Matters of life and death: Political crisis and the ghost film (Emmanuel Levinas)

The project focuses on the international phenomenon of political ghost cinema, through a comparative study of spectral responses to historical events, primarily World War II, the end of the Cold War, Poland's martial law era, and the post-revolutionary Chinese diaspora. Drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that political ghost cinema enables debate over the nature of public obligation. The dialogic tension between ghost and interlocutor animates a parallel tension felt by audiences grappling with the problem of right action in times of political crisis.; Chapters One and Two examine commercial Anglo-American ghost films, first from the World War II era, and then from the post-Vietnam period of the 1980s and 1990s. These films, while undeniably functioning to some extent as propaganda vehicles, nevertheless reveal a self-conscious ambivalence about the obligatory relation of the individual to the state. Chapters Three and Four focus on ghost cinema of the Chinese diaspora, and of post-Stalinist Poland respectively. The two chapters explore contrasting perspectives on the value of the spectral encounter as a constructive response to political violence and oppressive state ideology. Chapter Five develops this contrast into the digital era by looking at very recent video-saturated work by Aleksander Sokurov and Atom Egoyan.