{"title":"Sensing History. On the Uses of Medium-Specific Noise in Eastern European Found Footage Films","authors":"Melinda Blos-Jáni","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how sensual aspects of the moving image, such as visual errors, blurring and technical disturbances are employed in found footage films dealing with Eastern European socialist past and the regime changing events. In the selected films Eastern European socialist visual culture is reworked with the cinematic practices of the post-media age in order to shape the spectators’ historical consciousness. By deliberate reframing and intensifying the medium-specific noises of the archival sources, or by an artificially created visual precariousness a new type of spectatorial awareness is created. The article delineates four different strategies through which the mediality of the recycled archival footage is brought to the fore and made operational (engaging the senses of its viewers).","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79293027","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":"An Uncanny Cinema, a Cinema of the Uncanny. The Trope of the Doll in the Films of Manoel de Oliveira","authors":"Hajnal Király","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0002","url":null,"abstract":"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) – with the aim of tracking the line of transformations of an emblematic object into an aesthetic principle, a central figure involving psychoanalytical concepts such as the Freudian “uncanny,” the fetish or the transitional object.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87240572","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":"A Good Concept Should Be both Very Concrete and Very Abstract.”","authors":"Ágnes Pethő","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0011","url":null,"abstract":"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 articles, at least two of your books can be considered as real milestones regarding the theory of intermediality published in English: the edited collection of essays, resulting from an international conference that you organized in Växjö,","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83998469","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":"”Let Man Remain Dead:” The Posthuman Ecology of Tale of Tales","authors":"Francesco Sticchi","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0003","url":null,"abstract":"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 redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism; however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film Tale of Tales: by staging baroque and excessive characters, it allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74573467","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":"Gestural Intermediality in Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen (1983)","authors":"F. Giraud","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0007","url":null,"abstract":"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, arts, and media. The interconnection between the gestures of the musicians who are rehearsing Beethoven’s late string quartets and the lovers’ gestures, inspired by Rodin’s sculptures, gives cohesion to the hybrid aesthetics of the film. Gesture is the element which incorporates, develops, and sets in motion the features of the other arts, not only by creating an in-between space that forges links between media, but especially by exhibiting the process of making itself. Indeed, the relationship between the performing, musical, and visual arts is made visible in the exhibition of the corporeal effort of making (whether it be making music, film, or love) that tends to open the boundaries separating the different arts. The aural and visual qualities of gestures communicate between themselves, generating rhythms and forms that circulate in the continuous flow of moving images. By fostering the analogy between the gesture of carving, of performing music, and of making film, Godard highlights what unites the arts in cinema, while feeding on their differences.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90801531","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 Camera in House Arrest. Tactics of Non-Cinema in Jafar Panahi’s Films","authors":"Judit Pieldner","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0006","url":null,"abstract":"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 between cinema and the “real,” defying the limitations of filmmaking in astounding ways. The paper addresses the issue of non-cinema, pertaining to those instances of cinematic “impurity” in which “the medium disregards its own limits in order to politically interfere with the other arts and life itself” (Nagib 2016, 132). Panahi’s overtly confrontational (non-)cinematic discourse is an eminent example of “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001). His artisanal and secret use of the camera in deterritorialized conditions and extreme limitations as regards profilmic space – house arrest, fake taxi interior – gives way for multilayered reflexivity, incorporating non-actorial presence, performative self-filming and theatricality as subversive gestures, with a special emphasis on the off-screen and remediated video-orality performed in front of, or directly addressed to the camera. The paper explores the ways in which the filmmaker’s tactics become powerful gestures of “politicized immediacy” (Naficy 2001, 6) that call for the (inter)medial as an also indispensably political act ((Schröter 2010).","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85129625","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 Use of Other Media within Film as a Passage to Material Reality.”","authors":"Ágnes Pethő","doi":"10.1515/AUSFM-2018-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/AUSFM-2018-0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83262983","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":"Roy Andersson’s Tableau Aesthetic: A Cinematic Social Space Between Painting and Theatre","authors":"Fátima Chinita","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0004","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88149364","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":"Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Beauty-as-Attraction","authors":"Dan Wiegand","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0001","url":null,"abstract":"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 and reconciled with the attraction value of cinema. As a discussion of early film theory reveals, the concept of “beauty in film” depended on a taming of filmic motion, something that had already been realized in performance practices of tableaux vivants. In the subsequent analysis of the cultural context of tableaux vivants in European variety theatres, I outline a specific mode of address, which I term “beauty-as-attraction:” an overlap of the older aesthetics of the beautiful and the more modern aesthetics of attraction. Through concluding film analysis, I show how tableaux vivants became a model and source of inspiration for early cinema, thus bringing to fruition the two-fold address of beauty-as-attraction in a new media context.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79956965","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":"Approaches to Studying Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema","authors":"Ágnes Pethő","doi":"10.1515/ausfm-2018-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0009","url":null,"abstract":"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 of recent films. It identifies in contemporary cinema a tendency to add new dimensions to the relations of in-betweenness regarding both the connection of cinema to reality and its inter-art entanglements. Finally, the article describes a new type of intermediality, which integrates elements of trans-textuality, creating a format of expanded cinema within cinema. This strategy is presented in the context of Eastern European cinema through a short case study of Cristi Puiu’s film, Sieranevada (2016).","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89909240","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}