Expressionist filmmaking… on acid: a review of Mateo Vega’s ‘There Is A Ghost Of Me’ — Film Friday
Watching the introduction to Mateo Vega’s There Is A Ghost Of Me was like revisiting German Expressionist filmmaking, albeit on acid.
After receiving a press pass from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) for the February 2021 edition of their annual week-long event, I have written reviews for Bournbrook magazine of entries to the festival’s Ammodo Tiger Short competition, many of which are experimental in design, and play with a range of cinematic forms and ideas.
Watching the introduction to Mateo Vega’s There Is A Ghost Of Me was like revisiting German Expressionist filmmaking, albeit on acid.
The jumpy title cards featuring sharp gothic writing reminded me instantly of F W Murnau’s vampire classic, Nosferatu. Indeed, true to the nature of German Expressionism, the film features repeated use of chiaroscuro (an artistic method of contrasting light and dark), showing images of dark nightclub stairwells, unbidden images of x-ray scans showing people’s dubious dental health, and street scenes showing the aftermath of infernos.
I was confronted with images of people with their faces ‘edited-out’ which reminded me of the theme of forced anonymity which was prevalent in Eva Giolo’s Flowers Blooming In Our Throats, another of this year’s IFFR entries (reviewed here), which deals with the theme of domestic violence.
Credit: IFFR
Vega’s film is narrated alternately in Spanish and Dutch, and subtitled in English. The narration is a sort-of poetry which has the repeated phrase ‘there is a ghost of me…’.
Learning more about Vega as a filmmaker, I came to realise that the director is fond of unearthing spectral presences in the context of the themes of globalisation, gentrification, and activism, to name a few.
The narration and pace of the film reminded me very much of the work of the late Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly his film, The Mirror, which, in documentary-esque fashion, shares Vega’s concerns about self-reflection and nationhood.
