{"title":"Film and Performance: Intermedial Intersections","authors":"Stephen M. Barber","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Film and performance have always been closely interconnected, from the origins of cinematic projection in 1895. This essay, with a theoretical focus, explores how film and moving-image forms work to transform performance when they intersect with it, and vice versa. It examines how film serves to mediate and ‘reframe’ the experience and the time of live performance events, notably through the incorporation of moving-image elements into the space of performance, and through particular forms of projection and audience perception. It also probes how conceptions of intermediality can be traced specifically through the intersection of film and performance. The essay spans the entirety of moving image culture, beginning with an account of the connections between film and performance in the work of the German innovators of moving-image projection, the Skladanowsky Brothers, and ending with an examination of the work of the contemporary Lebanese filmmaker and performance artist, Rabih Mroué, whose work resonates with early cinema’s performative strategies but focuses also on current digital media events such as the dangerous ‘performative’ public filming with iPhones of government snipers in the streets of Syria.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125291091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intermediality and the Origins of Cinema","authors":"B. Wiseman","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores intermediality in early moving images. It traces manifestations of the cinematic prior to the invention of the cinematograph. It argues that, from Carlo Ponti's Megaletoscopio (1862), inspired by Daguerre’s dioramas, to stroboscopic projections and the early animations of Émile Reynaud, cinema came about in-between technologies, in-between different viewing experiences and viewing spaces, and in-between media.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124362242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performance, Moving Image, Installation: The Making of Body of War and Faith","authors":"Isabel Rocamora","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter, moving image artist Isabel Rocamora reflects on the thematic, aesthetic and philosophical concerns that drive her intermedial art practice. The essay traces the ways in which core elements of her performance work – gesture, place, temporality and presence – in turn inform and are transformed by her film and video installations. A discussion of the ethical dilemmas that motivate Body of War (2010) and Faith (2015) – namely, military violence and ethnic segregation – opens up problems of identity and alterity as well as questions of form, structure and register. To address these, Rocamora places the illuminating philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas into dialogue with her own directorial approach to casting, location, performance, cinematography, sound design and exhibition architecture. The aim of her moving images, she explains, is to draw out the personal from the collective in mise en scènes that dislodge performative action to expose ontological presence. The creative means, the essay concludes, emerge from the productive strife between the media.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"319 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115226783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Muybridge’s Disobedient Horses: Non-stop Stop-motion","authors":"Anna Vasof","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter, the media artist Anna Vasof discusses her animation project Non-Stop Stop-Motion, situated at the intersection between video, performance, the fine arts and photography. Non-Stop Stop-Motion is an ongoing practice-based artistic research project, which investigates where we can find the essence of cinematic illusion when we look into everyday life and what happens when we use everyday situations, objects, spaces and actions as cinematographic mechanisms. This question leads to multiple observations of everyday life and experimentation therein.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133521895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Does a Dance Filmmaker See?","authors":"Adam Roberts","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter, filmmaker Adam Roberts discusses three of his films, Hands (1995), blue yellow (1995) and Pieces of the Quiet Dance (2006). Meditating on the intimate relationship between the filmmaker and dancers in movement, he touches upon recurrent influences or concerns in his work, including carved funerary objects (‘stelae’), still life versus portraiture, and the forest glade as a cleared space (a space made and filled with light). In his films, he explains, the body of the filmed dancer is apprehended as a storehouse of infinite potential, a gesture into the past and the future. To film the human figure, he asserts, is to unveil a body in all its virtuality, in a celebration of the moment of discovery.