glamour

Roxana had recommended this film years ago but only now did I find a copy that was a decent print and that had subtitles.

There are moments of beautiful stillness in the film and a wonderfully eerie sense pervades parts of it as well..but..what? You just couldn't fully relate to it. The Swimmer or John Huston's The Dead seem far more mysterious-perhaps because you were more emotionally engaged-although in a different way.

~~

The thrill is gone (B.B.). Or has it? How we love to be haunted, how things never really end, just take a different form. As a child, it was the Ghost of Motley Hall, and the faintly understood idea that a place could be inhabited by the memories of people-and that people could exist and do exist in the form of a shadowy half-life, unfulfilled by destiny, trying to relive their life again without the failures, unfairness or mistakes- or more simply locked into repeating themselves, hoping there'd be some understanding in that.


"You look familiar...I never forget a face" 

Ghosts are always waiting for someone to kill them, to love them and then kill them.

~~

There is some pleasure in eating an ancient grain, something that has survived for thousands of years. When initially sown the hands would not have known who, later, would be giving thanks.

Some word, too, in our heart survives, though no-one speaks it.

~~

There are parts of us-our way of thinking-that are truly and astonishingly ancient (as if to say: our affiliating with the animals is carried over into us, even if unconsciously); the light glinting off a mid-morning stream, the last glow of warmth from burnt wood, the stark outline of the branches of a tree as crooked and convoluted as anything on earth...all of that seems vaguely but profoundly familiar. 

Why do we want to be spooked, haunted? Is it because mystery always leaves things open even when it takes the most rigid of forms? Everything is there and not there at the same time. Ghosts remind us of ourselves.