Abstract Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), an homage to the Argentine tango, situated in-between autobiography and fiction, creates multiple passages between art and life, the corporeal and the spiritual, emotional involvement and professional detachment. The romance story of filmmaker Sally Potter and dancer Pablo Verón is also readable as an allegory of interart relations, a dialogue of the

The VR installation Hamlet Encounters is part of a larger project in which we try to find out what we can do with new technologies in live performances. In the case of Hamlet Encounters we are experimenting with virtual reality and motion capture. We try to combine these technologies, wondering what we can do with these and what these can do with us. In our practice as research project we primarily

Abstract The paper discusses pertinent aspects of the screen as a device of framing and re-ordering. Television and video screens introduced in filmic diegesis are attributed three main functions (spatial, temporal, and topical re-ordering) and are related to the relationships Gerard Genette establishes between first-order narrative and metadiegetic levels (1987), as well as to Lars Elleström’s extracommunicational

Abstract This paper will present the role of the loops and the peculiarities of the mixed reality experience in the case of the performance of Illegitimate (stage adaptation by Adrian Sitaru, based on an original text by Adrian Sitaru and Alina Grigore). The author argues that the loops, defined by Manovich as “a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age” are also the key for the possible

Abstract The present article analyses the manner in which AAA action-adventure games adapt, quote, and reference Shakespeare’s plays in order to borrow the bard’s cultural capital and assert themselves as forms of art. My analysis focuses on three major releases: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, BioShock: Infinite, and God of War. The article shows that these games employ narrative content

Abstract In contemporary artworks of so-called post-media assemblage, screens can be argued to emphasize, interconnect and rearticulate relationships between various parts in various modalities of image-making and display. They can be understood to produce gesturality that maintains conditions of mediality, which is the sustenance of relations between different parts of the media ensemble. This paper

Abstract According to Rebecca Rouse’s concept of “media of attraction” (2016), the mediums of virtual reality have four characteristics: they are participatory, interdisciplinary, unassimilated and seamed. The author’s hypothesis is that even though 360-degree films and virtual reality experiences as seamed mediums are remediating the medium of film, they have the characteristics of the medium of live

Abstract Joan Jonas’s large survey exhibition at Tate Modern (2018) highlighted the contemporary relevance of this pioneer of performance art in her juxtapositions of analogue and virtual methods. Her process often relies on a ground or stage where physical remnants of her performances are tangible. Drawing from these insights and exploring figure-ground relations through a selection of works by various

Abstract The article investigates two seemingly conflicting critical approaches of haptic and transgressive cinema, which emerged along with the corporeal turn in film studies, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While haptics operates with undistinguishable figures and demands extreme closeness and an active caressing gaze, transgression is usually seen from a distance and subverts the social, political

Abstract Prerogative of what Jung calls visionary art, the aesthetics of German Expressionist cinema is “primarily expressive of the collective unconscious,” and – unlike the psychological art, whose goal is “to express the collective consciousness of a society” – they have succeeded not only to “compensate their culture for its biases” by bringing “to the consciousness what is ignored or repressed

Abstract The article is based on 20 in-depth interviews with women professionals conducted for a more comprehensive study focusing on gender roles within the film and television industry in Turkey. This study examines the career possibilities for women, the experience of being a woman working in television and cinema, and the working environment, including work-life balance issues, experiences of discrimination

Abstract The article looks at German Expressionist cinema through the eyes of contemporary, non-commercial filmmakers, to attempt to discover what aspects of this 1920s approach may guide filmmakers today. By drawing parallels between the outsider nature of Weimar artist-driven approaches to collaborative filmmaking and twenty-first-century non-mainstream independent filmmaking outside of major motion

Abstract The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to

Abstract Robert Bresson did not only distribute musical excerpts and sounds in his films, but also often conceived the whole film running in a general rhythm, including the repetition and variation of shots in their contents and length. David Bordwell (1985) considered Bresson’s films as examples of the style centred “parametric mode of narration.” More than that, after Jean-Louis Provoyeur (2003)

Abstract This article examines the modernist medievalism of Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight (Von morgens bis mitternachts), discussing the influence of the morality play genre on its form. The characterization and action in Kaiser’s play mirrors and evokes that of morality plays influenced by and including the late-medieval Dutch play Elckerlijc and its English translation as Everyman, in particular

Abstract An (un)conventional encounter between humans and alien beings has long been one of the main thematic preoccupations of the genre of science fiction. Such stories would thus include typical invasion narratives, as in the case of the three science fiction films I will discuss in the present paper: the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978; Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Abstract German Expressionism, although often viewed as a uniquely German phenomenon, was part of a broader crisis affecting the European avant-garde at the time of the First World War. The experience of modernity, so proudly displayed at events like the Universal Exposition of 1900, inspired both hopes and fears which were reflected in the works of artists, writers and musicians throughout Europe

