French Literature Reviews - 2026

B. Bonello, Ghost Films
Art and Visual Culture

Review published in the critical dossier of Acta Fabula "The Library of Ghost Texts" (November 2014, Vol. 15, no. 9): "Towards a History of Cinema in the Negative" by Jean-Louis Jeannelle.

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Bertrand Bonello, Ghost Films

Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, "Cinema" series, 2014.

EAN: 9782350960944

256 p.

Publisher's overview:

What do you do with a film you were never able to shoot? A film that was fantasized, written, toiled over, and dreamed of to the point of exhaustion... Dreamed of so intensely that it turns into a nightmare, as the nights relentlessly conjure up the images it was meant to produce. What do you do with this perverse ghost? The question regularly arises whether to take it up again just as it is.

Diving back into it year after year, rereading the notes, looking over the location scouting photos, remembering why the film wasn't made, thinking about the path that would need to be retraced, and then closing the script—not without revising a few scenes first. Or making it reappear in other films, perhaps in fragments. But doing so requires dismembering it, breaking its coherence. And so, sometimes, a line of dialogue resurfaces, a scene, a piece of music, a gesture... Or else leaving it like a block of granite deep within oneself. Ghost films keep coming back. Naturally, they are the finest ones because they have not failed.

Published on the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to him by the Centre Pompidou, this book brings together three unpublished projects by Bertrand Bonello: The Death of Laurie Markovitch, Madeleine Among the Dead, and American Music, as well as the script for the short film Cindy, the Doll is Mine.

The concept of the unrealized film occupies a unique space in film history, often studied under the rubric of cinema in the negative. For many directors, the screenplays, notes, and location photographs of unproduced projects represent a significant portion of their creative output. These ghost films, though never projected on a screen, continue to haunt the filmmaker's realized work, sometimes reemerging as fragmented scenes, musical cues, or dialogue in later productions.

This volume brings together three unpublished projects by Bertrand Bonello alongside the script for his short film Cindy, the Doll is Mine. Published on the occasion of a retrospective dedicated to him by the Centre Pompidou, the book includes The Death of Laurie Markovitch, Madeleine Among the Dead, and American Music. Readers interested in contemporary French cinema and the creative processes of filmmaking may find this exploration of unrealized art relevant.