<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This article explores how uncanny feelings may derive from ways in which a medium operates, from its mediality. Consistent with the main source of uncanny feelings identified by Ernst Anton Jentsch and later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud, tensions between the inanimate and the animate are at the centre of the exploration. Such tensions, the article proposes, are implicitly or explicitly intermedial. The malleability of photographic imagery boosted by the computational revolution remaking photographic technology and practices allow for ever more forms of hybrid mediality in which intermedial tensions operate. The proliferation of such tensions suggests that we are likely to see more uncanny mediality in the time ahead. Our uncanny future may further be strengthened by the increasingly autonomous operations of machine learning algorithms that in part relocate agency from humans to machines.
</abstract>

Uncanny (Inter)Mediality and Photo Futures

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The article analyses the problem of colouring black and white archival footage in <italic>Spain in Two Trenches: The Civil War in Colour</italic> (<italic>Espa</italic><italic>ñ</italic><italic>a en dos trincheras . La guerra civil en color</italic>, Francesc Ecribano and Luis Carrizo, 2016), which was made by digitizing and colouring more than 450 surviving films of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis focuses on the kind of affects and perceptual mechanisms which might ensue from the colourization of archival black and white footage, and on the justification of the use of colour to authenticate an event that has already happened. At the beginning of the paper, the author briefly reviews the approaches of the increasingly close relationship between mediatization and memory, then focuses on the justification of colourization in the light of the Spanish documentary and compares it with issues of perceptual realism. In the final part of the analysis, the author examines the historical consequences of the reconfiguration of the past in colour.1
</abstract>

Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The article argues for the relevance of the concept of the uncanny for a nuanced approach of intermediality. It identifies specific areas where the uncanniness of intermediality appears and examines Joanna Hogg’s three autobiographically inspired films, <italic>The Souvenir</italic> (2019), <italic>The Souvenir Part II</italic> (2021), <italic>and The Eternal Daughter</italic> (2022) from this point of view. The analysis does not offer a psychoanalytic reading of these films but focuses on aesthetic configurations that enable the affective performativity of intermediality in conjunction with particular strategies of reflexivity, and unravels the ways in which, ultimately, all these films speak about the uncanny, mutually haunting relationship between art and life. Blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, Hogg depicts the paradoxical nature of (post)trauma and the emotional turmoil of mourning feeding into artistic creativity. <italic>The Souvenir</italic> films revolve around the loss of a lover in her youth and weave together different styles and resonances across art history and many mediums. They reveal memory, imagination and palpable reality folding over in an uncanny and aestheticized construction of space and time. <italic>The Eternal Daughter</italic> presents a scenario of caring for her dying mother, and brings to the fore the tropes of the haunted house, ghosts and doubles, which were latent figures of the earlier films as well.1
</abstract>

The Uncanniness of Intermediality. Joanna Hogg’s Eerily Self-Reflexive Cinema

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Found footage filmmaking, or “archiveology” (Russell, 2008), has become a contemporary mode of understanding the collective past. At the same time, in some recent European documentaries we have a more intimate, personal use of archival (and animated) images. They construct two-strand narrative structures showing both the trauma of losing a parent and the excavation of the unresolved traumas of those ailing and passing. In <italic>Us against Us</italic> (<italic>Noi î</italic><italic>mpotriva noastr</italic><italic>ă</italic>, Andra Tarara, 2021) the director/daughter initiates a highly reflexive video dialogue with her schizophrenic father. <italic>Fragile Memory</italic> (<italic>Крихка пам‘ять</italic>, Igor Ivanko, 2022) is a grandson’s story about a former cameraman affected by Alzheimer’s. Postmemory and post-generational trauma work is in the focus of Aliona van der Horst’s films like <italic>Love is Potatoes</italic> (2017), in which her own mother’s emigration story is recovered through intermediality, or <italic>Turn Your Body to the Sun</italic> (2021), in which the digitally manipulated archival footage accompanies a woman’s quest for her father’s repressed memories. These are all medially hybrid films, which rely on the affordances of intermediality, and which combine present day footage with images from personal or public archives. Archiveology becomes in these films an affective tool in caring for family, and a reflection on the precarity of life and memory in general.1
</abstract>

Filial Care and Familial Postmemory. On the Uncanny and Affective Intermediality of Analogue Media Use in Recent European Documentaries

