Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1982) DVDRip VOSI

[kimkiduk]

" Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts" - Jacques Derrida



Ghost Dance
Directed By Ken Mc Mullen

Publicado por Stalker en Karagarga

IMDB - Ghost Dance's reviews - Ken McMullen

El cine y sus fantasmas: Una entrevista a Jacques Derrida

off screen voices:
Barbara Coles
Archie Poole
Ken McMullen
Michael Mellinger
Jacques Derrida

Marianne: Leonie Mellinger
Pascale: Pascale Ogier
George: Robbie Coltrane
himself: Jacques Derrida
salesman/guide: Dominique Pinon
action on water: Stuart Brisley
American Professor: John Annette

Comentario: Impresionante film que analiza con profunda complejidad las ideas sobre los fantasmas, la memoria y el pasado visto a lo largo de las aventuras de dos mujeres (Pascal Ogier y Leonie Mellinge) en Paris y Londres. La cinta guarda influencias del primer Rivette y de Jean Luc Godard. A caballo entre lo filósofico (la aportación de Derrida) y lo antropológico (la exhaustiva mirada de McMullen), constituye una nueva piedra de toque en la deconstrucción fílmica, no tanto por el tratamiento formal como por el objeto del film: ¿Acaso es posible rodar fantasmas?

"At first I thought that ghosts would be forgotten in this new electronic age. But as things turn out, they began to use electronic gadgets for their own purpose. Now they often fly down telephone lines, jump on radio waves, and take you by surprise when you are listening to music. There are many recorded cases of ghosts appearing in electrical shops..."

Bajo la mirada espectral de Marx, de todos sus espectros y de los que anunció, a la escucha de su palabra («Un espectro asedia Europa, el espectro del comunismo», dice el comienzo del Manifiesto), he intentado proseguir de otro modo una larga trayectoria cuya cartografía han habitado los espectros. Estos están por doquier en lo que escribo desde hace treinta años. Coincidencia: he actuado incluso en Ghost Dance, una película de Ken McMullen, el cineasta inglés. Fue en 1982, y Marx ya era un personaje, la principal referencia de la película. Algunas escenas se rodaron cerca de su tumba en el cementerio de Highgate, bajo su mirada, por así decirlo, ante su busto teatralizado. Entre Londres y París, la Comuna no estaba lejos. Yo interpretaba a un profesor a quien una joven estudiante (Pascale Ogier) viene a preguntarle si cree en los fantasmas. La pregunta estaba prescrita en el escenario, pero improvisé la respuesta. McMullen la conservó. Esta improvisación filmada convocaba, en el teatro de los fantasmas, toda la modernidad de las imágenes y de lo «virtual», el cine, la televisión, la fotografía... El fantasma no es extraño a la técnica y, aunque pertenece al pasado, es también una promesa, está prometido al porvenir que él promete.

Any synopsis gives inevitably a very selective account of Ghost Dance. In particular, it gives no sense of the importance of the various voices -sometimes associated with the film's characters, sometimes not - which are woven around the images and the 'action'. These voices are the most obvious (dis)embodiment of the film's concern with the role of ghosts in the electronic age', and also provide sub-texts which, by by introducing myth, history, dreams, ritual, etc. both shape and fragment the text. Perhaps the single most important observation inserted this way is the suggestion that at times when society is breaking up, there is a concomitant psychic fragmentation. Myths then spring up as a way of 'making historical sense of historical chaos'. Fragmentation invades every area of the film, from its mix of of present and post-industrial landscapes, to the division into chapters which bear no fixed relation to any narrative progression, to the treatment of character.

The latter is appropriately 'flexible'. A feeling expressed by a female voice-over of the self being split ('I and me became separate people') is diagnosed by a male voice as an effect of social decay. But the idea of identity fracturing is given positive force for the two female central characters, who gain strength and magical powers as their disparate personae come to complement each other. Elsewhere figures adopt roles according to the requirements of individual scenes, embodying Derrida's suggestion that 'memory is the past that never had the force of the present'. Thus the man who violently refuses to repurchase Pascale's electrical goods (explaining, in a short, sharp economics lesson that they are only worth something at the point where he originally sells them to her) later turns up as a guide delivering a lecture on the Paris Commune revolution. Similarly Robbie Coltrane, whose George is as stable as he is manic, is allowed a brief vignette as a photo-copier operator with a ghost in his machine which refuses to copy Pascale's thesis). And this flexibility likewise allows the figure of Derrida, playing himself, to function appropriately as a source of ideas and reflections, simultaneously within and outside the function.

