+ Q&A with director Charlie Shackleton
‘More stars than there are in heaven,’ MGM boasted in its heyday. That motto could apply to Charlie Shackleton’s collage film, which places hundreds of screen presences in an eerie celluloid version of the beyond. They’re not just stars: The Afterlight is populated by actors ranging from legendary to obscure, ‘some that you recognise, others that you’ve never even heard of’, as Ray Davies sang in ‘Celluloid Heroes’. What they have in common is that they are all dead: the end credits list them in order of appearance (from Gérard Blain to Betsy Blair) and with dates, among the most recent losses being Anne Wiazemsky (d. 2017). In this film, they live on, enshrined – or entrapped – in a meticulously constructed simulation of immortality.
Shackleton has assembled clips from different eras and countries, in a way that at once emphasises discontinuity and multiplicity, and at the same time creates an effect of narrative unity. His montage evokes a world in which all these actors exist as lost souls, wandering landscapes and streets alone, then converging in a shape-shifting, multifarious drinking den called ‘The Afterlight’, before moving on. Each clip has a particular resonance in itself – each movement or spoken line seems significant rather than merely casual – and so we imagine all these players to be re-enacting the gestures and words they performed when alive, as if doomed to eternal repetition: not merely like ghosts, but like the mechanically reproduced and projected revenants of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novel The Invention of Morel, the inspiration behind Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad (1961).
Placed together, the images evoke a post-death existence, perfect, poetic and yet irreducibly desolate. The actors are first seen wandering disparate, disconnected landscapes: an Alpine expanse, a desert, eerily unpopulated streets. There are city scenes, always deserted but for one player: the world has become a vast abandoned backlot, each set discrete from the others, as if occupying separate planes of being.
Some of the actors look stalked, others move with intent, as if stalking. That looks like Simone Simon in Cat People (1942), seen from behind, tensed for the approach of a beast, or a bus, that will never enter the shot. Dana Andrews doggedly walks through a ghostly city; Claude Laydu, the protagonist of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), trudges glumly down a country road, which we suspect may stretch on forever; at night, Jeanne Moreau clicks along rainy streets, as if sullenly aware that there is no simmering assignation awaiting her any more.
Eventually, all these people seem to converge at a watering hole. In a clever sleight of hand, the neon sign reading ‘The Afterlight’ (where the afterlife is the converse of cinema’s eternally promised place of forbidden after-dark pleasures) is the film’s single non-sampled image, specially shot by cinematographer Robbie Ryan. Inside, this protean hotspot – assembled from fragments of Hollywood nightclub, Mediterranean taverna, London local, you name it – welcomes drinkers of all nations, eras and dispositions. It’s hopping in some corners (‘What atmosphere! It’s electric!’ chirrups a 1950s girl), morose in others: here’s Bogart from In a Lonely Place (1950), waxing philosophical (‘There is no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality’); here’s Polish star Zbigniew Cybulski, still dreaming hip sedition behind cinema’s coolest shades; and here’s William Hartnell staffing the bar, in his TV days, a preeminent traveller through time and space, and breaker of the mortality barrier.
Eventually, everyone leaves to resume their wandering, then to take shelter from a thunderstorm. Later, people walk – some nervously, some deliberately – to buildings, and up staircases to the doors of flats they don’t seem to recognise, on landings where Katharine Hepburn might be neighbour to the Mexican comic Cantinflas. In his room, Laydu’s Priest holds his head in despair, as if there’s no hope even after death: it’s amazing how one shot, recontextualised, can infuse the overall picture with new metaphysical, theological connotations.
Alongside his essay documentaries on genre (Beyond Clueless, 2014; Fear Itself, 2015), Shackleton has cultivated a conceptual streak, notably in his ten-hour 2016 Paint Drying (talk about doing what it says on the tin), a protest against the BBFC’s certification fees. The Afterlight’s conceptual singularity, beyond its actual content, is that it is touring in a single 35mm print that will endure the damage of projection until it is unshowable: material transience built into an evocation of immaterial immortality.
There are clear affinities with other recent collage films: Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), with its invocation of celluloid’s ghost life; and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), although that film was rigorously constructed around a single non-narrative element, markers of time. By contrast, The Afterlight’s loose narrative shape is closer to Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog (2017), which stitched moments from assorted movies and TV shows into a faux-remake of Vertigo (1958). The Afterlight’s own quasi-narrative is a sustained musing on the question: what do the dead do all day?
Taking these clips out of context and merging them into a new whole, Shackleton reminds us that a single detached film image can be more meaningful, evocative and rich in promise than the entire film it derives from (hence the almost mystical power of the movie still). As in The Clock, these orphaned moments can become little islands of intensified meaning, uncanny in their unmooring from any original narrative context. Sometimes a single snatch of dialogue catches our attention, taking on a meaning it can never have had originally. ‘The time is so short,’ someone says, ‘I don’t know how much time I have to spend.’ But what can these words mean, coming from someone already dead?
The closing moments suddenly introduce a new formal trick – with shades of materialist cinema – that doesn’t quite convince, feeling inconsistent with the rest. The Afterlight is arguably overstretched: the sequence towards the end, where people start driving cars towards another nightspot, feels too dynamic, too purposeful to match with the haunted drift of what’s gone before. Certain earlier moments feel like ideal points for the film to end: a sudden eerie blackout, or a furious-paced montage of close-ups set to Jeremy Warmsley’s propulsive piano music. But perhaps there is no natural end-point: a collage film like this is always liable to seem too long, or too short, disappointing in that it doesn’t go on forever. Just how long is long enough, when you’re invoking eternity?
Jonathan Romney, Sight and Sound, Summer 2022
THE AFTERLIGHT
Directed by: Charlie Shackleton
©: Loop Projects Limited
Presented by: Loop Projects Limited
Produced by: Catherine Bray, Anthony Ing, Charlie Shackleton
Production Manager: Oskar Pimlott
Original Cinematography by: Robbie Ryan
Clapper/Loader: Connor Travis-Hunter
Grip: Andy Woodcock
Assembled by: Charlie Shackleton
Original Music by: Jeremy Warmsley
Sound Design by: Charlie Shackleton
Additional Sound by: Eleanor McDowall
Re-recording Mixer: Tom Jenkins
UK 2021©
82 mins
BFI SOUTHBANK
Welcome to the home of great film and TV, with three cinemas and a studio, a world-class library, regular exhibitions and a pioneering Mediatheque with 1000s of free titles for you to explore. Browse special-edition merchandise in the BFI Shop.We're also pleased to offer you a unique new space, the BFI Riverfront – with unrivalled riverside views of Waterloo Bridge and beyond, a delicious seasonal menu, plus a stylish balcony bar for cocktails or special events. Come and enjoy a pre-cinema dinner or a drink on the balcony as the sun goes down.
BECOME A BFI MEMBER
Enjoy a great package of film benefits including priority booking at BFI Southbank and BFI Festivals. Join today at bfi.org.uk/join
BFI PLAYER
We are always open online on BFI Player where you can watch the best new, cult & classic cinema on demand. Showcasing hand-picked landmark British and independent titles, films are available to watch in three distinct ways: Subscription, Rentals & Free to view.
See something different today on player.bfi.org.uk
Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup
Programme notes and credits compiled by the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email