Hauntology is a concept upon which I have a precarious grasp. To the best I can understand, it could be summed up by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses when he said, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Then again, I may be misunderstanding that line as well.
The best example I have seen so far of a movie which channels this feeling is 2010’s MissinforMation. Really, this isn’t even a movie. It is, instead, a series of UK’s Central Office of Information educational shorts, rescored by ambient/electronic musician Mordant Music.
The resulting contrast is often unsettling. In some moments, there are amusing juxtapositions. I’m not sure edits were made to these informational films. There are times I suspected there were at least minor adjustments, as the music and images occasionally synchronize to a rhythm I would be surprised had existed in the original piece.
Consider the first piece, an intense one-minute PSA where magpies swoop into the open windows and doors of a house, stealing jewelry and trashing the rooms. That is weird enough on its own, but the droning soundtrack takes it to another level.
I also wondered how much here is odd simply by being taken out of context, or put into a new one. I’m still wondering what the original intent was for a clip where a couple finds their possessions disappearing until even their house is gone and, finally, their clothes. They find themselves running around naked in the open, as if society has reverted back to Adam and Eve.
There may not be an explicit plot unifying these otherwise unrelated shorts but, aside from the opening segment with the birds, I perceive a possible throughline, though I’m not sure it was the one the creators intended.
Basically, we have the early dreams of planned communities, through to the realization of those and, finally, the inevitable downside. In that final piece of this particular thread, it is skinhead kids walking around, huffing solvents from plastic bags. After that sequence, it feels like we’re witnessing the reboot of the Earth, with simple organisms like nematodes, and then plant roots growing in time-lapse footage and finally we have a diverse variety of organisms from the sea. Odd aside: that last PSA was directed by Peter Greenaway.
The earliest material about the conceptualization of planned communities has cute, bouncy animated figures pushing together housing blocks and factories and the like. Unless I’m mistaken, this appears to be the work of animation house Halas & Batchelor.
One especially funny bit in what I will call this, the “world of tomorrow” segment, is an exhibition of model homes of the future, but it ends with footage of some sort of exhibit of Star Wars props and costumes, as if that is the future. Pretty clever. Another unexpectedly humorous moment later has the “voice” of a guy in a boat simulator being some sort of high-pitched nonsense squeaking sound.
There is one clip I wanted to single out, as I suspect it was a bit unnerving in whatever context was originally presented. It appears to be a demonstration of a type of dot-matrix printer that can print on any surface. We first see it in action writing the word EGG on the shell of one, and then YOLK on that of one cooked over-easy. There’s a sleeve with SLEEVE printed on it, lifted by a finger with FINGER printed on it. Already, I was thinking about the time I went crazy with a label maker, and we still have a workbench chair with “CHAIR” on the back of it. As for the clip, what should be a whimsical look at nascent technology becomes something else, now bewildering and curiously appalling. The clip ends with butterflies with print of them, between the two spelling GOODBYE, and an orchid with text printed on the leaves reading LIVING TOMORROW. So, the final message was “GOODBYE, LIVING TOMORROW”?! That’s rather ominous.
I first become aware of MisinforMation from the BFI’s site, where this disc had very little information, and what was there was intriguingly cryptic. Unlike so many experimental works of this type (I’m looking at you, Anti-Clock), this one proved to be quite rewarding.
Experimental
Watched on BFI DVD (PAL, region 2)