A Ghost Story: una lectura derridiana del duelo y la condición del ser

En el regreso a sus raíces independientes, el director y guionista norteamericano David Lowery ofrece una visión alternativa de lo sobrenatural y sobre nuestro lugar en el mundo, planteando una serie de interrogantes al respecto. Una reflexión sobre la muerte y el paso del tiempo, pero también sobre la naturaleza efímera de la vida y lo que queda de nosotros tras ella.

„Praca widma w epoce mechanicznej reprodukcji”. China Miéville: koncepcje „haute weird” i „abcanny”

The aim of the paper is presentation and discussion of China Miéville’s theoretic approach to the issue of horror’s subgenres, including classical Victorian ghost story and Lovecraftian weird fiction. “The abcanny” — in a way a subversive, theoretical category, that Miéville coins in his critical writings — is crucial for both his own speculations and the problems considered here. As it is decisively opposite to Freudian “uncanny” and Kristevian “abject”, it constitutes a relatively new approach to the question of distinction among the aforementioned horror literary genres. The Victorian ghost story, as Miéville sees it, is deeply rooted in the experience of the uncanny, and so it presupposes the “return of the repressed” from the individual or collective/cultural unconsciousness. Hence ghost stories are — just for example — susceptible to hauntological interpretations. Weird fiction — on the contrary — implies the experience of something radically new, something so far non-existent and therefore unacceptable and dreadful. If a classical ghost story can be perceived as an expression of the nineteenth–century fear of the irrationality returning from the past preceding the revolution of the Enlightenment, haute weird narrative embodies modernistic anxiety of the upcoming future, its uncertain nature, cognitive and moral relativism, and — what is most important here — the dubious status of man facing a boundless chasm of time and space.

Virginia Woolf, Filmmaker

This chapter considers the afterlives of Virginia Woolf, beginning with a general overview and then turning to Woolf’s legacy in film. Whereas a few filmmakers have attempted to adapt Woolf’s works with varying degrees of success, a handful of twenty-first-century filmmakers have moved towards alternative modes of engagement beyond adaptation. Mark Cousins, François Ozon, David Lowery, and Alex Garland, this chapter suggests, have embraced Woolf as an experimental filmmaker, as one of them. Her writing helps focalize the explorations of identity, loss, and survival in What Is This Film Called Love? (2012), Under the Sand (2000), A Ghost Story (2017), and Annihilation (2018). No longer are Woolf’s biography, her body, or even particular works at the forefront of her legacy; this chapter argues that in this eclectic group of films, Woolf and her writing are not only vaporized and reconfigured but also, problematically, domesticated and neutered.