top of page

Ghost Dance: Film

The past haunts us. Forever drawing us back into repetition, a life doomed to repeat without consciously intending to do so. 

 

Ghost Dance is a 1983 British film directed by Ken McMullen. Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers a beautiful analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. The film focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who observes, ‘I think cinema, when it’s not boring, is the art of letting ghosts come back.’ He also says that ‘memory is the past that has never had the form of the present.’ The film is based around Jacques Derrida's theories about ghosts as a form of cultural memory, a cultural memory which is imposed on you rather than one which you develop, and how that relates to politics.

 

In the film, Jacques Derrida says 'the future belongs to the ghost' which I believe to be the most significant sentence. He says this by making the association between cinema and psychoanalysis. He has said before that language is always already writing and after watching him in Ghost Dance, I think one can say life is always already cinema.

Ghosts, then, but in the Freudian sense of 'internalised figures from the past' who collectively make their presence known to us. These myths, the film argues, seek to make historical sense out of historical chaos, and in the present electronic age they are omnipresent - in data banks, and even at the end of a telephone line.  

080210102026_l.jpg
bottom of page