June 16, 2023

The Phantom of the Celluloid

Recordings as metaphorical ghosts

Santi from La Espinazo del Diablo.

As far as we know, ghosts are as old as writing itself. The earliest known depiction of a spirit of the dead is a 3,500-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablet held by the British Museum. An even older tablet confirms that the earliest appearance of a word that means “ghost” is 5000 years old.1 How fitting that the oldest of ghosts come to us in the form of recordings.

Ghosts are traditionally spirits of the dead. In folklore, they haunt us from the past, walk through walls, and possess the living. However, if we think of them more broadly, they can also be thought of as displacements. They are displaced in time, space, identity, and more. If we accept this, then we must also accept that the more modern forms of communication proliferate, the more haunted we are.

Recordings are not merely a substitution for memory or a work of art, but displacements of information from the past, another place, and of particular things or people. A clay tablet may summon an ancient poet, displacing the words once sung on a street corner to another time and place entirely. A photograph from your childhood displaces you in time, space, and identity, as your existence is rendered as an impression. We live with ghosts inside us in the form of memories. The old horror trope of the disembodied voice became part of everyday life with the advent of the telephone, and with the advent of film and recorded music as art forms, ghosts began to dominate popular culture.

Ghosts in Film

Filmmakers frequently pick up on our increasing comfort with the ghosts in our midst. Ghosts appear in the family television in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, while in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Brian O’Blivion’s ghost/recording possesses the television. The protagonist, Max Ren, experiences possession himself when his body is displaced from its male and human identity when a vaginal/VCR opening appears on his abdomen. Our bodies as well as our memories are haunted by the ghosts of our ancestors– approximately 5% of people are born with extra nipples as evolutionary holdovers. The trope of the beast inside found in werewolf films or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depicts not only the displacement of identity as two personalities inhabit the same body but fear of being displaced in time as one reverts to a more “primitive” and “uncivilized” form. Temporal ripples made flesh.

Some filmmakers recognize not only the ghostliness of their chosen medium but also the nature of ghosts as displacements. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining executes this magnificently. Jack Torrance doesn’t merely encounter ghosts (or hallucinations) in the ballroom scene but is displaced from his own time to another. Kubrick abstracts this displacement further, depicting not only ghostly murder victims but ghostly twins– beings displaced from the quality of oneness– terrorizing Danny. Delbert Grady, the previous caretaker, is an echo of racist and patriarchal violence from the past, urging Jack to murder the black cook Dick Halloran and “correct” his wife and son. In a play on the belief that possessing spirits cause mental illness, Kubrick depicts Jack encountering his alcoholism in dialogue with a phantom bartender, while in his final mental break, he roars like an animal and acts like a man possessed. Once Jack becomes the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, he is displaced across time. “You’ve always been the caretaker,” Grady tells Jack. Naturally, we know Jack was absorbed into the hotel when his ghost appears in a photograph. Films about ghosts act not only as reflections of their medium but as meditations on what ghosts are.

In his 2001 gothic film La Espinazo del Diablo, director Guillermo del Toro opens his film by asking:

“¿Qué es un fantasma? Un evento terrible condenado a repetirse una y otra vez, un instante de dolor, quizá algo muerto que parece por momentos vivo aún, un sentimiento suspendido en el tiempo, como una fotografía borrosa, como un insecto atrapado en ámbar.”

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and time again? An instant of pain perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time like a blurred photograph, like an insect trapped in amber.”

Every cenotaph is an attempt to exorcize the ghosts of war. Every city and town seems to have a monument to its war heroes, an attempt to rescue an air of heroism from the reality of slaughter and tragedy. In his war films, del Toro attempts to exorcize the ghosts of fascism.

The film follows Carlos, a war orphan of the Spanish Civil War whose parents are implied to be Republican veterans killed in action. In the orphanage, he encounters two phantoms: the ghost of a young boy murdered by the cruel groundskeeper Jacinto and an unexploded bomb in the middle of the courtyard. Two things that are dead but seem to be alive, moments frozen in time– beings whose nature contradicts the world of becoming they inhabit.

