What will I do? What will I do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name . . . Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams to my reality: not dust and not fire . . . We have become two friends of the strange creature in the clouds . . . and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity’s land.

—Mahmoud Darwish, “Who Am I, Without Exile?” (The Butterfly’s Burden, 2007)

On a chilly and overcast day this past July, I met with the director and founder of Dublin’s Experimental Film Society, Rouzbeh Rashidi. For quite some time I had followed his work—and that of the collective’s—on social media, and was pleasantly surprised when I reached out to him for a conversation about the resonances between anthropology and experimental cinema and was received with sincerity and generosity that is not always the case for us anthropologists. Rashidi originally hails from Tehran, Iran, but has resided in Ireland for fifteen years, and in this admittedly short period of time, he has successfully built an enduring and innovative space of support for Ireland’s most daring filmmakers. There is an eerie grittiness to his work that is simultaneously sensuous and off-putting. Watching his films both enraptures and estranges. Ultimately experiments in form, Rashidi’s cinema is disinterested in presenting our worlds as either truth or fiction. Instead, it is stained with ghosts and irrevocably infused with the uncanny. In what follows, I draw parallels between ethnographers and filmmakers with the aid of Rashidi, who himself asserts that the power of experimental cinema lies in the crafting and presentation of “partial truths.” And it is not only that filmmakers and anthropologists are constantly crafting stories from images and texts that bring the two practices together, but the fact that our creations possess the tendency to haunt. This haunting aura—the presence of specters and otherworldly affects—is arguably linked to where anthropology and filmmaking derive their power, that is, through the experience of exile and displacement.

Ghosts of Images, Images of Ghosts: The Materiality of Decay

In her book, What It Is, cartoonist Lynda Barry (2008, 56) asks, “What is the difference between an image and a ghost?” Barry means this as a comparative and generative exercise, I am certain, but it is useful to think with here. Images and ghosts are made, essentially; they are constituted by processes that are meant to create likenesses of others. But what actually makes an image into a ghost or a ghost into an image?

Over coffee at the Library Bar in Dublin’s Temple District, I speak to Rashidi, first, about the origins of his Experimental Film Society, which began in Tehran. This soon turns to his fascination with technology and the process of decay. “I was always a cinephile. This was prohibited because of it being a Western product. And it was always analog technology—VHS. People would show up with suitcases of bootlegged films,” he recounts. A brief pause and Rashidi continues, explaining he was just eighteen years old when he started to make films. Above all, however, he wished to play with the format, deeply intrigued by 35 millimeter technology. “So, what is cinema?” he asks. “Where do images come from?”

Uncertain whether I am meant to answer, I mention Lynda Barry’s quote to him. Rashidi nods fiercely and shifts in his seat, jumping into his obsession with cinematic technology. “It’s the decay,” he points out, which seems to link images and ghosts together. After he became aware of the potential for VHS tapes to be textured, he was entirely captured by the materiality of film. In watching a VHS time and time again, or re-recording over the 35 mm film, he’d witness the colors wash out. “It degrades, but it is still there,” he remarks. “I found myself asking: ‘Why does it become like this?’ It’s like a ghost, basically!” And this is exactly why he came to prefer the 80s and 90s—analog technology—for telling cinematic stories. DVDs, quite simply, do not possess any ghostly or ethereal qualities. Well, at least not naturally.

It is this materiality of decay that Rashidi emphasizes that I wish to meditate on for a brief moment. French historian Marc Bloch (1964) once wrote of historical narratives leaving "tracks" in our world, like little footprints or stains. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) takes this one step further, and rather elegantly so when he describes the production of history as informed by the twinning or confluence of that which has happened (Historicity 1) and that which is said to have happened (Historicity 2). While Trouillot’s critical point is that we must trace the moment that power enters the story by acknowledging the relations between process and narrative, his concept of Historicity 1 highlights the inextricably material ways that history manifests around us; in other words, the materiality of history is what grants the past any power in the first place. Materiality, Trouillot reveals, comes to both represent and embody the "facts of the matter"—as tangible evidence, they may prove difficult to dispute. Yet even landscapes, bodies, fossils, and monuments contain bottomless silences—it is impossible for us to recognize the sedimentation of so many different stories deposited in one object. History, then, is inherently ambiguous and liminal; stories are always being created, destroyed, and recycled.

When Rashidi speaks of the materiality of decay as the mode through which he realizes film, he hones in on the ways in which anthropologists and filmmakers make texts and images that will perpetually experience "afterlives." Perhaps, as anthropologist Stephan Palmié (2002, 2013) has previously argued, all stories are ghost stories. An assemblage of gyrating stories, history as produced by that which has happened and that which is said to have happened resonates with the notion of what once was and what might be, Mark Fisher’s (2012) backbone of haunting. As Fisher contends, haunting occurs not only through spatial and temporal displacement, but through imagined failed futures. Narratives need neither be firmly rooted in the past, present, nor future. Decay, like haunting, indexes the passage of time, but we know little of anything else. What is history, if but a bundle of traces, preserved and animated residues from which we can never escape? If anything, it is an intangible specter constituted by the past lives of tangible things.