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In a world experiencing an ongoing crisis in healthcare, the value of caregiving has become marginalized, the work of carers undervalued and pushed into invisibility. Sally Potter’s film, <italic>The Roads Not Taken</italic> (2020) brings into the domain of the visible the toil of in-home care of the mentally ill, an instance of a “quiet crisis buried in individual lives” (Bunting 2020, 5). <italic>The Roads Not Taken</italic> as an illness narrative of a former writer, now suffering from dementia, being taken care of by his daughter, conveys a liminal case of despaired effort to reach for the Other, in an emotionally immersive manner. The paper explores the film’s uncanny sensations of in-betweenness, with special focus on the unhomeliness and heterotopia of the vulnerable male body, trapped between disconnection from the present and mental journeys into the past, traversing sites across geographic and spiritual borders, captured in intimate close-ups that invite “cinempathy.” The female figure of the caregiver emerges as a site of negotiating between self-sacrifice and self-care, between the deep-felt compassion of private caregiving and the objectifying impersonality of public care services, while just missing a work opportunity, thus experiencing the contradictions of capital and care (Fraser 2016). The film foregrounds unspeakable pains, entangled emotions and unbridgeable gaps, and subtly points at profound anxieties around the care crisis of our times (Dowling 2021).1
</abstract>

The Crisis of Care and Uncanny Intersensuality in Sally Potter’s <italic>The Roads Not Taken</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The paper discusses Radu Muntean 2021 film, <italic>Î</italic><italic>ntregalde</italic> focusing on the representation of rural landscapes and the encounter between different social classes. The film marks multiple displacements within the director’s oeuvre, epitomized as “the chronicler” of the middle class in contemporary Romanian cinema. The spatial displacement from middle class urban spaces towards mountain and rural areas and the shift from the distant picturesqueness of landscape to the experience of landscape as dwelling, as inhabited and sensed environment mediated through textural images enables unsettling embodied, affective encounters both with the natural environment and between different social classes. In this way, the film addresses the question of class differences and lays bare the socio-economic inequalities between the urban middle class and the countryside without reducing rural characters to clichéd figurants in a picturesque or sombre countryside decorum. The film’s critical reflection on a form of occasional humanitarian aid and middle class philanthropy does not relativize the concept of charity, altruism and help but rather points to the growing gap of social inequalities (and the crisis of care) in the context of contemporary capitalism.1
</abstract>

Rural Landscapes and Affective Encounters in Radu Muntean’s Film, <italic>Întregalde</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The experience of the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976), one of the most unusual filmmakers from South Asia, raises a significant issue, of how ritual can be considered a potent medium to have an intermedial effect within the complex mediality of cinema. The authors examine his film, <italic>The Cloud-Capped Star</italic> (<italic>Meghe Dhaka Tara</italic>, 1960), and show that in order to reach the “screaming point” of his “epic melodrama,” Ghatak borrowed form a forgotten ritual a fragment of a ritualistic song to become the experiential core for the experience of the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-betweenness, contrasting positions of anthropological distance to a forgotten ritual with an imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself.
</abstract>

Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s <italic>The Cloud-Capped Star</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Neither Jane Austen’s writing, nor film adaptations of her novels made in the heritage film tradition seem particularly uncanny. Linked in the viewers’ minds with the representation of the English countryside stability, the films promote traditional values and take the spectators away from the problems and anxieties of the contemporary status quo. However, Patricia Rozema’s <italic>Mansfield Park</italic> (1999) uses Austen’s plot to question the colonial past by creating uncanny effects. Understood in this paper as an eerie resurfacing of the hidden (following Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Sigmund Freud, John Hodgkins, Barbara Creed), the uncanny becomes a tool for inquiring into how contemporary filmmakers and their audiences revisit old stories. Rozema creates two subplots for the main narrative: a story about an artist’s growth (Fanny Price becomes a writer) and a colonial narrative, which foregrounds the Bertrams’ dependence on their property in Antigua and their use of slave labour. Both plot lines enrich the film with uncanny effects linked to the inherent intermediality of film adaptations. Grotesquely frightening verbal images from Fanny’s writing (extracts from Austen’s <italic>Juvenilia</italic>) and the uncanny visuality of Tom Bertram’s drawings frame the viewer’s revisitation of <italic>Mansfield Park</italic> while reminding him/her of a subversive potential – of the uncanny and film adaptations.
</abstract>

Jane Austen and the Uncanny: The Colonial Past in Patricia Rozema’s Adaptation, <italic>Mansfield Park</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This essay presents some results of the author’s current research about the intersections between intermediality and constructivist/constructionist branches of psychology (Kelly 1992; Mascolo and Mancuso 1990), which might prove productive for the study of the representation of emotions in literature. Although with some significant differences, these schools suggest that emotions are at least partly, cultural constructs that aggregate physiological and cultural elements. Some of these theoreticians also suggest that people can experience a discrepancy between what they feel and what they are culturally supposed to feel, and proceed to “work” on their emotions until they achieve the target state. The author’s hypothesis is that the insertion of media representation in prose texts might point to the existence of affective discrepancies and suggest that emotion work is needed in order to achieve a target emotional state. While sometimes “changing” the medium is a successful operation in this sense, in other instances it increases the indeterminacy of the target emotion, especially when we deal with morally ambiguous characters with whom the narrator must negotiate an affective relationship, and which might give rise to an uncanny feeling of ambivalence. The author illustrates this hypothesis while reading two family memoirs that deal with the inheritance of the Second World War, and the URSS, respectively, Martin Pollack’s <italic>Der Tote im Bunker</italic> (<italic>The Dead Man in the Bunker</italic>, 2004) and Katja Petrowskaja’s <italic>Vielleicht Esther</italic> (<italic>Maybe Esther</italic>, 2014), but also suggests that this mechanism is not limited to the use of photographs in memoirs.
</abstract>

