Ghost Dance: screening and panel discussion with director
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Ghost Dance: screening and panel discussion with director
Our event tonight is a special screening of ‘Ghost Dance' (1983, 100 mins) followed by a panel discussion with Ken McMullen and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Synopsis
Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983) explores the ghost not only as a passive remnant, but as the active passing between boundaries, blurring the lines of history and memory, consciousness and corporeality, the primordial and the modern. It follows two women adrift in Paris and London (played by Pascale Ogier and Leonie Mellinger), dual sides of a persona that collapse into one through their interactions with one another as they seek to find the ghosts present in the remnants of history, visualised in Marx’s grave and the Communard’s Wall. Ghosts in the film are present in anthropologies of early human psychology; the shift away from tangibility through media and cinema; and the “ghost in the machine” that speaks through the answerphone. The narrative flows from Ogier’s discussions with Jacques Derrida on what it means to be haunted, a precursory view on ideas he developed in Spectres of Marx (1993) a decade later, to a non-linear experimentation with image and sound, evoking the confrontation with dualism, materialism and form, enabled by the ghost’s passing into the present from a past that never was.
This screening will conclude with a panel discussion on the enduring influence of the film, its subjects, and the ghost in contemporary memory.
Biographies for the panel
Ken McMullen is a film director, artist, and Professor of Film at Kingston University London. He has produced and directed more than 50 motion picture works, including major international feature films such as Zina (1985), 1871 (1987) and Hamlet Within (2022).
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is a writer, philosopher, cultural critic, and Professor of Human Rights and Political Philosophy at Birkbeck Law School. He is the author of the critically acclaimed What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013).
This screening is organised by the CHASE Early Career Network for Philosophy and Critical Theory (phi-net) and is part of our Autumn Term programme ‘Against Frictionlessness’. To find out more about our programmes, please contact us: chasephinet@gmail.com
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Contact name: Matthew Barrington
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