Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly: a short introduction

Abstract

As a medium, cinema possesses a photographic nature. In his important article on the “photographic image”, André Bazin discusses the “essential objectivity” (2002, 13) shared by both cinema and photography. However, cinema adds time and movement to that photographic substrate, moving it closer to an idea of spectacle that dates back to older media and forms, such as the Magic Lantern and Phantasmagoria. Thus, cine- ma falls within a history of haunted media, and the place it occupies in this history was researched and discussed by Laurent Mannoni in his seminal book, Le Grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre: archéologie du cinéma, where he carries out a detailed and convinc- ing excavation of cinema’s spectral antecedents (Mannoni 1999).