Haunting the Shoreline: The Liminal Pasts of Moving Image

In this joint paper, the authors revisit three of their collaborative short films made on the southwest coast of Britain. These ‘works of memory’ about the liminal zone between land and sea incorporate 8mm film from Moore’s personal Super 8 archive (Sea Front, 2009), 1930’s amateur footage of family seaside holidays (Teign Spirit, 2009), and 1960’s home movie and TV news footage (Maelstrom, 2014).

The analysis draws on Jamie Baron’s thinking about ‘temporal disparity’, when archival material is included in a new piece of work (2014), and Avery Gordon’s insight (2008) that the past’s ‘ghosts’ emanating from such films permeates the viewer’s perception and affects their construction of meaning – creating an uncanny imaginary where ‘the dead’ are reanimated.

Using the three films as case studies, the presentation examines the liminal space in the three films – the ‘gap’ between the ‘then’ of the archival material and the ‘now’ of the new production. The ‘haunted’ archival material – where the ‘old’ appears within the ‘new’ – permeates our experience of linear time within moving image and affects our understanding of the past and present.

The paper will be presented as part of the panel, 'Ghosting the Frame: The Cinematic Imaginary Revisited', with Parker as the panel chair. The panel is co-convened with film colleagues, Dr Stuart Moore (UK) and Associate Professor Ming-Yu Lee and Professor Yung-Hao Liu (Taiwan).