<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In the last ten or fourteen years there has been a debate among the so called ludologists and narratologists in Computer Games Studies as to what is the best methodological approach for the academic study of electronic games. The aim of this paper is to propose a way out of the dilemma, suggesting that both ludology and narratology can be helpful methodologically. However, there is need for a wider theoretical perspective, that of semiotics, in which both approaches can be operative. The semiotic perspective proposed allows research in the field to focus on the similarities between games and traditional narrative forms (since they share narrativity to a greater or lesser extent) as well as on their difference (they have different degrees of interaction); it will facilitate communication among theorists if we want to understand each other when talking about games and stories, and it will lead to a better understanding of the hybrid nature of the medium of game. In this sense the present paper aims to complement Gonzalo Frasca’s reconciliatory attempt made a few years back and expand on his proposal. </abstract>

Intermediality between Games and Fiction: The “Ludology vs. Narratology” Debate in Computer Game Studies: A Response to Gonzalo Frasca

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The article looks at German Expressionist cinema through the eyes of contemporary, non-commercial filmmakers, to attempt to discover what aspects of this 1920s approach may guide filmmakers today. By drawing parallels between the outsider nature of Weimar artist-driven approaches to collaborative filmmaking and twenty-first-century non-mainstream independent filmmaking outside of major motion picture producing centres, the writers have attempted to find ways to strengthen their own filmmaking practices as well as to investigate methods of re-invigorating other independent or national cinemas. Putting their academic observations of the thematic, technical, and aesthetic aspects of Expressionist cinema into practice, Ells and Saul illustrate and discuss the uses, strengths, and pitfalls, within the realm of low-budget art cinema today.</abstract>

Shadows Illuminated. Understanding German Expressionist Cinema through the Lens of Contemporary Filmmaking Practices

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> With respect to adaptation studies, contemporary Japanese popular culture signifies a unique case, as different types of media (be those textual, auditive, visual or audio-visual) are tightly intertwined through the “recycling” of successful characters and stories. As a result, a neatly woven net of intermedial adaptations has been formed - the core of this complex system being the manga-anime-live-action film “adaptational triangle.” On the one hand, the paper addresses the interplay of the various factors by which the very existence of this network is made possible, such as the distinctive cultural attitude to “originality,” the structure of the comics, animation and film industries, and finally, the role of fictitious genealogies of both traditional and contemporary media in the negotiation of national identity. On the other hand, the essay also considers some of the most significant thematic, narrative, and stylistic effects this close interconnectedness has on the individual medium. Special attention is being paid to the nascent trend of merging the adaptive medium with that of the original story (viewing adaptation as integration), apparent in contemporary manga-based live- action comedies, as the extreme case of intermedial adaptation. That is, when the aim of the adaptational process is no longer the transposition of the story but the adaptation (i.e. the incorporation) of the medium itself- elevating certain medium-specific devices into transmedial phenomena. </abstract>

Adapting the Medium: Dynamics of Intermedial Adaptation in Contemporary Japanese Popular Visual Culture

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Carlos Saura’s “pure musicals,” as he calls them, are highly based on the formal properties of the image and the expressive use of light in a minimalist scenic space. Although, they have not been declared screendance pieces (as per Rosenberg 2012), which conjoin rhythmic body movements with screen-based, technologically mediated methods of rendering, they are full-fledged screendance examples, being hybrid, symbiotic, and integral (Richard James Allen, 2006). This article concentrates on Saura’s musicals from 2005 onwards – <italic>Flamenco</italic> (1995), <italic>Iberia</italic> (2005), <italic>Fados</italic> (2007), <italic>Flamenco Flamenco</italic> (2010), <italic>Argentina</italic> (<italic>Zonda, folclore argentino</italic>, 2015) and <italic>Jota de Saura</italic> (2016) – particularly the immersive mediation operated through the use of live video feed as an intermedial sensorial device. Saura’s silky, glossy, and lustrous images form an optical-haptic continuum. The twofold bodies, the digital doubles and the flesh-and-bone act as inducers of crystallization in Gilles Deleuze’s perception of modern cinema (1985), inasmuch as they interact and alternate in a cinematic flux, forming a circuit. Thus, an image of a recorded stage performance enters into a relationship with cinema, a medium already endowed with reflective features, producing the crystallization of these screendance films in all their Saurian immersivenness and sensoriality.
</abstract>

Dance and the Mediated Immersive Flux in Carlos Saura’s Musical Hybrids with Live Feed

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Can the transcendence of the sacred be represented through the potential of cinema, a medium based on the ontological reproduction of the Real? Can the dimension of the completely Other, whose limits and boundaries are hardly identifiable, come to the screen and become sensitive and perceptible? This contribution, taking as references the phenomenological dimension of the sacred proper to the investigation of Father Amédée Ayfre and the more stylistic one studied by Paul Schrader, intends to propose a reflection on how the miraculous event, understood as an objective suspension of physical laws, of narrative verisimilitude, in which the procedures of representation and rendering in images are configured as a fracture with respect to the customary nature of aesthetic expression of reality, are made evident in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s <italic>Ordet</italic>.
</abstract>

The Flagrance of the Sacred. Notes on the Miraculous Event in <italic>Ordet</italic> by Carl Theodor Dreyer

