“A cinema studio is a factory for making ghosts. The cinema is a ghost language that has to be learned. It is incredible for a poet to know this.”
Jean Cocteau
“The task of cinema, or any other art form, is not to translate hidden messages of the soul into art, but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”
Maya Deren
There is a tidal melancholy to the holiday abroad. Perhaps nowhere else are we more conscious of the loom of memory, caught in a future perfect nostalgia, knowing we’ll be looking back. Transplanted beyond home, we are more porous; sensations have a tannic edge to them that perforates tenses. The pucker of sunburnt skin, the smell of chlorine, salt, sunscreen, the plush grit of sand against bare feet, indolent and evocative. The bleach-bloom of a Polaroid reminds you that it will fade. It’s a feeling I’ve been pressing like a bruise since seeing Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun last year, a film whose helical language of memory and grief finds immediate sorority in Lynne Ramsay’s maligned masterpiece Morvern Callar.
It is difficult to untangle the diffuse ether of Morvern Callar, a film whose tacit brutality and mysterious convections are felt rather than understood. Our heroine’s name is a sly promise. Morvern means ‘sea-gap’ in Gaelic; Callar means ‘to silence’ in Spanish. Its guile is changeling, provoking and mirroring what haunts you. It is by turns a ghost story, bildungsroman, a Christmas movie, a vacation movie, a breakup movie. It’s a kitchen sink surrealist myth where Eurydice supplants Orpheus, breaking out from the underworld with only a walkman to guide her and tether her to her dead lover’s song. It is about the fugue of grief syncopated through a strange girl, the ellipsis of being alien, the sickly slalom of identity, the bliss of abdicating the self. And it’s about the tyranny of the package resort holiday.
Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) wakes on Christmas morning to find her boyfriend has killed himself. He leaves a note, imploring her to send his novel to a publisher, and gifts under the tree, including a walkman and an eclectic mixtape (Music For You). She dolls up, goes out on the lash, does a shift at the supermarket. She sends his novel off to the publisher, but not before deleting his name – James – and changing it to her own. She chops up and buries his corpse, and uses his funeral money on an all-inclusive holiday, absconding to Ibiza, with her best friend Lanna in tow. She receives a £100,00 advance for the novel, and after failing to convince Lanna to leave their hometown on the coast of Scotland, then disappears to some far off, landless latitude.
The film opens as if struggling into consciousness with bleary eyes, as images flare and recede with a soft pulse of light. We see a series of close contact shots of a woman embracing a man, maybe in bed. In the next image, the focus is sober and stark. The man is dead, face down on the floor, an archipelago of blood just noticeable by the blinking caesura of lights on a tree. The woman lies turned away from him, paralysed in a Wyeth pose, facing us. Her face is vacant, illegible, and will remain so.
In his 1936 essay Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting, Bertolt Brecht writes of the Verfremdungseffekt - the ‘distancing effect’. In Western conventions of theatre, popularised by Stanislavski, performance hinges on a disciplined transformation that draws from the unconscious spring. Brecht noted that in contrast, the techniques of Chinese Theatre consciously estranged an audience instead of immersing them. Rather than appealing to a subconscious plane of feeling, these impulses and articulations are brought to the surface, from actor to audience. It challenges identification, not as an act of universal sympathy but as a covalent empathy, where we are aligned with the performer’s way of perceiving himself in his world and surroundings. There is no fourth wall, and we are not spectators; we do not bask in or submit to illusion, but grapple with it in tandem with the actor. The performance is often characterised as one of seeming economy and restraint, that creates a hypnotic spell. It is disturbing in that it agitates the viewer into an active participle, scrambling and recomposing their idea of identity, and identification.
According to Brecht “the artist has been using his countenance as a blank sheet, to be inscribed by the gest of the body…to appear strange and surprising…by looking strangely at himself, and his work…a splendid remoteness”. In Morvern Callar, Samantha Morton uses her face as an implacable, agnostic canvas, a glacial reservoir across which emotions skate or rise to the surface, suggesting hidden fathoms below. It is a phenomenal performance of dissociation that reverberates through the film, her features a galvanic lacuna. The alienated artist “expresses awareness of being watched” - in the bath, Morton at one point looks into the camera, but manages to make it horrifyingly oblique, off centre. There is no fourth wall to be broken; Morvern is detached and looking at herself with us. Ramsay’s camera is often handheld in close proximity to her actor, emanating her viscerally disembodied perspective. “The Chinese artist’s performance often strikes the western actor as cold…conjures the impression of mystery, he seems uninterested in disclosing a mystery to us”. Audiences are notoriously marmite split on Morvern Callar, either mesmerised or reviled, finding her cold, frustrating, impenetrable, the film in kind bafflingly distant and withholding. Morton’s potent passivity is a vortex that envelops and hijacks the nerves of the viewer, planting them in the turbid doldrums of alienation. We are never lost in her performance, but estranged with her. We are aligned with Morvern’s vacation - one where identity is not illusory, but elusory.