With a narrative structure in which such elements can be played off against each other, there is an inevitable tendency for ideas to spill out of the film, in a 'playful' manner, rather than be developed to any degree. And occasionally, with casually offered lines such as 'History's just a point of view like anything else' there is a sense of glibness (particularly when coupled with a sometimes over-obvious use of metaphor). Also the predominant association of female characters with the eruption of repressed myths is a tricky area, leading perhaps into rather reactionary mysticism. But these doubts aside, and given the anti-pleasure strategies still so earnestly adopted by so much post-68 British independent cinema, Ghost Dance still has much to offer. In particular, the constant tempering of its overt intellectual content with a sense of atmosphere and humour, coupled with an excellent music track, makes this particular dance on capitalism's grave a highly enjoyable one.
Steve Jenkins
Monthly Film Bulletin
February 1984

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E-Link:

Ghost Dance (Ken Mc Mullen, 1982) DVDRip VO.ENG Hardsubbed.avi
Subtítulos incrustados en inglés para las partes que hablan en otros idiomas
English hardsubbed for the no spoken english's parts

I'll share in a couple of days:
Compartiré después:

extras include: interviews with Leonie Mellinger ,(Actress, Uk), Dominique Pinon ( Actor, France) Bernard Steigler ,(Philospher, France, Oscar Guardiola- Rivera (Philosopher, Columbia), Jean-Max causse (Director, Filmoteque, France) and David Cunnigham (Composer, Uk -(as labeled in file)

[Coursodon]

¡¡¡¡¡Joderrrr!!!! Me lo llevo. Gracias Kimki.

[adrian mole]

GHOST DANCE
REVIEWS

"Continually engaging because of Ken McMullen's strong visual sense and also because of his welcome sense of humour...It does suggest that Ken McMullen is worth watching" Variety

Ghost Dance is a visually impressive and complex examination of ideas about ghosts, memory and the past seen across the adventures of two women(Pascal Ogier and Leonie Mellinger) in Paris and in London.
It draws strongly on influences from Jacques Rivette (Especially Celine and Julie go Boating) and Jean Luc Godard.

The film's intellectual centre is French theorist Jacques Derrida whose ideas about ghosts being memories of a past never present underline much of what happens on screen.

Writer-director Ken McMullen also draws upon anthropological myth studies, most notably the cargo cults, and explores the possibility that ghosts have been able to use electricity and electronics to expand their presence in the modern world -Ken Wlaschin,Los Angeles Times.

Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers a stunning analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. It is an adventure film strongly influenced by the work of Jacques Rivette and Jean Luc Godard but with a unique intellectual and artistic discourse of it's own and it is this that tempts the ghosts to appear, for Ghost Dance is permeated with all kinds of phantomatic presence. The film focuses on philosopher Jacques Derrida who considers ghosts to be the memory of something which has never been present. This theory is explored in the film. Dinard 1996


GHOSTS DON'T REALLY HAVE A VERY HIGH STANDING IN OUR CIVILISATION; reason has banished them to the edge of our world. As childish imaginings, as archaic relic of a backward culture, as leftover superstitions of our own history, they continue a tenuous existence, although they were once powers respected with reverential reserve. That is of course not the whole truth. in his brilliant first film GHOST DANCE Ken McMullen has placed the land of ghosts in the modern, and not at the edges but right in the centre. The cities of London and Paris are the territories over which he traces the cracks through which the fragmented archaic infiltrates into a rationale-ordered world.

