Loop Narratives and Eternalism in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017)
Loop Narratives and Eternalism in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017)

Summary/Abstract: A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery (2017), stands out in the current cinematic landscape due to its use of an innovative narrative structure and an unusual point of view. The film follows the story of a ghost who haunts the house where he lived while he was human, observing the passage of time and the changes occurring around it. The ghost becomes trapped in a temporal drift in which he is forced to watch the same type of events over and over, being unable to move on to another level of existence. Dramaturgically, this loop structure is intended to highlight the human difficulty of overcoming loss and moving forward. I intend to demonstrate that the unique articulation between a point of view free from the temporal contingencies that regulate human experience and a fragmented, anachronistic, and paradoxical narrative organization that breaks the barriers of causality and linearity of conventional narratives suggests a contemporary approach to the conception of time which comes close to Eternalism. Adapting Matthias Brütsch’s taxonomy for this subject, I position David Lowery’s film alongside other loop narratives and explore how the use of such a structure in this case differs from other similar narratives. I delve upon the loopnarrative function as defined by Sabine Schenk in Future Narratives (2013), where she advocates for as a broader cultural change in the conceptualization of time.

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