"Films about Ghosts"

Growing up in a time and place where the father of every child had a video camcorder at every major family and school function, my memory can get a little fuzzy. Sometimes I don't actually know what I REALLY remember or what I remember because I grew up watching the memory. Then there are memories I have that may really be dreams; they seem more like home movies. I suppose they could also be dreams based on memories of home movies.
My favorite band of all time has a song lyric that best illustrates the idea, while illuminating nothing: "If dreams are like movies/then memories are films about ghosts" (Yes, I did just quote Counting Crows in a Cinema Studies related assignment). Key term here: ghosts. Now I like a good ghost story just as much as the next person; in fact it is probably safe to say that I like a good ghost story more than most people. I like the concept of film being not just a bottle that holds memories and dreams to be uncorked at our whim, but also as a sort of afterlife for those that have passed. I guess that makes me, a future moving image archivist, a wannabe Hades—telling every moving image where to go (or St. Peter, but he is not as cool). Perhaps archivists have the power to save the ghostly element inside each film. Or maybe I am just a nostalgic so-and-so.
Peter Forgacs in Mining the Home Movie wrote that a viewer of a home movie today may know that the person they are watching is dead and gone; yet the image of life is given and "it is as if they have sent a message with skeletal traces for today's viewer" (49). It is only a piece of them: no one wants to be forgotten and no one wants to die, and home movies help to prevent these things from happening in an abstract way.
Now Mr. David Hackett Fischer in Historians' Fallacies wrote when describing the fallacy of essences that "the existence of essences, like the existence of ghosts, cannot be disproved by any rational method" (68). The fallacy he describes in historical writing is "psychologically pleasing, for it supplies a sense of completeness and it encourages a sense of certainty." This fallacy and the holistic and the antinomian fallacies are the opposite extremes of a fallacy that is committed in the Introduction to Mining the Home Movie. Patricia R. Zimmermann explains how the book is intended to create a new way of discussing Hayden White's idea of history as a "place of fantasy". This idea believes that looking at history empirically is a fallacy because no one can ever know what happened. I feel Fischer would agree that a historian should not assume that the past is completely fixed and knowable, yet he/she should also not assume that it is constantly changing and unknowable. In t
he end I think that there should be a place in historical writing for ghosts and for memories, for facts and for imagination, for change and for stasis.

Siobhan C. Hagan