This is Not Magritte: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Theory of Representation

The chapter attempts to provide an analysis of Porumboiu's body of work in a way that goes beyond the notions of Realism that is usually discussed in relation to the New Romanian Cinema. Theories of visual and verbal representation are identified that seem to be central to several of his Porumboiu's films from Foucault's seminal discussion of Magritte through Barthes's analysis of the Panzani commercial, Gadamer's description of the differences between signs, images and symbols, to Mitchell's notion of metapicture. Two important issues are highlighted: the mediality of representations and their relation to the represented reality. The author contends that although these theoretical issues are clearly brought up in the stories and dialogues of the films, Porumboiu fails to make them an intrinsic part of his own filmic form of expression.

The Real and the Intermedial in Alexander Sokurov’s Family Trilogy

This chapter examines how Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn, 1997), Father and Son (Otsets i syn, 2003) and Alexandra (2007) situate themselves at the intersection of the immediate and the constructed cinematic experience. The films under discussion emphasise the trace of physical presence on screen through haptic images conveying the multisensory dimension of the human experience, in particular touch and smell. Simultaneously, the Russian family trilogy consciously underscores the awareness of film as a medium carrying the story along with the mediation and remediation of painterly and medical images. Each section of the chapter focuses on a discrete part of the trilogy and investigates the oscillation between the material and artificial that is characteristic of these works.

Black-and-White Sensations of History and Female Identity in Contemporary Polish and Czech Cinema

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), The Reverse (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.

Superhero Genre and Graphic Storytelling in Contemporary Hungarian and Russian Cinema

The chapter examines how certain contemporary Eastern European genre films use superhero stories rooted in American comic books, and apply specific techniques and methods of the comic book form. Besides the visual connections between the two media, film and comics, the chapter also addresses intermediality and adaptation through the representation of the superhero, and deals with questions concerning postcolonial and post-socialist interpretations of superhero adaptations outside of the United States. It focusses on the connections and continuity between national mass culture, folklore and contemporary national genre films. The interpretations focus primarily on Shaman Vs. Ikarus (György Pálfi, Hungary, 2002) and Black Lightning (Dmitry Kiselev – Aleksandr Voitinsky, Russia, 2009), but also build on the context of other non-American superhero movies, Russian genre films and Hungarian art films.

Photographic Passages to the Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films

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.

Introduction: The Art of In-Betweenness in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema

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.

Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema

New technologies have deeply informed the ways to think about cinema, film and video. If digital cinema is often understood as a break with past film aesthetics, this chapter rather sees continuity. Digital culture also preserves and prolongs video culture. This chapter examines the use of video and digital images in the context of minor national cinemas, and takes the view that digital filmmaking is a continuation not only of argentic cinema but also of video aesthetics. It suggests that certain Polish films use analogue and digital video cameras in ways that can be considered as strategies of unveilment, which assist the critical discourse that these works engage in regarding the social reality they depict.

Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema

Based on similarities in Mikhail Bakhtin's and Carl Gustav Jung's ideas about dialogism, this chapter discusses the inclusion of sequences featuring heterogenic audio-visual media of conspicuously lower quality – the shooting of a film, TV reportage, a home video – in representative selection of films by veteran Romanian directors Mircea Daneliuc and Lucian Pintilie, as well as in films by Corneliu Porumboiu and Gabriel Achim from the New Romanian Cinema generation. The chapter then argues that the resultant intermedial carnivalesque, or trickster narrative, is facilitated by a Trickster figure, usually a director's stand-in of ambiguous cultural, ideological and ethical repute. This self-reflexive and meta-médiatique versatility of Trickster narratives, the chapter concludes, have proven time and again to be superb vehicles for cinematic encoding, which explains the fascination of Romanian film auteurs with tricksterish re-enactments and intermedial carnivalesque.

Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A Media-Anthropological Case Study

This chapter suggests that intermediality offers itself as a reinforced sense of intimacy. Dialogue requires to get in ‘touch’ with each other, to share each other's worlds. Based on the writings of Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, and on Giorgio Agamben's notes on gesture, the essay pursues this idea from a media-anthropological perspective in the work of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, focusing on three films: The Flat (Byt, 1968), The Ossuary (Kostnice, 1970) and Dimension of Dialogue (Moznosti dialogu, 1982).

Sculpture and Affect in Cinema’s Expanded Field: From Aleksey Gherman’s Hard to Be a God to Aleksey Gherman Jr’s Under Electric Clouds

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.