heels were digging their own deep trenches in the mud. La nuit sera noire et blanche. He muttered the first verses of W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues afterwards. "Stop all the clocks."[11]

The one medium that is in a way able to stop all the clocks is, of course, photography. As if it were the mechanical counterpart of Medusa, the photo camera turns time to stone right onto a shiny piece of paper. The past gets embezzled with a shade of the present, saved from the digestive process that is brought along by the passing of years. But never quite entirely. Photography fails in fully bringing back the past and this makes the medium inherently melancholic for the viewer, moving in its grimness. No one describes this phenomenon more beautifully than Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire, a sentiment undoubtedly shared by Andy Grundberg, who wrote about Barthes’ book in the New York Times: “Barthes bites into photography like Proust into a madeleine and what results is an intricate, quirky and ultimately frustrating meditation linking photography to death.”[12]  

At some point after his mother's death – about which he touchingly wrote in his Journal de deuil – Barthes discovered a photograph of her as a child in the winter garden in Chennevières-sur-Marne, an event around which his whole idea of photography as being haunting was built: “Devant la photo de ma mère enfant, je me dis : elle va mourir : je frémis (…) d’une catastrophe qui déjà eu lieu. Que le sujet en soit déjà mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe.”[13] He is also deeply moved by an 1865 photo of Lewis Payne waiting for his execution after being sentenced to death for an attempted murder. The punctum of this photo lies for Barthes in the thought that Payne is about to die, but the nature of the photograph makes time stand still, and Payne seems to be stuck in the eternal limbo of waiting.[14] We’re looking at nothing less and nothing more than a ghost.

Photo portraits from the late nineteenth century are often described as ghostly. Generic strangers sit stiffly next to each other, never smiling, while the monochrome complexion of their faces has started to fade already, thus mercilessly crushing any signs of vitality. Imagine my amazement when I came across a lavishly illustrated online Vice article from 2017 titled “The Unbridled Joy of Victorian Porn.” As the title suggests, the editors collected and wrote about old pornographic photos of Victorian times. The rigidity and prudishness we so deeply associate with these times vaporised instantly. Instead, these explicit pictures show men and women, just like us today, enjoying intimate and animalistic moments of the now. The people of any time period are our contemporaries.

Photography proved to be a true revolution in pornography. In 1839, French inventor Louis Daguerre created the predecessor of the photograph as we know it today, and it took very little time, of course, before the French public was overwhelmed by an unprecedented range of realistic bawdy imagery. “For a time, the photos were incredibly expensive: one daguerreotype cost a full week's wages for a French worker” according to Alain de Botton’s article “The Poignancy of Old Pornography.”[15] He claims it was cheaper to pay the services of a prostitute for one day than to buy one unchaste photo of her. But prices collapsed due to the rapidly growing supply of pornographic images. “By 1860, there were estimated to be 400 shops selling pornographic photos in Paris,”[16] but on-the-go was also an option; for example, women in train stations sold packs of five photos that they conjured up from under their skirts. 

In his article, de Botton links these vitalist thrusts of expression to a melancholic affect in the viewer when realising all the people in the picture are now dead: “Their photographic liveliness makes their eventual deaths all the more tangible.”[17] For a fraction of a moment, they seem to live again, but inevitably they, their entire inner world of experiences, and all the moments of their lives, big and small, get lost in time, like tears in rain. “It’s worse when it’s children,” de Botton claims.[18] When we see old pictures of young children staring in the lens, we imagine how much future was still waiting for them in that moment, even though it is already fully behind us or may have never even happened. Everything they were, everything they would ever be, has been annihilated.

