front cover of Ghostly Desires
Ghostly Desires
Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema
Arnika Fuhrmann
Duke University Press, 2016
Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.
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front cover of Ghosts
Ghosts
Death’S Double And The Phenomena Of Theatre
Alice Rayner
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Making spirits visible has been a part of the theatrical experience since at least the sixteenth century. Instead of illusions, however, ghostly doubles in theatre are materially real and pervasive.

In Ghosts, Alice Rayner examines theatre as a memorial practice that is haunted by the presence of loss, looking at how aspects of stagecraft turn familiar elements into something uncanny. Citing examples from the works of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as the films Vertigo, Gaslight, and The Sixth Sense, she begins by describing time as it is employed by theatre with multiple aspects of presence, duration, and passage. Suggesting that objects connect past to present through the sense of touch, she explores how props are suspended backstage between motion and meaning. Her final chapters consider the curtain as theatre’s means for attempting to divide real and imaginary worlds.

If ghosts hover where secrets—secrets of the past, secrets from oneself, secrets of life and death—are kept, then, according to Rayner, “theatre is where ghosts best make their appearances and let communities and individuals know that we live amid secrets hiding in plain sight.”

Alice Rayner is associate professor of drama at Stanford University and author of, most recently, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action.
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front cover of Meaninglessness
Meaninglessness
Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema
Vlad Dima
Michigan State University Press, 2023
For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.
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front cover of Modern Ghost Melodramas
Modern Ghost Melodramas
'What Lies Beneath'
Michael Walker
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The popular and critical successes of films like The Sixth Sense and the Ring film and its sequels in the late 1990s led to an impressive international explosion of scary films dealing with ghosts. This book takes a close look at a number of those films from different countries, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Great Britain. Making a crucial distinction between these atmospheric films and conventional horror, Michael Walker argues that they are most productively seen as ghost melodramas, which opens them up to a powerful range of analytic tools from the study of melodrama, including, crucially, psychoanalysis.
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