Ghosts, Imagination and Theatre: re-enacting the futural past through documentary film

This practice-led research looks at creative strategies to address the under-represented and marginalised history of Roma persecution in WWII

The research has resulted in a film, The Deathless Woman (89’ 2019), a hybrid documentary film that has been created in response to European sites of atrocity against the Roma. This practice employs a number of experimental strategies that seek to supplement the limited historiography of the genocide of the Roma during WWII and formulate an innovative approach to documentary production that questions notions of authenticity and indexicality in Western knowledge formation. Starting in 1942 with the murder of a Roma family in a small village in Poland, the film aims to bring these events into the present by employing strategies such as the use of ghosts, fantasy and theatre within a documentary framework. Through this, the film aims to visualise and connect the traumatic past of the Roma to other traumatic pasts and to the traumatic present.

This research project interrogates two central research questions. Firstly, how might a phenomenological approach to the invisible be employed in knowledge production to reframe our relationship to traumatic or marginalised histories and make their legacy relevant? Within this, I employ an experimental approach to empiricism that foregrounds the sensory as a device to investigate sites of atrocity. That these events were traumatic and centred on specific geographic sites is critical in my choice of sensory methods. I have paid particular attention to atmospheres, ghosts and affects in constructing both a film and an academic argument that foregrounds sensory experience as a method for knowledge production. Critical to my methodology is my decision not to make binary distinctions between imagination and reality (or truth and fiction), but rather to see the two as interrelated and intertwined. More specifically, this extends to declining to rationalise such things as ghosts, but rather to treat the ghost as an object of experience and this has led to the employment of a ghost as a legitimatised narrator within a documentary film.

This fantastic notion has been extended into the film’s production through the application of theatrical methods as strategies to further critically challenge and redress the failures of both the archive and of history and has led to my second research question – how might creative strategies in hybrid documentary film practice be effective in reframing marginalised histories in an affectively-impactful way? I demonstrate the potential for non-realist modes such as the literary fantastic, the methods of documentary theatre and the tableau vivant to offer audiences a route to thinking about complicated and traumatic subject matter while simultaneously revealing the virtues and flaws of its sources. The seemingly paradoxical nature of combining documentary and the fantastic comes out of a consideration of what role ghosts might have in the way traumatic histories are communicated and represented, and most importantly, how the ghost has the capacity to bring the past forwards to us in the present. This inter-relationship between imagination or artifice and moral or political thought is at the heart of my work.