Agnes Pethő - Cinema and Intermediality

Cinema and Intermediality
Cinema and Intermediality:

The Passion for the In-Between
By
gnes Peth
Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between,
by gnes Peth
This book first published 2011
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2011 by gnes Peth
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2879-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2879-6

A love of cinema desires only cinema, whereas
passion is excessive: it wants cinema but it also
wants cinema to become something else, it even
longs for the horizon where cinema risks being
absorbed by dint of metamorphosis, it opens up its
focus onto the unknown.
Serge Daney: The Godard Paradox. In: Michael

Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt (eds.):
Forever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing,
2004, 68.
For my children who share my passion for the visual arts

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Cinema and the Passion for the In-Between
Cinema In-Between Media
Chapter One............................................................................................... 19
Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 55

Reading the Intermedial: Abysmal Mediality and Trans-Figuration
in the Cinema
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 95

The World as a Media Maze: Sensual and Structural Gateways
of Intermediality in the Cinematic Image
The Intermedial Demon of the Cinematic Image
Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 179

Spellbound by Images: the Allure of Painting in the Cinema of Alfred
Hitchcock
Cinema as the Currency of the Absolute: The Godard Paradigm
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 231

Tensional Differences: The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc
Godards Films
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 265

From the Blank Page to the White Beach: Word and Image Plays
in Jean-Luc Godards Cinema
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 293

Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc Godards Poetics of the In-Between
viii Table of Contents
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 317

Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema and Media Archaeology in Jean-Luc
Godards Histoire(s) du cinma
Re-Mediating the Real: Paradoxes (?) of an Intermedial Cinema

of Immediacy
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 341

Intermediality as the Passion of the Collector (Agns Varda:
The Gleaners and I, Jos Luis Guern: In the City of Sylvia,
Some Photos in the City of Sylvia)
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 367

Intermediality as Metalepsis: The Cincriture of Agns Varda
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 395

Message in the (Intermedial) Bottle. The Politics and Poetics
of Intermediality in Eastern Europe: The Case of Mircea Daneliuc
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 417

INTRODUCTION
CINEMA AND THE PASSION

FOR THE IN-BETWEEN
Within the last two decades intermediality has emerged as one of the
most challenging concepts in media theory, and as such in a relatively
short time it has also become a highly controversial term depending on
the assumptions regarding the nature of mediality itself, with no shortage
of various taxonomies and definitions concerning the types and categories
of intermediality. What prompted the writing of the essays gathered in this
book, however, was not a desire for more classifications applied to the
world of moving pictures, but a strong urge to investigate what the inter
implied by the idea of intermediality stands for, and what it actually
entails in the cinema. This inter indicating that this kind of theorizing is
focused on relationships, rather than structures, on something that happens
in-between media rather than simply exists within a given signification has
proved to be the key element of the term. Although the idea that film has
indissoluble ties with other media and arts is one of the oldest concerns of
theorizing about the movies, it is the theory of intermediality that has
brought into the spotlight the intricate interactions of different media
manifest in the cinema, emphasizing the way in which the moving pictures
can incorporate forms of all other media, and can initiate fusions and
dialogues between the distinct arts.1 Furthermore, it seems that
intermediality has also the potential of becoming one of the major
theoretical issues of contemporary thinking about cinema, precisely
because it regards film to be a medium in continuous change and
interchange, and as such it can address fundamental problems related to
the connections between different configurations of communication that
1
Some of the latest concepts dealing with the interrelationship of media, like
remediation or media convergence, have also helped to fuel the discussions
around intermediality (remediation dealing with the processes through which
different media absorb other media in their evolution, while studies in media
convergence have tried to map the intricate web of interactions on the level of
media production and consumption).
2 Introduction
have occurred following the multiplication of the forms of moving images

themselves, of the cinematic experience moving beyond the walls of the
movie theatre, into the streets, into our homes, into the exhibition halls,
and into newer and even newer media.
The benefit of thinking of cinema in terms of intermediality consists,
however, not only in a more flexible way of looking at the changes
occurring within the mediality of cinema, but also more importantly
from the perspective employed by this book in the way in which the
poetics of cinema and specific stylistic effects can be described. Long
shot views over cinema get to be replaced by a close up investigation
of the images themselves together with their media components and media
relations, the aim of an intermedial analysis being the uncovering of the
possible functions and meanings of intermedial figurations within a film, a
type of investigation that in essence has a lot in common with the kind of
piecemeal theorizing advocated by David Bordwell and Nol Carroll,
inasmuch as it is problem-driven reflection and research that is as far
from data shuffling as it is from the ethereal speculations of Grand
Theory (Bordwell and Carroll 1996, xiii). Consequently, adhering to this
type of research, despite the possible suggestion of the title (Cinema and
Intermediality) pointing towards a broad-spectrum approach, this book
does not have the ambition to construct an all-comprising theory of
intermediality concerning the cinema, it is merely an attempt to delve into
a few of the theoretical and poetical issues regarding intermediality, to
offer in each of the individual essays a cross-section view of some of the
possible phenomena implied by the pairing of the terms cinema and
intermediality.
All the films discussed in this volume can be considered as specific
instances in which cinema seems to consciously position itself in-
between media and arts, employing techniques that tap into the
multimedial complexity of cinema, exploiting the possibilities offered by
the distinctive characteristics of the media components involved in the
cinematic process of signification, and bringing into play the tensions
generated by media differences. Such tendencies can be seen, in fact, as
something that persists in the history of film from pre-cinematic times,
beginning from the early, pre-narrative forms of the moving images up to
the mediums recent mutations into video, television and the digital
environment, into so called post-cinema. Nevertheless, the essays
published in this volume only deal with subjects related to what we
traditionally call cinema. The wording of the title of the book using
cinema and not a more general term like moving image for example
is in this way a deliberate choice, indicating that the scope of the research
Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between 3
has been more or less narrowed down to a type of film that has been
produced for the purpose of being shown in a movie theatre, or in the case
of the few exceptions e.g. Michael Snows exhibited experimental movie,
So is This (1982) or Godards video essay series, Histoire(s) du cinma
(1988-98) to films that reflect on cinema as a medium in its more
traditional form.
The book is divided into four parts, beginning in the first part with
theoretical chapters revealing different points of view in approaching
intermedial phenomena in cinema and positing some important questions
regarding their perception and interpretation, as well as offering concrete
film analyses exemplifying the theoretical issues addressed here. The
discussion of relevant questions of intermediality is then placed into the
context of a historical poetics of cinema as the following parts continue to
examine more closely two of the specific paradigms in the poetics of
intermediality in the cinema (Hitchcock at the juncture of classical cinema
and modernism, and Godard at the juncture of modernism and post-
modernism). The final part continues the analysis of the poetics of
intermediality, this time primarily from theoretical vantage point: it offers
analyses of films that expose the coexistence of the hypermediated
experience of intermediality and the illusion of reality, connecting the
questions of intermediality both to the indexical nature of cinematic
representation and to the specific ideological and cultural context of the
films, in the last essay offering insights into a few questions regarding the
politics of intermediality as well.
The first part of the book, Cinema In-Between Media, contains three
essays, each dealing with specific theoretical questions of cinematic
intermediality. It starts with a meta-theoretical survey of some of the main
issues regarding cinema and intermediality addressed within the context of
the scientific discourse of film studies (Intermediality in Film: a
Historiography of Methodologies). After evaluating the persisting problems
raised by the still not so commonly accepted idea of cinematic intermediality
the chapter focuses on certain characteristic methodologies that have
emerged in treating intermedial occurrences within films throughout the
history of theorizing about the movies in general. The major historical
paradigms to be briefly described here include: the normative aesthetic
viewpoints in the spirit of cinematic New Laocons, the trans-medial
theorizing of the moving image, the inter-art theories, and parallax
historiographies. This chapter is also an attempt to systematically present
through the description of some of the key concepts by way of which
these analyses interpret intermediality in film the existing theories and
4 Introduction
methodologies aiming at modelling intermediality in film and mapping the

rhetoric of intermedial cinema.
The second essay included in this first part, Reading the Intermedial:
Abysmal Mediality and Trans-Figuration in the Cinema, discusses the way
intermediality can be perceived in cinema. It is argued that despite Nol
Carrolls famous interdiction (forget the medium!) the mediality of the
moving pictures cannot be ignored, filmic mediality can be conceived in
fact as intermediality where the different media forms are not only united
as if in a melting pot or reflected as if in a mirror, but where each medium
participates with its own cognitive specificities, shaping the messages
conveyed by the cinematic flow of images. This chapter also breaks with
the tradition of thinking of intermediality in analogy with intertextuality,
and attempts a phenomenological (re)definition intermediality, based on
the assumption that while reading intertextual relations engages our
intellectual capacities, reading intermedial relations requires, more than
anything else, an embodied spectator who gets in touch with the world
of the film. Intermediality in film is grounded in the (inter)sensuality of
cinema itself, in the experience of the viewer being aroused simultaneously
on different levels of consciousness and perception. Not surprisingly the
poetics of intermediality is called upon whenever the cinematic authors
aim to reach the ideal of a total cinema. Ingmar Bergmans Persona
(1966) and Abbas Kiarostamis Shirin (2008) are used as examples to
demonstrate how cinema can reflexively define itself as a complete and
sensorial experience and how in each case the mediality of the moving
pictures becomes perceivable (unfolded) through interactions between
the senses and between media. The essay also argues that in certain cases
the poetics of intermediality in the cinema takes the form of an intermedial
mise en abyme in which we see not just an inscription of one medium
into another, but a more complex trans-figuration taking place, in the
process of which one medium is transposed as a figure into the other,
also acting as a figure of in-betweenness that reflects on both the media
involved in this process. Peter Greenaways cinema is quoted as an
example where this trans-figuration usually takes place in the context of a
ritualistic narrative, and Michael Snows experimental film, So is This
(1982) is analysed as a minimalistic form in which images and words
mirror each other in the cinema.
The theoretical questions of cinematic intermediality are continued in a
longer essay closing the first part of the book entitled The World as a
Media Maze: Sensual and Structural Gateways of Intermediality in the
Cinematic Image. Starting from the idea that techniques of intermediality
effectively break the transparency of the filmic image, and open it up
towards illusory inter-media and inter-art transgressions I claim that this

can happen not only in obvious cases of stylization, but also within a
cinema that maintains the illusions of realistic representation. There are
instances in which we can witness a two way porosity of the moving
image both towards what we perceive as the real world and both towards
its own mediality reflected in a kind of intermedialization of the image: in
its being perceived as if filtered through other arts (like painting) or being
reframed, disassembled by other media. Consequently, in this chapter I
tried to outline some of the possibilities of how intermediality enters our
perception of images in cinema by identifying some of the gateways
through which cinematic images within the boundaries of the transparent
perceptual cinematic frame of the real world get to be re-framed by
other media.
I have found that there are at least two templates that are capable of
generating a more or less emphatic sense of intermediality within the
cinematic image. First of all a kind of sensual mode can be revealed that
invites the viewer to literally get in touch with a world portrayed not at a
distance but at the proximity of entangled synesthetic sensations, and
resulting in a cinema that can be perceived in the terms of music, painting,
architectural forms or haptic textures. This model can be comprehended as
based on the attitude of flnerie, on the sensibility of the stroller/driver
that wanders around the (urban) landscape, absorbing the kaleidoscopic
sensations of a modern (cinematic) city that appears as a liquid environment
constructed of a continuous flow of spots of lights, shades and colours.
The way in which such haptic imagery contrasts with the optical is
demonstrated by examples taken among others from Francis Ford
Coppolas, Wong Kar Wais films and a special subchapter is dedicated to
the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni which displays the most elaborate
forms of such a contrast (elaborating an exquisite cinematic poetics of
framing and un-framing the haptical within the moving image), opening
up at the same time sensuous interfaces within the image towards the
affordances of painting and architecture.
The structural gateway into intermediality, on the other hand, relies
on the possibility of the cinematic flow of images to break down into
their media components and the image of the world to become spread out
as a giant screen of media palimpsest. The structural mode thus involves
either a fragmentation, a shattering of the world into pieces of media
representations or the experience of some kind of juxtapositions, jumps,
loops or foldings between the media representations and what we perceive
as cinematic reality. This kind of intermedialization may take the form of
diegetic reflexivity, or it may result in the world appearing as a media
6 Introduction
collage, it can be perceived as a marker for metaleptic leaps, intermediality

may perform metaleptic contrasts between the natural, the seemingly
unmediated and the artificial within the image, as well as folds of
the immediate and the mediated (applying Deleuzes well-known concept
to intermedial cinema). In some of the latest films of Jim Jarmusch, Abbas
Kiarostami or Tsai Ming Liang I have found that we have a proliferation
of images juxtaposing reflection and/or mediation over what is perceived
as the immediate world. Accordingly, still image appears to be folded
over movement, while the spectator is invited not to a narrative decoding
but to a kind of post-cinematic contemplation over individual frames and
scenes. In this way, in certain cases the sensual mode also seems to
fold into the structural, resulting in a type of cinematic image that
displays its palimpsest like layers and that impresses the viewer with its
fusion between the haptical and the optical.
The second and third parts of the book are both centred on the idea of
intermediality being conceived as a kind of excess, a surplus in the
cinematic image, as the medium is reaching beyond its own conventional
boundaries and into ways of expression attributed to the other arts: cinema
is displaying its passion for expanding beyond cinema. The allure of
such an inter-media trespassing may prove threatening and disruptive, as
it is demonstrated in the examples taken from the films of Alfred
Hitchcock, or as it is shown in the art of Jean-Luc Godard spanning
already more than half a century it may also bear the of promise of a
total cinema, of the possibility of cinema becoming the currency of the
absolute (as Godard quotes Malraux), of cinema being capable of
figurating the infigurable (Lyotard), of making the viewer see the
invisible.
The chapter dedicated to Hitchcock (Spellbound by Images: The Allure
of Painting in the Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock) is intended to offer a
summary of some of the most important issues related to the use of
paintings and painterly techniques in Alfred Hitchcocks cinema and to
contribute to an intermedial interpretation of some of his major films
displaying explicit relations with painting. Hitchcocks films constitute a
unique link between the early cinema of attractions, the avant-garde
affinity towards painting and the conventions of classical storytelling,
displaying in certain films an abstract imagery that can achieve a self-
reflexion of cinema as a visual medium that resembles at the same time the
techniques of modernism. The paintings introduced in his films always
have the potential of opening up an abyss, a rupture in the texture of
classical narrative, and transpose the story over a meta-narrative plane by
dislocating the narrative into an abstract space. The referents of the
painterly images are always revealed to belong to an ontologically

different plane such images being always strongly connected to pure
fiction and imagination. The significance of the paintings in Hitchcocks
films is not only connected to the solving of a particular story of mystery
or mysterious identity, but it also consists in raising questions about the
interpretation of images in general. In contrast with a classic dramaturgy
that neatly solves all the puzzles, the Hitchcockian painting, or painterly
image emerges as the medium of the unknown threatening to throw the
mind of the character (and implicitly of the viewer) into the abysmal
depths of the uncanny and the unidentifiable. (One of the most eloquent
examples of this is the startling image of the squirt of blood painted over
the black and white images and thrown towards the off-screen space,
implicitly at the spectator at the end of Spellbound.) It seems that for
Hitchcock painting acts like an intermedial demon of the cinematic
image, a medial doppelgnger that is ready at any time to take charge,
threatening to disrupt the reasonable (and discursive) order of the world.
The next part of the book is dedicated to the total cinema of Jean-
Luc Godard, a cinema that has achieved not only the undisputed status of
being one of the most important paradigms in cinematic intermediality but
played a decisive role in advancing the idea of intermediality itself into the
centre of contemporary thinking about the arts. The first chapter dedicated
to Godard (Tensional Differences. The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-
Luc Godards Films) discusses the way in which in his early films, made
during the period of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard consciously addresses
the issues relating to the rivalry between the emerging modern cinema and
the other arts and media. In a combination of Harold Blooms (1997)
literary concept of the anxiety of influence that evaluates the re-writing
and/or debunking of earlier poetic models as a natural way through which
a new artist asserts himself and the idea of remediation elaborated by
Bolter and Grusin (1999) that implies that all media repurpose and
incorporate older media, the chapter contends that early Godard films
display a pronounced anxiety of remediation, for they continually
present filmmaking as incorporating, refashioning other media while also
relating to these other media, and among them, especially literature as a
major authority that cinema has to come to terms with. It is argued that in
Godards early films, beside other, better known (or documented) stylistic
techniques, media differences are also projected onto a narrative level: the
tensional differences between the media and the anxiety of re-
mediation of literature within cinema are often staged as an allegoric
confrontation between the sexes. In Godards New Wave films we find
several examples in which men and women seem to embody different
8 Introduction
media ideals and the complex relationships and/or conflicts between them
can be interpreted as narrative enactments of intermedial relations or
media rivalries. In this line of thought, for example, Godards romantic
comedy, A Woman is a Woman (Une femme est une femme, 1961), is
relevant as it presents a mnage trois between two men and a woman
that can be interpreted as a parable constructed around the issue of the
rivalry of influences and the wish for the birth of a new cinema (as such a
parable of the inception of the New Wave itself). Through these films
Godards cinema is actually trying to come to terms with its own re-
mediating processes by narrativizing the processes of a cinema that is
inseparably linked to literature in a sort of painful intimacy.
The next chapter, From the Blank Page to the White Beach: Word
and Image Plays in Jean-Luc Godards Cinema, outlines the paradigm
shift in Jean-Luc Godards transition from his New Wave period to his
major films made beginning from the late 1970s and leading into the new
millennium. It describes the underlying principles that distinguish early
Godard from late Godard by identifying the most relevant artistic
devices through word and image relationships are actualized in Godards
cinema. The key notions of these paradigms are borrowed from Godards
meditation over the nature of the cinema offered by his essay film entitled
Scenario of the film called Passion (Scnario du film Passion, 1982) in
which, in a word play typical for Godard, he proposes two ways of looking
at cinema by contemplating the empty screens resemblance first with a
white page (page blanche), and then with a white beach (plage
blanche). The paradigm of the white page brings into mind first of all
literary associations, like Mallarms notion of the white page or the
palimpsest, ideas connected to writing or re-writing (as such its
other characteristic self-reflexive metaphor recurrent in Godards films is
the image of the blackboard, a surface awaiting the inscriptions, erasures
and re-inscriptions of different signs). Words and images in these early
films continuously deconstruct each other and consequently the unity of
the cinematic image, of cinema as a cohesive medium. The use of
language itself is always visibly performative and bears the traces of
intermedial tensions. Diegetic texts are not merely transposed onto the
screen, but they are always subjected to some kind of action: they are read
aloud, they are being translated, rewritten, misquoted, etc. Text is always
subjected to violent de-contextualization and re-contextualization as it
enters the screen: it is torn out of context, and broken down to words and
letters, these pieces in turn are often re-arranged and multiplied.
The paradigm of the white beach, on the other hand, crystallizes
around the metaphor of the screen compared to a beach basked in blinding
sunlight and covered in a rhythmic flow by the images coming in time like
the waves of the ocean. And while in the connotations of the first metaphor
texture and mosaic like fragmentation emerge as key features; the second
metaphor suggests a shift towards a more fluid, musical model: instead
of the page or the blackboard implying literary analogies and a collage-
like patchwork, what becomes more important in this model is the space of
in-between that is continually constructed and deconstructed by the ebb
and flow of the images, by their appearance and disappearance. Accordingly,
in many of the films of Godards later period the transcendental qualities
of the images are emphasized together with the fundamental mystery of
art.
After exploring Godards various techniques of connecting images and
words, the third chapter included in this part (Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc
Godards Poetics of the In-Between) focuses on features that connect
Godards cinema to a more general artistic tradition: the phenomenon
known as ekphrasis which has always been considered a challenge for the
arts to test and/or surpass their limitations. The chapter attempts an
application of the term ekphrasis to the medium of cinema based on the
assumption that certain films and tendencies in film history have aspects
that can be related to what theorists call ekphrastic impulse, and a few
major conditions for the perception of cinematic ekphrasis are outlined.
The investigation into the ekphrastic aspects of Godards films have
revealed that these films can be considered ekphrastic not merely on a
general, philosophic level, but also because some of them include explicit
quotations from ekphrastic literature. Detailed analyses of Godards
ekphrastic techniques have been undertaken hoping to produce not only a
more refined understanding of his films, but to get us closer to
understanding the possibilities of ekphrastic intermediality in cinema in
general. From the variety of intermedial relations that can be called
ekphrastic in Godards films, four types have been set apart and
exemplified here: (1) the multiplication of media layers opening up
towards each other and remediating each other, producing a kind of
vertigo of media; (2) ekphrasis seen as a figure of oblivion (adopting the
literary term introduced by Harald Weinrich); (3) the functioning of
ekphrastic metaphors pointing to the (medial) Other of the filmic image;
(4) the museum of memory and the essayistic expansion and
deconstruction of the principle of ekphrasis in his later, highly ambitious
cinematic meditations upon the archaeology of the seventh art, discovering
in it layers upon layers of mediality and culture.
Jean-Luc Godards grand project and ultimate ekphrastic endeavour
entitled Histoire(s) du cinma (19881998) comprising a total of four
10 Introduction
films each consisting of two parts accompanied by the publication of an art

book and a set of CDs with audio-visual material taken from the films is
the subject of the analysis of the next chapter in the book (Post-Cinema as
Pre-Cinema and Media Archaeology in Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du
cinma) that also concludes the series of essays written about Godard. This
is one of the most challenging works in the history of cinema, one that has
often been compared to the magnitude and importance of James Joyces
Finnegans Wake, and although it has most often been treated as a regular
documentary or a philosophical investigation, here the attention is directed
towards problems of mediality and intermediality regarding Godards
project. Several models and metaphors are proposed that could describe
Godards project (e.g. Andr Malrauxs idea of the imaginary museum,
Freuds and Derridas mystic writing-pad, Deleuze and Guattaris
rhizome), and also it is pointed out that Godards Histoire(s) of cinema
can be considered as a whole not only an intermedial palimpsest reflecting
on images from the history of cinema, but first and foremost it can be
regarded as an experimentation with and an inquiry into the complex
mediality of the moving images (in the spirit of an avant-garde direct
theory). As a whole, we can observe that Histoire(s) uses a seemingly
archaic medium of moving pictures, however, this is a form that was
constructed in retrospection, a form that has never existed as a vehicle for
cinematic storytelling as such: it is a uniquely paradoxical fusion of
photographic collage, calligrammatic text with the musical and spiritual
aspects of cinematic montage, and this inter-medium is the one that
ekphrastically mirrors what cinema is supposed to stand for in-between the
arts according to Jean-Luc Godard. Furthermore, by saturating each frame
to the extreme, by the sheer excess of the various superimpositions and
cultural references, what we experience in this flow of cinematic,
painterly, musical and literary discourses blended together is a language
about the outside of language (Foucault 1989, 154). Godard seems to
experiment here with a medium that remains throughout the film open to
its outside, and constantly gravitates towards its abysmal collapse into
its Others, the other arts. At the same time, the Histoire(s) also
impresses as a highly personal and sort of hand-made cinema that
communicates primarily a sense of texture and manual craftsmanship
emphasized also by Godards bodily implication into the artistic creation:
the work continuously bearing the traces of performing the artistic
creation.
The final part of the volume, Re-Mediating the Real: Paradoxes (?) of
an Intermedial Cinema of Immediacy, continues to concentrate on this
possibility of intermediality being closely connected to a strong emphasis
on the indexical nature of cinema, of cinema mediating between the

palpable and the imaginary. The chapters included in this part intend to
show how a kind of cinema employing markedly intermedial techniques
can fold back to the redemption of physical reality (Kracauer), and,
after the death of the author, we may assist to the paradoxical revival of
the author as an intermedial collector, or as a first-person installation,
and also we can see how in the case of certain Eastern-European films an
elaborate strategy of deceiving official censorship was forged through an
intermedial language of esoteric allegory that nevertheless managed to
deliver a relevant cinematic representation of a contemporary reality, and a
message containing substantial ideological charge. This last part of the
book is at the same time a further exemplification of the possibility of
viewing intermediality as being deeply grounded in the complex experiences
of the embodied spectator, and the inter-sensuality of perception, a concept
put forward in the second and third chapters of the book. As such, the
analyses offered here may effectively dispute the paradoxical nature of
pairing the notions of intermediality and immediacy (as indicated in
the title of this part), since there may be perceived no paradox at all, if we
consider the essentially sensual nature of intermediality.
The first chapter included in this part, Intermediality as the Passion of
the Collector, examines films that qualify for the label of reflexive and
hypermediated cinema, but which, nevertheless, have the purpose of
achieving the sensation of immediacy as well. Agns Vardas The
Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) and Jos Luis Guerns
two interrelated films, In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia, 2007)
and Some Photos Made in the City of Sylvia (Unas fotos en la ciudad de
Sylvia, 2007) are interpreted as typical examples of such hypermediated
cinematic experiences re-mediating the real (Bolter and Grusin). The
media to be remediated in each case are: painting, photography and
language/literature, and the experience of media within media somehow
does not convey a sense of infinite regress of signification, an entrapment
within a text that merely refers to another text ad infinitum, but a
configuration that communicates paradoxically a sense of immediacy both
on a more general level (exemplifying the multiple faces of media versus
reality or media within reality) and on a more specific, personal level (in
the sense of recording ones own personal experiences handling these
media). Furthermore, all these examples can be seen as re-mediating to an
excess the indexicality of modernist cinema and challenging cinemas lack
of auratic quality through the directors marked personal implication and
the traces of his/her handling of the media.
12 Introduction
The next chapter both expands and narrows down the research as
compared to the previous text. The scope of the analysis is widened to
cover the whole span of Agns Vardas cinematic oeuvre but it is
narrowed down to consider specific ways in which Vardas films
accomplish a kind of metaleptic leap between levels of fiction and
reality. Vardas techniques can be viewed both within the context of the
poetics of New Wave cinemas metaleptic tendencies (as best represented
by Godards films) and as significant alternatives to these well-known
tendencies. Most of the times, for Varda cinema is defined as an artifice
between two layers of the real: the reality of herself, the personal world
of the author-narrator and the reality captured by cinma vrit style
cinematography. Intermediality in these films serves as a figuration that
on the one hand performs these metaleptic leaps from palpable
immediacy to stylized representation/hypermediacy, and on the other hand
figurates the impossibility of such a leap. The survey presents instances
in which intermediality can be conceived either as a leap into the domain
of the figural, or cases in which discourse is disrupted or masked by the
intermedial figuration, concluding with the ultimate metalepsis: the leap
from the figural into the corporeal. Among the films referred to in the
analysis are Lopra-mouffe (1958), an effective collage of photographic
flnerie and concept-art; Daguerreotypes (Daguerrotypes, 1976), a
controversial documentary that includes a playful paraphrase of the mirror-
image structure of Las Meninas; Ulysse (1982), a narrative-dramatic
ekphrasis of a photograph; Seven Rooms, Kitchen and Bath (7p., cuis., s.
de b., ... saisir, 1984), a film inspired by an exhibition entitled The
Living and The Artificial); the short film The Story of an Old Lady (Histoire
dune vieille dame, 1985), a sort of cinematic objet-trouv recovered from
the shooting of Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985); and finally, The Beaches
of Agns (Les Plages dAgns, 2008), an autobiographical essay film, etc.
The last chapter of the book, Message in the (Intermedial) Bottle. The
Politics and Poetics of Intermediality in Eastern Europe: the Case of
Mircea Daneliuc, connects the questions of intermediality even more
closely to a specific time and space frame of reality. At the time when
fiction films in Romania were mainly used for the ideological propaganda
of the communist party, Daneliucs Glissando (1984) shocked its spectators
as a message out of chaos: it managed to capture the general disgust of a
people fed up with a life of seemingly never-ending humiliation, and to
express at the same time a nostalgia for artistic beauty through elaborate
techniques of intermediality, creating a unique allegory. As a contemporary
to Western European filmmakers like Peter Greenaway who practiced a
kind of baroque intermediality, Daneliuc constructed his own unique and
typical Eastern-European version of an intermedial cinema that on the one

hand relied on references to French decadent literature and techniques
characteristic of modernism in film, while on the other hand, it systematically
deconstructed a textual world all too well known to contemporary viewers.
This erased text of official genre movies and ideological clichs lay as a
hidden canvas behind Daneliucs own images and was responsible for the
films exceptional impact at the time. The whole film could be interpreted
as a giant, metaphorical wipe-cut that cleaned the cinema screen of all the
lies that filled it earlier. The more the film glissaded into symbolic and
intermedial dimensions, the closer it got to becoming not a representation
of Romanian reality but an accurate portrayal of the state of mind of the
Romanians, and of the images that haunted them. As such the film proved
that the expression of the need for reflection and the repeated
thematization of the act of reflection itself, the imprints of certain
intertexts have the power of becoming authentic traces of the reality of a
certain age, and it also constitutes a good example for the relevance of
ideological and contextual considerations in examining phenomena of
intermediality.
In conclusion, after this round up of the main questions raised in the
individual chapters, I feel that some acknowledgments and personal
remarks have to be made as well. First of all, the book is the result of
several years of investigations into cinematic intermediality, the texts that
can be read here also bearing the imprint of a personal journey that started
with an interest in semiotics, intertextuality and self-reflexivity in film,
and went on in the direction of a re-evaluation, and re-interpretation of
ideas about intermediality and the poetics of intermediality beyond ideas
of (inter)textuality applied to film, following, on the one hand, the
recognition of the importance of the sensual nature of filmic experience
revealed by phenomenological approaches, and on the other hand, an
increased awareness of the figurative nature of intermediality. Being the
outcome of several years of work, as it usually happens, ideas expressed in
the individual chapters have been previously tested in the form of
conference presentations and articles published in conference proceedings
or film studies journals, consequently there are cases in which an earlier
version of the essay included in this collection has already been
published.2 It has to be mentioned, however, that all the previously
2
Chapter One, Cinema and Intermediality: a Historiography of Methodologies,
was originally published with the same title in the Film and Media Studies journal
of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Acta Universitatis
Sapientiae, 2010, vol. 2. 3972. The previous, shorter version of Chapter Six,
From the Blank Page to the White Beach: Word and Image Plays in Jean-
14 Introduction
published material has been substantially reworked (ideas have been re-
distributed, and important additions, more detailed analyses have been
made) for the purposes of this volume.
As a whole this collection of writings in its present form is intended to
be a mere contribution to the study of the theory and the historical poetics
of intermediality in film as I am fully aware of the vastness of the subject
in terms of the possible topics or approaches that cinema and
intermediality might imply. Jean-Luc Godard confesses in For Ever
Mozart (1996): Its what I like in cinema: a saturation of glorious signs
bathing in the light of their absent explanation and I find this to be an
idea that this whole book subscribes to, as the words might be interpreted
also as a concise definition of what I perceive to be the essence of
intermediality in the cinema: a saturation of media within media, media
overwriting media, open to interpretation but actually deriving its
expressiveness from the very fact that it is not something that can be easily
translated into words, as it belongs primarily to the domain of the
sensorial, it is something that is only discontinuously sensed and can
Luc Godards Cinema, was included with a different title (The Screen is a Blank
Page: Jean-Luc Godards Word and Image Plays) in the collection publishing the
proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference held in Cluj-Napoca, at the
Department of Photography, Film and Media of the Sapientia Hungarian University
of Transylvania, Words and Images on the Screen. Language, Literature, Moving
Images, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 159187. In
Chapter Seven, Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc Godards Poetics of the In-Between, I
considerably reworked a previous, shorter essay that can be read with the title
Media in the Cinematic Imagination: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of the In-Between
in Jean-Luc Godards Cinema in the volume edited by Lars Ellestrm Media
Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010: 211225. Chapter Eight, Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema and
Media Archaeology in Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma is based on a
paper published in the conference proceedings Orientation in the Occurrence,
edited by Istvn Berszn, Cluj-Napoca: Komp-Press, 2009: 317331. Chapters
Nine and Ten are revised versions of two articles that were published in Acta
Universitatis Sapientiae, as follows: Intermediality as the Passion of the Collector
is based on an article from 2009, vol. 1: 4769, the ideas of Intermediality as
Metalepsis in the Cincriture of Agns Varda first appeared in 2010, vol. 3: 69
95. The final chapter, Message in the (Intermedial) Bottle. The Politics and Poetics
of Intermediality in Eastern Europe: The Case of Mircea Daneliuc, is based on an
earlier, shorter essay (Chaos, Allegory, Intermediality. The Cinema of Mircea
Daneliuc) included in the volume edited by Anik Imre: East European Cinemas,
New YorkLondon, Routledge, 2005: 165179. All the articles mentioned here
have been revised to suit the goals of the present publication, therefore the chapters
of this book can be considered as longer and improved versions of these texts.
never be [] grasped as a whole (Oosterling 2003, 41). Accordingly, the

present volume is merely a discontinuous imprint of the incursions into
the cinematic in-between undertaking some of the intellectual challenges
raised by intermedial cinema.
The illustrations included in the volume at the end of each chapter,
screenshots of the analysed films, are meant to make the arguments more
accessible to the reader and to communicate the medial aspects in a more
palpable manner through alleviating the tensions induced by the
intransitivity of the linguistic discourse of the analyses towards their
subject, the moving images, even though this is achieved through the
performance of another intermediality, that of designating stills images as
imprints of moving pictures. As such the book itself is instituting its own
unique position of being in-between words and images in the process of
discussing not so much the language of cinema, but of recording some
of the dialogues between the languages constituting the saturation of
glorious signs in cinema.
CINEMA IN-BETWEEN MEDIA
CHAPTER ONE
INTERMEDIALITY IN FILM:
A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF METHODOLOGIES
1. Theorizing Intermediality in the Cinema:

Persisting Questions
1.1 Still a Maverick Scholarly Enterprise?
In speaking about intermediality in the cinema we have to ask ourselves
first of all the following questions: What is the role of cinema in what can
be defined as intermedial studies within media studies? What is the place
of an intermedial study of cinema within the general framework of film
theory? And implicitly, can we speak of a general film theory regarding
cinematic intermediality? And we may find that these questions are not so
easily answered as they might seem at first sight. Whereas intermediality
has become a generally accepted term in media studies, in film studies it is
still a concept surrounded with much scepticism and ambiguity.1
If we look at the bigger picture, without any doubt, in the past two
decades, intermediality has proved to be one of the most productive
terms in the field of humanities generating an impressive number of
publications and theoretical debates. This popularity of intermedial
researches was prompted by the incredibly accelerated multiplication of
media themselves that called for an adequate theoretical framework
1
I am fully aware at the same time that the term intermediality itself may not be
the only possible term relating to problems involving multiple media relations, lots
of terminological surveys have shown us that multimediality or recently
multimodality, or trans-mediality, media hybridity, media convergence, etc. also
denote similar media phenomena, yet all of which can and should be distinguished
from each other. Or, as the denomination of the recently convened expert
workshop (the ESF Exploratory Workshop held in Amsterdam, 1214 June 2009:
Intermedialities) has already suggested it, we might use the plural form of the word
as an umbrella term, and refer to phenomena involving media relations as
intermedialities, thus admitting that they can be approached from various points
of view.
20 Chapter One
mapping the proliferation of media relations. The other factor that

propelled intermediality to a wider attention was most likely the fact that
it emerged on an interdisciplinary basis that made it possible for scholars
from a great number of fields (theories of literature, art history, music,
communication and cultural studies, philosophy, cinema studies, etc.) to
participate in the discourse around questions of intermediality.
The balance of these intermedial studies, we can say, is that a great
amount of work has been done especially in three directions: a) studies
concentrating on intermediality as a fundamental condition or category
(Rajewsky 2005, 47) that resulted in debates over the general terminology
and classification of intermedial relations; b) tracking media history from
the viewpoint of the birth and interrelationship of each media (a direction
that received a great boost on the one hand from the media studies of
Friedrich A. Kittler, 2 and on the other, from the concept of remediation
introduced by Bolter and Grusin (1999), or more recently, from the
pragmatic concept of media convergence introduced by Henry Jenkins3);
c) studies using intermediality as a critical category (Rajewsky 2005,
47) resulting in detailed analyses of intermedial relations within specific
texts or media (configurations). As we see, the field is wide open from
meta-theoretical enquiries and general philosophical approaches to
specific empirical analyses. So much so, that more recently, even the
possibility of conferring intermedial studies the status of an academic
discipline has been brought into discussion.4 However, an increasing
number of theorists argue that essentially intermediality remains more like
a research axis, a research concept (Suchbegriff) to quote J. E.
Mller,5 and not a coherent system of thought that would unite all the
phenomena that can be called intermedial within a single theory. This
research axis is meant to cut across several disciplines and identifies
2
E.g. Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter in which he develops the idea of how
media cross one another in time (1999, 115).
3
Jenkins stresses both the idea of the interrelatedness of media and their
interaction with an active consumer See: Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture.
Where Old and New Media Collide (2006).
4
This was one of the issues brought to general debate at the conference Imagine
Media! Media Borders and Intermediality hosted by the University of Vxj,
Sweden, 2528 October, 2007.
5
See for instance: Mller 2008, 31. Also in an earlier formulation of the same idea,
he states that intermediality does not offer the security and the status of a closed
scientific paradigm, but appears more like a theory of praxis. (Sie bietet gewiss
nicht die Sicherheit und den Status eines geschlossenen wissenschaftlichen
Paradigmas, vielmehr rckt sie als eine Theorie der Praxis Intermedialitt in das
Zentrum medienwissenschaftlicher Analysen. Mller 1996, 17.)
Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies 21
primarily the object of scientific investigation (namely, intermedial

relations) that should otherwise be handled in a media specific research.
The interdisciplinary approach to intermediality that resulted in the
incredible diversity of topics taken on by intermedial studies, however,
also brought about a proliferation of heterogeneous conceptions and
methodologies that can often seem confusing.6 The study of intermediality
(or intermedialities) has reached a state of dissemination across disciplines
and research topics that may seem productive, yet in fact, often results in a
mere inflation of its terminology.
Within this general and highly disseminated field of intermedial
studies, the investigations into cinematic intermediality seem to have a
somewhat uniquely paradoxical status. While intermediality in literature
and, more recently, in new, digital media dominates the discourse on
intermediality and most of the people who embrace this research
concept have a basic training either in literature or in communication
studies/media theory, we can see that no theoretical study of intermediality
can be written without references to cinema. Almost all essays dealing
with the concept mention film as a possible field where intermediality can
be observed, but time and again they limit their observations to only a few
sentences which sometimes clearly betray that they are not at home with
the history or theory of film as a medium; as a consequence these remarks
are often received with due scepticism by film scholars. But this does not
mean that researches concentrating directly on the intermediality of cinema
are missing, on the contrary, the bibliography of cinematic intermediality
has grown to an impressive bulk since the 1990s. Still we have to deal
with a situation in which the idea of cinematic intermediality is far from
being as accepted as literary intermediality is, for instance, that has had its
validation through a more natural adaptation of the terminologies of
linguistic or literary theory (intertextuality, dialogism, deconstruction,
etc.). Studies openly confessing an intermedial approach to film may find
themselves in a kind of maverick status, being disregarded by certain
academic circles that see in them an unwelcome hybridization of film
theory, an application of a conceptual framework regarded as something
coming from outside mainstream film theories.7
6
Hence we can see a continuous urge for a more clarified meta-theory in several
current scholarly debates around the concept of intermediality.
7
Quite often researches concentrating on cinematic intermediality are hosted by
academic departments of linguistics and literature embracing interdisciplinary
approaches (sometimes as a means of spicing up their current offer of courses and
research topics) or departments of communication/media studies instead of university
departments specializing in film studies.
22 Chapter One
So is it only a problem of a somewhat unbalanced interdisciplinarity,

where the emphasis remains on territories other than film, and notions
related to intermediality come to be merely illustrated by stretching the
examples further over the media border lying between literature and
cinema? Or is it a problem deriving from the other side, namely from the
side of film theory that has still not acknowledged as its own, so to
speak, researches into cinematic intermediality?
1.2 Intermediality: A Rift in Film Theory, a Matter of Politics,

or Just a Blind Spot?
There have been two outstanding critical assessments of the state of film
theory in the last few decades. The first critical survey accompanied the
introduction of the idea of post-theory by David Bordwell and Nol
Carroll in the mid 1990s and it was interpreted as an attack on film theory
itself in the fiery debates that followed. The second prominent re-
evaluation came from David N. Rodowick, who in 2007 voiced his
concern in a public lecture entitled An Elegy for Theory8 that film theory is
currently undergoing a crisis, declaring that: the evolution of cinema
studies since the early 1980s has been marked both by a decentering of
film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory
(2007a, 91).9 In this lecture that is currently being elaborated into a
whole book project devised to be a sequel to his latest work, The Virtual
Life of Film (2007b) Rodowick mourns the loss of emphasis on film
theory on the one hand in favour of renewed interest in both the history of
film, implicitly the historical poetics of film and of a meta-theoretical
interest in the critical history of theory itself. Both of these tendencies can
8
The lecture that was originally prepared as a keynote address at the Framework
conference On the Future of Theory, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater,
November 3-4, 2006 and was revised for the Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on
Contesting Theory at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, May 45,
2007, was published subsequently as an article in the journal October (2007a).
9
Although it seems a little paradoxical that Rodowick admits that the film
theory that these newer tendencies seem to retreat from was also highly
interdisciplinary in methods and concepts, therefore less of an autonomous
discipline as certain scientific criteria would demand it: From the late 1960s and
throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in
North America and Europe became identified with a certain idea of theory. This
was less a theory in the abstract or natural scientific sense than an interdisciplinary
commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism, echoed in the broader influence of
structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities (2007a, 91).
be tied to the ideas put forward by David Bordwell in several of his books.
In the introductory chapters written to the Post-Theory (1996) volume,
Bordwell and Carroll themselves proclaimed the end of Theory or Grand
Theory consisting of what they saw as ethereal speculations, and
presented strong arguments for a piecemeal or middle level research,
(cf. Bordwell 1996) insisting on anchoring the discipline in film as an
empirical object subject to investigations grounded in natural scientific
methods (Rodowick 2007a, 92). On the other hand Rodowick notes that
philosophical challenges to theory came from film scholars influenced by
analytic philosophy, naming Richard Allen, Malcom Turvey, Murray
Smith as some of the allies from the side of philosophy to the idea of
contesting the validity of film theory (2007a, 92). In this manner, he
finds, that throughout the 1980s and 90s there is a triple displacement
of theory by history, science, and finally, philosophy (2007a, 95). He
notes that from the analytic point of view, arguments for and against
theory take place against the background of a philosophy of science and
philosophy disappears into science as theory becomes indistinguishable
from scientific methodology (2007a, 97).
From these debates the two sides are fairly clearly distinguishable: one
is reclaiming the rights of Theory grounded in philosophy (consequently
ethics and epistemology), and seeking for instance, as Rodowick points
out in Stanley Cavells example an understanding of how our current
ways of being in the world and relating to it are cinematic (2007a, 107),
while the other can be seen from this point of view as a retreat into
post-theory, understood by its promoters as a multiplication of theories
and theorizing, of not doctrine- but problem-driven researches (Bordwell
1996, xvii). What seems to be relevant from our standpoint, however, is
not which line of arguments we can accept, but what is missing from these
critical perspectives. Although both Bordwell and Rodowick present fairly
nuanced overviews of what they consider to be the current state of affairs
in film studies, we can observe that there is also another divide that could
be taken into account as far as film theory is concerned: there seems to be
a rift not only between Theory and contemporary piecemeal
theorizing, as Rodowick sees it, or between associative interpretations or
theoretical writings written as a bricolage of other theories (Bordwell
1996, 25) and a search for a more scientific method as Bordwell sees it,
but there is also a distinct divide between current cognitive, ecological or
philosophical approaches to moving image theory on the one hand, and a
media theoretical discussion of cinema that also inevitably includes
questions of intermediality, on the other. This latter rift seems even more
acute, as despite the existence of important works on both sides, there
24 Chapter One
seems to be very little communication between the scholars on each side

of the two trenches, so to speak. And while the first divide has been
much debated, this second divide is much less visible. One of the
possible causes for this is the fact that the rift seems to be not only
between theoretical schools or applied methodologies but also between the
languages of discourse: English versus German and French. In contrast to
early film theory which started in Europe, the current mainstream
theorizing seems to be located in America. Intermedial studies, however,
established strongholds in Europe and Canada, and cinema studies
embracing the idea of intermediality are practiced within an interdisciplinary
framework. It is no surprise then, that important analyses scattered within
mainly German or French language collections tend to fall out of sight as
far as American based film theorizing is concerned.10 It is true that, while
there is no shortage of writings that can qualify for an intermedial theory
in general, no grand intermedial film theory is in sight, only the kind of
middle-level research that Bordwell advocated as responsible, imaginative,
and lively inquiry (1996, xvii).
Nevertheless, in an age demanding a more specific and scientific
pursuit of film studies, an intermedial analysis of film apparently still
seems too much tainted by its interdisciplinarity or, as Rodowicks
argument might imply, too much attached to another vast field of interest,
media studies in general. And we may also ask: why is it so that an
intensely method-driven theorizing that borrows from other disciplines is
accepted in the case of film semiotics, narratology or cognitive film theory
which are all recognized as legitimate pursuits of film studies, and not
merely as branches of some other disciplines , but the interdisciplinarity
of intermediality so often suggests negative connotations of hybridity?
Is it on account of the language barrier, suggested earlier, on account of
the differences in cultural contexts that these researches are embedded
in,11 or is it more the effect of diverging trends in what we could call the
10
Although Yvonne Spielmanns book on intermediality and the work of Peter
Greenaway (Intermedialitt. Das System Peter Greenaway, 1997) is a notable
attempt to reconcile the neo-formalist film analysis practiced by David Bordwell
and Kristin Thompson with the perspective of intermedial studies, this gesture
has not been reciprocated, cognitive film theory has never really dealt with
intermedial aspects of cinema.
11
In the USA film theorizing, as I understand, is even today constantly forced to
assert itself against filmmaking practices and film criticism. In Europe, by
comparison, film theory is compelled to find its foothold not so much against the
backdrop of film production, but among traditional academic disciplines and
global politics of science? Or does it have to do with the implicit

ideological assumptions that also seem to contaminate the notion of
intermediality,12 or merely with the suspicion that the undertaking of this
research perspective is a sign of decline in an academic world based on
classic disciplinary hierarchies and a clear-cut distinction of academic
fields of research (as suggested by Jrgen E. Mller13)? For there is
undoubtedly an eschatological line of thinking linked to intermediality
that is discernible in the symptomatic interpretation of intermedial
researches (as manifestations of the the end of certain academic disciplines
and subject matters, and also as manifestations of the efforts to revitalize
ailing academic structures here and there). The same eschatological idea
of intermediality emerges in the rhetoric of the discussions about the
imminent demise of the cinematic medium (discussions that were held
mainly around the centenary of the cinema, mourning the death of
classical movie experiences and technologies).
But putting aside these ambivalences that can lead to such final
perspectives and interpretations of academic policies, perhaps it is ultimately
more adequate to describe the place of intermedial film researches not
so much in terms of a rift or divergence between schools of thought or
in terms of a politics of science, but merely as a kind of invisibility, a
blind spot of film theory, as Franois Jost put it (2005, 111112).
Paradoxically, both Bordwells piecemeal-theorizing and Rodowicks
researches into the figural or the virtual life of film have a lot in
common with intermedial studies of film, one in method, the other in
actual content: the Bordwellian piecemeal as suggested earlier can
be seen as just another name of the slices of researches done along the
research axis of intermediality; while Rodowicks theorizing can be seen
as revolving around the same questions as debated by media theorists
regarding cinema,14 even if he does not explicitly place himself along this
axis of intermedial researches.
But what seems to be the most important blind spot factor is that
several contemporary scholars who write about the medium of cinema
institutions in the context of which a strategy of interdisciplinarity might seem

more successful.
12
See details about the ideological charge of the notion of intermediality in Jens
Schrters article, The Politics of Intermediality (2010).
13
Cf. the article entitled: Intermediality and Media Historiography in the Digital
Era (2010b).
14
The Virtual Life of Film (Rodowick 2007b) is essentially about the changing
mediality of the moving pictures, and what can also be considered as the
remediation of classical cinema into newer media.
26 Chapter One
consider it primarily from an aesthetic point of view, and place it into a

discourse that revolves around the aesthetic value of cinema, and do not
seem to consider it from a medium theoretical perspective. The question of
cinematic mediality comes into their debates via criticism of classical film
theories, and the concept of medium itself seems to become a casualty in
the repeated attacks against Big Theory. The case of Nol Carroll is
perhaps the most edifying in this respect. On the first glance, Carroll
throws out completely the possibility of discussing the mediality of
cinema. Forget the Medium! the title of Carrolls chapter explicitly
says in one of his latest books. (Carroll 2003, 110). But in fact, the
rejection of media foundationalism, as he calls it, equals merely the
ousting of the monomedial concept of cinema, and the rejection of a
normative, prescriptive aesthetics based on the assumption of media
essentialism.15 So, on the second glance, quite the opposite is true, Carroll
seems to advocate the hybrid, multimedial nature of cinema as an
artform.16 However, as Rodowick rightly states (2007b, 41), Carroll
manages to throw out the baby with the bathwater in arguing against
media specificity of cinema on account of its hybridity. For as Rodowick
states it is impossible to understood multimediality without a proper
understanding of the individual properties of the media being combined.
So in Carrolls case it is the concept of a legislative aesthetics, and also
a simplified idea of cinematic multimediality that in fact blocks the view
towards a more nuanced understanding of media relations involved in
cinema.17 In an earlier example, in a book entitled Theorizing the Moving
Image (1996), Carroll even deals with the deep interconnectedness of
verbal language structures and images within certain metaphors, for
instance, but without considering it a case for intermediality as we grew
accustomed to in studies about word and image relations.
In a similar manner, there are some theoretical works that speak about
certain facets of cinema that would rightly fall under the scope of
intermedial analyses or would necessitate the discussion of medial aspects,
but this is somehow not the case. Most often intermediality remains: une
question non questionne (an unquestioned question) to quote Franois
15
He rejects that there is a distinctive medium of film and that the essential
properties of the film medium implicitly prescribe important constraints on what
artistically successful cinema can and should achieve (Carroll 2003, xiii).
16
Cf. Carroll: Artforms generally involve a number of media, including
frequently overlapping ones (2003, 5).
17
See a short summary of Carrolls position regarding the question of cinematic
mediality also in the essay included in this volume with the title Reading the
Intermedial. Abysmal Mediality and Trans-Figuration of the Moving Images.
Jost (2005, 111) again. In addition, most mainstream theoretical writings

