Hauntology Beyond the Cinema: the Technological Uncanny 66 Closings 78 5

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Information manycinemas 03: dread, ghost, specter and possession

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Front: Screenshot The cabinet of Caligari

Contents

Editorial 4 Helen Staufer and Michael Christopher Magical thrilling spooky moments in cinema. An Introduction 6 Brenda S. Gardenour Left Behind. Child Ghosts, The Dreaded Past, and Reconciliation in Rinne, Dek Hor, and El Orfanato 10 Cen Cheng No Dread for Disasters. Aftershock and the Plasticity of Chinese Life 26 Swantje Buddensiek When the Shit Starts Flying: Literary ghosts in Michael Raeburn's film Triomf 40 Carmela Garritano Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies: Understanding Africa’s Occult Narratives in the Context of Neoliberal Capitalism 50 Carrie Clanton Hauntology Beyond the Cinema: The Technological Uncanny 66 Closings 78 5

Editorial

Sorry

Sorry!

We apologize for the late publishing of our third issue. We have planned to present it to you in May 2012 - and not in December. Sometimes we felt jinxed because nothing worked. Nevertheless, now we are happy to finish it. Please enjoy this issue.

Helen & Michael Christopher editors of manycinemas 6 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Staufer/ Christopher: Magical thrilling spooky moments in cinema Magical thrilling spooky moments in cinema

An Introduction by Helen Staufer and Michael Christopher

Screenshot Orlocks Hands (source www.archive.org)

Summary :

The introducing article.

Keywords :

Introduction, ghost, supernatural

Quotation : Staufer, Helen and Michael Christopher (2012) “Magical thrilling spooky moments in cinema: An introduction”, in: manycinemas issue 3, page 6-10 Staufer/ Christopher: Magical thrilling spooky moments in cinema 7

Take a step into a cinema hall, leave reality when you cross the entrance, take a seat and wait. The ultimate magic moment of film is when pictures ap - pear in the dark, moving on the screen, changing form, and creating visual ef - fects out of nothing. Directors and special effect artists make things possible that lay beyond reality. While narrated stories and literature help to create visions through description, film depictures them and creates images.

Cinema is a modern tale. The monsters of childhood (or past) come alive and haunt the protagonists on the screen, almost as a substitute for the viewer. How do they meet their fears? How does film show fear? And is there any es - cape? In literature most of these pictures are absolutely personal. The reader must create these monsters in his head. Film presents the m as seen by the director. But even these monsters are able to enter the thoughts of the viewers, to go deep inside. Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, etc. have a common image of fear: the scar on the forehead of the creature of Frankenstein, the cape, coffin and teeth of the vampire lord or the saurian like statue and his sound over Tokyo. This all generates dread in the head of the people who share these cultural codes made by movies (even if the original descriptions are written in books). Next to these fear-creating-creatures, people are afraid of the disembodied. Ghosts are a common motif in cinema.

Screenshot Arabala (source VHS) 8 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Fairy tales, myths, or literature adaptations are the main sources of thrilling supernatural moments in cinema. Bram Stokers novels Dracula or Frankenstein create modern thrilling tales which are used all over the world. Of- ten, fairy tales are filmed for young consumers or as comedy. The Czech TV - Serial Arabala (CZ 1979-1981, Václav Vorlíček) lets the protagonists of popular fairy tales appear in reality. While the black wizard Rumburak tries to change the world of fairy tales by modification of the stories, narrated in television as bedtime-stories, the other protagonists try to live with the changing situation or to fight back to re-install the written order. Here, we can detect critic of the power of visual media: television has the ability to rewrite stories and to create new realities by manipulation.

However, not all stories are made for children: Terry Gilliam uses the stories of The Brothers Grimm (USA 2005) to mix the life of these famous brothers with the tales they collected through all the land. Herewith, he put s fiction into the historical reality and shows a world of monsters as a real possibility. The Korean film Hansel and Gretel (South-Korea 2007, original 헨젤과 그레 텔, dir. Pil-Sung) uses the story of one of Grimm's fairy tale, but locates it into today Korea. A young man has an accident deep in the forest where he follows a lantern to find a hut. Inside this hut, everything is fine, but as time goes by, the situation turns strange. He wants to escape to the civilization, but it seems that there is no way out. Pil-Sung's adaptation of this popular tale into a color - ful Korean story is disturbing, especially because the spectator expects a narra - tion he almost knows, but the story differs with every minute.

Screenshot 헨젤과 그레텔 (source DVD) Staufer/ Christopher: Magical thrilling spooky moments in cinema 9

The tradition of yōkai (ghost, phantom, strange apparition) is narrated in Japanese folk tales and has also found its way into film. At most, Manga/ Anime or Japan-Horrorfilms use this kind of monsters wh o sometimes are called mononoke. You can find some in Mononoke Hime (Japan 1997, dir. Miyazaki), the Golden Bear Award-winning anime of Miyazaki, in which the space of these mystic creatures is haunted by the people who want to exploit the nature the yōkais live in. Only the “Princess of Mononoke” can lead the yōkai troops against the human invaders and re-unite the yōkai. In Sen to Chi- hiro no Kamikakushi (Japan 2001, dir. Miyazaki) yōkai also appears in the won- derland Chihiro travels to. The cinema of the Ghibli studio is full of creatures like Ponyo, Totoro, etc., but all of them have a kind character and there is nothing to fear. Even the atomic dinosaur like monster Godzilla, which stars in un- countable Japanese disaster films, is not evil at all. There is more than one truth in Japanese ghost stories.

The supernatural is a popular topic in many films of the African and Asian continent. In Ghana. the term Juju describes films in which supernatural power is used to force own interests. Souleymane Cissé tells in his film Yeelen (Mali 1987) an old Bambara epic, full of magic power. Film takes over the role of history keepers/story tellers of the West African societies: the griots. In West African cinema, there is often the effect that the invisible is visualized in the film. The spirit becomes a real surface and thus the belief of its power in - creases.

The Nigerian video industry produces many video serials. Some are centered around love tales, some are crime stories, and many of these films are supernatural. Carmela Garritano detects the effects of neoliberal capitalism on the Nigerian society in these occult stories of popular movies. Blood-money, Big Men and Zombies leads you deep inside the Nigerian video industry.

“When the shit hits the fan, the time to leave has come.” Swantje Bud- densiek explores the world of a Boer family in Triomf, a novel of Marlene van Niekerk and how the cinema adaption of director Michael Raeburn differs in its narrative style. The story reveals about the decay of Apartheid in South Africa and the ghosts of past that haunted back the different family members. But no real ghost appears. Instead of, a kind of uncanny moments haunt the 10 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession protagonists. Swantje Buddensiek detects these ghosts in the novel, but she misses them in the story's visualization.

Cen Cheng describes the dread shown in Aftershock, one of the few disaster films of China. This kind of genre is an alien tale in the prosperous China story of technological progress. Her article No dread for disasters shows the reader the plasticity of Chinese life.

Brenda Gardenour focuses in her article Left behind the phenomena of Child Ghosts in three different movies: Rinne (Japan 2005), Dek Hor (Thailand 2006), and El Orfanato (Spain 2007). She describes a journey into the dread of the human mind.

A step “Beyond the screen”, we are very happy to include this article, goes Carrie Clanton who explores the Hauntology beyond the cinema. She leads us to the uncanny moments of electronic music.

Have a good time!

Filmography

Arabala, Czech Republic 1979-1981, dir. Václav Vorlíček, Czech. Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Japan 2001, dir. Miyazaki, Japanese, original:千と千尋の神隠し, engl title: Spirited Away. The Brothers Grimm, USA 2005, Terry Gilliam, English. Hansel and Gretel, South-Korea 2007, dir. Pil-Sung, Korean, original: 헨젤과 그레 텔. Mononoke Hime, Japan 1997, dir. Miyazaki, Japanese, original: もののけ姫, engl. Title: Princess Monoke. Yeelen, Mali 1987, dir. Souleymane Cissé, Bambara.

12 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Gardenour – Left Behind Left Behind

Child Ghosts, The Dreaded Past, and Reconciliation in Rinne, Dek Hor, and El Orfanato

by Brenda S. Gardenour

Summary : Screenshot El Orfanato In recent years, the locus of the horror industry has shifted from Ameri - can milieu to East Asia and increasingly to the Spanish-speaking world. Conversations with the past will form the backbone of this analysis. The article examines cryptomnesia, sorrowful nostalgia, the advocacy of the living for the dead, the weight of the past, and the fulfillment of the present in three films from developing horror traditions. At the center of each of these films rests the plight of displaced, orphaned, and institu - tionalized children and their encounters with child-ghosts, reminders of a tragic past that has been forgotten but demands to be remembered. Author : Brenda S. Gardenour, PhD, Assistant Professor of History/History of Medicine, Saint Louis College of Pharmacy. Keywords : Ghost, childhood, memory, nostalgia, displacement

Quotation :

Gardenour, Brenda S. (2012) “Left Behind. Child Ghosts, The Dreaded Past, and Reconciliation in Rinne, Dek Hor, and El Orfanato”, in: manycinemas, issue 3, 12-25. Gardenour – Left Behind 13

“When something terrible happens, sometimes it leaves a trace, a wound that acts as a knot between two time lines. It’s like an echo repeated over and over, waiting to be heard. Like a scar or a pinch that begs for a caress to relieve it.” Aurora in El Orfanato

A decaying hotel on the slopes of a sleeping volcano north of Tokyo, Japan; an abandoned swimming pool and a darkened bathroom in a boys’ dor - mitory in Thailand; an old orphanage on a craggy cliff by the sea in Asturias, Spain. Such haunted spaces are the playground for child ghosts in three horror films, Takashi Shimizu’s Rinne (2005), Songyos Sugmakanan’s Dek Hor (2006), and Juan Antonio Bayona’s El Orfanato (2007). Born in disparate cultures, these films nevertheless share a similar sense of dread, a horrible premonition rooted in a sorrowful memory hidden just out of reach, buried in the haunted attic of the mind. In each film, a tragic event has been carefully hidden or willfully for - gotten and ultimately obscured by the quotidian demands of the present; un - willing to be orphaned, the past resurfaces in the form of a child ghost who demands that the living remember and bear witness to its suffering. Children make effective symbolic agents for such repressed memories because of their liminality; they embody our nostalgic visions of childhood as a time of inno - cence and wonder, a time of boundless promises for the future. 1 A child’s death cuts this short, leaving its ghost suspended in a state of hopeless poten - tiality, left behind by time itself. Suspended in single moment, these orphans relive their tragic deaths in endless cycles — like severed memories spinning in the dark — a process represented in Rinne by a doll that repeats the phrase, “Together Forever,” in Dek Hor by a skipping record, and in El Orfanato by the echoes of the children’s deaths “repeated over and over, waiting to be heard.” In order to find their way home, these orphans must lead the living on a jour - ney into the haunted mind-crypt where long-buried memories are exhumed and life breathed into them anew. 2 In Rinne, the journey into the self is terrifying; the child-ghost Chisato serves as an agent of revenge, dragging those con - nected to her death back into their own hidden and inescapable pasts. In Dek Hor and El Orfanato, however, ghost children are agents of reconciliation ex - tending their little hands to the living, befriending those who are willing to bear witness to dreadful events so that both living and dead might move for - ward into a peaceful future. 14 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

“Together Forever:” Reincarnation and the Inescapable Past in Rinne

Takashi Shimizu’s Rinne, or Reincarnation, opens with three school girls laughing at a phone app that discerns a person’s past lives. One girl looks into the cell phone and sees only a blank screen. A strange puff of air stirs her hair and she turns away, but no one is behind her. As she glances back at the dark screen, her reflection is not her own but that of an older woman with vintage glasses. In one of several vignettes that follow, a trucker looks into a restroom mirror and sees his reflection momentarily morph into that of another man. Later, while driving down a treacherous road, he hears a radio report about the filming of Memory, a movie that will retell the story of a thirty-five year old murder case in which a professor brutally stabbed and killed eleven people, in - cluding his own two children, at the Ono Kanko hotel in the mountains north of Tokyo. Not wanting to remember such things, the trucker snaps off the ra - dio in disgust, a distraction that leads him to hit a grey man lilting in his head - lights; upon investigation, he finds that the dead man’s face is the same one that he saw in the bathroom mirror. Terrified, he tries to hide but is con - fronted by eleven dead faces that crowd into his truck and ultimately spirit him away. We later learn that both the school girl and the trucker are reincarnations of people murdered at the Ono Kanko and that their hidden pasts have come to claim them. These opening scenes introduce the thematic core of the film: the dread that our identities might not be our own but shared with a not-so - distant other through reincarnation, and that the act of remembering our past lives might stir hungry ghosts who demand reparations in the present.

In the Japanese Buddhist concept of reincarnation central to Rinne, an individual soul is not reborn in toto into a new body after death, nor are the memories of the older soul completely lost. Instead, the new soul is an aggre - gate of past self and present self, with only the basic dispositions and karmic actions of the former carrying over into the new life; those who live lives of bad karma carry this burden into their next incarnation. Although the new soul generally does not remember its past, an individual might catch brief glimpses of its former self through premonitions, what the west calls déjà vu. This conception of reincarnation means that each person lives in at least two separate Gardenour – Left Behind 15 timelines, that of the living present and that of the hidden residual soul’s past. 3 Likewise, the film Rinne has two timelines, the first of which is centered on the murders at the Ono Kanko hotel in 1970, and the second of which follows the filming of the movie Memory in 2005. In interpreting and retelling the story of the Ono Kanko murders, Memory becomes a cinematic reincarnation of the events at the hotel, one that awakens angry ghosts in both timelines. 4 Bound together forever through reincarnation, the ghostly dead of 1970 stalk the liv - ing of 2005, filling them with a dread of something both familiar and terrifying that lurks in the darkness of memory.

In Rinne, the act of remembering reincarnates a haunted past long buried. Since she was a child, a young woman named Yayoi has drawn pictures of a strange hotel that she has never visited. Meanwhile, Yuka, an aspiring actress who was born with strange ligature mark around her neck, often remembers things that could not have happened in her lifetime; “They must be experiences from before I was born as who I am now.” Like Yayoi, Yuka dreams of the strange hotel with the steep orange roof; unlike Yayoi, Yuka has done research at the library and knows the history of the Ono Kanko and the reasons that it haunts her. For Nagisa and Matsumura, the realization that they are connected to the Ono Kanko murders comes through their participation in the movie, Memory, and the ghosts that it awakens. Nagisa is untroubled by her past life until she auditions for a part in the film; from the moment she hears the tale of the Ono Kanko, she is stalked by the ghost of a little girl who carries an enormous doll. On the set, Nagisa learns that she has been cast in the role of Chisato, the six-year-old girl murdered at the hotel by her father, Professor Omori — the very child whose ghost has been haunting her. At first, Nagisa believes that she is the reincarnation of Chisato. Running her fingers over pho - tographs in old newspapers, however, she comes to the dreadful realization that she is actually bound to Professor Omori and that Chisato’s visits are not com - passionate but vengeful. Matsumura, the director of Memory, is likewise haunted by the Ono Kanko. Obsessed with memorializing the experiences of the murder victims on film, Matsumura hopes to “lay their vengeful souls to rest” while ensuring that they will not be forgotten. Surrounded by newspaper clippings, photographs, notebooks, and artifacts from the murders, Matsumura works on the script and is visited by Chisato. Rising up through the pages of Memory, the child ghost guides Matsumura through the touchstones of a horri - 16 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession ble past to a realization of who he once was, Chisato’s big brother, Yuya Omori.

