Spectral cinema: Invisible things are not necessarily not there

Abstract

This editorial introduces the Special Issue of Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), ‘Spectral Cinema and Contested Landscapes’, a volume that has been created in response to the symposium of the same name that was held at University for the Creative Arts in 2022. In the journal, as in the symposium, we frame a discussion around how the spectral can be interpreted and re-evaluated through contemporary socially and politically motivated moving image practice. Articles by Struan Gray, Astrid Korporaal, Cecília Mello, Louise K. Wilson and Kate Woodward are accompanied by a conversation between artist-filmmaker Juanita Onzaga and philosopher Michaela Kinghorn. The editorial highlights how these discussions circle around animism, fear, unresolved trauma, totalitarianism, the agency and intention of affect, phantasmagorical cinema, and how the more-than-human can lead us to re-interpret positivist approaches to knowledge construction. The ghosts the authors bring to the page are variously disruptive, unruly, fantastical, playful and politically motivated. The spectres in these essays have no temporal boundaries, they can move backwards and forwards through time, not just pulling us back to the past, but more effectively bringing the past forwards to meet us in the present. As ghosts they are often bound to specific locations that are politically significant, and they manifest to remind us not to look away, that something unresolved needs to be attended to. The authors in this volume demonstrate these ideas through their discussions and analyses of the spectral within cinema, sonic arts and artists’ moving image.