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 and intracommunicational actual and virtual spheres (2018). The visibility through noise of the televisual and of the video media is theorized based on Sybille Krämer’s media theory (2015) and three pre-digital arthouse films: Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1984), Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996), and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).1

Abstract This article examines the modernist medievalism of Georg Kaiser’sFrom 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 playElckerlijcand its English translation asEveryman, in particular Hugo von Hofmannsthal’sJedermann, first produced in Berlin in 1911. The medievalism of Kaiser’s play is particularly evident when it is compared to Karl Heinz Martin’s film version of the text, produced in 1920. The play’s allegory and message, though contemporary, are less specifically historically contextual than the film’s, while its central protagonist is more representative of generic capitalist subjectivity. The detective film shapes Martin’s adaptation, obscuring the morality play conventions and therefore medievalism of Kaiser’s earlier text.

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 complex image,” a tableau aesthetic that instigates social criticism, and is dependent upon long shots, immobility, unchanging shot scale, and layered compositions. The author establishes a connection between artistic and social space and scrutinizes the challenges that this “complexity” poses for the film viewer from an intermedial perspective in which cinema enters into a dialogue with two other art forms: painting and theatre. Four specific issues are discussed: (1) the intertwining of reality and artificiality as a “hyperreality;” (2) the visual compositions which are simultaneously self-contained and entirely open, highlighting a tension between volume and surface; (3) the opposition between stasis and movement, conveying a meaningful social contrast and the characters’ angst; (4) the pictoriality of the image.

Abstract This paper analyses two recent works by American filmmaker Ken Jacobs that deal with aspects of remediation. The first isA Tom Tom Chaser, in which Jacobs records the telecine process that transforms the classic silent filmTom, Tom, the Piper’s Sonfrom chemical into electronic media. The film is riddled with poetic turns inviting the audience to rediscover the medial noise hidden by images. Moreover, Jacobs focuses on the moment of transition from a material medium (the film strip) to the immaterial (the image, the video), so that the noise brings the viewer closer to a perception or brief capture of the medium in itself. Images are both figured and disfigured along this process. The second work isThe Guests, an unconventional 3D film in which Jacobs transforms a short take from a Lumière Brothers film by discovering unseen views of the original footage. In his remediation of the 3D technology, Jacobs employs the Pulfrich effect, which allows him to blur the images of the archival film and to create instances of uncertainty between the views coming from the two human eyes. As a result of this procedure, the characters in the film seem to look directly at the audience. The analysis of both films highlights the poetry of the typical manoeuvre by which Jacobs perverts the archival medium, whereupon the viewing mode between media denaturalizes the usual media gaze (framed and representational), focusing on the moment of viewing in itself. This, as a result, favours the medium for what it is and subverts the gaze that expects something representational, discursive, perhaps story-driven.

Abstract InThe 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 a complex dynamic of “reality effect” and critical meta-discourse. The aim of this paper is the analysis of the main discursive strategies deployed by the film to disclose an intermedial effectiveness in the light of its original digital aesthetics. Furthermore, it focuses on the problematic relationship between image and reality, deliberately addressed by Rohmer through the dichotomy simulation/illusion. Finally, drawing on the works of Louis Marin, it deals with the representation of history and the related ideology, in order to point out the film’s paradoxical nature, caught in an undecidability between past and present.

Abstract This article offers an analysis of Videograms of a Revolution (1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujica and The Pixelated Revolution (2011) by Rabih Mroue, which both reflect on the role of amateur recordings in a revolution. While the first deals with the abundant footage of the mass protests in 1989 Romania, revealing how images became operative in the unfolding of the revolution, the second shows that mobile phone videos disseminated by the Syrian protesters in 2011 respond to the desire of immediacy with the blurry, fragmentary images taken in the heart of the events. One of the most significant results of this new situation is the way image production steers the comportment of people involved in the events. Ordinary participants become actors performing certain roles, while the events themselves are being seen as cinematic. This increased theatricality of mass protests can thus be seen as an instance of blurring the lines between video and photography on the one hand and performance, theatre and cinema on the other.

Abstract By coining the term “unreliable narrator” Wayne Booth hypothesized another agent in his model besides the author, the implicit author, to explain the double coding of narratives where a distorted view of reality and the exposure of this distortion are presented simultaneously. The article deals with the applicability of the concept in visual narratives. Since unreliability is traditionally considered to be intertwined with first person narratives, it works through subjective mediators. According to scholarly literature on the subject, the narrator has to be strongly characterized, or in other words, anthropomorphized. In the case of film, the main problem is that the narrator is either missing or the narration cannot be attributed entirely to them. There is a medial rupture where the apparatus mediates the story instead of a character’s oral or written discourse. The present paper focuses on some important but overlooked questions about the nature of cinematic storytelling through a re-examination of |the lying flashback in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright. Can a character-narrator control the images the viewer sees? How can the filmic image still be unreliable without having an anthropomorphic narrator? How useful is the term focalization when we are dealing with embedded character-narratives in film?

Abstract One of the oldest complex forms of intermediality is the static live-performance adaptation of the iconographic qualities of well-known stories. Early examples of this phenomenon are the depictions of biblical scenes in the form of grand (and largely static) tableaux in medieval Mystery Plays, very popular until the emergence of the professional entertainment stage. The nineteenth century had its fascination with the tableaux vivants - not coincidentally during the time that photography was introduced - and the late twentieth century saw the beginning of the newest variety with cosplay, which has by now become a global cultural phenomenon. Cosplay, the activity of fans dressing up and posing in a visually recognizable way as characters from popular media franchises such as manga, anime, or TV series, developed from role-playing activities into its current, highly ritualized static form through its symbiosis with amateur photography. This paper wants to first analyse the underlying art form in its historical varieties from an intermedial perspective, and in connection with that, it will explore the deeper philosophical significance of this practice, looking particularly at the role of embodiment.

Abstract Keynote talk given at the conference of ISIS <http://lnu.se/research-groups/isis?l=en> (International Society for Intermedial Studies) “Rethinking Intermediality in the Digital Age” organized by the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, between the 24th and 26th of October 2013. (The photos of Henry Jenkins illustrating the article were taken by Ágnes Pethő.)

Abstract Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance (Koi no tsumi, 2011) was adapted from an actual crime in Tokyo’s love hotel: an educated woman (a prostitute at night) was found decapitated and her limbs were re-assembled with a sex-doll. Sono renders this through his cinematic narrative blurring the distinction between true crime and fictional sin like Rancière’s idea that everything is a narrative dissipating the opposition between “fact and fiction,” and “quasi-body” becomes a product of human literarity while an imaginary collective body is formed to fill the fracture in-between. In Sono’s story, the victim is a literature professor tormented by an incestuous desire for her father, whose favorite book is Kafka’s Castle. Thus she compares the love-hotel district where she turns loose at night as a castle of lusts. Here the narrative becomes a collective body that puppeteers human “quasi-bodies” in a Kafkaesque spatio-temporal aporia, and time’s spatialized horizontally with the germs of desire spread like a contagion on a Deleuzian “plane of immanence.”