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This article offers an analysis of Videograms of a Revolution (1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujica and The Pixelated Revolution (2011) by Rabih Mroue, which both reflect on the role of amateur recordings in a revolution. While the first deals with the abundant footage of the mass protests in 1989 Romania, revealing how images became operative in the unfolding of the revolution, the second shows that mobile phone videos disseminated by the Syrian protesters in 2011 respond to the desire of immediacy with the blurry, fragmentary images taken in the heart of the events. One of the most significant results of this new situation is the way image production steers the comportment of people involved in the events. Ordinary participants become actors performing certain roles, while the events themselves are being seen as cinematic. This increased theatricality of mass protests can thus be seen as an instance of blurring the lines between video and photography on the one hand and performance, theatre and cinema on the other. </abstract>

The Revolution Will Be Performed. Cameras and Mass Protests in the Perspective of Contemporary Art

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
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>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
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>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
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>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
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>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
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>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
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

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> In the last two decades there has been an international resurgence of realistic films, i.e., films directed by filmmakers who believe in the ontological power of reality and, at the same time, in the capacity of the medium’s expressive scope for building a story without undermining the viewer’s impression of reality. On the one hand, this new movement is a rehabilitation of the cinematic Realism that throughout the history of film has touted cinema as an open window to the real world, a view particularly exemplified by Italian Neo-Realism. On the other hand, this new trend has given new life to the Realist film theories championed mainly by André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. Bazin defines the Realist style as “all narratives means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen” (1971, 27). In the article titled Neo-Neo Realism (2009), A. O. Scott discusses a number of filmmakers whom he categorizes within the new Realist trend in contemporary American independent cinema. Among these is Ramin Bahrani, director of the film Chop Shop (2007). Bahrani is a USborn filmmaker of Iranian origin, based in New York. Abbas Kiarostami is one of his main points of reference. Kiarostami, as Scott notes, “refined the old Neorealist spirit through the 1990s and into the next decade.” Bahrani himself acknowledges this influence with his desire to make “an Iranianstyle movie here in New York.”</abstract>

The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema: Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop as a Case Study

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The paper analyses the re-conceptualization of the intermedial trope of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of “the real into the image” (as Brigitte Peucker described), instead it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the “sex appeal of the inorganic” or “the Egyptian moment in art.” As such, the tableau becomes a powerful agent in generating metanarratives, offering a blueprint for a “big picture,” a comprehensive vision of the world (reinforced by recurring mythological themes like the genesis or the end of the world, the loss of Paradise, etc.). We may connect this feature of these tableaux vivants, therefore, to what Lyotard termed as the “figure of return,” and to the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art. </abstract>

The Tableau Vivant as a “Figure of Return” in Contemporary East European Cinema

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> As transmedia franchises increasingly populate our cultural environment, many questions arise about the effect of the different media involved in the depiction of storyworlds. Through the analysis of different examples, with special emphasis on the particular case of The Walking Dead, and drawing primarily from Henry Jenkins’s concept of “transmedia storytelling” and Jens Schroter’s concept of intermediality, this paper aims to show how different media aesthetics contribute to the process of storytelling and enrich the experience of the consumer. Usually overlooked in other analyses, we argue that these formal and aesthetical characteristics, such as the interactive nature of video games, call for a broader approach that transcends the accustomed search of common narrative aspects. This will be exemplified by a closer comparative look at the adventure game The Walking Dead: The Ganie (Telltale Games, 2012) and The Walking Dead: Survival Instiiict (Terminal Reality, 2013). The transformations that the different media demand contribute not only to the narrative, but also provide different tools for the construction of storyworlds and different ways to engage with it. </abstract>

The World of The Walking Dead – Transmediality and Transmedial Intermediality

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The article is based on 20 in-depth interviews with women professionals conducted for a more comprehensive study focusing on gender roles within the film and television industry in Turkey. This study examines the career possibilities for women, the experience of being a woman working in television and cinema, and the working environment, including work-life balance issues, experiences of discrimination and experiences of sexism. The hypothesis of this study is that film industry is male-dominated, and women have to struggle to be able to prove themselves in this industry in the 21st century in Turkey, where the position of women is made even more difficult by the gender role codes and the structure of Turkish society.</abstract>

The Experiences of Women Professionals in the Film Industry in Turkey: A Gender-Based Study

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The winner of many prestigious prizes (Oscar for the best foreign language film, Grand Prize of the Cannes Film Festival, and the Golden Globe among them), the Hungarian film, <italic>Son of Saul</italic> – according to most critics – represents the Holocaust trauma in a completely new and intriguing way. The filmmakers have invented a special form in order to tackle the heroic task of showing the unwatchable, representing the unthinkable. In this essay I analyse the representational strategy of the film from a phenomenological point of view, and position it in the theoretical framework of haptic sensuality formulated by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, among others. I mainly focus on the use of sound, in particular the role of sound design in the creation of haptic space. With the help of the analysis of the representation and artistic invocation of the different bodily senses in the film, I demonstrate how traditional artistic formal elements (characteristic of highly artistic, even experimental productions) are combined with high impact effects often present in popular film forms. I argue that the successful combination of these two factors makes the film an example of artistic immersive cinema.<xref ref-type="fn" rid="j_ausfm-2016-0017_fn_001_w2aab2b8c10b1b7b1ab1aaAa">1</xref></abstract>

The Phenomenology of Trauma. Sound and Haptic Sensuality in <italic>Son of Saul</italic>

Call for Papers

Evaluation Form

Instructions for Authors

Open Access License

Publication Ethics

Peer Review Process

Copyright Agreement

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

The Journal of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

 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...

Impact Factor

Five Year Impact Factor

MNiSW

 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

The Journal of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

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

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

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

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

Framing Anxiety. Intermedial Techniques of the Uncanny