Spook House

The documentaries of Cameron Jamie may well strike us with their unspoken language of form at first sight. Sometimes they look just like registrations of street culture and folklore customs without any specific artistic ambitions. Jamie does however use an idiom of his own. He only deviates from the usual narrative techniques. The importance of his films is not to be found so much in their formal aesthetics. He puts low-threshold folk events that embrace the burlesque and grotesque on a par with art and thus presents both as a form of social ritual. Or he links very different elements from the folk cultures of the European and American continents together, as a result of which they seem to have emerged from a communal or similar basis. In Spook House he travels with the camera through the outer suburbs of Detroit, where houses, garages and basements form a ghostly arena for the most bizarre Halloween characters and horror effects. Jamie does not judge. The film switches from black & white to colour and back, representing a metaphorical jump between present and past, reality and fiction and marking above all the long tradition of this form of social theatre. As more often, there are no dialogues and the role of an absent voice is taken over in a way by the soundtrack by the hard rock band The Melvins, which ensures a suitably gross sounding board.