Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Spectral Cinema and Contested Landscapes, Dec 2023

This article considers the haunting presence of the Pacific Ocean in two films about Southern Chile that respond to the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90). I build from the premise that the heterogeneous materiality of landscapes can provoke reflection on multiple entangled histories, memories and hauntings, potentially enabling a counter-hegemonic form of historiography. Water itself is rarely analysed as ghostly matter. Its liquid materiality resists the emplacing of memorials or the accumulation of human-made debris. And yet, in the documentary El Botón de Nácar (The Pearl Button) (2015) and the narrative film La Frontera (The Frontier) (1991), water is the agglutinating presence that places different pasts in dialogue. Through my analysis, I explore the films’ engagement with the complex temporalities and cultural connotations of the ocean in Southern Chile – the cyclical movement of tides, the inevitability of catastrophic tsunamis and the enduring currents between islands that are invisible to the tourist gaze. I argue that in engaging with these temporalities, the films open alternate ways of thinking about time, history, truth and justice in the Chilean ‘transition to democracy’. This disruption makes room for histories of Indigenous survival, transnational solidarity, natural disaster and ecological destruction that are often absent or erased from postdictatorship memory culture.

This article will focus on spectrality in the cinematic spaces of two Welsh language films, Yr Ymadawiad (The Passing) (2015) and Gwledd (The Feast) (2021). Both films envision spectral happenings as a means of exploring and re-exploring past and present debates about the endlessly contested nature of the Welsh landscape and the resulting hauntological traces within the national psyche. The films suggest contradictory versions of the Welsh landscape. Often described as empty and barren, Wales has simultaneously been seen as a rich resource for extensive extraction of its natural resources. With located hauntings by ghosts that are specific and placed, Yr Ymadawiad’s temporal indeterminacy imagines ghostly presences beneath the waters of a drowned village, while Gwledd depicts the horrific revenge of an earth at the mercy of humans, characterizing human use of rural space as monstrous and destructive. Both films are highly located and rooted within specific Welsh landscapes, depicting both the uniqueness of the Welsh experience and its intimate connection with global issues relating to the loss of land.

This article investigates uses of sound in contemporary artists’ time-based work in relation to Nils Bubandt’s concept of ‘haunted geologies’. The work of artists and filmmakers such as Ben Rivers, Derek Jarman, Mark Jenkin, Shift Register and Louise K. Wilson is utilized as a means of exploring and enriching the concept of the haunted geological. Combined uses of field recording, post-production and the manipulation of frequencies are examined, as suggestive of affective acts of divination and evocation, which evidence both visual and sonic signification. The visible forms and discrete voids of ‘difficult’ and unquiet locations (in the United Kingdom and Australia) that have been disturbed, unsettled or remain resistant to knowledge provide the focus for a discussion, appertaining both to the realm of the ‘above’ and to the ‘below’. The concept of ghost strata enables a consideration or navigation of that which has been misplaced, providing a useful and productive means for imaginative reflection on the impacts of loss. While suggesting this loss, nonetheless, ghost strata remind us of the persistence of stone as a form of vibrant and sentient matter – providing evidence of material agency which foregrounds and heightens the sense of the destructive nature of the current environment. The potency of materiality is further present in the media utilized to ‘capture’ or co-create phenomena across a variety of scales and states of rock and stone. To this end, the powers of analogue film, audio recorder or hard drive to both document and manifest phenomena are explored as a means of unearthing a recent past of spectrality in the geologic. In this sense, the ghosts that we have created can be seen to foretell of future hauntings in the time of the Anthropocene.

In this article, I look at environmental agency in Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012). Both films are structured through re-enactments of political violence that involve perpetrators as protagonists. In this context, I study the traces of disruptions that exceed the agency of human makers and protagonists. I argue that landscapes can ‘ghost’ filmic re-enactments by refusing access or communication. Seen through the lens of decolonial theory, these spectral disobediences connect to the shadow side of rational thought and action. The environmental agencies in these films act as ghosts by pointing to different orders of remembering, resisting a singular view of contested sites of trauma. They push against the framing of truth as a document to be extracted by the camera. I conclude that environments can both store memories and prevent these memories from being retold in seemingly innocent ways. This refusal unfixes the traditional distance between filmmaker, protagonist and environment. It prompts viewers to seek layered truths and healing informed by accountability.

Review of: Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s, Rachel Garfield (2022)

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 274 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78831-399-5, h/bk, £75

ISBN 978-1-35029-308-3, p/bk, £25.99

ISBN 978-1-35019-764-0, ebook, £23.39

Review of: Slow Emergency Siren Ongoing: Accessing Handsworth Songs, Sarah Hayden (ed.) (2022)

London: LUX, 176 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-99288-407-9, p/bk, £20.00