For both Nagisa and Matsumura, the child ghost Chisato is a doorway into the terrifying memories buried in their mental crypts; the key to this door - way is Chisato’s doll, “imbued with all her bitter fury.” 5 Given to Matsumura in a dusty old box as he wrote Memory, the doll waited silently for him to open its secret chamber and reveal the memories of Chisato’s short life and tragic death. To look upon the blood-soaked doll with its crushed face is to see in an instant the convergence of Chisato’s past and present. In newspaper photo - graphs, Chisato’s smile illuminates the otherwise dead page; in a home movie shot on the day of the murders, she runs through the streets of a village with sweet curiosity, wonderfully innocent and alive. Such images make us tremble at what she has become, a bloodied corpse in a closet, a vengeful and hungry ghost suspended in the dark crypt of memory who holds out her hand in order to pull others into the shadows. Chisato and her doll reach out to the living, re - peating a single phrase, “Together forever.” For those who remember the Ono Kanko, it is a sorrowful plea to be remembered and not forgotten. For Nagisa/Omori, however, it is not a question but a demand that the Professor fulfill his promise to be with his daughter beyond death. Chisato forces Nagisa to confront Professor Omori’s horrible reflection within her own soul, to claim her inherited karmic actions, and to care for the children that s/he once left behind. At the conclusion of the film, Nagisa/Omori does not die to be reborn again. Instead, driven insane by the memory of who s/he once was, s/he re - mains alive and straightjacketed in a locked cell, forgotten by society. The crypt-like room is empty save for a small red ball and a doll containing the sus - pended spirits of the children; Nagisa, Omori, Yuya, and Chisato will be “To - gether forever” after all.

The true horror of Rinne rests in our fear that, like Nagisa, we might all be captives to a tragic past from which we cannot escape, unknowingly living out our lives according to a film already made, a script already written. The thought that we might be held responsible for the actions of pre vious generations fills us with dread; like the trucker, we would rather turn off the radio in disgust and forget it entirely. 6 Like Chisato, however, our memories refuse to be left behind, pressing upon us like a needful child, grabbing our hands and Gardenour – Left Behind 17 dragging us backwards in time, often into sorrow. It is through such memories that the past lives again, reincarnated in myriad forms, haunting us, binding us, and sometimes confronting us with our own dreaded reflection in the mirror. 7

Screenshot Rinne

Dek Hor : Dread, Memory, Rebirth, and Reconciliation

Songyos Sugmakanan’s Thai film Dek Hor (2006) shares several themes with Rinne. Parallel timelines intersect in a dreadful space and converge through the agency of a dead child who, connected to tragic events buried and spinning in the dark tomb of memory, persists in reaching out to the present, demand - ing to be known and remembered. The intentions of the ghost-children in each film, however, are quite different; Rinne’s Chisato reaches out to the present in vengeance, dragging the living back into her darkened closet-crypt, while Dek Hor’s ghost-child, Vichien, reaches out to the living in order to bring all into the light of love and reconciliation. Through friendship, Vichien and the living boy, Ton, clasp hands and walk through death together, pulling each other from their respective crypts so that each might be liberated from the past and re - born. Both Rinne and Dek Hor take reincarnation and rebirth as central themes; unlike Rinne, however, where reincarnation is a form of punishment that demands a perpetual return to a dreadful past, Dek Hor presents rebirth as a promise fulfilled through love, one that allows all of the characters, living and dead, to move into the light of a new future. 8 And while the characters of Rinne become trapped in eternal cycles of dread and memory, the characters of Dek Hor use remembrance as a path to reconciliation and peace. 18 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Dek Hor, or Dormitory, is the story of Ton Chatree, a young boy who witnesses his father’s infidelity with the family maid and is subsequently sent to Saichon Witaya boarding school. Watching his parents drive away, Ton not only fears being left behind and hidden like his father’s crime, but also dreads sleep - ing in the dorm with its dark shadows and seemingly sinister faces. One night, he is brought into a circle of boys hunkered between the cots where they are telling “the history of the school” through ghost stories. One boy tells the story of a girl who hung herself from a Po tree; an autopsy later revealed that she was pregnant, and “a pregnant ghost is the nastiest kind around.” 9 A phantom school master reportedly haunts the grounds, and a ghost stalks the bath - rooms, especially on nights when the dogs howl in unison. Worst of all is the story of the seventh-grade boy who slept in their dorm, in Ton’s very bed, who drowned himself in the swimming pool. That night, Ton gets up to use the bathroom; in the shadowy darkness, he hears the dogs howl, sees a figure standing behind him, and runs back to his bed to hide. The next morning he has wet his bed and is teased and shunned by the other boys except for Vichien Chumchong, a loner who helps him navigate his new environment and eases his sense of abandonment. It is not until the boys gather in an outside theater to watch Hungry Ghost 4, a movie that encapsulates traditional Thai and East Asian pop-cultural assumptions about vengeful and hungry ghosts who have it in for the living, that Ton discovers he has himself befriended a ghost. 10

Much like uncovering a long-buried memory, Vichien and Ton’s parallel timelines are slowly revealed through short vignettes. In one flashback, we learn that Vichien, like Ton, bears the burden of his father’s misdeeds. Accused of corruption, Vichien’s father is stripped of his police badge and sentenced to twenty five years in prison. The schoolmistress Miss Pranee tries to protect Vichien from the truth, but he discovers a newspaper detailing the case in her office; she catches him reading the paper, hits him repeatedly, and he falls into the record player, gouging the record. A second vignette reveals another con - nection between Vichien and Ton — both boys sense that they do not fit in, that they are somehow invisible and forgotten. Even Ton sees that “We have a lot in common, you know? Nobody cares about either of us.” For Vichien, loneliness and longing for acceptance are the catalysts of his death. After dis - covering his father’s crime, Vichien goes swimming with the other boys at the pool. When one boy feigns that he is drowning, the others rush to save him. Gardenour – Left Behind 19

Unwisely, Vichien decides to try the same ruse, but his plan backfires when he develops a leg cramp and begins to drown. Dismissing him as a pretender, the boys ignore his cries and head to dinner while Vichien dies alone at the bottom of the pool. A third vignette unearths an even deeper connection between Vichien and Ton; both boys are trapped in the past, compelled to relive one dreadful moment over and over again. Vichien’s ghost is forced to drown in the now empty pool every night at 6:00 pm, the moment of his death, just as Ton repeatedly drowns in his feelings of anger and rejection towards his father. Vichien and Ton are not alone in their compulsion to repeatedly relive a single moment; believing that her inability to protect Vichien from the news of his father’s crime led to his “suicide,” Miss Pranee continually listens to the gouged record skip like a rift in time, staring into her empty drawer, unable to let go of the past.

In Dek Hor, the friendship between the ghost-boy Vichien (past) and the living Ton (present) acts as a catalyst for rebirth (future) across two timelines. Vichien, who rightfully lives in the past, cannot bear to see the living trapped there with him, stuck in a moment, unable to move forward. To this end, he confronts Ton about his selfish obsession with his father’s rejection: “You said no one cares about you. How about yourself? Do you care about anyone else but yourself?” Shocked, Ton realizes that Vichien has given him a great gift in rescuing him from the darkness of his selfish anger and wants to return the fa - vor. Using ether from the science laboratory, Ton liberates his soul from his body, crosses back into the past, and saves Vichien at the moment of his drowning. This selfless act releases Vichien from the dark cycle of death and enables him to step fully into the light. No longer encumbered by past anger or loneliness, Vichien and Ton walk side-by-side down the school’s entry road, bathed in late-afternoon sunlight. As they joke about who will get to date the cafeteria lady’s daughter, Vichien turns to Ton and says, “I have to go now;” he places his hand on Ton’s shoulder then pulls it away, severing the two timelines, and walks into the light of rebirth alone, waving his hand, never looking back. Ton suddenly awakens, surrounded by his living friends who, after all, would never leave him behind. Having liberated the past, Ton redeems the present, most notably his relationship with his father. When his parents come to collect him, Ton approaches his father and tells him that he likes his new school. His smile lights up his father’s face, and the two hug; at last, the past is no longer 20 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession between them, but behind them. Unwilling to leave anyone behind in the dark - ness, Ton visits Miss Pranee who sits listening to her broken record. Giving her a memento from Vichien, Ton tells her that she is not responsible for Vichien’s death, adding that “He knows that you were concerned about him. Thank you, Miss Pranee, for always taking care of us.” At these words, the record stops skipping and the song continues its melody to the end.

In Dek Hor, the ghost child embodies the trauma of a tragic event that lurks in the darkness, waiting to be remembered. Unlike Chisato or the stereo - typical ghosts from Hungry Ghosts 4, however, neither Vichien nor the collective past seeks to consume the living in revenge for its own misfortunes. Instead, the past and its child-ghosts reach out to the present in order to befriend us, reveal our true reflections, and — if we listen carefully — lead us into the light of the future.

Screenshot Dek Hor

El Orfanato : The Dark Key to Eternal Childhood

In Rinne, characters are dragged unwillingly into a past that they have no wish to remember, while the characters of Dek Hor confront the past in order to redeem it and move into the future. Completing the circle, the Spanish film El Orfanato, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, presents characters who must ex - hume tragic events hidden in the recent past in or der to enter a beautiful world beyond death where forever-children play in dappled sunlight. This Neverland exists not in the future, but in a distant past that pre-exists the tragic deaths of the orphan-ghosts that haunt the film. The agents for this process are the Gardenour – Left Behind 21 ghost-child Tomás and five orphans, all murdered; a living child named Simón who is very close to death; and Simón’s nostalgic mother, Laura — also an or - phan — who must unlock her own dark memories in order to return with Simón to her own idealized childhood.

El Orfanato opens with Laura as a little girl playing toca la pared with her fellows in the orphanage play yard; small leaves drift down from the bluest of skies and golden afternoon sunlight bathes the past in luminescence. A phone rings, and we learn that Laura is to be adopted that very day, separated from her friends forever. When the story resumes, the adult Laura and her husband, Carlos, have purchased the old orphanage in order to open a home for disabled children. For Laura, the return to the orphanage by the sea is also a return to her mythologized childhood, an experience that which she would like to recre - ate for her six-year-old son, Simón. As a mother, Laura sees the world with a child’s eyes, giving credence to Simón’s imaginary friends and telling him sto - ries that she knows will spark his wondrous imagination. She takes him on an adventure to a cave down at the beach, telling him tales of pirates and hidden treasure; inside the cave, Simón encounters Tomás, a new imaginary friend hid - ing in the darkness. He asks if Tomás can come home with them, and she ac - quiesces, not realizing that she has just adopted a child-ghost who holds the key to her own dark past. One rainy afternoon, Laura and Simón sit together while he finishes Peter Pan. Upset that Wendy isn’t allowed to return to Never - land, Simón asks, “If Peter Pan came for me, would you come too?” Looking away sadly, she responds, “No, I’m too old to go to Neverland, darling.” De - spite her child-like spirit and aching for the past, Laura seems to know that such a return is impossible.

Laura and Simón’s idyllic relationship is first shattered and ultimately rec - onciled by horrible secrets buried on two timelines, that of Simón in the present, and that of Tomás and his friends in the past; Laura, it is revealed, bridges both. Simón’s past resurfaces with an unannounced visit from Benigna, a woman claiming to be a social worker assigned Simón’s case. She presents Laura with a folder on Simón, who we learn is adopted and HIV positive. Laura sends Benigna away, locking the secret folder in a kitchen drawer and hoping that it will remain buried in the forbidden darkness; as in Rinne and Dek Hor, however, the past refuses to remain silent. That afternoon, Simón tells Laura 22 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession about a game that his invisible friends like to play; the ghosts hide your great - est treasure and you must follow the clues to reclaim it. If you are successful, the ghosts grant you a wish. The two hunt for Simón’s golden coins and are ul - timately lead to the drawer in the kitchen and the secret folder where the trea - sure is hidden. As the coins hit the floor, Simón jumps up and down and confronts Laura with the truth, that he is adopted, that he is dying, and that she is a liar. When asked where he learned such things, he says, “Tomás told me the truth, that I’m just like them!” Tomás appears again the next day as Laura and Carlos host a party to celebrate the opening of the group home; when Laura comes to get Simón so that he can meet the children, he lashes out, de - manding that she come to see Tomás’ little house, NOW. She hits him and leaves the room; when she returns to reconcile, he is gone. Running around the house frantically, she is confronted with a boy wearing an vintage orphan’s frock and a strange sack over his head. The boy pushes her into the bathroom and locks her in, holding the key to the window, a foreshadowing of all the hid - den secrets yet to be revealed. From this moment forward, Simón is missing; her greatest treasure has been stolen, but Laura doesn’t remember how to play.

In order to find Simón, Laura must excavate that which has been buried in the dark crypt of the past, including the hidden history of Tomás and the orphanage, and bring it into the light. Several months after Simón’s disappear - ance, Laura learns that Tomás was Benigna’s son and that because of his defor - mities he was secreted away in the dark cellar, his face hidden behind a one-eyed mask. One day, the other orphans — Laura’s playmates before her adoption — brought him down to the cave on the beach and stole his mask, betting that he would not emerge without it. The tide came in, and Tomás died hidden in the darkness beneath the cliffs rather than face the light. Convinced that Tomás is the key to her son’s recovery, Laura hires a medium who enters the darkness of the past and discovers the ghosts of the dying orphans locked away, poisoned by Benigna in retaliation for Tomás’ death. Their suffering re - vealed, the ghosts lead Laura to an old storage shed where she exhumes flour sacks containing their burnt little bodies from a dark crypt. 11 Simón’s recovery, however, requires Laura to tunnel even deeper into the past, into a time before the children’s deaths. To this end, Laura recreates the orphanage the way it looked in her childhood. Wearing an old frock, she makes the beds, sets the ta - ble, and attempts to bring her memories alive. Ultimately, it is a game of toca la Gardenour – Left Behind 23 pared that exhumes Simón; she is tagged by a ghost who leads her to a closet and locks her in. There Laura discovers a secret door covered with wallpaper and, behind it, a set of stairs descending into the darkness and Tomás’ hidden room. At this moment, Laura remembers what she had tried to forget: Simón wanted to show her this room on the day he disappeared. On the cold cellar floor, she finds Simón ’s festering corpse, dressed in Tomás’ clothes and mask. Another memory surfaces: on the night of Simón ’s disappearance she heard banging in the walls and a crash from below — his failed attempts to get her attention and escape the darkness.