When I was a kid, my parents would ask me what my favourite part of our holiday had been. I always answered blithely and instantly: ‘the airport’. It would make them laugh, thinking this was a childish way of recognising how special the anticipation of an event was, but nah. I really fucking liked the airport. I’ve always felt soothed and charged by monumental spaces of transit – the liminal colonies of shopping centres, train stations, rest stops, hotels, the big Sainsbury’s, and that Ozymandian king, Gatwick. I loved the droning ambience, the overlit, palatial sterility in the laminated duodenum of endless corridors, the peninsula of tacky departure lounges. I felt dwarfed, a quiet in my head and body as I recognised the atonal zither of estrangement, an antenna for the dissonant pleasure of environments characterised by J. G. Ballard as “built, not for man, but for man’s absence”. Don DeLillo also distilled this notion in White Noise, where one character anoints the supermarket as a “gateway” that “recharges us spiritually”, pontificating further:
“Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability.”
On Christmas Day 1972, the BBC broadcast The Stone Tape, a teleplay written by Nigel Kneale, the creator of Quatermass. It focuses on a group of electronics researchers who set up a facility in a dilapidated mansion, as they strive to find a revolutionary new recording material that will help them corner the market. They find out the building is haunted when they come across a ghost in a sealed off stone room that suggests much older foundations. In their scientific investigation, it dawns on them that the apparitions are residual recordings, imprinted and stored in the stone, projected through the prism of human consciousness in a kind of psychic playback. Trying to trigger these phenomena, they find that like tape, the room has rerecorded events, as they encounter increasingly atavistic, malignant presences.
I have no memory of how I first watched The Stone Tape – just that it’s always been there, etched in grey matter, the mortar of my mind bent to its will.
The concept of ‘Psychogeography’ holds a loose school of practices and thoughts about how (typically urban) environments affect and (dis)orient public health, behaviour and emotion, about the nexus of architecture, soul, and spacetime. It has a suitably vague and meandering history, polymorphic and alive, inscribed by those who walk and explore those spaces. The ‘derive’, or drift, was originally a surrealist notion developed by the French Situationists, of walking aimlessly, to subject oneself to the whims and suggestion of the city, described by Guy Debord as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences”. For modern disciples like Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Alan Moore, the derive is not aimless, but an act of insurgency, of time travel, of magick and divination – to embody the infinitive and walk with ghosts. Bodies, both organic and inorganic, are analogue palimpsests, and the convergence of these material and immaterial ley lines defines us. The latitudes that bind or affect a person are not beyond, but implicit to our very matter. Or as James Ellroy would growl, “geography is destiny”. This symbiotic colonisation is the Janus key to Morvern Callar: a girl seemingly flung out of space, drowning in the inertia of her hometown, desperately seeking metamorphosis.
Lynne Ramsay is a director with an intrinsic skill for suffusing us in the climate of her characters. She saw Morvern not just as an outsider in the existential tradition of Camus, but as a drifter in the borderlands, a “wanderer…like one of those intriguing characters in a Western, where you don’t get to the bottom of that sorrow – John Wayne or something!” Ramsay uses the frame of exile iconic to The Searchers, but resists strict demarcation in her use of sound and image to channel the shadowy confluence between internal and external landscapes, a conductor of Morvern’s intense permeability. She is always on the cusp, framed by thresholds and membranes both spectral and earthly. Ramsey often shoots her between alleys, in silhouette as she reaches out through doorways and windows, hanging out of car windows. Her work has a haptic lyricism, noted for her lens onto the small, private rituals of loneliness. Morvern’s hands are in perpetual reach, looking for assurance of herself and the world, disarticulated but grounding. In the Greek mythic cult of Calibri, fingers symbolised the chthonic connection between the nether world and the terrestrial, conscious and unconscious; for Jung, they were dactyls of ‘multiplicity’. Morvern traces the dead body of her boyfriend as he lies between the kitchen and living room, a gesture refrained throughout the film. In the supermarket, she handles carrots caked in dirt, lingering over them as a maggot wriggles through. After burying her boyfriend, she spins in the brush and woods of the mountain, caressing branches, plunging her hands into water cascading over detritus, lice, and worms. When she’s asked by her publishers how she's enjoying her holiday, she tells them she likes the ants. In a lovely scene where she and Lanna rain flour upon one another while baking jam tarts, her hands start to uncontrollably shake, as she looks at them in betrayal. At home, she paints her nails in the kitchen, examining her hand against the dark contrast of her sepulchral living room and what lies there. Ramsay includes a negative symmetry later – the outline of Morvern’s hand against the azure horizon of the beach, as through the pane of a window. Even in evaporating from the desolate, grey lip of Scotland to the parched, jaundiced shore of Spain, the sea is always just out of reach.