(almost all the Film Studies or Film Analysis handbooks available, for
instance) treat film as a monomedial entity, without taking into account its
intermedial aspects even in newer works which deal with cinemas
transition from the analogue to the digital.
Furthermore, in the course of the past decade questions of intermediality
have had to face a new challenge that began to take shape in the growing
discussions about the so called post medium condition. After years of
upheaval brought about by the proliferation of new technologies producing
and disseminating moving images, the challenge of the so called post
media age can also be indentified in the fact that there seems to be an
effect of uniformization among the different forms of the moving images.
Theorists claim that now that the term medium has triumphed, the actual
media are already deceased. (Lutticken 2004, 12). Digitized imagery
absorbs media that become undead media, mere phantoms of their
former self (Lutticken 2004, 12).18 So, the invisibility of intermediality
seems to be threatened both by the contemporary media practice of digital
mixtures, and by contemporary theories claiming that the concept of the
medium itself needs a mutation accordingly.19 So what happens to film
and the notion of intermediality in the post-media age? Will its relevance
disappear while questions of monomediality threaten to gain new strength
with the uniformity of digitization? Or quite the contrary, it will come
back with a vengeance, as intermediality (and moving images themselves)
can be perceived more and more not just as a form of communication but
as a form of an environment that remains a multilayered sensual
experience despite all its globalizing and unifying aspects?
1.3 Film as an Incredible Shrinking Medium,

or an Intermedium?
In asking ourselves the basic questions about film theory and intermediality,
we cannot avoid the fact that the core of all these questions is the problem
of the mediality of film itself. As Rodowick explains: one powerful
consequence of the rapid emergence of electronic and digital media is that
we can no longer take for granted what film is its ontological anchors
18
This type of discourse, in a way, seems to continue the death of cinema
debates among film critics and aesthetes conducted around the time of the
centenary of cinema.
19
See for instance Lev Manovichs claims for a new conceptual system that
would replace the old discourse of mediums and be able to describe post-digital,
post-net culture more adequately (2001b).
28 Chapter One
have come ungrounded and thus we are compelled to revisit continually

the question, What is cinema? (2007b, 93.) Film as we knew it, has
acquired a historical status, it has become a medium mainly preserved by
film archives. Traditional movie theatre experience has been replaced by a
cinema based on new digital technologies in order to provide an
overwhelming multi-sensory experience. Home video systems, interactive
3D computer games, or even mobile phones or advertising screens
installed on streets or underground stations have become media for our
daily consumption of moving images. Film has become an incredible
shrinking medium, as David N. Rodowick has pointed out in his book
entitled the Virtual Life of Film (2007b), disappearing from our daily life
as a medium but persisting as cinematic experience in new media, and in
the spaces and spectacles of everyday life.
So, consequently, a logical step to take is that film studies should
include all the possible media mutations of cinema. In a way this has
already happened. Instead of cinema or film the more general term of
moving images seems to acquire a growing popularity while the so
called, analogue, classical cinema becomes only one of the media that
can be included under this umbrella term. Cognitive and ecological film
theories have already adopted this perspective (see Carroll 2003, Anderson
2005, etc.), and it is only natural that the perspective of intermediality
should be edifying with regards to the different manifestations or changes
in the mediality/configuration/social uses of moving images and their
newfound interrelationships.20
The other important question, both from a narrower or a wider perspective,
has been the following: Is film one medium among several others in our
culture or is it one that combines more than one? Is film (even in its
traditional form) an intermedium, a composite medium, in other words,
perhaps the ultimate mixed or hybrid medium that combines all kinds
of media in its texture of signification? Or should we more likely regard it
merely as a place, a field where intermedial relationships and/or
media transformations can occur? Is cinema therefore a prototype or a
unique case for intermediality as some of the studies suggest?
In one of the groundbreaking books written on cinematic intermediality,
Jrgen E. Mller writes the following: The introduction of electricity and
electronics made film into the intermedial threshold-medium of modernism
that meant the final stages of mechanizing and also the beginning of the
electronic and the digital within media history. Therefore film is not
20
See also Mllers views expressed in the article published in Acta Universitatis
Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies, Volume 2 (2010b).
hybrid or intermedial because it made its medial forerunners into its own
contents (as was the thesis of McLuhan), but because from the very
beginning we find medial interactions and interferences on almost every
level. Its technical conditions, its circumstances of presentation and its
aesthetic structures are all marked by these interactions (1996, 47).21
Similarly, Jrgen Heinrichs and Yvonne Spielmann address this
subject in the following way in an editorial to the special issue entitled
What is Intermedia? of the journal Convergence (2002 No. 8):
Conceptually, intermedia denotes a fusion rather than an accumulation of
media. Thus, the convergence of elements of different media implies the
transformation that is more than the sum of its parts. [] Media
histories tend to view cinema as the first truly intermedial medium. Such
historical assessments argue that cinemas adaptation, convergence, and
amalgamation of discrete features from literature, music, dance, theatre
and painting account for its intermedial quality. However, this does not
imply that the medium of film per se should be considered intermedia.22
The example of cinema rather highlights the transformative quality of
intermediality that can be found in the varying interrelationships between
two or more media forms. These may have developed separately but are
transformed through convergence into a new, mixed form. In the example
of cinema, intermediality acts as a model for the varied interrelationships
between diachronic and synchronic media (2002, 6-7).
These theoretical assessments clearly link the idea of intermediality to
film, considering film either as a medium that interacts with other media
on several levels and in a variety of forms, or as a medium that has
developed certain configurations that can be called intermedial.
Nevertheless, there is still room for more comprehensive answers to these
fundamental questions. Theorizing intermediality in film, or a philosophy
of cinematic intermediality in film is far from being a closed chapter, in
21
Die Einfhrung der Elektrizitt und der Elektronik machte den Film zu dem
intermedialen Schwellen-Medium der Moderne, welches den Endpunkt der
Mechanisierung und zugleich den Ausgangspunkt der Elektronisierung und
Digitalisierung in Mediengeschichte markiert. Der Film ist jedoch nicht deshalb
hybrid und intermedial, weil er sich seit seinem Beginn auf nahezu jedem Niveau
in medialen Interaktionen und Interferenzen befindet. Seine technische
Voraussetzungen, seine Auffhrungsbedingungen und seine sthetischen
Strukturen sind durch diese Interferenzen geprgt. (Mller 1996, 47.)
22
In her earlier book, Yvonne Spielmann declares in a similar way that film has
produced intermedial forms throughout its history, however this does not mean that
film should be considered per se intermedial. (Cf. Im Medium Film haben sich
historisch intermediale Formen herausgebildet, aber das Medium ist nicht per se
intermedial. Spielmann 1998, 9.)
30 Chapter One
fact it should become an even more acute question with the advent of
post-medium theories and aesthetics.
2. Routes along the Historical Research Axis

of Intermediality in Film?
What is already quite clear is that questions of intermediality should
always be regarded in a historical perspective: both in the case of researches
done into intermediality, or in the case of meta-theoretical inquiries, when
we look into theories about intermedial relations. Intermediality as an
object of research can only be examined within its context, within the
framework of concrete time and place coordinates.23 Early films display a
whole different array of media relations than the ones we find in the
established institutionalized forms of cinematic storytelling, not to
mention later developments of technique that establish new sets of
intermedial networks or newer forms of moving images. And if we search
for the history of thought regarding the idea of intermediality, likewise, we
will find that the problem of media interactions emerges right at the very
beginning of film history and is immediately reflected upon by early film
theorists. Media relations together with inter-art relations of film prove to
be an area under discussion that persists more or less emphatically
throughout the history of film theory and do not only surface in the
intermediality studies of the latter decades. On the one hand it is indeed a
subject brought to attention by media studies, and the amount of literature
that has been published on the topic of intermediality in film can already
be assessed in terms of specific methodologies and terminology. On the
other hand, it is also true that we can trace the input not only of explicit
intermedial theorizing of cinema, but also of the more implicit
theoretical considerations that preceded the emergence of medium theory,
and also of analyses that may not include themselves under the heading of
intermedial studies, which nevertheless deal with the same issues as the
studies grounded in intermedial theories.
Historically speaking, the ways in which intermedial occurrences (in
other words, media relations that cinema engages in) have been discussed
(directly or indirectly) in film theory or analysis can be grouped in the
following paradigms sketched below.
23
Rodowicks The Virtual Life of Film is a good example of this.
2.1 Film as Synesthetic Experience and the Spirit

of a New Laocon
The idea that cinema is unavoidably interconnected with other media and
arts has been a constant issue addressed by theories one way or another
ever since the first moving picture shows were presented in a theatrical
environment and ever since movies attempted to present narratives and to
produce emotions by a combination of images in movement, music and
words. In the early decades of cinema history we find wonderfully poetic
similes or synesthetic metaphors in essays describing the essence of
cinema as a new art and medium emerging in terms of comparison to the
other arts, also defining what films are not, and thus defining the
specificity of cinema. Ricciotto Canudo wrote in 1911: The new
manifestation of Art should really be more precisely a Painting and a
Sculpture developing in Time [] in a most astonishing apotheosis, the
Plastic Art in Motion will arise (1993, 59). The name of photoplay
employed by Hugo Mnsterberg (1916) also suggests a similar mixture of
arts giving rise to cinema. Vachel Lindsays Art of the Moving Picture
(1915) even elaborates a taxonomy of photoplay types describing film
either as sculpture in motion, painting in motion, or architecture in
motion, and his whole vision of cinematic complexity culminates in the
idea of a specific hieroglyphics of the moving image.
This tendency of describing the essence of cinema by way of pointing
out analogies with other arts and media continued in a more systematic
way with the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein, whose famous montage theory
was elaborated on the concept of film being music to the eyes (the
terminology used also reflects this concept, e.g. tonal, overtonal
montage, etc.). His famous collaboration with Sergei Prokofiev in
Alexander Nevsky (1938) is a well-known example of how he conceived of
moving images following the rhythmic structure of a musical score.
Eisensteins essays (1942) can also be regarded as the forerunners of the
idea of media archaeology when he talks of the techniques of Dickenss or
Zolas novels in comparison to filmic narrative, or the parallels between
cinematic montage and El Grecos paintings. In all his works, at the same
time, he maintained a highly synesthetic view upon cinema, in which
elements characteristic to each of the arts or to each of the senses were
combined in a unique way. When talking about El Greco, for example, he
talks of cromo-phonic montage and the rhapsody of the colour yellow;
in presenting his own method of mixing black-and-white cinematography
with colour in Ivan the Terrible (1944), he speaks of colour acting as a
musical theme. As a whole, his theory of montage is an attempt (matching
32 Chapter One
the ambition of Lessings synthesis in his Laocon) to find correspondences

between all the arts.
This type of theorizing cinemas interconnectedness with the other arts
and media is more than merely conferring a poetic quality (consequently
aesthetic value) to film by the use of a synesthetic language, it can be
attributed in fact to an early realization of what later came to be known as
the phenomenon of remediation in the media theory of Bolter and Grusin
(1999) or what Jens Schrter denoted as ontological intermediality
(ontologische Intermedialitt, 1996, 146): the definition of the emerging
new media is done through comparisons with other, already familiar arts
and media, and also cinemas repurposing of the arts and media is
acknowledged. It is also consistent with the process necessarily involved
in the emergence of a new medium, as Gaudreault and Marion explained:
a mediums identity is a very complex affair. Moreover, specificity by no
means signifies separation or isolation. A good understanding of a medium
thus entails understanding its relationship to other media: it is through
intermediality, through a concern with the intermedial, that a medium is
understood (2002, 15).
However, the arguments for the acceptance of the new, seventh art
bring forward not only such enthusiastic Gesamtkunstwerk-like ideas or
synesthetic metaphors about cinema as quoted above, but also explicit
rejections of too much contamination with the other arts, especially
literature. And these debates tend to renew from time to time around the
introduction of new technologies within cinema: the introduction of sound
or the shift from analogue to digital, and also around the questions of
adaptations from literature.24
The so called essentialist aesthetics of film often resort to a
comparison between the arts in the spirit practiced by G. E. Lessing in his
famous Laocon essay and set up normative aesthetic principles and media
boundaries that film should conform to. Arnheims New Laocon (1938)
dealing with the advent of the talkies and dismissing sound as an
unwelcome interference with the purity of the medium is one example in
point. A medium of expression that is capable of producing complete
24
See for instance the views of Russian Formalist Boris Eichenbaum, who
advocated the idea that cinema and language cannot be separated and the analysis
of the use of language in film constitutes one of the most important questions of
film theory (Problems of Film Stylistics, 1927), but who also compared the
relationship of film and literature to a marriage that has been going on too long,
and urged that cinema should leave his honourable mistress, namely literature
(Film and Literature, 1926). Bazins highly influential essay written in defence of
an impure cinema can also be noted (1967).
works by its own resources will forever keep up its resistance against any
combination with any other medium, Arnheim declared (1938, 2002). In
a later article, however, published in 1999, Arnheim revised his attitude
and admitted that: in film a variety of media could be involved, as is the
case of an orchestra where every instrument plays its part in the whole
performance. [] I see now that there is no such thing as a work limited to
a single medium. [] The film medium, as I recognize now, profits from a
freedom, a breathing space that I could not afford to consider when I
fought for the autonomy of the cinema. It is free to use sound or no sound,
color or no color, a limited frame or an endless space; it can exploit depth
or use the virtues of the flat plane. This freedom puts the film more closely
in the company of the other performing arts, such as the theater, the dance,
music, or pantomime (Arnheim 1999, 558).25 Thus Arnheim actually
returns to a synesthetic or Gesamtkunstwerk-like model in the vein of
Eisenstein.
The analogy of cinema with music or musical performance, that
Arnheim mentions here, is in fact a recurring metaphor of film aesthetics
acknowledging the composite nature of films signification and the
synesthetic quality of cinematic experience well beyond the range of
influence of Eisensteins montage theory. David Bordwell has assessed the
history of this analogy in detail and pointed out its diverse ramifications.
He considers that on the one hand it has functioned to brake a tendency to
think of cinema as an art of the real (Bordwell 1980, 142). On the other
hand music became useful as a model because of its architectonic
features. A musical piece exhibits form at many levels []. What has
made the analogy attractive are the ways in which a musical piece can be
analyzed as a system of systems []. On this analogy, a film becomes a
large-scale form made of smaller systems (Bordwell 1980, 142), and as
such it helped film theorists think of film as an interplay of formal systems
(raising, of course, further questions regarding the nature of such an
interplay). Nevertheless, we also have to take into account, as Nol
Carroll has pointed out, that quite often such musicalist analogies are
used not to stress the synesthetic quality of cinema but precisely the
presumed aesthetic norms put forward in the spirit of the legacy of Lessing
in order to express the true essence of the medium in contrast to an
overly literary cinema in the name of purism (Carroll 1996, 18).
25
One of the interpreters of Arnheims theory, Dimitri Liebsch considers that
Arnheims revision of his earlier views could be described something like a new
Hamburgische Dramaturgie in a further parallel with Lessings works (2004).
34 Chapter One
2.2 Trans-Medial Theories of Cinema

This is perhaps the most arguable category listed here. As we know,
especially in the field of narratology we have a long running tradition of
theorizing filmic narrative (just like more recently computer games) on the
basis of the notions developed in literary narratology. The first theorists to
do so were the Russian formalists (Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky,
Yuri Tinyanov, etc.) who, as we know, wrote extensively on matters
regarding the medium of film as well. Their ideas were later taken over by
the so called neo-formalist film analyses (as practiced by Kristin
Thompson, for example). David Bordwells narratology is also based on
formalist categories (like fabula and suzhet), just as Edward Branigans
theories of filmic narration or point of view repurpose Genettes
categories. What makes it questionable to include such theories in the line
of theorizing intermediality is that these categories of narratology are
considered to be trans-medially applicable exactly because according to
certain views narrative structure is believed to be medially non-specific (as
a semiotic universal or as a deep structure), and without doubt these
theories do not approach cinema as having the potential of engaging in
intermedial relations. However, there are cases in which a trans-medial
theoretic framework is used in order to theorize medial specificity and
differences. Seymour Chatmans seminal essay: What Novels can Do that
Films cant (and Vice Versa), 1981, is a good example, but it can actually
be fitted in the next category, named below (exemplifying how these
categories are sometimes interconnected).
2.3 Comparative Analyses, Inter-Art Theories

(Cinema and-Type Works)
Quite a few works present comparative analyses of cinema and the other
arts. This type of theorizing is most often practiced as a general inter-art
theory comparing two art forms or media (painting and cinema, literature
and cinema), which usually does not only comprise the comparative
presentation of one art versus the other, but also deal with: a) tracing the
influences/borrowings between the arts and media, their genealogical
interconnectedness (see for instance, Joachim Paechs Literatur und Film,
1988), or b) concrete occurrences of interartiality, i.e. embedded
representations of one art within the other (the analysis of the role of
paintings seen in cinema, for instance, or comparing literary works and
films, etc.). Both Bazins well-known essay on the differences of painting
and cinema (Painting and Cinema, 1967) and Chatmans essay quoted
before, exhibit such duality in their methodology within a single work.

Also, we can find a third type: c) comparative analyses that deal with
phenomena that can be viewed comparatively in the arts, this is the case,
for instance, of Robert Stams approach, who examines reflexivity in both
film and literature (Stam 1992). Nevertheless, this type of work can also
be considered as both comparative and trans-medial theory as it deploys a
methodology that rests on concepts elaborated by Bakhtin or Brecht in
reference to literature.
As a whole, this category covers an extremely large area of researches
(beside the already named connections: cinema and photography, cinema
and architecture, cinema and theatre, cinema and television, cinema and
new media, cinema and computer games, etc.) and it has to be said, that
some of these do not even adopt a media theoretical approach (most works
that incorporate intermediality as their blind spot can be found in this
group, as sometimes the applied trans-medial conceptual frameworks
like hermeneutics or general philosophical categories do not allow a
conscious exploration of mediality). Nevertheless, as I have said, the
works are numerous, only the works dealing with the relationship of
painting and cinema, for instance, are so many that I cannot even attempt
to enlist them here.26
An equally important subcategory here consists of the adaptation
theories. Not all of the works, however, analyse the relation of film and
literature from the perspective of mediality. Earlier theories most often
construct their theses and methodologies based on aesthetic and critical
assumptions and revolve around the fidelity issue, questioning to what
degree films are true to their literary source. An important turning point in
the history of adaptation theories constituted the rejection of the fidelity
discourse, and the orientation of the adaptation studies in the direction of
Bakhtinian dialogism and intertextuality (implicitly, sometimes even
intermediality).27 As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out in her recent book
synthesizing contemporary views regarding these questions, adaptation
can be seen from several perspectives: as trans-mediality, a trans-coding
into a different set of conventions (2006, 33), translation of one media
into another, as a cultural or trans-cultural phenomenon of indigenization
26
Only some of the names here: Bonitzer (1987), Aumont (1989), Dalle Vacche
(1996), Fellemann (2006), Bonfand (2007), etc.
27
Again the works are too numerous to even attempt to list them here. Some of the
important contributors to the contemporary discourse on adaptations are: Elliot
(2003), Stam and Raengo (2004, 2005), Stam (2005), Aragay (2005), Hutcheon
(2006), Leitch (2007), etc. A new impetus was given to these studies by the start of
a new specialized Oxford journal, Adaptation, in 2008.
36 Chapter One
(or colonization) or a kind of extended palimpsest (2006, 33). Or, we

can add, as a more complex intermediality that combines all kinds of
media relations, as can be observed, for instance, in the so called picto-
films28 that have emerged almost as a sub-genre among adaptations. We
have so many adaptations of classical narrative literature in which a sense
of literariness is conveyed in fact through ostensible imitations of
paintings or painterly styles.29 [Figs. 1.13.]
2.4 Parallax Historiography and Media Archaeology

The term parallax historiography has been introduced by Catherine
Russell (2002), and refers to the way in which earlier forms of cinema get
to be revisited and re-interpreted from the perspective of newer media
forms of moving images, or reversely, how these newer forms can be
interpreted from the perspective of earlier forms of cinema. As Russell
explains: new media technologies have created new theoretical passages
back to the first decades of film history (2002, 552). Parallax
historiography refers to the way that early cinema comes into focus from
the perspective of the end of the 20th century. [] The term parallax is
useful to describe this historiography, because it is a term that invokes a
shift in perspective as well as a sense of parallelism (Russell 2002, 552).
Naturally, we could dispute whether the relation of older and newer
forms of moving images should be considered intermediality or a sort of
trans-mediality within moving pictures; nevertheless, this approach is
extremely appropriate at a time of an incredible multiplication of the
media forms of moving images and of an ever widening area of the
remediation of cinematic techniques. We can see, for instance, how the
internet is displaying forms of private moving picture consumption
comparable to early, pre-cinematographic techniques of cinema (see for
instance, Lev Manovichs idea that Quick Time is similar to Edisons
kinetoscope). In a similar parallax view Manovich (2001a, 180) sees
Mlis as the father of computer graphics and there are several studies of
computer games or digital media that draw similar parallels with early
cinema. (See: Punt, 2000). The ongoing fascination or fashion of
contemporary silent films (the films of Guy Maddin, for example), some
28
The term is borrowed from Jost (1993).
29
Numerous BBC series adapting the works of Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Jane
Austen or Thackeray could be cited as examples for this, or Roman Polanskis Tess
(1979), Franco Zefirellis Jane Eyre (1996), James Ivorys films etc. (Cf. Peth
2010a, or its rewritten version in the present volume, Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc
Godards Poetics of the In-Between.)
instances of postmodern pastiche also invite such a parallax view over the
medium of film.
From the part of film history this approach has benefited from the
ideology of so called contemporary revisionist film history (as practiced
by Thomas Elsaesser and Tom Gunning, for instance [cf. Elsaesser and
Barker 1989]), defined as a kind of complex archaeology of the medium,
that on the one hand takes into account several factors of the production of
cinema and on the other hand, also envisages the history of cinema not as
a linear progress in time, but as a set of paradigms that can be re-visited
and refashioned (like the cinema of attractions that characterized early
cinema and that proved to be a paradigm the elements of which persist not
only in the avant-garde or several Hollywood genres, but can be
reloaded into a number of other film types along the history of film or
even newer media, like video blogging30).
In other instances we have researches into media archaeology in the
spirit of Bolter and Grusins idea of remediation, examining how cinema
displays earlier forms of media, or how cinematic forms get to be
remediated in other, newer forms. Certain types of films have also been
singled out as explicitly acting as the memory/archive of the medium,
(see the museum of memory taken over from Malraux, in Godards
work, or the kind of archival or database aesthetics [cf. Vesna 2007]
employed by Greenaway).
2.5 Modelling Cinematic Intermediality and Mapping

the Rhetoric of Intermedial Cinema
Within the studies explicitly dealing with intermedial occurrences in cinema
we find that general theory and concrete analysis are two large avenues of
investigation31 that are usually intertwined: the aim to reach a general
outline of some kind of a model of intermediality is usually meant to lead
to specific analyses of intermedial techniques.
In trying to identify the methodologies employed by the writings on
cinematic intermediality within the last few decades I have found that the
general debate over types and terminologies in intermedial studies have
been matched by similar meta-theoretic approaches concerning cinematic
intermediality. Moreover, these often meant a thorough investigation into
the nature of cinematic mediality itself. The adaptation of the terminology
30
Cf. the essays in the volume edited by Wanda Strauven: The Cinema of
Attractions Reloaded (2007).
31
I have borrowed the expression from Gaudreault and Marion (2002, 12).
38 Chapter One
of philosophy, literary theory or communication studies has been done

with an ambition to draw conclusions that could apply not only to cinema
but to a general view over intermediality as well.32 Also, more specifically,
certain artists like Peter Greenaway or Jean-Luc Godard have been singled
out not just to exemplify cinematic intermediality but in order to unravel
the intricate weave of intermedial relations within cinema and the
particular intermedial rhetoric distinguishable within their works.33
It seems that intermediality has been explicitly targeted in such studies
both as a general concept defining the complex mediality of cinema and as
a rhetoric that defines certain artists or cinematic trends.
If mapping the rhetoric of intermedial cinema has been one of the main
goals of theoretical investigations, in order to sketch some of the
characteristic points of view adopted by these analyses, in what follows,
mutatis mutandis, I should likewise be mapping the rhetoric of intermedial
studies of cinema. In order to do that, I will attempt a brief survey of some
of the key concepts by way of which these analyses interpret
intermediality in film. I am doing this not only because there seems to
exist a recurring terminology, but also because, as a rule, the analysis of
specific concepts or metaphors used in the rhetoric of a discourse may
prove to be relevant in trying to assess how a certain way of theorizing
makes meaning of the things it tries to describe.34
a) Intermediality described as a system or a network of interrelations

(Beziehungsnetz), a system of media convergence and transformation
This model is perhaps best presented by Yvonne Spielmann in her

analysis of the intermedial features of Peter Greenaways cinema (cf.
Spielmann 1994 and also 2001). She speaks of media correlations, of the
way different types of images are correlated and merged, describing
intermedial cinema as a result of processes of transformation effected
through convergence of elements of different media (2001, 55). She
emphasizes: What is essential to intermedia and intertextuality as well is
32
No doubt, this is a possible argument for including studies of intermediality
within the cinema under the umbrella term of media studies, as well as considering
them as valid exercises of film theory.
33
Cf. Spielmann (1998), Paech (1989), Mller (1996, 1997), Roloff-Winter
(1997), etc.
34
The choice of words in my own rhetoric here is also not accidental, as I proceed
with this type of meta-theoretical analysis in the spirit of David Bordwells
methodology of identifying cognitive metaphors underlying the rhetoric of film
criticism in Making Meaning (1989).
the category of transformation. But where intertextuality expresses a text

text relationship, intermedia means that the reference frame of the entire
system of art forms that mediates the intermedial correlation is itself
included in the processes of transformation. (2001, 57) Joachim Paech
speaks of a constitutive intermediality and a dynamic correspondence/
relationship35 between media (2002, 279), stating that intermediality is to
be understood as the repetition of one medium as the content of its form
within another medium.36
b) Theorizing the perception of intermediality in film: as a reflexive

experience, a trace, difference, a parasitic third, oscillation, an interim
form
All these are ostensibly indebted to Derridas ideas of difference and

trace and these ideas often accompany the previously named correlational
model. I quote Joachim Paech again, he writes: The only possibility to, as
it were, reach the medium behind the form consists in self-observation of
the observation and the re-entry of the medium as form or as a back link,
in which mediality as the constitutive difference in the oscillation between
medium and form becomes observable as the parasitic third, whose
background noise renders the event of the difference, thus, the message,
perceptible and comprehensible. (Paech 2000)
In this view there are certain conditions that have to be met in order to
perceive intermediality as such. This definition contains multiple elements
that are important: first of all the self-reflexive aspect (the spectator has to
be either conscious of media processes or the film has to use a reflexive
strategy that makes media processes visible)37 and also the idea of media
difference that has to be inscribed/re-inscribed within the work.38
35
Translated from the German original of: konstitutive Intermedialitt, and
Dynamische Zusammenhang. (Paech 2002, 279.)
36
Intermedialitt ist als konstitutives und reflexives Verfahren der Wiederholung
eines Mediums als Inhalt seiner Form in einem anderen Medium dargestellt
worden. (Paech 2002, 283.)
37
Yvonne Spielmann also speaks of this reflexive aspect: In relation to visual
media, then, this definition of intermedia inherently implies that the processes of
transformation are reflected in the form of the images, because it is through the
modes of self-reflection that the structural shifts characteristic of new media
images are mediated and made visible. (2001, 55.)
38
Paech observes that intermediality can only take place on the level of the
forms of their media. (Intermedialitt kann nur auf der Ebene der Formen ihrer
Medien stattfinden, ihre Differenz figuriert ihrerseits als Form, in der sich die
Medien unterscheiden und in Beziehung setzen (lassen) Paech 1997b, 334). In a
40 Chapter One
Paech elaborates on the idea, saying that: Strictly speaking, intermedial

processes are also only manifest as configurations or as transformative
inscriptions of mediality in a work, text, or intertext. Thus, intermediality
as medial transformation can always be observed where the medial
difference of forms (of communication) is relevant in works, texts, or
other (cultural) manifestations (Paech 2000). The state in which we can
observe intermediality according to this view is never a fixed form or
structure but the events of difference, of oscillations, and as such,
merely as the interim of forms.
More recently Paech has compared the dynamics of the perception of
intermediality (i.e. the way medium and form become observable and the
way in which one form of a medium can be seen within another medium)
to the perception of the duality of figure and ground as it is
understood in the visual psychology of the so called Gestalt theory and in
which one form can be perceived alternately either as figure or as
ground depending on the context and reflexive predisposition. As the
title of one of his latest essays indicates: the medium formulates and the
form figurates (Das Medium formuliert, die Form figuriert): the medium
becomes observable as form, and the form serves as a medium for the
figure. Intermediality as an experience can be described in this way as a
specific figure or figuration of media form processes, i.e. as the repetition
or the re-inscription of a medium as a form in the form of another medium,
where the procedure of intermediality itself is also figurated, that is: it
becomes observable and it refers reflexively to itself.39
summary of his basic ideas on intermediality for a compendium of film theories

Paech also emphasizes the influence of Niklas Luhmanns distinction between
medium and form. According to Luhmann media can be perceived only as
contingencies of their forms that they make possible, i.e. media can only be
observed as forms (cf. Paech 2007, 296303).
39
Die Form bleibt auf das Medium bezogen, das sie formuliert (hnlich der
Gestalt im Verhltnis zum Grund in der psychologischen Gestalttheorie). Die Figur
ist auf die Form bezogen, die sich im Prozess der Figuration differenziert (in
diesem Sinne ist die Form auch wieder Medium der Figur, wie zum Beispiel bei
Kippfiguren). Eine der Figuren in diesem Prozess ist der Vorgang reflexiver
Formbildung selbst. Mediale Formprozesse knnen auf diese Weise selbst in der
Figuration ihres Verfahrens anschaulich (sthetisch) werden. Intermedialitt als
Verfahren ist daher als eine bestimmte Figur(ation) medialer Formprozesse zu
beschreiben, nmlich als Wiederholung oder Wiedereinschreibung eines Mediums
als Form in die Form eines (anderen) Mediums, wo das Verfahren der
Intermedialitt figuriert, also anschaulich wird und reflexiv auf sich selbst als
Verfahren verweist. (Excerpt from a manuscript due to be published in 2011. I am
All these ideas have served not only as the foundations for a general
theoretical argument, but have also generated in-depth analyses of media
relations within film. See for instance Joachim Paechs study (1997a)
written on the subject of the traces of writing (die Spur der Schrift),40
a comprehensive and detailed study of the interrelationship of writing and
cinema that can eloquently exemplify the huge import this type of
approach has brought to film studies in general.
c) Intermediality described as a performative act, an action
In close connection with the view presented earlier, we can also

distinguish a performative aspect emphasized in theorizing cinematic
intermediality. Already as we have seen earlier, Paech described the
perception of medium difference as an event, a process,41 and this
kind of rhetoric persists in several other intermedial analyses emphasizing
in the first place the dynamics of intermedial relations. This dynamic is
presented as ars combinatoria (cf. Roloff 1997, 22), a play with media
forms,42 or a transgression of media borders, a displacement/dislocation of
media forms. Most often, however, it is presented as a dialogue between
arts and media, repurposing Bakhtins term that came into focus with the
theories of intertextuality. Then again this dialogism involved in
intermediality can also highlight the differences of media in an acute
manner, intermedial dialogues can actually become tangible manifestations
of media rivalries. As Bolter and Grusins book on remediation has stated:
A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must
enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media (1999,
65). Cinematic intermediality, as such, quite often takes the form of
remediation or a reflection upon the processes of remediation. Intermedial
cinema incorporates painting or literature, but this is often done as a kind
of anxiety of influence,43 the tensions of such relations are then often
described as warfare (inter-media battles) or in psychoanalytic terms of
displacements, repressions.
grateful to Professor Joachim Paech for making this text available to me even
before its publication.)
40
An earlier study by Ropars-Wuilleumier (1982) referring to the way writing gets
inscribed within a filmic image and narrative should also be noted.
41
Cf. Paech: Intermedialitt ist nur prozessual denkbar (2002, 280).
42
Cf. Zwischen-Spiele (Mller 1997), Spielformen (Spielmann 1998).
43
Harold Bloom (1973) has coined the phrase that was widely used in the
discourse on intertextuality.
42 Chapter One
The most characteristic example in this way is perhaps the presentation

of the relationship of the French New Wave to literature: in T. Jefferson
Klines evaluation New Wave filmmakers developed an ambivalent,
almost oedipal relationship to literature which appears in their films as a
constituted-and-then-repressed authority (1992, 5). For them literature
was both a model and an authority to be challenged which can be seen in
the techniques used to remediate literature.44 This prototype of interpreting
modernist cinema can be seen also in Dalle Vacches descriptions of
different media rivalries, the random proliferation of competing, unstable
signs (1996, 6) within Godards Pierrot le fou that culminates in Godards
use of cinematic collage meant to dismantle the traditional powers of
painting and portraiture.45
Henk Oosterlings theoretical writings emphasize this aspect of
performativity from several points of view: from the perspective of the
receiver we can say that the interpretation of intermediality requires an
active viewer, willing to participate in interactivity; from the perspective
of the avant-garde type intermedia artist we have the desire to make a
statement (often to deliver a conceptual message no wonder that
performance can be seen as a typical form of intermediality), and also
from a general, philosophical view we can note the tensional differences
of media within phenomena of intermediality (cf. Oosterling 1998, 2003).
The ideological charges that accompany ideas on intermediality and
that we see time and again also attest to this performative, active aspect of
intermediality. Intermediality is seen, more often than not, as something
that actively does, performs something, and not merely is.
d) Intermediality described in spatial terms, as a transitory or

impossible place (heterotopia)
Intermediality appears as a border zone across which media transgressions

take place, or an instable place of in-between (Zwischenraum), a
44
See more about this also in Chapter Five: Tensional Differences: The Anxiety
of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godards Films.
45
Cf. Dalle Vacche, in the essay entitled Jean-Luc Godards Pierrot le Fou.
Cinema as Collage against Painting uses all kinds of imagery to describe the
violent action that takes place in the interaction of media on the screen: In
collage the frame does not regulate any longer what gets into the composition; life
seems to hit the canvas and leave its traces in defiance of aesthetic norms and
standards of good taste (1996, 108), or: the transformation of the portrait into
collage can also pave the way for a new level of energy (1996, 129).
passageway from one media towards another.46 The site for intermedial
relations to be played out is considered in much of the literature of
cinematic intermediality an impossible place, a heterotopia making use
of Foucaults term.47 It is also a fact that explicitly intermedial films often
prefer diegetic settings that can be directly associated with the principles
of heterotopia described by Foucault (see for instance the garden and the
hotel in Last Year in Marienbad, 1960), and such heterotopias also often
serve as allegorical sites for intermedial relations to be brought to the
viewers attention in some self-reflexive films. (See for example almost all
of Greenaways films: the imaginary, impossible space mixing time and
spatial frames in Prosperos Books, 1991, the stylized cathedral as ritual
and theatrical space of The Baby of Mcon, 1993, the garden in The
Draughtsmans Contract, 1982, the zoo in A Zed and Two Noughts, 1986,
the combination of the diegetic sites of the train, the cemetery and the
museum in The Belly of the Architect, 1987.)
e) Mapping intermedial figurations, and intermediality as part of the

domain of the figural
First of all, it has to be noted, that according to Joachim Paech,

intermediality as such manifests itself as a kind of figuration. He writes:
The trace of the medium would become describable as a figured process
or a configuration in the film (2000). It is perhaps not surprising that as a
methodology, identifying specific figures of intermedial cinema has been
one of the main goals of intermedial studies of cinema. There have been a
great number of analyses of individual films with an explicit aim of
researching the historical poetics of intermediality so to speak, of
identifying the most important rhetorical tropes or figures of cinematic
intermediality or a taxonomy of the basic techniques that convey medial
difference.
Some of these figures are derived from techniques specific to cinema;
others are trans-medial adaptations of more traditional rhetorical figures,
while some of them seem to be forged on a more poetic level, in the
poetics of individual authors. Without the possibility of making a complete
list, let us review some of these two types of figurations.
Yvonne Spielmann identifies, for instance, a category of intermedial
relations in Peter Greenaways films that she calls cluster (i.e. multiple
46
Raymond Bellours title, Lentre images (2002) also echoes this idea.
47
It is true again, that heterotopia is also used in describing the impossible,
mirror-like and illusory medium of film in general. The term is used in reference to
cinematic intermediality for example by Roloff (1997).
44 Chapter One
layering of different images or image elements, resulting in a spatial

density, see: Figs. 1.45.) closely linked to another category, the interval
(something that in classical cinema marks a temporal difference or
mediates continuity, which, however, in intermedial cinema can mediate
the juxtaposition of different media and thus result in a cluster). Although
she does not explicitly refer to them as tropes, the terminology that can
also be related to musical theory entails connotations beyond a mere
formal device.
Perhaps the most debated intermedial image type has been the tableau
vivant: a site where painting and cinema can interact in different ways.
The analysis of Jean-Luc Godards Passion (1982) by Joachim Paech
revealed the multiple facets of the use of the cinematic reproductions of
painting by Godard as devices that anchor certain thematic elements of the
fragmented narrative, and as more complex vehicles for a cinematic
meditation at the state of the art of cinema among the arts (Godard himself
likened these to the operation of a musical theme, a note that is struck, so
to speak, with each picture).48 [Figs. 1.69.] What is also very important in
a tableau vivant is that it does not only mediate between reality and fiction
or between painting and cinema, but figurates a more complex intermedial
relation. Paech writes: In a tableau vivant we only have the memory of a
painting present and not the painting itself before the camera. The
confrontation between cinema and painting unfolds on a third level: the
level of the theatre. Such tableaux vivants are actually theatrical scenes, in
which the penetration of the camera into the picture means an entrance
into a stage-like setting. The space of the picture becomes theatrical space,
the bodies that are represented in a picture become actual bodies further
deconstructed into actor and part interpreted by the actor (1989, 45). We
have a direct rendering of this idea in Peter Greenaways more recent film,
Nightwatching (2007), [Figs. 1.1012.] in which he presented this
interconnection between the scene of the painting transposed both onto the
screen and onto the theatre stage, thus confronting the painters gaze and
handwork (resulting in images and textures) with theatrical acting and
watching (resulting in different situations and interpretations of
situations).49 Brigitte Peucker (2007) emphasizes that tableaux vivants in
cinema are extremely charged instances of intermediality in which,
furthermore, the bodily sensation is accentuated, animating the otherwise
48
See Godards reflections on his own film in the Scnario du film Passion (1982),
a video post-scriptum to the film itself.
49
A film that continues the theme of being framed and trapped presented in his
earlier Draughtsmans Contract with the theme of being set up, staged.
more abstract image and eliciting a direct, corporeal and emotional

response from the viewer.50
Joachim Paech identifies in the technique of the photographic blur a
similar device that can act as a figure of multiple mediation between the
transparency of the cinematic image, and the painterly, almost palpable
and material rendering of an image on the one hand, and the photographic
reality of the event captured in motion on the other (2008).
Another way of obtaining a complex intermedial figure in film is
translating verbal metaphors or just word plays into cinematic imagery or
narrative, thus, implicitly, self-reflexively foregrounding in cinema a deep
underlying relationship between words and images, the culture of the book
and that of the visual, between discourse and figure. Greenaways
framed draughtsman in The Draughtsmans Contract is a good example
of this. The films main figure is both a visual rendering of the
draughtsmans concrete activity of representing reality by framing it, and
transferring it via a mechanical system of grids into the field of graphic
representation (enacting the meaning of mise en cadre), thus inscribing
the trace of its own medium within the representation and the narrative of
being framed, entrapped. [Figs. 1.1314.]
Beside Greenaway, Godard is also famous for an extensive use of word
plays and word-image translations. Of the multitude of such instances
(some of which I have analysed myself, cf. Peth 200851), I will now quote
just one. Christa Blmlinger identifies the figure of dfil in Godards
oeuvre as one not only present in his short film entitled They all Marched
By (On sest tous dfil, 1988) but in many other films. The French word
defil that stands at the basis of this complex figure means, beside
procession, also the passage of the celluloid film through the projector.
In the form se dfiler it means to undo something that has been
threaded, and the phrase to steal away. Godard draws on all these
meanings, as the procession, in the form of/ functioning as a mise en
scne of a number of bodies crossing the field of view, conspicuously
represents the idea of the passage of the moving, living image says
Blmlinger (2004, 178). Through this figure Godard records the power of
the image (and of the body) that is recorded and then projected, but which
50
Other notable artists beside Jean-Luc Godard, who have used this device
extensively, include Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman or Raul Ruiz, all of them
have also been subjects of such analyses.
51
The reworked version of the article can be found in the present volume with the
title From the Blank Page to the White Beach: Word and Image Plays in
Jean-Luc Godards Cinema in the chapter on the Godard paradigm.
46 Chapter One
in its very projection and movement constantly pulls back and remains,
therefore, forever elusive (2004, 187).
Beside these figurations there is also the possibility of exploring the
cinematic versions of some more traditional rhetorical figures like
metalepsis (which usually involves a reference to yet another figure or
requires a further often intermedial imaginative leap to establish its
reference52), or like ekphrasis, a figure that implies crossing media
borders. In fact, ekphrasis, as Bolter and Grusin have pointed out, can
actually be considered a form of remediation (1999, 151152). Again, we
can think of several instances of cinematic intermediality in Godards
films in which one medium becomes the mirror of the other in such and
ekphrastic way.53 In other words we can speak of an intermedial mise en
abyme. One of the best known examples of this is Godards early
masterpiece Vivre sa vie (1962, translated as A Life of her Own/Her Life to
Live) which also includes a direct reference to the ekphrastic tradition
itself. Here in the last episode a young man reads out a fragment from
Edgar Allen Poes short story The Oval Portrait which includes an
ekphrasis of a painting and the whole sequence displays cinemas
ekphrastic impulse that aims at rivalling the other arts by remediating
traditional forms of portraiture both in the visual arts and in literature. The
embedded representations flaunt cinemas multiple mediality, but they
also result in an endless process of signification. Similarly, in other
Godard films the numerous reflections of characters in paintings, posters,
comic book drawings, genre film iconography, literary figures, etc., may
be seen in parallel with the re-mediational logic of traditional literary
ekphrasis. Not to mention Godards ultimate ekphrastic project, the series
of essays entitled Histoire(s) du cinma (Histories of Cinema, 1989
1999). Paech argues (2002) that the films main figuration is the medial
difference between video as individual medium (as video-graphic
writing, a medium suitable for personal archives) and the dreamlike
medium of film. Not disputing this, we can also observe that as a whole,
Histoire(s) accomplishes a uniquely paradoxical fusion of photographic
collage, calligrammatic text with the musical and spiritual aspects of
cinematic montage, and thus, using a seemingly archaic, or primitive
52
I have elaborated on the possibility of intermedial techniques being perceived as
metalepsis (both in a figurative and in a narrative sense) in two of the essays
included in this volume: The World as a Media Maze: Sensual and Structural
Gateways of Intermediality in the Cinematic Image; Intermediality as Metalepsis.
The Cincriture of Agns Varda.
53
More about the possibilities of a cinematic ekphrasis in Peth (2010a) and in the
chapter Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc Godards Poetics of the In-Between.
medium (with relatively simple superimpositions, dissolves, photographic

inserts, etc.), Godard effectively creates a singular inter-medium for
cinema to speak about cinema.54
In conclusion, we can say that this methodology of mapping intermedial
figurations not only produces data for a historical poetics of cinematic
intermediality, but also effectively distances studies of intermediality from
intertextuality, a concept it used to have a lot in common with at its
genesis. While in intertextuality we have an object that apparently
dissolves into its relations, in cinematic intermediality, more recently, we
seem to have moved closer and closer to what Oosterling defines as the
sensable, or what Peucker considers, the material image: namely, a
quasi-palpable, corporeal entity in its intermedial density.
At the same time, we can also witness a strong direct influence of
Lyotards concept of the figural (1971) applied not merely to film in
general (as was systematically done by D. N. Rodowick in the chapters
dedicated to film in his book, Reading the Figural, 2001), but in particular
to intermedial occurrences. For Lyotard, the figural is an unspeakable
other necessarily at work within and against discourse, disrupting the rule
of representation. It is not opposed to discourse, but it is the point at which
the oppositions by which discourse works are opened to a radical
heterogeneity or singularity. As such, the figural is the resistant or
irreconcilable trace of a space or time that is radically incommensurable
with that of discursive meaning. (Readings 1991, xxiv.)55 Moreover
54
For a more detailed analysis of the ekphrastic nature of the film see Peth
(2009a). The article has been rewritten for the purposes of this present volume in
the essay included in the chapter on Godard: Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema and
Media Archaeology in Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma.
55
See the further assessment of Lyotards concept by Readings: Against the rule
of discourse in figurative or textual space, Lyotard insists upon the figural. It is
crucial to understand that the figural is not simply opposed to the discursive, as
another kind of space. Lyotard is not making a romantic claim that irrationality is
better than reason, that desire is better than understanding. If the rule of discourse
is primarily the rule of representation by conceptual oppositions, the figural cannot
simply be opposed to the discursive. Rather, the figural opens the discourse to a
radical heterogeneity, a singularity, a difference which cannot be rationalized or
subsumed within the rule of representation. Discourse, figure evokes a difference
or singularity of objects (A is not B) which cannot be thought under the logic of
identity, as an opposition (A is defined by not being the rest of the system). The
discursive system cannot deal with this singularity, cannot reduce it to an
opposition within the network. The object resists being reduced to the state of mere
equivalence to its meaning within a system of signification, and the figural marks
this resistance, the sense that we cannot say everything about an object, that an
48 Chapter One
Lyotards concept of the sublime can also apply: intermediality is often

viewed as having the ultimate goal of figurating the infigurable, the
incommensurable. This is obviously the case with Godard, for instance,
who in Vivre sa vie, attempts by different embedded media forms and
representations to figurate the infigurable identity and beauty of
Nana/Anna Karina. (The ultimate image of Nana/Anna Karina that we get
in the film is placed somewhere in an impossible space between art and
reality, between one medium and another.) Or we can note the case of the
Histoire(s) du cinma in which Godard regards, on the one hand, as
Jacques Rancire has put it the image as a promise of flesh (2007, 8),
and on the other hand, considers that cinema is ultimately: Neither an art,
nor a technique. A mystery, or in other words borrowing the expression
from Malraux the currency of the absolute. The Histoire(s) in this way
highlights, paradoxically, both the tangible, hand-crafted nature of a quasi
corporeal cinema in its sensual mediality and intermediality, of the
transcendence from the reel into the real, and by way of the
intermedial figurations a cinema that is reaching into domains that are
intangible, infigurable, invisible.
The mapping of such tendencies has brought the study of cinematic
intermediality far from the mere listing of media combinations or
analogies of intertextual relations. As Henk Oosterling has observed, there
has been, in general, a major shift from the utopia of the Gesamtkunstwerk to
the heterotopia of intermediality (2003, 38), but furthermore, we can also
add that nowadays we can witness a similarly important shift towards a
scholarship acknowledging cinemas non-discursive domains and more
sensual modes of perception.
object always in some sense remains other to any discourse we may maintain
about it, has a singularity in excess of any meanings we may assign to it. The
figural arises as the co-existence of incommensurable or heterogeneous spaces, of
the figurative in the textual, or the textual in the figurative. (Readings 1991, 34.)
We can also note that Barthess comments on Eisensteins photogram (on the
third meaning, 1977, 5269), or even Eisensteins idea of hieroglyphic writing
in film can be seen very much in parallel with Lyotards notion of the figural.
Also, W. J. T. Mitchells concept of the imagetext (1994a) shares similar ideas
on a more general level.
Figures
Figures 1.13. Roman Polanski: Tess (1979): a sense of literariness conveyed
through ostensible imitations of paintings or painterly styles.
50 Chapter One
Figures 1.45. Cinematic image clusters from Peter Greenaways Prosperos

Books (1995).
Figures 1.69. The tableau vivant: a site where painting and cinema can interact,
e.g. Jean-Luc Godard: Passion (1982).
52 Chapter One
Figures 1.1012. Peter Greenaways Nightwatching (2007): animating the image

through the transposition of the scene of the painting onto the screen and onto the
theatre stage.
54 Chapter One
Figures 1.1314. Peter Greenaway The Draughtsmans Contract (1982): a

correspondence between the visual rendering of the draughtsmans activity of
representing reality by framing it, and the narrative of being framed, entrapped.
CHAPTER TWO
READING THE INTERMEDIAL:

ABYSMAL MEDIALITY
AND TRANS-FIGURATION IN THE CINEMA
A medium is a medium is a medium.

