In Between Two Deaths:

Hauntological Negative Time-Images in Global South Cinema

Resumen

This essay introduces the concept of the ”negative time-image” to explore how certain contemporary films from the Global South operate as cinematic ledgers of temporal debt. Building on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, Jacques Lacan’s idea of the “space between two deaths,” and Mark Fisher’s writings on lost futures, the negative time-image refers to a cinematic articulation of time shaped by absence, spectrality, and disjointed chronology, a ghostly temporality out of sync with the present. These films frame history not as resolved narrative, but as a lingering debt: past traumas and foreclosed futures continue to haunt the now, demanding recognition. Focusing on three films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006), and Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona (2019), the essay traces how each work embodies a distinct aspect of the negative time-image. Through detailed analysis of cinematic form, long takes, fractured timelines, sound design, and the visual motif of ruins and ghosts, it examines how these films enact a nonlinear mode of mourning. Rather than resolving grief, they remain suspended in a liminal temporality “between two deaths,” where the victims of historical violence persist in spectral form. The essay develops the idea of temporal debt as the unresolved, unpaid dues of history, wounds that remain unhealed, losses unmourned, and argues that cinema, in these cases, becomes a medium for registering that debt. Ultimately, it weaves together the theoretical and cinematic threads to propose cinema as a haunted ledger of time, extending the metaphor toward speculative terrains such as ecological collapse and digital afterlives. The result is a sustained argument for film’s capacity to visualize the ghost-time of unfinished histories.