Standing in the dark cellar of the orphanage, the dark core of her own memory, Laura realizes that all of the forbidden drawers, haunted closets, and buried secrets have been unlocked and illuminated. Having exhumed her old memories, Laura reconsolidates them with the help of the ghosts, her fellow orphans. Cradling Simón in her arms, she raises him out of the cellar and into the main bedroom where she rocks him in the darkness. Unable to bear the horrible memory of Simón’s death, she denies the validity of the present, re - jects her future with Carlos, and taking a handful of pills, chooses to die so that she might return to a golden past and regain her son. Lifting her head she says, “I want Simón back,” and with these words the lighthouse once again shines its beacon into the orphanage, calling her home. Simón awakens in her arms, telling her his wish — that she would stay to take care of him and the other children forever. Laura’s playmates, the long-dead orphans, rise from their beds and hug her, amazed that she has returned, “grown old, like Wendy!” As they gather around her, she tells them a story about a house of “where the lost children lived.” In this strangest of happy endings, Laura resurrects her deepest and oldest memories, reconsolidating them to accommodate her most recent experiences; through this process, Laura and Simón might share her own distant childhood and live with their fellow orphans in golden Neverland for - ever.

In El Orfanato, as in Rinne and Dek Hor, characters both living and dead are haunted by a pervasive sense of dread that rises from repressed memories too unpleasant to remember. Like a child ghost, these memories refuse to re - main buried in the mind-crypt and demand to be revealed, to be brought into the light. Repressed memories and child ghosts necessitate the intersection of 24 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession two timelines — the living present and the dead past. The nature of the past varies in each of our films. In Rinne, for example, the past is a terrifying place that cannot be escaped; past lives and the karmic actions of previous genera - tions haunt the living like Chisato, dragging them back into the darkness against their will. In Dek Hor, however, human beings have the power and obli - gation to redeem the past; Ton and Vichien work together to unearth dreadful memories and through them, heal the present and open the path to future en - lightenment. In El Orfanato, the distant past and the memories of childhood are a wondrous place in which to hide from the horrors of the present and a terri - fying future; Tomás helps guide Laura deep into her own memory, into a place of golden light beyond pain that she would never wish to escape. In all three, the journey into dread is really a passage into the most haunted space of all, the human mind, with its memories, like orphaned ghosts, reaching out their hands to the present.

References Colmeiro, José (2004) “Nation of Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco Spain,” in: 452º: Electronic Journal of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature 4 (2011), 17-34. Andrés del Pozo, M. Natalia (2010) “Dealing with the Uncomfortable Relative: The Silent Mass Graves in the Orphanage,” in: More than Thought (Fall 2010). Kim, Ji-Hoon (2011) “Learning About Time: An Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul”, in: Film Quarterly 64:4, 48-52. McRoy, Jay (1995) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 75-77. Nelson, Lindsay (2009) “Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema”, in: Cinemascope, Issue 13. Punter, David (2002) “Spectral Criticism”, in: Julian Woffreys (ed.) Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 259-278. Filmography Rinne, Japan, 2005, dir. Takashi Shimizu, Japanese and English. Original: 輪廻 (Reincarnation). Dek Hor, Thailand, 2006, dir. Songyos Sugmakanan, Thai and English, Original: เด็ กหอ (Dorm). El Orfanato, Spain, 2007, dir. Juan Antonio Bayona, Spanish. Gardenour – Left Behind 25

Notes 1 Lindsay Nelson, “Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema,” Cinemascope, V: 13 (2009). 2 On the idea of cryptonomy, see David Punter, “Spectral Criticism” in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, Julian Woffreys, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002). 3 As if this was not horrifying enough, each elder soul contains a secondary soul from a more distant past, and so on, back to origins. In such a system, the present has very little freedom, and all are culpable of ancient crimes. 4 Throughout Rinne, the medium of film itself serves as a type of reincarnation. Memory is a reincarnation of the original events at the Ono Kanko. Likewise, the original Super 8 recording of the murders that appears in Nagisa’s bed is another form of reincarnation, one that might be played again and again. As an experiment, Professor Omori may have been attempting to trap the souls of his victims in the film as each died. As Nagisa’s agent watches Omori’s home movie, the murders are reenacted at the now abandoned Ono Kanko with the reincarnations of the original victims. As a commission views raw footage from the filming of Memory, still more ghosts are released, yet another reincarnation. 5 Chisato’s doll is the modern reincarnation of the ancient Hinamatsuri, or spirit doll, which recurs in Japanese horror as well as supernatural survival games such as Tecmo’s Fatal Frame series. 6 For a concise introduction to memory, identity, and the national past, see the introduction in José Colmeiro, “Nation of Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco Spain,” 452º: Electronic Journal of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature 4 (2011), 17-34. 7 On the loss of free will, see Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 75-77 8 On time, memory, reincarnation, and ghosts in Thai cinema, see “Learning About Time: An Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul,” Film Quarterly 64:4, (2011), 48-52. 9 In Indonesian mythology, the pregnant ghost is called a kuntilanak and is said to linger beneath Po trees and along the edges of the water where they eat curious children. 10 This movie within a movie pokes fun at the Chinese Hopping Vampire genre, the ultimate vintage B-horror movie in East Asian culture. 11 M. Natalia Andrés del Pozo, “Dealing with the Uncomfortable Relative: The Silent Mass Graves in the Orphanage,” More than Thought (Fall 2010) 26 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Cheng: No dread for Disarsters No Dread for Disasters

Aftershock and the Plasticity of Chinese Life by Cen Cheng

Summary: Screenshot Aftershock Aftershock is one of the few Chinese disaster films ever created. Based on the historic catastrophic earthquake in Tangshan, China in 1976, the film tells the story of one daughter who is considered dead and the two families that she does/does not belong to. The article investigates the construction of dread and the making of truth for the disaster victims, which sheds light on a great feature of Chinese life – its plasticity. Author: Cen Cheng, M.A. graduate in American Studies from Michigan State Uni - versity

Keywords:

China, disaster, dread, plasticity

Quotation:

Cheng, Cen (2012) “No Dread for Disasters. Aftershock and the Plasticity of Chinese Life”, in: manycinemas issue 3, 26-39 Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 27

Unlike Hollywood, a witness of two tides of disaster films in American cinema, Chinese film industry has only seen a handful of disaster films so far. Although the number of images and scenes of destruction are growing on the Chinese screen, disasters turn out to be a less favored realm for the Chinese imagination. Among this handful of disaster films, the majority have been triggered by historic disasters and stories. This tradition has been honored by a recent film, Aftershock (China 2010) which narrates the story of a family after being hit by the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976. The Chinese film scholar, Wang Xiangyu, calls this tradition an expression of the aesthetic realism of Chinese disaster films, which is further demonstrated by their ongoing effort to docu- ment disasters, rather than imagining them and presenting the imaginations (Wang 2008:117). The documentary inclination of Chinese disaster films can be the first aspect which distinguishes them from their Hollywood counterparts, the second distinguishing aspect lies in the blurring of binary oppositions in their treatment of man and nature.1

Binary oppositions in traditional Hollywood disaster films include the opposition between natural and man-made disaster, the opposition between the individual struggle for life and the formidable scale of disaster, and that between life and death, among others. Chinese disaster films tend to blur the boundaries of these oppositions, if not to omit them completely (cf. Wang 2008). In Aftershock, the depiction of earthquake lasts roughly 16 minutes, which is measured merely one eighth of the total length of the film. Moreover, the unveiling of the earthquake takes place in the first quarter of the film, which again forms a sharp contrast to the Hollywood tradition where disasters would usually last until the end, and with incremental degrees as the story develops. In the following three quarters of the film, there are virtually no scenes of the Tangshan Earthquake. Except for the last part where narration jumps to the more recent 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, the majority of the film can be easily mistaken for a non-disaster film, or a film about ordinary life. The scale of the Tangshan Earthquake remains a spectacle, but it is not laboriously main- tained or centered on in the rest of the film. The individual struggle in the face of disaster, therefore, is also weakened in the narrative of the film. Partly due to the physical nature of earthquake and partly due to the narrational focus on the survivors’ recuperation and adaptation after the shock, the attention to in- 28 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession dividual struggles during earthquake is minimized. The two siblings in the family were trapped in a building too young to escape when the earthquake broke out; their only reactions were to cry and to call for their parents. The father’s run into the tumbling building was interpreted as an instinctive response to his children’s call, a protective act to save his wife, but never a struggle for his own survival.

The absence of a lasting confrontation with disasters diminishes the distinction between natural disaster and man-made disaster. The focus on the post-traumatic adaptation to losses and shock also relieves the pressure to identify the cause for the disaster. Except for immediately after the shock when the mother wailed over the buried body of her husband and howled “God nature, you bastard”2, there is no other reference to the earthquake as a product of nature. Moreover, after this curse, the mother cried to the corpse of her husband “Why do you leave me alone (alive in this world)”, which changes the previous rage and accusation of nature into a mourning accusation of her husband and his run into death, as if it were his agency not the nature’s vitality which determined the death for him. Thus the mother’s would-be conflict with nature is subtly reconciled, and substituted by her recognition of the sacrifice of her husband. This internalization of disaster once again downplays the distinction between natural and man-made disaster. One’s harmony with nature is quickly restored, as no fear or dread over nature has been constructed. As the story progresses, one’s emotional acceptance of nature and peaceful association with it will be revamped. Similar rendering of disaster is discernible in other Chinese films as well. In Still Life (China 2006), a film by Jia Zhangke on the fate of the people associated with the town scheduled to be inundated to give way to the construction of a giant dam, the categorization of disaster is also blurry. The only explicit lament over the loss of one’s hometown takes place in the beginning of the story when the motor taxi driver pointed to a boat in the center of a quiet lake and told Han Sanming, the protagonist, that “My home is underneath the boat”. A moment of mix-up strikes, for the tranquility of the water on the screen tells nothing of man-made ruin or destruction, but something of natural beauty and belonging. The agency of man and the vitality of nature once again seem interchangeable. A moment of atemporality also strikes, due to the lack of verb inflection as tense indicator in the Chinese language – the utterance of the driver can be translated into either “My home is under - Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 29 neath the boat” or “My home was underneath the boat” – the audience is thus granted the liberty to interpret and to choose the temporality of his old home, the same type of liberty the driver has himself. This liberty gives rise to a certain agency in individuals in their interpretations of disasters as well as their interpretations of history and memory, and shifts the burden of identifying the cause of disasters to that of choosing how to register disasters together with the losses.

Thus the opposition between life and death is not as essential as one’s subjective interpretation of them. The line between life and death is continually blurred in the post-traumatic lives of the mother and the daughter, where their choices in the treatment of the family members overwrite the normal boundaries of life and death. The mother, who thought she lost both her husband and her daughter in the earthquake, decided to live with them, spiritually and emotionally, forever. Figuratively, she has the aid of portraits on the altar in the house to remember them and to feel their being on a daily basis. She has refused to leave Tangshan, the city once destroyed by earthquake, or the location of their house many times and quite stubbornly. Her refusals for leaving are always based on her sense of togetherness with the lost family members, and her belief that they are still in the city, that they need a home and family to return to. Her persistence in the belief of the return of the lost family members has been rewarded in the film, for at the end, the estranged daughter did choose to return to the mother, to reconcile with the portrait of the once dead girl on the altar and to reunite with the family. The mother also refused to remarry because of her wish to remain a faithful and devoted wife to her former husband for the entirety of her life. The daughter’s adoptive father, after the death of her adoptive mother, made a similar decision never to remarry precisely for the

Screenshot Aftershock 30 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession same sense of togetherness with his diseased wife, which is discernible in his response to his daughter on the topic of remarriage: “your mother accompanies me everyday”. It is for this sense of togetherness that the death of a family member is registered differently for them. The dead are not physically with us anymore, but they have not diminished or evaporated; it all depends on our memories and feelings of them, which could persist, or even prevail.

Similarly, many more binary oppositions are perceivable but not well retained in Aftershock. On the other hand, there is always a clear tendency to blur the boundaries between these oppositions; a jump back and forth takes place often. That bespeaks the plasticity of Chinese life: it is malleable, flexible and highly adaptable. In the face of disasters, the surface of Chinese life is sometimes only part of the true story. The true story is all about choices, and the choices are what make disasters less dreadful.

Do Not Dread: Man as Nature

In Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (2007), Kirsten Thompson demonstrates how the second wave of American disaster films is all about apocalypticism and dread: memorial dread, familial dread, scopic dread, specular dread, eschatological/millennial dread, to name but a few. Certain types of dread do exist in Aftershock, however, dread is always subject to one’s interpretation and choice, rather than to external forces.

Memorial dread for the daughter is the strongest expression of dread in the film. It stems from her mother’s denial of her right to life from the daughter’s perception. The moment the daughter heard her mother’s utterance of “save the brother”, in preference to saving her while both herself and her brother were under the same piece of debris after the shock and only one can be saved, triggers the onset of three decades of memorial dread and estrange- ment from family for her. For the many times of being asked to identify herself and her relatives, the daughter has chosen to remain silent, and in this way she has chosen a life of exile from the previous life and family. She was soon sent to the military relief team and adopted by a couple in the military. The daughter has not lost her memory at all, the fact that she blurted out her original name “Wang Deng” forcefully in rebellion to the new name her adoptive parents have selected is telling of her conflict over her old identity and her new Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 31 one. She constantly refused her old identity, and has chosen to unregister her life with her biological family, in response to the perceived betrayal of her mother to her life. However, the trauma and the memory could only be repressed rather than removed. And the most traumatic moment keeps haunting her in her dreams, with the repetition which is claimed by Freud to be one of the characteristics of the working of trauma. In response to the last query from her adoptive father on the topic, the daughter revealed to him the traumatic memory and admitted that “it’s not because I can’t remember, it’s because I can’t forget”.

For the daughter, memorial dread is linked to familial dread. Her es- trangement from both of her families is obvious. Her silence and the choice not to identify her biological family guaranteed her a new life, with a new family. Her final choice to return to her biological family took place thirty two years after the earthquake, thirty two years of what she admitted to be torture for her mother. The mother helplessly reprimanded her cruelty to stay completely away from the family; however, on the other hand, the mother also understood her impulse to exile from the family: at the news of the daughter’s current residency in Canada, the mother signed “she’s hiding so far away from me.” The daughter seemed unable to belong to either of her families, for she was as far from her adoptive parents as she was from her biological parents. She cut the relationship with her adoptive family completely and exiled from family life again after dropping college and giving birth to her illegal child. Her adoptive father, once reunited with the daughter, reproached her for her unex- cused absence for so many years in a similar helpless rage. The helplessness derives from the bottomless gap in the daughter’s relationship with family in her psyche, a post-traumatic scar rendered in the ruins of the earthquake. Figura- tively, in terms of the scene composition for her return to both of the families, the daughter is always positioned at the entrance of a house, always ready to leave and reluctant to enter, which betokens her dubious relationship to the in- stitution of family.

