When will you come home? What did you find?
It is as accidentally appropriate that I am reading Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) now as it was that I saw Marcin Wrona's Demon (2015) when I did; Fisher committed suicide in January. He writes of hauntings, of the echoes of the past, the exhaustion of the future, the conditions under which time slips and fractures and fails and what it means to evoke this effect in art or to experience it in life, and I read a voice so recently dead that it feels itself out of place. I don't expect to be able to follow Derek Jarman on Twitter, but Fisher's seminal blog k-punk is still hanging there in the void. All movies are spirit photography, all books eventually are dialogues with the dead, and of course if I had read this one when it was published I could have said any number of things to the author and he might have answered me, but what I have now is a dead voice saying everything it ever will. He opens with a spectacular appreciation of Assignment 6 of Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), which fortunately I watched back in the summer ("There's no time here, not any more"). He is equally acute about John le Carré, Ghost Box, Tricky, Christopher Nolan, other artists I am less qualified to evaluate his opinions of, although he's given me several good pointers for music and film. It is extremely obvious that I will need to get hold of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie (2017), because the ways in which he thinks about time and haunting and landscape are so congruent with mine: he will either be very useful for some of the places I have been thinking about weird fiction and folk horror or he will have gotten there ahead of me. He begins one music review, "Hauntological Blues: Little Axe" (subtitled "k-punk post, October 3, 2006"), with a piece of film criticism I wish I had been able to point to when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme was asking me about the forms of American folk horror:
Like The Shining – a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a decade – Beloved (1998) reminds us that America, with its anxious hankerings after an innocence it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World . . . but here they are . . .
Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of America's other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. No doubt the film's commercial failure was in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassified as Horror . . . well, so should American history . . .
That's eleven years old and touches this weekend's protests with a needle. I understand he could no longer be, but that is someone whose voice I wish were living now.
ashlyme was asking me about the forms of American folk horror:Like The Shining – a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a decade – Beloved (1998) reminds us that America, with its anxious hankerings after an innocence it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World . . . but here they are . . .
Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of America's other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. No doubt the film's commercial failure was in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassified as Horror . . . well, so should American history . . .
That's eleven years old and touches this weekend's protests with a needle. I understand he could no longer be, but that is someone whose voice I wish were living now.
no subject
no subject
It would be a great title for a compilation. I'd listen to it. Zeal & Ardor would count.
And yeah, American history could definitely be classed as horror.
I had managed to identify the two layers of genocide as components of American folk horror, but what Fisher points out—and I should have noticed for myself—is that especially the latter is a horror that cannot be left safely in the theater; it doesn't even follow you out into the street because it didn't enter with you, it was already there, everywhere, in the theater, in the street, in your house, in you. People don't like to be reminded. Exhibit A, 2017.
no subject
no subject
Ooh, well, now that is a good starting point!!
no subject
He saw it when it aired and was, appropriately, haunted by it for years; he identifies many of the same aspects that make me love the show, including the likeness to le Carré, and uses the assignment to illustrate the defining role that anachronism plays in hauntology, as in the café where Silver says "time just got mixed up, jumbled up together, making no sense." It's really well done. And after that I trusted him on television, books, and movies, because he got Sapphire & Steel.
no subject
*nods* Yes, because not everybody does, indeed.
no subject
Indeed.
no subject
The topicality somewhat leapt out at me.
no subject
no subject
I thought of you frequently while reading it, and would have even if he hadn't loved Ghost Box so much. One of the last pieces in the book is a review of Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) (2011).
no subject
no subject
*hugs*
I feel like I might have glanced off his criticism at prior points in my life, but he was really off my radar until this summer; I think I sort of backed into him via the overlap of folk horror with hauntology. I wish he were still alive to write. I want his opinion on some things I have heard and seen since January. How are his other books?
no subject
I wish there was an easy way to download his blog, I keep getting terrified that one day it'll be all gone. He's such an example of the postmodern thinker with no stability? to fall back on, it's like he's writing from inside a collapsed building.
no subject
no subject
The whole book is like that. Enjoy!