The will to remember, to retain, to contain and the will to overcome death, it’s an invisible thrust that arguably drives many branches of the arts. French all-rounder Jean Cocteau said about cinema, for example, that it is “la mort au travail, la mort au présent.”[19] With its ability to capture motion and duration, cinema can be seen as the ultimate medium to remember. Or in the words of Olivier Assayas, during an interview with Indiewire: “Cinema is about resurrection. Cinema is about dealing with ghosts and bringing them to life. Cinema … allows what is lost to come back.”[20]

Olivier Smolders reflects in his experimental short film Mort à Vignole (1998) on the ability and non-ability of film and photography to explore the themes of remembering and death: “How long do people remember every one of us? After two generations we're just shadows. When you add a third, at best, we're prisoners of vague memories and stories. All our dreams, enthusiasm and hatred come down to a few pictures saved by time.”[21] Mort à Vignole consists of a montage of home videos shot during Smolders’ own childhood. But when viewing these moving pictures, we cannot help feeling something is lacking. Even though we see various family members interact with one another, we do not know who these people are, what they’re thinking, what lives they lead. These intimate moments do not subjectify the strangers. Despite the time conserved in the images, they remain strangers, a few of the infinite number of people we will never know. We feel these memories may be meaningful to Smolders, but not to us. They are flimsy spectres, with no past, no future. These are ghosts of ghosts. 

*

Yuri Gagarin knew that just like any other living being he was going to die one day. The probability that he would lose his life in his technically imperfect Vostok capsule was rather high; he knew that too. But the top commanders of the USSR wanted to make history, and so Gagarin was strapped into his cramped seat on April 12, 1961, where he sat waiting for the historic rocket launch. A photographer quickly snapped a few obligatory marketing portraits, images that went around the world while the propaganda machine was chugging away at full speed. 

One of those photo frames is overcrowded with different pieces of technological hardware, but then, childishly small in a giant helmet, Gagarin’s face suddenly stands out, the only living element in the whole photograph. His facial expression seems calm and resigned. He knows that he’s playing Russian roulette with his life and that this photo will be in the papers the next day either as the man who burnt up in the atmosphere like half of the other test capsules or as the first human in space ever. The resolute acceptance of his fate tugs at the heartstrings. We know he survived. We know that in the photo he will soon be the first human to float in the vacuum of space. In his trip around the earth he will transmit via his radio: “I see earth! It is so beautiful!" Gagarin will always be the first who was, just for a few hours, not part of life on earth. How existentially alone he must have felt. He might as well have been a god. He might as well have been a child.

Of course, this is all me fantasising. His gaze in the picture might as well have been towards the series of banal security checks he had to carry out, but the turn to sentimentality is an easy one to take. 

In 1922 another Russian, film theorist Lev Kuleshov, conducted his now-famous film-editing experiments and proved how deeply the cinematic medium is built on the idea of viewers being machines of meaning. An audience identifies with the neutral close-up of a man on the screen and unconsciously tries to correlate this man’s gaze to the following seemingly random images: when a shot of soup is edited after his close-up, we think the man is looking at the soup and that he’s hungry. When a baby in a coffin is shown, we think he’s sad. A beautiful woman lying down, he’s aroused. The resulting interpretations of the audience were all the same. The Russian montage theorists of the beginning of the twentieth century pinpointed the revolutionary potential of the cinematic medium right here. According to them, a filmmaker and a film editor have immense suggestive powers.[22]  

When I repeated this experiment in my own screenwriting classes, it struck me how everyone’s interpretations certainly were in the same broad categories, but nevertheless differed slightly from one another. Someone told me, for example, that the man was desperately trying to hide his love for the woman; another student was absolutely positive the man was indignant because of her ‘erotic display’, while another thought the man might even be gay. 

Only the individual audience member can complete a story or cultural product, and the meaning is never fully fixed. I, as a viewer, gave meaning to the Gagarin photo in the same way: The astronaut’s fate belongs to our measureless shared archive of knowledge. The context of the picture evokes many feelings in me, which I unconsciously project onto Gagarin. The act of interpretation says more about the interpreter than about the object interpreted. Meaning is a mirror. We are all propaganda machines of our own ideas. 

Cinema inherently bears the doubling of projection: The first kind is that of the physical movie projector, the optical apparatus that sends a beam of fast-changing light. The second is the projection of meaning taken on by the audience. Both projections meet each other on the silver cinema screen, a silent dialogue between filmmaker and viewer, between strangers, with the veil as locus.

Gagarin’s own thoughts are long gone and what remains are phantasms, projections, mirrors. The well-known news photo of Yuri Gagarin suddenly becomes partly fiction. Without the viewer's gaze, the photo only exists in its materiality. Add a singular gaze and the shot is overloaded with meaning. No two gazes are the same, so one photo carries an abundance of possible interpretations and meanings, some of which are directly opposite to each other. The presence of the audience is, in other words, absolutely crucial. 