Both memorial and familial dread in the daughter have been remedied at the end of the film, with a renewed interpretation of her mother’s choice from a denial of her life to a pursuit for life for her brother through the sacrifice of hers. This renewal of understanding is triggered by the daughter’s experience as 32 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession a relief volunteer for the 2008 earthquake. The witnessing of a mother’s dilemma enlightened her with the realization that the denial of part of the child’s body (the choice to amputate the child) is in fact a pursuit for life for other parts of the body, which would constitute the preservation of the child’s life. The daughter’s emotional involvement with the situation is reflected with the slow motion on the screen, which signifies a subtle transformation in her understanding of human choices in the face of disaster. This belated realization, together with the accidental encounter with her biological brother and the brother’s narration of the mother’s story, which affirmed her of the mother’s sense of loss and grief, persuaded the daughter to return to and reunite with her original family. The memorial and familial dread is thus vanquished. In Af- tershock, the dread in the daughter has been provoked by a misunderstanding of the mother’s choice over her life and death; therefore, the dread will evaporate as soon as the misunderstanding is cleared. Dread thus becomes a totally subjective feeling, derived from human choices and dependent upon human interpretation. It is not about nature, it is always about man and man’s choices.

In Aftershock, natural disasters are rendered without allusion to apocalypse, or the construction of apocalyptic dread. The lack of dread for natural disasters in the victims can be discerned by the reaction of the brother to a mi- nor earthquake in his city, 32 years after the Tangshan Earthquake. While all the other employees went amuck with fear, the brother stayed calm and still, he commented “Don't run. There’s no need to fear minor earthquakes, and there’s no escape from major ones.” The capacity to stay composed and rational in the middle of shock and uncertainty is a distinct heritage from his experience from the earlier earthquake. The absence of dread over earthquakes, and an almost peaceful relationship with natural disasters is evidence to the harmonious relationship with nature that he has achieved. Human agency, in the face of natural disaster, is manifest in one’s choice of rationality and emotion, the ability to make judgments, and the capacity to adapt to the circumstance. Immediately after the minor shock, the first action the brother has taken is to make a call to his mother. The proof for a lack of dread for natural disasters and even apocalypse is further demonstrated off-screen. In one press conference for the movie, the leading actress in the film, Xu Fan (who played the mother) responded to one of the press’ questions on the attitude towards natural disasters and catastrophes by saying that “the point is to live your life to the fullest ev- Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 33 ery day rather than to run away; if catastrophes were to come, there’s no way to escape.” The actress’s own value system is obviously in agreement with the attitude depicted in the film.

The priority on human agency rather than nature in the film is a recognition of the distinction between man and nature, and a further push towards the unity between them. The subjective agency of man can compensate for the lack of subjectivity of the vitality of nature. The addition of such subjectivity in the course of natural events may not alter the natural events per se, but will result in an alteration in the relationship between man and nature. Nature’s vitality is registered on the surface of human life, and man offers subjective interpretation towards the changes in nature. The indispensability of both man and nature in the making and registering of natural disasters are indeed a proof of the unity between the two. The mise-en-scene of both of the earthquake scenes in Aftershock is a reflection of the projected unity between man and nature in the film. The monochrome long take of the ruined buildings, destroyed nature, scarred lives and traumatized psyches is a depiction of the homogeneity among them. The shot of a drooping placard on top of the debris suggests a parallel to the shot of a drooping dead body over the broken structure. The nudity of the earthquake victims divests humans of their superficial protection and denies their difference from the natural world; it bespeaks the sameness of one other and the sameness of the texture of our bodies, which proclaims our proximity to animals and nature. Destruction kills the same thingness of things as the thingness of human bodies. Before disasters, man and nature are not much different.

Screenshot Aftershock 34 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

The use of aerial shots in the film is common: many of the shots of the aftermath of the two earthquakes, the shot of the traditional Chinese practice of joss paper burning during the ghost festival, the shot of a suitor with the mother in her house, the shots of the many new looks of the city of Tangshan, to name but a few. These shots seem to be non-point-of-view shots, or an om- niscient point-of-view from non-humans, probably nature. However, in the context of the mother’s communication with the dead through the traditional practice of burning joss paper, these aerial shots seem to suggest the point-of- view from the dead – the nebulous, the elevated ones – who were believed by the living ones to be witnesses to all their expressions of care and love. Thus nature, or a point from nowhere, incarnates the points-of-view of the lost ones, and the unity between nature and human agency is again achieved. The unity between man and nature, or commonly referred to as the harmony of man and nature, is an essential concept in Chinese philosophy and world view. Two major Chinese scholars of the 20th century, Ji Xianlin and Ch’ien Mu agreed on this concept being the “destination of the Chinese culture” and the “primary contribution of Chinese culture to the humanities.”3 Although debate in the definition of nature and the explication of the concept exist, many roots of the concept can be traced back to classical Chinese texts. Dong Zhongshu, a leading Confucian scholar in the Han Dynasty, says “the place where nature meets man, combines the two into one.” Chuang Tzu, the leading Taoist philosopher, states “Nature and I live synchronously, all life and I are one.”4 The traditional belief in the unity between man and nature prompted the emphasis on human agency and choice instead of the vitality of nature in the film. With the emphasis on human agency, the trauma of natural disasters could also be assuaged and healed. Human agency thus functions as the substitute subjectivity of nature. Nature is man, and man is nature.

Truth as Subjectivity

Kirsten Thompson identifies Søren Kierkegaard to be the next philosopher after Descartes to understand truth as subjectivity (2007:17). Moreover, Kierkegaard has a heavy investment in the concept of dread and its relationship to choice. Kierkegaard identifies the root of dread to be the availability of choices, or the “radical freedom” one has. Free will, or the indeterminacy of our actions, is what enables us to commit wrong, unethical or sinful acts. It is Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 35 simultaneously the awareness of choice and freedom that produces dread and fear in us, rather than specific actions or beliefs per se. Therefore, it is the temptation to utilize our free will that causes our dread. Truth as subjectivity is also the motif of the story in Aftershock.

The perceptions of life and death are the major realm for the making of truth in the film. Different characters have offered the audience multiple perceptions of life and death. The mother, as mentioned earlier, chose to register death differently from the son. While the mother registered death as an alter- nate state of being together, the son registered death as a separation, a spatial and temporal disconnection. The mother’s sense of togetherness with the dead family members was so strong that she would sometimes utter sentences surprising to his son as well as to the audience. The mother’s sense of togetherness also leads to her belief in the growth of her dead daughter, which can be discerned at the moment when she blurted out, “I have successfully raised two children” (which refer to both the son and the “dead” daughter), and also revealed when the daughter’s tomb was excavated and a copy of all the textbooks required in school has been provided to “her”. The differences between the mother’s and the son’s treatment of death have caused collisions between them; and the mother’s stubbornness on the issue has resulted in a quarrel with the son, which happened after her obstinate refusal to move either to a new city or to a new apartment in Tangshan. (in a car in front of the new apartment complex the son has selected) Son: Mom, get off and take a look, see whether you like it. Mother: Can we choose not to buy it? Son: This is it. I insist to buy. Mother: Buy it if you insist, but I won’t live here. Son: (with discontent) Mom, why are you so against me like this? You won’t go to Hangzhou (the new city where the son currently settles), you won’t move to a new apartment. You just want to be tough on yourself, why? Mother: I don’t feel it’s tough, I feel it is fine. Son: (with rage) You feel it's fine, then how will all the old neighbors judge me? Like I don’t take care of you when I’m successful? Daughter-in-law: Fang Da, don’t shout at Mom, talk nicely. Son: Mom, even if I don’t take care of you, I cannot justify it to my father and sister. Mother: But I am for the interests of your father and your sister. The last time we moved, I’ve told them how to get to the new location. It’s been some 36 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

twenty years now, if we move again, I need to tell them again. I am too tired now, too tired to instruct them again. Let’s stay there, don’t move. The mother continued to stress the importance of having a home in the city of Tangshan, as well as a home which the dead family members could know how to get to. Her major choice in being together with the dead has led to a series of other life decisions which affected every aspect of her life. Via this choice, she has constructed a different truth for herself. Her subjective agency has determined the reality for herself, as well as everything she believed in and practiced. For individuals, subjectivity makes truth and affects reality; and every one lives in the truth his subjectivity renders. The son, unable to persuade his stubborn mother to move to a new apartment, was in a rage and was reminded by his wife to “talk nicely” to his mother. Enlightened somehow, the son chose to apply the mother’s “truth” as a tactic for persuasion; he referred to the father and the sister in an active and present sense and immediately re- ceived an affirmation from the mother. His tactic worked, unfortunately, it did not exactly meet his goal.

Besides a different concept of death from the mother’s, the son has a nu- anced concept of life himself. He chose to interpret the meaning of “giving birth” as the recognition of and the persistence on the value of his life, which is larger than the conventional interpretation of delivering the physical body of a baby. In a conversation with his would-be wife, the son stresses the importance of his mother to him and the fact that “my mom has given me birth three times” – the first time at his birthday, the second time when the mother in- sisted on medical treatment after doctor’s announcement that he was too sick to be saved, and the third time during the earthquake.

The daughter has a particular truth of life and death to herself, too. Trau- matized by her mother’s “preference” of her brother’s life over her own, the daughter chose to understand life as an act of loyalty and death as an act of betrayal. This truth also affected the orientation of her life. In a dual dilemma of being pregnant while at college and being asked to practice abortion by the boyfriend, the daughter chose to honor her truth and to stay loyal to the new life inside of her.5 She responded to her boyfriend’s request to abortion by claiming “Others can [choose abortion], but I can’t.” She apparently understands that her sense of truth and her subjective interpretation of abortion are Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 37 different from others’. Her subjectivity is a compound result of the earthquake, the traumatic memory and more importantly, her own interpretations of what has happened.

The Plasticity of Chinese Life

The film begins with shots on the railroad. With the employment of both aerial shots and bird’s eye view shots, the film records well the pattern of the railroad in the city of Tangshan. This image is both a metaphor for the life of the residents in the city and the Chinese life in general: a pattern with change- able routes, with countless interconnections and a pattern which provides plen- tiful choices. The plasticity of Chinese life depends on the availability of varied choices. Lin Yutang, a pioneer Chinese scholar, stated in his introduction of Chinese culture that a Chinese is able to lead a peaceful life only with the help of both Confucianism and Taoism. While Confucianism motivates a Chinese to pursue secular successes, Taoism is a haven to escape to and to shed secularism if he/she should encounter failure in the process. With the support from both of them a Chinese will be able to find a balance in the course of all his life events. This is further evidence for the subjective choice of truth and the making of individual life for the Chinese – its flexibility is rooted in their belief systems. The power of choice of one’s attitudes towards life events, positive or negative, constitutes the plasticity of one’s subjectivity; and this layer of subjectivity can function as a cushion to protect its subject from dangerous reper- cussions from a powerful shock or blow. With multiple choices available and the freedom to choose from them, the Chinese will gain a good amount of adaptability to disastrous events, and flexibility to embrace changes while at the same time keep the individual belief and truth intact. This makes the plasticity of Chinese life.

The first aspect of the plasticity of Chinese life is its malleability. The film intentionally showcased a chronology of change in the city of Tangshan since the earthquake in 1976: immediately after the shock there were shacks built next to the debris; one decade after we see grids of brick houses and buildings; two decades after boulevards, factories, skyscrapers and privately- owned cars; three decades after more skyscrapers, more cars and fancy street lights. The camera does not fail to make an aerial shot or a panorama shot of the city in each decade, which emphasizes the city’s constant change, its devel- 38 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession opment in terms of industrialization and modernization, and its recuperation in terms of recovery from the trauma of the earthquake. The malleability of the city is a silent but effective story of the malleability of the people of Tangshan. Moreover, it is a demonstration of at least two aspects of the malleability of its people: their recuperative capacity in the aftermath of disasters and their re- constructive capacity in their outlook for future.

Another aspect of the plasticity of Chinese life is its flexibility, which would demand one’s sacrifice on some occasions. Flexibility entails active agency in the process of choice making. The choice over the meaning of life and death, the choice over truths and lies, the choice in the interpretation of life events, to name but a few, are among the many open options in life which would affect the orientation of one’s life. In the narration of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, the flexibility is discernible in the choice of the mother to amputate her daughter’s leg at the critical moment. The initial goal of saving her daughter intact has been transformed into a choice to sacrifice part of her daughter’s body in order to save her life. The external harm has been subtly transformed into an internal harm, as the mother lamented “if she would grow up hating me, then let her.” What is implied here is once again the emphasis on the power of subjective interpretation of the daughter’s of her mother’s decision at this particular moment. The objective fact of losing one leg may not be as important as the daughter’s interpretation of it, or her understanding of her mother’s choice back then. The internationalization of external factors grant man the power of agency again; during the process, the sense of helplessness in the face of uncontrollable external forces is minimized while the sense of agency and the strength of one’s internal force is augmented. Thus harmony with nature can once again be restored; and the conflict in the time of disaster is then intricately transformed as a conflict among men, rather than between man and nature.

Tangshan Earthquake, one of the major earthquakes in contemporary China, leaves behind both shock and stories. The shock of the earthquake produced trauma, but the stories of the earthquake affirm us that trauma can be healed. The healing of trauma is not only about time, but about active choice and the making of truth for the Chinese. In Chinese life, truth is subjective; moreover, it is plastic. Cheng: No dread for Disarsters 39

References Dixon, Wheeler W (2003) Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema, London: Wallflower. Feil, Ken (2005) Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination, Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press. Ji, Xianlin (2006) Thirty Years West of the River, Thirty Years East of It [San Shi Nian He Dong, San Shi Nian He Xi], Beijing: Contemporary China Press. Lin, Yutang (2000) My Country and My People, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Sontag, Susan (1985) "The Imagination of Disaster", in: Mast, Gerald and Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press. Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner (1988) Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Thompson, Kirsten M (2007) Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium, Albany: State University of New York Press. Timothy, Morton (2007) Ecology Without Nature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trend, David (2007) The Myth of Media Violence: A Critical Introduction, Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. Wang, Xiangyu (2008) “The Forms of Chinese Disaster Films and Realism Aesthetics Style”, in: Contemporary Cinema, Vol. 11, 117-119.