Abstract This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate some of the reasons why Lynch’s highly complex narrative has gained a cult – if not classic – status in recent film history. To explain

Abstract In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015) within the perspective of embodied cognition. I consider film experience as an affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer’s embodiment of the visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm

Abstract The article attempts a brief overview and evaluation of the main theoretical approaches that have emerged in the study of cinematic intermediality in the last decades since intermediality has become an established research term in media studies. It distinguishes three major paradigms in theorizing intermedia phenomena and outlines some of the directions of change in the intermedial strategies

Beginning from the 1990s, intermediality has not only been a highly productive concept that generated a great deal of analyses and theoretical writings that contributed to the understanding of media hybridity and interart connections, but has also proved to be a somewhat nebulous term that semiotics and media studies repeatedly attempted to define and categorize once and for all, or quite the contrary

Abstract I argue that the trope of the doll, recurrent throughout the films of Manoel de Oliveira, is a visual figure that beyond narrative becomes a discourse on modernity and modernism, stillness and movement, life and death. Accordingly, I propose an overview of occurences of dolls and of “dollness” throughout the work of Oliveira – from Aniki Bobó (1942) to The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) –

Abstract Given the present proliferation of profilmic electronic screens in narrative feature films, it is of some interest to examine their role apart from that of denoting objects pertaining to everyday reality. Electronic screens within the European-type filmic diegeses – characterized by adhering to conventions of (hyper)realism, non-hypermediation and character-centered storytelling – in a digital

Abstract Although the intermediality of Jean-Luc Godard’s films of the 1980s has been extensively analysed, especially the tableaux vivants in Passion (1982), little has been said on the intermedial dimension of gesture in the director’s work of this period. The article investigates how the gestural flows in Godard’s First Name: Carmen (Prénom Carmen, 1983) interrelate heterogeneous forms, meanings

Abstract In close intratextual connection with earlier pieces of Jafar Panahi’s oeuvre, pre-eminently The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Offside (2006), his recent films made in illegality, including This Is Not a Film (In film nist, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardeh, Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, 2013) and Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015), reformulate the relationship

You are Professor of Comparative Literature at the Linnaeus University in Sweden with an impressive research output, comprising several books, edited books, articles and book chapters written both in English and Swedish, some also translated into Portuguese and several other languages (listed in detail on the webpage of the university: https://lnu.se/en/staff/lars.ellestrom/). Besides several important

Abstract This article offers a case study in intermediality and explores relationships between tableaux vivants performances and early cinema around 1900. It locates processes of intermedial exchange not only at the level of form but also at the level of modes of address and reception. More specifically, the study is concerned with how bourgeois notions of beauty were transferred to the film image

Abstract The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), You, the Living (Du levande, 2007), and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron, 2014). The Swedish director depicts the human condition afflicted by the loss of its humanity through a personal style that he calls “the

Abstract The relation between war and cinema, propaganda and cinema is a most intriguing area, located at the intersection of media studies, history and film aesthetics. A truly tragic moment in human history, the First World War was also the first to be fought before film cameras. And while in the field, airborne reconnaissance became cinematic (Virilio), domestic propaganda occupied the screen of

Abstract The paper investigates Brothers and Sisters (Geschwister-Kardeşler, 1995), the first piece of Thomas Arslan’s Berlin-trilogy. While putting the film into the socio-historical context of the newly united German Republic, the study aims to highlight the characters’ struggle and constant shift between their Turkish and German identity. Through the narrative and textual analysis of Brothers and

Abstract The paper investigates two possible critical arguments following the pictorial turn. The first is formulated within ocularcentrism, the dominance of sight, and starts with the right to visibility as a general principle that governs today’s digital culture but gets twisted in special cases like the Auschwitz photos of the Shoa, the Abu Ghraib prison videos, or recently the website called Yolocaust

Abstract This work sets off to offer a polemical response to postcolonialist theories advanced by Homi Bhabha in his seminal work The Location of Culture, particularly to Bhabha’s famous notions of ambivalence and mimicry purportedly used as methods of struggle against colonialism. Reading Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000) as an allegory for the colonization of

Abstract This study proposes a twofold analysis: the presumable strategies of the December 1989 events in Romania and their complexity as it appears in later filmic re-enactments. These re-enactments as theatrical “translations” offer a rhetorical reading of past events, and can also be seen as practices of memories inscribed in the body. The events are interpreted in the duality of the archival image

Abstract Active since 1980, the multidisciplinary Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK, New Slovenian Art) and its branches, the fine arts group IRWIN, industrial music band Laibach and theatre troupe Gledališče Sester Scipion Nasice (The Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre), have seen their works widely and often controversially discussed, most often in the context of subversion and over