Positioning the audience as a necessary witness is an act the American film A Ghost Story (2017) explicitly undertakes. In the movie, the husband of a young American couple (Casey Affleck) is killed in a car accident, after which the wife (Rooney Mara) tries to cope with life thereafter, even though she is crippled with grief. However, as time goes by, her grieving becomes less all-encompassing and she builds a new life for herself. She inevitably does what the living are destined to do: She moves on. 

The man, however, sticks to life as a ghost, a literal, almost cartoonish white-sheet presence in the house, only visible to the viewer. The ghost seems to be tied to the house and his old life for eternity. He also must move on and let go, even if he doesn’t know what that means. The ghost witnesses the woman falling in love with someone new, her moving out, and an unfamiliar family moving in. Time passes by. People come and go, parties are held, lover’s quarrels are settled. The house gets demolished and a business building takes its place. The future is impersonal and therefore uninteresting and estranged. The phantom lives through the end of time, and all starts anew: the formation of the earth, the break-up of Pangea, the colonisation of the American continents and finally the ghost sees his past self move into the house together with his wife.

The director of the movie, David Lowery, has made the idea of time being a circle the very foundation of his story. The phantom simultaneously haunts, observes and remembers the times his past self and his wife make music together, wake up together and talk about the future together. He becomes the voyeur of his own death. But then he also sees himself return as a ghost. Now there are two ghosts in the house: one per time rotation. The old ghost is invisible to the new ghost. The viewer realises that this cycle can go on infinitely. Who knows, maybe there are three, four, or even a hundred ghosts in the house, but they’re not visible since we haven’t got around to that specific time rotation yet. Time may be a circle, for Lowery, but it has depth, just like a spring. The ghost becomes its own ghost, the erosion of haunting. 

The entire film can be read as an abstract metaphor for cinema. The audience is the voyeur to the lives of fictional characters on screen who act as if they don’t know they’re being watched; we only get a limited insight into their lives and then they leave us without a second thought. All we can do as an audience, is to restart the movie. At this point we do not only re-watch the narrative that we already know, but we may also remember the first viewing. 

Every time I start The Tree of Life (2011), I think back to my first screening and the cinema where it took place. I remember the musky smell of the dark red seats and the physical feeling of just having been struck by lightning when the credits rolled. I remember the company I was with and our conversation afterwards, full of long contemplative silences. When I revisited the film three months after my mother passed away, I couldn’t even finish an hour of it because I felt like every cell of my body would fall apart if I did. It took me years to try again, and that time around the movie was suddenly comforting in the way it engulfed, destroyed, and rebuilt me. I remember every single re-watch crystal-clear, and I sit myself down next to myselves every time I press play.

Two psychoanalyst FilmAtelier colleagues spoke in their introduction to a screening of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (2003) about the idea of the previous viewing experiences being captured on the material of film itself. On a reel of analogue film, the image is literally burnt in a negative layer while recording, so it can be developed later and rolled out for viewing. Every time such a reel is played, new scratches and bumps are added to the film because the material itself is quite sensitive and flimsy. These blemishes add to the characteristic visual noise we so deeply associate with analogue film. In this way, each screening makes a physically real impact on the original material, and every gaze adds to the collective of viewers. When looking at a reel of film, we look at the many lives that saw this exact movie pass before their eyes, but there’s a fundamental impossibility of ever reconstructing or meeting these lives. Cinema is a medium of haunting presences and of alien absences. 

*

Ghosts pop up everywhere in our cultural products, even though they were carried to the grave in 1960 by American literary critic Leslie Fiedler in his book Love and Death in the American Novel, in which he called ghost stories "an obsolescent subgenre,", a "naive little form" intended only for members of the lower middle class.[23]  He couldn't wait for it to disappear. Hopefully, the cemetery in Buffalo, New York is being monitored for paranormal sightings, because since ghost stories are alive and well, Fiedler surely must be spinning in his grave with the speed of an unchecked windmill in a winter storm.