(Friedrich A. Kittler 1990, 265.)
1. A Game of Mirrors: Mediality as Intermediality

How can we define the mediality of cinema? What distinguishes it from
other media? These questions can prove almost impossible to answer with
precision. Nol Carroll has solved the Gordian Knot by dismissing the
notion altogether. Forget the Medium! he commands in the opening
chapter of his book, Engaging the Moving Image (2003), arguing that the
idea that the moving images possess a unique medium played first and
foremost an ideological role in the recognition of film as a distinctive form
of art and in legitimizing film studies. Film, in virtue of its distinctive
medium, afforded the possibility of a discrete aesthetic system, one with
its own unprecedented capacities and laws. For many, the task of film
theory became that of identifying the nature of the film medium and
calculating its laws. But this, of course, was not a completely disinterested
enterprise, since in the background of this research was a motive namely,
if one could show that the film medium supported a unique artform, then
film deserved an equal place among the arts Carroll writes (2003, 1).
Furthermore, he claims that the concept of the uniqueness of the cinematic
medium was kept alive even after the art of cinema has produced its
incontestable masterpieces because of a need for a premise in the argument
for the formation of film programs within universities (Carroll 2003, 2).
All these having been said, he still believes that: It has always been a
philosophical error to attempt to base the case for both film as art and for
film studies on the notion that film is a unique medium (Carroll 2003, 2).1
1
Carroll addressed the issue of medium specificity already in an earlier essay
entitled Medium Specificity Arguments and Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film,
56 Chapter Two
In essence, Carroll rejects the notion of specific mediality on two

fronts. The first is the presupposition of the existence of laws that a
certain medium dictates (limitations: what it can and cannot do, and also
possibilities: what it can do best and how it can do it). In this case it is the
aesthetic norms that are based on the idea of medium specificity that need
to be discarded in Carrolls views. The second line of reasoning relies on
the idea of arts being usually based on more than one media, and the fact
that neither of these media can be considered specific to any forms or art
as they are being shared by several of them.2 Taking into account also the
fact that art forms do not stay invariable but they are subjected to changes
in time due to differences in the use of technology and style, Carroll
concludes that it is safer to exchange nostalgic and cinphile views upon
cinema as a unique art form for a more flexible concept of moving
images. Although we can admit that Carroll is right in advocating a more
adaptable and less restrictive notion for what we consider as cinematic,
it is also true as David N. Rodowicks counter arguments suggest3 (cf.
2007b, 41) that we need to speak about the specific traits of each
medium if we want to establish their role within any multimedial art.
Moreover we have to take into account also the already well circulated
idea of W. J. T. Mitchell as well, that media in themselves are also already
composite in nature (all media are mixed media Mitchell 1994, 94).4
Video and Photography (originally published in 198485, in the Millennium Film

Journal, No. 1415, and later included as the first chapter in the 1996 volume,
Theorizing the Moving Image. He also provided a historical overview of the
medium-specificity idea in cinema in his volume Philosophical Problems of
Classical Film (1988), and another summary of the arguments related to medium
specificity in the second chapter of The Philosophy of the Moving Pictures (2008,
3553).
2
Suppose that words do constitute the medium of literature. They could hardly
amount to a distinctive artistic medium. For words are shared with all types of
speech and writing, on the one hand, and by all sorts of artforms, including theatre,
opera, song, and even some painting and sculpture, on the other hand. (Carroll
2003, 3.)
3
I have summarized Rodowicks s stand in this dispute in the earlier, meta-
theoretical essay included in this volume (Intermediality in Film: a Historiography
of Methodologies).
4
The flexibility of the notion of mediality with regards to cinema has also already
been emphasized by Krauss, who celebrated Stanley Cavells insistence on the
internal plurality of any given medium, of the impossibility of thinking of any
aesthetic medium as nothing more than an unworked physical support (Krauss
1999a, 6 emphasis mine, . P.). More recently Jacques Rancire articulated from
a philosophical perspective a somewhat similar view over the intermedial nature
Reading the Intermedial 57
The monomediality of cinema (i.e. the concept that cinema is based on

a unique and distinctive medium of communication) may therefore be
mainly an ideal that had it legitimacy in the history of the emancipation of
the art of film among the other art forms, or even the ideal of an
essentialist or purist approach to media that by today is generally deemed
as untenable, nevertheless, to a certain degree, it is also an illusion of the
spectator, who sits in the movie theatre and watches a film. The experience
of watching a movie in its traditional, conventional form of social
activity, as a singular event is characterized by a certain continuum and
linearity of the events we see unfold in time one after the other, by the
attention grabbing force of the things that move on the screen and by the
transparency of the images. Not only that the spectator does not
distinguish between the media constituting cinematic multimediality, the
mediated nature of the experience itself (the mediality of the movies) also
becomes almost unperceivable. As Bazins theory cinema has pointed out,
cinema in its traditional, analogue form is a medium that relies on the
ontology of photography; it is the imprint of the world, the preservation of
the traces of life itself. Or, to quote the spirit of another also famous
metaphor, cinema can be regarded as a window to the world, an
experience captured by Hitchcocks Rear Window (1954), a frame through
which images of life can be observed from a safe distance.5 Both
metaphors imply a direct contact with the world and no sense of
mediation. Within the history of film the emergence of a visual rhetoric
that ensures the transparency of the classical film narrative and the realist
conventions of representation has contributed even further to a great
degree of invisibility of the medium.6 And, paradoxically, this invisibility
is perhaps one of the most characteristic features of cinematic mediality
together with the impossibility of pinning it down to one certain material
vehicle. The question where is the cinematic medium? may prove just as
hard to answer as the question regarding its essence. Is the medium located
in the images imprinted over the celluloid strip, in the technology of
the arts, declaring that: cinema, like painting and literature, is not just the name of
an art whose processes can be deduced from the specificity of its material and
technical apparatuses. Like painting and literature, cinema is the name of an art
whose meaning cuts across the borders between the arts. (Rancire 2006, 4.)
5
One might argue that the advent of 3D cinema has effectively challenged the
safe distance of the viewer in the cinema, but for the moment let us limit our
perspective to the classic, two-dimensional film.
6
See in this respect David Bordwells description of the so called classical
narrative style or canonic narration that he characterizes as seamless, invisible
or self-effacing (Bordwell 1985, 162).
58 Chapter Two
projection, the play of lights and shadows beamed over the screen, or is it
ultimately nowhere else but in the illusion produced in our heads during
the reception of the series of still images flashing before our eyes?7
We may even posit the question: is there a medium at all, for that
matter? And the possible answer is: there is and there isnt. For there is no
unique, single medium that can be called cinema or film: if we search
for cinematic mediality we are bound to arrive at the conclusion that there
are only media (in the plural) that participate in the experience we
distinctively call cinema or film. And if we are tempted to identify the
specific medium of cinema by reducing it to one of its defining components,
we might also find the result no less puzzling. If we consider, for example,
that the medium of cinema is the moving image (which is also colloquially
done), we will have to admit that moving images differ according to the
technology that produces them; what is more, moving images existed
before cinema, as pre-cinema, throughout the history of cinema in
different variations, and they continue their existence outside the usual
context of cinema in all kinds of environments making use of a variety of
technologies in the so called post-cinematic age. The image in itself (even
the moving image) is not specific to the movies. As Hans Belting wrote:
images resemble nomads in the sense that they take residence in one
medium after another (2005, 310).
Speaking of mediality one always thinks of something that defines it,
and there is no single defining element that could be singled out and taken
apart in the movies that would suffice in itself, moreover, all the elements
are subject to change. We have to recognize that cinema has been from its
very beginnings a complex medium consisting of heterogeneous elements:
visual composition (often deriving from the canons of pictorial
representation), verbal language, graphic signs, music, the language of
gestures, dance, etc. Film can be considered as a par excellence
multimedia enunciation in the context of which specific intermedial
relations, contrasts and interactions can be experienced. This multimedial
texture of cinema is, however, not a fixed and invariable structure, the
connections and relationships of the different elements, the shifts of focus
from one codification to another can vary in a significant degree throughout
7
The same question is answered by Hans Belting in his anthropological approach
to images by emphasizing the dynamics involved in the transmission and reception
of images, by seeing images not as things but more like as events: Images are
neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head alone. They do not exist by
themselves, but they happen; they take place whether they are moving images
(where this is so obvious) or not. They happen via transmission and perception.
(Belting 2005, 302303.)
the history of cinema and evolution of its technological basis, and is

capable of producing unique stylistic effects (relying on a more or less
emphatic use of the media elements of cinema). Just consider the balance
of media within silent cinema (with its written intertitles often
remediating forms of gothic typography , with its painted studio sets, the
accompanying music, etc.) in comparison with the way an Atom Egoyan
film or a Hollywood blockbuster movie orchestrates media today. So
instead of Rodowicks notion of cinema as the incredible shrinking
medium (2007b), we might say that the medium of cinema is neither
shrinking nor expanding with the evolution of its technologies, but it
has always been something incredibly flexible and able to alter its
configuration due to several factors.8
At the same time the semantic relations of the filmic image always
include intertextual-intermedial connections (i.e. they rely on information
from previous film experiences, or presuppose the understanding of
interrelationship between media, like words and the images and so on),9
and consequently, as a whole, cinema can be regarded as being open on all
levels of codifications towards other communicational systems, texts and
8
I am well aware that this may raise another important question: until which point
(or configuration) in the evolution of cinema can we still speak of cinema? Is there
a media border for cinema? Or should we just surrender to adopting the
generalized notion of moving images and include all the media-mutations under
the same umbrella (as Carroll has suggested)? Is there a reason, beyond the
possible safeguarding of an already established academic discipline (cinema
studies) for speaking of borders at all? I am also equally aware that there are no
easy answers to these questions. Nevertheless, I think that borders do become
perceivable in strategies of intermediality (i.e. in the reflexive experience of media
differences being inscribed within a work), and also that the metaphor of
media border is necessary from a theoretical standpoint exactly for the purposes
of speaking about what these differences are (as Rodowick has suggested, and I
have already quoted before, cf. 2007b, 41).
9
The semantics of cinema is fundamentally relational. Semiotic studies of cinema,
seeking the comparisons of cinema and the structure of language, established
already in the 1960s that cinema does not possess either a vocabulary or a fixed set
of grammar rules. Cinematic meaning is always contextual and signification relies
on a set of relationships: the relationship of the image to the real world (its
indexicality and iconicity: the way it resembles what we already know in the real
world, and the way we magically interpret the image as the real world, etc.), the
relationship of one image to another (meaning forged by the cinematic montage,
the famous Kuleshov effect, for example), the relationship between the media
constituents of the film, between the present film and our previous experiences
(what David Bordwell called trans-textual motivation in interpreting a film, cf.
1985), and so on.
60 Chapter Two
works of art (being capable of both enfolding and unfolding as

Laura U. Marks would say (cf. 2010) something from the other arts).
The extraordinary importance of the cinematic melting pot of media
therefore also consists in the fact that it is through the intrinsic multimediality
and intermediality of cinema that cinemas various possibilities of
relations are activated with other art forms.
These manifold and changing relationships between the media
participating in the cinematic experience can be studied both from a
theoretical point of view (questions of cinematic mediality seen as
multimediality and intermediality), and also from a historical perspective
(studying the changes that occur with the evolution of technology or style
within the media involved in the cinematic experience, or the changes in
the media configurations that occur within a certain genre, period or
authorial oeuvre).
So in fact Carrolls argument that we should not speak of a specific
medium of cinema can be elaborated not only in the direction of the total
dismissal of the concept, but also in the direction of an intermedial
perspective over film. From this perspective we can and should speak of
cinematic mediality in terms of a flexible multimediality (if we consider its
composite nature, the multitude of media called upon to construct a film
and to be weaved into its fabric as well as its changes within the
history of film), and even more importantly we should speak of
cinematic mediality in terms of intermediality as a film always communicates
through the relations between the media involved in its signification, and
media always participate with their own cognitive specificities, leaving
traces of their own media messages within the complex world of
cinema.10
Let us make a short expansion of the argument here, demonstrating
how media participate in the cinematic flow of information, and take the
medium of verbal language as an example. Speech included in films brings
along a whole set of meanings already established in a fundamentally oral
culture and in everyday oral communication. If we take into consideration
the aspects that Walter J. Ong described regarding the psychodynamics of
10
Seeing cinematic mediality itself as intermediality might seem confusing at first
sight, as usually intermediality is considered to be the specific process through
which as Joachim Paech asserts the form of another medium (of art) is
inscribed, repeated within cinema (cf. Paech 2002) and the viewer experiences it
in a reflexive way, as a figuration of its own medial difference. Nevertheless, this
figuration, or poetic effect of intermediality would not be possible without an
intrinsic intermedial relation working at the most fundamental level of filmic
signification.
orality (Ong 2002, 3177.): the fact that it is not an abstract form of
communication (not merely delivering a message by the mediation of
human voice11) but it is a live, here and now complex action and
interaction involving people engaged in a kind of power play, the fact
that speech is conducted in a context perceivable with all of our senses,
that the bodily implication of the speakers and all the other meta-
communicative aspects are also parts of the interaction, and so on, we find
that all of these are important in the construction of meaning in relation
with the moving images as well. Eric Rohmer in several films, or Jim
Jarmusch in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), for example, configured their
cinematic world around presenting the games involved in complex
speech interactions between the characters.12 Ingmar Bergmans cinema
also excels in exposing the psychological warfare conducted through
human speech, in presenting the sounded word as power and action
(Ong 2002, 3133). Only that in films the natural context of live speech
is exchanged for the artificially created context of the cinematic image,
thus the image becomes the most important factor in establishing the
meaning of the speech that we see on screen, what we see while we hear
certain words can make all the difference.
11
For this reason Ong is even reluctant to use the term medium which he sees as
projecting an idea has very little to do with the nature of live communication. He
states: Thinking of a medium of communication or of media of communication
suggests that communication is a pipeline transfer of units of material called
information from one place to another. My mind is a box. I take a unit of
information out of it, encode the unit (that is, fit it to the size and shape of the
pipe it will go through), and put it into one end of the pipe (the medium, something
in the middle between two other things). From the one end of the pipe the
information proceeds to the other end, where someone decodes it (restores its
proper size and shape) and puts it in his or her own box-like container called a
mind. This model obviously has something to do with human communication, but,
on close inspection, very little, and it distorts the act of communication beyond
recognition (Ong 2005, 171172). In his protest against a mechanic (pipeline)
view upon communication his reference is naturally verbal language, but the idea
is equally valid for any other form: media never just pass around information as
if in a pipe, their perception is never resumed to mere mediation, the sensual
forms of media have become parts of our world in complex ways. See more about
the physical nature of cinematic mediality in the next chapter.
12
Not surprisingly many typical genres of television (a medium meant to become
part of our homes and be integrated in our private lives) are also based on the
powers of the illusion of live, interpersonal speech staging power plays between
the characters (talk shows, soap operas, sitcoms, etc.).
62 Chapter Two
The famous, twice heard monologue included in Ingmar Bergmans

Persona (1966) is a wonderful exercise in demonstrating the powers of
imageword interaction within cinema. At a climactic point of the plot, the
nurse in charge of taking care of the psychologically ill actress, Elisabeth
Vogler, confronts her over the photograph of the actresss son, telling
everything she thinks about her as a mother and as a person. The monologue
is shown twice: we hear exactly the same words, only the images differ.
The sequence is also a notable break from the convention of shotreverse
shot structure used in filming a conversation, as the camera concentrates
for the duration of each monologue solely on the listener and then on the
speaker in compositions that mirror each other. The first time we hear the
monologue we hear it sounding from off screen while we are watching
Elisabeth (played by Liv Ullmann), the actress who has been speechless
from the beginning of the film. The face of Liv Ullmann, heavy with an
impression of humiliation, stays bare and defenceless as the words of the
disembodied speech fall upon her features with exceptional cruelty,
accusingly and relentlessly. Whereas sight situates the observer outside
what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer observes Ong
about the psychodynamics of auditive language (2002, 70), and
accordingly, Elisabeths face is shown as slowly incorporating the words
that accuse her. In addition to this, at the same time, the separation of the
voice from the body fills the image with a sense of the uncanny (as it is
customary to associate a voice with a person who is the source of the
voice).13 The second time we hear the speech we see the person who is
speaking, nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), this time the words that are
uttered fall back upon her face that is in turn rendered defenceless and
naked by this relentless technique of not moving away from her for the
entire duration of the speech, and thus the same words are incorporated
within this image. The speech is no longer an accusation of Elisabeth
13
There are several horror movies or thrillers that amply exemplify the use of off
screen voices for delivering a sense of eeriness. Michel Chion (1999) used the term
acousmtre for denoting the kind of voice-character specific to cinema that derives
mysterious powers from being heard and not seen. Chions examples include Fritz
Langs The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968, the voice of HAL), Hitchcocks Psycho (1960, an example of an
impossible acousmtre of voice substitution, a monstrous marriage of voice and
body).Voice off (disembodied) speech in relation to moving images at the same
time can imply connotations of authority and control: the power of seeing and
knowing all, as well as omnipotence and uncanny ubiquity (to be wherever it
wishes), as Chion explains. In addition we can observe that not only fiction films
built on suspense but also documentaries, in which the voice guides and informs
the viewer, rely on this medial characteristic of speech.
coming from a safe and firm outside position, but it becomes more a
tormented exposure of Almas aggressive attitude, revealing this time her
own complex frustrations (over having gone through an abortion instead of
having her own child, over becoming more and more vulnerable in this
unbalanced situation of incessantly talking to a person who remains
silent,14 etc.), resulting in anger and ultimately a confusion of identity.
[Figs. 2.14.] The meaning of the words that are spoken changes
according to which image we see, and in both cases the images foreground
the power of live speech to pour into the image and into the flesh.
From the medial characteristics of speech that get to be transcribed
onto the screen let us mention only one more, the so called homeostatic
nature of speech that is manifest, for instance, in the practice of dubbing
foreign films for domestic audiences. The main purpose of dubbing is to
reduce the feeling of cultural difference through making the films more
accessible and less foreign in their use of language. But paradoxically,
while the film in this way becomes more user friendly, diminishing the
gap between the actual context of the receiver and the context of the
images, dubbing can initiate new relationships with the images of the film,
generating another, formerly nonexistent break between the new language
and the world portrayed in the film. It is also easy to observe if we have
the opportunity to hear a dubbing made several decades ago and compare
it to the speech that we hear in more recent films that the language of the
translation is always homeostatic, it is always the language adapted to
the present needs of a consumer (no matter if we are watching a movie set
in historical times or in regions that are far from our home).15 Dubbing
thus preserves the imprint of the time and place that it was made in.
Therefore it can easily become outdated and foreign to anyone speaking
the same language but in a different time and space frame.16 As soon as
14
The whole dramatic tension of the film relies on the unbalance of speech and
muteness.
15
See some of the ideas on oralitys homeostasis described by Ong: Oral societies
live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by
sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance []. The oral
mind is uninterested in definitions []. Words acquire their meanings only from
their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other
words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the
entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs.
Word meanings come continuously out of the present (Ong 2002, 46).
16
The local jargons that appear in the Hungarian dubbings made in Budapest in the
1960s to 1990s, for example, may be not so easily understood by Hungarians
living across the border in the region of Transylvania today who have not come
into contact with certain words used in Budapest during communist times when
64 Chapter Two
the actuality of the language is gone, dubbing can become on the one hand
a useful resource for linguistic researches, while on the other hand, the
collage effect of text and image can become even more obvious. Dubbing,
in this way, may indeed erase the foreignness of language, but it also
always generates new tensions with the image. The fact that usually the
same actors are employed for different genres makes the spectators
ultimately insensitive for distinguishing between nuances of expression,
concentrating merely on the content of the speech that is heard. At the
same time unintended intertextual relations may be activated when we
hear voices that we already know in different bodies.17 Sometimes we
encounter also an anti-homeostasis tendency in the use of language in
films: this time the avoidance of dubbing, of using a vernacular language
that is spoken by the present day audience serves the purpose of preserving
the cultural foreignness of the world seen in the film either for the sake of
creating the illusion of authenticity, like in the films of Mel Gibson: The
Passion of the Christ (2004), Apocalypto (2006), and in Clint Eastwoods
war drama Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), or for the sake of clearly
marking the barriers of language, using a fictitious speech that no spectator
can understand, as we saw in Ingmar Bergmans Silence (1963).
After this brief demonstration of how media can inscribe their own
messages within a film, let us resume the thread of the main argument,
namely, that the mediality of cinema is always constructed of
intermedial relations, interactions, of media reflecting, rewriting each
other on the screen. These media involved in intricate interplays are
however, most of the times, not registered in the spectator as distinctive
constituents, but are integrated in the general universe that we perceive
in a film. The illusive nature of filmic mediality is therefore on the one
hand due to the multitude of media all converging within the cinematic
world, and on the other hand due to the transparency of the images
towards the empirical world. However, there is also a distinct way in
Hungarian television broadcasts could not be received in neighbouring Romania.

The situation changed after 1990, since when several Hungarian digital TV stations
have been available in Transylvania, and by now the practice of Hungarian
televisions dubbing all the foreign films has become a force to be reckoned with
in influencing the local speech of the Hungarians living in Romania (exposed to
this new homeostatic source of language).
17
This can be the opposite of what certain fashionable animation films consciously
do today, namely, to use well-known actors to voice the characters, and thus give
life to an animated figure or even initiate an intertextual play of self-parody of the
actor involved (see in this respect the role of Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots in
the Shrek films).
which the medium of cinema does reveal itself and does become
distinguishable from other media. It is the case of reflexivity. Usually we
cannot see the medium of cinema in cinema, so to speak (i.e. in the
conventional, narrative film experience), but we can always see it in a
mirror: placed as if en abyme, as medium within the medium.18 The
elements constituting the cinematic medium can be seen either in
cinema reflexively foregrounding its own characteristics (in the context of
a specific poetics that we call reflexivity in art, through which mediality
gets to be re-inscribed within the film)19 or in the features reflected in
some other medium (of art). Jacques Rancire launched a similar idea in
the introduction written to his book of essays entitled Film Fables (2006)
declaring that the essence of the medium (the games with its own
means) can be made visible, perceptible through games that actually
cross the border of the arts: Cinema can only make the games it plays
with its own means intelligible to itself through the games of exchange and
inversion it plays with the literary fable, the plastic form, and the theatrical
voice (Rancire 2006, 15).20
The mediality of the cinema is thus always observable through
techniques of poetic (inter-media) reflexivity, techniques that break the
transparency of the filmic image, reveal glimpses of the apparatus that
produces the illusion we call cinema, about the media elements a cinematic
word gets to be constructed of, and at the same time open up the gateways
into media exchanges or crossovers, trans-figurations building on
the inherent multimediality and intermediality of cinema.21 Paradoxically,
the more motion pictures engage in inter-art or intermedia games,
becoming increasingly literary, theatrical or painterly etc., the more
18
Joachim Paechs idea of the stratification of intermediality when he speaks
of the medium becoming observable as form, and the form serving as a medium
for the figure (2011) also contains this element of media being conceived en
abyme.
19
The role of reflexivity in the perception of the medium has been also emphasized
by Joachim Paech in his theory of intermediality (see the first essay in this volume:
Cinema and Intermediality: a Historiography of Methodologies).
20
In a recent evaluation of Rancires philosophical perspective on cinema Sudeep
Dasgupta interprets these lines in the following way: Rancires framing of film
thus suggests not just a reworking of a philosophical lineage going back to the
nineteenth-century Romantics concern with the unity of opposites, but also a
cross-disciplinary understanding of aesthetic play that is relevant to the materiality
of all art forms (Dasgupta 2009, 344).
21
We see such intermedial poetics in the films of Jean Luc Godard as well as quite
a few other representative works of the sixties, and later on in the cinema of Peter
Greenaway, or the pictorial films of the 1980s and 1990s, and so on.
66 Chapter Two
they expose regarding the nature, possibilities and limitations of their own
medium.22
On the other hand, we also always clearly recognize the cinematic in
literature, in theatre, in painting or photography. We can always tell for
example when a piece of prose writing or poetry in literature is unfolding
like moving images, we recognize the characteristics of cinematic
framing or montage whenever it is reflected in any other medium.
Nobody disputes that Cindy Shermans series of photographs, the Untitled
Film Stills (19771980) exhibit something that makes them cinematic,
although neither of them quote any actual image seen in any film. The
great message of the Untitled Film Stills from our point of view is
therefore that they do not reflect specific films; they reflect film as a
medium, a medium captured within or imprinted over the still images of
photography. Indirectly all the feminist analyses23 that focus on the fact
that the stills manipulate female stereotypes actually support this idea, as
these are stereotypes and myths that have been produced by movies, and
as such they are attributed to belonging to the world of the movies. And
these stereotypes are not limited to the postures or gestures, the costume or
make up of the female characters being impersonated by Sherman,
they are also constructed by cinematic mise en scne, lighting and framing;
the elements in themselves would not suffice were it not for their
interaction building up to a general impression of the images being as if
filtered through the medium of cinema. Rosalind Krauss is therefore right
when she observes that the images captured by Cindy Sherman are being
relayed through a generalized matrix of filmic portrayals and projections
(Krauss 1999b, 112).
But we do not have to resort to reflections within the other arts; even
our everyday use of language revealing our so called nave notions
about the medium also reflects what we consider to be the relevant
features of the cinematic medium. Sometimes we see something in the
world and we recognize it as being like the movies, we hear a story of
life or experience an event and speak of it in similar terms as we think of
the cinema, making references to cinematic techniques or genres, etc.24
22
Whenever this happens there is always the possibility of perceiving the inter-art
or inter-media games as initiating a more or less explicit meta-linguistic or meta-
poetic discourse within the film: in other words, films employing reflexive
strategies of intermediality can always be interpreted as films about the medium
of cinema.
23
The analysis of Rosalind Krauss (1999b) reflects on these in detail.
24
Perhaps media anthropology joining forces with cognitive linguistics can offer
us more information through specific researches about this.
We intuit what constitutes specifically cinematic, because we see it

reflected in mirrors scattered around us all the time.25
What can be regarded as defining features of cinema as a medium
considering what gets to be reflected in other arts and in our everyday
cognitive reflections over cinema can be a great variety of things: it can
be the way the images move before our eyes, it can be the way they are
framed, connected, the style of certain genres, and elements of the so
called canonical narrative, stereotypes, conventions of cinematic
storytelling or construction of time and place, or it can be something
related to the pragmatic aspects (what moving pictures mean to us, how
and where they are presented), etc.26
2. The Phenomenology of (Inter)Mediality

and the Experience of Total Cinema
I have to confess that the title of this chapter a faint attempt at
paraphrasing the title of Rodowicks groundbreaking book, Reading the
Figural (2001) might in fact be slightly misleading, because what I
intend to argue is exactly the opposite: intermediality cannot be read, at
least not in the conventional way we understand reading as an intellectual
activity of deciphering messages, most of all because as I see it
intermediality is not textual in nature,27 and therefore I would like to argue
for the necessity of re-defining both mediality and intermediality as
something entirely divorced from models of text, texture and
reading. Although the theory of intermediality originates in the theories
of intertextuality (as conceived by Julia Kristeva), and up to this day there
are several advocates of the structuralist, semiotic approach to the idea of
categorizing intermedial relations into endless taxonomies deriving from
the model of intertextuality, intermediality I contend should not be
thought of as an extension of intertextuality over the domain comprising
multiple media relationships. As Jrgen E. Mller pointed out, in the
1970s several phenomena later to be described as intermedial processes
25
These cognitive reflections of cinema are of course not to be confused with the
social practices induced and influenced by cinema (like tourism targeting specific
famous locations seen in cult films), even though these undeniably attest to the
way in which cinema gets to be integrated in life and thinking about geography and
space.
26
The necessity to include pragmatic aspects in discussions of mediality (and
intermediality) has been recently pointed out by Mller (2010a,b).
27
It is also true, that neither can the figural be read in the literal sense:
Rodowick also uses the verb as a mere metaphor for making sense of.
68 Chapter Two
were denominated as intertextual processes and there were several

paradigmatic approaches which tried to include to a certain extent
intermedial processes in intertextual reflection (Mller 2010a, 244).
Theories of intertextuality paved the way for a better understanding of the
dynamics of cultural exchanges. Nevertheless, Mller remarks that from
the vantage point of the present, intertextuality represents a key concept in
the area of cultural and literary studies (2010b, 22), and no longer a key
concept for cinematic intermediality, we may add. The relevance of the
concept of intertextuality for cinema is diminished by its basic assumption
of textuality, a metaphor that got to be extended via semiotics over all
cultural phenomena. Cinema may be to some extent compatible with
metaphors of texture but it strongly resists metaphors of the text.
As I have already mentioned both mediality and intermediality may be
conceived as reflexive notions: media get to be reflected within media,
nevertheless, the reading of intermediality cannot be described as an
intellectual, and as such a reflexive act. Intermediality and most of all
intermediality in the cinema is not something one deciphers, it is
something one perceives or senses. In this respect I adhere to Henk
Oosterlings idea who speaks of intermediality in general as being
sensational (in a Deleuzean sense, as he described it in his analysis of
Bacons paintings, cf. 2003) rather than conceptual, reflective rather
than reflexive. Relying on previous researches regarding the intermediality
of Buuel (cf. RoloffLink-Heer 1994) he declares: in order to capture
this heterotopic in-between, conceptual reflection alone does not suffice
[] reflections on the inter of the media transgress discursive thinking.
Reflective intermediality goes beyond concepts. [] As a result this
reflectivity can neither be theorized with the tools of post-structuralisms
intertextuality nor with those of hermeneutics (Oosterling 2003, 38).
Oosterling then goes on to argue for a more systematic implementation of
the philosophical theories of difference (i.e. ideas of Foucault, Derrida,
Irigaray, Lyotard, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari) in the studying of
intermediality. He also believes that in order to understand the meaning
of linear connections or simultaneous layering of two, three or more
media the spectator has to anticipate a sense of an in-between the totality
of which is only discontinuously sensed and can never be, not even
hermeneutically, grasped as a whole (Oosterling 2003, 41). Jacques
Rancire thinks of cinema in some respects similarly to Oosterlings views
(and akin to Deleuzes theory) when he also declares that in film thoughts
and things, exterior and interior, are captured in the same texture, in which
the sensible and the intelligible remain undistinguished (Rancire 2006,
3).
So while reading intertextual relations engages our intellectual

capacities, reading intermedial relations requires, more than anything
else, an embodied spectator: film cannot be denied to be a profoundly
sensuous experience in many ways. Intertextuality operates with
intellectual constructions: we read a text and associate other texts,
intertexts with it; we activate our memories of texts. However, if we think
of a medium with the implications of how Ong considered it, i.e. not as a
pipeline of communication, but as a sensual interface in our world
perceived with all the richness of our senses, even reading a written text
becomes no longer a mere intellectual endeavour but a multi-sensual
experience.28 Thus reading a multimedial texture like film even more
so, as in the case of the movies the associations brought into play are both
pre-reflexive and non-textual, as well as, most of the times, synesthetic.
Cinema has a profound experiential quality; we do not only see the film,
and the world of the screen does not communicate a message to us: it
reaches out and touches us and we cannot escape the allure of touching
it, feeling it with every fibre of our being. Sensing the intermediality of
film is therefore grounded in the (inter)sensuality of cinema itself, in the
experience of the viewer being aroused simultaneously on different levels
of consciousness and perception.
I think therefore that the possible import of phenomenological
approaches to film in the interpretation of cinematic intermediality has not
been stressed enough. We have seen semiotic interpretations of intermediality
(whereas media have been defined as complex sign systems), we have
seen intertextual approaches to intermediality (extending a pre-existing
vocabulary and methodology over inter-art relationships), and we have
seen philosophical theorizing of intermedial relations based on ideas
originating in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, and so
on. The phenomenology of intermediality although many times hinted at
through the references to theses philosophers mentioned before is yet to
be explicitly spelled out. It is true, that such an approach to cinema on the
whole has been available for some time, even if not so long ago Vivian
Sobchack decried the lack of theoretical writings about the sensual
experience of moving images, claiming that there is very little sustained
28
Reading a book if we follow Ongs suggestions about mediality is also an act
of multi-sensual (and medial) bodily experience: the sight of the book, the graphic
image of the text and the intellectual content on the one hand, the feeling of the
texture of the binding and the paper, as well as the sensual reception of the live
context we might read in the shadow of our grandmothers old oak tree, or
comfortably on a couch, or even in a train compartment all of which add to the
sum of the experience we receive while reading.
70 Chapter Two
work in English to be found on the carnal sensuality of the film experience

and what and how it constitutes meaning (Sobchack 2004, 56).29 A
phenomenological, inter-sensual understanding of the concept of the
medium seems to be very close to what I have earlier described as the
idea of mediality as being fundamentally intermediality. Phenomenology
does not see images as representations or signs; it sees them foremost as
events and corporeal experiences,30 acknowledging that the flesh is
intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and
its limit (Shaviro 1993, 255256). Moreover, Vivian Sobchacks concept
of the cinesthetic subject that both touches and is touched by the
screen (Sobchack 2004, 71) seems to be the adequate description of the
spectators receptiveness towards reading the intermedial in cinema. As
Sobchack explains, the term cinesthetic is a neologism that derives not
only from cinema but also from two scientific terms that designate
particular structures and conditions of the human sensorium: synaesthesia
and coenaesthesia. Both of these structures and conditions foreground the
complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that
grounds our particular experience of cinema, and both also point to ways
in which the cinema uses our dominant senses of vision and hearing to
speak comprehensibly to our other senses. (Sobchack 2004, 67.)
29
She adds that the few exceptions include Linda Williamss ongoing investigation
of what she calls body genres; Jonathan Crarys recognition, in Techniques of the
Observer, of the carnal density of spectatorship that emerges with the new visual
technologies of the nineteenth century; Steven Shaviros Deleuzean emphasis, in
The Cinematic Body, on the visceral event of film viewing; Laura Markss works
on the skin of the film and touch that focus on what she describes as haptic
visuality in relation to bodies and images (Sobchack 2004, 56).
30
Hans Beltings urge for the recognition of bodies as living media in the
anthropological, iconological study of images shares some of the basic assumptions
of phenomenologys corporeal experiences. Cf: Perception alone does not
explain the interaction of body and medium that takes place in the transmission of
images. Images, as I have said, happen, or are negotiated, between bodies and
media. Bodies censor the flux of images via projection, memory, attention, or
neglect. Private or individual bodies also act as public or collective bodies in a
given society. Our bodies always carry a collective identity in that they represent a
given culture as a result of ethnicity, education, and a particular visual
environment. Representing bodies are those that perform themselves, while
represented bodies are separate or independent images that represent bodies.
Bodies perform images (of themselves or even against themselves) as much as they
perceive outside images. In this double sense, they are living media that transcend
the capacities of their prosthetic media. Despite their marginalization, so much la
mode, I am here still pleading their cause as indispensable for any iconology.
(Belting 2005, 311.)
The films body being at once empirical and imagined, elusive and
all-pervasive seen as a complex phenomenon at the crossroads of the
specifically cinematic game of mirrors (played between illusion and
reality, the projection room and the screen, the gaze and the touch) is
perhaps the most comprehensible and tactile aspect of mediality in the
cinema that we can think of. Vivian Sobchack summarizes her own
concept first developed in The Address of the Eye (1992) in the following
way: I use the phrase the films body very precisely [] to designate
the material existence of the film as functionally embodied (and thus
differentiated in existence from the filmmaker and spectator). The films
body is not visible in the film except for its intentional agency and
diacritical motion. It is not anthropomorphic, but it is also not reducible to
the cinematic apparatus (in the same way that we are not reducible to our
material physiognomy); it is discovered and located only reflexively as a
quasi-subjective and embodied eye that has a discrete if ordinarily
prepersonal and anonymous existence. (Sobchack 2004, 66.)
In referring to the complexity of the cinematic experience Jennifer M.
Barker, on the other hand, speaks of more anthropomorphic corporeality
when she writes the following: The films body also adopts toward the
world a tactile attitude of intimacy and reciprocity that is played out across
its nonhuman body: haptically, at the screens surface, with the caress of
shimmering nitrate and the scratch of dust and fibre on celluloid;
kinaesthetically, through the contours of on- and off-screen space and of
the bodies, both human and mechanical that inhabit of escape those
spaces; and viscerally, with the films rush through a projectors gate and
the breathing of lenses. (Barker 2009, 3.) Barker also holds that the
film and the viewer are in [] a relationship of reversibility and that we
inhabit and enact embodied structures tactile structures that are not the
same, but are intimately related and reversible. We do not lose ourselves
in the film, so much as we exist emerge really in the contact between
our body and the films body. [] We are in a relationship of intimate,
tactile, reversible contact with the films body a complex relationship
that is marked as often by tension as by alignment, by repulsion as often as
by attraction. We are embedded in a constantly mutual experience with the
film, so that the cinematic experience is the experience of being both in
our bodies and in the liminal space created by that contact. (Barker
2009, 19.)31
31
The recent redefinition of the medium as a tissue by Laura U. Marks also
stresses the non-textual and intensely sensual nature of cinematic mediation. We
can think of mediation not as a barrier but as an enfolded, connective tissue
between the beholder and the beheld Marks summarizes in an abstract to her
72 Chapter Two
Indebted to Merleau-Pontys ideas about the chiasmic structure of the

eye and the material world, of the intertwining of the gaze and the
touch, and also of the subject and the object, phenomenological
approaches view cinema as the totality of experiences provided by the
moving pictures, a totality that is to be understood both spatially and
materially (the phenomenology of the movies comprises both what is on
and what is off screen), as well as in a synesthetic way (the array of the
intertwining of the senses knows no boundaries). Conversely, the idea of
totality in the movies somehow always involves all those aspects
foregrounded by phenomenological approaches to cinema. Vivian Sobchack
remarks that critical discussions often also suggest that films that appeal
to our sensorium are the quintessence of cinema (2004, 57). Not
surprisingly the poetics of intermediality is called upon whenever directors
aim to construct a cinematic world corresponding to the ideal of a total
cinema. On the other hand, films that reflexively show cinemas inter-
sensual, embodied nature always end up contesting the conventional media
borders of cinema (the emphasis being on the conventional aspect,
provided we can even speak of such a border metaphor given the
flexibility and the intermedial nature of cinema itself), and work on an
expansion of the cinematic experience towards a totality that is repeatedly
redefined.
Let me bring two examples from the works of Ingmar Bergman and
Abbas Kiarostami of how cinema reflexively defines itself as a total
and sensorial experience and how in each case the mediality of the moving
pictures becomes perceivable (unfolded) through interactions between
the senses and between media.
In the famous prologue of Ingmar Bergmans already mentioned
Persona (1966)32 we see a series of images that on the one hand offer
talk presented at the University of Toronto (2011, January 27) with the title
Manners of Unfolding in the Cinema and relying on ideas published in her newest
book, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010) (cf.
http://www.utoronto.ca/cinema/article-2010-012.html). I am also indebted to her
for explaining her ideas to me in person on the occasion of meeting her at a
conference in Pcs, Hungary in December 2010.
32
Lloyd Michaels describes the images that we see in this prologue in the
introduction to the volume of analyses written about the film in this way (notably
omitting though the presence of the almost subliminal image of an erect penis, an
image that often gets to be censored out of the film): The darkness of the movie
theater is suddenly illuminated on screen by the flash of light from the projector
arc, followed by a shot of film leader running through the machine. Images of
unrelated figures an animated cartoon, close-ups of hands, a spider, an eye,
animal entrails alternate with blinding reflections of white light off the empty
quick flash-backs to Bergmans previous works: quoting the short

burlesque film included originally in his early film entitled Prison33
(Fngelse, 1949), which in turn was a remake of a short burlesque piece
that Bergman remembered from his childhood,34 and motifs from his
famous trilogy (like the giant spider, the borrowing of the child actor
who played the boy in The Silence/Tystnaden, 1963, etc.). On the other
hand we are presented images that go to the roots of the cinematic
experience and reflexively show the fundamental technical, material,
emotional, visceral, intellectual, spiritual aspects of the cinematic
medium. In these images what we see in fact, beyond the raw texture of
technologically projected images, is the emergence of the films body
itself out of nothingness: shown from the moment of its magical
conception in the intersection of immaterial darkness and light, through
the intertwining of the naked technology (the artificiality of the film
stock and the apparatus of film projection), and the naked body of film
as a shocking and unmediated presence (enhanced by the flashes of the
naked body in its literal sense and the disembowelled inside of a living
body), experienced through different textures and styles of moving
pictures, cut up in a montage defying narrative rules, and finally
resurrected, brought together in a mysterious passion play of the
image (with the motif of the crucifixion, the bodies lying as if in a morgue,
the angelic figure of the boy, and finally the awakening of the bodies and
the vision of the two faces being revealed in the shining light that the boy
touches longingly). [Figs. 2.530.]
screen, accompanied by abstract sounds. After the shocking close-up of a human

hand with a spike driven through it, the picture dissolves into a montage of wintry
scenes and of aged faces, apparently corpses, as we become aware of the sound of
dripping water and then a distant ringing. The close-up of an elderly woman
viewed upside down suddenly cuts to the same shot with the crones eyes now
wide open. A strange looking boy lying under a sheet slowly awakens, puts on
glasses, and begins reading a book, only to be disturbed by the presence of the
camera, which he tentatively reaches out toward to touch. A reverse shot reveals
the object of his attention to be a huge, unfocused still of a womans face; this
image gradually shifts to the close-up of what seems to be another woman, one
who closely resembles the first. The boys extended hand traces the elusive figure,
separated from him by the screen, as the sound track becomes high pitched and
intrusive. (Michaels 2000, 1.)
33
This is the translation of the original Swedish title, however, the film is also
known with the English title The Devils Wanton (1949).
34
See Bergmans memories about the original film and its remake in his memoir
entitled Images: My Life in Film (1990, 152).
74 Chapter Two
Everything in this prologue can be viewed at the same time in its

