Ghost Dance

A film to watch rather than to analyse or write about (though it stubbornly encourages both activities). Its pleasures - which are not consistent over 100 minutes - are intensely visual: a beachscape, blighted urban landscape, a city by night, evocatively photographed by Peter Harvey. Evocation is the film's key theme. A 'calling up' of images, myths and memories from a past which, according to philosopher Jacques Derrida (who is 'interviewed' in one sequence), was never present. Ghosts, then, but in the Freudian sense of 'internalised figures from the past' who collectively make their presence known to us. These myths, the film argues, seek to make historical sense out of historical chaos, and in the present electronic age they are omnipresent - in data banks, and even at the end of a telephone line. Quite how the thesis connects with the narrative - Ogier and Mellinger drifting around Paris and London and running into the bulky frame of Coltrane - remains a mythtery.