Decoding Tableaux Vivants: the Metareferential Potential of Painterly References in Cinema

The article focuses on the intermedial relationship between cinema and painting, viewed as a self-referential process, and tries to determine various ways in which this type of signifying process can be used to “encode” various messages (within the work itself), or become an integral part of this (meta)communicative operation. Starting from a broad definition of intermedial references and continuing with a brief recontextualized detour through Gérard Genette’s taxonomy of transtextual instances, the author narrows down a specific technique that exemplifies this type of “codifying” procedure, namely the tableau vivant. In accordance with Werner Wolf’s proposed terminology, he attempts to determine the metareferential potential of this extra-compositional self-referential technique. The case studies focus on films by Peter Greenaway and Lars von Trier.

Images in Suspension: Tableaux Vivants, Gesturality and Simulacra in Raul Ruiz’s film The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting

The article discusses Raul Ruiz’s film The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978). In the closed space of the house a parallel world emerges, where the filmic hypertext is constituted by a series of mise-en-abyme images that explore the multiple universe of tableaux vivants. The article analyses Ruiz’s appropriation of Pierre Klossowski’s concept of simulacra. The structure of The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is based upon the infinite reproduction of meaning since each simulacrum-tableau vivant leads to another. The author explores the gesturality of the bodies and its relevance to the use of language and sound in the film. Furthermore, he argues that Ruiz orchestrates the placement of the tableaux vivants in the filmic space in order to reveal the thought of eternal return.

The Tableau Vivant and Social Media Culture

The article aims to analyse the tableau vivant in social media culture by emphasizing its intermedial relation to technical visual media, particularly digital photography and film. By focusing on the living picture’s specific mimetic qualities, the study traces back the tableau vivant’s history in a media archaeological perspective primarily regarding photography. It explores the current revival of the tableau vivant within social media. The article examines living pictures and the aspect of self-staging, relevant to contemporary digital culture. The tableau vivant develops between two polarities: a primarily analytical approach that allows a profound exploration of a particular artwork and the performative aspects of self-staging.

A Dialogue with Claude Cahun: Between Writing, Photography and Film in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror

In this chapter, the artist filmmaker Sarah Pucill elucidates her artistic dialogue with the Surrealist lesbian artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), whose photographs and manuscripts are constitutive of her films Magic Mirror (2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (2016). Pursuing Pucill’s earlier interest in the intersubjectivity between women, the films re-enact Cahun’s photographs in the form of tableaux vivants, creating new connections between the French artist’s visual and written work and Pucill’s own creative practice. Drawing on Ágnes Pethő’s theoretical writing on the intermediality of the tableau vivant in film, the artist analyses how her re-enactment of Cahun’s photographs as tableaux vivants creates a sense of indecipherability caused by the overlaying of the original ‘ghost’ photograph with its re-staging in colour and with sound. The reworkings of Cahun's texts and photographs in the films conjoin different art forms and authors, interrogating questions of queer female subjectivity across time and space.

O dispositivo do Tableau vivant e o gesto em Faz que Vai (2015) de Bárbara Wagner e Benjamin de Burca

Resumo Há uma “vontade de movimento” generalizada nas imagens fotográficas (gifs, boomerangs e vídeos de curtíssima duração são o sintoma mais visível deste fenômeno), assim como uma progressiva estaticidade das imagens em movimento. Esse fenômeno pode ser investigado a partir do uso recorrente e atualizado da prática do Tableau Vivant na fotografia e no cinema contemporâneos, assim como nas práticas híbridas da videoarte. A questão que levanto deriva da percepção deste fenômeno, articulado com o lugar do “gesto” na cultura contemporânea. Se partirmos do pressuposto de que a mecanização progressiva da modernidade resultou no sentimento da perda do gesto, de que maneira a imagem em movimento pode vir a restituí-lo, como nos sugere Agamben? E como as atuais imagens híbridas contemporâneas, no caso aqui o trabalho Faz que Vai (2015), de Bárbara Wagner e Benjamin de Burca, reatualizam essa questão?

« Le tableau vivant » ou sur l’intermédialité au théâtre

Intermediality, as an act which is necessarily an extension of what we might call inter-arts, makes theatre reconfigure not only its status, but also its structural elements. Thus, the presence becomes a theme which is impossible to be avoided in the analytical approach of theatre. It is the presence that is led in the direction of integrating the multiple meanings of those media that are on same level with the dedicated theater art. Our study will try to point out some elements that make intermediality transform the theatrical into a “composition” with paradoxical meanings and significances.

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Trying an Essay Film

This essay is about the essay, a form (as Adorno called it) of thought alive that is partial in the two senses of the word: subjective and fragmented. Thinking as social, performative, and always un-finished; as dialogic. Through the mythical figure of Cassandra, who could foresee the future but was cursed to be never believed, I tried to “figure,” make a figural shape for the thoughts on the indifference of people towards the imminent ecological disaster of the world. At the invitation of Jakub Mikurda of the Łódź Film School to come and make an essay film, within one week, but with the participation of many great professionals, I was able to create, at least in the first draft, the essay film IT’S ABOUT TIME! The ambiguity of the title suggests the bringing together of my thoughts about time, in relation to history in its interrelation with the present, and, as the exclamation mark intimates, the urgency to do something. The former is enacted by a tableau vivant of Cassandra’s lover Aeneas as Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, with a contemporary painting by David Reed shifting over it; and by interactions with two paintings by Ina van Zyl. The urgency is presented in many of the dialogues, quoted from various sources, especially Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra. I argue that “thinking in film,” with film as a medium for thought, is what the essay film’s foremost vocation is. Through a reflection on “thought-images,” which I see as the result of “image-thinking,” I also argue for the intellectual gain to be had from “essaying” thought artistically.