Filmography Aftershock: China 2010, dir. Feng Xiaogang, Chinese. Still Life: China 2006, dir. Jia Zhangke, Chinese

Notes 1 In light of all the polemics around the term “nature”, the definition of nature in the context of my paper is all being that is non man-made, in contrast, the artificial would refer to those that is man-made. 2 All translations from the Chinese sources are mine. 3 Both quotes are quoted by Ji Xianlin in Thirty Years West of the River, Thirty Years East of It. Beijing: Contemporary China Press, 2006. 4 Both quotes are quoted by Ji Xianlin in Thirty Years West of the River, Thirty Years East of It. The debate over the definition of nature is bases on its possible references to God, or nature with a will. 5 Chinese postsecondary institutions had banned marriage for undergraduate students until 2005 40 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Buddensiek: When the Shit Starts Flying When the Shit Starts Flying

Literary ghosts in Michael Raeburn's film Triomf by Swantje Buddensiek

Triomf, ©photo: Alex Flynn Summary: Marlene Van Niekerk's novel Triomf tells the story of a Boer family living in decline. The Benades appear to be haunted by their family history as well as, more subtly, by the guilt-laden past of their district in Johannes - burg. Uncanny disturbances occur in their living situation and in the un - stable ground of the narrated space ⎯ even graves do not keep in their place. Triomf has been adapted into a film by Michael Raeburn in 2010, and while the degeneration and tragic insight of the family are illustrated vividly, the literary ghosts become lost in the story's visualization. Author: Swantje Buddensiek is currently writing her PHD on "Heimsuchungen / Uncanny Visitations: Ghosts and Homes in South African Literature" at Humboldt-University in Berlin. Keywords: South Africa, novel, uncanny, space, post-Apartheid Quotation: Buddensiek, Swantje (2012) “When the Shit Starts Flying: Literary ghosts in Michael Raeburn's film Triomf”, in: manycinemas 3, 40-49. Buddensiek: When the Shit Starts Flying 41

Triomf has been first published in 1994, in a time of the countryʼ s al - most completed transition. A new order of a 'post-Apartheid South Africa' had just been set in political terms, and more or less so in peoples minds. The au - thor Marlene Van Niekerk, a South African of Boer origin herself, depicts de - scendants of the Dutch immigrants who built a Christian and agrarian orientated society in the settlement colony that later became an Apartheid state. Van Niekerk's novel, originally written in Afrikaans, illustrates the decay of Apartheid, exemplifying the Benades in their house as the last 'stuck' wagon of the Boersʼ Great Trek — a central historical event for their settlement in South Africa. Each of the four main characters tells the story from his or her perspective. The plot duration is set in the very days and weeks before the first free election, including this event as turning point for the nation and for the family.

The Benades are not longer landowners or part of the privileged white community in South Africa, although one could regard their beneficiary of so - cial welfare (including the social housing space they inhabit) as a privilege, compared to the millions of South Africans without any support from the state. The parents of the protagonists had once owned a farm, but lost it dur - ing an economic depression, which forced them to move to Johannesburg in order to find an employment.

The inhabited space plays a mayor role in the peculiar mode of haunting in the text. 'Triomf' is the Afrikaans name of the neighbourhood in Johannes - burg that the family lives in, but this district has actually been built upon an - other one. Until the late fifties, the area had been called Sophiatown, and it was well known for its culturally vibrant scene and the mix of people. For these reasons, the Apartheid regime gave order to demolish the entire neighbour - hood. It was then destroyed completely, against strong resistance of its inhabi - tants. While most of the people were sent to live in townships outside of the city centre ⎯ Sophiatown was the last central area in any South African city in which persons classified as 'coloured' did own houses ⎯ the buildings were flat - tened with all remaining content. Later, 'Triomf' was built upon this levelled ground, the name speaking for itself. This historical background sets the novel in a sombre light: it is the space of Triomf, or rather Sophiatown, that appears to be haunting the protagonists, however they also go after themselves. 42 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Failures

The Benade's four family members are Pop and Treppie, who are in their fifties and sixties, and the only female, Mol, perhaps in the same age. Then there is Lambert, who is about to turn forty. Formally, he is the son of Pop and Mol, and Treppie a ʻ distant family member ʼ from the Cape region. But as Lam - bert uncovers the family secret on the day of South Africa's first free elections, he finds out that the older three are siblings and have had a sexual relationship since their troubled childhood. Now he finally knows why he is different than others, with his knobbly body and epileptic seizures. His own pondering of his difference and the following rages liken him to a tragic, monstrous figure. But the bitter part of the family life does not start or end with Lamberts descent.

The Benade's cohabitate is marked by alcoholism, social isolation, and frequent aggressive outbursts that let Treppie and Lambert repeatedly demolish everything they can find in the house and garden, and later repair the very same things again and again. At one point Lambert even shuts his mother in - side of a fridge, together with some fireworks already lit.

The Benades do not have any friends; they regard others with both cu - riosity and contempt. At times, Lambert prompts conflicts due to his lack of social appropriateness. Neighbours look down on the four family members, who can be seen on their veranda and in the garden every day ⎯ drunk, desper - ate, and insufficiently clothed. The only frequent visitors the family has are

Triomf, ©photo: Alex Flynn Buddensiek: When the Shit Starts Flying 43 delegates from both the National Party and the Jehovah Witnesses. Each of those parties considers the family as degenerate, and the protagonists are aware about this. The novel's irony and tragedy lies in this aspect: the Benades repre - sent the failure of 'white supremacy', and they know and reflect on this. Trep - pie has a notable insight into their situation and finds cynical and sometimes poetic ways to describe it. But it does not change a thing.

The incest continues between the siblings. Even worse is the fact that all of the three men sleep with Mol, including her son Lambert. She sustains this habit because she believes that the family has to be strictly kept together. In this way, the text draws a horrible picture of Apartheid politics from 'within'. It is explained that the Benades had been rigidly taught to look after them - selves.

'Look after' was supposed to mean they were valuable. More valuable than other people. Most other people couldn't look after themselves properly. That was Old Mol's opinion in those days. She clung to that belief, even though she knew there was something wrong with it. What's more, it also meant that if they wanted to fight or look for trouble, they had to do it with each other and not with other people. A 'well-looked-after' person was someone who stayed the way he was, a person who kept to himself, to his own kind. (Van Niekerk 2004:138-139) There is little surprise that the family feels haunted in their house. In a certain way, the Benades resemble the image of a decadent family in a haunted mansion. But their ghosts are not restless ancestors in their own old house.

Haunting patterns

Ghosts do not appear as such in Triomf. Still, the novel deals with aspects of South Africa's past that keep on returning and even seem to have a dynamic of their own. The present time is unsettling for the family in their home in Tri- omf. As a last refuge for poor whites, the ideals of the Apartheid society and ʻwhite supremacy ʼ are already put into question. Also, the order of the state, as a wider sense of 'home', is about to fall apart. In this way, the living situation in the narrated space is altogether disturbed and uncanny. The term 'uncanny' is commonly considered to refer to the German word ' unheimlich', defined by Sigmund Freud as something repressed re-appearing in the familiar setting as estranged, disturbing its order. (Royle 2003) Representing some ʻ thing ʼ that re - turns when not expected, wanted, nor allowed to become visible, the notion 44 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession does remind of the structural changes in South Africa in the narrated time. A related term is Heimsuchung, among whose connotations are both 'uncanny visi- tation' of either a guest or a ghost, and 'search for a home'. The notion of Heimsuchung fits well to the events in Triomf: something un-settling is going on in the former settlement colony.

The past resurfaces in various ways: Lambert digs holes in the garden and therefore produces things that once were part of Sophiatown's homes. He col - lects these remainders in his own private museum. Furthermore, the ground be - neath the narrated space seems unstable. Mol often wakes up because she hears a rumbling underneath, she can sense hollows that originate in old mining tun - nels and in the built-over ruins of Sophiatown. This apprehension causes an uncanny feeling: Mol fears that the house will sink in and fall downward through an endless tunnel. This notion is consolidated in the fact that their dog's grave sinks deeper in the ground of their garden. That is especially un - settling for Mol. Following Jacques Derrida in Spectres de Marx, one of the main elements that enable haunting is mourning, which has to be connected to a fixed place, most likely a grave (Derrida 1994:9). Otherwise there cannot be a secure situation for the dead and the living; the line between both needs to be clear. Derrida illustrates the importance of mourning at a certain space as in the following:

It consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead. [...] One has to know. [...]. Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies - for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. [...] Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where-and it is necessary (to know-to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more! (Derrida 1994:9) On many occasions, the line between the family members and their dogs and even between living and dead dogs seems to blur. There are 'ghost dogs' hunting for their lost homes in Sophiatown, crying nightly in Triomf's streets. Likewise, the Benades often howl together in order to stir up the dogs in their neighbourhood and the 'ghost dogs' of Sophiatown. Their own two dogs are descendants of Sophiatown's ones: When the district had been destroyed, many domestic animals were left behind in the chaos and kept on searching for their Buddensiek: When the Shit Starts Flying 45 lost homes. The Benades had at this time visited the place and picked up two abandoned dogs which they named after the streets where they found them, Toby and Gerty. These names in turn go back to the daughters of a farmer who settled in this same space long before it became part of a city. In this way, as - pects of the past are being conjured up again. Ever since the Benades had them, the dogs reproduced (incestuous and through rape of a policeman's sheepdog) and were repeatedly given the same names in each generation. The deceased ones were buried in the garden, composing layers in the ruins of their ancestor's homes.

Inside of the Benade's house, marks of both human and animal house - mates decorate the walls: "[Y]ou'll find their personal effects all over the house. Their spit and their blood and their breath. And paw marks, all over the walls." (Van Niekerk 1994:359). Concerning this modus vivendi, one feels reminded of how Roland Barthes enquires the term 'bestiality'. In his disquisition on various modes on how to live together, Wie zusammen leben, the relationship of humans and their domestic animals can seem ambivalent (Barthes 2007:73-74). Often, animals are treated almost like human beings. At the same time, their natural behaviour has to be repressed when they are trained to fit into the orderliness of a home. Regarding animals with such a trained behaviour, the opposite tendencies in their human counterparts seem to become more visible. According to Barthes, one often finds features of bestiality in the cohabiting of animals and their owners. Their co-living can raise the question who is actually 'human' and who is 'bestial'. Regarding the Benades, this question definitely comes up. The family's dogs do have more rights and get more affection than their human cohabitants, as Treppie complains. The dogs are the only ones in the house who are not doing terrible things. But generally, the dogs represent uncanny space in the way that they remind of the lost homes underground. Together with the ghost dogs, which are heard howling at night, their existence is almost subverting present time and space.

The inward spiral

There is a particularly uncanny dynamic in the decline of the Benades, which is illustrated with various metaphorical images throughout the novel. Firstly, it is shown through images of infertility. The succession of generations comes to an end with Lambert, who cannot find a woman and perhaps could 46 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Triomf, ©photo: Alex Flynn not have children due to his constitution. His elders (it remains unclear whether Pop or Treppie is his biological father) worry about this, and sense the familyʼ s end in Triomf. Similarly, the space of Triomf is infertile. With Sophia- town underneath, there is no ground on which anything bigger then weeds could grow. A tree's roots would have to reach at least six feet deep to find soil, just as deep as a grave usually is.

Another uncanny dynamic is in the repeating prophecies about Pop's death, which then happens as foretold. Throughout the text, he has visions and 'visitations' predicting his death. He does not see a phantom or ghost, but re - peatedly dreams of a complete and excruciating 'whiteness' suffocating him. Ironically, he dies exactly on the day of the first free elections, when craftsmen come to paint the Benade's house white. One of them covers the furniture with white cloth, together with Pop, who is overseen sleeping in his armchair. At the same time, Lambert finds out about the family secret and unintentionally kills Pop when ravaging in the house. He could not make Pop out in all of the white: In the very same moment, he inherits Pops fear of being inside of a suf - focating whiteness. The family plans to flee north 'when the shit starts flying' or 'when the shit hits the fan' — that means, in the case of the end of Apartheid. They fear possible consequences and that they might lose their home, which is already a last resort for them. Lambert imagines a 'decent life for whites' somewhere else, as if the Great Trek of the Boers could go on for the Benades. It is Lambert who keeps on trying to establish normalcy and de - Buddensiek: When the Shit Starts Flying 47 cency within their home, in spite of his own contradictory actions. In the end there will be neither a flight north, nor any decency. Symbolically, everything about the Benades is growing inward and falling together.

At one point, Treppie wonders about possible ways in which his family could be shown on television:

He's already warned them, one day the TV people are going to come and make a movie about them. He's not sure what kind of a movie, a horror or a sitcom or a documentary. He thinks they're too soft for horror and too sad for sitcom, so maybe they're just right for a documentary. Documentaries are about weird things like force-feeding parrots for export. He told Lambert he'd better behave himself, otherwise they'd come and ask him to make a special appearance on Wildlife Today. Lambert said only threatened species got shown on that programme. The poor fucker kids himself. (Van Niekerk 2004:129) These are just the reasons why an adaption of their story into a movie script has to be challenging. Obviously, Michael Raeburn could not shoot a documentary about the family in his film Triomf (South Africa 2010). Still, he takes on the contradictory issues that the novel provides. The movie depicts both the sadness and tragic elements the family faces alongside funny action. It is not easy to see Lambert sleeping with his mother and laugh about a funny scene a few minutes later. But, considering the topic, it makes sense that the audience is forced to feel uncomfortable when watching the movie.

For a transformation of this lengthy and very dense text into the dra - matic structure a film needs, the plotline understandably had to be fitted. Per - haps for this reason, there are some crucial changes to the story. One of them is that the family is depicted as younger. A series of events the film focuses are the preparations for Lambert's twenty-first birthday. In the text, it is his forti - eth birthday. But, both in the novel and in the movie, similar events happen on this day: Treppie hires a prostitute for Lambert to celebrate the occasion, a coloured girl called Cleo, whom he asks to wear a blonde wig and play the role of a good Christian Boer girl. Mol and Pop speculate about a potential rela - tionship that might develop from this ʻ date ʼ , and Lambert even dreams about her fleeing north with them ʻ when the shit starts flying ʼ . The movie ʼ s plot cul - minates in Lambert's birthday and the following day of the first free elections. Both dates are highly expected and feared — while the 'date' goes terribly 48 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Triomf, ©photo: Alex Flynn wrong, the political event seems to bring rather peaceful and hopeful mo ments with it. Still, the ending of the Benadeʼ s story in the movie is changed into Lambert killing Treppie and Pop in his rage.

After Cleo got scared of Lambert during their ʻ date ʼ , she insults him and eventually runs away, leaving him alone in a seizure. When the returning family finds him, Treppie deliberately reveals to him their family secret, in front of the others. Treppie does so because he could not find peace for himself, he has always been strained and destructive because of their past and has passed this on to Lambert. As a consequence to the revelation, Lambert starts to halluci - nate his family members as monstrous animals, leading to the deadly show - down.

This hallucination is depicted visually, as there is a different level of vi - sions in the movie. They illustrate only Lambert's perspective, especially in mo - ments of despair. In the novel, he rather appears to be obsessed with 'insides' in these moments. In the visions, he can see the insides of humans and things mashing into each other. This reflects his obsessions with interior of any kind: digging Sophiatown up, opening up all kinds of things, and trying to look in - side of anything possible. It also fits into the chain of metaphorical motives that Van Niekerk implemented in the text: Lambert's obsession increases up to a seizure, which is when he can see everything and everyone melting into each Buddensiek: When the Shit Starts Flying 49 other. According to Nicolas Royle, this can be understood as an uncanny ef - fect.

The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained hidden but has come to light. But it is not ʻ out thereʼ , in any simple sense: as a crisis of the proper and natural, it disturbs any straightforward sense of what is inside and what is outside. The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality. (Royle 2003:2) In the movie, Lambertʼ s visions show distorted faces and his family members with the heads of rats. Although he is scared of what he sees, the vi - sualization lacks the depth and the uncanny notion of the visions described in the novel. Also, Pop's white dreams and his subsequent death according to them, and even the growling, threatening, hollow ground underneath are not depicted at all in the filmʼ s visual solution. Consequently, this visualization turns out to actually kill the ghosts that haunt in the text.

Triomf, ©photo: Alex Flynn References: Barthes, Roland (2007) Wie zusammen leben, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx, New York and London: Routledge. Royle, Nicolas (2003) The Uncanny, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Van Niekerk, Marlene (2004), Triomf, New York: Overlook.