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116066663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cinematography’s Blind Spots: Artistic Exploitations of the Film Frame","authors":"Gabriele Jutz","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses filmic and photographic works that focus on isolated film frames, whether extracted from the continuum of a film strip, as in Slide Movie (Gebhard Sengmüller, 2007) and Und ich blieb stehen. (Thames, London) (Susanne Miggitsch, 2017), or captured photographically from a book or a viewing table, as in Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon) (Peter Tscherkassky, 1984/2008) and Précis de decomposition (Éric Rondepierre, 1993–1999). Usually rendered invisible during projection, a single frame represents the ‘blind spot’ of cinematography. An explicitly ideological perspective was offered in 1971 by French film critic Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, who distinguished between the use of extracted frames (or ‘photograms’) and idealized still photographs produced on a film set. These ‘parasitic photographs’ no longer bear traces of the material state of a given film copy; they look flawless and perfectly meet ideological requirements of ‘legibility’ and ‘beauty’. The examples presented here bypass ideological claims, because, on the one hand, their dissected frames belong to the same order as the film they are taken from, and, on the other, they result in varying forms of ‘illegibility’.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122833271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Filming and Feeling between the Arts: Pascale Breton, Suite armoricaine and Eugène Green, Le Fils de Joseph","authors":"M. Schmid","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the intersections between cinema, literature, painting and music in two recent French films: Pascale Breton’s Suite Armoricaine and Eugène Green’s Le Fils de Joseph [The Son of Joseph, both 2016]. With special reference to Proust, Georges de La Tour and Caravaggio, the author argues for the significance of the other arts in these works as a means of interrogating questions of belonging, personal growth and transmission. Drawing on Jacques Aumont’s notion of artistic ‘migration’ as well as on Alain Badiou’s concept of cinema’s ‘breached frontier’, where ideas can pass through the invocation of other art forms, the chapter explores cinematic intermediality as a privileged vehicle for making ideas and emotions apprehensible in a non-verbal, sensory mode.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131906499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Periphery to the Interstices: Avant-garde Film, Medium Specificity and Intermediality, 1970–2015","authors":"Christopher Townsend","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter surveys an important shift in the last fifty years in the study of avant-garde film within academia. It explores the move from study at the margins of widely separated disciplines, notably Art History and the nascent field of Film Studies, to the interstices between increasingly connected disciplines, but focused upon English and Modern Languages. As a consequence of this move, the author argues, avant-garde film has become the object of a form of scholarship that scrutinises the intermedial relations of films and texts. With this attention, mostly from scholars trained in literature and textual analysis, there is a risk of losing the technical competence in film analysis that characterised the earlier mode of scholarship. In the 1960s and 70s, much of the crucial work in the field was undertaken by practising, experimental filmmakers who understood the material possibilities and constraints of their medium. Both approaches and sites of scholarship bring particular benefits and problems, and contemporary study of the intermedial relationships of experimental film in the wider, intermedial, culture needs to account for both in its historiography.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123330649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Artwork/Statement as Intermedial Nexus: Paul Sharits’s N:O:T:H:I:N:G","authors":"B. Dicker","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter asks if an artist statement can be integral to, rather than simply illuminate, an artwork. The close-knit rapport between Paul Sharits’s 1968 flicker film N:O:T:H:I:N:G and some remarks about it published in Film Culture the following year suggest such an ‘intermedial nexus’. The concepts of ‘differential specificity’ as developed by Louis Althusser and Marcelin Pleynet and that of the ‘avant-garde gambit’ set out by Griselda Pollock are useful in navigating this proposition.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"19 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113984796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dream Screen: On Cinema and Painting, Blur and Absorption","authors":"M. Beugnet","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446341.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores some of the ways in which low definition or blur orchestrate the encounter between film and painting. Depending on the technique, film stock, the choice of analogue or digital filming, and the degree of experimentation, such an encounter may take an endless variety of forms. Focusing on the effects of blur on figurality and the representation of the human form, this chapter interrogates intermedial resonances as well as the regimes of identification or absorption that are produced when the depiction of the figure eschews visual clarity. \u0000With reference to films ranging from the silent to the digital era, the author considers the sense of absorption and empathetic response the softening of contours elicits from the viewer, as well as the contradictory effect of the blurring of lines, between intimacy and distance, closeness and concealment. In turn, M. Beugnet looks at the different kind of absorption offered by the chaotic universes of the cinema of sensation, before discussing the tension between theatricality and absorption in evidence in recent filmmaking.","PeriodicalId":124580,"journal":{"name":"Cinematic Intermediality","volume":"221 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132324864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}