In a scene from Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, Angelica Huston’s Grand High Witch glides across a hotel lobby to an oil painting, a countryside scene with a girl standing on a dirt road. She raps three times with a gloved finger against the girl, an imperious smirk on Huston’s face. After she leaves, we see the girl fade from the painting. I used to obsessively rewind this moment on our scratchy Polaroid E180 VHS, a tape that still lies in wait in my attic. I would tap on my face captured in the huddle of a class photo as I passed it on the stairs, tap on other girls trapped in the frames of friends’ living rooms, clustered in the gulag of family fridges. Not so much out of superstition, but a queer reflex, looking for a response that would tell me I was still here. I’m still looking.
Ramsay originally trained as a photographer, until a tutor showed her Maya Deren’s avant garde short film, Meshes of the Afternoon, made with her husband Alexander Hammid. She was compelled to move to filmmaking, rattled by the disturbing coalition of sound and image in Deren’s dreamscapes, describing the experience as feeling “like I was in a house of ghosts.” In the film Deren plays a woman who dreams fitfully about chasing a shrouded figure with a mirror for a face, caught in concentric loops as she tries to enter her house, encountering herself each time. Deren’s surreal syntax, where interiority and reality are not just in fractured dialogue, but subsumed by one another, is foundational to Ramsay’s filmmaking. In an interview with ExBerliner where she discusses Lynne Ramsay’s influence on her filmmaking, Charlotte Wells affirms that the camera is not just perspective, but a “textural and temporal element”. Though Deren’s film is silent, its imagery and editing are so arresting and violent in their suggestion, that the absence of sound feels almost deafening and dangerous, like you are suspended in the eye of a hurricane. In Morvern Callar’s one sex scene, all sound including room tone is sapped from the film as she frantically embraces a stranger, who has also lost someone close to him. You cannot tell if she is sobbing or laughing, but you feel a howling anguish in their furious connection, battered by the same force in Deren’s dream.
Contrastingly, Deren’s vantages and approach to slow motion render her weightless in a way I have never seen achieved in any other film, the infinite freefall confined to the substance of dreams. She saw film as a breathtaking window, a uniquely revolutionary reality that uncovered a new logic and language of spacetime between the natural and unnatural, a medium of relativity in which “slow motion is the microscope of time”. Ramsay exerts a crushing gravity in the scrutiny of her microscope - in one scene at the beginning of the film, Morvern flashes a coastal guard from the shore, pulling up her dress. The staggered slow motion creates the same molasses of dread that David Lynch uses to such great effect, another filmmaker whose dreams are pollinated by Deren. In filming the supermarket, Ramsay transitions from handheld to dolly shot, sweeping along the aisles and counters before cutting to Morvern walking toward us in slow motion, her lazuli eyes unblinking and entranced, pulled by an orphic undertow as Lee Hazelwood croons about Phaedra in her ears. As the camera then pans along Morvern’s sightline of the ceiling, we are pulled into her dissociative traction.
In Deren’s film, both herselves and her elusive shadow are seen carrying a large, wilting flower. After celebrating the deal on his/her novel, Morvern explores a cemetery at sunrise, her befuddled, drunk publishers following in her wake. One interrupted shot has her holding a flower in profile, the camera panning beyond her to follow the crypt wall, to Morvern facing herself still holding the flower, a languid palindrome that breaches and synthesises time like Deren’s mirrors. It also harks to a similar scene which fuses present and past in a fluid, unbroken sweep in Antonioni’s The Passenger, a film whose metaphysics of alienation are kin to Morvern Callar. Deren found a metaphysical freedom in film reminiscent of Eastern artistic convention: “Oriental music is infinite…the Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours…film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite”. She wanted to create a form that focuses on this infinite subjective ellipsis, without western notions of resolution or climax:
“My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door.”
