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In Roland Barthes’s ‘Michelet, l’histoire et la mort’ (1951), Michelet’s linear journey through centuries of French history is contrasted with the panoramic ‘tableau’ that holds together, in a moment of euphoric understanding, otherwise unconnected points in time. This chapter moves from this play of reversible and irreversible time to that of centred and decentred spaces in an unpublished section of Barthes’s 1966–7 seminar, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’. It suggests that Barthes’s discussion of time and space, which draws on the work of Vernant, Levêque, and Vidal-Naquet, and is applied to Michelet, Machiavelli, and Bossuet, can be mapped onto a shift from a structuralist focus on intra-relations between elements of a structure (as in Lévi-Strauss’s account of totemism) to the nascent post-structuralist emphasis on excentric structures associated with Derrida’s notion of ‘play’. The excentric centre is shown to underpin Barthes’s analysis of Michelet’s Tableau de la France, whereby Jakobson’s account of the poetic function of language is applied to Michelet’s rhetorical construction of the geography of France: the sequential ordering of the outlying regions according to their antithetical characteristics is ‘poetic’ in its form; by contrast, the ‘prosaic’ centre (the Île de France) absorbs and neutralises these differences.

This chapter translates the definitions of the Weyl group multiple Dirichlet series into the language of crystal bases. It reinterprets the entries in these arrays and the accompanying boxing and circling rules in terms of the Kashiwara operators. Thus, what appeared as a pair of unmotivated functions on Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns in the previous chapter now takes on intrinsic representation theoretic meaning. The discussion is restricted to crystals of Cartan type Aᵣ. The Weyl vector, denoted by ρ‎, is considered as an element of the weight lattice, and the bijection between Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns and tableaux is described. The chapter also examines the λ‎-part of the multiple Dirichlet series in terms of crystal graphs.

It is generally assumed that a ‘triumphal painting’ glorified and commemorated the general's martial deeds by way of a twofold display: first in his triumphal procession, later in a temple or a public place. This chapter argues that commemorative paintings placed in temples and public places were made directly for static display and not for show in the triumphal processions. Battle scenes in the triumphs were other kinds of representations, produced in various media, such as models, sculptures, and dramatic tableaux. Besides war scenes, the triumph included personifications of peoples and rivers that were staged as living captives. Representations of cities, on the other hand, were shown primarily as models of rich materials, such as ivory and silver. The preference for models over personifications reveals a Roman fear of offending the gods by displaying divine, or quasi-divine beings such as cities as living creatures in fetters.

The symmetric group S_r and Young tableaux are defined. It is shown that the actions of the symmetric group and unitary group commute, therefore SU(n) tensors can be classified by the symmetric group. The cycle notation is described. Symmetrizer and antisymmetrizer are defined and expressed in terms of Young tableaux. Rules are given for forming Young tableaux for a given Young pattern. The general Young pattern provides an irreducible representation of the symmetric group and can be specified by the partition (f ₁, f ₂,…, f_n ). The number of different tableaux for a given pattern gives the dimension of the corresponding representation of the symmetric group S_r . Biographical notes on Young are given.

In his famous photographs of children and in the Alice books, Lewis Carroll often displays a surprising willingness to jettison the solitary Child of Nature paradigm and explore instead the complex relationship that links children to adults, himself to his beloved child friends. Rather than single-mindedly insisting that a firm barrier separates young from old, Carroll frequently blurs this line, characterizing the child not as an untouched Other, but as a collaborator enmeshed in a complicated relationship with the adults who surround her. As in the case of the female children’s authors studied in Chapter 1, his work reveals a keen awareness of the fact that children are always already involved with (and influenced by) adults. But whereas they seem comfortably certain that children can nevertheless develop into creative agents who help shape their own life stories, Carroll remains unsure. He hopes that children can function as empowered collaborators, but—like Stevenson—he fears that the power imbalance inherent in the adult-child relationship ensures that all adults can offer children is a fraudulent illusion of reciprocity. Even his own cherished brand of nonsense literature, he suggests, can function as a form of coercion that pushy adults foist upon profoundly uninterested children.

The contribution of the Physiocratic School and the Italian School (Milan and Naples) is analysed. This is followed by a thorough investigation of Smithian's theoretical system, at both the philosophical level and the economic one. The Smithian orthodoxy is compared to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham.

This chapter discusses François Quesnay's contributions to macroeconomics. The “Tableau économique”, the “Economic Picture”, was Quesnay's visual representation of the macroeconomy. The “Tableau économique” clearly shows a visual circular flow of income, expenditure, and output. It was the first macroeconomic diagram showing the importance of expenditure, the interrelationships between income, expenditure, and output, and the interdependencies between different sectors of the economy.

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.

