Ghosts in the Machine: Charlie Shackleton's Afterlight Project
“Poetry is born of insecurity.....the impermanence of things.”
- Chris Marker, La Jetee
Movies are for everyone to see how young everyone once was. And how very much alive.
Cinema is a transient artform, which makes it perhaps the most well equipped to deal with the subjects of death and age. Throughout its short but wild history, great filmmakers have struck paydirt exploring themes of impermanence and longevity. The act of filming something, photography that lives in images succeeding one another in a sequence is what gives cinema the magic of a plastic artform - a pictorial approximation of time and thought. This active, living quality - for which term “moving pictures” is still perfect - is what makes every film that’s ever been made a time capsule in its own way. Everything is a period piece. Everything in movies, not just the people but the street corners, the clothing, the slang expressions, the body types, the cars, the buildings, the social customs, even the way people pronounce words: it’s all always slowly on its way out.
When you watch an old movie, one in which all the actors you see and the director and crew have passed away, it’s as if those people are all living again for the duration of the film and you’re with them. It’s within the movie that they and you all seem to forget together that the existence we share for a brief time on Earth is a fragile one. When a reel of film is unspooling in front of a flickering light, the people in it seem immortal, larger than life. This is what makes The Afterlight, a new film collage touring the US and the UK in a 35mm presentation, so fascinating. Freed from story, this assemblage of numerous clips from old films evicts sequential life from the essence of cinema, leaving only the fragility and transience for us to chew on.
Found Footage compilations are often fascinating filmic projects with evocative (and sometimes hilarious) results but here perhaps the term “appropriated footage” is a better fit. British Artist Charlie Shackleton’s feature length piece utilizes footage taken from a dizzying number of black and white features dating from about the mid 30’s to the early 60’s, arranged into a composite of something with the vague appearance of a story. No accurate description of any kind of narrative can be given here and I doubt there may even be one to speak of. Shackleton groups images, motifs and actions bearing traces of aesthetic similarity together until they form a sequence. It even seems as if he’s made some effort to match different shots from different films in different eras across cuts, which seems like an impossible task.
What ties these clips together is that everyone in them is dead. The credits for the people depicted on screen list hundreds of names (along with the years of their births and deaths). Each actor is no longer alive. So is the transient nature of cinema, keeping with the transience of nature, exemplified by the faces and bodies we see. Shackleton has done something very clever. He omits overt moments of narrative exposition and even goes as far to include very few scenes of people speaking. Though not silent, The Afterlight is extremely light on dialogue. It certainly plays like a silent feature, in which the story is told with the facial expressions of the actors. Instead, Shackleton favors physical acting and atmosphere: small moments of subterfuge and contemplation. Or physical drift within a space.
We open with an entire string of segments lasting anywhere from a few seconds to ten seconds of a single character walking down a dark, lonely street at night. We hear wind and the footsteps of high heels or wingtip shoes on pavement, or the sound of a step taken in a puddle. Very often in The Afterlight, the person onscreen is the only figure in the shot, further adding to the sense of loneliness and isolation. A successive barrage of clips of characters entering late night taverns, playing jukeboxes, lighting cigarettes, dancing, disappearing into the night, re-emerging, dialing and answering rotary telephones, laying in bed, fighting back tears, losing themselves in worlds of their own. Unsurprisingly, Shackleton’s project is heavy on close-ups and medium shots. This is a film of faces, eyes, shadows, hands, quiet rooms, wet street corners and public moments of anxiety, wistfulness or regret.
People are almost imprisoned within onscreen spaces. One gets the sense that just off screen lies The Void, the sense of eternity in the great beyond that awaits the characters. The temporary peace they enjoy on screen seems to be the only shelter from the encroachment of nothingness. As visitors to the gravesite of Yasujiro Ozu in Kamakura, a site which is marked only with the word Mu or “Nothing,” leave bottles of sake or whiskey on the site for the drunk who was perhaps the greatest filmmaker that ever lived, the embrace of fear (or whatever you want to call it) of this all-consuming nothing poses the very narrow sliver of emotional reality in which Shackleton’s footage exists. At least, that’s how I felt about it. Seen in the context of death, with cinema only as a record of prior existence, each piece of footage is repurposed within the context of the most basic sources of primal human fear. As a result, the film feels constantly about to be over while never actually starting.
What makes this such an powerful and evocative strategy is that it plays with the aspects of memory that are in play when we see a movie. I realized I’d seen and recognized a number of the features The Afterlight appropriates - film noirs, French crime pictures, social dramas, doomed romances - and I confess to not being able to recount specific elements in the plots of all of them. But what I do remember are the small moments, those little touches like the dimly lit cafes, the furtive glances in dive bars, with light thrown on sets of eyes and those stolen glances leading to illicit passions and the emotional entanglements they inspire in so many of the movies I love. Backlit cigarette smoke. Crackling torch songs played on a Victrola in a cheap hotel room. The mist on the docks late at night. Neon signs. Old Hollywood movie acting - overheated and flamboyant. For me, this is the most potent material in classic cinematic iconography. An entire film has been constructed with those materials.