Abstract Modern audiences engage with representations of the past in a particular way via the medium of television, negotiating a shared understanding of the past. This is evidenced by the increasing popularity of reboots, newly developed history and documentary programming, re-use of archival footage and nostalgia content. This article takes a closer look at television’s abilities to circulate and

Abstract The theatre of Jay Scheib blends theatrical and filmic features, allowing for a theoretical investigation of the manner in which two different media coexist on the same expressive support. How can two distinct media like film and theatre fuse and, at the same time, be apprehended as separate artistic means in a single artifact? The present article uses a theoretical interpretive metaphor that

Abstract This paper inspects the concept of immersion in video games as a gradient category resulting from the degrees of interactivity and immediacy. By factoring in the objective technological affordances of media, as well as the subjective impression that these affordances help create, and the culturally constructed nature of gameplay experience, I argue that high degrees of interactivity and immediacy

Abstract The so-called German Weimar Cinema encompasses a profusion of films that used frame narratives. In the case of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924), as the framing stems from a literary act (the stories are framed by the act of narration), the film proposes the mise-en-abyme technique as a sort of immersion into the intermedial when it deals with notions like speaking, writing

Abstract It is widely accepted that Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema revolves around the representation of the gaze. Many critics argue that he should be considered a late modernist who repeats the self-reflexive gestures of modernist European cinema decades after they were first introduced. The present paper will contradict this assertion by investigating the problematic of the Kiarostamian gaze and analyzing

Abstract The winner of many prestigious prizes (Oscar for the best foreign language film, Grand Prize of the Cannes Film Festival, and the Golden Globe among them), the Hungarian film, Son of Saul – according to most critics – represents the Holocaust trauma in a completely new and intriguing way. The filmmakers have invented a special form in order to tackle the heroic task of showing the unwatchable

Abstract The essay offers a brief overview of famous Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s intermedial practices. By exploring a number of artistic media (drama, theatre, novel, television play, film) the artist tried to get at the essentials of each medium by virtue of his minimalist and media-conscious aesthetics. As a result of this gesture he uncovered certain transmedial properties such as musical

Abstract This paper analyses two recent works by American filmmaker Ken Jacobs that deal with aspects of remediation. The first is A Tom Tom Chaser, in which Jacobs records the telecine process that transforms the classic silent film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son from chemical into electronic media. The film is riddled with poetic turns inviting the audience to rediscover the medial noise hidden by images

Abstract Through films such as Tony Manero (2008), Santiago 73, Post Mortem (2010), and No (2012), the productions of Chilean director Pablo Larraín have focused on the historical and political themes that marked the last decades in the life of his country: the putsch against Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. This paper analyses the last film of the trilogy, dedicated to the 1988

Abstract Operating self-sufficiently on the fringes of the Japanese film industry for almost his entire career, the work of independent filmmaker Tsukamoto Shinya1 is perhaps best-known for its uncompromising, musical freneticism, as well as its corporeal spectacle. However, Tsukamoto’s dynamic clashing of visual media signifiers, such as those of theatre and television (industries within which he

Abstract Drawing on Brigitte Peucker’s question – “in cinematic experience, what promotes the impression of reality, and when does medium awareness come into play?” – I examine how Sokurov’s family trilogy constitutes a certain oscillation between the immediate and the constructed. The films under discussion connect with the sensual, physical-biological and socio-political reality, while, simultaneously

Abstract The paper surveys two modes of representation present in contemporary Hungarian and Romanian cinema, namely magic realism and minimalist realism, as two ways of rendering the “real” in the Central Eastern European geocultural context. New Hungarian Film tends to display narratives that share the features of what is generally assumed as being magic realist, accompanied by a high degree of stylization

Abstract In The Lady and the Duke (2001), Eric Rohmer provides an unusual and “conservative” account of the French Revolution by recurring to classical and yet “revolutionary” means. The interpolation between painting and film produces a visual surface which pursues a paradoxical effect of immediacy and verisimilitude. At the same time though, it underscores the represented nature of the images in

Abstract Drawing on the application of C. S. Peirce’s notion of indexicality, this paper argues that iterative imaging technologies modulate the manner in which moving images represent reality and determine how they are traced back to that referent. Rather than subscribing to the canonical divergence between analogue and digital technologies, the paper argues that current moving image theories do not

Abstract This article offers an in-depth analysis of 2010 British film The Arbor by Clio Barnard. The director’s debut feature is a groundbreaking work dedicated to the lives of playwright Andrea Dunbar and her eldest daughter Lorraine. Dunbar grew up in the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford and drew on her own experiences to write her first play The Arbor at the age of 15, followed by Rita, Sue and Bob