This fascinatingly puzzling film, that is comprised of suggestive pictures and the poetic essayism of it's text, does not arise from dim speculation. With the coarse monsters and strong shivers of the horror film, this film has nothing in common. Modern thought in relation to language and history-philosophy and ethnology, was the film's Godfather, as protagonist, the philosopher Jacques Derrida-himself co-operates in the film. Myth and ritual are it's keywords, they merge in our midst in many metamorphoses. They allow themselves to be easily discovered by the alienated look of the observation that owes itself to he investigation of "primitive" cultures. History. and memory, language and the erotic, and even modern technology, are their realm. "Cinema is the art of conjuring up ghosts" says Derrida at one point: that is more than a witty remark he touches on there, from a perspective that one must call phenomenological, the bodilessness of the visible and audible, which distinguishes the film. Similarly without body, even ghostly, are the phenomena which bring forth the modern technology of communication; and perhaps it is really so, that we are at first able to find our way about the world of the electronic revolution by means of a new science of ghosts.

This delightful, highly complex film resists, again and again, understanding; it demands a patient, careful "Reading", which is barred to one in the haste of cinematic pictures. This might indeed be quite appropriate to it's theme; but better one holds tight to that which is slipping away.

The film by Ken McMullen GHOST DANCE one would with pleasure submit oneself to again.
Rough Translation of the review in "Frankfurte Allgemeine Zeitung" 17 December 83




Cinema=ART+ DECONSTRUCTION
(or British filmmaker Ken McMullen in Regina)
By Jeannie Mah (Splice)Extract

Since I last saw Ghost Dance and Zina ten years ago, Ken McMullen has been one of my favourite directors (up there with Antonioni, Godard, Paradjanov), so Ken's visit to Regina in late September thrilled me. With my heart on my sleeve, I offer a few moments from the week long event.

Ken McMullen is an artist who became a filmmaker, and his films are both cinematic and painterly. He works intuitively and visually, yet his well researched films are grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature. "Tarkovsky referred to film as sculpting in time. it's painting in time, for me.' He encourages his students to study paintings to learn about composition and lighting. "Go sit in front of a Rembrandt for two hours; it takes about that long to see what is there." Ken spoke of his affinity with other painters who became filmmakers, such as Derek Jarman who was at the Slade, and was the subject of a portrait film, called There we are John. Ken has also worked with performance artists Joseph Beuys and Stuart Brisley, and others who use the body as the fundamental form of expression. The synthesis of historical and contemporary art with cinema produce films that are pictorially stunning and intellectually challenging.

Ken McMullen is the master of the long take, and an excellent example of this is 1867, a film based on the Manet painting The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian. the eighteen months in which Manet painted the four versions of the painting is portrayed in an 11 minute take which uses the whole of a 1000 foot reel of film. Ken deconstructs time and space within a Bazinian Realism which reaches beyond the present, so that tightly choreographed camera movements work to speak of social history and cultural memory. He refers to the long take as a negotiation of technical and dramatic realities. "The long take is something I am very drawn to, like material that I am playing with. It is organic; it is quite intriguing, it can imply time. The slowness of the take draws on anxiety. It plays with the off-screen, and the camera movement allow mystery, so a conclusion is reached through a whole series of contradictions."

While introducing Ghost Dance Ken recounted how philosopher Jacques Derrida agreed to appear in a fictional film as Jacques Derrida, but neither were sure what would materialise. The collaboration included Pascal Ogier, who arrived at the question to ask Derrida, "Do you believe in ghosts?" This question elicited from Derrida one of his few pronouncements on cinema. Cinema plus psychoanalyse *gale le science des fantômes. Vive les fantômes! This improvised interview gained greater poignancy as unconscious communication of Pascal's own mortality, for after Ghost Dance she would win best actress at Venice for Rohmer's Full Moon over Paris, and then she would die. This scene continues to haunt Derrida and McMullen to this day, and Derrida has said that Ghost Dance has returned in Spectres of Marx. Hurrah for Ghosts!

"Cinema plus psychoanalysis is the science of ghosts." says Derrida. Cinema and psychoanalysis began one hundred years ago, and Ken enjoys playing with the notion that , possibly, both could have been born the same day.