In fact, the subdued tone of The Afterlight, in which there is a jittery anxiousness to much of the physicality and gesticulation rather than a panic and mania, suggests more Purgatory than Hell. An infinite potential waiting for the closure brought on by finality. The underlying emotions one can imagine when within this predicament are familiar to us in terms of visual movie grammar. So many filmmakers have explored them: Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Pedro Costa, Chantal Ackerman, Jacques Tourneur. Subdued tension as the raw essence of Character. The discomfort in one’s own skin, the expectation of transcendence that’s never fully arriving. Presented in this clipped mix-&-match manner, with a context that can only be imposed by us as spectators, these moments of closed romantic realism could have easily come to resemble cliches, but they never do. In fact, it’s their more shopworn qualities that allow for any number of intuitive critical readings.
Stars, movie icons, long gone creatures of the screen appear and disappear in front of our eyes: Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou, Jeanne Moreau, Frank Sinatra, Jack Elam, John Garfield, Simone Signoret, Joan Crawford, Richard Widmark, Orson Welles, Conrad Veidt, Janet Leigh, Jean Gabin, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Marcello Mastroianni, Lauren Bacall and what must be hundreds of others. The greatest cast ever is assembled and then de-emphasized and stripped down to its collective physicality to create an experiment in sustaining a tone.
Other than the mere fact of the expirations of these stars, there is no easy answer for determining just how the specter of death manages to loom over the proceedings as a whole. In supposing what that tone is meant to evoke, we can't just psychoanalyze the material for the answer. We cannot simply apply Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious to a movie. Freud’s ideas were applied to the mind of individuals, not movies, which don’t have minds.
There’s no room for star power in a project like this - a movie which is like a scrapbook of aborted attempts at a narrative. In a way, this project has a realism about it as an honest reading of people in spaces. Take a sequence which is supposed to add up to a “scene” at a Bar, called “The Afterlight.” Clips of characters entering, sitting down, ordering. Clips of someone playing the jukebox. Clips of a man and woman dancing. Clips of someone at the table by themself watching. Clips of the bartender and a regular peering over, whispering to each other about the stranger(s).
All of these moments are happening in separate universes, with the context provided by the moments that would have come before or after them omitted. And yet our brains, which need for everything to make sense, impose a continuity on this material despite its scant offering. It defies notions of spatial and temporal continuity. We know what the artist is up to, and yet we still do the work of creating a story in our minds as it unfolds, which means there are as many potential storylines as there are members of the audience.
When we’re in a space with others, numerous stories are unfolding all around us. Movie scenes typically can only follow at most a handful of stories taking place in a given public space and those stories must flow or coincide with one another so as not to bore or confuse us. In The Afterlight, it’s as if we’re seeing every story happening in a given setting at once, with this sense of tone being the only connective strand. In telling stories, movie editing typically is saying, “This, and then this, and then that, which leads to this. Meanwhile, this.” Shackleton’s film is saying, “thisthisthisthisthisthisthisthis.” All of time seems to be progressing forward simultaneously, together, all at once.
In imagining multiple interactions in the movie are all happening in the same settings, we’re getting a sense of the totality of all that actually goes on in any space we occupy. Most movies are single-minded, pretending what’s happening in front of the camera is Earth-shakingly important. But the world doesn’t revolve around us and our plangent dispositions, which makes the idea of a film documenting the passage of history and life into the finality of death, strangely a more palatable and peaceful watch than one would ostensibly think.
For me, the big clue would have to do the presentation of The Afterlight that elevates it from a nifty video project to a rich art piece. In keeping with the fleeting nature of the deceased subjects not seen so much as glimpsed on screen, Shackleton is touring the US and the UK with a single 35mm print, the only copy of the film which exists. Having deleted every video file on which his project was edited and stored, this lone print is the only record of the film’s existence. It will not be streamed or uploaded on the internet. Shackleton is emphasizing the notion of transience and fragility in form as well as content - which sadly must have been an easy artistic decision. He’d explained in the Q&A session after the screening that this had to do with the fact that there’s no national market clamoring to open a film like this up to a larger audience.
That makes The Afterlight an esoteric and precious experience just by the nature of its physical form, which requires a certified projectionist to properly screen it and this is, I would agree, the only correct way to present this film. The strip Shackleton is touring with - through the end of July 2022 - will continue to bear additional traces of wear, scratches and marks from being handled while its life as a document begins to expire. “The film is a living document of its life in circulation,” states Shackleton on the movie’s website. “Eventually, it will disappear entirely.”
Fittingly for a film about impermanence and death, the filmstrip itself has a limited life. Its days are numbered, and only those few who've seen it, which includes myself along with of course Shackleton and his producers and crew, will be able to attest to its ever having existed. And before too long, we too will be gone. These are just traces of the work done by these creatures of the celluloid as they float through the cinematic apparatus like ghosts. They live in our minds and hearts for a while, bringing us comfort, terror, pleasure or escape. And before too long, they vanish, with the cinema as the delivery system for humbling the magnificent and pathetic and tyrannical fact of our blind Existence, our temporal concerns caught in a human snapshot between all and nothingness.
A complete listing of all remaining screenings of The Afterlight (hope you live in England), are provided here: https://theafterlight.xyz/#moreinfo
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