‘The Girl Down Loch Änzi’ and Our Slippery Relationship with Ghosts

‘The Girl Down Loch Änzi,’ which had its North American premiere at the 2017 Hot Docs film festival, is a ghost story. Laura lives on a Swiss farm that borders the fabled Änziloch – a deep ravine that, legend has it, is home to the ghost of a woman cast out from the village several centuries before, and either left to die or imprisoned below. …An unusually stylish documentary, with beautifully-composed shots and scenes that play out with a feature film’s attention to blocking…

loch anzi 2

Written by Katherine Murray.


The Girl Down Loch Änzi, which had its North American premiere at the 2017 Hot Docs film festival, is a ghost story. The film’s central character, Laura, lives on a Swiss farm that borders the fabled Änziloch – a deep ravine that, legend has it, is home to the ghost of a woman cast out from the village several centuries before, and either left to die or imprisoned below. As the film goes on though, there is a gathering sense that its real subject is the women who disappear, or leave, or are cast out in general for reasons that can’t be spoken.

Most of the film’s action focuses on a summer that Laura spends on the farm and one week in particular that she spends with a village boy, Thom. Their conversation often turns to the ghost of the Änziloch; they speculate about what this woman did to deserve being trapped in the ravine. In the version of the legend Laura is familiar with, the woman got into a fight with her father and accidentally killed him, at which point she either jumped, or was thrown by a storm or by God, into the ravine. Some of the neighbors speculate that the woman was pregnant as well but, as Laura says, everyone has their own version of the story, and it’s hard to say what is the truth.

The farm itself is a site of conflicting narratives, some of which are unsettling. The buildings have fallen into disrepair and the animals live in what used to be Laura’s family home, meaning that, when she takes Thom on a tour, they walk down a hallway and open what looks like a bedroom door to a room full of birds who are viciously trying to mate with each other. The flapping and screeching that follows is either funny or disquieting or, maybe more accurately, both. Similarly, there’s a very long sequence near the start of the film – gruesome enough that Hot Docs posted a warning for incoming viewers – where one of the rabbits that lives on the farm, whom Laura was petting a few minutes before, is killed and butchered in front of her. Her request to keep the rabbit’s fur begins a very conflicted subplot about the small pleasures she’s able to find and protect for herself.

That’s not to say that Laura seems unhappy on the farm – just that the overall depiction of farm-life isn’t especially light-hearted. There is a darkness to the lens writer/director Alice Schmid turns on this story that often hovers around the edges, unspoken and just out of sight.

The same oblique sense of darkness came out in the Q&A after the screening I attended, in which Schmid explained that another character in the film, an elderly nun who was rumored to have gone into the Änziloch before joining the convent, wouldn’t say on camera why she’d left. In a similar vein, Schmid, who left Switzerland as a young woman and didn’t return until she was an accomplished filmmaker in her 60s, described her homecoming by saying, “I was surprised. Everyone was glad to see me. No one asked why I left. You don’t talk about these things.”

There is a persistent sense in The Girl Down Loch Änzi that the ghost of the Änziloch is made of these very same things.

The Girl Down Loch Anzi

The other interesting tension in the film, which also came up during the Q&A, is its complex relationship with factuality. Every documentary has to make some kind of peace with the idea that it isn’t possible to show the world exactly as it is. By filming a thing, by observing it, by cutting the footage together to tell a story, you’re always imposing a perspective on the events and, usually, you influence what happens. The filmmakers working on The Girl Down Loch Änzi influenced events a lot.

One of the most important details is that Thom, the boy who comes to work on the farm for a week, has come mostly in response to a casting call. As Schmid – who readily and openly describes the film as partly fiction – explained during the Q&A, she was looking for a character who could serve as a surrogate for the audience, as an outsider, and also offer up a worldview that was different from Laura’s, so that Laura would have someone interesting to talk to. Although there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach, it’s worth noting that the film, by itself, makes it appear that Thom is there just by coincidence. It also develops a narrative that’s slightly unflattering to Thom, in which he and Laura have a budding romance that he then abandons. It’s hard to know whether he or Laura would have been interested in each other at all if they weren’t making a movie.