Filmography: Triomf, South Africa, 2010, dir. Michael Raeburn, Afrikaans and English. 50 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies:

Understanding Africa’s Occult Narratives in the Context of Neoliberal Capitalism

by Carmela Garritano

Oxford Street Accra © Carmela Garritano

Summary: This paper analyzes occult movies produced in the burgeoning commer - cial movie industries in Nigeria (Nollywood) and Ghana. Fusing conven - tions of Hollywood horror films and West African witchcraft discourses, these cultural forms visualize the transformation of human life into sur - plus value and in this, present a critique of neo-liberal rationalities and global capitalism. Author: Carmela Garritano , Associate Professor of English , University of St. Thomas. Keywords: Africa, transnational, urban, Nollywood

Quotation: Garritano, Carmela (2012) “Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies: Understanding Africa’s Occult Narratives in the Context of Neoliberal Capitalism”, in: manycinemas, issue 3, 50-65. Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 51

The movies credited with launching the thriving, local commercial movie industries in Ghana and Nigeria center on men who engage in black magic to get rich quick. In the Ghanaian English-language movie Zinabu (1987), Kofi is a poor auto mechanic who exchanges what he refers to as “his man - hood” for wealth. Zinabu, a wealthy and beautiful witch, offers Kofi unlimited riches on the condition that he swears, with his life, to abstain from all sexual relations, with her or any other woman. The almost instantaneously affluent Kofi, driving a new car and dressed to kill, attracts the attention and advances of many women, and eventually he finds the temptations too great. He suc - cumbs to his sexual desire, and because he has “disobeyed” Zinabu’s interdic - tion, she performs a ritual and causes his death. The Nigerian movie Living in Bondage (1993) focuses on Andy, a man who joins a cult called “the million - aires club” because he cannot afford the flashy cars and trips abroad that his friends enjoy. To gain access to untold riches, Andy must sacrifice the person he “loves most,” his wife Merit. After Andy murders Merit, a devout Christian in life, she refuses to rest, and her ghost haunts Andy, appearing unexpectedly again and again until Andy goes mad. 1

Didactic and melodramatic, occult movies from Ghana and Nigeria criti - cize desires that drive men to put the attainment of wealth before human life and to consume selfishly and excessively. Set within the everyday of urban Africa, where people’s lived experiences of scarcity collide with fantasies of af - fluence and new “imaginaires of consumption” (Mbembe 2002), these movies address anxieties about wealth’s mysterious sources in a global context where affluence seems disconnected from work and production. More than that, movies such as Blood Money (1997), Rituals (1997), Blood Billionaires (2003), Bil- lionaires Club (2005), and Sika Mu Sakawa (2009) articulate strong critiques of neoliberal capitalism. Invoking African repertoires and the conventions of the Hollywood horror film, they expose the human violence, dismemberment, and death rationalized and effaced by the economic idioms of capitalist develop - ment.

Across Africa during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the dereg - ulation of state-controlled media environments, a central component of eco - nomic liberalization, opened national borders to a multiplicity of global media flows, making available, at an unprecedented rate, an extraordinary array of 52 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession media content. Concurrently, the emergence of new media transmission and distribution technologies, including the VHS standard, direct broadcast satel - lite, and cable television, significantly broadened citizens’ access (Dal Yong Jin 2007; Teer-Tomaselli, Wasserman, de Beer 2007). According to a 1999 UN - ESCO report, the number of television sets per one thousand inhabitants in - creased by thirteen percent in Africa between 1970 and 1997, and in recent years, an influx of inexpensive and portable media technologies, including VCD and DVD players, from China, Japan, and Singapore has further expanded and accelerated the spread of global media (Ugor 2009; Garritano forthcom - ing). In Ghana and Nigeria, it was from within the local networks erected to fa - cilitate the circulation and viewing of this new media that the local production of feature-length movies on videotape emerged (Larkin 2008; Garritano 2007). With access to easy-to-use video technology, individuals detached from net - works of state-sponsored and official cultural production, first pirated and dis - tributed imported films and television programming, and, later, produced their own features. In Ghana, for example, the first video-movie makers had no pro - fessional training in film or video production. They were individuals connected to commercial film and video distribution and who had access to video equip - ment and possessed some knowledge of how it worked. Socrate Safo, a pioneer of Ghana’s movie industry, worked at a video center in Accra that charged a nominal fee for patrons to watch bootlegged copies of foreign TV programs and sporting events, which were played on a VCR connected to a small televi - sion, and he learned about videotaping when the owner of the center, Samuel Ankra, hired a video camera operator to record his child’s naming ceremony, which Safo attended. Shortly after, when he was only nineteen years old, Safo rented a home VHS camera to make his first movie, Unconditional Love (1989), and since then he has produced hundreds of local movies.

From these grassroots and amateur beginnings, two independent, prolific, and vast commercial movies industries have developed in West Africa. 2 The massive Nigerian movie industry has become, by some accounts, the third largest commercial movie industry in the world, releasing as many as 1500 movies each year (Barrot 2008). Commercial movie production in Nigeria in - cludes Nollywood, the name used widely to refer to the English-language in - dustry in southern Nigeria, a large number of movies made in Yoruba, and in northern Nigeria, a Hausa-language industry, which, for the most part, operates Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 53 independent of southern circuits of production and distribution. 3 The smaller Ghanaian movie industry, spread between two urban centers, Accra and Ku - masi, and intertwined at various points with Nollywood, released approximately two hundred movies in 2010. English-language movies dominated the Ghanaian market until about 2006, when movies made in Akan, a Ghanaian language spo - ken widely across the country, became incredibly popular. In recent years, Ghana-Nigeria co-productions and a significant number of movies made transnationally have blurred boundaries between the industries, particularly in the case of English-language movies, which easily slip across national borders in the Anglophone West Africa region. In the twenty-first century, the occult genre is among a wide variety of locally–made African movies consumed by Africans, locally and transnationally. These include domestic dramas, crime thrillers, epic dramas, comedies, and a multiplicity of hybrid movies that cre - atively combine genres and styles.

Screenshot Sika Mu Sakawa

Karin Barber (1987) noted long ago that African popular culture enthusi - astically embraces foreign influences as sources of newness and singularity, and so it is not surprising that African popular movies display an inexhaustible ca - pacity to recontextualize and localize forms and styles associated with global mass culture, including the Hollywood horror film, as Tobias Wendl (2007) has shown. Here, I want to build on Wendl’s survey of several types of African occult movies to concentrate particular attention on urban occult movies. These movies typically center on men who participate in blood-money rituals, 54 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession known in Akan as sika aduro, to access wealth. Characters in these movies kill family members and strangers, or in some instances obtain blood or body parts, in exchange for affluence. Like many other local African discourses about witchcraft and prosperity, they explain and denounce wealth immorally ob - tained and selfishly accrued, and though they draw from older African archives, occult narratives should not been read as remnants of “traditional” or “primi - tive” beliefs, but as a dynamic, modern discourse that reflects and attempts to make sense of contemporary capitalist forces. 4 What makes these movies particularly compelling, from my point-of-view, is their articulation of resistance to Africa’s “initiation into capitalism,” (Medley and Carroll 2011:283), a phrase I’ve taken from Joseph Medley and Lorrayne Carroll’s reading of Lawrence Chua’s “Gold by Inch,” a novel that brings into visibility the human suffering and bodily violence concealed by dominant narratives of global capitalism and development. According to these critics, Chua’s novel excavates the exploita - tion and dehumanization of laboring Thai and Malay bodies subjected to the disciplinary regimes of capitalism, and in so doing, represents “a challenging counter-imagery to the IMF rhetoric that unreservedly praises capital’s effects” (2011:284). Occult movies from Ghana and Nigeria, countries that also have been subjected to IMF and World Bank structural adjustment regimes, emerge from and address conditions of global marginalization and chronic scarcity, “where desired goods are known, that may sometimes be seen, that one wants to enjoy, but to which one will never have material access” (Mbembe 2002:271). They at once probe the sinister, secret sources of capital and express deep dis - content with the unjust allocation of wealth under neoliberal capitalism. As ar - gued by Brigit Meyer (1998), the movies give voice to a moral critique of power. Occult economies and melodrama align to distill complex material, eco - nomic processes onto linear narratives about personal, moral surrender to the enchantments of wealth. In ways similar to many Hollywood horror films, African occult movies adopt the perspective of the outsider who gradually be - comes aware of and so must confront evil. The movies’ conflicts involve death and violence brought about by the protagonist’s immoral accumulation, and plots resolve in strong assertions of moral instruction. Protagonists typically die painful and gruesome deaths or are redeemed by prayer, though sometimes the state intervenes to arrest the murdering ritualists. Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 55

At least in part, the appeal of these local movies grows from their topi - cality and immediacy. Producers pick up on and address the most current scan - dal or gossip and quickly release a movie about it; sometimes movies are completed in only two weeks. Poaching stories from other sites of public cul - ture the producers deploy what Angela Ndalianis has described in Hollywood films as “a logic of seriality” that emphasizes “the marketable aspects of sto - ries rather than their ‘originality’” (2004:59). Much as other serial forms of screen media, occult movies participate in an elaborate narrative web that reaches beyond the text of the single movie to include previous occult movies, current news stories, and the rampant and sensational rumors about blood money rituals and other sinister dealings in the occult that circulate through Accra and Lagos. In Nigeria in 1996, the brutal murder of an eleven year old boy, Ikechukwu Okoronkwo at the Otokoto Hotel in Owerri, which was ru - mored to be an occult killing, animated several movies, including Blood Money and Rituals.5 The Ghanaian movie Nkrabea (1992) claims to tell the true story of the widely reported murder of a young boy called Kofi Kyinto, who was al - leged to have been beheaded in a ritual murder. Accra Killings (2000) offers a fictionalized account of the thirty-one serial murders of women in Ghana, again rumored to have been carried out by occultists. Coincident with a surge of news reports, radio programs, and locally produced novels on sakawa, a type of internet fraud associated with witchcraft and magic, several very profitable movies on the same topic have appeared recently in Ghana. 6

Urban occult movie speak out against the erosion of humanity and social relations brought about by wealth, reinventing tropes common to older African discourses about witchcraft and other forms of immoral accumulation. In his book Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006), anthropologist James Ferguson succinctly summaries this African vocabulary, describing two types of wealth and the metaphors used to describe them. Wealth is either "the kind that feeds the people” or “the kind that eats them” (2006:73). In other words, it contributes to the growth and health of a community or it brings about its demise. In urban occult movies, wealth is always destructive and dan - gerous, and once ensnared in its net, protagonists cannot break free. In Billion- aires Club, Zed owns a small, poorly stocked kiosk, where he sells pills and other medical supplies. Newly married to Victoria and with a baby to care for, Zed takes a loan from his wife to expand his pharmacy business. When his 56 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession business falters, he must ask his wealthy friend Don for help. Don invites him to join his “brotherhood,” warning him that he must “be brave.” Zed accepts Don’s invitation even though his wife warns him to be careful. The leader of the brotherhood, Damien Billion, or D.B., tells Zed that for his initiation, he must bring his new baby to the shrine. Realizing that he is being asked to kill his child, Zed is horrified and refuses. But when he returns home and finds the baby ill, he tells his wife that they must take the baby to the hospital. Instead, Zed brings his baby to the shrine, where, in a gruesome ritual, it is placed in a deep bowl and pounded, like yam, with a large pestle. When his wife demands to know what has happened to her baby, she, too, is killed.

As in many movies where men kill for wealth, in Blood Billionaires the ghosts of the dead return to torment their killer. Zed hears his baby crying and sees his wife when no one else does. His young and beautiful second wife, new mansion, many cars, and flashy wardrobe cannot quiet the ghosts of the mur - dered. Desperate, Zed seeks the council of his “brothers,” who laugh at his distress and remind him that they all must pay their “dues” for their luxurious lifestyles. D.B. removes the small hat he always to wears to reveal an open sore covered in maggots. Don says continues to be haunted by his apprentice, whom he killed many years ago. They tell Zed that if he is prepared to sacrifice a part of his body, the spirit of his dead wife will never bother him again. Reluctantly, Zed says he will give up his arm. That evening, black blotches appear on Zed’s arm, and in a few days, his arm is festering and bleeding. Soon, his entire body is covered in open wounds. His second wife takes him to his parents’ house in the village, where his mother prays for his dead wife to forgive her son and end his suffering, and finally, he dies.

Sakawa movies, unlike Blood Billionaires and several of the other occult movies discussed here, do not focus on middle-aged business men, but describe and criticize the dire material circumstances that push young, unemployed men into crime or immoral acts. 7 Each movie devotes significant time to narrating the extreme economic hardships that drive young men to sakawa. These are boys who, in most movies, do not have fathers and who cannot look to the state for assistance. Frustrated by their inability to take care of themselves and to fulfill their obligations to their loved-ones, the boys reluctantly seek the aid of the occult. To become rich, each boy is required to survive an initial ardu - Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 57 ous ordeal and then to obey, without question or hesitation, the series of inter - dictions placed before them. These tasks are referred to as the “work” the young men do and require them to engage in extreme, anti-social acts that vio - late basic tenets of family and community. Indeed, their pursuit of wealth, even though their initial motives are justifiable, unravels all social ties in these movies. Sammy and Kobi, from Café Boys, are not allowed to bath or touch water for three weeks. In other movies, the protagonists must eat garbage, collect menstrual blood from used sanitary napkins, have sex with mad and homeless women, or sleep in coffins. In Sika mu Sakawa, Ampong’s father dies and leaves his family impoverished. Though he works one menial job after another, Am - pong fails to earn enough to feed his family and pay his sister’s school fees. When his rich friend Fred brings him into a cult, Ampong must sacrifice his sister for money. In Agya Koo Sakawa, Gyima is forced to kill his brother to keep his wealth. Paradoxically, Gyimah’s wish to help his brother get estab - lished in the city is the main reason he falls prey to the occult. In The Dons in Sakawa, Hakim is granted immense wealth on the condition that he obeys “the golden rule,” which forbids him from giving money to his mother and sister or spending any of his money to feed them or maintain their health. If he breaks this rule, he will die. When Hakim’s mother and sister become critically ill and the hospital refuses to treat them unless Hakim pays for their care, he is forced to either let them die or give up his life to save them. In the end, he pays for their care and dies. Here, Hakim’s decision to sacrifice his life for the wellbeing of his family represents his moment of personal redemption.

