Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly: a short introduction

Abstract

The edition brings texts of a markedly heterogeneous nature, with the aim of dealing with a whole set of aporias that place cinema and photography in relation to the ideas of specter and ghost. With approaches sometimes more historical and sometimes more analytical, and focusing on a diverse network of objects — photographic, cinematographic, and others — the essays gathered here aim to substantially contribute to the ongoing discussion about the reflexive power of the ghost. within the scope of thinking about the (audio)visual arts and the media.

As a medium, cinema possesses a photographic nature. In his important article on the “photographic image”, André Bazin discusses the “essential objectivity” (2002, 13) shared by both cinema and photography. However, cinema adds time and movement to that photographic substrate, moving it closer to an idea of spectacle that dates back to older media and forms, such as the Magic Lantern and Phantasmagoria. Thus, cinema falls within a history of haunted media, and the place it occupies in this history was researched and discussed by Laurent Mannoni in his seminal book, Le Grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre: archéologie du cinéma, where he carries out a detailed and convincing excavation of cinema’s spectral antecedents (Mannoni 1999).