Similarly, it’s hard to know whether Laura’s parents would have let her trek into the Änziloch alone – which she eventually does – if she hadn’t had a film crew watching over her.

The Girl Down Loch Änzi is an unusually stylish documentary, with beautifully-composed shots and scenes that play out with a feature film’s attention to blocking and, as soon as you start to reverse-engineer how it was made, you realize that it involves a lot of staging. That’s not good or bad, but it does mean that, on the spectrum between objective observation and straight-up fiction that all documentaries occupy, the film occupies a space close to reality TV shows. It’s not fake, and there’s certainly some element of truth that gives us insight into human behavior – but it’s also not a reflection of how the characters would have behaved if there wasn’t a camera crew following them.

It might be best to view the film as a collaboration between Schmid and Laura – who became friends after filming a previous documentary together – in which they craft a story that’s meaningful to both of them, but isn’t what literally happened. Kind of like the legend of the ghost.


Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.


 

The Allure of the Female Ghost in ‘Ringu’

Horror. It’s a genre that ignites different reactions: excitement, disgust, fear or indifference. Who would have thought that an inanimate object – and the female ghost that comes with it (free of charge) – could be so frightening? The enigma of the monstrous female can be found throughout history in literature, movies, and contemporary pop-culture. An array of female monsters are waddling around in our hazy pop-culture memories. Think of the witch, vampire, psychopath, and the scorned ghost. The term “ghost girl” has now even levitated itself to our cultural lexicon.

Reiko and Ryuji mean business
Reiko and Ryuji mean business

 

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

Horror. It’s a genre that ignites different reactions: excitement, disgust, fear or indifference. Who would have thought that an inanimate object – and the female ghost that comes with it (free of charge) – could be so frightening? The enigma of the monstrous female can be found throughout history in literature, movies, and contemporary pop-culture. An array of female monsters are waddling around in our hazy pop-culture memories. Think of the witch, vampire, psychopath, and the scorned ghost. The term “ghost girl” has now even levitated itself to our cultural lexicon.

The Japanese horror genre gained popularity since the fifties, thanks to a group of visionary directors such as Masaki Kobayashi (Kaidan), Nobuo Nakagawa (Ghost Story of Yotsuya) and Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). These directors usually brought adaptations of traditional Japanese stories, but they were not afraid to experiment with other genres or even psychedelic influences. The crux is that the appeal of the Japanese horror movie lies in the fact that the genre constantly renews itself, while ensuring to remain faithful to its roots.

In 1998, a new creative and commercial momentum took place thanks to Ringu (Ring), an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Koji Suzuki. The story has some elements from the 18th-century Japanese ghost story Bancho Sarayashiki. Director Hideo Nakata managed to visualize a clever but vulnerable heroine, and themes were subtle interwoven by using the power of the media to portray the heroine’s fears. Ringu, an unusually oppressive  movie, became a blockbuster, followed by the inevitable sequels, American remake, a television series, and a series of comic books.

Ringu follows the storyline of the TV journalist Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) who investigates a bizarre rumor: her niece Tomoko and three of her friends apparently died after seeing a videotape. Reiko hears stories that the videotape kills the people after they have watched it, and they all die in the exact the same way. Reiko investigates the story, finds the videotape, and ends up watching it herself. Soon after, Reiko receives a phone call with the news that she has only one week to live. What follows is a race against the clock, in which Reiko tries to figure out the origin of the videotape. Her ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) tries to help her break the curse and find the true story behind the cursed videotape and the connection with a psychic who died 30 years ago and her child Sadako.

Reiko has to make a though choice. To watch or not to watch.
Reiko has to make a though choice. To watch or not to watch.

 

Why are we so enthralled with female monsters? In The Monstrous Feminine, cultural critic Barbara Creed refers to Freud’s controversial theory of castration anxiety – children notice the difference between boys and girls aka penis or vagina, boys are of the opinion that something is taken away from girls, and this makes them worried – in dreams, myths, and in movies this fear translates to the symbolic loss of a phallic symbol. It can be a sword, a motorcycle, or car. When you flip the coin, the vagina is portrayed in a less favorable way. All too often the vagina is depicted as a dangerous – monstrous – hole to be avoided at all costs. This is described as the “vagina dentata,” the symbolic representation of a vagina with teeth, making the Freudian castration anxiety tangible within the story. In popular culture, the vagina dentata can for example be seen as the eye of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings or the desert monster Sarlacc in the Star Wars trilogy.