(carnal) immediacy and as an abstraction. The sequence both deconstructs
the cinematic experience shredding it into its most elemental sensual
stimuli and flaunts the possibility of the kaleidoscopic images to build a
symbolic world to which we may assign all kinds of interpretations. It
alternates on the one hand haptic and corporeal imagery that we
experience in the flashes of the playful soft hands of a child, the cut out
insides of the lamb, the aroused male genital, the close up of the eyes and
skin, intertwined with the details of the inanimate machinery together with
the abstract forms and the lack of forms: blank black or white frames, and
on the other hand it intersperses it with culturally charged imagery (the
slaughtering of the lamb, the symbolism of the eye and the cross, the book,
the face, etc.). As the images unfold we also experience how they resonate
and acquire metaphorical meaning: how the gesture of the hands
accompanies the movement of the body of the projector to release the
film stock, and, whats more, repeats in a way the gesture seen in the
cartoon images inserted before, how the position in which we see the
flaring up of the light at the beginning of the film and fertilizing the
blank screen gets to be repeated in the position of the male genital flashed
almost subliminally a few frames later, how the evisceration of the lamb
gains symbolic significance with the introduction of the piercing of the
hand, and in turn, how the piercing of the hand acts as a similarly shocking
carnal image as the preceding images of the slaughter, and how the
touching of the face is preceded by the touching of the lens, and so on.
The passion play sequence seen towards the end of the prologue is
even more interesting as it shows how Bergman is not content with
presenting a short poetic form of a sensual encyclopaedia of cinema, but
also connects elements anticipating the films key sequence (the faces of
the main actresses morphed into one unidentifiable image35) with a
personal and a philosophical as well as an embodied vision over the
medium of film. The sequence can be seen thus at the same time as a
subjective reflection over his own art and as a series of intimations about
the processes of creating this particular film, in addition to showing how
inspiration and memory, carnal experience and spiritual elevation get to be
intertwined in the cinema.
It is also an eloquent example of how mediality can be grasped
within the cinema (it is maybe not by chance that the image of the hand
35
The morphing of the two faces is a key image that kind of works in this way as a
mystery towards which the whole narrative of the film will later gravitate, acting
much like the famous Rosebud and the image of the crystal ball in Orson
Welless Citizen Kane (1940).
emerges as a recurring and defining motif of the sequence). Touching

the medium is both metaphorically and literally presented as touching the
face (first as touching the face of the camera as a reaction to the touch,
the stimulus coming from the direction of the screen, then as touching the
face of a woman), but it is also presented as touching a face within another
virtual space, another medium: the vision revealing the enigmatic faces of
the women appears as a film in a film or more like a giant photo inserted
or overlapping the cinematic frame. The photographic, translucent
juxtaposition of the two faces of the women appears within a cinematic
space that has already been presented as a space of the flesh, and at the
same time as a space of in-between: of the passage from life to death, from
death to resurrection, from one medium to another (we must note here not
only the presence of elements of Christian iconography but also the
previous montage of different types of images, as well as the emphatic
gesture of the act of reading that precedes the apparition of the faces).
The processes of embodiment involved within the cinematic
spectacle get to be represented through the allegory of crucifixion and
resurrection. The shocking, visceral images are paired with images
transcending the world of tangible materiality, with a projection of a
mysterious double image: a mental projection that later in the film might
be attributed to one of the characters who loses her sense of identity (or the
other, who stands witness to this), but at this point seems to be a mental
projection of the young boy himself, a possible alter ego for the author
himself (who might find the figure of a vulnerable youth placed in such a
haunting environment an adequate representation for his own state of mind
at the inception of the film). The double vision of the morphing faces acts
like an abyss, pointing to the gateway through which visions can flood
the screen, one medium can penetrate the other; where ultimately the
spectre36 meets the embodied in the cinema and where all these may
interleave or interchange. The whole sequence exemplifies once again that
there is no perception of mediality until there is no tactile or embodied
experience of the film, and also that cinematic mediality can only be
touched in the mirror, either as a self-reflection (film within a film) or an
intermedial reflection (film in another medium: photography, painting,
etc.).
In the other example, in Abbas Kiarostamis Shirin (2008) paradoxically
we have a cinema that reaches beyond its conventional borders by way
of a reduction, by way of a specific minimalism that rests on a chiasmus:
36
Let us remember as Henk Oosterling words it that Barthes conceives of a
photo as a spectre that haunts the reality that once was its referent (Oosterling
2003, 37).
76 Chapter Two
at the beginning of the film we are presented the tale of the Shirin, the
legendary Queen of Armenia in a series of miniatures, still images shown
one after the other without any commentary, without the story being
actually told (also perhaps as a kind of pre-cinematic experience of
narrativity in visual arts), these images without sound are followed by their
reverse presentation in a way: the sounds of the story offered to the
spectators, this time however without the images of the story itself. Also as
a kind of post-cinematic experiment the story gets to be told with another
notable twist, one that apparently reverses the usual order of the gaze in
the cinema: we are not allowed to see the film itself, instead the camera
turns way and films the spectators all women37 gazing at a screen,
touching their faces and hair in emotional response, wiping their tears,
trembling with emotions while the screen they are looking at remains
hidden from us to the very end. [Figs. 3138.] Somewhere between the
language of pre-cinema (the narrativity of the miniatures) and the post-
cinematic display of a gallery of moving images (the series of portraits) we
are tricked by a sophisticated game of mirrors to stare something
essentially (and maybe even universally) cinematic in the face.38
Similarly to the Bergman sequence quoted before, the hand and the face
emerge as key motifs providing insight into the nature of the medium
itself. The whole film rests on the visual spectacle provided by the faces
and hands of these women and by the visual spectacle reflected by these
faces and hands. Placing the (female) spectator in the mirror of the screen,
transposing the faces of the onlookers onto the screen, results in a
displacement of the tensions of the usual cinematic narrative over the faces
of the women who are watching the film (making their bodies the living
medium of film in this case, to quote Beltings already mentioned
anthropological views), while we can merely access the sounds coming
37
The gendered aspects of Kiarostamis film are therefore extremely significant
given the cultural context the film was made in (for a more comprehensive analysis
of all these aspects see: Kirly 2010); however, this is less important from the
point of view of this exemplification.
38
In Jean-Luc Godards Two or Three Things I Know about her (2 ou 3 choses que
je sais delle, 1967) when we hear the authors commentary in a lowered voice we
have another minimalistic technique that gives emphasis to the space of the
spectators watching the screen: this time simply by the use of the whispering voice
we have the illusion that Godard is speaking directly into our ears not as an on-
screen narrator, but as an off-screen fellow spectator. Thus the voice widens the
space of the film so that it now includes not only the things visible on the screen,
but also the reflections made by this voice coming from the world outside the
screen, a world shared by the spectator and the author and made in this way an
audible (and thus perceivable) part of the total world of a sensual cinema.
from outside the image and everything takes place in the darkened space
of the moving picture theatre (mirroring our own). In this way Kiarostami
shows how cinematic experience is clearly located not on the screen but
in the eyes of the beholder, on the face and body of the spectator, the
films body becomes the spectators body mirroring the carnal world of
the screen, responding to each flicker of the cinematic spectacle.
Paradoxically the reductions that the film operates with work in exactly
the opposite direction: the fact that we are compelled to witness only the
bodily reactions of the women (used as veritable inter-faces39) reflecting
the screen and reacting to the sensual stimuli coming from the direction of
the screen (and we may not turn our eyes towards the film itself) acts as an
incredibly strong impulse to stimulate our imagination, the extreme
portrayal of corporeality and emotions throws us towards the imaginary
that lies beyond the visible screen akin to a black hole pulling not only the
visible (fictitious) spectators but also the real spectators towards a
whirlpool of infinite possibilities.40 At the same time, being deprived of
the images of the film in the film that these women are looking at
enhances the significance of the sounds coming from off screen. We can
see as the voices and sounds (of the spectacle denied from the viewer)
literally pour into the spectators of the tale of Shirin, and again
similarly to Bergmans use of off screen voice in the double monologue of
Persona the sound gets detached from its source and becomes a
companion of several other stories told (or better said: acted out) by
the faces of the women shown in the close ups, the tale of the mythical
Shirin becoming a tale shattered into as many other tales as many faces
we are allowed to see. Sound becomes image, action and narrative
conjuring up vivid images in our imagination while the spectator
39
The expression is borrowed from the analysis of Kirly (2010, 138).
40
In this respect Shirin may offer an interesting example for testing the ideas of
Jean-Luc Nancy who disputes the applicability of Platos metaphor of the cave to
the cinematic experience. He states in his essay written on Kiarostami: Until our
time the wall with its display of pictures was solid and it bore witness to the
worlds outside or its inmost depths. [] With the film, the wall becomes an
opening cut in the world onto this very world. That is why the recurring attempt to
compare cinema with Platos cave is inaccurate: precisely, the depths of the cave
attest to an outside of the world, but as a negative, and this sets up the discrediting
of images, as we know, or it demands a consideration for images that are loftier
and purer named ideas. Film works the opposite way: it does not reflect an
outside, it opens an inside onto itself. The image on the screen is itself the idea
(Nancy 2001, 44-45). This opening of an inside onto the filmic spectacle itself is
doubled by Kiarostamis technique of reversing the camera and turning towards
the spectator.
78 Chapter Two
responding to it becomes the locus of total cinema, a cinema not afraid to

show its abysses of synesthetic mediality and a cinema open towards the
plenitude of images without images.41 The immediacy and the corporeality
of the faces of Shirin draw their incredible strength exactly from their
potential for mediation and reflection in the exchanges that are taking
place between sight and sound, touch and imagination, physical and
spiritual.
3. Intermedial Mise en Abyme and Trans-Figuration

within Cinema
Most often in cases in which the films themselves aspire to an ideal of
total cinema or to a conscious reflection of the possibilities of the
cinematic medium the poetics of intermediality in the cinema takes the
form of an intermedial mise en abyme in which one medium reflects
another as if in a mirror, or one medium acquires the guise of another. In
some cases we see not merely an inscription of one medium into
another, but a more complex trans-figuration, in the process of which
one medium gets to be transposed as a figure into another, a figure of
in-betweenness that reflects on both the media involved in this
intermedial process.
The most eloquent examples of these are to be found, of course, in the
cinema of Peter Greenaway42 where this trans-figuration is usually presented
in the form of a ritualistic narrative, nevertheless I intend to show that this
41
In a conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy Kiarostami confesses that he
contemplates the possibility of making a film with only the use of images, and
without saying anything: its better not to say anything and let the viewer imagine
it all. When we tell a story, we tell but one story, and each member of the
audience, with a peculiar capacity to imagine things, hears but one story. But when
we say nothing, its as if we said a great number of things. The spectator is the one
empowered. Andr Gide said that the gaze is whats important, not the subject
matter. And Godard says thats what on the screen is already dead, the spectators
gaze breathes life into it. (Nancy 2001, 84.) With Shirin Kiarostami seems to
experiment with the opposite of what he describes here: not with the absence of
words from the screen, but with filming the absence of images through showing
the empowered gaze of the spectator that breathes life into the body of the
film.
42
Such techniques are also numerous in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. For a
more detailed look at Godards intermedial trans-figurations see Part Three
included in this present volume with the title Cinema as the Currency of the
Absolute: the Godard Paradigm.
type of intermediality can appear in seemingly minimalistic forms as well,

in which images and words mirror each other in the cinema.
Peter Greenaways cinema is famous not only for his exhaustingly
overloaded picture frames, exhibiting pictures within pictures and
writing medium over medium, thus creating an intermedial palimpsest,
but also for using cinema as a place where all these media can reflexively
interact and where the narrative is often woven around a complex medium
metaphor (visual composition seen as framing in The Draughtsmans
Contract, 1982; mechanical reproduction set against the order of games in
Drowning by Numbers, 1988, the book seen as a world within a world in
Prosperos Books, 1991; the body presented as a book and reversely, the
book as a body in The Pillow Book, 1995; and so on). Although these
films are offered to us as a moving image spectacle, the medium of the
cinema seems to acquire a position of mediation between the arts, to
become an interface for the complex game of reflections taking place
between the media. Greenaways films often self-reflexively demonstrate
this position of the moving image acting as a mediator by the use of
colourful lighting effects, beams of light or reflexes that amount to a kind
of painting with light (even more so when these effects paraphrase well-
known forerunners like Vermeer or Velazquez in art history), a painting,
however, that is always the painting of the space and not of the surface,
and thus positioned in-between traditional painting and the transparency
of classic cinema. We see such effects in ZOO (A Zed and Two Noughts,
1985)43 or in the open air scenes of Drowning by Numbers (1988). The
cinematic emphasis of the materiality and the spatiality of light can not
only join painting and cinema but it also act in other films as a mediator
towards literature. In The Pillow Book besides the projection of
picturesque texts over the images, Greenaway also uses letters formed of
light, and this specific writing with light is again not beamed onto a flat
surface but is dispersed in space, it either floats in front of the background
or envelops the character seen in between the background and the
audience giving a heightened plasticity to space. The technique does not
only endow texts with a non discursive significance, allowing them to
touch the characters emphasizing the sensuous nature of all messages
conveyed by texts and images, or it does not only separate the moving
light from the image but it has at the same time the effect of transposing
the special aura of the cinema theatre onto the screen, of reflecting the
darkened space of the audience in which the light of the film projector
43
The film can be seen as an encyclopaedia of painterly lighting techniques.
Jonathan Hacker and David Price (1991, 220) counted at least thirteen different
sources of light used in the film.
80 Chapter Two
paints images and writes its arcane signs not only onto the screen but onto
the bodies of spectators. [Figs. 2.3942.] The sensation of a total
experience of the cinema in this respect resembles in a palimpsest like
structure the more straight forward presentation of the magic play of lights
over the faces of spectators of the cinema theatre in Kiarostamis Shirin
quoted earlier.
Prosperos Books and The Pillow Book may be considered as films
dedicated to the medium of literature; nevertheless, texts and literature
become continually transfigured in these films both as plastic arts and as
moving images. Prospero is not only a writer, reader, character in one
person, but the whole film amounts to a complex allegory of the creative
powers of literature to bring to life a whole universe of its own, while at
the same time the allegory is also a mirror of what cinema can do, and how
cinematic multimediality draws on a centuries old tradition within the fine
arts and literature. Besides transposing a compendium of different forms
of word and image relations characteristic for literature (calligraphic,
calligrammatic, illustrative, etc.) Greenaway also presents the creative
universe of imagination mediated by books that virtually come alive as
tableaux vivants, architectural models, theatrical song and dance acts and a
kaleidoscope of moving images. The books throbbing as live organisms,
ideas literally chasing one another may only appear in the magic world
of cinema, and cinema may only present the vastness of its repository of
audio-visual effects by acquiring the carnivalesque disguise of literature
and painting, by placing the moving images in the mirror of the other arts
and making the mediality of the cinema tangible through the process of
reflecting other media.
When Prospero appears at the beginning of the adaptation of
Shakespeares Tempest he ceremoniously puts on his magic robe and starts
a ritual of transfiguration that can be seen as an allegory of what happens
at the level of signification in Greenaways cinema. As Prospero becomes
an actor in the play that he himself conjures up, and becomes more and
more like a painting (paraphrasing a well-known Bellini painting of Doge
Leonardo Loredan) he also steps into an infinite process of mise en
abyme in which media are continuously shattered into their reflections and
are paraded in an incessant game of permutation. Nevertheless these
permutations are not merely formal: the essence of Greenaways ritualistic
intermediality always coincides with the ultimate goal of ekphrasis.44 As
Murray Krieger conceives it, ekphrasis is ultimately an attempt to create
44
Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device through which
one medium of art reflects another medium (i.e. literature describing a painting, a
sculpture).
the illusion of the natural sign, as it seeks to defy the mediating

properties of language by finding in language a plasticity that [...] turns its
medium into the unmediated thing itself, as if it were the word of God
(Krieger 1992, 22).
In one scene of The Pillow Book Greenaway creates a powerful
metaphor that reflects on this characteristic of his films. By translating
once more a medium metaphor into narrative this time, the metaphor of
visual representation implied by the English phrase to take a picture, that
is to take away something essential to life in the form of the image-
replica he shows how multimedial and multi-sensual signification is
meant to work in cinema. Alluding to the embalming nature of both still
and motion photographic representation, in the scene in which (as a
profane reversal of a traditional burial, the interment of the body) Jerome
is literally skinned in order to preserve him as a text and as a body, we can
see how his picture is literally taken off him, his skin is actually
converted into the pages of a book and the image of the body is not merely
copied but it is the body itself that is inscribed into the surface and
preserved. In this way the object represented and the representation
become one and the same: something that has no other precedents than the
indexicality and fetishistic reception of photography, an in general a
magical approach to images and objects within a ritual (for example the
mystery of the Eucharist). We can also remember that Bazin (1967, 14)
wrote about the Shroud of Turin that it was in fact the mixture of
photographic reproduction and the embalming of the body where the
image transcribed in the object makes it a relic, establishes a direct link
between sign and sign object. Jeromes skin converted into a book is a
profane and shockingly naturalistic embodiment of an abstract idea, of a
spiritual experience, a metaphor translated into life.
This magic approach to signs in general is omnipresent in Greenaways
cinema: by a stroke of the pen and the articulation of a few words, both
Prospero and Nagikos father in The Pillow Book (later she herself)
conjures up images and creates worlds, people come into being and are
filled with meaning being transformed into images, bodies of texts,
making the motion of the picture in Greenaways films become literally an
animation of representation. The dramatic force of the uttered words, the
act of reading/writing seen in ritualistic circumstances and always
underlining their synchronicity with the images they refer to, have the
power of bringing things into presence (in praesentia) and revealing
cinema as a magical medium, which paradoxically through this maze of
signification ultimately aspires to a shocking, enthralling, gut-wrenching
presence of things, and not a sense of mediation. The introduction of
82 Chapter Two
theatrical devices in many of Greenaways films as an explicit rendering

of the term picture show or cinema theatre that gives the overall frame
to this subversive intermedial ritual at the same time implies a radical
archaism of cinematic techniques themselves (together with the
domination of the plan tableau and the exclusion of the moving camera,
the preference for subtitles and double exposures, etc.) and as another
paradox, both a rehabilitation of the early cinema of attractions, and a
transition beyond the transparency of classical cinema in the direction of
newer, post-cinematic forms (the frequent formal and thematic
permutations being consistent with the so called database aesthetics of
new media).
The presence of the medium of literature/written language within film
is able to act as a mirror to the medium of cinema and as a trans-
figuration of cinema into words and words into cinema in its most
minimalist form as well. In the famous experimental film directed by
Michael Snow with the title So is This (1982) we have a film that consists
of nothing else but single words inscribed over a black surface [Figs. 2.43
46.], a blank cinematic frame, and projected at different speed without any
sound whatsoever. Considered to be a kind of semiotic play (a film that is
writing, a writing that is presented as moving picture), the film raises
important questions regarding the mediality of both language and film
functioning as a perfect double mirror or reciprocal mise en abyme for the
two media. The image consisting of writing banishes from its frame any
traditional cinematic storytelling, and the writing that is presented as an
image, does not function primarily as a medium of storytelling either (it
remains writing: i.e. visible signs inscribed on a surface), so both media
get stuck so to speak, paradoxically, at the crossroads of a heightened
visibility of their signifiers. On the one hand it seems that it is language
that invades the cinematic frame, and gains the upper hand by
imposing its own rules over what we are accustomed to see as a
multimedial and transparent world of cinematic representation. (And this
might effectively be considered as a pun on the term language of
cinema.) Instead of the photographic representation of the world we only
have a projection of words, instead of watching, we are compelled to the
act of reading. Moreover, the continuum of moving images is broken
down by the individual words into individual frames, into a series of still
images, a process that may allude to the photographic roots of the cinema.
The way the film was conceived (as the film tells us) also supports the idea
that its inception was the word. Snow confesses that the text was first
handwritten, then typeset and later photographed, transferred over a
traditional 16 mm film.
Nevertheless, we might also see that it is in fact the words that become
images (writing that can be seen as lighting over the black canvas,
deciphered as light reading, as Snow self-reflexively remarks in a pun),
it is the act of reading that becomes cinematic through this strange
experiment.45 The writing that can be deciphered in the images is no
longer a static object of the gaze, but an event that unfolds in time,46
something that is subjected to the rules of viewing a motion picture. Even
the fragmentation of the text is dictated by the frame and by the logic of
images, as we never single out the words in this way when we are reading
a book. The succession of graphic signs appears as a series of events, of
sentences being written and thoughts literally chasing one another in
their embodiments as words. We anticipate with curiosity what will come
next, there is tension and there is release of tension along the experience of
reading, there are unexpected turns of events, changes of rhythm, very
much in a similar way as in the experience of a traditional narrative film,
only this time have a self-reflexive projection of the intellectual and
emotional processes involved in the act of reading: the experience of
reading shown in the same way as we experience a film. This is manifest
in the transformation of the act of reading usually practiced as a solitary,
individual activity into a public show, a public display of images
(communal reading, as Snow remarks) that impose their own rhythm
and time structure over the reader who is no longer in control over the
temporality of reception. On top of all these, the self-reflexive content of
the text turns another mirror towards itself: Snow writes a text that refers,
in fact, to nothing else but itself and refers to itself as a film, and not just
as a text. Moreover, he incorporates a paraphrase of Magrittes famous
45
Catherine Bdard sees the tensions between the two media in this way: By
isolating words, the films structure denies the filmic image its illusionistic
capacity to reproduce movement, leading one to reflect (among other matters) on
the specificity of the cinematographic medium and its basic building block, the
frame. Snow confronts us with words presented as units isolated from their
narrative context and isolated also from any relationship to the flow of the real.
Thus, in essence, we are confronted with the invisible but perceptible gearing-
down of the filmic image, in which the illusion of movement inherent in the
cinematographic conventions is confounded by a still-photo effect that is itself
illusory. This effect, in turn, sets up tensions with the repressed linearity of the
text. The spectator is frozen in the pose of the reader inordinately taxed by the
image, a reader who must follow it without blinking or else lose the thread of the
film. (Bdard 2005, 204205.)
46
As Snow consciously declares in the film: The decision has been made to
concentrate on the distinctive capacity of film to structure time: the word as the
individual unit of writing, the frame as the smallest unit of the film.
84 Chapter Two
image vs. text paradox (expressed in his painting/words: Ceci nest pas
une pipe/This is not a pipe) by using a flash-back French translation
of the first sentence: This is the title, (Ceci est le titre), and saying that
Magrittes message applies here as well. (Is this really the title? No, this is
merely a sentence about the title positioned where the title should be.)
The double mirror (words as images, images as words) is effective as it
can disjoint both our automatisms related to written language that in this
way does not only become non-transparent, but alive as a picture in
motion, while retaining all its possibilities of conveying abstract meaning,
and the automatisms related to cinema that is generally thought of as being
a mirror to the world and not a discursive medium. The cinematism of
the text and the readability of the image in motion ultimately act as a
double mise en abyme, a double figure of the cross-fertilization of images
and text in the cinema. In the end if we posit the question whether this can
be considered literature or cinema, the title may enigmatically refer to
them both, if literature is words, the tangible forms of thoughts in action,
so is this, if cinema is conveying a complex message through moving
images, so is this: the borders of both media have been effectively
dislodged in this intermedial trans-figuration of words and images.
Both Greenaways complex, palimpsest-like techniques that overload
the cinematic frame or generate an intermedial discourse based on the
narrativization of medium metaphors and Snows example of a more
minimalist experimentation with the self-reflexive use of the language of
cinema in the form of language as cinema demonstrate how cinematic
mediality can become visible as intermediality, how cinema can be
conceived as a mirror reflecting and refracting media. Moreover, they
exemplify how these reflections and refractions can never be regarded as
acting in only one direction, as they actualize a whole set of
interrelationships between the media in which medial differences become
visible, and can be played upon: media can alter the perceptibility of each
other within a film, they can overwrite, mask each other, or quite
conversely, they can spotlight each other unmasking each others specific
potential within an endless process of intermedial mise en abyme.
Reading the intermedial within the cinema therefore ultimately amounts
to being willing to engage in such a game of mirrors implied by the
abysmal mediality of cinema (displaying medium as a medium as a
medium), and being willing to engage all our senses in a cinematic
experience challenging us on all levels of perception and abstraction.
Figures
Figures 2.14. Ingmar Bergman: Persona (1966): speech incorporated in turn into
the mirror-like images of the listener and of the speaker and changing its meaning
according to what we see while we hear it.
86 Chapter Two
Figures 2.530. The prologue to Persona: images deconstructing and re-constructing

the cinematic medium as a total experience from the raw texture of technology
to the emergence of the films body; from nothingness to haptic images, from
abstract to metaphoric vision; from the naked technology to the naked body of
film as a shocking and unmediated presence brought together in a mysterious
passion play of the image.
88 Chapter Two
Figures 2.3138. Abbas Kiarostamis Shirin (2008): somewhere between the language
of pre-cinema (the narrativity of the miniatures) and the post-cinematic display of a
gallery of moving images we are tricked by a sophisticated game of mirrors to
stare something essentially cinematic in the face: the spectator as a living
medium and the body of cinema.
90 Chapter Two
92 Chapter Two
Figures 2.3942. Peter Greenaways The Pillow Book (1995): the letters formed of
light floating in front of the background or touching their bodies emphasize the
sensuous nature of signification, and also transpose the special aura of the
cinema theatre onto the screen.
94 Chapter Two
Figures 2.4346. Michael Snow, So is This (1982): image as writing, writing as

moving picture revealing the cinematism of the text and the readability of the
image, and a paraphrase in the first sentence of Magrittes famous image vs. text
paradox expressed in his this is not pipe picture/statement.
CHAPTER THREE
THE WORLD AS A MEDIA MAZE:

SENSUAL AND STRUCTURAL GATEWAYS
OF INTERMEDIALITY
IN THE CINEMATIC IMAGE
Introduction: Moving Frames of Reality

Moving Frames of Mediality
According to some of the most enduring metaphors regarding the nature of
cinematic representation, the screen is a window to the world or a
gateway towards a fantasy land where the cinematic imagination knows
no boundaries. In both cases the world conceived either as reality or
fiction prevails over the frame that remains mostly invisible as the
spectator is invited to get immersed emotionally and perceptually into the
visual spectacle. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener in their latest book
(Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses, 2010) discuss the
relevance of the metaphors of window, door and frame with respect to film
theory, and find that cinema as window and frame can be defined as
ocular-specular (i.e. conditioned by optical access), transitive (one looks
at something) and disembodied (the spectator maintains a safe distance),
and also that the notion of the window implies that one loses sight of the
framing rectangle as it denotes transparency, while the frame highlights
the content of the (opaque) surface and its constructed nature, effectively
implying composition and artificiality (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 14).
While the metaphors of the window and door imply the illusion of
unmediated contact and tend to efface the frame of the screen in the course
of the cinematic experience, foregrounding the frame itself in one way or
another exhibits the medium in its material specificity (Elsaesser and
Hagener 2010, 15).
Nevertheless, as we well know, it is not only the consciousness of the
actual frame itself (or even its repeated reflections in inner framings within
the filmic image) that can act reflexively and remind us of the cinematic
96 Chapter Three
world as a closed system of artifice within its own boundaries, but it is

often the cinematic image itself that acts as an opening, a gateway
through which the elusive mediality1 of the moving images is revealed.
The term mediality has been used in many ways in media studies and
also in the aesthetics or philosophy of modern art. In this case, it has to be
specified, I use it reflexively as it is mainly understood in the theories of
intermediality , namely starting from the idea that whenever a so called
medium is transparent we do not perceive it as a medium, but we
perceive something else that is communicated by it (i.e. the represented
world itself), we have the illusion of the immediacy of the object, and we
do not have a sense of any mediation taking place. Thus, for instance, the
mediality of the cinema becomes visible through diverse techniques of
reflexivity that may or may not involve a conspicuous framing of the
image, but which always render the image itself less translucent and more
opaque (stressing its qualities of being an image). The more opaque the
image becomes, the less it resembles the world, and also the more it
resembles some of the other arts and media. Techniques of intermediality
effectively break the transparency of the filmic image, and while they sort
of close the image up upon itself, they can also open it up towards illusory
inter-media and inter-art transgressions, crossovers. The cinematic
frame, that in so called classical cinema acts as a moving frame through
which despite all the time and space fragmentation of the image we
perceive a continuous world, becomes a moving frame of mediality and a
gateway of intermediality shifting between the perceptual frames of
cinema and those of different media and arts. And this can happen not only
in extreme (and therefore obvious) cases of stylization2 or avant-garde
type hybridization of cinema, but also within narrative cinema that
maintains its illusions of realistic representation. Paradoxically, in some
cases, we can witness a two way porosity of the cinematic image both
1
See more about the nature of cinematic mediality in the essay included in this
volume with the title: Reading the Intermedial: Abysmal Mediality and Trans-
Figuration in the Cinema.
2
One of the most frequent possibilities of the images to open up towards other
media is to be subjected to some kind of stylization carried on throughout the film
and as a result of which the images will be perceived in a mediated way.
Stylization is of course a very wide category that can include all kinds of examples
ranging from the iconography of gangster films and film noir movies (heavily
borrowing from the imagery of contemporary urban photography and of popular
comic books) to cyberpunk and neo-noir cinema, and the deployment of such
extreme intermedial techniques as was the case of Sin City (Robert Rodriguez,
2005) or 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006) both created as the digital transposition of the
visual style of a graphic novel onto the moving images.
The World as a Media Maze 97
towards what we perceive as the real world3 and both towards its own
mediality reflected in a kind of intermedialization of the image: in its
being perceived as if filtered through the medium of another art (like
painting, for example), or being reframed, disassembled by other media.
In what follows I will try to outline some of the possibilities of how
intermediality enters our perception of images in cinema, and show how
the perception of the images can open up towards the perception of
cinematic mediality itself. I will try to do this by pinpointing some of the
gateways through which cinematic images within the boundaries of the
transparent perceptual cinematic frame of the real world get to be re-
framed by other media.
In addressing this issue I have found the theory of Siegfried Kracauer
(1960) an extremely fertile pool of ideas, for among the so called theorists
of cinematic realism Kracauer was the one who was not only concerned
with the definition of the cinematic medium in its relationship with reality
but forged his film theory grounded in his vision over urban life and
argued for a cinema that captures the unstaged flow of life observable in
the sights and sounds of the modern city. In searching for images at the
threshold of reality and intermediality I regard Kracauers thoughts on the
relationship of cinema and city life to be enlightening as I have discovered
that urban scenes in cinema offer ample examples for the media
intersections that I proposed to explore. Streets and cities can be seen not
only as the most common sites of contemporary life but also as privileged
sites for intermedia relations to be played out.
Modern cityscapes have been conceived to be breathtaking in their
visual splendour, and together with the multitude of media displayed in
urban spaces the city amounts to a spectacle in itself: it has become a
world composed of images, sounds, light and movement, a web of media
communications, as the title of one of Vilm Flussers articles describing
the rising new urbanism indicates, it has become a wave-trough in the
image-flood,4 a dynamic project of projections (2005, 327). No wonder
therefore that ever since the discovery of cinema so many individual films
and genres have been set within this environment of moving images of
3
The category of the real in this case is not defined in ontological, philosophical
terms but in cognitive-perceptual and phenomenological terms, as the image that
we perceive through the conventions of cinematic realism.
4
The article, written originally in 1988, and first published in 1990 in German with
the title Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut, presents Flussers concept of a
city as a medium, as a net consisting of the intersection of various channels of
information.
98 Chapter Three
urban reality.5 From the beginning the modern city emerged as a proto-
cinematic environment, moreover as Scott McQuire has pointed out
the image of the city illuminated at night became a potent metaphor for
the forces of modernization6 (2008, 114). Films set in the city captured
not only the pulse of modern life (beginning already from the silent
movies) but also developed visual forms of cinematic storytelling that
emphasized the interaction of human bodies with architectural space and
the media environment of urban life. In his book on cinema and urban
space Stephen Barber insists on such a complex relationship between city
space, architecture, human bodies and the presence of media in films. He
writes: Film began with a scattering of gesturing ghosts, of human bodies
walking city streets, within the encompassing outlines of bridges, hotels
and warehouses, under polluted industrial skies. The first incendiary spark
of the film image extending across almost every country in the world,
around the end of the nineteenth century propelled forward a history of
the body that remains inescapably locked into the history of the city
(Barber 2002, 13).
The idea is reinforced by James Orr, who writes: The metropolis is
thus never the sum of its physical parts but an accretion of living tissue of
both humdrum activities (work, commuting, shopping, eating, and
sleeping) and public spectacle []. A film is both representation of that
living tissue and an integral element within it. It not only records and
documents the symbolic. It is itself symbolic. Thus technically film is
always a two-fold meditation on the ground and the nature of its own
being (2003, 287). The cinematic city excels at flaunting its media
components as Barber states: The space of the city formed the primary
site within which visual media collided and amalgamated with one
another, across space and time, from the very origins of film. For all its
infinite enchantments and attractions, the city formed a ferocious zone of
conflict for cinematic imagery (Barber 2002, 60), a zone that mirrored
the clashes and clusters of media that are manifest within cinema as
well, we might add.
5
Kracauer writes: The mediums affinity for the flow of life would be enough to
explain the attraction which the street has ever since exerted on the screen (1960,
72).
6
Beside Kracauers film theory the relationship between cinema and the modern
city has been explored in several more recent analyses, among them: the studies
included in the volumes edited by David B. Clarke (1997), Mark Shiel and Tony
Fitzmaurice (2003), the books written by Peter Brooker (2002), Stephen Barber
(2002), Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli (2003), Scott McQuire (2008),
Barbara Mennel (2008), Robert Zecker (2008), etc.
So if urban imagery is such a rich terrain for the merging of the real
and the artificial, for the interrelationship between bodies and sensations,
between cinema and the other media, how does this ferocious zone of
cinematic imagery work as a site for intermediality? Returning to our
original question: how does the (real) world in the cinematic window
get to be reframed by other media in cinema? The first and most general
observation is that the perception of the images of reality (not just urban
reality) can be accompanied either by the awareness of being filtered
through media, or it can be combined with the specific awareness of
different media scattered within the field of vision (and in films set in the
city: within the urban landscape). As a rule, the (urban) world populated
by media lies in front of the cinematic gaze in a seemingly unmediated,
continuous flow; however it can also appear as trans-coded and fragmented
by these media. Thus a cinematic reality and a cinematic city can open
up towards the expressiveness, the affordance of other media (if we
might borrow a term from the ecological approaches of visual perception7),
or may even become a scene for intermedial processes to take place.
In this respect I have found that there are at least two basic templates
that generate a more or less emphatic sense of intermediality within
cinema:
1. a sensual mode that invites the viewer to literally get in touch with
a world portrayed not at a distance but at the proximity of entangled
synesthetic sensations, and resulting in a cinema that can be perceived in
the terms of music, painting, architectural forms or haptic textures; and
2. a structural mode that makes the media components of cinema
visible, and exposes the layers of multimediality that constitute the
fabric of the cinematic medium, revealing at the same time the mesh of
their complex interactions.
7
See James J. Gibsons theory of affordances in his Ecological Approach to
Visual Perception (1986, 127147). Gibson considered that affordances were
action possibilities latent in the environment (the affordances of the environment
are in Gibsons words: what it offers, what it furnishes, what it provides for
the animal or human being, 1986, 127), independent of the individuals ability to
recognize them, but always in relation to the actor: so an affordance points two
ways (), to the environment and to the observer (1986, 141). In this sense, if we
were to transfer the concept onto intermedial relationships, the affordance of
other media (or arts) for cinema would be to potentially bring into play all their
cognitive and communicational characteristics pointing two ways, both to
cinema and to another media or art.
100 Chapter Three
1. The Multi-Sensual Flow of the Images of the World

and the Flneuristic Gaze
We can distinguish several tendencies of how visuality or the gaze has
acted in our culture with marked emphasis beginning from the turn of the
20th century. The first version is embodied in Foucaults description of the
panopticon, an idea that also finds its extensions in all kinds of theories
of surveillance, and basically means that mediated vision is seen as an all-
pervasive agency of control. The panopticon induces a sense of
permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power (to quote
Foucaults words: visibility is a trap, 1979, 200). In fact it is not even
necessary that visibility be uninterrupted and effective all the time: the
thought in itself that permanent visibility is possible makes panopticism
function without fail. So while panopticism relies on actual physical
devices and architectural structures that enable surveillance, at the same
time it also functions at a psychological level keeping the inmates of the
panopticon in a state of permanent alert and anxiety.
In terms of cinema, a similarly controlling and intruding type of
visibility is manifested in the scopophilia and voyeurism of classical
cinema, a cinema in which we, the spectators, can follow from a safe
distance the personal lives of others shown to us on the screen. As Laura
Mulvey has put it, classical cinema revolves around a fascination with the
human form. The mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within
which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world
which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience,
producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic
phantasy (1992, 25).
Comparable to these, there is another type of handling visual
experiences, or another type of cultural gaze that can be identified in the
so called phenomenon of flnerie, or as some phrase it, the gaze
accompanying the art of taking a walk. Flnerie, is in fact, not so much
about the control exerted through vision (and the anxiety induced by the
possibility of visual control), or the peeping into the lives of others, as it
is about a sensual mode of reflection, a mapping of the world through
the eye and the collecting of visual sensations. As such it denotes a
complex artistic attitude that was productive both in literature and in the
visual arts beginning from the 19th century towards the beginning of the
20th century. In some views the flneuristic sensitivity of 19th century
literature can actually be seen as a forerunner of cinematic vision itself.
Flnerie meant a reading of the street as a text and also a kind of
photographic recording of experiences that found its natural extension in
both the medium of photography and film that appeared later on at the end
of that century. The flneur sees the world as a continuous cinema of the
street, and conversely, early film displays a special affinity with the realm
of the street, the territory of the flneur (cf. Gleber 1999). Cinema and
flnerie share an attraction toward unstaged reality whose impressions
call forth [] kaleidoscopic sensations, (1960, 50) along a journey
through the maze of physical existence as Kracauer states (1960, 257)
himself both a practitioner of flnerie and a theoretician of early cinema.
However, flneuristic cinema cannot only be identified in early films
displaying fascination with street scenes, but also in the so called
modernist cinema of the 1950s and 60s that makes a shift from action and
character based storytelling to what Deleuze calls purely optical and
sound situations and to films featuring heroes who have seemingly no
other role than to roam the streets. In Deleuzes words this is a cinema of
the seer and no longer of the agent [de voyant, non plus dactant] (1989,
126).8 Most of the films of the French New Wave, for example, convey a
sense of cinematic flnerie also as a critical response from an artistic point
of view to a general commodification of visual culture, a society turned
into a society of spectacle (to quote Guy Debords catchphrase).
A flneuristic attitude can be distinguished from panopticism through
the element of entrapment and exercise of power through vision that
panopticism implies. The strolling or ambling around of the flneur
introduces an idea of freedom and randomness that can be seen as opposed
to the structural (closed circuit) functioning of the panopticon. Some
might argue against this distinction observing that the flneur moves in a
similarly enclosed world of urban consumerism, and is both a product and
an observer of modern city life. Nevertheless, his entrapment in such a
world is alleviated by his essentially aesthetic attitude towards his
environment.9 As Walter Benjamin remarked (in his interpretation of
Baudelaires writings on the subject): in the flneur the joy of watching is
triumphant (1997, 67). So while panopticism shares similarities with the
immanent voyeurism of filmmaking and can offer a theoretical background
for the analysis of voyeuristic situations in films, flnerie may prove to be
relevant for understanding some of the elemental gateways of intermedial
8
In Deleuzes view this type of film emerged following the crisis of what he
described as the action-image, here the characters were found less and less in
sensory-motor motivating situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering
or of rambling which defined pure optical and sound situations (1986, 120).
9
For the flneur, the [] pleasures of the city stemmed from an aesthetic
proximity to others that was wholly detached from any social proximity (and hence
from any responsibility or consequence) (Clarke 1997, 5 emphasis mine, . P.).
102 Chapter Three
cinema as it entails more than the sense of vision (or aesthetic attitude
towards the world through vision). In the writings about literary flnerie
one of the most frequent metaphors that pops up is the (already mentioned)
kaleidoscope implying beyond a fragmentation of vision, also a multitude
of physical sensations recorded by the pedestrian wedged into the crowd,
impulses that can never be grasped in their totality and never exclusively
as visuality. Flnerie implies both a concrete bodily presence and a sense
of aesthetic detachment (window shopping activity). Benjamin describes
the hectic stimuli of the street in this way: Moving through this traffic
involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous
intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like
the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into
the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the
experience of the shock, he calls this man a kaleidoscope equipped with
consciousness (Benjamin 1997, 29).
The flneur is therefore more than just a hunter on the optical scene of
the street; he is also a sensual stroller and observer whose physical
impressions mingle with a sensitivity generated by a dreamlike state of
reverie. The concrete images of the world are meshed up with the
phantasmagorical as the flneur walks about as if intoxicated and excited
by the whirlpool of sights and sounds of the surrounding world. Kracauer
considered that imbibing a thousand casual impressions the flneur
indiscriminately absorbed the spectacle of life that went on all around
him and for him the sights of the city were like dreams to a hashish
smoker (2002, 121).
The spectacle of life or the kaleidoscopic sensations mentioned by
Kracauer can be interpreted as perceptions that are as we have seen not
limited to the visual, but as perceptions that include cross-sensory,
synesthetic experiences that can be considered as sensual gateways to
intermediality: it is through these synesthetic occurrences that the moving
image gives way to overtones characteristic to other media, and thus
spotlight its own fabric. In the following subchapters I will outline some
of the possible types of such flneuristic and synesthetic (inter)mediality
of cinematic imagery (being fully aware that the examples singled out here
are only fairly random samples from a broad range of films).
1.1. The Liquid City: a City of Lights, an Electropolis10

The modern cinematic city (or metropolis) may appear as a liquid
environment constructed of a continuous flow of spots of lights, shades
and colours, images sometimes passing in slow motion or in an accelerated
or stroboscopic rhythm. The key impression is a kind of fluid synesthesia
that records the pulse of the city that invites not just an optical but also a
fundamentally musical reading of the street. This is usually not only
emphasized by the rhythmic montage alternating extreme close-ups with
birds-eye views, images speeded up and/or broken down into fragmented,
mosaic like details that we see in the type of film that have been called city
symphony films (like Walter Ruttmans Berlin, Symphony of a Great City,
1927 or Dziga Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) but it is also
frequently highlighted by a dynamic musical score in fiction films
employing this kind of imagery. Such a musical (video-clip like) rendering
of the flow of the traffic and the clustering of (illuminated) skyscrapers has
also already become one of the running clichs of television series that
place their narratives into the hectic urban jungle of contemporary
metropolises.11
The coloured spots or lights of the electric city are sometimes
enhanced by the pictorial quality of more or less blurred images which can
also add up to something like a cinematic action painting. Examples
could range from Martin Scorseses famous opening and closing shots that
frame the Taxi Driver (1976) to Jean Luc Godards In Praise of Love
(Eloge de lamour, 2001), and Francis Ford Coppolas latest film, Tetro
(2009) [Figs. 3.12].
The substitution of the urban stroller in these films with the urban
driver who has his own personal photographic surface in the car
window12 only adds to the possibility of the images being perceived as
10
The expressions although with different meaning are borrowed from Scott
McQuires book The Media City (2008).
11
The importance of such images to set the mood for the urban jungle narratives
is demonstrated by the frequency with which these images are incorporated into
the characteristic credit sequences of certain TV series (see for example the
opening shots recurring later through the film as shots of transition from one
scene to another of the popular TV series of the CSI and the Law and Order
franchises, as well as the shorter lived, midcult courtroom comedy and drama:
Boston Legal, 20042008; and Damages, 20072010).
12
In speaking about the films of Abbas Kiarostami that often stage scenes in cars
and show the world as it is revealed through the car window, Jean-Luc Nancy also
speaks of the mediating quality of such images. He writes: The automobile carries
around the screen or the lens, the screen-lens of its windshield, always further, and
104 Chapter Three
mediated within the order of cinematic representation. In all of them the

lights that leave traces of their movements over the screen, or seem to be
splashed over the reflective surface of the windshield like paint over
canvas, resemble what Nelson Goodman (1968) considered as the
autographic gesture in arts. [Fig. 3.3.] In Goodmans typology the so
called arts of signature like hand-drafted manuscripts or easel painting
are considered autographic arts that are primarily defined by the trace
of an action, the physical contact of the artists hand (cf. Rodowick
2007b, 14).13 I believe that such haptic,14 almost tactile imagery [see Figs.
3.14.] goes beyond conventional hapticality in cinema (which is thought
to be primarily aiming at the construction of realistic space15) and may
suggest to the viewer a resemblance with impressionist or abstract
expressionist (or as mentioned before, so called action) painting,16 and
seems to incorporate a kind of autographic gesture of the cinema artist
himself who inscribes these photographic traces over the transparent
image, and who makes the cinematic cross over into the painterly as a
result of these actions.
At the same time, what such images figurate by their intermedial
overtones is also another gesture, that of the viewers crossing over into
a new, somewhat enigmatic (sometimes even dangerous) realm, a territory
that is no longer a simple background, a neutral setting for the action of
this screen is precisely not a screen neither obstacle, nor wall of projection but
a text (crit), a sinuous, steep and dusty trace (2001, 66).
13
In this respect Goodman proves to be a precursor of the media theories that
emphasize not only the role of the technical apparatus but also the personal, bodily
implication of the author in certain fields of media, like Kittlers analysis of the
different media of writing (handwriting, typing, etc.), cf. Kittler 1999.
14
The term haptic used in opposition with the optic originates from the art
historian Alois Riegl. For a detailed evaluation of the influence of Riegls notion
over theories of film see the introductory essay written by Angela Dalle Vacche to
the volume Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art History (2003).
15
So called classical narrative films use the technical and stylistic possibilities of
cinema (lighting, framing, mise-en-scne, montage, etc.) so as to construct a sense
of reality through building a coherent and haptic space that offers the illusion of
the spectator moving in a three dimensional space. See the description of the
evolution of these techniques in cinema in Nol Burchs seminal work, Life to
those Shadows (1990, 162186).
16
Nevertheless, it is exactly because the images are in movement and because they
already exist within the conventional haptic framework of cinema (the cinematic
world being presented with the illusion of three dimensionality and objecthood)
that the effect goes beyond the mainly optical sensation that spots of colours or
light might confer in a painting, and produces a sensation of tactility.
the narrative to unfold but an active component of the exchange of

tensions that are communicated to the spectator. 17 The image is no longer
a mere object of our vision but seems to assert itself against the observer
through the pulse of the electropolis, a pulse that accumulates into a
feeling of vertigo as the whirlpool of lights is no longer in a safe optical
distance but draws nearer in its hapticality and threatens to engulf the
individual facing the city. (This characteristic is eloquently demonstrated
in the opening and final sequences in both Scorseses Taxi Driver and
Coppolas Tetro in both of which the nocturnal and illuminated city
emerges as a threatening terrain harbouring unnamed tensions beyond its
shiny surface, see an image from Tetro in Fig. 3.4.)18
The unsettling, paradoxical effect of all kinds of haptic images in the
cinema have been described by Laura U. Marks (2002) and more recently
by Martine Beugnet (2007) who consider that the threatening impression
of hapticality (a way of seeing analogous to tactility) consists in a shift
from the voyeuristic and somewhat safe distance of visual observation to a
closeness of sensual experience. Laura U. Marks writes: In the sliding
relationship between haptic and optical, distant vision gives way to touch,
and touch reconceives the object to be seen from a distance. Optical
visuality requires distance and a centre, the viewer acting like a pinhole
camera. In a haptic relationship our self rushes up to the surface to interact
with another surface. [] But just as the optical needs the haptic, the
haptic must return to the optical. To maintain optical distance is to die the
death of abstraction. But to lose all distance from the world is to die a
17
It is because of this quality that images of the electropolis have become so
popular with urban thrillers and TV series that deal with crime and dangerous
situations.
18
One might also argue that the latest popularity of 3D cinema is nothing but a
step further in making the images even more tactile, and even more intrusive into
the originally detached world of the spectator, who can no longer act as a mere
observer, but is forced to react to images in the proximity of an illusory
corporeality. However, one of the fundamental differences between the intrusive
tactility of 3D images and such haptic images as described here is exactly this
quality of openness towards intermediality: whenever the image appears to be like
an impressionist or expressionist painting (like painting in general, or reminds us
of the so called pictorialism in photography), we are dealing not with a mere
illusory display of objects in space that act upon our senses (as in the case of 3D
imagery) but with an ambivalence combining both the sense of hapticality (an
image that touches upon our senses) and the aesthetic perception of the quality
of being like a painting at the same time. The paradoxical presence of this
aesthetic distance is preserved exactly through the overtones of intermediality
(which are missing from a 3D action movie as practiced today).
106 Chapter Three
material death, to become indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