Fiedler should have known better. People fictionalise their fears and use fiction as a voltage conductor to deal with the danger and the unknown. For example, stories about zombies, biochemical monsters, and spies reached a peak in the 1950s and 1960s because the bombing of Hiroshima and the Cold War caused a collective anxiety neurosis, which was made liveable partly through cultural products dealing with this fear. This is also true for the way the supernatural is represented: During the Civil War in the United States, ghosts wore distinctive white dresses, while during the Victorian era in England, they roamed houses and the streets in black sackcloth; both fashion choices were inspired by their respective local funeral customs, and were therefore seen as creepy only locally. Our fictional ghost stories betray our real and singular human struggles with grief, love, transience, and meaning, while never refraining from unconsciously reflecting the writer’s backdrop of time and culture.

As soon as the writer forms a sentence, whether fiction or non-fiction, they always offer a part of themselves. Every word and every musical note of Nick Cave's album Skeleton Tree breathes the loss of his son Arthur, who tragically died during the recording process. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, her last collection of poetry, eerily predicts Plath’s suicide after she finished writing the book. 

While some authors attempt to hide themselves and their lives as well as they can inside their work, others experiment with showing and hiding the generous fertile soil of personal experience. Some, for example Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård and his literary oeuvre, lavishly indulge themselves in pushing their stories to the very limits of narrative exhibitionism. Whether obtrusively naked or almost not quite hidden, the spectre of the author can’t but roam his work after all. 

The work of art is becoming an entire pantheon of different hauntings: the writer’s, the audience’s, the characters’, the subject’s. They could form a modest party, as in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. So many shadows and flimsy prints of long-gone realities and only half-true phantasms in something so simple as a story, a book, a movie, a photograph, silently overcoming death and making sure that even though we may be fully alone within the universe, we’re never without. “[H]e heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”[24]  

Rows and rows of slow-moving handshakers say that there are no words for it. They admit they have no idea what to say, that they can’t imagine what it’s like. At funerals even well-meaning words lose all consolation. The failure of language is almost tangible. Some people turn to famous poems of long-gone writers in the hope these works of art can put whatever they’re feeling into words. But nothing is enough at that moment. Language is a too small blanket that always leaves your feet cold; it will never cover any of us. Roland Barthes perfectly compared it to a stone in his Journal de deuil: “Désespoir: le mot est trop théâtral, il fait partie du langage. Une pierre.”[25]  

Grossman can’t help but undertake the same quest. In Falling Out of Time, the character of the Centaur struggles to describe death: “Death will deathify, / or is it deathened? Deatherized? / Deathered?”[26] He turns it into a game that exposes the limitations and the flexibility of language itself. If anything, the ghost in this essay I’m writing, is language itself, something never enough, a spectre of impossibility, haunting, haunted. When asked by Polonius what he is reading, Hamlet answers: “Words, words, words.”[27]  

Writing is an absolute torment. It’s physical labour, including the back pain, the sweat, and the low hum of continuous swearing. Every so often I mutter that line from Hamlet to myself. Words, words, words. It doesn’t matter what is put on paper. Since it cannot grasp anything substantial, it is in itself empty and meaningless. Only fools, both deceived and deceiving, write. Words disappear into a Danaides’ infinite emptiness out of which only flimsy ghostly echoes return, disintegrated, nonsensical. Even language falls apart. What is left, is annihilation. And yet, I write. I can’t not write. I can’t turn away from it. Hamlet reads words, words, words, but thank god he reads them.

Just as in the vanishing portraits by Jake Wood Evans of humans struggling against their own vanishing presence, almost-lost VHS-like memories in the paintings of Andy Denzler or throughout William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, it is the very act of dying – but never succeeding – in which life is to be found. 

The first scenes of The Tree of Life show the birth of the universe, as sublime as it is vast and incomprehensible. The “Lacrimosa” of composer Zbigniew Preisner’s Requiem for my Friend forms a deeply moving accompaniment for this sequence. What is born is in a constant process of decay as well. The beauty of the event doesn’t cancel out the grief for its inevitable loss, and vice versa. What Barthes didn’t see when he looked at the portrait of Lewis Payne, or indeed of his mother as a child, was that what was captured was not a catastrophe alone, but also a stubborn continuation of life within the catastrophe within ourselves. 

