Series Site
"This SPECTOBER, we will invoke spectres on the screen. Probing the economic, social and political hauntings that possess the doomed state of our present condition, this program addresses the echoes of buried philosophies that reverberate beyond their graves.
"Ken McMullen’s GHOST DANCE (1983) dives into a Derridean whirlpool as it reconciles the immortal nature of ghosts against the finitude of life, while Alan Klima’s GHOSTS AND NUMBERS locates a shared virtuality among phantoms and cybernetics. Legendary Spanish director Pere Portabella’s VAMPIR-CUADECUC (1971), a film forged on the fly as Jesús Franco filmed his own Count Dracula starring Christopher Lee, tessellates shards of making-of footage into an oblique allegory on dissent during dictatorial times. This subversion of Franco’s canonical narrative doubles as a disruptive act against Francisco Franco, collaging a mess of scenes that dispel the theatrical formulation of a grand political narrative. J.P. Sniadecki and artists Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang’s YUMEN (2013) takes over this legacy, piecing together an anti-portrait of China’s economic prosperity through its exploration of a once-oil rich town now in ruins."