I'd like to write about miniatures and the colour orange, but that will have to wait. Really Ghosts of Mars is defined by the use of dissolves. Images of incoming trains open the film, arriving from different angles, and they dissolve into one another. It's L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat as eternal recurrence. Always arriving, we become aware that things disappear here rather than ever leave. By which I mean nothing can leave. Things can only compost. Most striking in this opening montage is that the composer abandons the linear repetition we've come to expect from him, and which would mirror the layering of dissolution in the image. Instead he opts for thrashy forward momentum, and it desynchronises everything. Neither the sound nor the image is allowed to coincide with itself. Things can only keep arriving. Time incoming is battered into a mire. It eats oxygen.

What reason is there for the dissolves in Ghosts of Mars? For one thing the film is framed as a deposition. A dissolve in this context signals to us that the information we're receiving is from the past. In the past we see Ballard on a train, and when Ballard acknowledges us a dissolve brings us back to the deposition, in the present. Something has gone wrong. This second dissolve has the effect of either breaking the meaning of the dissolve, or of time as a linear sequence. It makes it seem as though the deposition is now past to Ballard on the train. Dissolves in the legal drama tell us we are self-possessed enough to think back to the past and then return securely to the flow of linear time having acquired what we needed from it. Ghosts of Mars insists we can't do this. The act of recollection here compounds time such that the object of the past is always arriving, and the time of recollection is made to precede it, having already dissolved for it. There's a truth to this approach. We watch depositions less to cherry pick from the past, than to watch the present disappear into it. The dissolve brings to us the wounding of time.

When we first encounter Ballard, she's sleeping. We soon learn that she's also high. Ballard is always high, and she often seems to be dozing off. While the deposition frames the story, Ballard's narcotic memory forms its organs. When Ballard eats pills the duration of the dissolve is swelling, and a wave is crashing very slowly, and a warm numb rises up through the spine. Perhaps the seasickness of the dissolve is the defining characteristic of this agent of recollection. A cut would offer us a clean break in space and time. Scenes in Ghosts of Mars dissolve into the next like the crashing waves. Derrida writes on the repetition of the wave "It carries everything, that sea, and on two sides; it swells, sweeps along, and enriches itself with everything, carries away, brings back, deports and becomes swollen again with what it has dragged away." Something is arriving with insistence, and something is disappearing, and what has disappeared has fertilised the arrival, which is also now disappearing. When the edits follow Williams the dissolve is traded for a diagonal wipe. When they follow Butler there are iris and horizontals. When either of them is near Ballard, the dissolves return.

When they arrive Braddock reminds everyone that because of the time dilation on Mars one year here is two on earth and that means they're only getting half the pay they signed up for. Could it be that Ballard dilates time in the same way, and that being in her immediate vicinity deforms the flow of time? This would mean the dissolve is not a contact high but something else. Around Ballard time as an abstraction applied to movement becomes a thing of great physical density, affecting space as well as peoples' movement through it. It's not only that the dissolve combines temporal registers in the deposition. It's in the action. There are sequences where a dissolve is used to rearrange people standing in a room: for half a second they may be both to the left of a table and in front of it, in the doorway and in the middle of the room. And there are other sequences where a series of dissolves are applied to a character moving in a straight line. Jump cuts make the movement angular (the tide carries away), dissolves make it continuous (the tide is enriched), and through this simple movement is distended (the tide is swollen). Every attempt at abbreviation dilates time instead, because what comes back always comes back heavier. This is mechanical as much as it is affective: the appearance of slowness in the dissolve comes about through the double exposure of frames. They are actually twice as heavy.

The recurring wave image is extended through Ballard and Williams' ongoing mention of tides. They bond over their love of the time and tide proverb, which they love because it has nothing to do with windows of opportunity. They both feel as though they are drowning in time and want to be outside of it. Ghosts of Mars is certain there's no way out. Its dissolves are always there, and our initial seasickness goes away when we submit to the pleasant experience of its live burial. The dissolve is always a deathly transition, a folding in, a wistful "and so," that waives the detail of the actual for the benefit of flow. It takes away everything it doesn't need and it makes connections from this nothing. In Ghosts of Mars it is at once a falling through and persistent arrival — a strangely haunting anadiplosis where each image is doubled from the preceding clause before it's gone again, retrieved again, battered and dissolved into the mire.

25 July 2025