Voicing the Border: On Some Spectral Essay Films

Giving prominence to the auditory nature of the border, this article argues for the importance of voice to the epistemological practices of border essay films. By engaging with three relevant case studies—Appunti del passaggio by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo (2014–2016), Spectres Are Haunting Europe by Maria Kourkouta and Niki Giannari (Fantasmata planiountai pano apo tin Evropi, 2016), and An Asian Ghost Story by Bo Wang (九龍東往事, 2022)—it carries out an acoustemology of spectral border essay films that, to cite Jacques Derrida, speak of the ghost to speak of justice. In so doing, it shows that, through an experimental use of voice, these films perform the border by making it audible. Their experimental approach to make the border “heard” subverts the standard relationship between sound and image in documentary cinema. Simultaneously, it de-forms and re-forms the essay film via postcolonial and feminist appropriations and spectral modifications of the essayist’s translocal, border-crossing voiceover.