The movies appropriate the lexicon of the market to describe the im - moral and exploitative acts that guarantee wealth. In Blood Billionaires, for ex -

Screenshot Sika Mu Sakawa 58 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession ample, cult members refer to their cult as “an investment conglomerate.” Body parts are bargained for and purchased as if they were market shares. One ritu - alist tells another of human heads offered for sacrifice, “…the prettier the faces, the better economy they will yield.” In Sakawa Boys, under the guise of assisting his old school friends, a wealthy occult member, someone known and trusted, denies his friends’ requests for money but offers to teach them his “line of work.” D.B., the head of the brotherhood in Billionaires Club, reminds Zed that “nothing good comes without sacrifice,” parodying cliché’s that cele - brate the relentless pursuit of success and prosperity and neoliberal individual - izing ideologies that champion strong will. In Blood Money, the cult leader, referred to as “Lord Spiritual” by his subordinate ritualists, tells the newest member Mike that their cult, called The Vultures, operates like a bank. “They take a little risk and make plenty of money.” Mike can join the cult only after “passing through” the body of a vulture for three days. Misty Bastian (2001) and John McCall (2002) have discussed the symbolic significance of the vulture in Nigerian popular culture, a figuration of “predatory capitalism” (McCall 2002, 91) that feeds off refuse, “the malodorous monuments to capitalist sur - plus” (McCall 2002:91).

In scenes of haunting violence, occult movies lay bare the rapacious and destructive desires of “Big Men,” the powerful and wealthy patriarchs who can - nibalize vulnerable women and children to maintain their status. Through the

Screenshot Sika Mu Sakawa figure of the zombie, the movies, again and again, reveal the connection be - tween the ostentatious wealth of those in power and the exploitation and death of the poor and powerless. Human bodies, shorn of their human-ness, are Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 59 needed to vomit or give birth to wealth. In many occult movies, the initiate must sacrifice a family member, who is transformed into a money zombie and lodged in a private shrine in the man’s home. In Sika Mu Sakawa, Ampong kills his sister and Frank his pregnant wife. The man covers the woman with a white cloth, which, in the shrine, morphs into a snake and then back into the shape of the woman, but now she is more zombie than human. She appears with sores and cuts on her arms and legs, and she does not speak or resist. On her hands and knees, she emits animal-groans and vomits money, or pushes money from her vagina as if she were giving birth to it. Her body, neither alive nor dead, has been transformed into a money-producing apparatus. In this grotesque allegory of capitalism, the movie enacts the extraction of wealth from human life.

In the Nollywood movie Blood Money, Mike abducts a small boy by hand- ing him a packet of magic power, which turns him into a fowl. Mike places the small bird in a bag and carries it to the shrine for sacrifice. Inside the shrine, the fowl is transformed back into a child, and when one of the other cult mem - bers recognizes the child as his very own son, he begs the priest to spare him. Here the movie emphasizes the boy’s human-ness, that he is unique, has a fam - ily, and is loved. But the priest says it is too late and instructs Mike to take the child home and lock him in his personal shrine, “a room into which no one else should enter.” The boy no longer speaks or moves, but exists as bare life and only to create money, which pools all around his small body. But one body is never enough, and the men must find other sacrifices to stave off poverty. Cultists prowl the city for disposable bodies, typically poor women who work as house cleaners, road-side merchants, or prostitutes, and they use their bodies in the rituals that produce their wealth. In Sika mu Sakawa, the camera watches Ampong sleep with these women, and after sex, wipe some part of their bodies with a white cloth. He then takes the cloth to his shrine, where he performs a ritual, chanting and rocking menacingly. The women become sick, their bodies slowly eaten by cankerous ulcers. One after another, he leaves the suffering women to die alone.

The shrine is a space of exchange and transformation, where human be - ings become vultures or zombies, or through their murder and sacrifice are ex - changed for wealth. The shrine stands in for what Jean Comaroff and John 60 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Comaroff call “the experiential contradiction at the core of neoliberal capital - ism” (2002:782). It functions as a metaphor for the mysteries that surround wealth. “The fact that [capitalism] appears to offer up vast, almost instanta - neous riches to those who control its technologies, and simultaneously, to threaten the very livelihood of those who do not” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2002:782). It is a space of initiation, where an ordinary person is transformed into a cult member and given access to the mysteries of capitalism (wealth without work or production.) Birgit Meyer has described the camera’s look into this secret space as a divine vision that sees into what is usually hidden, “offer - ing first hand views deep into hell” (2004:104). Producers exploit special ef - fects to enhance the representation of the magical and mysterious. Viewers see men turn into vultures and ghostly figures appear from nowhere.

The movies recycle iconographies of evil common to many horror films and incorporate narrative conventions common to the demonic variant of the genre. Shrines are draped in black and red, and rituals involving blood, eerie chanting, and violence take place in remote, secret locations. Musical cues heighten suspense and terror, and shock cuts provoke bodily jolts in spectators. Most notably, occult movies place before the spectator images of violence and abjection, which are at once fascinating and repulsive. The bodies of victims are cut open and cut into pieces. Bloody body parts are pulled from bags, heads are severed from bodies, babies cut from wombs, and human blood poured into bowls. Victims develop open and oozing sores and writhe in pain. These im - ages, as Barbara Creed explains, address “a desire not only for perverse plea - sure (confronting sickening, horrific images, being filled with terror/desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, having taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out, eject the abject (from the safety of the spectator’s seat)” (1996:40). The films stage an encounter with the horrors that threaten the sym - bolic order, casting them out to affirm the stability of the symbolic.

Creed’s well-known psychoanalytical analysis of horror, which borrows from Julia Kristeva’s writing on the abject, understands the genre as a manifes - tation of psychic processes, and as such, it eclipses history and culture, collaps - ing specificity and materiality into the psychological. Blood money movies from Ghana and Nigeria resist such a reading. They address viewers as social subjects, and violence, rather than functioning as a projection of individual Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 61

Screenshot Sika Mu Sakawa psychology, works as a public demonstration of power acting on bodies. Im - ages of pain and suffering inflicted on victims and villains project fantasies of privately administered and controlled violence. Unattached from character point-of-view, the camera displays scenes of abjection, pulling the spectator into this theatre of pain. Spectacles of violence in occult movies work like the scenes of violence Mbembe (2001) describes as features of the African post - colony. Citing Foucault’s analysis of the torture of Damiens, Mbembe analyzes a small, intimate public punishment carried out against a misbehaving teacher in front of a church congregation. Mbembe calls this display of punishment “a social transaction” (115) that incorporates actors and observers as it “opens up a space for enjoyment at the very moment it makes room for death” (115). When occult movies end with the torture and death of the greedy capitalist, the point is that he gets what he deserves, and the audiences’ own desires for wealth or their own envy of the rich are contained by this public, moral resolu - tion.

African occult movies investigate what Wendy Brown has referred to in another context as “the mystified nature of the production of value” (2010:102) under capitalism. In a provocative reading of Marx, Brown suggests that, for Marx, capitalism profanes the world “insofar as it destroys ineffable goods and quantities such as love, intelligence, beauty, bravery, and honesty by making them purchasable” (99). African occult movies act out this horrific transformation of human life into surplus value. They call attention to the hu - man costs of prosperity, which is never achieved without the exploitation of another. 62 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

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Videos Accra Killings. 2000. Directed by George Arcton-Tetty. Ghana: In English. VHS. Billionaires Club, two parts. 2003. Directed by Afam Okereke. Nigeria: Great Movies, Inc. In English. VCD. Blood Billionaires, two parts. 2005. Directed by Mac Collins Chidebe. Nigeria: Chez International Production. In English VCD.

Blood Money. 1997. Directed by Chico Ejiro. Nigeria: Ojiofor Ezeanyaeche Production. In English. Blood Money Part II. 1997. Directed by Abasseno Uko. Nigeria: Ojiofor Ezeanyaeche Production. In English. Café Guys, two parts. 2002. Directed by Uriel Adjin-Tetty. Ghana: Creative Mindz Production. In Akan. VCD. Dons in Sakawa. 2009. Directed by Moses Ebere. Ghana: Venus Film. In English. VCD. Living in Bondage, two parts. Directed by Kenneth Nnebue. Nigeria: NEK Video Links. In Igbo with English subtitles. VCD. Nkrabea. 1992. Directed by C.B. Baffoe Bommie. Ghana: Amahilbee Productions. In English. VHS. Rituals. 1997. Directed by Kenneth Nnebue. Nigeria: NEK Video Links. In English. VCD. Sakawa, two parts. 2010. Directed by Richmond Aframe. Big Joe Production. Ghana: In Akan. VCD. Sakawa 419. 2009 Directed by Jones Agyemang. Miracle Films. In Akan and English. Ghana. VCD. Sakawa Boys, four parts. 2009. Directed by Socrate Safo. Movie Africa Productions. Ghana. VCD Sakawa Girls, two parts. 2009. Directed by Kafui Dzivenu. Ghana: Blema Production. VCD. Sika Mu Sakawa. 2009. Directed by Evans Kumi Wademor. Ghana: Miracle Films. In English and Akan. DVD. Time. 2000. Directed by Ifeanyi Onyeabor. Ghana: Miracle Films. In English. VHS. Zinabu. 1999. (remake of 1987 original) Directed by William Akuffo. Accra, Ghana: World Wide Pictures. In English. VHS. Garritano: Blood Money, Big Men and Zombies 65

Notes: 1 The movie ends when a born-again woman, a former prostitute who remembered Andy, sees him eating garbage on the street and takes him to her church, where his soul and sanity are saved by a group of Christian prayer warriors. 2 Based on the West African model, commercial movies industries have appeared in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, and Tanzania. 3 The study of Nollywood now supports a large body of scholarship. Important work has been done by Moradewun Adejunmobi (2002, 2007, 2010); Akin Adesokan (2004); Jonathan Haynes (1995, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010); Brain Larkin (2008); and Onookome Okome (2000, 2007a, 2007b). Birgit Meyer (1998, 2004) has published significant research on Ghanaian videos. 4 The scholarship on witchcraft, the occult, and other modern magics in Africa is vast. Examples that I have found illuminating include Bastian (1993, 2001); Bayart (2009); Comaroff and Comaroff (2002); Geschiere (1997); Smith (2007); and Parish (1999, 2000). 5 See Daniel Jordan Smith (2007) for an analysis of the Owerri incident. I also want to thank Jon Haynes for calling my attention to the Nollywood movies linked to this incident. 6 The word sakawa derives from Hausa and translates into English as “to penetrate,” or “to get into.” It generally refers to a type of magic or juju used by internet scammers to penetrate the Internet through the computer and enable the success of their fraud schemes. Movies on sakawa include Café Guys (2002), the five part Sakawa Boys (2009), Sakawa Girls (2009), and Agya Koo Sakawa, I and II (2009). Venus Film produced The Dons in Sakawa, parts 1-4 (2009), and Big Joe Production’s made Sakawa (2010). Other Ghanaian titles include: Sika Mu Sakawa (2009) and Sakawa 419 (2009). 7 I have written in greater detail about sakawa movies from Ghana in my forthcoming book. 66 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema Hauntology Beyond the Cinema:

The Technological Uncanny

by Carrie Clanton Visualized Sound: Battle of the Ghost (Deine Lakaien)

Summary:

Cinema is an intrinsically ghostly medium, its narratives conjuring other times and places. But all media may be said to be “hauntological” in nature, entailing chronological and spatial disruptions that technologically produce a sense of the uncanny. Beyond the séance-room of the cinema, other hauntological representations such as dub and electronic music constitute politically and culturally deconstructive media projects.

Author:

Carrie B. Clanton, PhD in Cultural Studies, Centre for Cultural Studies. Goldsmiths College, University of London. Thesis: “The End of the Uncanny: Hunting for Ghosts in the UK”.

Keywords:

ghosts, hauntology, technological uncanny, digital, electronic music

Quotation: Clanton, Carrie (2012) “Hauntology Beyond the Cinema: The Technological Uncanny”, in: manycinemas, issue 3, 66-76. Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema 67

The Cinematic Medium

It is not surprising that cinema has enjoyed a particularly rich engage - ment with ghosts and hauntings. The medium of film, as it seemingly magically conjures sounds and images from other times and places for audiences in a darkened room, is spectral in nature, beyond the ghostly narratives it is so of - ten adept at presenting. The development of all media and communications technologies, from telephones to digital video, is closely associated with the su - pernatural, with such “ghostly media” producing disembodied voices, enabling scenes of the past to repeat in the future, and evoking the presence of those spatially absent or long since dead. In a sense, all recorded media haunts and is haunted: as Roland Barthes (1981) pointed out about old photographs, the peo - ple we see in them are likely dead, but are also going to die, and the same is true of audio recordings and film. With digital media, this unsettling of time (not to mention space) has perhaps become all the more uncanny, with the con - tent of sound and image files capable of being created, archived, fast-for - warded, rewound, and even frozen in time, at the click of a button. Such technologically produced spatial and chronological disruptions imply that me - dia recordings are always potentially hauntological: like ghosts, they call into question established borders and the neatly linear categories of history. Film has especially been a natural home for what Freud (1919), in his seminal essay on the uncanny, considered that most un-homely of iterations, the ghost, as ex - emplified by countless movies about ghosts produced across all continents. Be - yond the cinema, however, a closer look at the spectral tendencies of communications technology in general, and electronic sound in particular, re - veals the hauntological undercurrents of all media.

Ghosts have seemingly never been absent from any time or culture. They exemplify Derrida’s (1967:63) statement that “there is nothing outside the text”: they are perpetuated not by people’s ongoing belief in them, but by the myriad representations of them, such as in popular ghost films. John Potts (2006:81) notes, however, that the expression of the idea of the ghost is “shaped by its worldly environment, undergoing transformations in specific cultural habitats.” As such, ghosts always mirror Freud’s theory of repression— like suppressed desires or guilt they always return to haunt, and in culturally determined ways. As Potts (2006:83) argues, a ghost is “a representation of the 68 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession past as it endures in the future” and “to be haunted by a ghost is to be haunted by the past.” Ghosts may be interpreted as the external expression of some no - tion of the unsettledness about the past; their presence signifies the past im - peding upon the enjoyment of the present. For example, Ken Gelder (1994:xi) describes how Australian ghost stories double as tales of post-colonial guilt, il - lustrating that the history of white settlement is “fundamentally unsettled.” Likewise, Renee Berglund (2000) has written about the “spectralization” of North American Indians not only through stories of haunted burial sites and indigenous ghosts but also via government policies that have sought to write Native Americans out of U.S. history and politics (while nonetheless maintain - ing them as fantastical figures in the public imagination). More radically, Michael Taussig’s (1997) The Magic of the State deals with the spirits intrinsic to the state systems of South America; according to Taussig (Taussig and Levi Strauss 2005), “people today gain magical power not from the dead, but from the state's embellishment of them. And the state, authoritarian and spooky, is as much possessed by the dead as is any individual pilgrim.” As Avery Gordon (1998:8) states in her call to incorporate ghosts into sociological thinking, “to be haunted is to be tied to social and historical effects.”

Gordon describes how the narratives of haunting register cultural experi - ences such as slavery or torture more fully and in different ways than other ac - counts are able to; she argues that anyone concerned with social and cultural representation, not to mention political reform, must engage with ghosts. Ac - cording to Julian Wolfreys (2002:3), "to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns" so that "all stories are, more or less, ghost stories." But ghosts—with their magical propensity to al - ways be returning—are more than just an allegory for some repressed cultural guilt or an unsettled past. Their presence represents the category of the past, which is expected to remain dead and buried (or archived or repressed) and this disruption implicates those living in the present. As Bliss Cua Lim (2001:287), in her study of ghosts in film, puts it:

The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the con - trary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles the boundaries of past, present, and future, and cannot be written back to the complacency of Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema 69 a homogeneous, empty time. The ghost always presents a problem, not merely because it might provoke disbelief, but because it is only admissible insofar as it can be domesticated by a modern concept of time.

