“The Ghost is the future of mankind” — the spectrality of the cinematographic image: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s KAIRO (2001)

Abstract

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work poses the question of “the end of humanity”. This question leads us to another, related to the end of cinema in an age where film is being replaced by digital. This framework introduces us to a second degree of the problematization of the concept of the “spectre”, which is closely linked to a conceptualization of cinema as a spectral art. Establishing relations between different media, Kairo (2001) explores the “mutation effect” of (analog) reality into virtuality (the pixelized “flou” of the bodies on screen). This can be viewed as a comment on the state of cinema in the XX th century, also boldly suggesting that the ghost is the future of mankind.