<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article offers a case study in intermediality and explores relationships between tableaux vivants performances and early cinema around 1900. It locates processes of intermedial exchange not only at the level of form but also at the level of modes of address and reception. More specifically, the study is concerned with how bourgeois notions of beauty were transferred to the film image and reconciled with the attraction value of cinema. As a discussion of early film theory reveals, the concept of “beauty in film” depended on a taming of filmic motion, something that had already been realized in performance practices of tableaux vivants. In the subsequent analysis of the cultural context of tableaux vivants in European variety theatres, I outline a specific mode of address, which I term “beauty-as-attraction:” an overlap of the older aesthetics of the beautiful and the more modern aesthetics of attraction. Through concluding film analysis, I show how tableaux vivants became a model and source of inspiration for early cinema, thus bringing to fruition the two-fold address of beauty-as-attraction in a new media context.</abstract>

Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Beauty-as-Attraction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I argue that the trope of the doll, recurrent throughout the films of Manoel de Oliveira, is a visual figure that beyond narrative becomes a discourse on modernity and modernism, stillness and movement, life and death. Accordingly, I propose an overview of occurences of dolls and of “dollness” throughout the work of Oliveira – from <italic>Aniki Bobó</italic> (1942) to <italic>The Strange Case of Angelica</italic> (2010) – with the aim of tracking the line of transformations of an emblematic object into an aesthetic principle, a central figure involving psychoanalytical concepts such as the Freudian “uncanny,” the fetish or the transitional object.</abstract>

An Uncanny Cinema, a Cinema of the Uncanny. The Trope of the Doll in the Films of Manoel de Oliveira

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone’s <italic>Tale of Tales</italic> (2015) within the perspective of embodied cognition. I consider film experience as an affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer’s embodiment of the visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism; however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film <italic>Tale of Tales</italic>: by staging baroque and excessive characters, it allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.</abstract>

”Let Man Remain Dead:” The Posthuman Ecology of <italic>Tale of Tales</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, <italic>Songs from the Second Floor</italic> (<italic>Sånger från andra våningen</italic>, 2000), <italic>You, the Living</italic> (<italic>Du levande</italic>, 2007), and <italic>A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence</italic> (<italic>En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron</italic>, 2014). The Swedish director depicts the human condition afflicted by the loss of its humanity through a personal style that he calls “the complex image,” a tableau aesthetic that instigates social criticism, and is dependent upon long shots, immobility, unchanging shot scale, and layered compositions. The author establishes a connection between artistic and social space and scrutinizes the challenges that this “complexity” poses for the film viewer from an intermedial perspective in which cinema enters into a dialogue with two other art forms: painting and theatre. Four specific issues are discussed: (1) the intertwining of reality and artificiality as a “hyperreality;” (2) the visual compositions which are simultaneously self-contained and entirely open, highlighting a tension between volume and surface; (3) the opposition between stasis and movement, conveying a meaningful social contrast and the characters’ angst; (4) the pictoriality of the image.</abstract>

Roy Andersson’s Tableau Aesthetic: A Cinematic Social Space Between Painting and Theatre

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Given the present proliferation of profilmic electronic screens in narrative feature films, it is of some interest to examine their role apart from that of denoting objects pertaining to everyday reality. Electronic screens within the European-type filmic diegeses – characterized by adhering to conventions of (hyper)realism, non-hypermediation and character-centered storytelling – in a digital era are used not only as props, but as frames that re-order and aestheticize levels of reality (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0005_ref_010_w2aab3b7b4b1b6b1ab1ac10Aa">Odin 2016</xref>), while focusing, in a hypnotic manner, the viewers’ attention (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0005_ref_005_w2aab3b7b4b1b6b1ab1ab5Aa">Chateau 2016</xref>) on traumatic memories related to usually female characters, and consequently to the collectivities they represent in the respective diegetic worlds. These electronic screens force the viewer to constantly shift between the actual cinematic screen conventions and the mental screen (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0005_ref_010_w2aab3b7b4b1b6b1ab1ac10Aa">Odin 2016</xref>) of smaller formats, training the film viewers for experiences of expanded and fragmented cinema (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0005_ref_008_w2aab3b7b4b1b6b1ab1ab8Aa">Gaudreault and Marion 2015</xref>).</abstract>

