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Cinema is an art of the ghost.
Here, the ghost is me.
-Jacques Derrida
The promises of an introduction are many: it is an opening, an initiation, an overview, and a setup or mise-en-scène for an encounter or encounters between unaligned phenomena. Its temporal conjugations are those of a beginning that is also a return, carrying something of the rhythms of haunting, a contretemps that Derrida describes in Specters of Marx as "a repetition and first time."1 For the encounter staged by an introduction to be worthy of its name, it must not simply prescribe a series of relations and a fixed course but must also open itself to difference and the unforeseeable or incalculable. In this sense the introductory encounter may produce a double exposure that captures a scene of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in which all parties and all parts are doubly exposed, opened up to forces that leave them mutually inflected, affected, and even altered.
In the technical language of photographic media, the term "double exposure" refers to an image produced when a camera's aperture allows light to pass through the lens and onto a sensitized substrate within its dark chamber more than one time. The outcome is a superimposition of several temporally discrete impressions within the same frame, which by accidental development or by design simultaneously testifies to these separate instances and their mutual entanglements by virtue of being together in a single visual field. Spirit photographs and early filmic ghosts owe their existence to the technique of multiple exposures. They bear the traces of the ghostly encounters and spectral economy occasioned by the advent of photographic media and the age of technical reproducibility. But such tricks and special effects are but the most explicit manifestations of the fundamental fact to which each and every photographic and filmic impression testifies: all photographic images are spirit photographs, and all films are haunted. In his 1993 text "Aletheia," consecrated to the photographs of Kishin Shinoyama, Derrida addresses these inextricable links, stating "No phantasm and thus no specter (phantasma) without photography-and vice versa"; he extends these thoughts to film in "Cinema and Its Ghosts," his 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinema, where he remarks on the "thoroughly spectral structure" of cinema.2 Photographic media conjure,...