After arriving at their room at the resort, Morvern immediately throws open a sliding door to peer over the balcony edge. Her black hair is whipped straight up as she looks down, a stark stream against the brutalist grid of the surrounding hotel. Later, she moves indoors away from the jackal sounds of yobs partying on their balconies, into the interminable silence of a seemingly infinite corridor. In Dorothea Tanning’s painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, a girl stands with her back to us in a hotel corridor, her hair rising upwards as if swept up in an invisible current. A gigantic, wilting sunflower blocks her path. All the doors are closed, except one, slightly ajar to reveal a chasm of molten light, as if from a furnace. Whether this light is celestial or infernal, radiant or ominous, beckoning or warning, depends on the mercurial transfer of secrets between beholder and painting.
In Notes on the Cinematograph, Robert Bresson distinguishes the ‘cinematograph’ as the filmmaker who truly creates as opposed to reproducing or imitating, who can masterfully exploit the relay and association between sound and image instead of being distracted by fealty to literalism. Lynne Ramsay is a rare cinematograph, a surrealist whose work casts indelible impressions inside the body, who understands that cinema is looking upon vistas fraught with ghosts, while carving space to prod and conjure our own.
When Alex Garland adapted Annihilation, he drew only from his memory of reading the book, an act of uncanny coalescence that itself refracted Jeff VanderMeer’s novel into an iridescent mirage. When I set out to write this, I decided to refrain from going back to film or book, to rely on the fickle alloy and sunspotted spool and splice of dream and memory, the splintered reel in my head. Morvern Callar ends with a similarly fragmented afterimage, a strobing carousel of faces and bodies moving, snatched in the flash of red and white lights, the careen and blister of phosphenes against eyelids. Revellers are sorted for E’s and wizz, a brittle euphoria as Morvern wanders wraithlike through the crowded club, The Mamas and The Papas’ Dedicated to the One I Love playing on her walkman. In prep, Ramsay gave cinematographer Alwin Küchler photos she’d taken as a student in clubs in Edinburgh; she has said that this is the only scene in the film ‘closest to the image in her head’. Jean Cocteau once remarked that “poets…shed not only the red blood of their hearts, but the white blood of their souls.” In the psychic centrifuge of the rave, in Ramsay’s house of ghosts, Morvern is adrift in a shuddering mosaic of faces, her gaze fixed ahead toward somewhere beautiful. When I was a teenager, in full fatalistic throttle, I saw the ending of Morvern Callar as one where she is doomed to be alone and asunder, unplugged and flatlining in the underworld of the rave. Now, I’m not so sure.
In Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, three women read and try to untangle the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Why does Orpheus thwart his rescue and turn around to look at Eurydice, casting her back into the Underworld? It is the poet’s choice, one insists, instead of the lover’s choice – to live with memory over the folly of resurrection, the choice we are all confronted with in loss. In this scene, they linger over the fate of Eurydice: “She spoke a last farewell that scarcely reached his ears, and fell back into the abyss”. In the katabatic gasp of Movern Callar’s final frames, she is alone, cast in a cherry-coloured funk as she turns and relents to the dance, the song now a receding threnody in the tinny whisper of headphones.
If the necromantic cassette of Music For You is James’s lyre, then the final track of Dedicated to the One I Love is not just an elegy and farewell, but a prayer ushering Morvern through the dark toward rebirth (and the darkest hour, is just before dawn). Morvern heeds her lover, and turns around, making the poet’s choice and refusing amnesia. She chooses life for herself, assumes his stopped future, and steps out of that shrouded valley into a new, uncertain world. She is not eclipsed by grief, but transformed, its ebb and flow an eternal braid in the metabolic roar and static of her body.
Bresson punctuates Notes on the Cinematograph with this final fragment:
“DIVINATION - how can one not associate that name with the two sublime machines I use for my work? Camera and tape recorder carry me far away from the intelligence which complicates everything.”
The haunting power of Morvern Callar’s sublime divination lies in its rorschach ambiguities; its strange heroine, and its strange ellipsis disinters our own private house of ghosts… if only those walls could talk.