On the Role of Diegetic Electronic Screens in Contemporary European Films

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In close intratextual connection with earlier pieces of Jafar Panahi’s oeuvre, pre-eminently <italic>The Mirror</italic> (<italic>Ayneh</italic>, 1997) and <italic>Offside</italic> (2006), his recent films made in illegality, including <italic>This Is Not a Film</italic> (<italic>In film nist</italic>, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011), <italic>Closed Curtain</italic> (<italic>Pardeh</italic>, Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, 2013) and <italic>Taxi Tehran</italic> (Jafar Panahi, 2015), reformulate the relationship between cinema and the “real,” defying the limitations of filmmaking in astounding ways. The paper addresses the issue of non-cinema, pertaining to those instances of cinematic “impurity” in which “the medium disregards its own limits in order to politically interfere with the other arts and life itself” (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0006_ref_015_w2aab3b7b5b1b6b1ab1ac15Aa">Nagib 2016, 132</xref>). Panahi’s overtly confrontational (non-)cinematic discourse is an eminent example of “accented cinema” (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0006_ref_013_w2aab3b7b5b1b6b1ab1ac13Aa">Naficy 2001</xref>). His artisanal and secret use of the camera in deterritorialized conditions and extreme limitations as regards profilmic space – house arrest, fake taxi interior – gives way for multilayered reflexivity, incorporating non-actorial presence, performative self-filming and theatricality as subversive gestures, with a special emphasis on the off-screen and remediated video-orality performed in front of, or directly addressed to the camera. The paper explores the ways in which the filmmaker’s tactics become powerful gestures of “politicized immediacy” (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0006_ref_013_w2aab3b7b5b1b6b1ab1ac13Aa">Naficy 2001</xref>, 6) that call for the (inter)medial as an also indispensably political act ((<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ausfm-2018-0006_ref_022_w2aab3b7b5b1b6b1ab1ac22Aa">Schröter 2010</xref>).</abstract>

The Camera in House Arrest. Tactics of Non-Cinema in Jafar Panahi’s Films

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Although the intermediality of Jean-Luc Godard’s films of the 1980s has been extensively analysed, especially the tableaux vivants in <italic>Passion</italic> (1982), little has been said on the intermedial dimension of gesture in the director’s work of this period. The article investigates how the gestural flows in Godard’s <italic>First Name: Carmen</italic> (<italic>Prénom Carmen,</italic> 1983) interrelate heterogeneous forms, meanings, arts, and media. The interconnection between the gestures of the musicians who are rehearsing Beethoven’s late string quartets and the lovers’ gestures, inspired by Rodin’s sculptures, gives cohesion to the hybrid aesthetics of the film. Gesture is the element which incorporates, develops, and sets in motion the features of the other arts, not only by creating an in-between space that forges links between media, but especially by exhibiting the process of making itself. Indeed, the relationship between the performing, musical, and visual arts is made visible in the exhibition of the corporeal effort of making (whether it be making music, film, or love) that tends to open the boundaries separating the different arts. The aural and visual qualities of gestures communicate between themselves, generating rhythms and forms that circulate in the continuous flow of moving images. By fostering the analogy between the gesture of carving, of performing music, and of making film, Godard highlights what unites the arts in cinema, while feeding on their differences.</abstract>

Gestural Intermediality in Jean-Luc Godard’s <italic>First Name: Carmen</italic> (1983)

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article examines how sensual aspects of the moving image, such as visual errors, blurring and technical disturbances are employed in found footage films dealing with Eastern European socialist past and the regime changing events. In the selected films Eastern European socialist visual culture is reworked with the cinematic practices of the post-media age in order to shape the spectators’ historical consciousness. By deliberate reframing and intensifying the medium-specific noises of the archival sources, or by an artificially created visual precariousness a new type of spectatorial awareness is created. The article delineates four different strategies through which the mediality of the recycled archival footage is brought to the fore and made operational (engaging the senses of its viewers).</abstract>

Sensing History. On the Uses of Medium-Specific Noise in Eastern European Found Footage Films

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article attempts a brief overview and evaluation of the main theoretical approaches that have emerged in the study of cinematic intermediality in the last decades since intermediality has become an established research term in media studies. It distinguishes three major paradigms in theorizing intermedia phenomena and outlines some of the directions of change in the intermedial strategies of recent films. It identifies in contemporary cinema a tendency to add new dimensions to the relations of in-betweenness regarding both the connection of cinema to reality and its inter-art entanglements. Finally, the article describes a new type of intermediality, which integrates elements of trans-textuality, creating a format of expanded cinema within cinema. This strategy is presented in the context of Eastern European cinema through a short case study of Cristi Puiu’s film, <italic>Sieranevada</italic> (2016).</abstract>

Approaches to Studying Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema

Three Interviews with Scholars who Defined the Field

A Good Concept Should Be both Very Concrete and Very Abstract.”

”The Use of Other Media within Film as a Passage to Material Reality.”

”Film Studies Always Need the Wider Approach of Intermediality.”

AHEAD OF PRINT

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

Volume 23 (2023): Issue 1 (May 2023)

Volume 22 (2022): Issue 1 (November 2022)

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 1 (July 2022)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 1 (November 2021)

Volume 19 (2021): Issue 1 (March 2021)

Volume 18 (2020): Issue 1 (October 2020)

Volume 17 (2019): Issue 1 (October 2019)

Volume 16 (2019): Issue 1 (August 2019)

Volume 15 (2018): Issue 1 (October 2018)

Volume 14 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017)

Volume 13 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016)

Volume 12 (2016): Issue 1 (September 2016)

Volume 11 (2015): Issue 1 (December 2015)

Volume 10 (2015): Issue 1 (August 2015)

Volume 9 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014)

Volume 8 (2014): Issue 1 (September 2014)

Volume 7 (2013): Issue 1 (November 2013)

Volume 6 (2013): Issue 1 (August 2013)

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. 