Media Representation and Affective Intermediality in <italic>Der Tote im Bunker</italic> and <italic>Vielleicht Esther</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The academic discourse on the uncanny in video games usually focuses on the phenomenon of the so-called “uncanny valley” (Mori 2012). The article explores the emergence of other, medium-specific occurrences of the effect, prioritizing interactivity as a key factor in its establishment. Two unique areas are particularly prominent in the increasingly photorealistic worlds of video games where uncanny moments associated with the wider, Freudian concept can be found. These are linked to necessary (structuring) and contingent (destructuring) components of the game: namely its heterogeneous ontology and the glitches that may appear in it. The author hypothesizes that these less conceptualized uncanny situations are regular features of the gaming experience and emerge when the immersion in an iconically realistic environment has been broken and eerie absences or ghostly presences pop up either through encounters with the game’s boundaries that result from the technological limitations of the software or the appearance of unintended errors in its processes.
</abstract>

Medium Specific Uncanny in Contemporary Video Games

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Since its 2015 debut, Alex Garland’s <italic>Ex Machina</italic> has been conceptualized as a creation myth, as a succession myth, as the Pygmalion myth and as the Pandora myth, among others – each of these argumentations acknowledging the permeability between different interpretations. The author argues that <italic>Ex Machina</italic> recodes the myth of Pandora and creates a fertile ground to display cultural traumas that have been affecting women – such as female subordination and oppression caused by a patriarchal structure and stereotypical binary oppositions. Thus, Garland’s film also suggests that the old forms of female oppression might be reaffirmed in the context of the age of technological innovation.1
</abstract>

Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s <italic>Ex Machina</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The article deals with techniques of the uncanny that are used in horror films, especially in movies that show frames within the image frame and particularly frames of television sets. The author situates the concrete device of framing in the context of medial technology and intermediality, not least the mediality of the television, its representation in movies and the resultant uncanny aspects. Distinctions are then made between the uncanny and anxiety with regard to the effects of framing, especially in relation to the specific status of a framed gaze. The author uses examples from Japanese and US-American horror films.1
</abstract>

Framing Anxiety. Intermedial Techniques of the Uncanny

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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

 Film and Media Studies publishes papers in English in various fields of Film and Media. The printed and online versions of the journal are identical.   Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies was founded in 2009 and since then has published one or two issues annually. The Executive Editor of the journal is Professor Ágnes Pethõ, assisted by Lecturer Melinda Blos-Jáni. The journal has an international editorial board comprising prestigious scholars within the field coming from Romania, Hungary, The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, China, and The United States. It operates on a system of double blind peer review and welcomes original, previously unpublished research articles by scholars from all over the world.   The journal publishes articles addressing the most exciting questions emerging from recent researches within the field of film and media studies, and its mission is to promote works of promising young researchers working on their PhD theses or on post-doctoral projects alongside prominent scholars and internationally acclaimed authors in the field of film and media studies. Throughout the years, the journal has disseminated results of several major research projects executed at the Sapientia Hungarian University and has also published selections from papers written for the widely acclaimed international film and media studies conferences convened by the editors and organized by the Film, Photography and Media Department of the Sapientia Hungarian University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania).   The journal publishes articles in all areas of film and media studies. Within this general area, however, we there is a special emphasis on the following topics either from a theoretical point of view or in the form of in-depth case studies:    newest trends in world cinema and the cinemas of Eastern Europe,   questions regarding intermediality or media convergence in cinema and new media,   the relationship between image, body and sound in moving images,   the relationship between fiction and reality in cinema,   moving images in the context of the called "post medium" condition.      Rejection Rate    30%      Archiving   Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.   Plagiarism Policy   The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.   Article Processing Charge (APC)   The journal does not have article processing charges (APCs) nor article submission charges. 

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

Volume 24 (2023): Issue 1 (November 2023)

Uncanny (Inter)Mediality and Photo Futures

Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage

The Uncanniness of Intermediality. Joanna Hogg’s Eerily Self-Reflexive Cinema

Filial Care and Familial Postmemory. On the Uncanny and Affective Intermediality of Analogue Media Use in Recent European Documentaries

The Crisis of Care and Uncanny Intersensuality in Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken

Rural Landscapes and Affective Encounters in Radu Muntean’s Film, Întregalde

Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star

Jane Austen and the Uncanny: The Colonial Past in Patricia Rozema’s Adaptation, Mansfield Park

Media Representation and Affective Intermediality in Der Tote im Bunker and Vielleicht Esther

Medium Specific Uncanny in Contemporary Video Games

Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina

Framing Anxiety. Intermedial Techniques of the Uncanny

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