Every film is haunted: A dialogue between Laura Mulvey and José Luís Guerín on cinema, time and ghosts

Abstract

The present paper attempts to create a dialogue between the films Train of shadows (1997) and In the city of Sylvia (2007), by the Spanish filmmaker José Luís Guerín’s, and some of the ideas discussed by Laura Mulvey in her book Death 24x a second – stillness and the moving image (2006). For the author, the act of delaying the flow of a fi lm through pause and repetition of certain sequences is capable of bringing to the surface the stillness of the single frame and the consciousness of the photographic index, evoking the presence of death. Through analysis of the aforementioned films, we investigate the strategies employed by Guerín to delay narrative, giving space to reflection on time and memory. Furthermore, we take note of the ways in which the filmmaker stages the tension between stasis and movement in terms of gender, linking it to the roles played by male and female characters in the narrative.

Keywords: film, memory, narrative, feminist theory.