Several years ago, while visiting the Roman Baths in Bath, I found myself overwhelmed by a profound feeling of existential insignificance. Standing beside the spring water in the remarkably well-preserved bath house, I started picturing the humans, not so unlike me, who had come to wash themselves at that exact spot almost 2,000 years earlier. Each of them doubtless had hopes, dreams and everyday worries that seemed vitally important, yet all of them had long since been rendered flatly meaningless by the same indifferent march of time that would one day relieve me of my own trivial ambitions. It was almost enough to put me off my souvenir fudge.
That same disorientating sensation rushed back to me as I watched How to Shoot a Ghost, a short film by Charlie Kaufman that screened last Friday at AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Kaufman has often explored the big questions of life, death and memory in surreal and astonishing screenplays, including Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, but here he directs from a lyrical script written by the Canadian-Greek poet Eva HD.
The new short follows a translator (Josef Akiki) and a photographer (Jessie Buckley) who have both recently died of unrelated causes in Athens, a place already teeming with the ghosts of various eras. As the spectral pair wander through the ancient city snapping pictures, Kaufman cuts their narrative together with street photography, historical footage and old home videos. The wistful film invites us to wrestle with our own doomed attempts to preserve or capture our fleeting, ephemeral existences. “[Buckley’s] character is trying to hold on to life,” Kaufman tells me the morning after the screening. “I think that’s her motivation in photographing everything, and she can’t. No one can, but certainly after you’re dead you can’t.”
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 