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ABSTRACT: Superimposition was long a popular technique for showing ghosts in films. Through the example of Victor Sjöström's film Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921), this article examines the technique and its critical reception. André Bazin wrote an important essay on superimposition (first published in 1945) where he dismissed the use of double exposure to depict ghosts in films. The article examines Bazin's remarks in detail. The credibility-and the fraudulent associations-of multiple-exposure effects may derive from their similarity to spirit photography, but the article also argues that our understanding of superimposed phantoms may be enhanced if we draw on the cognitive study of religion.
KEYWORDS: Victor Sjöström, André Bazin, special effects, ghosts in film, cognitive film theory
In his article "To Scan a Ghost," a fascinating meditation on the cultural history of vision, Tom Gunning asks: "What does a ghost look like?"1 He does not quite tell us since his real concern is with the phantasmal qualities of the medium of photography. But if we take Gunning's question in a different direction, we find that the great French film critic André Bazin had already provided at least a partial answer back in the 1940s: a ghost does not look like a movie ghost. Movie ghosts, he writes in his essay "The Life and Death of Superimposition," have typically ("since Méliès") been semitransparent and insubstantial, created through the technique of double exposure. In the essay, originally published in two parts in L'Écran français in 1945, Bazin dismissed the use of double exposures to convey dream states and picture ghosts as "pure convention," continuing: "Superimposition on the screen signals: 'Attention: unreal world, imaginary characters'; it doesn't portray in any way what hallucinations and dreams are really like, or, for that matter, how a ghost would look."2 How could Bazin know what a ghost would look like? At first glance, the remark is an exceedingly strange one, but I think what Bazin was getting at is not as occult as it may seem.
My interest in understanding Bazin's point grew out of my work on a film he mentions as a high point in the history of the use of superimposition for showing supernatural apparitions in films: Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage [distributed in the 1920s as The Stroke...