Cinema is a Haunted House by Murray Leeder B.A. (Honours) English, University of Calgary A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Film Studies © Murray Leeder April 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 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Abstract This thesis is a consideration of self-reflexivity in ghost films, holding that film is inherently and essentially a ghostly medium, a record of life now revived in a spectral form and exhibited in a location analogous to a haunted house. It proposes a conceptualization of cinema’s essence as dialectical poles reflecting film’s scientific/material dimension and its spiritual/evanescent dimension, proposing that these poles are always in tension. It especially examines haunted house films in which this tension is particularly foregrounded, first analyzingThe Legend of Hell House as an exemplary case of scientism and Spiritualism clashing in a haunted setting before turning to The Entity, a narrative of ghostly cinema’s impact of its viewer. These two arguments are drawn together in a final chapter onPoltergeist. This thesis proposes a new conceptualization of the “essence” of cinema while seeking to inaugurate a new theoretical approach particularly to ghost films. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgments “This house has many hearts,” says Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist. It is likewise with this thesis, which is haunted by many helpful voices. My thanks to the Carleton Film Studies faculty, especially Chris Faulkner, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Mark Langer, Charles O ’ Brien and George McKnight, who collectively translated to a very productive couple of years of my life, and to Malek Khouri for pointing me here. T o Andre Loiselle, indefatigable advisor and firm but gentle taskmaster who forever made sure I kept order in this Flouse of Meaning. Andre, you’re my own personal Emeric Belasco. To my fellow inmates, Amy Ratelle, Jeremy Maron, Sonya Poweska, Joe Lipsett, Angie Chiang, Matt Croombs, Matt MacKinnon, Steve Rifkin and Tim Rayne, for misery loves company. And most especially to Rachel E. Beattie, the heart that glows the brightest of all. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iii Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgments ii Introduction: “Not life but its shadow” 1 1 “She had to destroy my beliefs before they could destroy hers”: The Failures of Polarity inThe Legend of Hell House 39 2 The Trembling Mirror: The Audience Under Attack in The Entity 70 3 Between Static and Slime: Ghosts of Film and Technology in Poltergeist 103 Conclusion: Playing Cards Unto Eternity 153 Works Cited 155 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Introduction: “Not life but its shadow” After the Russian essayist and playwright Maxim Gorky watched the Lumiere Brothers programme of short films at Nizhni-Novgorod in 1896, he published his intense and fascinating reaction in Nizhegorodski listok, beginning “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows” (407).1 His famous essay materializes all of the tensions typically surrounding new media as they manifested for the cinema, while simultaneously painting a captivating image of what it must have been like to see moving images for the first time. Gorky wrote: If only you knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there - the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air - is dipped in monotonous gray. Gray rays of the sun across the gray sky, gray eyes in gray faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen gray. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre (Gorky 407). Gorky’s description of his experience is predominated by two emotions: terror and depression. Even the Lumieres’ little realist episodes each become horror films in Gorky’s descriptions, be it the train that threatens to “[turn] you into a rippled sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones” (408), the people walking through a gray and silent world, or the card players laughing noiselessly and playing their game unto infinity. The fundamental language of film is unknown to Gorky and thus many of its features are a cause of unease. That film presents a world that is silent and colourless, the ability of 1 So translated by “Leda Swan” in Jay Ley da’sKino: A Histoiy o f the Russian and Soviet Film. Tom Ruffles notes that other versions exist, some with less overtly supernatural overtones (238). However, Ley da’s remains the standard and most accessible translation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 characters (and, most terrifyingly, the train) to enter from outside of the frame and leave it, the fact that a life-size street may be compressed to fit onto the screen or that people might be equivalently shrunk - all of these are causes for grave unease in Gorky. He is uncertain of the boundaries of film and reality (T sivian 147), writing that when the gardener gets sprayed in the face “you imagine the spray will reach you, and you want to shield yourself’ (408). For Gorky, film requires a highly mystical language to characterize, and he imagines film as the phantasmal product of an evil magician: “Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep, come to mind and you feel as though Merlin’s vicious trick is being enacted before you. He dwarfed the people in corresponding proportion... under this guise he shoved his grotesque creation into the dark room of a restaurant” (408). Gorky the novelist was, as Ian Christie writes, “quick to see how suggestive the film image could be. We don’t have to regard him as an objective reporter” (Christie 15). However, this thesis is not a j oumalistic account of people ’ s real reactions to film but a theoretical one devoted to film’s ghostliness2, a conception best articulated through Gorky’s florid descriptions. The image of film as shadow is appropriate: it is indeed the shadow of light projected through celluloid. At points Gorky pushes this metaphor to its logical conclusion, with both shadow and film representing death, or particularly, survival after death. Several times he imagine film as a location of punishment: “The gray silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly 2 The word “ghost” is one with numerous semantic possibilities. My general feeling, however, is that the term ghost suggests something that combines properties of substantiality and insubstantiality, presence and absence, especially including that which has died and is now returned. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 punished by being deprived of all the colours of life” (407). Unnerved by the card game depicted in one of Lumiere brothers’ shorts, he writes: “[the players] laugh until their sides split but not a sound is heard. It seems as if these people have died and their shadows have been condemned to play cards in silence unto eternity” (408). Gorky recognizes the ghostliness of film, a record of actual events but now figured only as “a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours” (407) and regards the figures therein as ghosts, inhabiting a state analogous to death and a most unpleasant afterlife at that. Even on his first viewing, Gorky seems to have further identified the repetitive properties of film, specifically invoking the T antalus and Sisyphus myths of condemned sinners doomed to repeat tasks endlessly but never quite fulfilling them. Film as ghost, yes, but in particular film as a storehouse for the unhappy dead.