Search Results

The introduction offers an overview of a wide spectrum of approaches to studying intermediality in the context of Eastern European cinemas, from concept-based studies to analyses of films, and the stylistic devices of intermediality. It presents the way in which the poetics of intermediality can reflect not only the correlations between arts and media, but also between art and life, corporeality and abstraction. The relevance of intermediality is that it enables us to grasp the complexity of reality and culture, to observe various tensional states of in-betweenness, along with anxieties, relations of power and conflict that define life in Eastern Europe. The introduction outlines some of the main figurations of intermediality or 'strategies of in-betweenness’ which have significantly shaped the aesthetic of contemporary Eastern European films followed by a brief summary of each chapter in this volume.

This chapter addresses the aesthetic of black-and-white filmmaking in the digital age, with special attention to the ways in which the black-and-white image manifests its perceptual otherness in between the analogue and the digital, the natural and the artificial, the cinematic and the photographic. Through examples taken from contemporary Polish and Czech cinema, including Hi, Tereska! (Cześć, Tereska, Robert Gliński, 2001), TheReverse (Rewers, Borys Lankosz, 2009), Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013), Papusza (Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, 2013), Cold War (Zimna wojna, Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018) and I, Olga Hepnarová (Já, Olga Hepnarová, Tomáš Weinreb and Petr Kazda, 2016), it discusses the uses and functions of the black-and-white image rendering female identity caught in the grip of Eastern European history. The black-and-white image is often associated with high artistry and the photographic quality of film; accordingly, the emphasis is laid on photographic compositions, static shots, long takes and tableau moments, which confer on the digital monochrome subtle sensations of intermediality.

There is a tendency in recent nonfiction film to recontextualise archival photographs in creative ways. In films like Felvidék. Caught In-Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photographs are part of a collage work, while films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) use photographs in animated environments. At the other extreme is Radu Jude's Dead Nation (2017) presenting a series of photographs as a film that paradoxically demonstrates the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. These films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema the complex relationship between photography/the indexical trace and history. This chapter builds upon the phenomenological approach to images by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay in order to discuss intermedial relations of nonfiction films and to present what the photographic image means in the post-media age documentary.

This chapter discusses cinematic intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić's film, For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (2013) as a modality of addressing the traumatic memory of atrocities and mass rapes committed during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. Traumatic memory is not primarily formed through symbols or narratives but rather resembles ?a wounded body’ (Broderick–Traverso), and therefore it may disrupt cultural strategies of memorialisation, narrativization and representation through which personal, collective or historical trauma is approached. In Žbanić's film, intermediality becomes a mode of addressing collective trauma by ‘acknowledging’ the unrepresentable within representation and by foregrounding the interstitial and corporeal aspect of traumatic memory. The intermedial cinematic discourse that incorporates photofilmic pictures, fragments of performance art and practices of non-cinematic image-making (such as amateur video diary) performs an irresolute and affective memorialisation of war trauma engaging the viewer in potentially transformative memory work.

This chapter defines the category of pensive images as not representing a narrative or a meaning, but as articulating thought. In contrast to self-reflexive images (such as Las Meninas) that have produced discourse, pensive images’ main characteristic is stillness, a productive silence. They do not so much trigger thought as arrest it. The chapter explores the concept of stillness, starting from recent discussions around the still image in photofilmic video art of Fiona Tan to the debate about stillness’ relation to thought in theory of photography of Barthes, Mulvey and Bellour to Lessing’s pregnant moment.