Several years ago, while visiting the Roman Baths in Bath, I found myself overwhelmed by a profound feeling of existential insignificance. Standing beside the spring water in the remarkably well-preserved bath house, I started picturing the humans, not so unlike me, who had come to wash themselves at that exact spot almost 2,000 years earlier. Each of them doubtless had hopes, dreams and everyday worries that seemed vitally important, yet all of them had long since been rendered flatly meaningless by the same indifferent march of time that would one day relieve me of my own trivial ambitions. It was almost enough to put me off my souvenir fudge.
That same disorientating sensation rushed back to me as I watched How to Shoot a Ghost, a short film by Charlie Kaufman that screened last Friday at AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Kaufman has often explored the big questions of life, death and memory in surreal and astonishing screenplays, including Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, but here he directs from a lyrical script written by the Canadian-Greek poet Eva HD.
