TRICKS OF FAITH

The first cinematic projections often struck fear in their earliest viewers, and anybody who has read Volume I of In Search of Lost Time or watched Fanny and Alexander will find it difficult to forget how the nursery suddenly becomes a wonderfully haunted space when the children bring out their magic lantern, and image follows image on the wall. When their old aunt tells Apu and Durga her fi-fo-fum story of the man-eating ghost in Pather Panchali, her gigantic shadow on the wall turns into a macabre illustration of the tale.

That shadow would have been coveted by the madcap collector of shadows in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol, who gathers tricks of light and shade in his basket to sell them in the market. In a family of photographers, illustrators, storytellers and filmmakers, a poem about catching and selling shadows reads like a tongue-in-cheek, in-house manifesto. And, from father to son, the great dance of the ghosts in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is as much a celebration of this lineage in cinema, shadow-play and animation — “chhayabaji”, dealing in shadows — as of the timeless allure of ghost stories.

From its beginnings in that spectral century, the Nineteenth, photography has been associated with the uncanny, the return of the dead. Many a trick photographer, master of the double exposure, has been taken to court for fooling credulous spiritualists into thinking that they have been photographed in the ‘presence’ of their dear departed. The 19th and early-20th centuries were also when x-rays played a different kind of game with mortality. It was both an intensification of the macabre, the baring of the skull beneath the face, and a salvation from the mortal, when x-ray photography became a medical tool, making us see through and look into ourselves and others — modes of vision that are at once compelling, dangerous and life-transforming. In The Magic Mountain, a young hypochondriac and his beloved delight in looking at x-ray images of each other’s hands and face as Mann explores the perverse heart of a kind of memento-mori modernism, deeply understood by photogram artists like Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and Adam Fuss.

After Barthes’s Camera Lucida, it feels like stating the obvious to declare that when we hold a photograph, we are holding a piece of death in our hands, a real trace of what was once there and is now no more. But photographs and ghosts confront us with the two sides of the same coin of faith: do we believe what we see, or do we see what we believe? Think of the word, evidence, and of how its Latin root, videre, takes us back to the act of seeing. We lay much store on photographic evidence in our empirical lives. But such notions of proof fall away easily when somebody asks, “Have you ever seen a ghost?” or “How do you know god exists?” or that terrible Iago-question, “How do you know that your beloved isn’t sleeping with somebody else?” We willingly become, then, our own tricksters of faith.