When a bereaved woman asked Nick Cave whether he also sees the phantom of his son sometimes, he answered in a beautiful letter to her which he ended with these lines: “Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned.”[28]  

Language and its inherent failure drive the invisible guardian angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) in the German film Der Himmel über Berlin (1987) to become human. He’s an absent presence, a form between life and death. He wanders around and observes human life, which he finds fascinating but can’t understand. Eventually, he makes the choice to become a mortal being, and even though he’s ecstatic that he’s now part of humanity, something is still lacking. Because of his persistent position of distant observer, a stubborn repetitive reminder of how he roamed the earth for millennia as an angel, he’s barely connecting to people and thus missing out on the most human of experiences. 

During a Nick Cave concert, Damiel meets a woman who looks right through him and puts him on the spot. She forces him to decide what he wants to do, whether he really wants to take the leap of faith into what he calls the absence of knowing. Whether he allows for time and unpredictability to exist. Whether he can accept the not-enoughness of language. Life is in the unknown beyond. Life is in the poetry of failing, falling, dying. 

During her monologue the woman suddenly breaks the fourth wall and looks straight into the camera. She doesn’t just address Damiel, but also the audience. The watcher in the dark, who has had an implicit voyeuristic position throughout the film, is recognised and is told, to come out of the shadows; it is now up to you to decide. 

It’s up to you now. It’s up to me now. In the limping, leaky, jolting language, I take pleasure in the endless failure of trying again and again. There is life in this unstable hopscotch game. Je te laisserai des mots. Language is a ghost, an alien, a presence between life and death as it falls in and out of itself. All in all, it is actually unimportant that the tsunami of entropy will claim even this, for at least the game existed for as long as it did. Now the game is over. It's coming. The end is coming.

Inevitably,       m y     l      a      n       g           u                  a                  g                e   

a                   l    s     o 

f a

l l

s 

a    

 p

a

r

t

.

[1] Philip Jaekl, “What is Behind the Decline in UFO Sightings?” The Guardian, September 21, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/21/what-is-behind-the-decline-in-ufo-sightings.

[2] Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psycho-Analusis, trans. G. Stanley Hall (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1965), 296.

[3] Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 35.

[4] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Hampshire: Zero Books, 2014), 30, Adobe ePub.

[5] Van Hee, personal communication. Undated.

[6] Colin Davis, “État Présent Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms”, French Studies, 59, no. 3 (2005): 373.

[7] Ken McMullen, Ghost Dance, Looseyard Production, 1981.

[8] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 19.

[9] Joachim Cauwe, “‘Uit de tijd vallen’ Over rouw en psychoanalyse”, Psychoanalytische Perspectieven”37, no. 4 (2019): 944, https://www.psychoanalytischeperspectieven.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/13-Cauwe.pdf.

[10] David Grossman, Falling Out of Time, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Knopf, 2014), 145.

[11] Cauwe, “‘Uit de tijd vallen’”, 944.

[12] Andy Grundberg, “Death in the Photograph”, New York Times, August 23, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/books/death-in-the-photograph.html.

[13] Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire: Note Sur La Photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 150.

[14] Ibid., 149.

[15] Alain de Botton, “The Poignancy of Old Pornography”, The School of Life, https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/old-pornography/.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Bernardo Bertolucci, “Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci”, La Cinématèque française, September 10, 2013, https://www.cinematheque.fr/video/489.html.

[20] David Ehrlich, “How Kristen Stewart and Olivier Assayas Bring the Dead Back to Life in ‘Personal Shopper’”, Indiewire, March 6, 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/03/kristen-steward-olivier-assayas-personal-shopper-interview-1201789051.

[21] Olivier Smolders, Mort à Vignole, Wip, 1998.

[22] Lev Kuleshov, “Art of the Cinema”, in Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 55.

[23] Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), 473.

[24] James Joyce, “The Dead”, in Dubliners, by James Joyce (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1992), 225.

[25] Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 117.

[26] Grossman, Falling Out of Time, 89.

[27] Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139.

[28] Nick Cave, “Issue #6: Dear Cynthia”, The Red Hand Files, October 2018, https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dream-feeling.