Life is served by the ability to come close, pull away, come close again.
(Marks 2002, xvi.) In Beugnets words: there is something both appealing
and potentially threatening in the way haptic perception undermines the
strategies of distanciation at work in conventional optical perception
(2007, 68). The inserted extreme close up of the eyes of Robert De Niro
hit by the coloured lights in Scorseses credit sequence to the Taxi Driver,
or the metaphor of the moth circling the light at the beginning of Tetro
seem to summarize well the ominous closeness of such a sensual
vision within this type of imagery [Figs. 3.56].
One of the most relevant films in this respect that seems to be
constructed entirely on the ambivalence of the sensual appeal and the
threatening effect of hapticality within the perception of urban space is
Claire Deniss Friday Night (Vendredi soir, 2002). The film presents a
woman named Laure (Valrie Lemercier) driving alone at night through
the crowded streets of Paris, and caught in a massive traffic jam. The
minimalist story revolves around a chance encounter with a stranger and
the development of their mutual attraction. The images presenting the
electropolis, the dark, wet pavement and the reflective surfaces of the
vehicles, people trapped within their cars in the traffic jam, the shop
windows, etc. are conceived so as to convey both a sense of excitement
caused by the closeness of sensual exploration of the world and a sense of
apprehension and repulsion as Martine Beugnet writes the close
encounter with the abject, that is, the immersion in the anxiety of the self
when individuality dissolves into the undifferentiated and formless.
(Beugnet 2007, 32.)
In addition to all these, in all such instances in which hapticality
prevails over the optical qualities of the cinematic image, we might also
note that a shift is performed in the viewer not only from observation to
experience (with all its disconcerting effects), but also the attention is
diverted from the diegetic world onto the medium of the film itself in a
direct sensual contact.19 Beugnet attributes this to a new paradigm, the
19
The effect also has the potential of acting in a self-reflexive way, provided the
movie supports this kind of meta-narrative reading of the film. This is the case of
Godards Eloge de lamour in contrast with the other examples named here
(especially in a stark contrast to the clichs of TV series), in which such images are
placed into a reflexive context of a continuous meditation upon the condition of the
medium of cinema itself. In David Rodowicks interpretation the narrative of
Eloge de lamour allegorizes the present virtual life of film. In what Rodowick
sees as Godards last exercise in medium specificity (2007b, 90), by contrasting
the black and white first half of the film with the digitally colourized and painterly
cinema of sensation and describes this in the following way: Beyond

the needs of narrative clarity, the cinema of sensation thus plays on the
material qualities of the medium to construct a space that encourages a
relation of intimacy or proximity with the object of the gaze, privileging
primary identification with the film as event, rather than identification
with characters caught in plot developments. The effect is an unsettling of
the conventional vision-knowledge-mastery paradigm, in favour of a
relation where the spectator may surrender, at least partly, a sense of visual
control for the possibility of a sensuous encounter with the film where
the subject affectively yields into its object (2007, 68). Beugnet adds:
Between the cinema of psychological situations and that of pure
abstraction, the cinema of sensation opens a space of becoming, a space
where the human form is less character and more figure, a figure caught
again in the material reality of the film as event (2007, 149).20
Beside an increased hapticality the liquidity of the streets and the flow
of people and traffic can also often be accentuated by time lapse
photography or blurred images.21 So beyond hapticality and the similarities
with painting, what also often happens here is that the cinematic image
lays bare its (ontological and aesthetic) connections with the art of
photography by way of emphasizing photographic techniques of recording
movement or time change (for, as we know, in photography movement or
time can only be represented as a material photographic trace).
We can remember how Joachim Paech in a recent seminal essay (2008)
contends that the blur can be interpreted as a symbol of medial experience
itself,22 and describes its complex intermedial status. The blur in photography
can be inscribed/repeated within another medium (like painting) as a sign
second half, Godard effectively compares film and video, the passing present and
the emerging future (2007b, 93).
20
On the interchanges between the fields of the optical and the haptical,
between visual perception and bodily sensation see also Deleuzes detailed
analysis in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003), in which he remarks
how a sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and
boredom of conveying a story (2003, 36) and notes how moving away from the
optical can mean an imposition of a violent manual space (2003, 127).
21
Along with the musical reading of the electropolis time lapses and blurs can
also be listed in the arsenal of clichs of the earlier mentioned introductory
sequences of popular TV series based on urban narratives of crime (see especially
the intros of CSI New York and Damages).
22
Unschrfe wird zum Symbol medialer Verfahren selbst (Paech 2008, 358).
Paech declares this especially with the widespread use of the effect through digital
media, nevertheless the reflexive potential of the blur can be explored in cinema as
well.
108 Chapter Three
of movement. As such the figure of the blur is neither the effect of human
perception that is reproduced realistically in the image, nor a genuine
painterly experience, but it can be regarded as a medial figure, a product
of photography as a technical apparatus, an apparatus to which it is linked
with its specific medial characteristics, but once the blur is put forward as
a representational code, it can also be repeated as a form irrespective of its
medial origin. In photography the blur is decoded as the figure of the
passing of time and as such it was quoted by painting (by Turner, for
example and impressionist studies of movement).23 Paech also observes
that as a relational code or figure of the connection between clear/unclear,
sharp/blurred, etc. the blur can figure in a totally different way in the
relationship between photography and painting. While the painterly occurs
in photography through the haziness of the reproduction process in copies
and from a stylistical point of view it leads to pictorialism, the blur is also
a photographic effect in painting, namely in the first place it stands for the
static figure of movement.24 In the case of cinema he distinguishes two
ways of functioning of the photographic blur: once in a cinematic
(kinematographisch) manner that draws in a media-referential way upon
photography, and once in a filmic manner in which it is employed
23
The passage is a free translation of the ideas in the original German article. Cf.
Die mediale Figur der Unschrfe in der Fotografie wird auf ihren bloen Code
reduziert, der als Zeichen der Bewegung in einem anderen Medium (der Malerei)
wiederholt werden kann. Die Figur der Bewegungsunschrfe ist also weder ein
Effekt menschlicher Wahrnehmung, der realistisch wiedergegeben wird, noch ein
genuin malerisches Verfahren, sondern als mediale Figur ein Produkt des
Dispositivs Fotografie (der Fotografie als technisch-apparativer Anordnung), mit
dem sich spezifische mediale Eigenschaften verbinden, die, einmal zum
Abbildungscode avanciert, auch unabhngig von ihrem medialen Ausgangspunkt
als Formen wiederholt werden knnen. In der Fotografie wird die Zeit ihrer
apparativen Bewegung im Kameraverschluss (Zeit der apparativen Darstellung)
umcodiert in die Unschrfe als Figur fr die dargestellte Zeit und so von der
Malerei (etwa bei Turner, dann bei den Impressionistischen Bewegungsstudien)
zitiert. (Paech 2008, 348.)
24
Als relationaler Code oder Figur des Verhltnisses von deutlich/undeutlich,
scharf/unscharf etc. kann Unschrfe in der Beziehung zwischen Fotografie und
Malerei ganz unterschiedlich figurieren. Whrend das Malerische in der Fotografie
durch Weichzeichnung im Reproduktionsprozess bei Abzgen entsteht und
stilistisch den Piktoralismus begrndet, ist Unschrfe ein Effekt der Fotografie auf
die Malerei, und zwar in erster Linie fr die unbewegte Figur von Bewegung
(Paech 2008, 349).
thematically and on the level of sjuzhet (as a projection of mental

disturbance for instance).25
We can see such a cinematic intermedial use of the blur together
with sequences of time lapse photography in the examples of Wong Kar
Wais Chungking Express (1994) or Coppolas Rumble Fish (1983), which
not only incorporate these photographic effects [Figs. 3.78], but seem to
construct a cinema that is based on the enhancement and repetition of
these. In both films the markedly photographic effects are used in a
primarily media-referential way not being motivated on the level of
sjuzhet in any other way than to project an image of the hectic rhythm of
the liquid city. The blurred images in Chungking Express, just like all
the other photographic effects in Rumble Fish, make the viewer experience
the images as being delivered through the medium of painterly photography.
In both of these films the sense of fluidity is reinforced by the
conventional symbolism of flowing water, the surge of clouds and vapours
(which also increase the hapticality of the images)26 [Figs. 3.910], and we
are reminded of the perspective of speeding time by the repeated images of
clocks. Also in both cases the spatial and temporal fluidity stands in
contrast with the shattered individual lives that are presented against this
backdrop of the liquid city. Coppola rewrites the now traditional
American myth of rebel without a cause by showing flashes of the idle
lives of the young men loitering about the streets, hanging out in bars,
clashing with rival gangs under the imposing skyline of the metropolis.
While Wong Kar Wai loosely intersects two stories within the framework
of a narrative structure emphasizing chance encounters. The increasingly
photographic techniques in Rumble Fish can be recognized not only in the
recurring time lapse sequences (showing the metropolis towering over its
inhabitants, or exquisite details of shadows moving across walls, of the
clouds rushing over the sky or reflected in the shiny metal fender of the
motorcycle, see Figs. 3.1113) but also in the careful mise en scne and
framing of each individual shot that can easily be detached from the scene
and contemplated as an individual still [Figs. 3.1415], as well as in the
use of expressionist lights and shadows of the gorgeous black and white
photography (with surprising details in colour).27 At the time of its release
25
Sie funktioniert einmal kinematographisch, also medien-referentiell auf die
Fotografie bezogen, und filmisch, indem sie tematisch-sujethafte Aspekte
(mentale Aufmerksamkeitsstrungen z.B.) formuliert (Paech 2008, 350).
26
The use of the imagery of vapours is also remarkable in Claire Deniss Friday
Night, mentioned earlier.
27
Coppola confessed in the audio commentary of the DVD release of the film that
he intended to create an artfilm for teenagers, and that he drew inspiration for the
110 Chapter Three
the film received mixed reviews on account of its mixing the aesthetics of
the avant-garde with that of mainstream cinema, later, however, it was
considered that it was exactly the disjuncture between the visuality of
Rumble Fish and its teenage biker story that contributed to establishing the
films cult status.28 The fact that the film slides between two hermetically
sealed domains: a European aesthetic tradition and a disaffected or
delinquent teen culture (Lebeau 1995, 99) at the same time can be seen as
sliding between the storytelling tradition of mainstream cinema and a
continuous and heightened sensual mapping of the world through the
touches of photo-graphic pictoriality. The photographic accent of the
cinematic imagery is more than a simple coating over the story, it
actually contributes to the elevation of the rather conventional (and
simplistic), all-American story about individual freedom and coming of
age onto a level of an aestheticized discourse about the allures and perils
of contemporary urban life, and thus results in a rewriting of the best
traditions of cinematic flnerie. Similarly Wong Kar Wais film also
presents the spectacle of the city through the filter of photographic
techniques conveying a sense of visual pleasure that compensates for the
frustrations resulting from the fragmentary narrative.
The metaphor of the aquarium that appears in both films reveals the
paradoxes of liquidity and entrapment in an urban setting that seems to be
without bounds yet at the same time appears as an enclosed space. In
Chungking Express the frequent images of shop windows, monitors and
glass cages seem to project the protagonists into a giant aquarium of
communicating vessels. In Rumble Fish the aquarium becomes an
emblematic image of constraint (and therefore the target of youthful
rebellion), the city appearing as a mere numeric multiplication of the
aquariums seen in the pet shop. This duality of seeing the city alternately
now landscape, now a room (Benjamin 1997, 170)29 is consistent with
the idea how the street becomes a dwelling for the flneur who is as
much at home among the faades of the houses as a citizen is in his four
use of time lapses and other photographic effects from the work of Godfrey Reggio
entitled Koyaanisqatsi (1982, in the making of which he was in fact involved as an
executive producer).
28
See Lebeaus analysis in which she defines the cult film as a borderline
category and states: by disturbing the boundaries between a high cultural
aesthetic and the teen violence film, it situates itself as neither avant-garde nor
mainstream but cult a term which, however difficult to define, has been
consistently attached to the film (1995, 97).
29
In another place Benjamin speaks of the transformation of the city into an
intrieur for the flneur (2003, 101).
walls (Benjamin 1997, 37), an idea reflected in the way of existence of

the protagonists of both films.30 Nevertheless, in both Coppolas and
Wong Kar Wais film the dialectic of openness and confinement goes
beyond the paradoxes of traditional flnerie and makes the protagonists
themselves ultimately to appear as only would be flneurs trapped in an
environment of the panopticon. [Figs. 3.1619.]
1.2. Architecture and Abstract Forms against a World

of Haptic Textures the Antonioni Paradigm
a) The (media) affordances of architecture
The alternations and contrasts between the optical and the haptic in the
images, combined with explicit sequences of flnerie have been explored
perhaps in the most sophisticated way in the modernist cinema of
Michelangelo Antonioni. In Antonionis famous tetralogy31 the conflicting
qualities of the optical and the haptic unfold in close relation with another
dimension to the perception of cinema open to other arts and media,
namely, a dimension provided by the conspicuous presence of architecture
within these films.32 Architecture is used both in the form of complete,
sometimes famous buildings (as a form of art) included in the diegetic
world together with their symbolic values and expressivity of style, and
both in the form of being reduced to abstract surfaces or material
structures, either by a fragmentation ensuing from the cinematic montage
or by being captured in a state of construction, demolition or even decay.
The way in which these architectural elements interact with the human
characters of the minimalist narratives has been analysed by many scholars
30
Moreover John Rignall connects this idea to the emergence of the figure of the
urban detective: Seeing the city now as open now as enclosing, now familiar, now
phantasmagoric, the flneur also combines the casual eye of the stroller with the
purposeful gaze of the detective. His vision is both wide-ranging and penetrating at
the same time; he can read the signs of the streets and unlock their secrets.
(Rignall 1992, 10.) And we may observe that in the Wong Kar Wai film one of the
main characters who inspects the sights and signs of the city is a policeman.
31
The tetralogy consists of three films often referred to as a trilogy: the
Adventure (Lavventura, 1960), the Night (La notte, 1961), the Eclipse (Leclisse,
1962) plus the Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964), which being shot in colour
is often not included in the cycle.
32
Antonionis lifelong fascination with architecture is well-known and usually
attributed to his studies in architecture prior to becoming a film director.
112 Chapter Three
of Antonionis work.33 The modern buildings, the glass and concrete

walls, construction sites and fragments of walls with decaying textures
seem to be absolutely detached even from the people who come in contact
with them.34 Both the imposing sights of buildings and the palpable
presence of the texture of the building materials of the city are brought to
the foreground in order to reflect a decentring of the human figure within a
world that the individual is no longer in control of.35
The city of architecture seems to stand alone and above the human
world, as the famous opening sequence of the Night (La notte, 1961)
eloquently illustrates with the camera slowly gliding down along the glass
wall of a skyscraper in Milan without any hint of a human point of view.
Supreme and detached, devoid of life, architecture only puzzles the
flneuristic observer with its mere existence, and the human figure ceases
to be the centre of the world and even the centre of the cinematic narrative.
[Figs. 3.2021.] As Seymour Chatman notes, in the tetralogy we come to
read buildings []. And though the characters do not lose their individual
importance, they also function, especially in certain long shots, like
mannequins in architectural models (1985, 102 emphasis in the
original). Mitchell Schwarzer also concludes that in Antonionis cinema
the forms and spaces of architecture stalk the viewer, and that
architecture acts both as protagonist and antagonist, as a nucleus for the
slow collapse of perception into a space between the actors lines, a visual
language with a power all its own (2000, 198).
Architectural sites in Antonionis tetralogy also testify to the failure of
the idealized dreams of pure geometrical cities (Schwarzer 2000, 201).
In the Adventure (Lavventura, 1960) we see an entire cluster of buildings,
a kind of ghost town deserted by people. Originally designed during the
fascist times of Mussolini, the site may appear, to the viewer who knows
the history of the place, as the relic of dangerous dreams (as Schwarzer
describes, 2000, 201), however, the viewer less familiar with the historical
context will only see the emptiness of the carefully designed shapes, the
33
Just to name a few: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1976), Seymour B. Chatman
(1985), Peter Brunette (1998), David Forgacs (2000), Mitchell Schwarzer (2000),
Giuliana Bruno (2002), Kaiser (2007), etc.
34
We see characters photographed against the background of peeling walls in the
Adventure, in the famous flneuristic scene of Lidias walk in the city in the Night,
or in the street images of the Red Desert.
35
In another example, in the midcult horror of Nicholas Roegs Dont Look Now
(1973) such a domineering architecture serves as a site of the uncanny: the
crumbling walls of the dark alleys in Venice construct a festering environment
hostile to people.
lack of human habitat and how eventually the protagonists also abandon
the place leaving the baffled spectator to contemplate the lifeless
architectural forms (as again the camera does not follow the characters).
The futuristic design of the EUR district in Rome dominating the visual
image of the city in the Eclipse (Leclisse, 1962) has the same alienating
effect throughout the film. Architecture in Antonionis films is no longer
presented as a living space, but as a composition of abstract forms, and as
an entity wedged into the lives of people, dividing their existence,
confining them to separate spaces [Figs. 3.2225], obstructing their
communication (see the example of the often quoted pillar standing
between the characters played by Monica Vitti and Alain Delon in the
Eclipse, Fig. 3.24.). In the famous final montage of the Eclipse we have
the feeling again that the individual shots of architecture and the streets not
only become detached but also take charge over the human protagonists:
despite their promise to meet again, Vittoria and Piero do not appear as we
would expect in a conventional narrative in the already familiar places that
remind us of their moments together, instead they are replaced by
unknown faces that uncannily multiply and depersonalize their existence.
The architectural city absorbs, consumes the action and the human
characters that have appeared within its labyrinthine walls and deconstructed
structures (cf. the analyses of Deleuze 1989, and Schwarzer 2000).
Moreover, as Schwarzer has pointed out, in Antonionis cinema
modern architecture not only cuts people off from each other, it also cuts
them off from the past (2000, 204). Modern design is contrasted with
architecture clearly bearing the marks of history and time as Antonioni
juxtaposes the empty lives of the rich with the monumental weightiness
of palaces, churches and ancient villages they frequent yet blithely ignore
and even degrade. One palace is now a police station; another has become
a hotel and a setting for interminable parties (Schwarzer 2000, 204). We
can see this with marked emphasis in the Adventure the protagonist of
which is not only a failed architect, but whose search for his disappeared
fianc takes him to architectural experiences that confront and intertwine
the old and the new. The modernist fascist design of the ghost city
appears as old and abandoned, for example, while the centuries old,
beautiful baroque cathedral of Noto although also abandoned, and
presented as a site of ennui for Sandro, the male protagonist seems to
come alive at one point as something fresh and fragile seen through the
inquisitive eyes of a young architectural student who reproduces one of its
magnificent details in an ink drawing, just to be destroyed by the frustrated
architect, who has already abandoned his creative dreams, Figs. 3.2627).
And we find a similar confrontation in the Eclipse which presents the
114 Chapter Three
bourgeois home of Pieros parents crammed with objects of antique and

traditional artefacts in stark contrast with the futuristic location of our first
encounters with Vittoria. Here the old family home (whose original
inhabitants remain absent) again seems to come alive for a minute
through a small analogy of a classic bust and the sculptural appearance of
Vittoria in a clean cut white robe reminding us of a Greek statue [Figs.
3.2829.], while the obviously new building sites appear instead of being
in construction more like as desolate sites of decomposition.
Antonionis use of architecture can be appreciated as a key element in
the context of one the most suggestive redefinitions of the flneuristic
attitude towards urban existence.36 His characters that roam the city are
just as out of place (or paradoxically, at home) in their own
apartments as they are in impersonal hotel rooms or in the streets,
stumbling around construction sites. Nevertheless, despite all its dismal
effects, the aesthetic aspects of flnerie remain intact within his films:
architecture may be lifeless and alienating, but it is always impressive. We
can agree with Schwarzers final evaluation: The plotless stories, the
desultory rhythms, and the lugubrious visual contents wage offensives on
two fronts. For Antonioni, architecture is menacing but exact; it is
monotonous but exquisite. Modern architecture is Antonionis grand
metaphor for the turbulence, tedium, and sublimity that make up the age
(2000, 214).
What is also important to note is that with Antonioni the role of
architecture is not limited to the use of buildings and architectural
elements within the images: in a way his distinctive visual style can be
attributed to the fact that it is the image itself that becomes architectural,
that it is the image itself that can be read similar to an architectural form
in the films of the tetralogy. Passionate about mapping space as
architexture (Bruno 2002, 98), it seems as if the spirit of architecture
has penetrated Antonionis cinematic image: the image is being
constructed not only in depth,37 but as a markedly spatial structure, based
on the multiplication of spaces opening upon other spaces that communicate
with each other. [Figs. 3.3031.]
In the same manner, Antonionis cinematic art as a whole can be seen
as opening up multiple possibilities of the moving images for incorporating
36
By building his film narratives around women protagonists Antonioni can also
be seen as one of the champions of adopting the viewpoint of a female flneuse in
cinema (cf. Kaiser 2007).
37
The images exploiting the depth of space together with the long takes were
already characteristic for the visual of Antonionis early films, but in the tetralogy
he devised a more architectural model for the construction of cinematic imagery.
the affordances of the art of architecture conceived as a medium that

conveys not just complex spatial and visual experiences but also multiple
metaphoric meanings. Antonionis similarly much debated relation to
painting is also closely connected to his architectural vision. For Antonioni
painting is not an art of the surface but a haptic experience in which form,
colour, texture, rhythm, abstraction and figurality are in constant interplay
and synesthetic fusion as we will see in the following subchapter.
b) Framing and un-framing the haptical
In the films that make up the tetralogy Antonionis characters experience

an emotional and communicational crisis, a crisis that usually remains
unresolved within the minimalist narratives. The characters are caught up
as Deleuze liked to call it in purely optical and sound situations, and
we see idle periods that show the banalities of daily life. These tensions
usually reap the consequences or the effect of a remarkable event which
is reported only through itself without being explained (the break-up of a
couple, the sudden disappearance of a woman) (Deleuze 1989, 7).
Theorists of Antonionis cinema see in this aspect either a characteristic
modern expression of anxiety and loss of orientation within a modern
world, or a specific modernist and intellectual rewriting of the genre of
melodrama.38 What I am to suggest is that beside all the possible
philosophical or genre oriented interpretations, there is also a key feature
in Antonionis films that can be identified in the sheer sensual contrasts
between the optical and the haptical characteristics of the films
imagery, and that the tensions ensuing from these contrasts offer a
strong phenomenological support for the narratives of otherwise unexplained
anxieties and emotional turmoil and also a kind of sensual gateway into
intermediality through which cinema becomes readable through
characteristics attributed to painting. In other words: the drama is not only
psychological (i.e. showing the angst and alienation of characters) or
ethical-philosophical (the acute consciousness of the loss of values, cf.
Kovcs 2007, 98, 394400), but it is also very much pictorial:
something preformed on the sheer painterly level of the cinematic
images. Accordingly, I would very strongly argue against Kovcss
conclusion of seeing in Antonionis pictorialism a manifestation of a so
38
See the description of Andrs Blint Kovcs of the Eclipse (2007, 9699), in
which he states that Antonioni has a deeply critical attitude toward the world he
represents, and his main artistic purpose is to show the dramatic character of a
situation, which fundamentally lacks humanistic values (2007, 98).
116 Chapter Three
called ornamental style,39 I see much more in this than the confrontation
of the estranged world of the story (Kovcs 2007, 151) and the beauty of
the images, or a mere penchant for visual decoration,40 for we cannot
disregard what happens on the level of the pictures themselves. We can
grasp this dramatic confrontation of the optical and the haptical if
we consider the cinematic frame in its analogy with painting and observe
all the constituents of the image primarily not as parts of a dramatic
construction of a narrative, but as plastic elements of a painterly
composition. Antonionis cinema makes this comparison of cinema and
painting easy by its almost calligraphic attention given to details in the
composition of each individual shot or sequence. Architecture functions
either as optical element of the image (i.e. architectural forms, outlines,
abstract surfaces) or as a haptic component (i.e. the texture of walls), in
both cases subordinated not so much to the narrative dimension of the
story as to the aesthetic and phenomenological dimension of the visual
ensemble revealed in the cinematic image.
The optical and haptical duality in Antonionis films, however, has
multiple possibilities of expressiveness, depending among other factors
both on a gendered vision over space and also upon their perception within
the context of a visible (inner) frame. The image at the beginning of the
Eclipse of Vittoria (Monica Vitti) arranging a small object (a sculpture?)
within an empty frame placed on the table can be considered emblematic
in this respect. [Fig. 3.32.] It does not only draw attention to the repeatedly
used inner frames within the cinematic image (which as we know have the
potential of reflexively reminding us of the otherwise invisible frame of
the screen itself) but it also points to something unusual: the frame does
not enclose a world of its own, but it is filled by the observer, who literally
39
As Kovcs declares: the tension between the estranged world of the story and
the colorful diversity of the environment almost creates an independent and purely
ornamental use of the objects and the space (2007, 151), later adding a similar
remark about the use of landscapes: the Antonioni style can be seen as a purely
ornamental use of landscape (2007, 153).
40
In this respect my argument is also consistent with Angela Dalle Vacches idea
of painting as ventriloquism in Antonionis cinema. Referring to the visual world
of the Red Desert Dalle Vacche considered that Antonioni used his main female
characters vision as a form of cinematic ventriloquism in which the painterly
image speaks in the manner of a free indirect style (to use Pasolinis term) for
the author himself. Although ventriloquism means to speak through someone
elses belly [] Antonioni does not quite endow Vitti with the power of winning
words but only lets her have visions so pictorial and so abstract that they push
outward the boundaries of what until now we have considered acceptable for the
visual track of a European art film. (Dalle Vacche 1996, 49.)
reaches into its space and takes hold of the objects. Consequently, the
sequence may be seen as a metaphor of the active, haptic vision of the
spectator itself getting in touch with the world within a frame. We might
also observe how what is being framed in this cinematic (and not
photographic or painterly) way throughout the sequence is not an image,
not even the objects in themselves placed within the visual range of frame
propped up on the table but ultimately the gesture itself. This framing of
the touch, of the gesture is significant because it emphasizes the
importance of bodily sensation and hapticality in the reception of images
as opposed to a mere optical scanning (or intellectual reading/symbolic
interpretation) of the visual display; and implicitly, by literally acting as
the image of framing the haptical it draws attention to the importance of
hapticality, and to the import of the sophisticated interplay between the
haptical and the optical in particular within Antonionis world.41
In Antonionis imagery hapticality in itself can have diverse functions.
First of all it has to be noted that haptic images are almost always
associated with the female characters and the way they experience the
world, correspondingly, the way we the spectators perceive them in
relation to the rest of the world seen on screen. This characteristic is
perceivable in Antonionis films (like in the cited sequence of the Eclipse)
not only in the fact that the female protagonist is often seen as going
about and repeatedly touching the objects, surfaces that surround her (and
therefore Antonionis camera foregrounding the image of disembodied
hands feeling around). Also, it cannot only be attributed to what is usually
interpreted as the foregrounding of female subjectivity: women walking
around and the spectator being offered the projection of their gendered
vision.42 I think that Peter Brunette strikes the right chord when he says:
41
Antonionis cinema is therefore an excellent example for a truly sensuous
cinema that presents touch not simply as a contact but rather as a profound
manner of being, a mode through which the body human or cinematic presents
and expresses itself to the world and through which it perceives that same world as
sensible (Jennifer M. Barker 2009, 2). This way of thinking of tactility as a mode
of being in and at the world has been one of the most influential ideas put forward
by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it has also been at the core of the
seminal works on cinema as embodied experience written by Vivian Sobchack
(1992, 2004) and Laura U. Marks (2000, 2002), and as a whole it can be integrated
within the paradigm that has been identified beyond the philosophical framework
of phenomenology as sensuous scholarship by the anthropologist Paul Stoller
(1997).
42
This is often the case in the interpretation of Antonionis films. However,
Brunette already emphasized that there is at least an ambivalence in the
presentation of the female figures and their subjective gaze: women appear as both
118 Chapter Three
One wonders therefore whether it might be more fruitful to take these

images in a more purely graphic sense rather than a narrowly symbolic,
literary one. In this way, the meaning of these human and material forms,
beyond their obvious functions in the narrative and as part of the world of
the film, would be emotionally expressive rather than intellectually
specifiable (Brunette 1998, 58 emphasis in the original).43
In Antonionis films there are a great number of specific images which
emphasize such a graphic analogy between the female protagonist and
haptical elements of nature. Although these analogies can well be
interpreted as a modernist reconfiguration of an essentially archetypal
symbolism (woman at one with nature, woman seen as nature, nature seen
as a woman) what seems to be even more relevant is that these sequences
suggest another type of communication that the character is engaged in.
This haptic analogy seen as a kind of effective graphic communication
stands out in contrast to the failures of verbal communication between
the characters of the film. Whilst there is a feeling of anxiety, alienation
entangling the intricate web of interpersonal relationships, there is a fairly
harmonious association of the visual forms of the character and the natural
background. This is the case, for example, of the Adventure in which
Antonioni uses an abundance of variations in presenting Monica Vittis
hair against a variety of haptic textures: we see its wavy forms resembling
the waves of the sea; then we see the same hair fluffed up in another
sequence looking much like the foaming water underneath the cliffs on the
island or the clouds hanging above in the sky, in another sequence it is
made analogous to the rough surface of the rocky terrain, or in the scene
with the lovers in the field the close up of the same mussy hair becomes
similar to the leaves of grass, in one of the final scenes of both the
Adventure and the Eclipse Monica Vittis hair seems to adapt to the forms
of a bush wiggling in the wind, and so on [Figs. 3.3340]. In the Eclipse
there is a scene in which Piero (Alain Delon) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti)
meet the next day after Pieros car was stolen. The gruesome discovery
that the drunken thief had drowned after driving the car into the river is
objects of the male gaze (as sexual and sensual objects surrendered to the
spectators voyeurism, a gender-inflected dynamic of vision that ties in with the
question of female representation throughout history, Brunette 1998, 36); and
active explorers of the visible and haptic world (the eloquent example would be
Lidias walk in Milan in The Night where she seems to project all her frustrations
or expectations into a world populated by masculine bodies and sexual symbolism,
cf. Brunette 1998, 58).
43
It is also true that Brunette does not go on to explore this idea any further than to
reject the overly literary or symbolic interpretation of the images.
counterpointed by a serene scene in which the characters flirtatiously walk

around the nearby park. In one of the images we see Vittoria standing
unusually close to the pointed, sharp blades of a palm bush, her hair
becoming almost indistinguishable from the vegetation in the background.
The hapticality of the image is so effective that we almost feel the touch of
the piercing blades: the moments of childish playfulness give way to a
more enigmatically teasing attitude of the woman as the images become
filled with the vibration induced by the visual analogy of the blades and
the hair. After a few moments in which the analogy lingers over the image,
Vittoria moves away from the frame and Piero (Alain Delon) who has
been standing there as the beneficiary of the gaze in front of which the
visual spectacle was performed is left alone, looking at the bush that
stands in for what has been the figure of an enticing woman before. [Figs.
3.4144.] The scene also seems to be an exemplification of how the eye
and the touch become interchangeable in Antonionis visual world (the
sharp forms of the shrubbery around Victoria can also be seen as the
substitutes of Pieros male gaze that Vittoria teasingly surrenders to, and in
the end of the sequence, the bush becomes a substitute of Vittoria herself,
the image of the tease alone, as she is no longer there to return his gaze).
This interplay between the senses is not only synesthetic but can also
remind us of Merleau-Pontys idea of vision as palpation (2007, 396)
and the complex, chiastic structure and reversibility of the visible and the
tangible (2007, 403).44
All these images support the observation made by several theorists that
the characters are incorporated in the landscapes (see Jazairy 2009),45
and starkly contradict the interpretation according to which the characters
cannot interact with their environment (Kovcs 2007, 152). As we have
44
We could also read the images in the light of Merleau-Pontys following ideas
(even if originally he refers to a narcissistic mode of mirroring between body and
touch, the same dynamic is applicable to this sequence in which two characters are
entangled in structures of vision, touch, desire, attraction, resistance and
reflection): There is vision, touch, when a certain visible, a certain tangible, turns
back upon the whole of the visible, the whole of the tangible, of which it is a part,
or when suddenly it finds itself surrounded by them, or when between it and them,
and through their commerce, is formed a Visibility, a Tangible in itself, which
belongs properly neither to the body qua fact nor to the world qua fact as upon
two mirrors facing one another where two indefinite series of images set in one
another arise which belong really to neither of the two surfaces, since each is only
the rejoinder of the other, and which therefore form a couple, a couple more real
than either of them. (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 399400.)
45
Brunette also remarks the fact that female faces are, in fact, often juxtaposed
with natural formations (1998, 37).
120 Chapter Three
seen, Antonionis women can and do interact with their environment; it is

true, not on the level of the diegesis, but on the level of the image itself.
And even if this does not necessarily suggests as many have considered
a secular mystery lying behind the visible (Brunette 1998, 53), it does
arrest the eye of the spectator and it does disjoint all our reflexes of
narrative decoding by the amazing array of visual variations that ultimately
make all kinds of interpretations evanescent. As a result of these analogies
the fabric of Antonionis cinema becomes multilayered beyond the
narrative, the ideological or the symbolic, and foregrounds the sheer visual
and haptical. Thus the failure of the narrative to resolve the conflicts and
the failure of the characters to communicate is compensated with the
extraordinary success of the film itself to convey a density and richness of
sensual experience: just as the action becomes minimal or things are left
out of sight,46 the attention is refocused on the images themselves that can
no longer be seen as merely ornamental surfaces, but emerge as canvases
for the graphic drama to be performed.47
There are countless examples of the way in which the optical and the
haptic elements of the image actually stage the drama for us (which
lifted out of the realm of the verbal, explicit meanings in this way
becomes both more sophisticated and more at gut level at the same
time). The use of paintings themselves as mirrors or projections of the
46
See the vast literature on the invisible aspects of Antonionis films and the
importance of the hors-cadre (space beyond the visible frame).
47
Such an approach is compatible with Susan Sontags demand in her notorious
essay entitled Against Interpretation: Interpretation takes the sensory experience
of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for
granted, now. [] Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result
is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. [] What is important now
is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less
to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut
back content so that we can see the thing at all. [] In place of a hermeneutics we
need an erotics of art. (Sontag 2001, 14.) This sensual approach is also similar
to what Roland Barthes called jouissance, the climactic pleasure of the text.
See Barthess distinction between text of pleasure and text of bliss
(jouissance): Text of pleasure: a text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the
text that comes from culture, and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable
practice of reading. Text of bliss [jouissance]: the texts that imposes a state of loss,
the texts that discomforts (perhaps to the point of certain boredom), unsettles the
readers historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his
tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language (Barthes
1975, 14).
characters has already been documented in detail in the literature on

Antonioni. What seems necessary to add is that a similar parallelism to the
above quoted sequences of natural forms reflecting human figures can be
seen in the juxtaposition of female faces and paintings [Figs. 3.4546]
(sometimes statues, as seen in Figs. 3.2829). Again it is perhaps not so
important that the face resembles a natural form or an artefact (although
undeniably there is a voyeuristic aspect of women seen as art objects, as
beautiful pictures), what is more important is the uncanny visual analogy,
something that is repeated in a kind of sheer visual rhythm or musical
modulation of optical and plastic forms.
The dramatic aspect of the use of haptic forms can best be interpreted
according to their visual framing or un-framing within the image. The
Eclipse, for instance, uses clear and almost obsessive framing techniques.
In fact the whole action of the Eclipse on the level of the images can be
described as a continuous interplay between the optical elements (straight
lines, grids, frames, abstract planes, etc.), and the haptic constituents of the
image carried on throughout the film. The containment of hapticality
within a visible inner frame (a double frame that only reiterates the
original frame of the screen) induces a tension between the optical and the
haptical and suggests an entrapment of something fragile, soft and alive. In
several of the images at the beginning of the Eclipse [Figs. 3.4750],
Vittorias face, and most of all again, her hair is presented within straight
geometrical forms and immobile inner frames that stand against the line of
the face and the texture of the silky hair that is also in continuous motion
throughout the scene being blown by a small electric fan. Throughout the
film we never really find out why this woman does not feel at ease within
the world she is in, nevertheless such cinematic frames paint an eloquent
picture: these two elements are not compatible, the tension between the
optical-geometrical rigid forms and stifling frames, and the haptical (the
fragile, vibrant, live, and uniquely beautiful face) cannot be resolved (the
fossilized plant contained in the piece of rock seen later in Vittorias
apartment is also a reminder of this). The image [see especially Fig. 3.47]
actually performs the essence of the drama on a pure pictorial level.
In contrast to the Eclipse, the Red Desert operates more with the un-
framing,48 the unleashing of the powers of the haptical with images of
48
There are possible similarities of what Pascal Bonitzer (1987) considered as
dcadrage (de-framing) as well, however, in this case I am merely emphasizing the
lack of interior frames and the free flow of forms and haptic textures within the
image (while the original frame of the screen may often act as a de-framing agent
just the way Bonitzer described, inducing tensions between what is seen and what
is left out of the screen image).
122 Chapter Three
clouds of vapours, thick fog, and blurred spots of colour without contours
(colour becoming textural in this case and quasi-embodied as the shapes
become dispersed as amorphous masses identifiable only through their
colour). [Figs. 3.5154.] In Antonionis world releasing the haptical forms
from the control of the inner frames seems to convey a state of fragility,
something that can always be at the peril of disintegration and at the mercy
of impending, unforeseeable events and forces. In the Adventure we see
Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Claudia (Monica Vitti) in a moment of
blissful lovemaking against the pictures of fluffy clouds, and in the
subsequent shots a noisy train pushes into the frame dangerously close to
the lovers embracing on the ground. In the Eclipse all the fleeting, happy
moments of the film are marked by images replete with haptical details
(water springing up from a sprinkler, foliage of trees waving gently in the
wind, etc.), and all of these elements are repeated at the end with
connotations of loss and emptiness. In the Red Desert the world presented
through the indirect vision of the neurotic protagonist is a world of
hapticality in which everything can be interpreted as both fragile and
menacing.49 Ultimately the all-pervading painterly quality of the cinematic
images and the hapticality that flows beyond all frames means not just a
kind of return to a basic, primitive medium of art (like the un-framed cave
paintings which naturally blur the border between fiction and reality), but
also a deep interconnectedness to the medium of modern abstract
expressionist painting (as many theorists have already noted). Such un-
framed, un-leashed haptical colours and evanescent forms become just as
consuming as their antitheses, the rigid architectural structures.
Antonionis cinema offers a unique paradigm of intermediality, one
that relies in the first place on the sensual and graphic characteristics, the
haptical versus optical quality of the images and opens up the cinematic
expression towards a realm where the arts become interpenetrable,
intertwined. Cinema does not become architecture or painting, but does
become both more readable and more palpable through its correlations
with the medium of architecture or painting.50
49
See the similar effect of such imagery in the already described cinematic figure
of the electropolis.
50
This paradigm has been fairly influential within the history of cinema, even
though not all of Antonionis disciples also follow him in activating the
affordances of other media for cinema in such a complex manner. One of the
latest examples is perhaps Jim Jarmuschs The Limits of Control (2009) which uses
architecture in a similar way both as an environment interacting with the main
character and as architexture penetrating the structure of the images themselves,
2. The Media Fragmentation of the World

2.1. The World Shattered into a Kaleidoscope of Media
Representations
Alongside this sensual, synesthetic threshold between cinema and other
media that we have seen in the previous subchapters, there is also the
possibility of the cinematic flow of images to break down into their
media components and the image of the world to become spread out as a
giant screen of media palimpsest. This time it is not the synesthetic and
embodied sensibility of the spectator that leads us to a sensation of
cinema reaching beyond cinema, of images moving in between the arts
and media but it is a kind of structural gateway: the otherwise continuous
and transparent multimediality of cinema reveals its heterogeneity, as
media become perceivable in their complex layering within the fabric of
moving pictures, activating intricate, reflexive interactions.
a) Intermediality as diegetic reflexivity
The most common and perhaps simplest or weakest level of cinema

being shattered into its media components but still remaining within a
general frame of realistic representation can be seen in instances in which
one medium like language, for instance emerges in close up and can be
interpreted as reflecting something from the narrative that is unfolding in
front of our eyes. Beside the title sequences which always feature the
medium of writing prominently and are usually deliberately designed to
serve as a kind of mise en abyme reflecting in style, motifs and visual
appearance the story to be told, a great many classical narratives use this
effect as a conventional device to ease the progress of the narrative itself.
The insertion of a written text within the filmic world, for example,
disrupts the homogeneous media flow of the images, yet it can be easily
accepted as a convention meant to fill the gaps of visual presentation (to
convey information about the events, to define time and place, to start the
narration, etc.), and efforts are made for a smooth integration within the
general visual scheme of the film (with a similar background, etc.). As
such, nevertheless, a textual insert, for instance, can always bring into play
more or less also the message of the media that is thus foregrounded.
For example, in classical genre films, language is often called upon to
while the whole film also bears strong resemblances to abstract painting (see more
about this later in this chapter).
124 Chapter Three
address the spectators directly, urging them to take an active part in the
performance or to take a moral position with regards to the events to be
shown,51 engaging in a kind of communication that the pictures alone
could not initiate. Language, in this way, is meant not only to inform, but
to activate its unique possibilities of inflection and focalization. And
because such a textual insert is an emphatic visual composition preceding
other images; it also projects its own qualities over the filmic image itself,
conferring it, in a way, the ability to speak, to acquire a visual voice.
In other cases, superimpositions of texts over the images can confer the
images within a narrative sequence the emphatic epic quality of
storytelling, the illusion of a narrative being unfold in time and in a time
worthy of being recorded, immortalized by writing, by epic literature or
historiography. The story of a mythic rite of passage presented in Howard
Hawkss Red River (1948), for instance, is presented in such a way: the
images of the wagons and the mounted cowboys on the move appear in a
palimpsest with the text relating the epic journey of the protagonists. [Figs.
3.5556.] Both image and text reflect each other: the image acquires the
role of an illustration as it becomes transparent towards the verbal
storytelling, and conversely, the text becomes opaque as it gradually
infuses the images with its epic quality.
In other cases we have a certain media representation within the filmic
narrative that is used reflexively in one way or another. We can see this for
example, in the introduction of the motif of paintings within narratives of
crime, detection, film noir, etc.52 We can also see more subtle instances of
textual insertions in the forms of diegetic inscriptions scattered around the
world portrayed in the film and caught on camera as if by accident in the
street, or we can see photographic images of advertisements the function
of which is to offer an understated, yet fairly revealing commentary on the
story that is presented. This occurs both in some of the classical genre
films (see the repeated neon inscriptions announcing the world is yours
that foreshadow the rise, and later ironically comment the fall of the
almighty gangster in Howard Hawkss Scarface, 1932), as well as in
examples of modernist European and American cinema.
51
Howard Hawkss classical gangster movie, Scarface (1932) begins with the
following direct address to the spectator: This picture is an indictment of gang
rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly
increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. The Government is your
government. What are YOU going to do about it? (The word you stressed in
this way so as to reflect an emphatic voice and urging tone.)
52
See also the chapter on Hitchcocks use of painting included in this present
volume.
Godards cult French New Wave film, Breathless (A bout de souffle,

1959) uses a series of diegetic media representations, like newspaper
headlines, advertisements and billboards to reflect on the cinematic
narrative: the protagonist, Michel Poiccard is defined by a series of
quotations from American gangster films (like the famous dialogue of
Michel with the photo of Humphrey Bogart exhibited in front of a
cinema), and on his every move he finds himself continually referenced in
representations scattered around the mediascape of the city. [Figs. 3.57
58.]53 Other French New Wave films also use this diegetic media
reflexivity. Agns Varda, for instance exhibits photographs and magazine
clips of blonde film stars and models (and all kinds of images from
advertisements) in different backgrounds (at work, at home, in the street)
against which she presents the male protagonist of Happiness (Le
Bonheur, 1965) to remind us of the artificial standards imposed by
contemporary mass media. Moreover, the blonde pinup girls bear an
uncanny resemblance to both the protagonists wife and his mistress, who
become interchangeable as the story unfolds (and such exchanges could
go on ad infinitum, as the multiplied representations may suggest). [Figs.
3.5960.]
The two Coppola films quoted earlier, Rumble Fish and Tetro also
contain some graffiti inscriptions on walls and street signs as visible
linguistic traces that the cinematic diegesis leaves upon the realistic
photographic representation of the city [Figs. 3.6162].
b) A world of media collage
On a more complex level the world presented as a media palimpsest can

be a vehicle for the modernist ideology of depicting the image of the world
itself as a construction, as a sum of media representations, as a collage.54
53
See more about the use of intermediality in Breathless in the chapter entitled
Tensional Differences. The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godards
Films.
54
All these can be seen, without doubt, as precursors of more radical techniques of
breaking down the image into superimposed media representations like in Peter
Greenaways cinema abounding in images within images and all kinds of media
clusters. The techniques described in the following subchapters are also all close
to what Deleuze described as the shots resembling no longer the perception of the
eye than the perception of the brain, in this way: when the frame or the screen
functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is constantly
being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over
other images in an incessant stream of messages, and the shot itself is less like an
eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing information: it is the brain-
126 Chapter Three
Most of the early (and some not so early) Godard films could be cited as
examples for this. The ironic and militant The Carabineers (Les carabiniers,
1963) is one of the films that balance on the verge of realistic representation
and absurd stylization. The film is loosely constructed of sequences
dominated by a certain media: a handwritten motto taken from Borges,
pages of commercial magazines hanging on the wall of a small hut in the
middle of nowhere, postcards collected by the two men who enlist in the
army and travel around the world, images reproducing early cinema as the
nave protagonist first experiences them, reproductions of paintings in the
spaces where the soldiers commit their actions of aggression and looting,
etc.), all adding up to a hotchpotch universe in which the two simple
minded players are like puppets at the mercy of the whirlpool of media
representations and ideologies, stumbling around a world torn violently
into pieces.
The same kaleidoscopic effect of media representations is used in a
much less sinister, though also seriously playful manner in Truffauts
Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962): the enigmatic smile of the ancient
sculpture reflected in the face of Katherine (Jeanne Moreau), the paintings
of Picassos different artistic periods used throughout the film to mark the
passage of time, the insertions of the freeze frames and photos, the archive
footages, the literary references used in the film all contribute to creating a
heterogeneous media texture. The famous song heard at one point of the
film entitled le tourbillion de la vie (the merry-go-round of life) seems
to capture the essence of the world portrayed: life is viewed as a
kaleidoscope of mediated experiences, as a merry-go-round in which
representations are not opposed to life, but constitute the very materials
that the fabric of life itself is weaved of.
The world shredded into a kaleidoscope of media generally represents
in modernist fiction films also the commodification of these ubiquitous
media representations and implicitly, the commodification of all aspects of
everyday life. Cassavetes uses such imagery in The Killing of a Chinese
Bookie (1976), or Arthur Penn, in his lesser known film inspired by
European art cinema, Mickey One (1965) [Figs. 3.6364]. In Jean-Luc
Godards complex philosophical essay film, 2 or 3 Things I Know about
her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais delle, 1967) the title of which refers both
to her (elle) as the woman portrayed in the film (by Marina Vlady)
and both to the district Sarcelle, colloquially referred to elle (homonymous
with her in French) we see everything in a process of being disassembled
information, brain-city couple that replaces that of eye-Nature. (Deleuze 1989,

267.)
or assembled. It is not only language that falls apart, as we can see in the
word play of the title,55 but the character is also dissected into the actress
and the role. In the introductory sequence Godard whispers into the ears of
the audience confiding in them how actually what we see is the actress
Marina Vlady, then he comments on the very same images again, this
time, introducing the figure as a fictional character. Later the director also
shares with the viewer his hesitations with regards to the various
possibilities of how a particular shot could be filmed. The act of
disassembling runs through the film like a leit motif, Godard shows in
mosaic-like scenes not only how life in general becomes fragmented and
marriages disintegrate in this suburban environment, but sequences of how
a radio is taken apart, how cars are repaired and maintained in a garage,
how architectural structures are suspended in the process of assemblage,
etc., as if everything that moves, communicates or should be steady were
stuck in this state of fragmentation, and eventually became a potential
commodity to be sold. [Figs. 3.6568.] Ultimately it is the cinematic
discourse itself that falls apart into a veritable kaleidoscope of self-
reflexive media (palimpsest-like imagery, authorial narration, philosophical
commentary about filmic representation, etc.), and the image of the city
emerges as a result of an infinite process of mediation and in the end it is
reduced to a cultural wasteland, littered with words and images torn out of
context.56 The same effect of the world being disintegrated into a collage
of media representations is used in his other films made towards the end of
the New Wave period, like Made in USA (1966), Weekend (1967) which
show similarly disintegrating structures within a few minimalist
locations that mark the transition towards a kind of cinema that no longer
aspires to retain the illusion of any realistic representation of the world but
stages its media interactions mainly within autonomous, artificial settings
put together only for the sake of the camera (see for example: The Chinese
Girl/La chinoise, 1967) and (The Joy of Learning/Le gai savoir, 1969).
55
See also the earlier chapter on Godards word and image plays in this present
volume.
56
The film could be compared with Mathieu Kassowitzs The Hate (La Haine,
1995, shot in the same district almost 30 years later), which, however, resembles
more Coppolas Rumble Fish both in theme a story of rough experiences of
youth, only this time it is set in a multiracial environment and in style: the
uniform stylization in its imagery heavily indebted to black and white photographic
effects.
128 Chapter Three
2.2. Metalepsis
Metalepsis is a literary term that can be applied trans-medially to cinema
as well.57 In rhetoric, according to the definition given by The Concise
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, it is used to denote various kinds of
complex figures the main trait of which is that the figuration involves a
kind of referential chain: the figure refers the reader to another figure or it
requires a further imaginative leap to establish its reference (Baldick 2001,
152). In narratology, metalepsis is usually defined as a crossing of the
boundaries between the possible diegetic levels of a narrative (extra-
diegetic and diegetic, meta-diegetic or diegetic levels: breaking the frame
between reality and fiction, between authorial narration or commentary
and the world within that frame), or the leap from any hierarchically
ordered (intra-diegetic, embedded) level into one above or below (see
Genette 2004).
a) Intermediality as a marker for metaleptic leaps
One of the most typical uses of a visible media shift, of employing

techniques of intermediality within cinema is to mark the breaking of the
narrative frame and perform a metaleptic leap. Sequences that suddenly
step from the medium of cinema into the realm of another media and/or
apparently employ the language of another art are conventionally markers
of a metaleptic crossing from the narrative level of reality into one of
subjective consciousness (dream, phantasy, memory flash-back, altered
mental state, etc.)58 The lavishly elaborate and exuberant song and dance
sequences (borrowed from the music halls and variety theatres, operettas,
or ballet) inserted within the narratives of musicals are examples for the
exploitation of this possibility within classical genres. The artificiality of
such scenes is always explicit; sometimes reinforced by other framing
devices to mark the fragment exhibiting media difference (visible inner
frames, sequences of colour introduced within a black and white film, etc.)
Hitchcocks dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) designed as a moving
painting based on sketches by Salvador Dali is an eloquent example of
such a metaleptic leap from filmic reality onto the level of the dream
57
See a more detailed presentation of metalepsis and the elaboration of further
possible forms of intermediality as metalepsis in the films of Agns Varda in
Chapter Eleven (Intermediality as Metalepsis).
58
The effect can be considered somehow similar to the double expositions and
superimpositions used in early cinema to render a feeling of crossing over into
another, more phantastic, uncanny realm.
being marked by explicit use of intermediality.59 Francis Ford Coppolas

earlier mentioned Tetro also uses such embedded scenes within the
primary narrative to transport the viewer into the free indirect vision of
the characters employing almost all the possible arsenal of conventional
intermedial metalepsis: the realistic presentation gives way to dance and
music, tableaux-like, stylized composition of images, effervescent
colouring, etc. that break the homogenous flow of black and white
cinematography.
Oliver Stone made the most of this enigmatic, uncanny metaleptic
effect of breaking down the homogeneous flow of cinematic images into
different modes of moving images and media representations of all kinds
in Natural Born Killers (1994). The perceivable changes in the modality
and mediality of the imagery projected on the one hand the free indirect
vision of the protagonists highly disturbed subjective mental state, and
on the other hand, they recorded the hectic media consciousness of the
society that generated and harboured such a consciousness.
Another prominent example of the use of intermediality to reflect the
moves between layers of consciousness and memory, as well as the
multimediality of the fabric of memory itself can be seen in the films of
Chris Marker. Several of his films can be considered as rewritings of the
city symphony genre in which the essayistic approach to depicting
reality as a surge of memories and free flowing associations is prompted
by cultural and personal, sensual, embodied experiences of the world.
Reality is deconstructed into flashes of images, words and sounds
springing from the sphere of personal memory and expanding with
metaleptic leaps into a wider philosophical essay searching the defining
features of the spirit of the world itself (see for example, The Koumiko
Mystery/Le Mystre Koumiko, 1965, Sunless/Sans soleil, 1982).
In other cases intermedial metalepsis cannot be seen as a signal for
stepping from reality into subjective consciousness, or as a representation
of the complexities of such a subjective consciousness, but it can perform
in itself a leap onto a meta-narrative, self-reflexive level within the film, or
it can point to the existence of such a meta-narrative level due to the fact
that it always introduces a level of otherness into the cinematic medium
that can serve as a platform through which a reflexive point of view over
cinema can be activated. The inclusion of a series of photographs for
instance into Michael Hanekes Code Unknown. Incomplete Journeys into
the Unknown (Code inconnu: Rcit incomplet de divers voyages, 2000)
59
See a more detailed analysis of Hitchcocks use of intermediality in the chapter
Spellbound by Images: The Allure of Painting in the Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock.
130 Chapter Three
photographs made by another artist, Luc Delahaye, with the title Lautre
(The Other) showing us surreptitiously shot portraits of passengers on a
subway adds to the already mosaic-like scenes another perspective
coming from outside the diegetic world of the film and outside the
medium of cinema, bringing another mediums viewpoint or type of gaze
to the film, and halting the narrative flow of the scenes. This perspective
that is both other (as it is that of the still image within a motion picture)
and both related to the essence of film (as it is coming from photography,
as the ontological basis of cinematic representation) suggests that the
whole film can be interpreted as a (fragmented) meta-narrative over the
possibilities of (photographic) representation in the cinema. As several
analyses of the film have shown (cf. Conley 2010; Peucker 2010, etc.),
Haneke here overwrites the cinematic with the photographic in the
sense Barthes thought about photograph as a message without a code,
and seems to revel in the affective charge of the photographic filmic
image (Peucker 2010, 139) while effectively questioning our codes for
mediating reality.
b) Contrasts between the natural, the seemingly unmediated and the

artificial within the image
Since Gerard Genettes (2004) reinterpretation of the rhetorical term of

metalepsis as a narratological concept, the main feature of metalepsis is
considered to be that it performs a paradoxical leap between the
ontological levels of the real and the fictional/mediated. In several
films we have urban imagery in which the seemingly unmediated flow of
life, and characters presented as real appear against a frame perceived
clearly as an image, a mere representation. Just consider the well-known
scene from the 1962 film Her Life to Live (Vivre sa vie) [Fig. 3.69] where
we see Nana, the young prostitute, standing in the street in front of a
palimpsest of posters. The frame consisting of the posters in the
background with the fragmented sentences and jumbled up words emphasizes
artifice, a world constructed by visible signs that need deciphering.60 In a
way Nana is also collaged into the posters, her figure projected onto this
background is partly reduced to a mere visible sign (an image of a
prostitute). However, the composition also highlights the ontological
collage between the real life figure and the inanimate composition of signs
60
It has also often been interpreted as a puzzle: analyses of the scene often derive
meaning from the significations that can be attributed to the possible intertextual
references hidden in these fragments (i.e. the reference to the Paul Newman film
with the French title Larnaqueur, etc.)
in the background. In the filmic sequence the shot is followed by the

countershot of the image of the passing cars in the street (that Nana is
looking at searching for potential clients), the incessant and spontaneous
stream of traffic captured in cinma vrit style cinematography. Godard
stages a fine dialogue through Nana between the cluster of disjointed,
artificial signs on the one side (the abstract collage of the posters), and the
continuous flow of images of life contrasting with this, on the other side.
Something similar is achieved in the composition that we see in A Married
Woman (Une femme marie, 1964) [Figs. 3.7172] in which Macha Mril
appears in front of a giant poster. In this case the real life figure is again
framed by an artificial representation. The uncanny effect on the viewer is
the result of the differences in the scale of the images of the two women
(the huge poster towering over the real figure), as well as the perceived
ontological difference between them (life and representation). In both
cases Godard not only contrasts the real with the mediated but also
plays with their paradoxes: the real Nana can be perceived as a mere
representation of a prostitute, and Charlotte, the married woman, is
shown in an earlier scene just like the poster girl advertising womens
underwear, while the posters, the collages of street life are shown as
integral parts of life itself. Similarly in Masculine, Feminine (Masculin,
fminine, 1966) the watchful eyes of poster image of a girl both frames
and participates in the conversation of the live characters [Fig. 3.70].
The collage effect of such imagery can merge the real, the sensual
with the mediated, the cultural, or it can be a figuration performing a
strange chiasmus, an exchange taking place: the real life characters living
in the shadow of these media representations seem to lead a life that is
increasingly structured by these media representations, and thus tend
towards the artificial, while the representations flaunt their lifelikeness
in a hyperbolic manner. Rainer Werner Fassbinders Katzelmacher61
(1969) proposes a similar chiasmus when he plays with the difference of
the blank walls of the spaces that his characters inhabit and the drawing of
the city posted on the wall of a restaurant they repeatedly visit [Figs. 3.73
74]. The images of nothingness, of empty spaces are intertwined: the
world his characters actually live in looks dull and lifeless, while the
poster on the wall though highly artificial is displaying its intricate
details and lively, convoluted forms. Pedro Almodvars film, All about
my Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999) uses the same kind of imagery in
elaborating on the complex questions of what is real and what is artificial
61
The German title is usually not translated into English (Katzelmacher is a
Bavarian slang for foreign worker).
132 Chapter Three
in a post-modern society [Figs. 3.75]. Godards already mentioned

