Of Haunted Spaces: An Essay Film on Ghost Cities

The research Of Haunted Spaces investigates the contemporary Chinese urban development shaped through global capitalism. These new cities are an effect of hypermodernity always coming to a head to something excessive. The phenomenon of the so-called ghost cities is an unresearched area in view of the distribution and circulation of global cultural and social capital. One of the main questions will be how global capitalism is effecting and thus haunting the living conditions of our times. Urban spaces are turned into void, exhausted and empty ruins, when once the collective fantasy had the grandiose vision of boosting prosperity but have now become anachronistic non-sites where histories are forgotten. The complexity woven among the investigation can be best realized through art-based research to find the intertextual significance in exploring the enigmas of how we live today. The method of the investigation will be the experimental poetics of an essay film in creating a cinematic narrative that crosses over different genres and is capable of telling the untold story of Chinese ghost cities. The paradoxical spatial logics inscribed into these haunted places call for the development of a genuine filmic language and new forms of narratives. The genuine solution for the narrative of this film cannot be a straightforward documentary, but a performative one which combines acting, reenactments and found footages in between the real and the fictional to show the social spectacle in reflexive mode, with double-references and comments regarding the making-of of the film as well as that of capitalism. Departing from authenticity, identification, and empathy in favor of experiment, staging and artificiality of the subject, the poetics of cinema are devised as the meta-critique in bringing together image and real world in one entity. Essay film is used not only to reflect the true social reality, but also to critique the normative representation. Film in that sense becomes an instrument of organic interpretation, much as what Jacques Derrida called hauntology, the present is haunted by the lost futures of modernity. The uniqueness and novelty in this artistic research done by Ella Raidel is to fabricate a discursive space by bridging between art and knowledgethis will require interrogation, method, thought and referencesbringing about a narrative which combines the documentary with the performative, and acting with acting-out to create the link that is usually missing in the visible worlds.

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