Jack Clayton's The Innocents (Patreon)

The central formal conceit of Jack Clayton's The Innocents: a subjective tracking shot of Miss Giddens exploring the manse for the first time, reaching out to touch a set of flowers whose petals immediately crumble and fall under her touch, apologizing, told affectionately by the maid "That's always happening", a Hollywood equivalent to the same year's La Notte, where Jeanne Moreau's cityscape wandering finds her delicate fingers crushing some thin plaster on the wall of a pre-war building.

All throughout the picture, the camera only moves when Miss Giddens does, where her body goes, and then later, her mind. The cinema's subjectivity is such that it can position its perspective as both outside and inside a depicted subject: we don't have to directly inhabit Miss Giddens' point-of-view via the camera in order to slip in and out of her mind's eye.

This combination of the time image and the mind image intrinsically evokes a gothic/expressionist mood, as the subjective and objective elements of the film's overall image do not find easy distinction. The Innocents being a Henry James adaptation finds him to be a less prosaic author than his reputation permits -- James, more than any other writer in the English language (save for Virginia Woolf), insists on the contradictory sublimity of consciousness, how the mind doubles-back on itself, curves, bends, inflates and contracts like a bloated rain cloud. When this literary content is combined with a cinematic form, what results in The Innocents is a pursed half-way house, cast astride between 19th century naturalism, 20th century psychologism, and the 18th century 'terrorist novels' of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.

Some clear cinematic sisters to The Innocents are Wise's The Haunting, Wyler's The Children's Hour, Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus, and Joseph H. Lewis' My Name Is Julia Ross -- what all these films have in common is an interest in women's realities, pushed to their absolute limits of reason. And here one cannot avoid the question of the supernatural, or of conspiracy, the question of a breach in the standard consensus in which the bourgeois subject is 'held accountable' for their experiences -- in short, the dignity we allow to extend to those whose claims we do not share.

The cinema has always been perched on this ledge, never being able to decide one way or another which way its nature falls: is it a documentarian 'depicting of the way things are', or a pure dream factory? Yet this question already begs us to assume that there is no real quality to dreams themselves -- do we not have them, do they not affect us? Then they must, by logical necessity, contain some reality to them, as much as the rock in your shoe does. The Innocents shows how, even if we take it all to be a fabulation, even if we do not believe in ghosts, we cannot deny that the belief in ghosts has a tangible effect on the world, it can cause things to happen that might not without it.

It is this 'holding accountable' that has plagued us in the centuries since Descartes: what is the causal link that bridges mind and body, which is to say, mind and the world around it? Dogmatic materialists don't even entertain the question and just assume that a sufficient answer is to reduce all interactions down to the level of atoms and flows of energy, in effect doing the reverse of idealists, turning all into a preconscious deterministic interplay of Stuff™, as opposed to the all-powerful Absolute Mind™ of their idealist enemies: mind or matter, the actual quandary is 'solved' by a chauvinistic metaphysics.

What seems more compelling is to depict the circuitous route that the subject/object dichotomy only barely describes: if the mind can invent its ghosts, does that make those ghosts any less legitimate? Humans wish to comfortably draw borders between 'who we really are' and then the arbitrary Outside, the materialists prioritizing the latter and the idealists valuing the former -- but we are not creatures in a test tube, we live in a real, messy environment that does not broker clear boundaries, we inhabit a time and space that is irregular, sketchy, and prone to change when one least expects it -- if a meteor could crash through your house at any moment, does a ghost really seem like such an unlikely entity?

Yet we treat ghosts with the category of the supernatural, we suspend their 'accountability', because their existence points to the bullshit arbitration of the Enlightenment's subject/object split. William James, Henry's brother, was at great pains in his pragmatic philosophy to root-out what he saw as a pitiless deadlock in his field, and to do this via a method for settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable:

"The tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve – what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare."

The reality of ghosts, then, is the effects which pertain under our recognition of them, and a haunting is as 'real' as a garden or your memory of your aunt -- its reality is only called into question at the juncture that it ceases to have a practical utility as a truth, and so far, ghosts have proven remarkably resilient to scientific pragmatism. William James engaged in decades of what he called 'psychical research', and found that despite the data amassed by him and others, they could no more easily 'prove' the existence of ghosts than 'disprove' them. The pragmatic attitude, then, is to admit of ghosts as an extant force, but to understand that they do not exist as an isolated truth: ghosts interface with matter as well as the mind, they are inherently bleeding past our pragmatic boundaries. William James saw the inconstancy of ghosts and other supernatural creatures not as evidence of their non-existence, but precisely as evidence that they do exist in some form or another -- that which resists easy cognition is the thing we must come to terms with, as it points to our own current limits in knowledge.

The cinema has been haunted by its own ghosts since its inception: dead things that remain alive, which move and speak. The man who points out 'that actress isn't really there, it's just a projection on a screen!' is one who reproaches life with the shallow cynicism of an adolescent -- the default mode of human experience is innocence, whether the naivete of a child or the openness of maturity.