There’s always been something about cinephilia, particularly that classic form of cinephilia (well known to many us) which fetishizes old Hollywood films, that strikes me as a little bit morbid. Films capture a series of moves and gestures that remain permanent — the movies always stay the same, though our reactions change almost invariably with each viewing. Etched in light and embalmed on celluloid, the faces and spaces of the screen become essences which occupy psychic space within us. We often watch films from the ‘30s and ‘40s in which most or all of the actors up on the screen are by now long dead. The ritualistic act of reviving older films, of watching them together in dark, silent rooms, and on occasion watching them on crackling, slowly decaying archival prints, ultimately amounts to a beautiful séance of sorts. Because cinema is full of ghosts, film culture is necessarily steeped in death.

Perhaps for this very reason, cinema seems an especially suitable medium for stories in which a character from the earthly realm (i.e., a spectator) communes with a phantom. One of my favorite subgenres in film history is the ghost romance, a form which combines the movies’ natural inclination toward the uncanny, the supernatural, and the dreamlike, with its equally strong penchant for eroticism and the matters of romantic love. The idea of a living person falling in love with a ghost has been the throughline which links a very special group of films, from Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) to Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954) to Legend of the Mountain (King Hu, 1979). This notion also permeates other major films in less literal, more metonymic forms, as in the cases of Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). All of these films possess a very mysterious quality that somehow seems to evoke the myth of cinephilia itself: every film buff has, while watching the films that they hold most dear, fallen in love with ghosts, too. (more…)