I first watched Ghost in the darkness of my bedroom, with a light breeze carrying the

night in through a half-open window. Itō’s film opens with an ethereal synth and a soft
explosion of light, a paleness barely recognisable as the sky. In the next scene we
witness the metamorphosis of day into night, the synth now hovering between
ethereality and debasement, and, in the blink of an eye, the world is transformed.
Familiar streetscapes, rendered alien by cold hues, become inhabited by lines of light,
spectres of motion, mutations of space-time.
In October, 1984, Itō said that “[film] is capable of presenting [an] unrealistic
world as a vivid reality and creating a strange space peculiar to the [medium],” that his
intention was to transmute the everyday in order to “draw the audience into a vortex of
supernatural illusion.”1 When, in Ghost, the city lights became spinning spatial
abstractions, these words rang true for me. In the realm of the “real” separate from Itō’s
constructed reality, the void of twilight extricated my room from all that which existed
outside and, as the film itself moved its subject from outside into inside space, this
spatial isolation only intensified, so that there was only the space in which I existed, the
space made manifest within the screen, and the relationship between the two – the real
and the moving image.

Ghost was completed in 1984, when Japan was experiencing an economic boom which
would eventually culminate in a bubble economy. In the 80s, Japan was a nation rising
in the international stage, with a governing authority caught up in zealousness and
submitting its subjects to hyper-capitalistic growth.2 Itō, who thought he “might die
from… [his] daily pattern of sleeping for two hours in the morning then going off to
work,”3 was one victim of the inhumane working conditions which inevitably accompany
such growth.
But even without the aforementioned context, Ghost – shot primarily in Itō’s
company dormitory after returning from work4 – is evidently an exploration of the
psychology of architectural space and its relation to the individual, a psychogeography
of interior living-space which is disjointed and claustrophobic. The film is mostly devoid
of human figures. We see eyes and hands projected onto walls, but these are
representations of representations, images within images. The only human figure we see
is a man without a face, who we can infer, almost immediately, as the eponymous ghost
which haunts the dormitory. The spectral figure is a manifestation of the result of
overwork: a weariness both somatic and psychological. It is always stationary, apart from
a face which is in perpetual, spasmodic motion. Here we see the spectre of someone
who has been alienated, not just from the fruits of their own labour, but from things
which, under “normal” conditions, one should have sovereignty over: their sense of
identity, their comprehension of the spatial and temporal conditions in which they exist.

The erratic way in which the camera aimlessly scours the labyrinth space contributes to
the sense of spatial disorientation, and the projected video of a clock in motion,
followed by a repeatedly clasping hand, suggests a lack of control over the passing of
time, a feeling of time belonging to a disparate plane of existence. A myriad of such
visuospatial elements congregate to evoke a general disorientation of
phenomenological space-time, an inability to comprehend it in relation to the self.
Relating back to the sociopolitical context of Ghost’s creation, I would like to propose
that Itō’s film performs a task still relevant to the world in which we live: it shines a light
on the “mental health plague” experienced by capitalist societies which Mark Fisher
describes in Capitalist Realism. It is a work which invokes “the Real(s) underlying the
reality that capitalism presents to us”. Through its dire depiction of psychosomatic
dissociation, Ghost reveals to us that “capitalism is inherently dysfunctional”5, and in
doing so, it indirectly undermines the pervasive dominance of capitalist realism.

A point of comparison which came to mind was Francesca Woodman, whose work
shares common concerns over an ambiguous sense of self, the psychology of space,
and capturing objectivity through subjective means (as Krauss put it, “objectivity is fine;
but without the subject, the personal, there simply is no problem”6). Woodman and Itō
even share a formal kinship over the use of slow shutter-speed to evoke the in-
betweenness of spectrality. But in the end, the two are divided over their preferred
medium; Woodman was a photographer, Itō a filmmaker. The latter “took” the former’s
explorations of objective space into the temporal dimension, where motion and the
illusion of spatiality gained a new vivacity. And while Woodman’s work was highly
anachronistic, Itō’s Ghost is set adamantly in its time – a time which sits between the
popularisation of television and the advent of the internet, when technological
developments lead to a rise in microelectronics and the popularisation of the personal
computer.7
Ghost deals with this paradigm shift, the unshakeable feeling of electronic
technology as an inescapable undercurrent of the quotidian. In the film, flashing lights
render the architectural space hostile and alien, while a pulsing, swirling electric noise
provides a textural sonic rhythm for the camera’s rigidly frantic movements. This
cinematographic navigation, at once calculated and random, can only be described as
algorithmic – and in this sense, Ghost seems almost prophetic, describing the
movement of an inhuman, systematic system that would come to dictate largely the
rhythm of everyday life. Furthermore, the projection of repetitive somatic actions – the
paranoid gazing of eyes, the clenching and unclenching of a fist, the opening and
closing of a mouth (as if to scream) – onto “real” architectural space seems to evoke the
instability of images when suspended within the realm of the real. This clash between
reality and representation also seems prescient, for in our current age, this clash is
exacerbated by the proliferation of images as a result of the internet.
But perhaps the most striking is the scene on which Ghost ends: the spasmodic
projections seemingly tamed and contained within the television screen, which
encapsulates Pfaller’s theory of interpassivity. Žižek explains this theory with the
contemporary example of an interactive screen, which “‘enjoys the show’ instead of [us],
relieving [us] of the superego duty to enjoy [ourselves]”8. Preciado, referring to a mobile
game, states that “in Candy Crush, the players never win anything: when they finish one
level, it’s the screen that has the orgasm.”9 The screaming mouth, the clenching hand,
the gazing eye. These images, bound within the screen, are spectral because they are
virtual, intangible. This final scene from Ghost is emblematic of a humanity dominated
by the interpassivity of the image.
It is the image that screams, that clenches, that gazes.
 Bibliography

[1] Nishijima, N., 1996. TAKASHI ITO - INTRODUCTION. [online] Imageforum.co.jp.

Available at: <http://www.imageforum.co.jp/ito/introduction_e.html>

[2] Schedelbauer, S., 2011. OTHERZINE : issue 20. [online] Othercinema.com.

Available at: <http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?
issueid=25&article_id=121>

[3] Itō, T., n.d. TAKASHI ITO - FILMOGRAPHY. [online] Imageforum.co.jp.

Available at: <http://www.imageforum.co.jp/ito/filmography_e.html>

[4] Ibid.

[5] Fisher, M., 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. O Books, pp.18 - 19.

[6] Krauss, R., 2001. Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.165.

[7] Morioka, K. (1991). Structural Changes in Japanese Capitalism.

International Journal of Political Economy, 21(3), p. 13.

[8] Žižek, S., 2003. Will You Laugh for Me, Please. [online] Žižek.uk.
Available at: <https://zizek.uk/will-you-laugh-for-me-please/>

[9] Preciado, P. B., 2020. An Apartment on Uranus. Fitzcarraldo Editions, p. 32

(All images are stills taken from Takashi Itō’s 1984 short film, Ghost)