Carabineers uses an even more extreme juxtaposition of representation
and reality than the previous examples. In one of its famous scenes [see
Figs. 3.7677.] Godard has its characters playfully substitute one part of
their living body by covering it up with a graphic representation of the
same body part (pictures advertising underwear in womens and mens
magazines): thus the images emphasize the way in which representations
are not only omnipresent, mirroring and moulding our lives, but the way
they continually fold into our lives.
c) Folds of the immediate and the mediated, of the inside and the
outside
Sometimes the metalepsis of the immediate and mediated takes the

form not so much of a side by side comparison but of an uncanny
juxtaposition of two images, one of which is considered to be reality and
the other some kind of representation of the very same reality. Images that
superimpose a segment of the world and its mirror reflection usually fall
into this category, sometimes combining the real and illusory antithesis
with the confusing overlapping of the two sides of a reflection: the side of
the mirror and the side of reality. Such juxtaposition can remind us of
Deleuzes concept of the crystal image, an image that condenses an
actual and a virtual side. Referring to the well-known scenes displaying
multiple reflections in Orson Welless Citizen Kane (1940) and in The
Lady from Shanghai (1947) [Figs. 3.7879.], Deleuze describes the effect
of crystal-like images multiply refracting reality and illusion in this way:
the mirror image is virtual in relation to the actual character the mirror
catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with
only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field. [] When virtual
images proliferate like this, all together they absorb the entire actuality of
the character, at the same time as the character is no more than one
virtuality among others (Deleuze 1989, 70). The combination of images
of the real confronted by their mirror reflection were emblematic for
cinematic modernity, modernist authors (Welles, Antonioni, Agns Varda,
Godard, etc.) used such imagery in their films in order to raise
epistemological questions and to challenge notions of individuality.
Whenever the characters of these narratives were reflected in mirrors (or
other images that resembled them) we can see this as figures demolishing
epistemological certainties about the world and its representation, as well
as figures questioning the uniqueness of the individual who got to be
multiplied, serialized and included into an order of things where the

human figure became more and more decentred. [Figs. 3.8081.]
At the same time, the effect can also be associated with another of
Deleuzes famous concepts, the fold, in which we have the inclusion, the
doubling of the outside on the inside, rather than their opposition. The
outside is not a fixed limit, but a moving matter, animated by peristaltic
movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are
not something other than an outside, but precisely the inside of an outside
(Deleuze 1988, 9697).
In cinema the inside and outside, the on screen and off-screen space,
filmic reality and its photographic reflection can be folded into a single
image either by way of mirrors or by the use of any other reflective
surfaces (glass panes, windows, etc.) One of the greatest modernist
masters of this type of imagery is undoubtedly Michelangelo Antonioni,
who repeatedly drew on photographic doubles folded upon real images
within his films, continually transforming in this way the palpable material
world into an immaterial, ghost apparition. [See Figs. 3.8285.] On the
one hand such overlaid images seem merely to support the Bazinian
interpretation of the life and death of superimposition in the cinema, as
they constitute a figuration in-between reality and fantasy in which the
fantastic dimension may appear exactly due to the irresistible realism of
the photographic image (Bazin 1997, 73). On the other hand, however, in
Antonionis cinema this figure became also much more than a fold
between reality and fantasy, this overwriting of the image with its mirror
reflection also transposed the minimalist narrative onto a meta-narrative
level (performing in this way also a narrative fold), a meditation upon
the nature of cinematic representation and upon the fragility, the transitory
and illusory nature of the (mediated) images through which the world is
revealed to us.62
A most recent reiteration of Antonionis technique can be seen in
Abbas Kiarostamis latest film entitled Certified Copy (Copie conforme,
2010) [Fig. 3.86], his first to be made outside his home country and
considered by some of the reviewers to be a certified simulacrum of a
modernist European artfilm (besides Antonioni, also strongly echoing
62
Although Bazin considered that such a superimposition could only suggest the
fantastic in a conventional way, lacking the ability actually to evoke the
supernatural (1997, 76), and as such doomed to disappear, he also recognized that
the impact made by the figure of superimposition relied on the basic characteristic
of the cinematic medium, the indexicality of photography. Through repetitions and
variations Antonionis films managed to make exactly this medial aspect of the
figure visible.
134 Chapter Three
Rossellinis Voyage in Italy/Viaggio in Italia, 1954).63 The film also

resonates with the epistemological issues of modernism in raising
questions about the differences between the original and the copy in
art or in life and displays images that turn the characteristic Kiarostami
motif of the windshield of the car into a multiple fold of inside and
outside, reality and illusion.
d) Folding the post-cinematic image and creating a pensive spectator
In some of the latest films, we have a similar proliferation of images

juxtaposing reflection and/or mediation over what is perceived as the
immediate world. The folds we see in these films, either in a
metaphorical sense (of overwriting, covering up one medium with
another) or in a more concrete sense of the unusual interlacings of spaces
and media are used as cinematic figures that reflect the fluidity of the
increasingly media dominated environment and the architexture we are
surrounded by, and appear as a continuous (and decorative) interplay of
representation and reality. As a result still image is folded over
movement, exhibited, framed, museum art overlaps (and effectively
effaces) classical cinema, and ultimately the spectator is invited not to a
narrative reading but to a post-cinematic contemplation over individual
frames and scenes.
The uncanny nature of such foldings of artifice into life is an important
part of Jim Jarmuschs latest film, The Limits of Control (2009) which
seems to go back to the modernist tradition of conceiving the screen as a
canvas and showing the world decomposed into abstract shapes and
colours, textures, and populated by cinphile characters quoting movies
and delivering deadpan allusions. The protagonist of the film whose name
is not mentioned in the film (referred to as the somewhat archetypal Lone
Man in the films credits, and played by Isaach De Bankol) possesses a
magnificently carved, statuesque face and body that moves with gracious
self-control in these painterly and architectural spaces. [Figs. 3.8790.]
63
The film could also be interpreted as a variation on the theme of another famous
modernist film, Last Year in Marienbad (directed by Alain Resnais, 1961) in
which we have similarly a couple in search of their possible (imagined or real)
mutual past. Just like in Resnaiss film, in Certified Copy there is a significant
scene in which the couple tries to understand each other by contemplating a
sculpture by the side of a pool. And perhaps more importantly, it is again the
power of the words uttered in the present that ambivalently either evokes (re-
creates), or brings to life (creates) a possible past, a connection between the two
characters.
The film suggests perfect artistic control over the world seen as a
multitude of colours and shapes that fill the carefully chosen frames of the
movie. The Lone Man is given a secret mission: he starts a journey to
accomplish a task as we find out eventually to kill a man surrounded
by a fortress in the middle of nowhere and guarded by an army of high-
tech soldiers, and whose control appears to be absolute. The film is thus
built upon a puzzling parallel: control in a political and social sense (the
figure of a mysterious all-powerful man) and control in the artistic and
self-reflexive sense, the composure of the Lone Man in all situations and
the artistic nature of the rigorous compositions of each set and each frame
of the film. Political control and artistic control usually go hand in hand as
history has taught us too well; dictators usually aspire to a complete
control of both body and mind. However, this does not appear to be the
message here, as the two ways of control over reality are set against each
other: the Lone Man, who repeatedly ends up in Madrids Reina Sofia
museum in front of modern abstract canvases [Figs. 3.8990.], has the
mission to destroy the control of the somewhat ridiculous authoritarian
figure in the fortress (played by Bill Murray). How does he get in there?
How does he go from the outside into the inside of the fortress? We
do not see. Nevertheless we are given a mysterious clue right from the
beginning: Use your imagination! the first messenger tells him, and
this is the same answer the Lone Man gives to the baffled Bill Murray who
is surrounded by all kinds of electronic gadgets of surveillance and who
asks him how he got inside: I used my imagination. Is this an allegory of
artistic freedom, of the supremacy of artistic control over technology and
political confinement, or ultimately of liberating the image from narrative?
The mixed reviews of the film either celebrate the artistry of the films
visual craftsmanship or suggest that Jarmuschs absolute control over
the visual array of the film backfired, and being immersed into weaving a
cinematic fabric of free flowing colours and forms, the film failed to offer
a real content to ponder. Without taking into account its aesthetic values or
limitations,64 we can, nevertheless, observe a recurring use of metalepsis
in the film. Throughout the journey the Lone Man makes to reach his
destination he continually experiences the loops between art (or between
some kind of representation) and the reality reflected in it. In several
scenes these artificial and real forms are shown either consecutively or
side by side as an enigmatic fold: the guitar given to him by one of the
contact persons and the guitar seen in the painting in the museum, the
64
The film may have ironically acknowledged its limitations (its limits of
control) when it showed the protagonist sitting in the end in front of an empty
white sheet framed as a piece of Arte Povera.
136 Chapter Three
strange blonde woman with an umbrella played by Tilda Swinton and the
poster image of the character using the same costume that we catch a
glimpse of in the street, the tower seen in Seville and its postcard
representation, later the small desk lamps reproducing the same
architectural structure, the small piece of paper folded in the Lone Mans
hand that he finds corresponding to the shape of the mountains seen in the
window of the train, etc.65 [Figs. 3.9196]. All these seem to suggest that
the main task of the Lone man has actually been to find this pattern in
which the world shows its folds interlacing art(ifice) and reality,
representation and direct experience. And perhaps it is in the spirit of this
pattern that the film uses its main clue in a self-reflexive (or ironical?)
way: it was enough to use his imagination and fold the outside over the
inside in order to bypass a conventional structure of control. And as the
film folds representation over reality, imagination over matter, arthouse
movie over genre, and finally as the repeated scenes at the museum
suggest exhibited, framed art over moving images,66 the effect is not
only minimalizing the narrative but also a transgression of cinema as we
know it from fiction and narrative construction into a cinema which folds
its images into uncanny static visual compositions within well chosen
frames, and gives extraordinary attention to details in mise en scne and
art direction: a cinema whose images should be contemplated individually
and that resemble the abstract and minimalist paintings hanging over the
walls of exhibition halls. [Figs. 3.97100]. Consequently, the film turns
out to be much like the wrinkled sheet exhibited in the museum or the
white cloth wrapped around a frame in several layers shown in one of its
last scenes [Figs. 3.101102], and ultimately becomes nothing less and
nothing more than a post-cinematic exercise in observing the multiple
sheets of reality and visual mediation, a play upon their plaits.
65
The repetition of the lines used as a kind of leit motif (He who thinks hes
bigger than the rest, must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is.
Its a handful of dust.) in different contexts and media (as part of a dialogue, as a
song and dance act, as an inscription, etc.) can also be seen as folding the media
layers of the film, just like the cinphile allusions that ripple the surface of the
film with their associations of films that the spectators may or may not have
memories of.
66
Just consider the images shown in Figures 3.93 and 3.100101: Figure 3.93
shows the character of the Lone Man in the museum (himself motionless like a
statue) between two canvases of modern abstract art, and then the cinematic
compositions in Figs. 3.100101 could well pass for autonomous paintings,
resembling modernist still lives.
In introducing long sequences containing static compositions, as well

as representations that exhibit stillness in contrast with the cinematic flow
of images (paintings, photographs, advertisements) Jarmusch arrests the
conventional narrative fluidity and creates a film that continually touches
upon its photographic roots, its qualities of an index as well as upon its
foundation in visual arts. The minimalist story line, and the continued
deferral of revealing the ultimate purpose of the Lone Mans journey,
includes Jarmuschs film even more in what Laura Mulvey considers to be
a typical cinema of delay (2006, 123161). Relying on the ideas of
Raymond Bellour (1987) Mulvey argues that moments of stillness within
the moving image and its narrative create a pensive spectator who can
reflect on the cinema. She writes: Not only can the pensive spectator
experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph
alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself. This pause
for the spectator, usually hurried by the movement of both film and
narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the
moving image (2006, 186).
Another example of relinquishing narrative control in favour of
spotlighting autonomous imagery and exercising exceptional visual
command in composition in contemporary cinema folding towards
painting can be seen in the work of Tsai Ming Liang. One can interpret
the stunning visuals of The Skywalk is Gone (2002) or Visage (Face,
2009), for example, as forms of exhibitions of moving images. In both
films there are long sequences in which within a certain location, a fixed
frame even, nothing really happens in the conventional dramatic sense, yet
there are minute visual happenings that feast the eye. Most often we can
observe the folding of a reflection/mediation over the world perceived as
an immediate reality, as well as an unusual interlacing of spaces (the
outside and inside multiply folded over the image).
We could even consider The Skywalk is Gone a re-writing of traditional
flnerie, but the human protagonists and the environment appear as equals
in the film, moreover the gaze of the character seems to be
interchangeable with the impersonal gaze of the city. We see, for
example, a long sequence of a young woman watching a big screen with
moving images in the street [Fig. 3.103], and in the next shot we have the
reverse: it is her moving image that is folded into a mirror reflection
that we can observe over the glass wall of another building [Fig. 3.104]. In
the subsequent shots the film continues to multiply these images and
reflections of the passers-by, confusing the insides and outsides making
use of the reflective surfaces that shatter reality into mirror images folded
upon themselves [Fig. 3.105]. In the introduction to Visage (2009) a film
138 Chapter Three
made in France by the Taiwanese director the spectator is left to observe

for an unusually long time the fragile palimpsest of colours and translucent
forms of multiple reflections produced in the window of a caf [Fig.
3.106]. Such images display to the full the potential of superimpositions to
convey less meaning and more texture, and to become gateways of
cinematic intermediality.67 The magic of the sequence results from the fact
that it appears to the spectator as a fragile figuration of the cinematic
image being situated in-between a photographic impression and a
painting in motion.
The film as a whole resembles Jarmuschs previously mentioned work
not only in using such static compositions or analogies to painting but also
in dropping cinphile allusions (the spirit of Truffaut is evoked, and two of
his actors, Jean-Pierre Laud, Fanny Ardant appear in the film). In one
elaborate scene we see a paraphrase of Orson Welless famous reflections
in the magic mirror maze, only this time it is an even more eerie folding of
artifice and reality, as the mirrors are apparently placed in a wood
juxtaposing the natural with the artificial, and the film noir clichs are
substituted with impressions of another classic Hollywood genre: the
dreamlike apparition of a musical revue scene featuring Letitia Casta
[Figs. 3.107108]. Later on the highly stylized action (in fact a mere
sequence of visual happenings, or installation art captured in the
making) moves into the Louvre, the museum in this way seems again
just like in Jarmuschs case to legitimize the loose string of autonomous
scenes and carefully designed imagery, and seems to absolve the pensive
spectator from the urge of looking for a narrative thread connecting the
scenes, at the same time, it also invites the spectator to act not as a
voyeuristic viewer but more as a browser of the post-cinematic gallery of
images, to fast forward or pause the picture as he or she wishes.68
In one of the most memorable constructions of images we see Fanny
Ardant lying on a bed and later making a phone call in a room high above
the city with large glass windows overlooking a busy highway. The
67
As Marc Vernet describes in the chapter on superimpositions in his book, The
Figures of Absence (1988), the layering of two images does not mean more
representation, but rather, less representation, the collapse of the depth of field, and
at the same time, an increased similarity with techniques in painting and art
photography.
68
Mulvey also speaks of the role of digital and domesticated technology as tools in
the hands of such a pensive spectator, saying that the spectator who pauses the
image with new technologies may bring to the cinema the resonance of the still
photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the films movement,
its particularly strong inscription of the index (2006, 186).
camera is positioned just outside the window, so as to capture both the

outside and the inside of the room not only dividing the visible frame into
two portions but also playing with the reflection of the image of the
impersonal highway projected through the glass pane over the private
sphere of the character [Fig. 3.109]. Despite all the characteristic elements
this is neither classical cinematic voyeurism nor flneuristic window
shopping. The whole scene just like the compositions seen in The
Skywalk is Gone seems to convey, beside the exquisite interlacings and
superimpositions of translucent forms and colours, or the mixing of the
sensation of the palpable with the illusory, primarily not a confusion of the
spectators spatial orientation,69 but a new perception of urban space, no
longer divided into outsides and insides, private or public spheres,
everything appearing as broken into a kaleidoscope of reflections, images
folded upon images. The fluidity of such a space is described by Scott
McQuire in his book, The Media City, in his way: The machine logic of
fragmentation, which conditioned the shock experience of the urban
dweller, has been redefined in terms of the network logic of flows,
feedback and resistances. The abrupt cut of montage has been displaced by
the real time melt of morphing, and the sequential narrative ordering of
images on a single screen by the simultaneous viewing of multiple
windows. Hard buildings have given way to soft cities, structural rigidity
to organizational flexibility, stable walls to responsive surfaces, permanent
dwelling to nomadism (McQuire 2008, 89).
It is also remarkable how images that in modernist cinema despite
their undeniable beauty used to be considered cinematic figures of
absence, emblematic representations of the dissolution of identity, of
spiritual and emotional insecurity, alienation and anxiety (i.e. the folds of
the mirror reflections in Antonionis films), have now become effective
interfaces between the imprint of the real over the moving images and the
imprint of the cinematic experiences over the flow of life, and how such
images can sustain the interest of a pensive spectator relying only on
their sheer visual appeal. Such images may have a lesser effect of
intermediality, however, they do always reflexively exhibit the
photographic roots of cinematic representation (no matter in this case that
the image is digital or analogue). Here more than anything else such
imagery exemplifies beyond the interlacings of urban space and fluid
architecture the paradoxes of personal lives being conducted in an
exceedingly transparent, Big Brother like environment, and reveals how
69
Marc Vernet (1988) considers that this is often the case in such compositions
where the transparent glass also acts as a mirror within an image.
140 Chapter Three
such loops and foldings of outside and inside, of private and public, of
material and immaterial, of immediate and virtual have become integral
parts of our everyday life, how ultimately the world appears to us as a
maze of mediated images.
Conclusion
As I have tried to point out, there can be both sensual and
structural gateways into intermediality as far as imagery conveying an
illusion of reality is concerned. The sensual mode always involves a
synesthetic reading of the world, one of its basic models being based on
the attitude of flnerie, on the sensibility of the stroller/driver who
wanders around the (urban) landscape, and there is often a sensation of
fluidity expressed both by time and space structures. In such a sensual
mode haptic imagery usually contrasts with the optical, cinema shows a
tangible, vibrant, fragile world at the proximity of embodied experience as
opposed to clear-cut, geometric shapes that can be observed at an aesthetic
distance. The most elaborate forms of such a contrast as well as opening
up sensuous interfaces within the image towards the affordances of
painting and architecture have been conceived in the cinema of Michelangelo
Antonioni.
The structural gateway into intermediality, on the other hand,
involves either a fragmentation, a shattering of the cinematic world into
pieces of media representations or the experience of some kind of
juxtapositions, jumps, loops or foldings between the media representations
and what we perceive as cinematic reality. If the sensual mode means a
perception of the haptic against the optical, of an autographic imagery
opening up towards cinemas roots with photography and towards
painting, the structural mode means a reading of the figural as Lyotard
(and based on his philosophy, David N. Rodowick, 2001) uses the term: as
the figuration of one medium in another, the linguistic in the visual, the
photographic in the cinematic, ultimately the representation in the domain
of the real. In the latest examples of the folds in the post-cinematic
imagery paradoxically we can also assist a folding of the sensual
mode into the structural: as the palimpsest-like images fuse the haptical
with the optical, the tangible with the intangible, and the direct, sensuous
experience of cinema with the reflexivity of the pensive spectator.
Figures
Figures 3.12. Coloured spots or lights and blurred images resulting in a kind of
cinematic action painting: Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver (1976), Francis Ford
Coppolas Tetro (2009).
142 Chapter Three
Figure 3.3. Jean-Luc Godard: Eloge de lamour (2001): the autographic gesture
of the cinema artist over the photographic surface of the car window (lights
splashed over the windshield like paint over canvas).
Figure 3.4. Francis Ford Coppola: Tetro (2009): crossing over into a territory that
asserts itself against the observer through the pulse of the electropolis. The
whirlpool of lights threatens to engulf the individual facing the city.
Figures 3.56. The unsettling effect of the closeness implied by haptic images in
cinema: the extreme close up of the eyes of Robert De Niro hit by the coloured
lights in Scorseses opening images to the Taxi Driver, and the metaphor of the
moth circling the light at the beginning of Tetro.
144 Chapter Three
Figures 3.78. The liquidity of the streets accentuated by blurred images: cinema
making use of photographic techniques of recording movement (movement
presented as material photographic trace). Wong Kar Wai: Chungking Express
(1994).
Figures 3.910. The sense of fluidity reinforced by the surge of clouds and vapours
(also increasing the hapticality of the images) in Francis Ford Coppolas Rumble
Fish (1983).
146 Chapter Three
Figures 3.1113. Rumble Fish (1983): time lapse sequences of the metropolis
towering over its inhabitants, or showing exquisite details of shadows moving
across walls, clouds rushing over the sky reflected in the shiny metal fender of a
motorcycle.
Figures 3.1415. Rumble Fish (1983): the careful mise en scne and framing of
each individual shot that can easily be detached from the scene and contemplated
as an individual still.
148 Chapter Three
Figures 3.1619. The metaphor of the aquarium reveals the paradoxes of liquidity
and entrapment in such an environment: the protagonists seem to be would be
flneurs trapped in an environment of the panopticon. (1617: Rumble Fish, 1983;
1819: Chungking Express, 1994.)
Figures 3.2021. Architecture as a supreme and detached composition of abstract

forms: Antonionis The Adventure (1960), The Night (1961).
Figures 3.2223. Architecture as an entity wedged into the lives of people, dividing
their existence, confining them to separate spaces, obstructing their communication.
Antonioni: The Night (1961).
Figures 3.2425. The Eclipse (1962).

150 Chapter Three
Figures 3.2627. The Adventure (1960): the baroque cathedral in Noto, site of
ennui and abandoned architectural dreams versus the fragile and exquisite detail of
the ink drawing.
Figures 3.2829. The Eclipse: the analogy of a classic bust and the sculptural
appearance of Vittoria reminding us of a Greek statue.
152 Chapter Three
Figures 3.3031. Mapping space as architexture, the architectural image in

Antonionis cinema: spaces opening upon other spaces (images taken from The
Adventure).
Figure 3.32. Antonioni: The Eclipse (1962): getting in touch with the world
within a frame. The framing of the touch, of the gesture, emphasizes the importance
of bodily sensation and hapticality in the reception of images as opposed to a
mere optical scanning (or intellectual reading/symbolic interpretation) of the
visual display.
Figures 3.3340. Images as canvases for the graphic drama to be performed:

Antonionis The Adventure Monica Vittis hair presented against a variety of
haptic textures (waves of the sea, foaming water, clouds, rocks, grass, bush, etc.)
The effectiveness of this analogy, this graphic communication stands out in
contrast to the failures of verbal communication between the characters of the film.
154 Chapter Three
156 Chapter Three
Figures 3.4144. The Eclipse: moments of childish playfulness give way to a more
enigmatically teasing attitude of the woman as the images become filled with the
vibration induced by the visual analogy of the blades and the hair. After a few
moments in which the analogy lingers over the image, Vittoria moves away from
the frame and Piero (Alain Delon) is left alone, looking at the bush that stands in
for what has been the figure of an enticing woman before.
158 Chapter Three
Figures 3.4546. Antonioni: The Adventure (1960): faces shown in analogy with
paintings.
Figures 3.4750. Framing the haptical in Antonionis The Eclipse: rigid geometrical
forms and immobile inner frames stand against (and frame) the vibrant human face
and the texture full of life of the silky hair blown by a small electric fan. The image
performs the essence of drama on a pure pictorial level.
Figures 3.5154. Un-framing the haptical in Antonionis The Red Desert (1964):
unleashing the powers of the haptical with clouds of vapours, blurred spots of
colour without contours (colour becoming textural and quasi-embodied).
160 Chapter Three
Figures 3.5556. The palimpsest of word and image in classical storytelling:

Howard Hawkss Red River (1948).
Figures 3.5758. Media representations scattered around the diegetic world used
reflexively, as commentaries upon the story: Jean-Luc Godard A bout de souffle
(1959).
Figures 3.5960. Agns Varda: Happiness (1965).

162 Chapter Three
Figures 3.6162. Francis Ford Coppola: Rumble Fish (1983): graffiti inscriptions
on walls and street signs as visible linguistic traces that the cinematic diegesis
leaves on the realistic photographic representation of the city.
Figures 3.6364. The city shredded into a kaleidoscope of media: the commodification
of media and all aspects of human life. Arthur Penn Mickey One (1965) and John
Cassavetes The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).
Figures 3.6568. Jean-Luc Godard: 2 or 3 things I Know about Her (1967): we see
everything in the course of being disassembled or assembled. The city is presented
as a result of an infinite process of mediation, and as a cultural wasteland.
164 Chapter Three
Figures 3.6970. Jean-Luc Godard: Her Life to Live (1962), Masculine, Feminine
(1966). Life framed by artifice, the collage of life and artifice.
Figures 3.7172. Jean-Luc Godard: A Married Woman (1964). The huge poster
image towering over the real figure reminding us of an earlier scene in which the
character walks about as a live poster girl advertising womens underwear.
Figures 3.7374. Rainer Werner Fassbinders Katzelmacher (1969): the contrast of

the blank walls of the room and the lively, convoluted forms displayed in the
poster on the wall of a restaurant.
Figure 3.75. Pedro Almodvar: All about my Mother (1999): the metalepsis in the
images used to echo complex questions of what is real and what is artificial in a
post-modern society.
166 Chapter Three
Figures 3.7677. Jean-Luc Godards The Carabineers (Les carabiniers, 1963):

representations mirroring and moulding our lives, images emphasizing the way in
which representations continually fold into our lives.
Figures 3.7881. Multiple mirror reflections in Orson Welless Citizen Kane

(1940) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Agns Vardas Clo from 5 to 7 (Clo
de 5 7, 1962): the demolition of epistemological certainties about the world and
questioning the uniqueness of the individual.
Figures 3.8285. Off-screen and on-screen, reality and its photographic

reflection folded into a single image: Michelangelo Antonioni: Identification of a
Woman (Identificazione di una donna, 1982), Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim
Wenders: Beyond the Clouds (Al di l delle nuvole, 1995).
168 Chapter Three
Figure 3.86. Abbas Kiarostamis Certified Copy (Copie conforme, 2010) as a

certified simulacrum of a modernist European artfilm: images that turn the
characteristic Kiarostami motif of the windshield of the car into a multiple fold of
inside and outside, reality and illusion.
Figures 3.8790. Jim Jarmusch: The Limits of Control (2009) is continuing the
modernist tradition of conceiving the screen as a canvas and showing the world
decomposed into abstract shapes and colours. The protagonist moves with gracious
self-control in painterly and architectural spaces.
170 Chapter Three
Figures 3.9196. The Limits of Control as an exercise in folds: the recurring use of
metalepsis, loops between representation and reality, artificial and real.
172 Chapter Three
Figures 3.97100. Jarmuschs film: a cinema which folds its images into uncanny
static visual compositions within well chosen frames: a cinema whose images
should be contemplated individually and that resemble the paintings hanging over
the walls of exhibition halls.
Figures 3.101102. The Limits of Control (2009): The long sequences containing
static compositions in contrast with the cinematic flow of images create a cinema
of delay and a pensive spectator.
174 Chapter Three
Figures 3.103106. Tsai Ming Liang, The Skywalk is Gone (2002): loops,
juxtapositions between the immediate and the mediated, folds between the inside
and the outside. Visage (2009): the fragile palimpsest of multiple reflections
produced in the window of a caf.
176 Chapter Three
Figures 3.107108. Tsai Ming Liang: Visage (2009): a paraphrase of Orson

Welless famous mirror reflections in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), an eerie
folding of artifice and reality, the film noir clichs substituted with the dreamlike
apparition of a musical revue scene.
Figure 3.109. The mirror image that in modernist cinema used to be an emblematic
representation of alienation and anxiety has become an interface between the
imprint of the real over the moving images and the imprint of the cinematic
experiences over the flow of life.
THE INTERMEDIAL DEMON
OF THE CINEMATIC IMAGE
CHAPTER FOUR
SPELLBOUND BY IMAGES:
THE ALLURE OF PAINTING IN THE CINEMA
OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Painting for the cinema constitutes a forbidden

object of desire.
(Angela Dalle Vacche 1996, 1.)
1. Intermediality as an Attraction
in Classical Narrative Cinema
The history of film means by no means a complete break with the other
arts despite the fact that the emergence of narrative cinema cut to a certain
extent the strong ties that linked early cinema to literature, theatre or the
world of painting by establishing its own institutions, conventions and
expectations. The self-effacing style of the classical narrative film
(Bordwell 1985, 162) consisted of storytelling techniques and patterns of
visual composition that directed the viewers attention not towards the
contemplation of the pictorial qualities of the image but towards the
comprehension of the plot and the correct understanding of coherent cause
and effect, as well as time and space relations, as Tom Gunning stated:
The transformation of filmic discourse that D.W. Griffith typifies bound
cinematic signifiers to the narration of stories and the creation of a self-
enclosed diegetic universe (1990, 60). In other words showing became
subordinated to telling. Nevertheless, this can only be said with a
considerable degree of simplification. As Tom Gunning also admitted in
the same essay: it would be too easy to see this as a Cain and Abel story,
with narrative strangling the nascent possibilities of a young iconoclastic
form of entertainment (1990, 60). The central role of visual composition
180 Chapter Four
was actually preserved in some classical narratives and in certain cases

even the explicit relationship between cinema and painting lived on.1
Although we cannot say that the type of film called by Gunning the
cinema of attraction (1990) 2 would have always meant a conscious use of
painterly techniques, consequently that attraction in cinema could be
equated with painterly or the presence of references to painting, there is
no doubt that the opposite of this is almost always true. An attraction in
cinema need not necessarily be painterly in nature, it can be purely
technical (see for example the magic tricks of Mlis resulting in the
disappearance, multiplication, transformation or cutting up of bodies); a
moving image that looks like a painting, however (something that in itself
counts as a technical wonder in early cinema, and can count as quite an
aesthetic attraction ever since) always impresses the viewer, and draws
the attention upon itself.
If we are looking for the defining traits of what we can consider
painterly in the cinema, the notion of attraction can prove to be helpful
not only from a historical perspective. We can consider as painterly any
technical or compositional effect that results in the visibility (and non-
transparency) of the surface against the scene, in which we can
witness a kind of harnessing of visibility (Gunning 1990, 56). In the case
of classical narrative cinema it is always relevant to look into the use of
painterly compositions in its relationship with narrativity. The main
question is to what degree the devices that we may associate with painting
are subordinated to the telling of the story. Whenever this is a one way
process we can speak of a painterly iconography (see for instance the
characteristically decorative settings of westerns and their breathtaking use
of painterly landscapes), or we can speak of visual elements that enable a
better understanding of the characters or situations, so they do not attract
the attention towards themselves, but actually direct it towards the
fictional world of the film.3 Taking into account the fact that the intensity
1
The most eloquent example of this, even before the time of the so called classical
Hollywood narrative films, was, of course, the European expressionist cinema.
2
The term attraction originates from the montage theory of Eisenstein, and was
introduced as a key notion to early cinema by Tom Gunning (1990) and Noel
Burch (1990).
3
Vincente Minnelli was a master of painting with light working within the
traditional studio system of Hollywood. The sophisticated imagery of his films
made use of painterly lighting effects in order to characterize the protagonists. The
style of lighting used in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), for example, can be
studied as a master class in painterly techniques used as a kind of psychological
portraiture.
Spellbound by Images 181
and the uniqueness of the impression exerted on the viewer is very

important in the definition of attraction as Gunning defines it,4 and also
taking into account that one of the defining features of classical narratives
is the way their effects tend to be well-known and paradigmatic (cf.
Bordwell 1985, 156206), the cases of painterly imagery that can be
classified as genre iconography have only a limited potential for becoming
unique attractions, instead their appeal rests on repeated recognition of
something already expected and not on the surprise factor of something
new.
In films made during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system the
question of intermediality (of the relationship between painting and
cinema) arises when in one way or another the images stand in contrast
with a characteristically self-effacing or transparent style of storytelling,
and lead to an exhibitionist cinema, a cinema that displays its visibility,
willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the
attention of the spectator (Gunning 1990, 57). The attraction in this
sense is not merely a visual surprise, but the emergence of a tension
between story and image that is also capable of conveying an intellectual
message, of raising self-reflexive questions about the nature of images in
the cinema in general and about specific qualities of visual representation.
Within the paradigm of the classical narrative film among others the
following instances can be considered as introducing the painterly into
the cinematic, and appearing as an attraction that the viewers could
appreciate not just inside the narrative, but also as images (relatively)
independent of the narrative context.
a) The cases of narrative image detachment,5 the Gregg Toland,
Orson Welles-type compositions in which the foreground is aggressively
blown up against the depth of the image, parts of the visual frame or the
images themselves seem to be ripped away from the story, or images
literally detach themselves from the narrative and for that matter from
cinema or film itself (Menard 2003).
b) Similarly the famous film noir lighting effects playing with dark
shadows and image projections produce images that become detached
from the narrative and seem to affect the viewer directly, and always
having the potential of making the image the real protagonist of the story
4
To summarize, the cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention,
inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle a
unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself.
(Gunning 1990, 58 emphasis added by me, . P.)
5
The expression is borrowed from David George Menards essay on the analysis
of the long take (2003).
182 Chapter Four
and doubling the narrative with a meta-narrative level addressing issues

related to visual imagery and symbolism.
c) The musical can be seen as the most prominent survivor of the
cinema of attraction in the paradigm of classical narratives, in it the
relation between painting and cinema is driven to the extreme, almost to
the point of hybridization. The painterly aspects of the musical did not
only mean an emphatic part of a Gesamtkunstwerk-like complexity of an
audiovisual spectacle but also made it possible for the concrete setting to
be exchanged with a completely fictional world (the scene of fantasies and
dreams) where any kind of abstract stylization became acceptable.
d) The representation of women in general, and especially the presence
of female portraiture hold a special significance in the history of voyeurism
and cinematic scopophilia as the feminist and psychoanalytical theories of
film have amply demonstrated. Woman appears as the target of the (male)
gaze within classical cinema and is often objectified as a beautiful image
or even as a painting arresting the eye (cf. Mulvey 1992). Moreover, in
films like Peter Godfreys The Two Mrs.Carrolls (1945), Otto Premingers
Laura (1944) or Terence Youngs Corridor of Mirrors (1948), etc.
important questions about the identity of the individuals, about the relation
between life and artistic representation, as well as about representation as
mental imagery are posited through the introduction of the still images of
paintings (cf. Felleman 2006, 1425, also Vernet 1988).
In what follows I will try to contribute to a better understanding of
Hitchcocks use of intermediality between painting and cinema, concentrating
on those instances in which his techniques go beyond conventional film
noir iconography or thematization of female portraiture and in which
paintings or painterly compositions appear as figures within the cinematic
flow of images that spellbind the viewer and elicit multiple possible
interpretations.
It has already been stated that Hitchcocks films can be considered as a
transition between classical and modernist cinema (cf. Deleuze 1986, Orr
2005, etc.). His films constitute a unique link between the early cinema of
attractions, the avant-garde affinity towards painting and the conventions
of classical storytelling, displaying in certain films a propensity towards
abstract imagery that can achieve an implicit self-reflexion of cinema as a
visual medium. The paintings introduced in his films always have the
potential of opening up an abyss, a rupture in the texture of classical
narrative, and transpose the story over a meta-narrative plane (one that
resembles more the techniques of modernism in the cinema). Hitchcock, as
a visual artist working on the media border of painting and cinema, can be
seen not only as a playful master of imagery, but also as an artist who
treated the image as the privileged imprint of the modern world (it is by no
accident that he insisted on leaving the mark of his own image over the
films he made in the form of the cameos), and an artist who did all this
with lots of humour, but also with a great amount of epistemological
skepsis.
2. The Painting as a Demonic Image

and the Embodiment of Nothingness
Susan Felleman notes in her book on art in the cinematic imagination:
the portrait [] hangs as an index of Art and Death on the walls of the
moving picture gallery and its movement there should remind us that this
gallery is anything but static (2006, 24), and without doubt, the
relationship of portraiture in Hitchcocks cinema and the theme of death,
Oedipal identification as well as the aestheticism of vision is even more
complex than we grew accustomed to in the film noir canon.
Both in Rebecca (1940) and in Vertigo (1958) we have a painting that
represents a dead woman and in both films there is a live woman (the
object of the male protagonists gaze and desire) who assumes a visual
likeness to the woman represented in the painting, as if the live woman
were a reincarnation of the dead one (in Vertigo this doubling is repeated
with a twist: first it is Madeleine who resembles Carlotta, then it is the red
haired Judy who resembles Madeleine). In the earlier film, Rebecca, the
young and shy second wife (Joan Fontaine) of the rich and elegant Max de
Winter (Laurence Olivier) tries to escape the shadow of the prematurely
departed first wife (Rebecca). She thinks that her husband adored Rebecca,
as she imagines her to have been a glamorous society lady. The new Mrs.
de Winter with her plain grey clothes and frail body is introduced to the
viewer against the backdrop of the huge aristocratic castle towering over
her. At the beginning of the film we see her as she arrives at her husbands
estate and starts to explore the awe inspiring halls of the castle, and the
inner framings of the archways do not direct our attention towards her
figure, detaching it from the background, rather, on the contrary, they
emphasize the way in which she is almost lost among the intricate details
of the decorative setting. (In the frame that can be seen in Fig. 4.1 it is
more the butler who stands out and not the young woman who almost
seems to be absorbed by the details in the background.) The architraves of
the castle become similar to empty frames that have clearly not been
conceived to surround her. In order to assume the role she is longing for,
the young Mrs. de Winter has to be transformed into an aesthetic picture
(that she thinks to be adequate) for these imposing frames presented in the
184 Chapter Four
architecture. And this is exactly what happens when trying to measure

up to the role she is supposed to fill in the social life of her husband she
accepts the demonic suggestion of the evil housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers to
appear in a costume that copies one of the paintings hanging in the
hallway of the castle [Fig. 4.2]. While she hopes that she will become an
accepted member of the prestigious family and she will gain the
admiration of her husband by dressing up so as to resemble a portrait
hanging in the family gallery, she has no idea that her rival, the first
Mrs. de Winter, chose to dress up in exactly the same way and that he
memories connected to this event are not pleasant but horrifying for the
widowed husband. The process of dressing up becomes, without her being
conscious of it, the process of becoming a double for the dead wife,
Rebecca. The dead woman, however, remains for her a fabrication of pure
fiction, as the information that she has about her is so scarce that she has to
fill the gaps with her own imagination, and as a result, she constructs a
completely false image that she tries to resemble. As we later learn in the
film, Rebecca compared to the angelic young second wife was a
demonic woman who caused her husband much suffering. So the young
woman played by Joan Fontaine is actually a rival of an image that she
tries to resemble, an image that has no referent in the life of her husband,
that does not actually exist. The scene in which Joan Fontaine dresses up
to become the painting emphasizes the coming alive of a false fantasy
and the demonic power of a mental image. The majestic presence of the
painting that she contemplates in the presence of Mrs. Danvers [Fig. 4.2]
becomes the metaphor of an entire world that she longs for, and at the
same time it represents the symbolic doorway through which she
believes she may enter the world of her dreams. When Joan Fontaine
appears as a tableau vivant, a personification of the painting, Hitchcock
emphatically confronts her with the painting, having her look at the
painting as if she were looking in a mirror [Fig. 4.3], then proceeds to
frame her with the architrave of the hallway, ultimately showing her
almost literally as if she were stepping out of a picture frame [Fig. 4.4].
After the vehement negative reaction of the husband who covers his eyes
as to protect himself from this phantom-like tableau vivant [Fig. 4.5]
the confused young woman casts another desperate glace at the
treacherous mirror painting, and at the end of the scene, as the ironic
reversal of her figure dressed all in white, Hitchcock shows us the dark
figure of Mrs. Danvers from the back, framed in a similar way as we saw
the beaming young Mrs. de Winter a few minutes before [see Fig. 4.6].6
6
The construction of the scene is a dramaturgical and visual masterpiece with its
The mirror-like symmetry of the images closes the scene upon itself:
instead of being a symbolic doorway for the young wife, the painting
proved to be a trap, as her husband failed to see the image she wished to
see in her.7
The use of the painting and the structure of presenting the figures in a
frame, the way the living is made the double of the dead image (and
dead character) serves primarily the purposes of suspense, and postpones
the solving of the mystery. On the other hand, however, the medium of
painting is used in a more complex way, the two Mrs. de Winters appear in
the film as Max de Winters objects of desire as two reflections or copies
of the same image and as such (romantic and ironic) doubles of each other.
Rebecca, who is revealed as the hidden referent of the painting in the
scene, is not only dead, but as the matter of fact she is also completely
unknown, and the mediality of the painting (as something radically
different from cinema) is also virtually effaced by the integration of the
painting as merely an object and an image linked to the narrative and to
the protagonists fantasies: the painting itself in this way becomes a
multiple sign of absence and uncertainty, a medium of the void.8
mirror-like structure. Hitchcock often resorted to construct his scenes (often entire
films) on the reversal of significant images/scenes that we have seen earlier (like
the scene of Madeleines death in the church in Vertigo). Richard Allen considers
this frequent structure of reversal of imagery or reversal in the narrative as a
manifestation of romantic irony in Hitchcocks films (cf. Allen 2007). Through
these reversals Hitchcock effectively doubles self-conscious (and ironic) narration
and a constant fascination with the romantic love story, while showing at the same
time the paradoxes of human desires. Richard Allen writes: The logic that unites
romantic love and human perversity or life and death in Hitchcocks works is the
both/and logic of romantic irony in which romantic love and human perversity are
at once utterly opposed to one another and yet, also, paradoxically, closely
identified (2007, 12). About the role of ironic reversals that can be seen in
Hitchcocks cinema see also David George Menards essay (2008).
7
Marc Vernet interprets (cf. 1988, 89112) the scene in the following way: the
young woman failed in her attempt to become someone else, to become similar to
the idealized image, and ultimately in trying to secure the love of her husband, and
thus implicitly the introduction of the painting can be seen as the way in which the
paradigm of classical narrative cinema deals with the power of the imaginary,
criticizing it in favour of a sense of realism.
8
According to Elsaesser (2002): a painting in a film, at any rate, in a classical
Hollywood film, seems to me always at a disadvantage by the very fact that it
signifies too much (the whole history of art) and too little (merely another image,
another view amidst the many others that make up a film) []. The painted
portrait in a film suffers doubly: it is radically insufficient as a signified and it is
contradictory as a sign. Hence the fact that a painting in a film so often creates a
186 Chapter Four
In addition to this the fiendish Mrs. Danvers can also be seen as a kind
of double, who moves around the house as in a haunted castle
preserving the phantom of the departed Rebecca. Her unconditional
loyalty and identification with Rebecca is another example of a character
being defined (and self-defined) as a reflection of another. The story
progresses towards a double revelation. The information withheld from the
viewer and from the young wife becomes the main source of suspense.
The viewer is intrigued by the question why the first Mrs. de Winter died,
but is equally anxious to find out how the two reflections of the portrait,
the two wives can be related to each other (and to the possible third
reflection, the figure of the housekeeper). There is a continuous dramatic
tension between the imaginary portrait of the dead woman and our
impressions of the portrait of the live protagonist. In the process of finding
out more about the circumstances of Rebeccas death the characters who
act as detectives in the film (for it is not only the police who are
conducting an investigation into the mystery: everybody is making
inquiries about the past) are actually in the process of slowly uncovering
Rebeccas true face. The learning process leads us through fantasy
images, memories and doublings (unique mirror phases) in the film.
Rebecca, a woman who lived like a man but also assumed the role of
an impeccable lady in society circles, a true female dandy, as Richard
Allen calls her (2004, 311), and who turns out to be in everything the
opposite of the innocent young second Mrs. de Winter, hovers over the
narrative like a demonic image, a vampire who exerts an inexplicable
attraction toward the female characters who are trying to identify with her
and sucks them into a terrible vortex threatening to make them lose their
identity.9
notable gap which the narrative has to motivate. This gap can be filled either by
the presentation of an artist as the protagonist, or by pointing to it as the source of
an enigma the enigma attaching itself not so much to who is being represented as
to why the represented is an enigma to one or several of the characters. [] It is as
if, a painted picture in a film invariably activates what Roland Barthes called the
narratives hermeneutic code, but we might also say that it activates one of
Todorovs properties of the fantastic, a hovering, a consistent undecidability of
discourses.
9
About the role of Rebecca as a female vampire (and the figure of Mrs. Danvers
who doubles this role as a kind of lesbian counterpart), as well as about the
opposition of femininity and patriarchal world view, the initiation of the new Mrs.
de Winter Richard Allen wrote an extensive analysis comparing Daphne du
Mauriers novel that served as the source of the film and Hitchcocks adaptation.
Allen notes that Hitchcock emphasizes the figure of the double in the relationship
of the two Mrs. de Winters, and associates the notions of demonic and sublime
In the scene analysed before, at the same time, we can find elements of
an even more general self-reflection of the images. The repeated framing
of the visual composition seems to transpose the cinematic picture itself
into this domain of the unknown. As if the scene would also show how
polysemic the picture can become, and how its referent is always unearthly
(on an ontologically different plane), how strongly it is connected to pure
fiction and imagination and most importantly what demonic power rests in
the hands of those who use images as tools (see the fiendish actions of
Mrs. Danvers). The significance of the painting in this case is not only
connected to the solving of this particular story of mysterious identity, but
it also consists in raising questions about the interpretation of images in
general. In contrast with a classic dramaturgy that neatly solves all
mysteries, the painting emerges as the medium of the unknown, as a
fracture that disrupts the order of the narration and threatens to throw the
mind of the character involved into its abysmal depths of the uncanny and
the unidentifiable.
In essence Vertigo carries on the same theme.10 In this film the
protagonist who is again a detective (therefore a perfect embodiment of an
epistemological pursuit) Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) falls in love
with a picture and tries to revive a dead woman11 by way of her image.12 It
is not by chance that the location for the first encounter with the woman of
his affection is a cemetery. The Pygmalion-like story takes interesting
turns in Hitchcocks film thematizing the relationship of representation
and life, of identification and copying. In this case we have a woman who
with their antithesis. Others see the relationship of the new Mrs. de Winter and
Rebecca in Oedipal terms, as the relationship of a daughter and a mother figure in
the course of which the daughter identifies with the image of the mother, and she
can present herself in society only the way the image of the mother has been
constructed within her imagination (cf. Felleman 2006, 16 and Modleski 1988, 49).
10
The film is one of Hitchcocks most analysed works, in the present essay
therefore I do not even attempt to summarize all the possible interpretations, I will
only emphasize elements that seem relevant from the point of view of the present
line of thought.
11
See the book of extensive interviews made by Truffaut with Hitchcock (1985).
Hitchcock even considers this as a form of outright necrophilia, saying: to put it
plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman whos dead; he is indulging in a
form of necrophilia (Truffaut 1985, 244).
12
The motif of falling in love with a woman as a picture and the haunting image
of a dead woman has not only several literary antecedents (like Edgar Allan Poes
Ligeia and Gustave Rodenbachs Bruges-la-Morte as Bronfen points out, 1992),
but it became one of the motifs characteristic of film noir narratives as well. Cf.
Elsaesser (2002) and Felleman (2006).
188 Chapter Four
is not only dead and therefore unattainable but we also have to deal not
only with multiple fictions but with an intrigue that involves lies,
misleadings, swindles and ultimately: sins. The main theme is introduced
into the film by Gavin Elster who hires Scottie as a detective. In the scene
in which they meet we see them in Elsters office where the walls are all
packed with pictures [Fig. 4.7]. The pictures hanging on walls become
ominous signals of the thematization of questions related to images
(similarly to the use of the stuffed birds in the Bates motel that are signs of
past and future horrors to be revealed through the plot in Psycho, 1960).
Scottie listens to Elsters bizarre story with skepticism, although Elster
assures him that every word of it is true and that he would be incapable of
fabricating such a story. At the same time the paintings exhibited on the
walls flaunt their artificiality and attract the attention of the viewer by their
sheer multitude suggesting the possibility of a multitude of fabrications
(each painting appearing as a fictional universe of its own).
Kim Novak, as Elsters wife, in the now famous scene at the
restaurant, appears like a painting. This is not only the result of being
shown in a relatively static pose and in profile, so somewhat two
dimensionally against the background plane, but also the result of a
carefully chosen chromatic scale and the presence of multiple inner
framing. [Figs. 4.810.] This picture, however, as many have already
written about it, will ultimately become an abysmal experience for
Scottie.13 First the woman played by Kim Novak lies that she is
Madeleine, the wife of Scotties employer, who being in a somewhat
troubled state of mind believes to be the reincarnation of a certain
Carlotta Valdes. This lie is supported by the supposedly mesmerizing
qualities of a painting portraying Carlotta. The images of the film
emphasize the similarities between the painting and the live woman,
strengthening the mystification. The second time the woman played by
Kim Novak appears in the film as Judy, she denies to be the same person
as he knew in the first half of the film, although the two women are one
and the same. Both, however, appear to Scottie as the image of another
woman (in the case of Madeleine, it is Carlotta, in the case of Judy it is
Madeleine), both women being or supposed to be dead. The painting is not
only the image of death, but in this case in its relation with reality it
proves to be a multiple fiction and a lie, a duplicitous sign of a world that
13
Many analyses point out the significance of the fact that Elster does not produce
a photograph of his wife but stages the introduction of a live double within a
painterly setting: a tableau vivant (cf. Felleman 2006, Modleski 1988, Peucker
1999).
does not exist.14 Moreover Hitchcock continuously plays with the duality
of presenting the figure of Kim Novak alternately as an erotic, bodily
presence moving in three dimensional space and as a two dimensional
figure, often a silhouette framed within a painterly composition. In this
way he practically re-enacts the main theme of the film on the level of
cinematic representation: the carnal appearance of Kim Novak is repeatedly
objectified (in the spirit of a classic sadistic voyeurism, as Laura Mulvey
described it, 1992), but at the same time he also aestheticizes her, makes
her resemble a beautiful and enigmatic painting. And this is in fact a one
way process in the film: the live woman becomes a picture (and can be
transformed into a picture as Scottie demonstrates with Judy) but the
picture ultimately resists being assigned a single referent, it resists
coming alive definitively and undoubtedly as a single person.
From the point of view of the films meta-narrative about images we
may note the significance of the scene in which Scottie is admiring
Madeleine in the gallery as she is sitting in front of the painting as if in
front of a mirror [Figs. 4.1112]. The figure of the man is presented as
standing in between two other paintings that frame him: on one side we
have the image of a respectable gentleman in a wig, on the other side there
is an image of a young boy. It is as if symbolically he would also be
deconstructed into multiple identities, making the viewer unable to decide
whether to see him in the posture of the mature and cultured, self-
possessed man, or as a boy who is a victim of his own curiosity and
instincts (it is no wonder that several psycho-analytic analyses of the film
emphasize the collusion of cultural and instinctual factors within the film).
The scene may also suggest that the enigmatic and multiplied appearance
of the image of the female protagonist will be a cause of an even more
disturbing shattering of the identity of the male character. (And indeed
between the first and the second appearance of the character played by
14
The interpretation is further complicated by Truffauts hypothesis that in fact
Hitchcock attempted to use the image of Kim Novak to revive on the screen
another, already unattainable actress for him, Grace Kelly, who had already retired
from the world of the cinema. Truffaut writes: Vertigo was undoubtedly a film in
which the leading lady was cast as a substitute for the one Hitchcock had in mind
initially. The actress we see on the screen is a substitute, and the change enhances
the appeal of the movie, since the substitution is the main theme of the picture. A
man who is still in love with a woman he believes to be dead attempts to re-create
the image of the dead woman when he meets up with a girl who is her lookalike.
[] I realized that Vertigo was even more intriguing in the light of the fact that the
director had compelled a substitute to imitate the actress he had initially chosen for
the role (Truffaut 1985, 325).
190 Chapter Four
Kim Novak, Scottie suffers a nervous breakdown.) The theme is emphasized