The chapter unravels the intermedial and interart admixture of sculpture and cinema in the posthumously released magnum opus of Aleksey Gherman, and the subsequent work of his son, Aleksey Gherman Jr. The films of the two Ghermans share the ambition to expand the cinematic experience towards the plastic arts, revealing two distinct ways in which an ‘intermedial sensibility’ may emerge in contemporary cinema. Hard to be a God (Trudno byt bogom, 2013) provides unique insights into the performative value and the phenomenology of what we can conceive as the cine-sculptural. Under Electric Clouds (Pod elektricheskimi oblakami, 2015), on the other hand, foregrounds sculptures in film more literally within the context of contemporary culture and the productive overlaps between the domains of cinema and installation art. The essay also examines how these connect to specific Russian traditions and how the sculptural images and images of sculptures activate different relations to language.

This chapter argues that Russian Ark is a rare intermedial achievement because of the quantity of media involved and, more importantly, the theatrical nature of the enterprise, which contributes to an intense feeling of immersion on the viewers’ part. The film is structured as a walk through the recesses of the Hermitage, undertaken by the two protagonists, a nineteenth-century French Marquis and an anonymous present-day man. Their motion in space and their interactions (or lack thereof) with other figures − either historical or contemporary – emulate an act of space-based immersive theatre. Characters and spaces are gradually discovered in theatrical tableaux by the protagonists and film viewers alike, with the resulting feeling of being ‘there’, transported into other eras. Russian Ark is meant to be fully experienced, holistically perceived by the film viewers as a spatial and sensual journey of discovery. Ultimately, the viewers long for the eternity of the spectacle, performed as a rite against death.

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.

According to Rudolf Arnheim, “much sculpture lacks the essential quality of life, namely, motion.” This is why, no doubt, marble statues and plaster casts played such an important role in the works of early photographers of the late 1830s and 1840s, who had to cope with long exposure times. Given this perspective, what can be said about the relation between sculpture and film, a medium often first and foremost characterized by motion? This book deals with a wide range of magical, mystical, cultural, historical, formal, and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Apart from the contrast between stillness and movement, sculpture and film can be seen as opposites in other ways. Whereas sculpture is an artistic practice that involves not only static but also material, three-dimensional, and durable objects, the cinema produces kinetic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images.

Some compositions of this period emerged from an inscrutable, sheltered corner of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's mind, while most were affected by what he called “servitude,” or work obligations. Progress and delay marked the Second Piano Concerto, which was sketched in two weeks, composed in less than two months but delayed for another five, in part by a hurried commission early in 1880 for a piece called “Montenegro at the Moment of Receiving Russia's Declaration of War against Turkey” to accompany a program of tableaux vivants comprising a “Dialogue of the Genius of Russia and History.” It celebrated the 25th anniversary of Alexander II's reign, to which others contributed. Tchaikovsky wrote “Montenegro” in six days, just to have the performance canceled and the score lost. He composed nothing else before June 1880 and no new orchestral work until September. He was still uncertain about the 1812 Overture in late September.

This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the stage, the cinema of the early 1900s appropriated the aesthetics of tableaux vivants in its attempts to develop a new model of narrative cinema. Strikingly, these practices were revived in post-war European modernist cinema, which often included tableaux vivants in line with its interest in duration and stillness. By incorporating tableaux vivants into their films, modernist filmmakers attempted at determining the specificity of their medium – movement was juxtaposed to stasis, pictorial or sculptural space to cinematic space, iconic immediacy to filmic duration, and so forth. These issues are particularly dealt with in the context of a discussion of Pasolini's La Ricotta and Godard's Passion, which both are films about the making of a film. In both works, the self-referential aspect is thus explicit and, strikingly, both films-in-the-film consist of tableaux vivants based on famous paintings.

This chapter talks about mise-en-scène as a French phrase that best translates in English as 'put into the scene', which includes setting, décor, costume, props, body language, and make-up. It explains how mise-en-scène conveys meaning and includes information concerning character emotion, psychological state, mood, atmosphere, historical time, genre, and point in the narrative. It also points out ways in which mise-en-scène dominates some films as they are constructed as cinematic tableau, such as a series of pictures or paintings. The chapter describes Guillermo Del Toro's vision of the world of Pan's Labyrinth, in which there are clear parallels between the real-world characters and sets and the imaginary ones. It explores how Pan's Labyrinth gives centre stage to the power of the imagination and the need to retain imagination in order to counter point the horrors of the real-world.

Starting from the “moving image” of a tableau-mécanique or clock-painting, this concluding chapter raises the question to what extent painting invites us to true thinking. Starting with Plato’s claim that wonder is the only possible beginning of philosophy, it is shown how the visual arts, historically, were meant to trigger thought, in particular when seen in the context of cabinet collections, in Germany literally called rooms of wonder, or Wunderkammern. The wonder that artworks may evoke is compared to various concepts of wonder, from Plato, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. The chapter concludes by stating that, as the book has demonstrated, pensive images, through their inconclusiveness and inexpressiveness, provoke wonder in us and, as such, set us off on a mental trajectory of true thinking that, ultimately, leads us to our philosophical home.