Jessie Buckley’s hesitant recitation of Bonedog — the achingly painful poem written by Eva H.D. — is one of the most memorably harrowing sequences in Charlie Kaufman’s already memorably harrowing I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The actress’s flat, almost affectless vocal performance doesn’t match her very obviously depressed physical performance in the same way Kaufman’s deliberately jarring edits (emphasizing discontinuity) don’t match the brutally bruising clarity of Eva H.D.’s written words. What you get, then, is an emotionally gut-wrenching disjunct, with Buckley’s recitation and Kaufman’s direction pushing us away from her character’s despair but Buckley’s body language and Eva H.D.’s words pulling us straight back in. This tension — between form and content — deepens the crushing existential weight felt by Kaufman’s character(s); it leaves an emotional scar because Eva H.D.’s words manage to — perhaps only occasionally — pierce through Kaufman’s narrative and formal game of psychological (dis)associations in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
The first short film that the two artists collaborated on after Kaufman’s most ambitiously directed feature film, “Jackals & Fireflies” (2023), is stripped of all this, well, “distracting” gamesmanship. And it’s entirely for the worse — Kaufman essentially fashions his version of sub-Malickian reverie in Jackals & Fireflies, producing an impressionist montage of New York City filtered through the bleary and blurry perspective of a nameless woman (played by Eva H.D.) whose poetic voiceover, constantly complemented by a twinkly background score, guides everything in the film. Whatever tension is there to be found between her caustic words (recited, here, somewhat affectlessly by Eva H.D. herself) and dreamy, soft-focused imagery is nullified by the constant use of the background score; there’s concerningly little else to note here other than the fact that Kaufman, along with cinematographer Chayse Irvin, shot this film entirely on a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.
It’s best to keep your expectations similarly low for How to Shoot a Ghost, Kaufman’s second short collaboration with Eva H.D., which is making its premiere Out of Competition at the Venice International Film Festival this year. Jessie Buckley also reunites with the pair, prompting an (unfairly) misguided expectation on this writer’s part that this short will create (or, at least, recreate) the deeply distressing sense of dread that dominated each and every second of the Bonedog recitation sequence in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. But no. This is essentially Jackals & Fireflies — The Athens Edition, just not shot on a phone and not in the conventional widescreen aspect ratio. Its plot, loosely speaking, follows two newly dead people — one, a translator (Josef Akiki), and the other, a photographer (Jessie Buckley) — as they meet on the streets of Athens, a city in which, as described by Kaufman in his director’s statement for the film’s premiere, “the bones of history are always on display.” Archival footage of Athens’ turbulent political history collides with these characters’ (constantly exhausting) poetic musings — liltingly narrated by Eva H.D., Jessie Buckley, and Josef Akiki — as they try to make sense of their place and time after life.
Conceptually speaking, How to Shoot a Ghost offers a much more fertile playground for Kaufman to combine and collide form and content than Jackals and Fireflies did. The consistent intercutting and crossfading between past, present, and future — again, overly complemented by a generically mournful background score, most definitely to its detriment — employs a similar tension between formal disjunct and poetic harmony like the Bonedog sequence in I’m Thinking of Ending Things did. The idea — again, clearly expressed by Kaufman in the director’s statement — is to create a “liminal space” whereby everything is a blur for these ghosts, who feel entirely displaced from both place and time.
But unlike, say, Sans Soleil (1983), the monumental Chris Marker cine-essay that manages to create an unforgettably hypnotic blur out of a similarly constant barrage of voiceover and “banal” images, nothing about the compositions here, and their obvious rhyming with the perfunctorily poetic words in How to Shoot a Ghost, lingers. Athens’ history, much like the characters’ personal histories, is treated like a vague blur, reduced by Kaufman’s commitment to romantic poeticism, to grand gestures and flash(y) images that don’t so much swirl around in your head after you’ve watched the film, but rather just seem to evaporate into ether. It’s perhaps apt in a way that a film about the fleeting nature of socio-political histories and personal lives feels so slight, but, in a different — and more significant — sense, it’s immensely disappointing that How to Shoot a Ghost never manages to make those fleeting feelings feel, in any way, memorably elegiac.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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