The boy and the bomb naturally both represent the consequences of fascism to del Toro. Fascism means war, and war inevitably means creating these recordings of pain with which del Toro haunts us. Fascism creates widows, orphans, and grieving parents; people who are defined as haunted by the absence of a loved one. Even in his most recent film, 2022’s Pinocchio, del Toro moves the setting from the 19th-century to a war-torn Italy at the height of Mussolini’s power and recasts the puppet as the reincarnation of the son Gepetto lost to the First World War. Whether it is Italian Fascism, the Spanish Civil War (La Espinazo del Diablo and 2006’s El Laberinto del Fauno), or the Red Scare, (2017’s The Shape of Water), del Toro haunts us both to process the horrors of fascism as well as instruct us on how to exorcize it when it possesses a people once again. Del Toro loves to cast his heroes as children such as Pinocchio, Carlos from Espinazo, and Ophelia from Laberinto, but he always does so to demonstrate the virtue of disobedience; it is never stiff rituals and chanting prayers that expel unclean spirits in del Toro’s films, but childlike play, adventure, and living with reckless abandon.

We have yet to learn our lesson. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men– produced decades before the height of the Syrian refugee crisis and the resurgence of the global far-right– eerily haunts us with the correct prediction that “democratic” governments gladly tossed children in cages and sterilized women. In the case of the former, this is confirmed to still be happening under the Biden administration. And yet it is always those who declare the necessity of war, killing, orphaning, imprisonment, and forcible de-wombing that accuse others of resurrecting the infant-eater Moloch. Del Toro’s Pale Man may be a fictional devourer of children, but he is no fairy tale. He haunts every war, border, prison, and courtroom, like a burning angel of wholesale slaughter.

Ghosts in Music

We’re destined to forget and be forgotten, so we created recordings. Even when carved in stone, human attempts to create an order where information propagates gives way to decay; step inside a cemetery and watch as the letters on the ever-more weathered gravestones fade and become more unreadable as the dates drop to 1900, 1800, 1700. Heidegger once advised his students to spend more time in graveyards to live more authentically, but he did not also consider that even stone will not remember what our descendants will forget. The inherent ghostliness of recordings becomes more and more apparent as their respective mediums decay and the information becomes faded, transparent, and more dominated by the background until they merge with it altogether.

Electroacoustic composer William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops takes this process of decay as its artistic subject. Accustomed to working with tape loops, he discovered that as older tape cycled through his machine, the magnetic adhesive was stripped away little by little. He recorded this process, resulting in an album that condenses the concept of decay itself into an hour. Alvin Lucier did something similar with I Am Sitting in a Room, recording his voice, playing it back, recording the result, and playing that back over and over until only the resonant frequencies of the room itself remained.

More than individual pieces or techniques, the entire genres of glitch and lo-fi define their sounds by drawing attention to the fact that one is listening to a recording through the presence of sonic artifacts such as skipping, cassette hiss, and vinyl popping. Noise and electroacoustic musicians that work with feedback loops take this to the next level by taking the medium of musical equipment itself as the instrument. When the signal and the noise merge, or rather when noise becomes the signal, is the moment when a recording acknowledges that it is a displacement.

Conclusion

The definition of “ghost” here is intentionally broader than the one that was laid out in the introduction, so let us define it more clearly. Ghosts are displacements, yes, but they are also things that fade or are faded and things that possess. A decayed house is displaced in time. A spirit or demon that possesses, on the other hand, displaces identity, whether it is a person that has their body taken over by a demon or a possessed object, such as a doll, that has its quality of inertness displaced by an animating spirit.

The concept of haunting is not always contained within the concept of displacement, however. Haunts may be displacements, such as a haunting memory of the past, or the ghost of fascism returning to modern politics. But we may also be haunted by ideas, emotions, or grudges; trauma haunts the violent apparatus of the state, ghosts are frequently said to have unfinished business, and the figure of the vengeful spirit recurs throughout world mythology. The work here is unfinished, and I hope I or someone else develops this idea further in the realm of cultural analysis.

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