Writer: Maedeh Moeini

Author of Maajara Film School Editorial

It doesn’t matter if there were never any ghosts under your bed at night. They were still there, somewhere. – Familiar Phantoms

Familiar Phantoms (2023), a 40-minute documentary by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, is an audio-visual collage of narration, family photos, super 8 footage, moving shots wandering around a desolate house and rapid slideshows of memorabilia with a black background. Sansour, the Danish-Palestinian artist mostly known for her science-fiction approach to depicting Palestine’s struggles, has called the documentary her “most personal film to date”. At first glance, the film might seem like a masterful attempt to preserve a family’s history, but it also, perhaps more importantly, questions the very nature of memory and its verifiability.

As the title suggests, Familiar Phantoms is filled with ghosts including but not limited to the haunting presence of people no longer alive. The continuous lingering of what is gone and lost or to borrow the words of the film’s voice-over “the never-ending ending” is the foundation of Jacques Derrida’s Hauntology, a concept that explores the ways in which the past continues to influence the present. When talking about Sanour’s father and aunt and their political activities, it is said that they were “not communists out of a profound admiration for the infamous specter haunting Europe”. One can’t help but think of Derrida’s 1993 book, Spectres of Marx and the idea of Karl Marx’s doctrine persisting even in a post-Marxist era but Hauntology also offers a powerful framework for understanding the impact of collective trauma on the memory of the exiled.

Sansour begins the film with a memory that couldn’t have possibly been her own; the image of her great-grandfather hiding from the Ottoman troops in an unused well. Without committing to a linear narrative that doesn’t apply to the workings of human memory either, she examines her own life in exile not necessarily through recent and personal experiences but as a generational trauma, a curse inflicted by geo-political forces, passing down from one generation to another and “turning the future into a thing of the past”. Derrida references Shakespeare’s Hamlet, particularly the line “the time is out of joint,” to emphasize the dislocated nature of the past and present in hauntology. In Familiar Phantoms, the same can be said about how an exiled person experiences the progression of time while grappling with the loss of their homeland. The Uncanny is another concept of Hauntology woven into the fabric of this documentary, notably in the filmmaker’s visit to Jerusalem after 15 years of being away, facing a complex interplay between the familiar land she once knew and the unfamiliar changes that negate her memories.

Maedeh Moeini

A haunting is often inextricably intertwined with a haunted space and corners of Sansour’s mind are portrayed in a place resembling a haunted mansion. A teenage Sansour roams around the empty rooms looking for bits and pieces of her lost childhood and she finds ghosts from her family’s past, the historical ruptures shared by her people, haunting and reimagining her memories. Since she no longer has access to the places she used to visit as a child, she wonders if the memory of being there is a part of the “local imagination”. Sansour depicts Bethlehem as the city of ghosts, forever possessed by the people who have left their DNA in its ancient stones. But to the person longing for what they have lost, haunting and haunted spaces are not always unsettling or undesirable; to Sansour these ghosts are “soothing”, perhaps because they are all that remain from the place she called home. However, some ghosts remain disturbing due to the traumatic nature of certain events in the past or the disasters yet to come; the attic in Sansour’s childhood home which terrified her since she was a little girl becomes a storage for the deadly weapons of informers, years after the family has moved out.

Familiar Phantoms utilizes cinematic techniques such as split-screen to showcase the ghostly nature of memory; images fade in and out like apparitions on each side of the screen. They rarely stay on for more than a few seconds and seldom have any intrinsic meaning except for what the narrator assigns to them. The same applies to the slideshows of artifacts from her childhood; these random objects “taunt and torture” like ghostly beings from her memory, urging her to give them significance and coherent causality lest “the continuum between [her] past and present” might be disrupted. As discussed in the realm of Hauntology, facing a ghost (by seeing, smelling, or sensing in any way) is always an act of confronting the past and remembering what cannot but needs to be remembered. Both in ghost stories and our understanding of the past, haunted objects are of great importance. The empty birdcages, the scattered lemons and apricots, the sewing machine, and the toy soldiers are all triggers, opening new narratives in the documentary and closing the distance between the filmmaker’s present and her past. The role of such artifacts as bridges between the two worlds and timelines is perhaps best described by Sanour herself when she recalls the mentioned sewing machine that remained from her deceased aunt and followed her family everywhere as they moved from one house to another; she mentions that as a child she’d put her foot on its pedal, spinning the wheel and “reviving the dead”.

In Familiar Phantoms, memory goes beyond the conventional limitations of being an objective recording of the past. This experimental documentary approaches memory as a subjective and selective work of fiction. Since the very beginning, Sansour combines fragments of what she has directly experienced with the stories of those around her and a broader collective memory. Hauntology also explores the shared experiences and narratives that shape a group or society which can be powerful forces, redesigning identities and influencing the present. Both in Hauntology and this film, memories are not fixed entities but rather spectral relics of the past. This perspective is evident in the way Sansour remembers her childhood mornings not as a coherent narrative but with fleeting remnants such as the sound of her father’s car starting, the smell of coffee and laundry detergent, and the squeak of a chair. Despite there being a few images as well, in this memory, the senses of smell and hearing are even more remarkable than sight. Similarly, it is said that the famous séances from the 19th century relied heavily on the first two senses and since many of the participants trusted their eyes with distinguishing the objective real more than they did their nose and ears, ghosts would often be smelled, heard and even touched before they could be seen.

Like specters with unfinished business, according to Hauntology, certain memories can be repressed but may resurface unexpectedly, often with unsettling consequences. As mentioned before, Sansour’s memories affect both the present and the future but they also cultivate her sense of self with a mixture of fact and fiction. By saying “Nobody is their own third person”, the filmmaker questions any claim for a memory deprived of imagination and remembered with stone-cold objectivity. Among the most notable memories/stories is when her younger self helped her father burn his political pamphlets; the static shots of her tearing up the papers and throwing them in an inflamed toilet leaves no doubt in our mind. Then, she confesses that this memory belonged to her sister. In fact, she wasn’t even born when it happened but it was as if her and her brother’s ghosts were present in the bathroom on that day. Counting a familial or generational experience as our own is another recurring concept in the documentary. It is shown as a way to understand the past and overcome death (be it physical or the death of identity, history, and a sense of belonging, imposed by external forces) by living as stories told by others.

Although many films employ literal ghosts or supernatural elements to portray a past that refuses to stay behind, Hauntology goes beyond this. It’s about the uncanny presences that linger in the narrative, characters, or audio-visual style. Sansour’s personal tour de force is haunted by ghosts of many shapes and forms. They are mentioned, metaphorically, several times throughout the narration. They can be heard through the persisting static noise, accompanying the sequences inside the mansion from time to time. They inhabit the random objects she’s collected over the years, each carrying a narrative she had to decipher. Perhaps, they are also the people (dead or alive) possessing, shaping, and changing her memories; from the French nuns in her school to the family members she was close to and those she probably had never seen. Like the grand-uncle who was killed when his axe hit a mysterious explosive device remaining from the past. The details of this explosion were never revealed, leading to different versions of the story from each family member but in Hauntology one of the most common and powerful ways in which specters of war haunt a country is through the explosives that may or may not detonate in the future. In that sense, the said explosion could be interpreted as a reminder of the past and/or a warning for the future. The familiar phantoms mostly appear as recurring motifs; they might coexist with the present or threaten it, demanding to be acknowledged and addressed; but they always carry “traces of the past and premonitions of the future”.

Derrida, Jacques. Ghostly Demarcations: The Limits of Religion. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. University of Chicago Press, 1997.