A Ghost Story.

A Ghost Story is a quaint movie that dips its toe into the big existential questions, but retracts to tell a story about a ghost.

A Ghost Story begins and ends with the ghost’s relationship with his partner before and after he died. These parts are staggeringly intimate, you really believe the closeness between these two characters and the chosen boxed aspect ratio locks us in with them. There’s something entirely earnest about these sections of the film and book-ending it is. Between these two sections, we follow the ghost as he tries to traverse the afterlife through a series of interspersed scenes.

This movie has moments, stunningly beautiful and captivating moments, where the movie stops to make a statement about life and death. It does this like someone tasting wine, they try it in their mouth for a little bit and then they spit it out. A Ghost Story touches on legacy, memory, what happens when you die, history and the relationship between the living and the dead. Every instance of this is a shallow glimmer into something you wish it had dived fully into.

However, the way the movie flits from idea to idea somehow makes it more accessible. There’s a scene for everyone, one scene that will surely resonate with those that buy into this story.

For me personally, the scene/scenes that resonated with me most were the ones in which the ghost spoke to the other ghost that lives next door. These scenes were haunting yet warm, they also remind me of a video I made over three years ago.

Here’s the video:

 

Overall, A Ghost Story is like a field after a rainstorm. Some of the puddles are shallow, some of them come up to your knee and whether you find them or not depends on the path you choose to take. This film will resonate strongly with some and not at all with others, but it’s so earnest and personal at times that I would recommend it to anyone that’s willing to give it a try.

What Makes Kafka Kafkaesque?

Franz Kafka’s influence has been felt throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st, you can so very clearly see it in Monty Python whenever the characters are caught up in mindless bureaucracy. The movie Brazil is basically one massive homage to Kafka’s work. The intense paranoia, other worldliness and the character’s inability to get out of the situation in Videodrome is inherently Kafka. The Haruki Murakami’s novel titled Kafka On The Shore, Murakami’s work often has a touch of Kafka throughout it. The phrase Kafkaesque has been thrown around quite a lot, to the point where critics have said that it has lost all meaning.

So, what makes things Kafkaesque, beside the attributes previously stated?

In his work, Kafka’s characters always seem to be trying to explain themselves, always trying to be heard and constantly trying to meet everyone’s expectations. And yet they’re so painfully aware that the very people they want to clear things up with and to do right by will never accept them and will only ask more of them once they have met their demands. So why do they keep trying when they know their efforts are futile? Well why does anyone?

He obviously loved his father, despite his abusiveness, and mother, perhaps in very different ways. He also had an awfully low view of himself and this may well be a part of his characters’ reasoning. He knew that reasoning with his father or appealing to the man’s better judgement was futile, he also assumed that fully working on his passions was futile, it seems as though futility was a central theme throughout his life and his writing.

Futility imposed upon oneself by outside forces, the expectations others have of us and ones we have of ourselves is something we’ve all felt at one time or another. This is a central part of Kafka’s work, which leads to many of the things that people have called Kafkaesque, and too the human experience.