If you only knew how strange it is to be there. This early example of projected film, devoid of sound and colour, did not resonate with life for Gorky. Rather than witnessing the living form immortalised, he saw only its death in its technologic iteration.
The very idea of seeing ghosts has, in the age of motion picture, been described in terms of televisual projection. Archaeologist and parapsychologist T.
The whole productionβ¦was exactly comparable to a television scene. There was the same curious lack of atmosphere and the same general gray [sic] drabness β¦ The figures were pictures projected by somebody other than myself and I was nothing more than the receiving set. The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye.
The camera can be Charon, but what if cinema requires its own ferryman? There is a term for such a form of transportation, echoing throughout history and through many different cultures. Its role is not to judge, to weigh a soul against a feather, only to steer spirits on their onward journey to the afterlife.
Cinema is an art form still in its infancy in the grand scale of human existence, and yet because of its widespread commercialisation, cinema appears constantly on the brink of death. Every new innovation represents a threat to what contemporary audiences come to know as cinema, and the act of cinema-going. The introduction of sound, the rise of Big Telly, blockbusters, the spike in streaming both before and through the pandemic and the collapse of release windows.