Creed also connects the creation of female monsters with abjection. She refers to Julia Kristeva who defines abjection as that which crosses borders, positions, rules and identity, system and all that disturbs the peace. In other words, anything beyond the strict limits of the phallic order and that aims to disturb the order. The abject not only crosses borders but draws the existence of limits itself into question, and thus the existence of the phallic order. This abjection is strongly related to the patriarchal vision of femininity. Creed describes horror movies where the monster is portrayed as abject as an “attempt to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies.”

For this reason, there are many movies that don’t have a male but a female monster. Abjection includes everything that we consider to be dirty. It’s what we learn as a child that is seen as bad and what we need to suppress. In particular, bodily secretions such as blood, urine, mucus, and pus. The horror genre plays with this fear of the abject and wants to break taboos. In Ringu, Sadako, the female ghost is portrayed as a lurchy and dirty, rotting dead girl with long, dark hair that obscures much of her face, dressed in white, and her fingernails are broken and bloody. Yuck.

The ghost Sadako
The ghost Sadako

 

We find Freud’s idea of castration anxiety also within the psychoanalytic film theory in terms of the male gaze. Laura Mulvey argues that cinema ideally is meant for the male audience: “The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. ” The problem lies in the fact that the woman is just a lust object on the screen, but that the male viewer meanwhile still has that (irrational) fear of the woman.

In Japanese horror  movies, they flip the script, and more often than not the focus is only on the eyes. This is also the case in Ringu. For a long time we do not even see the eyes of Sadako, and the tension builds up until the moment when we get to see them. In general, people blink around 15 times per minute. Ghosts don’t blink. They seemingly stare with an endless gaze ahead. But there’s another ambiguity. Sadako’s eyes show no sign of life; they are merely hollow, black orbs. At the same time they seem to register all the movement in her environment, and her looks are purposeful and deadly. It’s almost like the gaze of Medusa. In that sense, Sadako’s Medusa’s gaze is projected from the male gaze. The woman stares back at the man. In Ringu, it’s the woman who actually kills with her ​​looks. Ryuji symbolizes the male voyeur and gets punished. The fear of the man is a reality here.

Reiko watches the video tape
Reiko watches the video tape

 

Throughout the movie, director Nakata leaves room for your own imagination and strengthens the feeling of uneasiness that the story evokes. To be quite honest, on paper, the plot for the story line is at first sight not scary at all. The strength of Ringu lies in its absence and not particularly the gore that is visible on the screen. The hard, screeching and metallic, non-diegetic sounds, ups the creepiness of the movie. The editing, camera angles and lighting, lift the mediocre plot to the next level. The videotape – a seemingly innocent inanimate object (!) – of Sadako stands symbol for the mass media and for the pernicious influence they have on society. After all, only the people who watch the videotape die.

Ringu keeps your attention because – let’s be real here – the female ghost is a fascinating entity. All too often the source of their pain has nothing to do with the supernatural, but it’s a painful residue of their human lives. Sadako wanted vengeance, but her vengeance was randomly destructive. This makes her all the more powerful. You can see this in Kabuki and Noh theater also known as Oiwa, in which the spirit of a woman returns to her husband, who poisoned her. Unlike the average monsters in other horror movies, ghosts can think, feel, and they have a certain consciousness. Sadako holds the power to haunt us in our dreams. Yikes.

Ringu gave our pop-culture some of the most indelible images. The movie came out in 1998, and since then a variety of female ghosts have graced our screens. It would be interesting to see how this genre can renew itself over and over again. Let’s see what the future of horror brings.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JruLV_Wjkp4″]

 


Giselle Defares loves television shows like Äkte Människor and The Fades;  movies like The Fall, The Invader, High Fidelity. See her tumblr here.