Spectres Are Haunting Europe¶

Summary: 2016 documentary by Maria Kourkouta and Niki Yannari, shot in 2015–16 at the Idomeni refugee camp on the railtracks at the Greece / North Macedonia border. The film borrows its title from the opening line of the Communist Manifesto. Structurally split into a 67-minute digital long-take observational section and a 13-minute 16mm black-and-white hand-held coda. Central case study of section 3.2.3 of cinema-of-marbles.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, section 3.2.3 (lines 2953–3275).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Context¶

Idomeni in 2015–16 was the makeshift camp where thousands of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were stranded after several European countries closed their borders mid-route. The Dublin III Regulation (No. 604/2013) made Greece, as country of first registration, the designated gatekeeper. The camp formed on the disused railtracks of the Greece / North Macedonia border. Maria Kourkouta — a Paris-based Greek filmmaker — traveled there to record. The film was released in 2016.

Structure¶

First 67 minutes: thirty long takes on digital video, primarily eye-level steady cam (with occasional close-ups of feet in thick mud). People are mostly non-faced — covered, in flux, passing the lens. The audio is direct sound, an unprocessed "mangle of voices" largely in Arabic, deliberately untranslated.
Final 13 minutes: 16mm black-and-white, hand-held camera attached to the filmmaker's body. Medium close-ups of refugees facing the lens. Vivid faciality, expressivity, smiling. A scripted voice-over (by Niki Yannari, voiced by the composer Lena Platonos).

The mediality argument¶

This is the dissertation's central worked example of how analog and digital are not interchangeable. Yannari's account from the post-screening Q&A at documenta 14 (Kassel, 28 July 2016) is quoted at length: refugees were so habituated to digital cameras that they ignored the crew, but the 16mm camera "drew them in" — they recognized it as effortful, intimate machinery, and grew trusting.

The 16mm camera thus performs a political operation: it restores faciality where digital media had produced "hypervisible invisibility" (Arrivé) or "carceral visuality" (Fleetwood).

Theoretical scaffolding¶

The reading draws on:

Agamben on zoē / bios and the inclusive exclusion of bare life.
Glissant on "the right to opacity" and the township name Idomeni as past participle of βλέπω, to behold.
Derrida on the "touch of language" and the colonial inheritance of the mother tongue.
Resnais's Night and Fog (1956), the recognizable cinematic referent for the rail-track imagery.
Mark Nunes on the "poetics of noise."

The chapter also passes through the dissertation's larger concern with hauntology — the refugees are doubly spectralized, both by Agambenian bare-life status and by the over-imaging of international media.

Documenta 14¶

The film was one of the few Greek films screened in The Parliament of Bodies, documenta 14's public program (Kassel, 28 July 2016). The chapter uses this fact to anchor a long subsection on documenta 14's Greek leg — Adam Szymczyk's "Learning from Athens," Varoufakis's "crisis tourism" critique, and Tramboulis and Tzirtzilakis's reading of d14 as a failed "political metonymy."

What the dissertation does with the film¶

Spectres is read as the worked-example case for several of the dissertation's claims simultaneously:

That marmarization of digital images (here, refugee imagery) produces faceless monuments.
That obsolete analog technologies can serve as anti-monumentalizing tools.
That the double-structure is constitutive of crisis-era documentary.
That the boundary-archive needs not just material specificity but also a politics of opacity.