Derrida based his Spectres of Marx (1994) on these questions of time; his conception of hauntology as part and parcel of deconstruction underlines the capacity and implication of ghosts and their disruption of linear chronol - ogy—and hence the notion of history. As Fredric Jameson (1999:39) notes, Derrida’s spectrality “does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present;” rather, ghosts “make the present waver,” for their appearance shows that the here and now are not as solid as they claim to be.

Derrida’s (1994:4) hauntology calls for the deconstruction of all histori - cisms grounded in a rigid sense of chronology, and he states that “haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated—never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of the calen - dar.” Like all texts, including film, ghosts always arrive in the present from the past. They are not the same person, and so are not of the past, and are thus always making a debut—because they are not of the present either. As Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (1999: 15) put it, “the temporality to which ghosts are subject is therefore paradoxical, as at once they ‘return’ and make their appari - tional debut.” This dual movement of return and inauguration constitutes hauntology. As Derrida (1994:161) himself describes it:

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.

Hauntology functions as a kind of deconstruction; to acknowledge that cinema is a haunted medium is to submit to its capacity to perpetuate ghost stories, but also to the technological uncanniness of the very concept of cin - ema: to the way in which filmic time is always “out of joint” (as Derrida 70 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

(1994), after Hamlet, phrases it), and space is no longer bounded in the way that it is outside of the cinema.

Haunted Media

Long before the early cinematic travelogues of two centuries ago allowed audiences the uncanny experience of seeing and hearing other times and places, audio-visual technologies were used to produce phantasmagoria: sound and light shows that seemed to magically conjure and project voices and figures from thin air, to the delight and often terror of audiences. X. Theodore Barber (1989) has described how phantasmagoria shows prefigured modern contempo - rary film techniques such as superimposition and tracking shots, while Cristina Britzolakis (2000:79) sees the shows as denoting “a heightened, distorted, or manipulated visibility; the apparitional quality of objects extracted uncannily from the process of their own making, and disporting themselves in the new urban landscape of modernity.” It is no wonder that Walter Benjamin (2002) likened the arcades of 1920s Paris to phantasmagoria, replete with dialectical images in which the archaic and the modern combined, offering the possibility of profane illumination via this radical chronological and spatial displacement. Cinema, with its phantasmagoric roots, is always haunted; its narratives of haunting may offer deconstructive cultural criticism, but a shortcoming of nar - rative cinematic ghosts is that they tend be resolved, and the resolution of a haunting is not of the concept of haunting. As Derrida (1994) described, to pin down the ghost in time—to solve the mystery of why it comes or from whence or when it came—is akin to exorcism. It is not the resolving of the disruption of the ghost, but the experience of the disruption of the ghost it - self, that constitutes hauntology. It is the technology of film itself that is truly uncanny and hauntological, but despite film’s particularly apparitional qualities, ghosts have haunt the technologies of all media.

The history of the development of media and communications technolo - gies is inextricably linked with magic and ghosts. As Arthur C. Clarke (1962:36) famously theorized, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistin - guishable from magic.” However, 19th century Spiritualists were keenly devoted to the tasks of advancing technology for the purpose of scientifically bringing the world of ghosts closer, and as Eric Davis (1999), John Durham Peters Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema 71

(2001), and Jeffrey Sconce (2000) have all explored, Spiritualism, and later psy - chical research, were two of the driving forces behind the development of tele - phonic, photographic, and phonographic communication technologies. Film, Frederic Kittler (1999) has pointed out, was, like many 19th century explo - rations, invented to study movement too fast to otherwise be seen. Spirit pho - tography, in which the images of dead family and friends were made to appear in photographs alongside the living, was invented for a similar reasons; as Steven Connor (2000:208) describes it, “in spirit photography, otherness is made visible and familiar, and the unmasterable event of the manifestation be - comes the fixed and manipulable record.” Likewise, the advent of devices for contacting and recording the voices of those not present came at a time when people hoped that technology could extend to realms beyond death. According to Connor (2000:222), “spiritualism attests and contributes to the ghostliness of these new technologies [telephonic (transmissive) and phonographic (repro - ductive)], even as it also deploys them in its strangely enthusiastic struggle against the supernatural, to affirm the materiality, the manipulability, the tech - nicality of the unseen.” Peters (2001:180) is less cynical of the spectral drive behind the development of media and communications technologies, citing the circumstances of the first telephone call made by Alexandra Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson (as recounted by Ronell (1991)); he considers Bell’s exclamation--“Watson come here, I want you”--as “the symbol and type of all communication at a distance—an expression of desire for the presence of the absent other.”

Electricity would not only add to the ease of these desirous communica - tions with and recordings of loved ones at a distance, but would also further contribute to the uncanniness of the media technologies themselves. As elec - tricity was harnessed for communications inventions, scientists from Nikolai Tesla to Thomas Edison and later, even Einstein, explored the possibility that it could serve as a conduit to some unreachable world beyond that of the liv - ing. Indeed, technologies such as television and wireless radio would disrupt the previous concepts of proximity and the boundaries of place, while tele - phones, and much more recently, the Internet, would bring about the uncanni - ness of virtual communication—the opportunity to converse with voices without bodies, and in some cases, instantaneously receive “live” textual com - munication from some invisible and silent source across the ether from one’s 72 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession computer screen. Kittler (1999:22) has written that “media always already yield ghostly phenomena,” and even the face and voice of a living loved one experi - enced on Skype is rendered ghost-like and uncanny when an inevitable audio delay and frozen screen remind us that we are reaching across a great void, thwarting accepted conventional concepts of space and time in the process. As Scott McQuire (1997:686) has stated, “even those who don’t believe in ghosts might acknowledge that technology often produces surprisingly similar effects.” Certainly, the turn to digital technology has introduced new aspects of the un - canny to media. While “analogue” hints at the likeness between a source and a recording of that source, digital recordings, despite their presumed lack of ac - cretion and deference to an original, are infinitely repeatable (and thus poten - tially simulacrous) and easily malleable. Through digital media, the promise of the phantasmagoria shows lives on, though in perhaps unexpected ways.

Beyond the Cinema

Beyond the apparitional qualities of photography and cinema, the sonic realm of media hauntology has often been neglected, despite the intensely spectral nature of phonography and telephony. As Eric Davis (2005) has stated, “sound clearly plays a privileged role in both manifesting and mystifying elec - tricity,” and he recites an account of the finale of a lecture given by the Edison Company in 1887 that used sound to produce what more or less amounted to a séance: "bells rung, drums beat, noises natural and unnatural were heard, a cab - inet revolved and flashed fire, and a row of departed skulls came into view." Indeed, sound—and the act of recording it—is a focus of contemporary Spiri - tualists and ghost hunters who use audio recording devices to capture apparent voices of the dead (termed “electronic voice phenomena,” or EVP); impor - tantly, these voices cannot be heard without being conjured by media technolo - gies, which not only reveal their presence via the act of recording, but enable interpretation of them, thanks to computer programmes that allow digital sound clips to be manipulated and analysed. Davis (2005) likens EVP, and the uncanny possibilities of sound in general, to Kodwo Eshun’s (1998) concept of “sonic fictions,” the virtual spaces carved out by electronic media in particular. These spaces are inevitably haunted, not just by the voices of the dead, but by their potentially forgotten origins, and their propensity to debut even as they endlessly repeat. Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema 73

Any recorded electronic sound, including music, technically has the ca - pacity to haunt. Mark Fischer (2006a) has conjectured that if the popular music of the UK during the 1990s was characterized by rave and “jungle” music, with their fantasies of an African soundscape fusing the “tribal” sounds and elec - tronica, then the more sober new century has been typified by dub. Dub songs are like the ghostly others of the Caribbean reggae hits from which they glean their sparsely laden and highly manipulated electronic samples and beats, now echoing through the dancehalls of Brixton, evoking traces of their origin, but also debuting as something new. In dub, the uncanny is apparent; as Davis (1997), in an article on dub musician Lee “Scratch” Perry—himself an uncanny, idiosyncratic figure—describes it: Dub arose from doubling—the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring a prerecorded track into any number of new songs. Dub calls the apparent 'authenticity' of roots reggae into question because it destroys the holistic integrity of singer and song. It proclaims a primary postmodern law: there is no original, no homeland. (Davis 1997) The digital sounds heard in dub music are mutations—ghostly doubles--of the original. According to Davis (1997): dub music, “despite the crisp attack of its drums and the heaviness of its bass…swoops through empty space, spectral and disembodied.” Even the word “dub” is presumed to have been derived from the Jamaican slang for “ghost”--“duppy”--with Lee Perry describing dub as "the ghost in me coming out" (Toop 1995:115).

Ghosts, those uncanny others that haunt houses and may never be do - mesticated, are, of course, without a homeland, and according to Fischer (2006a), "it's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop.” Time being out of joint is what defines the African slave trade, which Fischer, after Paul Gilroy (1995) considers an Armageddon—an end of history—that cannot be written back into the past or reconciled with future. Fischer (2006a) sees hauntology in the music of rap musicians Public Enemy:

In this disjunctive time, it makes perfect sense for Terminator X to juxta - pose samples of helicopters with discussions about the slave trade, as he does on Apocalypse...91. There is no way in which a trauma on the scale of slavery - 'the holocaust that's still going on' as Chuck D had it - can be incorporated into history, American or otherwise. It must remain a series of gaps, lost names, screen memories, a hauntology. 74 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

As with cinema, the hauntological tendency in electronic music to experi - ment with temporality through samples, fractures, echoes, and re-assemblage constitutes a critical engagement with media and its representations of history and culture.

The sound of hauntology may be also apparent in any music where there is “a deliberate fogging of the digitally hyper-clean” (as Fischer (2006(b)) has written of musician Ariel Pink). Around the turn of this century, electronic musicians in the UK began to mine the audio of Britain’s distant past: crackling old library instructional LPs, recordings of war-time radio broadcasts, badly recorded sound-clips of conversation from folk-horror films such as The Wicker Man (UK 1973), with the resulting popular (if somewhat obscure) musi - cal genre being been dubbed hauntology—drawing, of course, upon the Der - ridean concepts discussed and applied above to other electronic music such as dub, but functioning in a particularly British way. British hauntology music, perhaps best represented by the releases of record companies such as GhostBox and the musician The Caretaker (James Kirby), represents a resurrection of certain nostalgic elements from Britain’s past, but elements that speak of a past when certain dreamy imaginings of the future flourished. Related to retro-fu - turism, the genre imagines a past that is already haunted by an imagined future; it is a deconstruction—indeed, a critical reconstruction—that allows listeners to discard traditional ways of thinking about social history and to re-imagine an inter-implicated past and future. Sonic hauntology—whether in the form of British hauntology, dub, or even EVP, represents a collage that is more than just fragmented and hybrid (cf. Sharma and Hutnyk (1996)). Electronic music— indeed, the inevitable sampling and assemblage that is inherent in digital media texts in general—is collage-like, but it goes one step further, blurring the seams so that the archaic and modern merge and transcend their original sources, phantasmagoric, dialectical, profane, but above all, deconstructive and hauntological.

References Gordon, Avery (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barber, X. Theodore (1989) “Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema 75

Ghost Show in Nineteenth-Century America,” Film History 3,2: 73-86 Barthes, Roland (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, Walter (2002) The Arcades Project, Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin (trans) ,New York: Belknap Press. Berglund, Renée (2000) The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, Hanover: University Press of New England. Britzolakis, Cristina (1999) “Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Poetics of Modern Urbanism,” in Buse, Peter and Stott, Andrew (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. London: MacMillan Press, 72-91. Buse, Peter and Andrew Stott (1999) “Introduction: A Future for Haunting,” in Buse, Peter and Stott, Andrew (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. London: MacMillan Press, 1-20. Clarke, Arthur C. (1962) Profiles of Magic: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible, London: Orion. Connor, Stephen (1999) “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology, and the ‘Direct Voice,’” in Buse, Peter and Stott, Andrew (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. London: MacMillan Press, 203-225. Davis, Eric (1997) “Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star: Lee Perry on the Mix,” on Techgnosis, available at http://www.techgnosis.com/dub.html, (Accesssed 29 February 29, 2012). Davis, Eric (2000) Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, London: Serpent’s Tail. Davis, Eric (2005) “Recording Angels” on Techgnosis, available at http://www.techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php? chunk=chunkfrom-2005-04-15-1742-0.txt, (Accessed 29 February 2012). Derrida, Jacques (1967) Of Grammatology, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1994) Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, London: Routledge. Eshun, Kodwo (1998) More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet Books. Fisher, Mark (2006a) “Phonograph Blues,“ on K-Punk, available at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html, (Accessed 29 February 2012). Fisher, Mark (2006b) “Hauntology Now,” on K-Punk, available at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007230.html, (Accessed 29 February 2012). Freud, Sigmund (1919) “The Uncanny,” Strachey, James (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, London: Hogarth, 219-252. Gelder, Ken. (1994). The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford University Press. Gilroy, Paul (1995) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Boston: Harvard University Press. Jameson, Frederic (1999) “Marx’s Purloined Letter”, in Sprinker, Michael (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx , New York: Verso. 76 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Kittler, Fredrich (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press. Levi Strauss, David and Michael Taussig (2005) “The Magic of the State: An Interview With Michael Taussig” in Cabinet Magazine, No. 18: Fictional States, available at http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/strauss.php, (Accessed 29 February 2012). Lim, Bliss Cua (2001) “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film As Historical Allegory,” in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique Vol. 9 No. 2, 287-329. McQuire, Scott (1997) “The Uncanny Home, Or Living Online With Others,” in, Droege, Peter and Elsevier (eds.), Intelligent Environments, Netherlands, 682-709. Mulvey, Laura (2006) Death 24x A Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books. Peters, John Durham (2001) Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Potts, John (2006) “The Idea of the Ghost”, in: Potts, John and Edward Scheer (eds), Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny, Sydney: Power Publications, 78-91. Reynolds, Simon (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, London: Faber and Faber. Ronell, Avital (1991) The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Omaha: University of Nebraska Press. Sconce, Jeffrey (2000) Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy to Television, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Sharma, Sanjay, Hutnyk, John, and Sharma, Ashwani (1996) Dis-orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, London: Zed Books. Taussig, Michael (1997) The Magic of the State, New York: Routledge. Wolfreys, Julian (2002) Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, the Uncanny and Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Press.

Discography Public Enemy (1991), Apocalypse…91, Def Jam Records. Ghostbox Records (catalogue available at http://www.ghostbox.co.uk) Filmography The Wicker Man: Great Britan: 1973, dir. Robin Hardy. Clanton: : Hauntology Beyond the Cinema 77 78 03 (2012): dread, ghost, specter and possession

Closings

We hope you have enjoyed these spooky moments. And we apologize, again, for our late delivery. The next issue will be published in May 2013 with NO – LOVE as topic! We wish you all the best! the editors: Michael Christopher & Helen Christopher