The ‘Spectral Turn’ in Film and Media. Technology, Images, Identities and Aesthetics in between Presence and Absence
The concept of spectrality has spread in a cross-disciplinary manner following the consolidation of the term ‘spectral turn’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013), courtesy of Derrida's (1994; Derrida and Stiegler 2002) notion of hauntology, subsequently reworked by Simon Reynolds (2011) and Mark Fisher (2014). A spectral perspective has cut across deconstructionist thought, media and film theories, cultural history and queer and postcolonial studies. Roger Luckhurst's (2002) seminal contributions on telepathy in late 19th century science, culture and literature, Terry Castle's (1995) investigations into the invention of the uncanny in post-Enlightenment culture, and Jeffrey Sconce's (2000) analyses of the “electronic liveness” of communication technology, have highlighted the mediumistic dimension of the media, highlighting the pledge to connect the world of the living with that of the dead.
These studies attribute a supernatural, magical and occult dimension to the media inventions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The communicative and visual functions of the media are juxtaposed with extra-ordinary uses and a symbolic construction that interacts with everything that appears as liminal. For instance, photography and the wireless telegraph experienced a kind of splitting apart through the spread of “spirit photography” (Gunning 2007, 99), which posed ghosts, phantoms and ectoplasm alongside the actual people portrayed, and the “spiritual telegraph’” (Sconce 2000, 12), which aimed to connect the living with the dead, the worldly with the otherworldly.
The study of spectrality is not limited to the analysis of representations of supernatural entities and the deconstruction of their recurrence in media texts. The evocation of spectral figures makes it possible to reflect on issues relating to the construction of identity, the processing of trauma and the creation of a collective memory. Through the reworking of the phantom as a conceptual metaphor, spectrality is expressed as a paradigmatically deconstructive gesture, the “dark third” or trace of an absence that undermines the fixedness of binary oppositions (such as those between life and death, visible and invisible, real and virtual, authentic and replica, wakefulness and sleep, absence and presence) by subverting the chronological dimension of time and history (Weinstock 2004, 4).
The ghost provides a figurative, impalpable and elusive structure to the continuity between the visible and invisible, produced through the technology of vision, establishing an osmotic relationship with cultural, political and scientific aspects. Tom Gunning (2007, 99), for instance, traces back one of the moments of intensification of the culture of spectrality to the spread of spirit photography in the second half of the 19th century. Akira M. Lippit (2005) sees X-rays as a form of denuding the invisibility of the human body, a visual revelation that coincides with the invention of cinema. Mireille Berton (in Grespi and Violi 2019, 99-125) traces the continuity between phantasmagoria and séances.
If then, as Tom Gunning (2007, 98) states, “in the new media environment based in the proliferation of virtual images, the concept of the phantasm gains a new valency as an element of the cultural imaginary”, is it then not possible to consider the digital avatar as a kind of post-media phantom integrated into the fabrics of contemporary communication?
However, specific and historically distinct, practices and techniques from the past show a surprising and inexhaustible conceptual proximity to contemporary ones. Therefore, from Phantasmagoria to Extended Reality, one can begin to trace media archaeology reinterpreted from a spectral perspective, focusing on technology and its cultural space and the ways in which the technical appearance of otherworldly entities has been disseminated on a cultural level.
Since the first forms of attraction, the cinema has not only explored the reproduction of the phenomena of reality, but also investigated the realms of the fantastic and the magical. It has nurtured a fascination with the occult that ran through late 19th century culture and society, creating tricks and magic, showing disappearances and reappearances, transformations and deformations, super-impositions and blurring. These techniques gave substance to an impossible world, based on the eerie wonder of seeing ghosts and other supernatural entities appear, infusing them with the illusion of movement.
In doing so, cinema reveals its spectral essence and restores a liminal reality. For Maksim Gor'kij (1896), cinema represents a threshold between worlds, while for Edgar Morin there is a profound connection between cinema and the realm of the dead (1956). This legacy stems from phantasmagoria, in which the lanternist often made the faces and portraits of deceased people appear. The return of the dead in phantasmagoria is revived in contemporary technology and digital spaces. Here we see the spread of virtual cemeteries and the “avatarisation” of the dead through algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence; through these it becomes possible to interact and communicate with those who are no longer present.
There is also another level on which the concept of spectralisation moves, that of expressive strategies. We can thus distinguish certain spectralising effects, such as backlighting, superimposition, out-of-focus (widely used by Garrone in his first films, e.g. The Embalmer), the handheld shot, the long-take, and various other techniques that tend to dematerialise the image. It is very interesting to note how some of these expressive strategies can even be found in the directors who most often employ and advocate a cinema of the body, such as Pasolini, for example, in whose work a spectralising tendency weaves like a hidden thread, almost as if it were a return of the repressed. We might also mention a more recent film, displaying a counterpoint Pasolini’s poetry: Her by Spike Jonze, exalts the ghostliness of desire and the spectrality of cinema, without facile enthusiasm, but with considerable, fascinating ambiguity, all culminating in a poignant and mysterious finale. If cinema is the art of “walking shadows” (Martini 1998), and an art that has links to the dead, then it is even more an art of spectres and ghosts.
Spectrality represents an elusive category based around the dialectics of the oxymoron, thus being strongly evocative; spectrality, in this special issue of “Cinergie”, is meant to be read and framed within theories of cinema and media. Therefore, it is to be examined as a field of archaeological investigation between the techniques and contents of the optical devices of the past and contemporary media, between pre- and post-cinematographic visual experiences, and as aesthetic tension capable of expressing a profound fascination for the impalpable, the immaterial and absence, as a media processing of bereavement.
There are several thematic references that we would like to see covered within the special issue:
- The representation of ghosts and spectral entities in cinema and digital media.
- The spectralisation of media
- Spectralisation and the symbolic construction of identity
- Spectralisation as a process of expression
- The spectral genealogy of cinema and media
- Spectrality, bereavement and media
- Trauma and cultural memory
- Spectrality and expanded cinema
Submission Details and Journal Deadlines
Please send a 300/500-word abstract (either in English or Italian) and a 50/100-word biographical note (in English) to mirko.lino@univaq.it and massimo.fusillo@sns.it by October 31, 2024.
If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article by February 28, 2025. Contributions will undergo a double blind peer review. The articles must not exceed 5,000/6,000 words and may include images, clips, and links for illustrative purposes. Please, provide correct credits, permissions, and copyright information in order to be sure that the images or archival documents are copyright free and can be published.
Number 27 of Cinergie will be published in June 2025.
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