throughout the film also by the multiplication of the images seen in mirrors
at different points of the narration. The result of these compositions
beyond making us uncertain of the status of the images, and confusing the
real and the illusory is an abstract fragmentation of the realistic image.
The most extreme case of the shattering of cinematic realism can be seen
in the hallucinatory sequence after Madeleines supposed death. What we
see as the projection of Scotties troubled mind [Figs. 4.1320.], the clear
geometrical forms and stylizations of the image15 (making the cinematic
image fuse with the medium of graphic and painterly animation) is in fact
indicative of something that runs as an undercurrent throughout the whole
film (e.g. the abstractions in the seemingly realistic details like the whorl
in Madeleines hair resembling a vortex, or the image of the spiral
staircase becoming like a cubist painting in motion in the protagonists
subjective projection of vertigo, the bold use of colours and points of view,
etc.).
In this way the end of the film can be seen as an allegory of the
impossible mission of Hitchcocks cinema acting as Pygmalions camera:
the multitude of images, fantasies, dreams and tableaux vivants can only
fleetingly assume the form of a bodily shape and the illusion of reality
within the film. This on the one hand can be interpreted as the metaphor of
cinematic mediality itself: it presents the primeval attraction of cinema
originating in the fascination with phantom images. Susan Felleman
summarized this eloquently: As with spirit photography, which is a kind
of ghostly ancestor of these scenarios, as observed by Tom Gunning, we
find an extraordinary conjunction of uncanny themes, the visual double,
the constant recurrence of the same thing, and the fascination with death
and its overcoming through the technical device of mechanical
reproduction. Hitchcocks Scottie is not the only one who indulges in a
form of necrophilia. This form of necrophilia, a form without cadavers
this specular necrophilia we all suffer from it: all cineastes, anyway.
(Felleman 2006, 4748.) Consequently, the kind of necrophilia that
appears in the painterly objectifications running as a leitmotif through the
film can be seen as the equivalent of the directors (and the spectators)
cinephilia, the fascination with seeing the lights and shadows produce the
15
The technique of dcoupage is often identified as one of Hitchcocks most
characteristic devices, although very often they see in it only the function of
emphasis or a kind of cubist formalism (see: Hutchings 2000).
magic presence of things that are in actuality unattainable for us, the
revival of dead persons and long lost worlds for us.16
On the other hand it is also remarkable how the tangible form of the
desired woman appearing in the film always means the identification with
another image, and how ultimately the object of desire falls by way of the
whirlpool of images17 into the void, into a mesmerizing nothingness.
Slavoj iek who analysed Hitchcocks film from the point of view of
Lacans psychoanalysis18 sees one of the main problems raised by Vertigo
in the fact that reality is ruptured by the presence of the female image that
acts as a vertiginous gap into nothingness. The painting and the woman
presented as a painting is nothing else but the material form, the
embodiment of nothingness (iek 1992, 83). The ambiguous identity of
the referent, the dissolution between the boundaries of life and death,
between reality and fiction, the emptying of the image in this way, the
horror of Nothingness are all interpretations that go beyond the usual
scope of classical narratives and add Hitchcock to the paradigm of modern
art.
3. Painting as the Dislocation of the Narrative,

the Transposition into an Abstract Space
In several of Hitchcocks films we see the use of paintings or painterly
images as vehicles for a specific philosophy of morals. In these films the
medial alterity of paintings or painterly compositions placed in the context
of cinema become not only signs of a world of fiction as opposed to
reality, but appear as the explicit projections of the subjective and
inscrutable world of moral sin itself. From this point of view the following
16
Brigitte Peucker in her essay about the cut of representation and the role of
statues and paintings in Hitchcocks films also finds an uncanny parallel between
the disembodiment and dismemberment, the cutting up of female bodies and a self-
reflexive discourse over the nature of cinematic representation. She writes: at
some level, the film and the female corpse function simultaneously as opposites
and equivalents as mirror images in fact (2007, 73).
17
We should note how the main plot of the film is doubled by a subplot involving
Midge, Scotties confidant, who is a designer and an amateur painter and would
very much like to become Scotties object of desire. In her jealousy over
Scotties infatuation with Madeleine, she is also presented as the object of painting,
her face being substituted for that of Carlotta (and implicitly, Madeleine identified
with Carlotta).
18
A similar analysis was performed by Joyce Huntjens (2003).
192 Chapter Four
films seem relevant: Suspicion (1941), Stage Fright (1950), and Strangers
on Train (1951).
There is an interesting scene in Suspicion that has often been discussed
in the literature on Hitchcocks cinema, and in which we see a seemingly
unmotivated introduction of a painting. [Figs. 4.2126.] Joachim Paech
(1989, 67) compares Hitchcocks scene with the famous inserts of the
Picasso paintings in Jean-Luc Godards Pierrot le fou (1965) and
appreciates it mainly from the point of view of its inclusion into the
narrative (in contrast with Godards technique of collage). Stephen Heath
(1986) examines the construction of narrative space in the same scene, and
emphasizes the symmetry of its construction pointing the disruptive effect
of the different spatial construction of the cubist painting. In this disruption
Heath sees a repetition of some other unmotivated spatial jumps which all
convey a sense of unsolved mystery. As the film does not make it clear
even at the end, whether the charming male protagonist played by Cary
Grant (Johnnie) is a killer who also intended to kill his wife, Lina (played
by Joan Fontaine), or the suspicion was merely the product of the
imagination of the overly sensitive wife (and of the spectator manipulated
by suspense). Heath also speaks of the role of another painting in the
scene: the massive portrait of Linas father which bears with all its
Oedipal weight on the whole action of the film,19 (Heath 1986, 379) and
showing Lina as a woman held under the constant scrutiny of the eye of
the father.20 [Fig. 4.27.] The robust portrait substituted for the real father
can be seen as the materialization of paternal authority and will (the
general was against his daughter marrying Johnnie because he thought he
only wanted to marry her for the money, moreover thought that his
daughter would remain an old spinster anyway).
In the scene that is organized around these paintings let us concentrate
now on the quality of abstraction, a feature that will have its analogies in
further examples.21 The dramatic charge of the scene results from the fact
that Lina who had her suspicions for some time that her husband might
be a cold blooded killer is informed by two police inspectors who arrive
at her house that their friend was brutally murdered, and that the
19
Felleman also thinks that the portrait of the father can be seen as a kind of
externalized emblem of the internalized father (2006, 16).
20
Heath also notes how the name employed by Hitchcock reinforces this
overbearing role, observing that the name [is] as crushing as the image: General
MacLaidlaw (Heath 1986, 379).
21
Making the cinematic image cross over into the world of painting through
techniques of abstract visuality (that can be seen as a contrast to realistic
representation) was something that Vertigo also used (see Figs. 3.133.20).
circumstances make her husband one of the suspects [Fig. 4.21]. The news
of the friends death is published in the newspaper, and the woman as if
to confer with her father reads it in the presence of the fathers portrait,
leaning towards it in a gesture seeking contact with him [Fig. 4.23]. The
two inspectors leave, and soon the husband arrives home. Linas fears are
intensified, but we have no tangible evidence regarding the guilt of the
husband, we only learn of extremely suspicious circumstances. The scene
has a circular structure: both the arrival and the departure of the inspectors
are shown in almost the same way. Moreover, when they leave, we have
the repetition of the same frame of Benson, one of the inspectors, gazing at
an abstract (cubist, Picasso-like) painting hanging in the hall [Fig. 4.22,
4.24]. Paech (1989, 67) suggests that in these moments, in which
Hitchcock separates him from the rest of the people in the scene, Benson
almost falls out of the narrative frame.
So the painting on the wall can be interpreted either as a materialization
of the nervous state of mind that begins to dominate Lina and the tension
of the narration, or it can be seen as a diversion, as another space wedged
into the cinematic space that has directly nothing to do with the main
story. We will never find out the real significance of these shots, just like
we will never find out whether Johnnie is guilty or innocent. We should
note, however, the presence of shadows that fracture the cinematic space
in a similar way to a cubist painting. The abstract painting in this way does
not seem to be merely a Hitchcock joke, as Heath considers (1986, 383),
it seems to be much more the representation of the same fictional space
that we see in Rebecca and Vertigo. Compared to the realist space of the
narrative, the painting appears as an opening towards another level of
existence: an abstract space onto which Hitchcock often displaces the
horrifying presence (or better said suspicion) of moral sin, fear or (as we
saw in Vertigo: desire bordering on perversion). Benson happens to cast
his glance over this abstract formation and remains mesmerized for a
moment: it cannot be decided whether this is a mirror of a subjective or of
a moral space that is at once visible and invisible, tangible and
unattainable, somewhere else compared to the narrative. Vision becomes
thematized but not as an activity that enables spatial orientation and
gathering of information, much more as the questioning of all of these.
The painting appears once again as an enigma, one that repeats and
foreshadows the mystery of the main story that remains unsolved in the
film. The disrespect for the golden rules of the classical narratives
(mysteries have to be solved one way or another) is signalled already in
this unmotivated fracture of the narrative. The abstract fragmentation of
the image is duplicated by the play of shadows cast over the images. In the
194 Chapter Four
scene shown after the departure of the inspectors Lina appears as if

entangled in the network of shadows, enmeshed in the spiders web of
her doubt (Heath 1986, 380) [Fig. 4.25] Johnnie, on the other hand, who
comes home at the end of the scene, appears as an enigmatic dark
silhouette framed by the doorway [Fig. 4.26]. His figure gains in this way
an aura of mystery: Hitchcock forces us, the spectators, to interpret him as
merely an image, as the narrative does not offer us enough clues to
understand him. And let us not forget that the image in these films means
nothing else but a vortex into nothingness (inducing vertigo in the viewer).
In this case, it is a conscious play with the already established image of a
male star, as the mechanism that Bordwell calls transtextual motivation22
invites the viewer not to suspect the handsome and debonair Cary Grant
(Johnnie) that he could be a ruthless murderer.23 What Hitchcock does is
nothing more and nothing less than to challenge our reflexes in interpreting
characters based on our presuppositions about the actors previous roles
(his image), and implicitly our capacity of interpreting pictures,
emphasizing once more the inscrutable nature of all images.
We can see a similar play with the expectations of the viewers and the
use of abstract compositions in Stage Fright, a film made in 1950. Here it
is not only that the narration leaves the spectator uninformed, but we have
a very rare case in which the narration deliberately misleads the viewers.
The events shown in the flash-back scene placed at the beginning of the
film are not real. But the viewer has no clue that would suggest that the
character is lying, and therefore no reason to doubt the images. It is only
at the end of the film that it is revealed that these were the fabrications of
the murderer (and a bold play with the viewers reflexes devised by the
master of suspense).
Although Hitchcocks trick works flawlessly (because of the strong
narrative conventions at work24), there are some elements that betray the
duplicity of the flash-back images even beyond the presence of the curtain
22
The most important forms of transtextual motivation are recognizing the
recurrence of a stars persona from film to film and recognizing generic conventions.
(Bordwell 1985, 164.)
23
Because of this, and allegedly at the pressure of the producers, Hitchcock was
considering the possibility of filming an alternative ending that would have cleared
up the suspicions about the character played by Cary Grant and proved his
innocence beyond any doubt, but later decided to use a more ambiguous ending
(see: Truffaut 1985, 142).
24
A detailed analysis of the narrative conventions used in this false flash-back
scene was performed by Francesco Cassetti (1986) in a comparative study of the
narrative strategies of Hitchcock and Antonioni.
at the beginning of the film that might suggest a theatrical play. In the
visual presentation of the images we find something disturbing, much in a
similar way as we had in the scene from Suspicion in which the mediality
of the painting disrupted the self-enclosed narrative space of cinema (and
thus suggested the possible presence of another, darker, more inscrutable
dimension of crime).
Already at the beginning of the scene Hitchcocks penchant for
geometrical visual composition and the use of pictures is striking. The
structure of placing pictures within pictures is repeated in many ways.
First we have it in the almost neutral objects of the setting (pictures
hanging on the wall, painted images on the door) [Figs. 4.2728], then we
have it in the artificiality of the collaged foreground and background (of
the close up of Marlene Dietrich and the Richard Todd seen in the
background, or the two of them appearing as mere silhouettes in the room,
see Figs. 4.2930), and also in the superimpositions of images as a
palimpsest [Figs. 4.3338].
According to the flash-back recollection of the character played by
Todd (Jonathan Cooper) the famous actress played by Dietrich is the
killer, and he is merely her partner in crime, who tries to defend her. Later
it is revealed that the actress is in fact innocent. Although at this point the
two characters appear to be on the same side (both being involved in the
crime), Hitchcock makes a visible effort to place the two figures in a non-
homogeneous space [Fig. 4.29], and in a clear break between foreground
and background emphasizing the space between them, placing them into
different planes of the picture. As the scene continues they are transformed
into plastic shapes (silhouettes) placed into a space typical in appearance
for the painterly stylization of film noir (with mysterious doorways
opening up a world of shadows and lights, shadows doubling the
character, etc.) [Figs. 4.2932]. The film also uses film noir iconography
and conventions in a self-conscious way by exploiting once again the
expectations of the spectators who assume Marlene Dietrich to be a femme
fatale, and therefore are willing to accept her as a murderer. What is even
more interesting is how the film connects the lie to visual composition
(and uses the stylization of the images as a covert commentary over the
narrative). Jonathan does not only recount what happened, but the events
are shown as if filtered through his eyes in a flash-back. In the whole
sequence Hitchcock insists on marking the images as subjective visions:
we see him peeping through the window, we see his memories in the form
of images connected by frequent dissolves. At one point the protagonist
catches a glimpse of an abstract painting on the wall, in a very similar way
as we saw Benson in Suspicion gazing at the cubist painting, and the sight
196 Chapter Four
of the painting seems to exert the same inexplicable attraction for a

moment that almost disjoints him from the flow of the narration: we see
him in several shots in the same frame with this enigmatic painting. [Figs.
4.3942.] The painting introduces again another space into the cinematic
world: it is the space of duplicity and sin that is just as metaphysically
inscrutable as in the other films, and at this point of the narration it is
also unrecognizable. The spiral form seen in the painting may be a visual
representation of the vertigo of sin and that of the unknown, and as such
as an image pre-figuring, reflecting other vertiginous images within the
film. The image of the staircase in itself, enhanced with the unusually
frequent repetition of the dissolves and superimpositions of images, also
projects spiral forms over the close up of the character. [Figs. 4.3338.]
These superimpositions at the same time introduce a visual fragmentation
into the frame making it become similar to an abstract painting; in
addition, other objects appearing in the sequence also repeat one way or
another the figure of the vortex (doorways, the telephone dial, the image of
the quickly turning pages of a book, etc.). The abstract geometry of the
vortex is a recurring visual motif of Hitchcocks cinema, only this time
there is no psychological motivation for the characters to feel as if caught
in a maelstrom of emotions (something that was exploited to the full in
Vertigo where it projected the vision of the protagonist suffering of
vertigo, or in Marnie, 1964, which recounts the story of a psychologically
injured character).25 The layering of these vertiginous forms ultimately
results in the shattering of the image into abstract fragments. This can be
interpreted, without doubt, as a conventional figure representing the mad
murderers fabulations, only this time the murderer is not mad, he is more
likely cold and calculated: it is the act of the crime, of the sin itself that
appears as madness, and the evil that is present in the world.
It is remarkable from this point of view how the film is again
constructed on the level of the images in a circular way. The final setting
in which we see the protagonist who gets more and more entangled in his
lies is a theatre, photographed so as to resemble an abstract whirlpool [Fig.
25
The visual tricks that Hitchcock uses, the overtly artificial, studio settings or
painterly inserts which are consciously non-realistic, as we have seen, are usually
the gateways towards abstract vision and towards another world that is presented
as the realm of crime. The weaving of artificiality into the fabric of a classical
narrative is interpreted by Lesley Brill as a method of creating ambivalent
romances or even as a technique of irony (cf. Brill 1988), and Richard Allen
(1999) concurs that the stylistic self-consciousness and the insistence on artifice,
surface, and masquerade (1999, 69) are prevailing features of Hitchcocks cinema
and contribute to the subversion of romance narratives.
4.43], and the murderer receives an adequate theatrical punishment (deus

ex machina): he is killed by the iron curtain falling down like a huge
picture frame (echoing the first images of the theatrical curtain) and acting
like a guillotine. Hitchcock spins the visual pun even further as he shows
the surviving characters of the story leave the theatre after the death of the
villain through a corridor resembling yet another vortex [Fig. 4.44].
The fracturing of the visual composition, the displacement of the world
of moral sin into an other, abstract space, one that is medially marked as
different from the cinematic space (by the introduction of paintings or
visual effects resembling paintings) is something that we can also observe
in another prominent Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train (1951). In this
film, in addition to the previously mentioned works, we have a murderer
who relates to the character that can be seen as his victim as a double, an
evil doppelgnger, who threatens to dislocate the victims whole world
from rational reality into this irrational world of sin revealed in the
painterly spaces. The film itself is a nightmarish story of an absurd fantasy
coming to life and that escapes from under the control of the protagonist.
The secret wish of Guy (Farley Granger), a celebrated tennis player, to
have his wife killed is fulfilled by a lunatic murderer, Bruno (Robert
Walker), who appears not only as the negative alter-ego of the protagonist,
but who is also frequently associated with painting or painterly compositions.
In the story laden with expressionist26 and romantic elements we have
the opposing characters of the tennis player who lives both on the bright
side of life (in every sense) and leads a dynamic, successful lifestyle,
whereas his counterpart, the looser Bruno kills his victim under the cover
of the night and appears in most of the shots as a static figure. One of the
most often quoted examples of this is the scene in which we see the figure
of Bruno as a haunting apparition during a tennis match that shows the
tennis player, Guy, in full action and the camera also tracks the perpetual
movement of the crowd, the rhythmic turning of the heads as people
follow the exciting game as Bruno remains motionless as a statue. The
most revealing analogy, however, that defines Bruno is the painting shown
at the beginning of the film. [Figs. 4.4546.] His home where he still
lives with his neurotic mother whom he continually teases with his morbid
fantasies is crowded with paintings, and his mother is also presented to
be an amateur painter. The picture painted by his mother is remarkable
first of all because of its ambiguity (again exemplifying the semantic
vertigo of images within a Hitchcock film): Bruno considers the ghastly,
26
With regards to the use of the expressionist elements see the analysis of Dellolio
(2003).
198 Chapter Four
expressionist style portrait to be a representation of his father, while his

mother claims that it is a portrayal of St. Francis, the viewer, nevertheless,
may be drawn to sensing in it a condensed imprint of what Bruno stands
for, and feel that it is a portrait similar to the picture of Dorian Gray, a
romantic mirror image revealing the true face behind the otherwise
impeccable faade of a dandy.27 This is reinforced by the composition of
the shot in which Bruno faces the painting as if looking into a mirror,
while his own head is being framed by the dark background of another
painting hanging on the wall behind him. And maybe it is not by accident
that the most memorable feature of the painting is exactly the eerie sight of
the bulging eyes, as Bruno himself is often presented in the pose of an
observer who keeps a visual track of his targeted victims and in several
shots Hitchcock emphasizes his ardent gaze (cf. Meola 2002, 118119).28
The murder itself occurs within the location of the Magic Island.
Enveiled in darkness with the carnivalesque and fragile constructions of an
amusement park, this is not the representation of the actual world people
live in, but a Foucauldian heterotopia (Foucault 1986), a site of fiction
and imagination. In the images shown before the murder with the shadows
projected onto the wall of the tunnel [Fig. 4.47] Hitchcock already
manages transports the viewer onto another level: after having successfully
removed his heroes from reality and placed them onto the island of
fiction where the perverse fantasy of the murderer can be enacted, he also
transports the viewer from the realm of realistic representation into a
27
Thomas Elsaesser (1999) describes the dandy not only as a recurring figure of
Hitchcocks films, but as a model for the personal myth of Hitchcock himself. The
main characteristics of a dandy according to Elsaesser are: rituals that give the
impression of perfect idleness and self-control, the elimination of randomness from
life, the rule of artifice over naturalness, a wish to be in perfect control over
everything, the goal to make life ones own creation (life imitates art, as Oscar
Wilde believed). It is not only Bruno who can be seen as such a dandy, but it is
Hitchcock himself with his trademark, sphinx-like silhouette image who is
obsessed with style and pursues perfection to the point of perversity like a dandy
(Elsaesser 1999, 4). The attitude of the dandy, the theme of the demonic
doppelgnger connected to the motif of the painting already occurred in a female
version in the already mentioned earlier film, Rebecca. In Strangers on a Train
because we see this Dorian Gray-like painting before the murder taking place and
the unfolding of the nightmarish plot it actually appears as if life in the film would
imitate the art seen in the picture.
28
Frank M. Meola (2002) considers Bruno to be the figure of the outsider who
always watches the others from a distance or looks in at them from the outside, and
finds this to be a motif that can be linked to an Emersonian reading of Hitchcocks
films.
surrealistic and painterly setting. We can notice once more the placement
of the act of sin onto an other, abstract space and its projection into a
shattered visual spectacle. Natural environment is replaced by artifice, by
painterly stylization and the transition is marked by the repeated
fragmentation, dislocation and suspension of vision. Bruno approaches
Miriam and talks to her from the off screen space (outside the visible
frame) while her face emerges from the surrounding darkness in the
artificial light of the cigarette lighter lit by Bruno, who in this way is
visually de-contextualizing her features [Fig. 4.48]. His figure stepping in
front of the camera also hides this image of Miriams face from the gaze of
the spectator for a moment [Fig. 4.49]. At the time of the attack itself
Miriam closes her eyes first then the whole scene is shown through the
lenses of Miriams glasses that fall on the ground as Bruno begins to
strangle her [Fig. 4.50]. The scene of the murder is thus shown to the
viewer from the non-human, abstract and distorted viewpoint of the lenses
in a highly artificial composition (as well as in unnatural slowness and
silence) [Figs. 4.5152]. After the murder the scene in which Guy and
Bruno meet is also highly stylized in visual composition. The faces of the
two men shown alternately behind the iron rails emphasize the mirror-like
position of the characters and the ambivalence between murderer and
victim characteristic for Hitchcock [Figs. 4.5354.]. Bruno fulfilled the
secret wish of Guy, so Hitchcock shows them both trapped within the
space broken up by the iron rails and we no longer see Guys world tilted
out of balance by Brunos skewed viewpoint [Fig. 4.55]. The broken
glasses that the murderer proudly produces as evidence for the
accomplishment of his hideous deed become the emblem of the violently
shattered vision and the symbolic gateway into a world (a distorted,
crushed space projected by the broken lenses) in which such murderous
acts can take place [Fig. 4.56]. The iron railing merely reiterates the visual
pattern already present in earlier images cutting up the frame.29 When the
two characters shown as each others doubles observe the policeman
arriving at Guys home, they are forced to look at him from behind the
rails, through the thick interlacing of the dark lines breaking up their field
of vision [Figs. 4.5758].30 Later on we will see the same mesh of dark
29
Elsaesser notes the first appearance of this visual motif in the image of the two
railway tracks forming a double cross shown at the beginning of the film
(Elsaesser 1999, 8).
30
Brill (1988, 7778) and Walker (2005, 118) interpret the image of the bars
simply as symbols of entrapment. Rothman sees in the recurring image of bars
within Hitchcocks films the mark of the boundaries of the cinematic frame,
something that stands for the barrier of the screen itself announcing to the viewer
200 Chapter Four
lines of shadows projected over the walls of Brunos flat where Guy
apparently goes with the intention to finally pay his debt and kill
Brunos father. The spider-web composition of shadows that is so
characteristic for Hitchcock is remarkable this time not only because of its
graphic quality but because the shadow projected over the wall that we see
behind Guy can be ambivalently seen as belonging to both of the men. The
shadow that appears between the two doppelgnger characters seems to be
placed in between them, as if the evil embodied in the shadow would not
actually be part of any of them, but would exist only in this immaterial
form: as an abstract image projection that can be linked to both of them as
a third entity [Fig. 4.59].
Although Guy and Bruno seem to be both repeatedly placed into such
painterly contexts within the images, there is a slight difference in the style
of imagery associated with them. The main style that defines Bruno is a
kind of abstract expressionism that we saw at the beginning of the film in
the painted Dorian Gray-like portrait, Guy, on the other hand is most often
placed in a kind of jail-bar imagery of geometrical forms suggestive of the
circumstances that constrain him [Fig. 4.59]. The splattering of spots of
paint that is remarkable in the style of the painting in Brunos home is
reiterated in the prints seen on the curtain in his home as well as on his
robe [Fig. 4.60]. And while the images of the bars can be interpreted as the
projections of the fragility of the moral world and of the situations
threatening to entrap Guy, the world of the painting and Brunos uncanny
portraiture as a painterly apparition can be seen nothing short of the
imprint of the inscrutable chaos (of the world of crime) itself. Hitchcocks
later film North by Northwest (1959) presents the chaos of the world of
crime driven to the extreme through a multiplication of absurd turns in the
plot and the fragmentation of the narrative. The title that echoes a line
referring to Hamlets madness in Shakespeares play (giving the spatial
extension of Hamlets insanity) is a typical instance of such an abstract
stylization: the madness of crime is given absurd, geographical coordinates
and the film repeatedly displays geometrical lines and forms that go from
north to northwest across the screen. This clue, however, does not lead
the viewer to a closer understanding either of the abundance of the
concrete acts of crime shown in the film or of the nature of crime in
general, that remains unsolved as pure lunacy.
that that we have arrived at the limit of our access, remarking that it is also
associated with sexual fear and the specific threat of loss of control (1982, 33).
4. Reading Images in Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945)

The 1950s are generally considered as Hitchcocks most mature period,31
the 1940s on the other hand are remarkable because this is the time when
Hitchcock seemed to experiment more with the possibilities of the
cinematic medium. This is explained perhaps by the fact that this is the
time he moved to America where the new technological possibilities
fascinated and inspired him. The success of his first film made in America,
Rebecca (1940) opened for him the door towards an artistic freedom that
was unprecedented within the Hollywood studio system. Almost all the
films made immediately after Rebecca in the 1940s can be regarded as
experiments testing the possibilities of the medium.32 He set himself
particular boundaries and played with the ways of transgressing them. In
Lifeboat (1944) he placed the entire narrative into the limited space of a
lifeboat at the mercy of the sea and tested the possibilities of a dramaturgy
that can balance the monotony ensuing from the spatial confinement. In
Rope (1948) he photographs a flat consisting of several rooms in a way
that the viewer sees a continuous travelling of the camera through the
spaces shown in the film and follows the characters without interruptions
in an incessant crescendo of dramatic tension. Deleuze likens the strict
delimitation of the cinematic frame throughout the film to a weaving
process producing an infinitely long tapestry writing that: the frame is
like the posts which hold the warp threads, whilst the action constitutes
merely the mobile shuttle which passes above and below. What becomes
visible in this way and what matters is not who did the action what
Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit but neither is it the action
itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it
are caught (Deleuze 1986, 200). The filmic image becomes in this way
the projection of a mental image. In fact, both Lifeboat and Rope play with
the confrontation of cinematic vision and the dramaturgy of theatrical
space, and introduce into typical situations that would already work well in
theatre unique tensions resulting from the mediality of cinema. In these
films the role of the limitations analogous to theatrical conventions, the
confinement of time and space, is to indicate the position from where the
challenge for the cinematic medium can be articulated and from where the
techniques of cinema may open up the image towards the perception of the
31
This is the decade in which he made prominent works like: I Confess (1953),
Rear Window (1954), Dial M. for Murder (1954), The Wrong Man (1957), Vertigo
(1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960).
32
The following films can be listed here: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat
(1944), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and Rope (1948).
202 Chapter Four
specificity of the cinematic itself. The aim of these experiments is the

repeated assertion of Hitchcocks control over the medium of cinema: in
the 1940s Hitchcock works an auteur filmmaker who juggles well
established narrative conventions, masters the art of images like a painter
and acts as an all powerful manipulator of the viewer. Like a modern
Prospero, within the limited space of his island, as if by a single stroke of
his magic wand, he feeds us information, conjures up images, teases our
imagination and continuously spellbinds us.
Nevertheless, whereas in the examples quoted earlier there is a fusion
between the techniques characteristic of theatre and the techniques of
cinema, in Spellbound (1945) there is a notable difference in the use of
inter-art relations: Hitchcock lets the elements of painting included in the
film to almost hybridize the fabric of cinema. In essence Spellbound can
be seen as a film about the spellbinding effect of images, or more precisely
about the passion for the interpretation of images: elucidating the enigma
of a crime in the film means no less and no more than solving the enigma
of a series of images. In the film we follow the story of unravelling a
mystery wrapped around a protagonist, John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck),
who suffers from amnesia and whose identity is therefore uncertain (he
might be a murderer or a victim, or just insane). In the course of an
amateur investigation that resembles the conventional detective work seen
in crime stories he is helped by a young woman psychiatrist, Dr.
Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) trained in Freudian psychoanalysis
who interprets his dreams. In the interpretation of the film itself it is
therefore understandable that this psychoanalytic viewpoint is considered
to be the most fertile.33 As an alternative to this approach, however, we
may also find another viewpoint, one that relies on a reflexive reading of
the film and has the purpose of concentrating on aspects that are related to
what the film reveals about the mediality of cinema, a mediality that in this
case becomes visible via the introduction of imagery resembling paintings.
The main theme of the film from this respect can be identified in
connecting vision and reflexion, seeing images and reading images.
Dualities are characteristic for the whole film. First of all the film can
be included within the framework of two classical genres: it can be viewed
both as a romance concentrating on the love story between its male and
female protagonists and as a thriller centred on the theme of revealing the
truth about a murder. The emphasis on the love story in generally
considered as a mistake, critics have often said that Hitchcock lost the
33
Both Freuds and Lacans ideas may prove fruitful in analyzing the film (cf.
Samuels 1998, 2745; Boyd 2000).
balance in the unfolding of the two causal lines of the narrative. The film
also presents a duality in the introduction of the characters: we cannot
decide whether the action is centred on the amnesiac man, who does not
know who he is and is merely a puppet in the whirlwind of the action that
unfolds, or whether the protagonist is in fact the woman who plays a much
more active role in the course of the action and who finally determines the
fate of the man. This, of course, could be a typical film noir situation in
which the man who has lost control over his life falls into the hands of a
femme fatale,34 however, the problems are finally solved (and not caused)
by the woman detective who uses her sheer intelligence to decipher the
mystery.35
The ambivalence of crime that is so characteristic of Hitchcock also
appears here, as Rohmer and Chabrol wrote in their book: one does not
commit a crime in Hitchcock, one delivers it up, one gives it or one
exchanges it (quoted by Deleuze 1986, 201). The main character who
thinks he is somebody else, assumes the guilt of the murder, but does so
only because of his own suppressed feelings of guilt over his actions as a
child (that resulted in the accidental death of his brother): he exchanges in
this way one crime with another. But the most interesting duality of
Spellbound can be perceived between cinema and painting, between the
alternation of a fairly conventional, transparent style in cinema and an
ostentatious painterly stylization of the images. Cinema and painting are
intertwined in three major scenes in the film; all three scenes are at key
points in the narration (at the beginning of the romance between the main
characters, at the climax of the film and at the end, when the mystery is
solved. All three scenes can be interpreted metaphorically and all three
scenes are centred on the motif of the eye or vision (and imply the
necessity of reading the images).
4.1. The Image of the Series of Doors Opening Up

The moment in which John Ballantyne and Constance fall in love is
depicted in the film by a beautiful metaphorical composition of images.
Hitchcock was famous for not presenting directly the erotic attraction
34
Some books on Hitchcock therefore even include the film into the noir category,
alongside the earlier mentioned Rebecca and Stage Fright.
35
Hitchcock uses female characters who act as detectives in other films as well: for
example in Stage Fright (1950) or Rear Window (1954). But in films like these the
adventurous woman detective finally does get into trouble and has to be rescued by
her male partner, or in critical situations has to surrender the leading role in the
action to the male character (e.g. The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956).
204 Chapter Four
between the characters but resorting to the use of some kind of metaphor.
In this case what we see is that John and Constance look into each others
eyes and as the scene progresses, suddenly, over the closed eyelids of the
woman superimposed images of a series of doors appear that gradually
take the place of the eyes and open up one after the other deeper and
deeper within the frame. [Figs. 4.6166.] The doors appearing in the place
of the eye (and the gaze) are clearly metaphorically associated with the
previous image; the dissolve marks the transition from the conventional
picture towards the poetic association. What is surprising is not only the
unexpected nature of this association, its collage effect within the classical
narrative style, but the fact that instead of the image of the eyes, it is an
image of an object that appears and what results is the opposite of an
anthropomorphic visual composition that substitutes the human eye (a
frequently used symbol) with an almost banal image made abstract by way
of repetition and that gets to be somehow invested with poetic and
emotional charge. The close-up of the eyes would be a typically cinematic
solution for eliciting a direct psychological identification of the viewer (it
would seem as if we ourselves would lean towards the face of the woman
and look into her eyes). The doors appearing instead of the eyes, however,
can remind us of paintings like those of Magritte where similar surprising
substitutions or framings occur.36 In this way the conventional scene
between the two people falling in love gains an almost surrealist stylization.
The scene is suggestive; however, its meaning is far from being
explicit or without ambivalence. We may interpret it as the opening up of
an inner vision behind the closed eyes, or as the metaphor of the eye as
the doorway to the soul, as the projection of the gesture of the lovers
gaze taking possession of the other person, even as the image of a
symbolic invitation from the part of the woman, etc. Nevertheless, all
these possible readings can make us realize that it is far from obvious,
whether the image is a metaphor standing for the gaze of the man or the
woman. Does the male gaze penetrate the image of the woman here (and
objectify her as feminist theories have taught us), or is this the projection
of the inner emotions of the woman (letting down her guard and opening
up)? Unlike in classical Hollywood genre films in this sequence the
mans gaze does not make the face of the woman emerge from the
background, but instead, quite the opposite happens, the charming face is
effaced by the superimpositions, so we might rightfully consider the
36
The scene may also remind us of the graphic vortex that appears superimposed
over the image of the eye at the beginning of Vertigo, a film made more than a
decade later (1958) in the credit sequence designed for Hitchcock by the famous
Saul Bass.
images as attributes of the woman herself. The overlaying of the images

halts the conventional order of the narrative, and this stylistic excess does
not only have an increased emotional effect on the viewer, but it also
facilitates a meta-linguistic reading: the sequence may appear like the
metaphor of metaphor itself within cinema, an image of the image opening
up towards yet another image, the way a metaphor always operates. At the
same time the sight of the frames within the frames reveals one of the
basic mechanisms of the transition from the language of cinema into the
language of painting: during the sequence we progress from the concrete
image towards an abstract composition. (The eye is like a door, so the eye
can be substituted with the image of the door, and the key feature of the
door proves to be its frame that gains relevance through the repetitions and
eventually is stripped down to the meaning of an image frame revealing
newer and newer visual layers.)
This kind of opening up towards inanimate, abstract forms within an
image is characteristic of the painterly techniques used both in the earlier
expressionist films and in some of the seminal modernist art films.
Expressionism is known to blur the boundaries between living environment
and the world of objects; it continually morphs one into the other, as a
projection of the feeling of anxiety (generated by the perception of the
ubiquitous presence of irrational evil in the world), either objects look as if
coming alive, or the living are shown similarly to inanimate objects. The
emphasis on the world of objects and the geometrical forms of the urban
environment also appears in the films of several remarkable modernist
authors (e.g. Jacques Tati, Michelangelo Antonioni, etc.).
Hitchcocks solution may seem nothing more than a simple play
upon the images, an unusual poetic moment that nevertheless dislocates
the image from the context of the narrative into a purely pictorial world, an
abstract space once more, just like in the previous examples, a world
where Hitchcock, surprisingly and ambivalently, places the moment of
erotic attraction into the visual imagery of the same unsettling vortex that
is usually the marker of the inscrutable world of uncontrollable and sinful
impulses (crime, lust, etc.).
What is an interesting feature in the sequence in addition to all these is
the fact that it is the motif of the door that appears here and not what
would have been much more conventional the image of the window in
association with the motif of the eyes. The window would have emphasized
the gaze itself, the image appearing within the opening provided by the
window: the world as a picture revealed within a frame. In this way, it is
not the gaze, but an emotion, a sensation that is emphasized. (The symbol
of the closed eyes suggesting a different kind of sight, an inner vision,
206 Chapter Four
only strengthens this.37) The door, in contrast to the window, does not
suggest a picture within a frame, but a threshold and an aperture. As a
universal symbol it is generally considered a feminine symbol (see Cirlot
2001, 85), so it is even more plausible in this way that the image may be
attached to the woman. In a symbolic interpretation the gate or the door
can be seen as the antithesis of the wall (as an obstacle), the opening space
becomes a gateway towards a symbolic totality that just like the
periphery of a circle has an organic connection with the inner essence.38
The door in this way does not only divide space, but it stands between
worlds, signifying at the same time separation and passage. 39 The door
that opens adds the element of action to such a symbolism; the connection
is made not only through the act of gazing, as a symbolic act, but as a
concrete action. As Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1969, 779) write the door is
not only a sign of a threshold, but it is an explicit invitation for a journey
into another space.40 The two worlds that are connected in this Hitchcock
sequence are, of course, the man and the woman, John Ballantyne and
Constance.
In what follows the dramaturgy of the film will be built on a chiasmic
inversion of the situation presented in these images: instead of the active
37
The symbol was one of the favourite of the surrealists. See for example the well-
known photo collage of the surrealist artists in which everybody is portrayed with
his eyes closed (among them we see Dali and Buuel, too).
38
This symbolism can be seen at work for example in the fact that the doors are
usually placed opposite the altar in churches, as if to mirror the altar and for this
reason the doors are usually given an enhanced significance through their
excessive ornaments.
39
From an anthropomorphic viewpoint the windows can be equated with the eyes
of the body, while the door to the mouth that leads the way into the inside of the
body (one can see this in drawings made by children or made for children). The
window connecting the notions of knowledge and vision is often interpreted as
the image of consciousness, of being alert, whereas the door is usually seen as an
aperture or closure towards more mystical and hidden contents (cf. Cirlot 2001,
373). The archetypal narrative of this can be found beside in several folk tales in
the story of Bluebeards Castle in which a series of locked doors hiding secrets
play the central role. Hitchcocks Spellbound could also be compared to Fritz
Langs film The Secret beyond the Door (1947) in which similarly we have a
woman in the role of an amateur detective who tries to uncover the secrets hidden
in the subconscious of the loved man, and in which these secrets are materialized
in a bizarre collection of rooms.
40
In this line of argument I tried to emphasize the differences between the two
figures, although, it has to be mentioned that the door and the window have several
common features on a symbolic level (the duality of separation and passage
implied by them is such a feature, for example).
man who takes possession of the woman with his gaze, we will see a
helpless man under the constant scrutiny of the woman, moreover, the
motif of the closed eyes of the man will prove to be extremely important,
as it will be his dreams that will help the solving of the mystery.
Moreover, the woman seen in this sequence as closing her eyes, as if
surrendering to the conquest of the man, is the one who will interpret the
dreams of the man and will be able to see the signs in the world that can be
matched with the symbols of the dream, and it is the woman who will
actively penetrate this dream world and find the source of the trauma that
haunts the man. So the mechanism of the film rests on the situation of one
of the characters (the man) seeing certain images (with his closed eyes)
and the other character (the woman) reading these images by inverting
the relationship seen in the image of the opening doors and stepping into
the mysterious world of the mans dreams. The duality in this way
appears, on the one hand, as the dialectics between secret and revelation,
known and unknown, conscious and unconscious, visible and invisible. At
the same time, however, the images emphasize a medial dichotomy of the
image that connects cinema and painting, and that goes beyond such
symbolism and initiates an intermedial oscillation that will continue and
amplify in the dream sequence that can be seen later. In fact, it is this
painterly concept of the dream that bears out retroactively the unusual
nature of this sequence of opening doors and that will also anticipate the
unusual, painterly effect seen at the end of the film.
4.2. The Dream Sequence

