TO BECOME GHOSTS

In our times of blacklists and government raids, should we take up arms and take to the streets? Go underground? Or put our faith in the power of public discourse and the political rationality of our contemporaries? In a room with outmoded decor untouched by time, six people are gathered together. These are dark days – they hotly debate the strategy to adopt while the State of New York organises massive raids to arrest militants from the revolutionary party they belong to. The dramatisation weds the frontality of theatre with an intensified deliberative genre, less to freeze positions than to underscore what, in each speech, infuriates the speaker: political utopias, memories of struggles, or conflicting timeframes. How are theoretical positions fleshed out in light of the current crisis? We find ourselves thrust into the midst of a perfect example of a revolutionary cell where political and strategic antagonisms play out during a decisive turning point that remains deliberately undefined. Alternating with these action scenes, black-and-white photographs of New York buildings, ghostly apparitions from another age, are superimposed onto still frames of the same buildings today. These buildings housed the national branches of anarchist movements and the Communist Party, harshly repressed in the United States from 1919 to 1920, whose members were hunted down and arrested during the Palmer Raids. The film thus establishes a spatio-temporal confusion in which past and present merge into one – and what if yesterday were in fact today? In TO BECOME GHOSTS, rhetorical strategies transcend history, bringing with them the same divisions, the same repressive tragedies, the same revolutionary possibilities, and the notion that those forced into hiding to survive and champion their ideas always return to haunt history.
Claire Lasolle