Imaginary Conversations on Film #5: Black Moon (1975) Louis Malle

Imaginary Conversations on Film #5: Black Moon (1975) Louis Malle

- What happens if you decide to look for ghosts in your own house?
- “Louis Malle shot this film on his own 200-year-old manor house and it’s surrounding estate.”
- “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
- He created a nightmarish day-dream.
- No, he found ghosts.

- Lily, a lost teenage girl hears the cries of a herd of sheep: their shepherd is hanged on a tree.
- And they’re looking for replacement already?
- She runs away horrified. They’re looking for his ghost.

- She finds herself in a manor house.
- There’s fire in the fire place: signs of life.
- They’re actually signs of human intervention.
- She finds a big glass of milk on the table, leans forward and drinks. When she looks up, instead of a human face she finds a pig.
- Animals even if domesticized, still occupy a different realm.
- The pig was on a baby’s seat.
- There’s food cooking on the stove: signs of human presence.
- She hears someone playing the piano–for someone has to be playing the piano with human fingers–she finds a cat walking on the piano keys.

- Even though the house seems empty of people, their presence is overwhelming and terrifying. That’s what we call ghosts, the absence of human presence while there are signs of life manifesting.
- Animals don’t have ghosts, animals are too real.
- The sheep are still looking for the shepherd’s ghost, at the end of the movie they go to the manor house.

- Derrida says that good cinema “is the art of allowing ghosts to come back.”
- Where have they gone to? “They come back to haunt you.”
- They never leave their place, the ghost is already in the living.
- We are all ghosts, only if we allow ourselves to be ghosts.
- “I am already a ghost, because this film will be seen after I die.”

- Lily hears a man singing opera, while burning tree leaves.
- “The Phantom of the Opera.”
- He wears golden wings on his neck, Icarus?
- Icarus is a ghost  His wings were not golden, they were made of feather and wax. But he flied too near the sun. Icarus is a ghost of the sun.

- The man with the golden voice holds her shoulders, and presses his fingers on her body as if he’s playing the piano.
- She is listening: “I understand, your name is Lily too.”
- Ghosts who can’t talk, touch.
- He types again on her flesh: “Oh you spell it differently.”

- Black Moon: the absence of a full moon in a calendar month.
- In paganism, the black moon is considered a time when any rituals and spells to be more effective.
- If the moon has a ghost, it’s the black moon.