Tombs, Ghosts and Songs

I begin with three sequences of Almodóvar's Volver. The film's first sequence starts with a tracking shot of ladies cleaning tombs in a rural cemetery. The soundtrack is a Spanish zarzuela song by the late singer Conchita Panadés, which may suggest an idealisation of an anachronistic past. The camera stops, and a static shot shows an almost monochrome grey tombstone of marble or granite on which the title of the film, Volver, is superimposed in red. Yet it looks like an inscription. We might associate the opacity of the monochrome with the death or the birth of painting, as the tombstone is a kind of unyielding screen which blocks our field of vision; the red letters ‘VOLVER’ then refer to a relationship between infinite mourning and cinematic representation or interpretation. Both of these processes, these letters suggest, may involve the endless repetition of what is lost, absent or dead. The repetition would be an attempt to reintegrate it into the present so it can be witnessed through our affective, critical encounter with cinematic practice.

Laura Mulvey has noted, in Death 24 X a Second (2006), how the tension between movement and stillness is constitutive of the cinematic medium, which is predicated on the animation of the still frame. According to Mulvey, cinema's relation to movement is accomplished by the camera, editing and ultimately by narrative, cinematic elements that contribute to the repression of the still frame. If the ontology of cinema is, then, predicated on transcending stillness through movement, the medium of film replicates the ontology of modernity, which is itself predicated on a continuous and accelerated mobility.

Bojana Kunst draws on Peter Sloterdijk's concept of ‘kinetic modernity’ to suggest that the very concept of movement can be instrumentalised, expropriated and appropriated by flexible, neoliberal capitalism. Like capital, subjects are socially divided into those who can move freely across the globe and those who cannot. In the case of refugees and migrants (an important thematic concern in Volver), the sense of dislocation and nonbelonging caused by the migrant's movement from one place to another may imply a potential transformation of material and symbolic conditions, thereby enabling us to think of migrant subjectivity beyond the category of victimhood. Yet Kunst suggests that movement can also be associated with a form of exclusion and material and psychic dispossession (Kunst 2010, unpaginated).