In the scene preceding the famous dream sequence of the film Constance,
the woman psychiatrist in love with her patient, takes the amnesiac young
man to her mentor, an old professor resembling Freud.41 In a scene full of
characteristic Hitchcockian suspense and ambivalence [Figs. 4.6768] the
patient approaches the old psychiatrist with a razor and we see the possible
weapon in an extreme close up, and as we do not know whether John is a
murderer or not, we fear for the old mans life as John behaves like a
sleepwalker. But the professor gives him a glass of milk in which he
previously put some strong sedative, and consequently the young man falls
asleep. The figure of the old man is shot in the scene from a bizarre
perspective, through the bottom of the glass of milk, through a similarly
distorted lens as the one we saw in the murder scene of Strangers on a
41
Hitchcock considered the film as one of the first major attempts to use Freuds
ideas in a film.
208 Chapter Four
Train in which the death of the woman was recorded from the perspective
of her glasses falling to the ground. The paradigm is actually the same:
suddenly the conventional space is exchanged with another, unearthly
spatial construction, a context in which murder (can) occur. In this case
Hitchcock merely teases the viewers and there is no murder, only the
possibility of one hovering over the images. However, on the following
day Constance and the professor begin to analyse in detail another set of
weird images, those that John saw in his dream. The images that appear in
the form of a flash back were designed by Salvador Dali, and although
Dalis surrealist style is clearly distinguishable in the images, the sequence
cannot only be interpreted as a pastiche of Dalis painting.42 [Figs. 4.69
76.] In the sequence it is not only cinema that is doubled/overwritten by
painting but the protagonist becomes also doubled. On the one hand we
have the man (Gregory Peck) we see at the beginning of the film arriving
at Green Manors as Dr. Edwardes, but this proves to be a misconception,
as it turns out to be merely an assumed identity. On the other hand we
have his real self that appears in the dream projection of his
unconscious, however, we can only see this as a painting.43 The dream
appears as a painterly veil that overlays the screen and conceals the images
of reality from our sight (the gesture of covering up reality is
emphasized by the symbolism of the theatrical curtains and the masks that
hide the faces in the dream). What is also remarkable in the visual and
spatial design of the dream sequence is that it reflects not only Dalis
surrealist style put in the service of the Freudian concept, but is also makes
extensive use of the type of deep focus cinematography that became the
42
As we know from Truffauts discussions with Hitchcock (1985, 165), the
director adjusted Dalis sketches to his own concept and was only partly faithful to
the original ideas of the painter. The use of the painterly effects was a conscious
stylistic choice and not a gesture meant to serve publicity reasons. Hitchcock
confesses: I wanted to convey the dream with great visual sharpness and clarity,
sharper than the film itself. I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of
his work. Chirico has the same quality, you know, the long shadows, the infinity of
distance and the converging lines of perspective (Truffaut 1985, 165).
43
The film offers a variation and a notable inversion of the way Rebecca and
Vertigo presented the issues of images. Paintings in those films only seemed to
contain relevant information for the protagonists, but in fact they deceived them.
The identification with paintings did not result in the strengthening of the identity
of the characters; on the contrary, they lead to the questioning of their identity.
Joan Fontaine did not win the coveted status of the respectable Mrs. De Winter in
Rebecca, but she almost lost it as a result of dressing up like a painting. The
identification of Madeleine in Vertigo with a static imagery resembling a painting
served the purpose of hiding her real identity from the viewer.
trademark of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland in the 1940s [see Fig. 4.73].
In order to unveil the truth we have to make the correspondence between
the world of the dream (the painting) and the world of reality (the fictive
world created by the film), we have to be able to cut the cover and step
into one world from the other, the image of the giant scissors cutting
through the image of the eyes (as the eyes are in fact painted on sheets that
cover another layer in the dream) suggest the necessity of the cutting open
of the world of the painting in order to reach the transparent cinematic
representation we are looking for in a classical film.44 [Figs. 4.7172.] The
gesture of cutting the eye may remind us of the famous introductory image
of Buuels Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou, 1929), and may be not
only the metaphor of the other vision (or subconscious) as used by the
surrealist, but it can be seen as an emblematic image for the Hitchcockian
broken up vision, the aggressively manipulated eye.
The possibility of cutting through the cover of the painting and
reaching the images of reality hidden behind is paradoxically facilitated by
its inversion. John Ballantyne is for example repeatedly shocked by the
appearance of parallel lines on different objects around him. In his
obsession with these lines it is the transformation of the concrete reality
into an abstract painterly (purely visual) form that can make the viewer
aware of the existence of another type of perception of the visual
environment, and the dream sequence only makes this already introduced
other gaze explicit by the introduction of the symbolism of the eye that
has to be cut, of the covers that have to be removed, and allegorizes the
whole process of crossing from one ontological level to another in the
form of overwriting cinematic transparency with painterly obscurity,
abstraction, and surrealism. In this process Hitchcock once again
successfully displaces the actual crime into this markedly other world,
and marks this otherness by way of introducing the recognizable stylistic
features of painting (in this case Salvador Dalis well-known style in
painting).
44
Brigitte Peucker (2007) suggests several other instances in Hitchcocks films in
which some kind of other representation (e.g. a statue in North by Northwest) has
to be shattered in order to (metaphorically) reach the film itself, in which the
cinematic appears in the cut of representation.
210 Chapter Four
4.3. The Painterly Effect of the Squirt of Blood towards

the Off-Screen Space
At the end of the film Constance uncovers the real murderer, and in a final
highly tensional scene, we see how the murderer first threatens Constance
with his revolver, then turns the weapon towards himself and commits
suicide. [Figs. 4.7782.] We see the woman in the far background opening
the door and leaving the room behind the giant close up of the revolver.
The deadly weapon is then turned slowly towards the camera like a cannon
barrel and the shot is fired. For a moment the screen turns blank and in the
context of the black and white film, as a highly unusual effect, for a few
seconds we see a splash of red colour filling the frame [Fig. 4.84]. The
scene is ended with the image of smoke shown again in black and white
and quite a lengthy effect of a fade to black (to mark the transition towards
an entirely different scene narrated on a much lighter tone in which we
are told of the happy ending of the romantic love story of the young
couple).
The splash of red colour lasts only a few seconds and puzzles the
spectator. (One may even not be sure if ones eyes have not been deceived:
did we really see red, or was it just our overexcited imagination?) What is
important, however, is not what we see but what this fleeting image
performs in the film: this is a kind of transgression again from a
perceptible, outer world into an emotionally charged inner image, from
the visible into the invisible. What we do not see is the death of the
character, Dr. Murchison. And what is not clear to us is why the splash of
red colour covers the screen as the gun goes off. Naturally, it could be
interpreted as the image of blood spilt by the gunshot, signalling the death
of the character. But why does Hitchcock use such an unusual way of
showing the death of the character, and why the sudden, unexpected use of
colour within an otherwise all black and white movie? Moreover there is
also a logical inversion in the scene that blurs the boundaries between
cause and effect as we are shown the effect (the image of blood that
shocks the viewer, spilt as the consequence of the shot) through the image
of the cause (the image of the shot itself is coloured in red). As a result of
this condensation it is the same frame that shows within a flash as if a
mirror image reflected upon itself the gun and the result of the shot and
elicits the immediate, instinctive emotional response of the viewer who
sees the suicide. The image therefore is primarily not recording the
suicide, but seems to be a anticipating, triggering in the viewer (as the
gun is also pointed at the spectator) as a strong impulse the feeling of the
imminent death of the character.
Such a complex performative effect of the filmic image is present in all

the three sequences discussed so far, and it is always made possible
through overwriting of the transparent filmic image some form of
painterly techniques. And this painterly vision that cuts through the
conventional transparency of the screen does not only facilitate an
imaginary leap beyond the world of the screen, onto another level in the
fiction (where crimes and hidden desires are lodged), but it can as we see
it in this final painterly effect facilitate a transgression into the
opposite direction, towards the world in front of the screen, towards the
inner vision of the spectator.45 The image of the series of doors opening up
one after the other is a metaphor among a series of other things (of the
subconscious, the woman opening up in front of the man etc.) of the
viewers passage from the concrete, tangible representation towards the
abstract and the figurative. The dream sequence is an allegory: it sets up a
parallel between a painting coming alive and a filmic sequence of events
and the relationship between the two levels (painting and film) becomes
the organizing principle of the narrative:46 this correspondence has to be
discovered, the meaning of the details in the painterly dream have to be
found and from those a logic of cause and effect must be reconstructed and
in this way the interpretation of the dream images is equated with the
solving of the murder. The last sequence of the spurt of red colour does
something entirely different: namely it does not metaphorize or allegorize,
it does something: it startles us, it exerts and immediate emotional and
intellectual response, it is directed towards us, it addresses us directly, as if
splashing into our face. The connection between techniques of painting
and cinema is established here too (just like in the dream sequence)
through the use of the extreme depth of field within the frame. Hitchcock
seems to consciously give a visual rendering of the feeling we have when
seeing such images, as Bazin describes it, this technique resembles a fully
extended slingshot in which a kind of systematic extension in depth of
reality, as if that reality were sketched on a rubber band that he would take
pleasure first in pulling back to scare us, second in letting go right into our
faces (Bazin 1997, 9). This time we have literally a shot into our faces
(not of a sling but of a revolver), the picture that was previously extended
45
As such it can be seen as an inversion of the logic of the opening doors which
direct the viewer toward the depth of the image and the subjective world of the
characters.
46
Perhaps it is also ironic that it is the sequence based on Dalis designs that
presents the viewer with the perfect legibility of the images, while Hitchcocks
original constructions in the other two sequences discussed here both convey a
sense of irreducible ambiguity.
212 Chapter Four
excessively towards the depth of field now smashes into our eyes making
us blink. The image at the same time seems to paraphrase the emblematic
image of the cinema of attractions that Tom Gunning speaks about: the
close up of the gangster shooting towards the audience in Porters The
Great Train Robbery (1903) that can be considered as a direct assault on
the spectator (the spectacularly enlarged outlaw unloading his pistol in our
faces) (Gunning 1990, 61). From all three sequences analysed here this
can exemplify best how the cinema of attractions operates: the self-
enclosed world of the screen is ruptured and the screen scenes energy
moves outward towards the acknowledged spectator rather than inward
towards the situations based on the characters (Gunning 1990, 59).
Beside all these attractions the sudden appearance of the colour red
should also be addressed separately. First of all because it is something
that can be directly linked to the attractive style of Expressionism (as
practiced by Eisenstein, for example), Deleuze considers that:
expressionism keeps on painting the world red on red; the one harking
back to the frightful non-organic life of things, the other to the sublime,
non-psychological life of the spirit. Expressionism attains the cry []
which marks the horror of non-organic life as much as the opening-up of a
spiritual universe which may be illusory (Deleuze 1986, 54). This image
of the spurt of red is such a cry, what makes it remarkable, however, is
that it is ore like the fragment of a cry which nonetheless manages to
introduce after all the ambivalences disentangled in the narrative yet
another puzzle that remains unsolved. There are a series of questions that
arise in the viewer: is Hitchcock painting the image of the sound of the
revolver (as if in a cartoon?) or does he want to signal the death of the
character in a single metonymic image, is it an icon or an index? Or is this
a way of making a visual representation of the astonishment of the
spectator? Is this a banal image of blood or is it again an image that flashes
through the screen coming from a world that only painting can portray,
rupturing the conventional cinematic space of the narrative? Does this red
mirror a sensation (a perfect correspondence of the viewpoints shared by
the character and the viewer in the moment of death) or introduce a
moment of (ironic) reflection over the action? What is more emphatic: the
cinematic aspect of the image or the painterly vision? Did Hitchcock
film something here (the squirt of blood) or he merely covered the
celluloid with a blotch of red paint, so literally the realistic filmic image
disappeared behind the layer of paint? (And if we stop the motion of the
images and make a frame by frame analysis of the sequence we will see
that this is exactly what was done here: the black and white images were
painted over; moreover, the form of the splash resembles very much the
forms we see in the graphic novels rendering shots or loud noise effects.)
But can we really consider this an abstraction taken into account how
quickly it flashes over the screen and how intense it is in the emotions it
generates? Are we being shown anything here or are we just pushed
towards a certain state of mind? Is this almost subliminal effect a mere
play upon our sensations?
The spellbinding bond between cinema and painting has never been
more confusing as in this fracture of a minute, where the painterly effect
seemingly enhances the visual impact of the cinematic language but in fact
it also introduces into it an ambivalence that is difficult to unravel. The
flow of the narrative denouement subsumes this strange image, and the
film quickly moves towards the finale of the story, nevertheless, the
painterly splatter of colour is also a mark of the rupture in the cinematic
vision, something perceivably other (even if for a very small time) in the
context of a classical film language.
So, eventually, while the enthusiastic and ingenious woman
psychiatrist continually works on the deciphering of images, the viewer
experiences the irreducible polysemy and sheer thrill of the synesthetic
imagery, and reaches such paradoxes of the communication with
images. Eisenstein wrote: In art it is not the absolute relationships
[between the image and its signification] that are decisive, but those
arbitrary relationships within a system of images dictated by the particular
work of art (Eisenstein 1957, 150). In this spirit Hitchcocks film, in this
last flash of paint, with this arbitrary shot, disqualifies the intellectual
victory of reading the images that the narrative presents us. At the end of
the film the suspense is released, the mystery is solved, the murderer is
unmasked. Dalis canvas is successfully ripped open by the Hitchcockian
scissors: the symbols of the dream are given proper interpretation, and we
can rest assured that John Ballantyne will lead the charming Constance
Petersen to the altar as elegantly and self-assuredly as any leading man
would in the happy ending of a typical Hollywood romance. The mystery,
however, that is presented in the images balancing on the borderline of
painting and cinema, the spellbinding effect of pure visuality as the
essence of Hitchcocks relationship with painting stays with us.
5. Hitchcock and Modernism: Painting

as the Double of Cinema
Hitchcocks use of paintings and painterly effects manages to establish
a connection between the spectacle of the cinema of attraction, the
abstract visual effects of expressionism and the more intellectually charged,
214 Chapter Four
reflexive techniques of modernist intermediality. As a whole Hitchcocks

obsession with the displacement of sin into a chaotic and abstract graphic
space, onto a level of perception marked as an other vision within
cinema that can be attributed to painting resembles the basic concept of
expressionism where we could likewise always see a mad, distorted world
of irrational fears and monstrous acts conveyed by painterly stylization.
What distinguishes Hitchcocks cinema, despite all its ties with
expressionism, is the fact that expressionist stylizations were carried out
consistently throughout the film. Hitchcock, however, uses the painterly
inserts and effects as a clear rupture within an otherwise classical style
narrative, reiterating the gesture of transgression between media and
ontological levels over and over again. While these effects challenge the
classical transparency of the narrative film, they also make use of, and
reflect upon the most characteristic elements of a classical narrative (e.g.
the established image of the star, the narrative conventions, the
metaphysics of the deep focus compositions, etc.), integrating them into
their signification. At the same time the questions related to the nature of
images, the collage effect of the painterly sequences he introduces into his
films, the graphic quality of the imagery that emerges from the flow of the
narrative bear much resemblance with some of the European modernist
films in the nineteen sixties contemporary to Hitchcocks films.47
The characteristic Hitchcock heroes and heroines get to be multiplied
by doubles, the situations are repeated in mirror-like sequences, scenes are
rewritten within films, images are repeatedly framed and the variations of
visual elements result in patterns characteristic of abstract expressionist
paintings. Hutchings (2000) even considers that Hitchcocks cinema
resembles Brechts epic theatre with its alienation-effect, since it also
changes the relationship between how a performance is watched,
inaugurating new dimensions of spectatorship. (Although, we might also
add, that Hitchcock continually balanced the consciousness of the
performance with the magic tricks engaging the spectators on an
emotional level.) Like Brecht through his address of their eyes, his
hollowing out of a space for their thoughts in his films, Hitchcock became
notorious for giving his audience a thinking place in a world of unreliable
images (Hutchings 2000).
47
We must not forget that Psycho was made at the same time as Antonionis
Adventure (LAvventura, 1960), The Birds were made at the time of the Eclipse
(Leclisse, 1962), Marnie is the same age as The Red Desert (Il deserto rosso,
1964). Hitchcock scholars also often emphasize Hitchcocks connections with
modern European cinema as well as his influence on modern painting and
intermedia (video and installation) art (see Orr 2005).
Hitchcocks imagery bordering on abstraction is able to activate the

fundamental effect of abstract painting: it drives cinema into the
dimension of the unnameable of the unspeakable.48 The rich palette of
possible painterly techniques in cinema Hitchcocks films despite all
their inventiveness may eventually be included in the category of
intermedial effects that are subordinated to narrativity: in his films
painting does not absorb cinema, nevertheless, it effectively challenges
its transparency. What is characteristic of Hitchcock is that he is able to
show the ambivalence of the images (of being able to both tell and show
things) in a specific duality that resembles the workings of the figure of
the double in a narrative, and that always undermines to certain degree the
self-enclosed order of the narrative and the seemingly unproblematic
(self-effacing) mediality of classical cinema.49 His attractive plays
with the visual layout of his films transfer the dramatic tension from the
level of the narrative onto the level of the cinematic language, positing the
images themselves as the ultimate mystery that have to be solved by the
48
W. J. T. Mitchell, alongside other scholars, claims that the defining attribute of
abstract painting is its resistance towards interpretation and towards verbal
narratives. The project of abstract painting [] he writes is only secondarily
the overcoming of representation or illusion; the primary aim is the erection of a
wall between the arts of vision and those of language (1994, 216).
49
Thomas Elsaesser (2002) also points out that a painting (a portrait) is always an
alien body, a double that generates uncanny and unnatural obsessions through its
immobility and through blurring boundary between life and death. Very often
classical narratives use paintings that can be seen as bad art (i.e. conventional
and kitschy) as if to flaunt the medial superiority of cinema over painting, and the
films can be interpreted as the revenge of the cinema on painting, celebrating the
cinemas own myth of artlessness and naturalness by emphasizing the artifice of
the other, drawing new life by warming itself at the ashes of a pictorial form the
cinema helped to consume (Elsaesser 2002). But sometimes even the inverse is
true, as Elsaesser admits: a painting in a film may appear as a black hole, it sucks
up all energy and movement, and to that extent, it is the painting that mocks the
cinema, not the other way round. Elsaessers example is Jacques Tourneurs
Experiment Perilous (1944) that seems to be exactly the opposite as I have
argued above of what Hitchcock does with the use of paintings and painterly
imagery. In Tourneurs film the explicitly bad painting stands for the merely
descriptive, the cinema haunted by its own origins in photography, the view, the
pictorial, the naturalistic, and at the limit, the mechanically reproductive. Such a
perception of the relationship between cinema and painting also applies to
Hitchcocks films made in the 1940s (see the portraits used in the gothic or
Oedipal stories), nevertheless, from a medial point of view Hitchcock surpasses
these conventional uses and opens up his films towards a modern cinematic
language acting continually in dialogue with itself.
216 Chapter Four
viewer. In Hitchcocks major films there are a series of questions that arise
regarding the mechanism of images perceived on different ontological
levels without the stories bringing any definite answers.
It seems that for Hitchcock painting is very much like the intermedial
demon of the cinematic image, a double of cinema, something lurking
beyond or hovering over the enthralling tale, something that exists even if
it remains unsaid, a shadow, a doppelgnger that is ready at any time to
take charge (just like the doppelgnger characters in the film: e.g. Bruno
appearing beside Guy in Strangers on a Train), threatening to disrupt the
reasonable (and discursive) order of the world and to invade it with
abstract shapes and colours, with images that resist to tell and impress
the viewer with what they show: with their spellbinding visual presence.
On the level of the cinematic narratives Hitchcock usually solves the
mysteries that intrigue the viewer; however, his painterly images forever
haunt the cinematic world with the impression of the inscrutable nature of
things, the indelible trace of Nothingness and the mesmerizing attraction
of a forbidden world.
Figures
Figures 4.16. Hitchcock: Rebecca (1940). The new Mrs. de Winter is presented
against the backdrop of the huge aristocratic castle and a portrait of a dead woman
towering over her. When she dresses up as a tableau vivant she is almost literally
stepping out of a picture frame. At the end of the scene, as an ironic reversal,
Hitchcock shows us the dark figure of Mrs. Danvers framed in a similar way.
Figures 4.712. Hitchcock: Vertigo (1958) The multitude of pictures hanging on

walls become ominous signals of the thematization of questions related to images.
Kim Novak introduced as a tableau vivant in the famous scene at the restaurant,
framed by the doorways: the live woman becomes a picture but the picture
ultimately resists being assigned a single referent, it acts as a vertiginous gap into
nothingness.
218 Chapter Four
Figures 4.1320. Abstract fragmentations and stylizations in Vertigo: the realist

cinematic image fuses with the medium of graphic and painterly animation.
,
Figures 4.2126. Hitchcock: Suspicion (1941), the use of paintings and painterly
compositions: the disruptive effect of the cubist painting, the Oedipal weight of the
robust portrait of the father, the spider web mesh of shadows and the suspected
murderer, the charming Cary Grant shown as an enigmatic silhouette in the
doorway.
220 Chapter Four
Figures 4.2732. Hitchcock: Stage Fright (1950). The repetition of the structure of
placing pictures within pictures, the artificiality of the collaged foreground and
background, film noir style silhouettes, shadows and opening doors dividing up the
frame.
Figures 4.3338. Stage Fright (1950). The abstract geometry of the vortex
becoming a figure rendering the madness of the act of crime: the frequent
repetition of the dissolves and superimpositions projects spiral forms over the
screen resulting in the shattering of the image into abstract fragments.
222 Chapter Four
Figures 4.3942. Stage Fright (1950): the placing of an abstract painting on the
wall, in a very similar way as in Suspicion. The spiral in the painting appears as the
representation of the Hitchcockian vertigo of the dark unknown and a reflection
of the films other vertiginous images.
Figures 4.4344. The final setting of Stage Fright photographed so as to resemble

an abstract whirlpool. The visual pun repeated in the image of the surviving
characters leaving through a corridor resembling yet another vortex.
Figures 4.4546. Strangers on a Train (1951): Hitchcock defines Bruno, the

protagonists doppelgnger, by an analogy with a ghastly painting, a portrait
similar to the picture of Dorian Gray, a romantic mirror image revealing the true
face behind the otherwise impeccable faade of a dandy.
Figures 4.4752. The scene of the murder placed in a painterly heterotopia and
shown to the viewer from the non-human, abstract and distorted viewpoint of the
lenses in a highly artificial composition.
224 Chapter Four
Figures 4.5358. The two characters are shown as each others doubles behind the
iron rails first on opposite then on the same side; the broken lenses become
symbolic of a crushed and dislocated vision, of space being fragmented by a mesh
of abstract shapes and forms.
Figures 4.5960. The shadow between the two doppelgnger characters seems to
be placed as an abstract image projection that can be linked to both of them as a
third entity. Guy is defined by jail-bar imagery suggestive of the circumstances
that constrain him, while in the other image the abstract expressionist splatter of
paint is projected onto the figure of Bruno.
Figures 4.6166. Spellbound (1945): a film abound the spellbinding effect of

images. The ambivalent metaphor of the series of doors opening up.
226 Chapter Four
Figures 4.6768. The bizarre perspective, through the distorted lens of the
bottom of the glass of milk reveals an unearthly spatial construction as a context in
which murders (can) occur.
Figures 4.6976. The dream sequence based on the designs made by Dali: the
dream appears as a painterly veil that overlays the screen and conceals the images
of reality from our sight.
228 Chapter Four
Figures 4.7782. The recurrence of the cinema of attraction: designing the image
as a fully extended slingshot directed at the spectator and the astonishing effect
of the spurt of red (blood?) splashed across the screen within the black and white
film.
CINEMA AS THE CURRENCY
OF THE ABSOLUTE:
THE GODARD PARADIGM
CHAPTER FIVE
TENSIONAL DIFFERENCES:
THE ANXIETY OF RE-MEDIATION
IN JEAN-LUC GODARDS FILMS
A medium in our culture can never operate in

isolation, because it must enter into relationships of
respect and rivalry with other media.
(Bolter and Grusin 1999, 65.)
1. The Anxiety of Re-Mediation

Jean-Luc Godards cinema as a whole is perhaps the most intellectually
challenging meditation upon the intermedial nature of the moving pictures.
The innovative and provocative quality of his works have often been
interpreted as a kind of counter cinema (Wollen 1985, 501), evaluating
his artistic attitude as an outright attack upon the seamlessness of the
classical narrative film by instituting a cinema of discontinuities with his
idiosyncratic jump-cuts in the images and a technique of collage and free
associations that replaced classical dramaturgy. Yet it would be a mistake
to construe that Godards films were ground-breaking only because they
introduced a new kind of storytelling or a new visual style that subverted
the pre-established canons of narrative cinema. What is equally unique in
his films is the way in which they self-reflexively acknowledge not only
their relationship to earlier modes of cinematic expression but they also
address fundamental issues of cinemas relationship to the other media and
arts on many levels. In other words, Godards intermediality and self-
conscious thematizations of inter-art relations are equally as important as
his ingenuity regarding the use of cinematic techniques or his no less self-
conscious mode of weaving cinphile allusions into the fabric of his own
films.1
1
The acknowledgement of the importance of inter-art relations in Godards work
from the perspective of intermediality can be seen in the volume Godard
intermedial, edited by Volker Roloff and Scarlett Winter (1997).
232 Chapter Five
If intermedial cinema is to be understood as a field where transformative

inscriptions of mediality can be observed within a work (in a McLuhanian
sense), a field where figurations of medial differences are played out, as
Joachim Paech states (2000), then it is also true that Godards cinema
reflexively foregrounds these inscriptions and differences, initiating a
meta-narrative discourse on the role of cinema in the context of media and
the arts. Henk Oosterling describes intermedial processes as operating
within a tensional field of signification, (2003, 38), enhancing an
experience of the in-between and a sensibility for tensional differences
(2003, 40), and accordingly, Godards cinema can also be described as an
arena not only for displaying medial differences, or for interactions
between the media, but for clashes, territorializing and de-territorializing
moves as well as fierce rivalries between media. A film is like a
battlefield Sam Fuller states in his famous cameo in Pierrot le fou
(1965) and this is also true for Godards use of media and references to the
other arts. Furthermore, besides the inherent tensions resulting from the
radical alterity of the media that participate within a filmic discourse,
especially in Godards early films, the films made during the period of the
Nouvelle Vague, we can see how Godard consciously addresses the issues
relating to the rivalry between cinema and the other arts and media.
There are two possible models for interpreting such a rivalry. One is
offered by the famous literary theory of Harold Bloom, who claimed that
poetic history [] is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence,
since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to
clear imaginative space for themselves, adding that self-appropriation
involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness (Bloom 1997, 5). Bloom
called this process the anxiety of influence, and considered the re-writing
and/or debunking of earlier poetic models a way through which a new
artist asserts himself. In this line of thought it is natural for an innovative
artist like Godard to insist on the influences of cinastes that marked his
work, and to engage in the playful reworking of cinematic clichs or
scenes. What is more interesting, however, is that these early Godard
films, despite all the intertextual references included in them, do not posit
a major precursor from film history, an equivalent of the kind of strong
poet that Bloom speaks about, or a poet in a poet (Bloom 1997, 53).
Instead, there seems to be an intermedial twist to this anxiety of
influence, for if we look more closely we will find more likely not the
equivalent of the poet in a poet, namely, a filmmaker in a filmmaker,
but a poet within a filmmaker: the authority that these early films relate
The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godards Films 233
to as the source for anxious influence is not any particular precursor in

film history but it can be identified more in literature or poetry itself.2
In this respect, another possible model can be called upon that was
devised to explain the dynamics of inter-art and inter-media relationships
that emerge in time, namely the media theoretical model of remediation
described by Bolter and Grusin (1999). The idea of remediation implies
that all media repurpose and incorporate older media as a usual process of
their evolution, and in addition, no medium can operate in isolation, it
must always enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other
media (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 65).
In a combination of these two, literary and media theoretical concepts,
we might therefore say that early Godard films display a pronounced
anxiety of remediation, for they continually present filmmaking as
incorporating, refashioning other media while also relating to these other
media, and among them, especially literature, as a major authority that
cinema has to come to terms with. In fact, we can observe, that the
function of literature as such an overpowering influence is not unique with
Godard, this is true for the majority of the New Wave filmmakers who
according to T. Jefferson Kline developed an ambivalent, almost oedipal
relationship to literature which appeared in their films as a constituted-
and-then-repressed authority (1992, 5). For them literature was both a
model to aspire to and an authority to be continually challenged. Most
New Wave directors considered themselves auteurs and rejected the
conventional forms of literary adaptations while at the same time they
advocated the idea of the camera stylo (filmic writing). Kline writes:
The new cineastes engaged directly in film writing, rejecting the
seamless interpretation of events that was implied by adaptation. In 1962,
for example, Agns Varda would declare, I wanted to make a film exactly
as one writes a book! The new French cinema thus sought to usurp rather
than imitate the role of literature. But usurpation, the absolute absorption
of the precursor,3 no less than imitation, is a form of (oedipal) rivalry
betraying its own obsession with the authoritative model (Kline 1992, 3).
And if literature as adaptation was repressed in their work, nevertheless it
2
Although the rivalry between film and literature marked the beginnings of cinema
and the first wave of the avant-garde movements when the emerging new medium
had to assert its own rights among the arts, at the time of Godards first films it was
time for cinema to prove not so much its individuality among the arts and media,
but its own capacities in addressing key issues of contemporary thinking, and
whats more, emerging as an effective self-reflexive medium consciously dealing
with inter-art relationships and participating as equal in the inter-art discourse.
3
Kline quotes Blooms Anxiety of Influence (1973).
234 Chapter Five
had an uncanny way of returning in other forms, Kline adds, so

insistent was this newly implicit presence that one of the historians of this
period of French cinema claims that the cineastes of the new wave are
rooted [enracins] in literature4 (Kline 1992, 5).
In Godards case these other (non-adaptational) forms in which
language and implicitly literature resurface (are re-mediated) in his films
can be identified on more than one level. First of all on the level of word
and image relations, where re-mediation includes an impressive arsenal of
verbal puns, authorial commentaries, inscriptions usurping the cinematic
frame, literary quotations and misquotations, etc.5 Some cases of re-
mediation that can be identified in Godards cinema could also be
considered as variations on the classical principle of ekphrasis: one media
mirroring the other and also very often a multiplication of media layers
which re-mediate each other.6 Moreover, we find that in Godards early
films media differences are even projected onto a narrative level: the
tensional differences between the media and the anxiety of re-mediation
of literature within cinema are staged as an allegoric confrontation of the
arts and media. In Godards New Wave films we find several examples in
which different characters most often men and women seem to
embody different media ideals and the complex relationships and/or
conflicts between them (often taking the form of the battle of the sexes)
can be interpreted as allegories, narrative enactments of intermedial
relations or media rivalries. And while the tensional differences that can
be sensed on the level of word-image relations always seem to have the
effect of deconstructing the unity of the image, in the case of such
narrativizations re-mediation appears ultimately as the deconstruction of
the identity and/or authority of the medium or the art.
2. The Love Affair: a Mnage Trois

at the Birth of a New Cinema
Godards romantic comedy, A Woman is a Woman (Une femme est une
femme, 1961), in which we have a light-hearted mnage trois between
4
The quote is from Francois Ramasses article Le Rgle du je: entretien avec
Claude-Jean Philippe (published in La Nouvelle Vague 25 ans aprs, ed. J. L.
Douin. Paris: Cerf, 1983: 31).
5
Se more about these in the following essay included in this volume with the title:
From the Blank Page to the White Beach: Word and Image Plays in Jean-
Luc Godards Cinema.
6
A more detailed analysis of Godards ekphrastic techniques can be read in the
chapter with the title: Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc Godards Poetics of the In-Between.
two men and a woman, can be interpreted as a playful allegory constructed

around the issue of the rivalry of influences and the wish for the birth of a
new cinema (as such an allegory of the inception of the New Wave itself).
The men are personifying the two competing media: one is a man of books
called Emile Rcamier (Jean-Claude Brialy), and the other is a man of the
movies, named Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo). The story is
constructed around these two men who compete in impregnating Angla
(Anna Karina), the angelic woman. Both literature and film are presented
with lots of irony, while Angla appears as the archetypal woman,
whimsical and endearing, whose profession working in a strip-tease
bar is to appear as the object of desire for men, and whose only purpose
in life seems to be to bear a child.7
When we first meet Emile, he and Angla are in a bookstore browsing
books about childbirth. Also, not surprisingly, while Emile browses the
books in the bookstore, Angla prefers the magazines with pictures and
identifies with a reproduction of a Paul Klee painting (suggestive of her
desired pregnancy). The scene also includes a reference to another famous
New Wave film, Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans la metro, 1960) directed
by Louis Malle, whose protagonist is a precocious girl named Zazie
visiting her uncle in Paris. Malles film is the perfect example of New
Wave cinema taking up the challenge of converting a literary work that
lives through its language Raymond Queneaus nonsensical novel
characterized by colourful colloquial language and puns into a genuine
cinematic experience through an avalanche of burlesque and self-reflexive
gags. Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) who appears in Godards film thus
appears more than a simple reference to another film, she becomes the
embodiment of what New Wave cinema and all its anxious re-mediating
tendencies strive for: the birth of a fresh, spontaneous cinema that is
nevertheless somehow the offspring of literature. The fact that the
reference to Zazie occurs in the form of a book, and only after we have
glanced at the cover of the book, we recognize the actual Zazie in the
film, is also suggestive of this link with literature. Moreover, the detail that
the book with Zazie on the cover appears in the same frame juxtaposed
with images of the female reproductive system [Fig. 5.1.] emphasizes the
idea of the cross-fertilization of the medium of the book and the film,
7
In presenting Angla as a seductive and frivolous angel, and the young woman
as something to be admired as a spectacle, Godards gendered vision reflects not
only an archetypal image of the woman, but also self-consciously accentuates
the clichs perpetuated by classical cinema. This self-reflexivity of the character is
made obvious in the gesture of Angla smiling and winking at the camera (and,
implicitly, at the spectators) at the beginning of the film.
236 Chapter Five
and anticipates on the level of the narrative both the rivalry between the
man of letters and the man of the movies in seducing Angla and the
issue of having a child (Zazie, in this way, being a possible projection of
what Emile and Anglas child could be like, and also of the cinematic
child brought to life by a love affair with literature).
Whereas Emile is presented in the company of books, Alfred, the other
possible lover, whose surname, Lubitsch, associates him with classical
Hollywood comedies, is used by Godard as a vehicle for a series of
cinematic references, including the mimicking of Burt Lancasters toothy
grin from Vera Cruz (directed by Robert Aldrich, 1954) [Figs. 5.23], a
short exchange of words with Jeanne Moreau appearing in a cameo and
hinting at both her roles in Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, directed by
Franois Truffaut, 1962) and in Moderato cantabile (directed by Peter
Brook, 1960) as well as a self-reference of Belmondo (and Godard) as
Alfred invites Emile and Angla to watch Breathless ( bout de souffle,
1960) at a nearby cinema.
The ironic re-mediation of literature in the film as Emiles sphere of
media influence is emphasized perhaps most eloquently in one of the
sequences in which Angla and Emile, who are angry at each other and
refuse to talk, begin to communicate through random quotations chosen
from books.8 [Figs. 5.45.] In another sequence we see how Angla sways
in the other direction in the company of Alfred imitating a song-and-dance
sequence typical of Hollywood musicals in the street. [Fig. 5.6.] In both
cases the collage effect (the decontextualized quotations and the
unmotivated song-and-dance sequence) is playfully mocking the
seriousness and the artificially constructed nature of the media products
they refer to (namely literary works and genre films). The tensions
between the characters and the media represented by them also reiterate
the intra-medial tension (on the level of specific cinematic techniques) that
results from the oscillation between cinema verit style sequences inserted
within the diegetic scenes that unfold the narrative and the sequences
foregrounding genre film clichs (like the imitation of Hollywood
musicals) or even New Wave film references (like the scene that imitates
Truffauts Shoot the Piano Player/Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960).
Not surprisingly for Godard in the end actually both men sleep with
Angla and therefore have equal chances of fathering her child. However,
Angla after the brief affair with Alfred chooses Emile, the man of
literature, playfully demonstrating a loyalty that would stay with Godard
8
The scene that is repeated at the end of the film can also be interpreted as a
parody of New Wave intertextuality, or even a self parody of Godard whose
intertextual appetite has always been notorious.
for the rest of his oeuvre. This tensional mnage trios oscillating
between literature and genre films seems to project an ambivalence of
influences that emerges in several forms and variations in Godards New
Wave films.
3. Breaking up the Painful Intimacy and Chiastic

Displacements of Media
The same model, with perhaps even more ambivalence appears already in
one of Godards short films made in 1958, Charlotte and her Boyfriend
(Charlotte et son Jules), in which Charlotte, a young Parisian girl returns
for a few minutes to her ex-boyfriends apartment. The young man, Jean,
delivers a long monologue expressing his anger about her leaving him, and
finally confesses to her that he cannot live without her, only to find out
that the girl has returned with the sole purpose of taking her toothbrush.
This time the story is centred on the theme of breaking up and it operates
with clearly distinguishable pairs: there is a woman and a man, each
defined by a domination of a different means of expression.
Jean delivers a great theatrical speech (the role-playing scale ranging
from boyish sulking to male chauvinism and also, the self-humiliation of a
desperate lover) through which language emerges as his most powerful
weapon. (While he is speaking, he can be seen as either reading or typing
at a typewriter, in this way commanding more than one media form of
language.) His speech is characterized both by a high degree of
redundancy and an absurd logic: one word brings forward the next without
much sense.9 Jeans linguistic attitude however is very similar to that of an
omniscient author in a book who imposes his authority over the narration.
And as the character is actually dubbed by Godards own voice,10 we can
regard this whole flow of words both as a disguise of a voice-over
authorial superimposition over the images and a mockery of such a literary
device.11
9
Of course, it didnt work out he says referring to their relationship. It didnt
work out because it couldnt work out. And it couldnt work out because it
shouldnt have. It was impossible. Possible? You should know that impossible is
a French word etc. We can observe how the logic turns away from the
commonplace melodramatic argument to a purely linguistic one.
10
In the beginning there was the voice states Raymond Bellour (1992, 219)
about Godards reflexivity and fundamental relation to literature.
11
From the mere fact that I say a sentence, there is necessarily a connection with
what came before says Godards voice through the character of Jean in a self-
conscious and somewhat self-conceited manner. David Bordwell sees in this the
238 Chapter Five
On the other hand, facing the young mans powerful verbalism we

have the flirtatious Charlotte who remains almost speechless throughout
the film. But this is a very eloquent silence as she compensates with an
expressive body language and mimicking. Her expressiveness is dominantly
visual (she is literally pretty as a picture) and in addition to this, her
image is always present in the frame. She appears in the form of photos
placed oddly enough on each wall of the small room. [Figs. 5.710.] In
this way, while Jean can be defined by the art of words (and his ambitions
to become a writer), Charlotte is perceived actually as nothing but a
picture in movement (with aspirations to become a film star). The parallel
between the girl and the movies is borne out not only by Jeans jealous
remarks about the girls willingness to resolve to prostitution in order to be
able to work in the motion pictures business, but also by Godards camera
which films her as an illustration to Jeans remarks about moving pictures.
Jean defines cinema as stupid, consisting of images of giant heads
making funny faces, while this is exactly the way we see Charlotte. [Fig.
5.8.]
Thus on a metalinguistic level the story is no longer about a man and a
woman ending an affair but about the rupture between literature (words)
and film (images). However, this is an ambivalent breakaway, because
cinema is embodied by a charming but capricious young woman who has
no regrets in breaking up with her former lover. And we can be dazzled by
the fact that Godard, by dubbing Belmondo, seems not only to identify
with cinemas opposing side, but he puts into the mouth of this
irresponsible young man contemptuous remarks against cinema.12 So the
rivalry between words and images is very ambivalent: is the young man, in
his ridiculous, theatrical manner indeed a true representative of the art of
words, and is the young woman, who is dominated and objectified by his
authoritative and garrulous speech, really the representative of a cinema
that Godard aspires to? Must cinema break away from the redundancy of
language or is it exactly this media tension that should spice it up?
defining and cohesive role of the author whose single hand leaves its mark over
the different layers of the palimpsest of discourses and media (Bordwell 1985,
321). (Although Bordwell mistakenly attributes the sentence to a character in
another short film entitled Charlotte and Veronique.)
12
The novel or painting, OK! But not the cinema! Jean throws the words at
Charlotte. We can also note that later in Pierrot le fou (1963) or Le Mpris (1963)
again the same attitude towards the arts is emphasized: literature and painting
praised high above the triviality of cinema. And all this is coming from a
filmmaker who himself has the highest ambitions in making cinema a genuine art
form.
According to this parable the relation between literature and film can only
be described as one of painful intimacy13 that cannot escape from the
trap of a love-hate double bind where each media interprets the other and
tries to assert its own superiority. Medial differences are in this way not
merely exposed in their tensions but their identity is continually
challenged and placed under a question mark.14
Between film and literature chiastic interchanges, displacements
take place that confuse the viewer. The male character despises the young
woman who dreams of the world of the movies while he himself has
fantasies of becoming a screenwriter. At the same time as literature is
being eulogized, the value of words is gradually inflated by the aggressive
and nonstop speech that lacks any commonsense logic. Your great fault is
babbling on forever says Jean. But the viewer perceives that the girl
hardly says a word, while it is Jean who talks incessantly. We can see a
kind of mockery of such a chiastic displacement that takes place between
the two characters in the shot in which Jean leans over the wash bin and in
the mirror above it we can see in the place of his head the photographic
image of Charlottes face [Fig. 5.10].
Similar chiastic displacements or ambivalences of media embodied in a
pair of lovers can be seen in Godards first major film, Breathless ( bout
de souffle, 1960). The theme of the rupture between lovers is also present,
only this time it is not introduced as the start of the narrative but it is
offered as the conclusion of the story. This film has been in fact the target
of a famous analysis performed by Marie-Claire Ropars Wuilleumier
(1982) in which she proposed an interpretation based on the opposition of
signs correlated with the division of the sexes. Furthermore, David
Rodowick (2001) dedicated an entire chapter to Ropars Wuilleumiers
essay in his book on the figural, evaluating her concept on how writing
operates within this Godard film (and how this can render insight into the
working of the figural in cinema).
Patricia, the charming American student studying in Paris, whom we
first see as selling newspapers in a t-shirt advertising the New York Herald
Tribune (as a female body inscribed with letters), is associated throughout
the film with references to literature (Ropars Wuilleumier considers her
13
The expression is borrowed from Raymond Bellour (1992, 230).
14
There is in fact a tradition to portray the relationship between literature and film
in terms of a relationship between the sexes. As early as 1926 the formalist theorist
Boris Eichenbaum defined the attempts of the silent film to break with the tradition
of literature as a break between lovers or spouses.
240 Chapter Five
therefore as the very embodiment of logocentrism15) and the arts. [Fig.

5.11.] Her apartment walls are covered with poster reproductions of
modern paintings, she listens to classical music, has the ambition to
become a journalist, interviews a famous writer, quotes passages from
books, etc. All in all, she seems to be defined by elements of high culture.
Whereas Michel identifies with the world of classical genre film
mythology and popular culture: he imagines himself as a Humphrey
Bogart type hero (the famous scene in which he is presented in a
dialogue with Bogies photograph in front of a cinema is revealing in
this sense) [Fig. 5.12], all his actions seem to be borrowed from genre
films (the stealing of the car, the shooting of the policeman, the ensuing
flight, the storyline of the lovers on the run, etc.), he knows nothing about
literature (when Patricia asks him: Do you know William Faulkner? he
replies: Whos he? Someone you slept with?), in Patricias apartment he
keeps browsing magazines with pictures of naked women, etc. So it might
seem that this time, it is the man, Michel, who is linked to popular
cinema and it is Patricia, the woman, who is portrayed through the arts
and especially literature and language. However, the two cultural and
media authorities are interchanged: it is true Patricia does not speak
the language of the movie citations that characterizes Michel, but in the
end, her decision to tell the police about Michel resembles a film noir style
betrayal, even if otherwise she is not really a femme fatale. Moreover,
throughout the film she is repeatedly presented in narcissistic poses
looking at her reflections in mirrors and even in the reproductions of the
artwork hanging in her apartment [Figs. 5.1314] identifying her as a
moving picture, at the same time Godard repeatedly calls our attention to
her problems with the French language. Being a foreigner in Paris, she
does not only speak French with a noticeable accent, but she has trouble
with the use and understanding of certain words. Michel is the one who
keeps reminding her of her mistakes in the use of the language, so that
finally she seems to be more at home in the world of images than in the
world of the words, something that Michel, on the other hand has no
15
Rodowick writes that: the graphic trace whose body seems both desired and
prohibited is rendered in the film an unequivocally feminine body, sealing it in
the figuration of Jean Seberg as Patricia (2001, 98). The way the film associates
writing with the feminine principle present in the film is already noticeable in
the appearance of the first figure of a woman in the film in the form of a
newspaper illustration [see Fig. 5.19] and later in the introduction of Michels
other girl friend whom he visits to ask for money, and whose room is decorated
with cigarette boxes stuck on the wall in the form of giant letters (spelling the word
pourquoi/why).
difficulties in mastering. Patricias enigmatic gesture of rubbing her thumb

against her lips at the end of the film, imitating Michels and Humphrey
Bogarts gesture (just like putting on Michels hat earlier and smoking a
cigarette in bed imitating him), and repeating the question What does it
mean disgusting (dgueulasse)? amounts to a final emblematic image
sealing this chiasmus.
Such chiastic intertwining occurs furthermore in the presentation of the
media themselves: as Ropars Wuilleumier remarks in her analysis, cinema
and literature are both displaced in their presentation. Rodowick sums up
her ideas in this way: A bout de souffle follows a double movement: the
multiple play between two forms of writing the cinematic and the
poetic that are continually interpenetrating and combining with each
other (2001, 96.) References to cinema appear reflexively in the film in
the form of graphic traces (movie posters, photos, cinema magazines,
texts). Whereas poetry appears in the context of cinema, in a sequence in
which quoting Rodowicks description having gone to the movies to
see a Western, Belmondo and Seberg are shown face-to-face close-up,
illuminated by the flickering light reflected from the screen. A male voice
off recites a text to which a female voice-off responds. This dialogue is
scattered over two poems, one by Apollinaire, the other by Aragon, and is
anchored diegetically neither to the characters, whose lips are otherwise
occupied, nor by the sound-off of the supposed cinema projection. Thus
sound has become disconnected from image while poetic writing
circulates in the form of disembodied voices (Rodowick 2001, 96). Also
we should not forget how even in seemingly minor details like presenting
the film director Jean-Pierre Melville as Parvulesco, a famous writer,
Godard operates with the interchange of the world of the cinema and that
of literature.16
In Michels figure the mythology of individual freedom projected into
the movie citations from American genre films proves to be a good vehicle
for the declaration of an artistic philosophy of individualism and
spontaneity. This spontaneity, however, falls prey to the principle of
repeated imitation. Michel identifies with the heroes of the American
movies, and he speaks this language of citations fluently and
spontaneously, and with the same naturalness a series of male lookalike
figures appear to reflect him in the street (among them, the passer-by
played by Godard himself, who points Michel out to the policeman) [Figs.
5.1516]. He dies, however, according to Ropars Wuilleumier, as the
16
The Melville/Parvulescu scene is further complicated by allegedly incorporating
other possible references to the classic film director Raoul Walsh and the Russian-
American novelist, Vladimir Nabokov.
242 Chapter Five
result of the devastating relationship with Patricia the female body

assigned to the medium of words collapsing at the feet of a female
double (1982, 71),17 a copy that erases his identity by sheer mechanical
imitation (her last question repeating Michels words emphasizes this).
Such emptied repetition of words, parrot talk, mocked by the male
protagonist, together with the other redundancies of language that appear
in her presence18 in Rodowicks (2001, 98) words: such deadly
monotony and together with an image of femininity enhanced with
references to paintings and music will appear again in Pierrot le fou, in the
character of Marianne. The way Patricia turns to the camera in this final
scene and her close-up fills the frame and calls attention to herself,
replacing Michel as the centre of the image, blocking our view from
seeing Michel any more, repeats a similar substitution seen at the
beginning of the film in which an image of a woman screens the image of
the man: Michels face cannot be seen because of the newspaper he holds
spread out in front of him and on which there is an enticing picture of a
woman turning towards the camera.19 And the chiasmic structure of
interchanges between man and woman is continued not only by her taking
over Michels gesture, but also by Michel, the man, being laid out flat on
the pavement and rendered helpless like an image confined to a frame (the
circle of onlookers closing up on him only accentuates this, at the same
time recalling the iris-in techniques of early cinema used earlier) [Figs.
5.1720].
4. The Masters Voice/Words

Not all of Godards early films present the medium of words, writing or
literature as having such a disruptive effect over the cinematic writing.
17
Rodowick summarizes the disruptive force of the medium of writing embodied
in Patricia like this: Through its references to the press, the novel, poetry, and
finally the cinema, writing names a trajectory that seals identity. For Michel
Poiccard, who is protected by the multiple guises that his closeness to the
imaginary of cinema affords him, this means capture and extinction (2001, 98).
18
Ropars-Wuilleumier (1982, 70) describes Patricias first appearance as marked
by such a redundancy of language: we hear her voice selling the newspapers, see
the newspapers in her hands and see the inscription on her t-shirt at the same time.
19
Ropars-Wuilleumier (1982, 71) considered this image to be a kind of
hieroglyphic construction uniting the male and the female principle present in the
film. The image can also be seen as a further variation of the substitution we saw
in Charlotte and her Boyfriend (where the picture of Charlotte appeared above her
boyfriends neck, see Fig. 5.10.)
In some of these films we also find occurrences of the redemptive,

enlightening force of words. Most often in these cases the medial authority
of literature and language, the culture of the words is embodied by a male
character, a strong, self-possessed father figure who plays a decisive role
in the lives of hesitant, insecure women. Perhaps the most pertinent
example is the figure of the real-life philosopher introduced in Vivre sa vie
(Her Life to Live, 1962), Brice Parain, who initiates a conversation with
Nana, the young prostitute who has ambitions of becoming a film star, but
who is intrigued by the respectable man of letters and finds herself making
philosophy with him at a caf. The appearance of the philosopher as
someone who masters the art of thinking and expressing oneself through
words is in fact only the most significant encounter in a series of other
encounters of Nana with the mediating quality of language (other
examples include: at the movies as intertitles and subtitles rendering the
dialogue of the silent film, at the police station where they interrogate her
and type her statement letter by letter on an old and noisy typewriter
towering over her figure, at the caf where her friend tells her the story of
her life or where she writes a long, handwritten letter to a possible
employer, etc.), so while Nana continually longs to become an actress, she
is also repeatedly presented in situations in which she is defined through
the use of some forms of language. As Deleuze writes Brice Parain is the
one who exhibits and individuates the category of language as the limit
towards which the heroine was moving with all her energy through the
series of images (Deleuze 1989, 186). So, even in these examples, where
the authority of the language seems to be unchallenged and language does
not act primarily as a subversive force within the images, the interchanges
within the world of cinema and that of literature remain in force.
In Alphaville (Alphaville, une etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution,
1965) the sombre Lemmy Caution arrives to a city enveloped in shadows
and having surrendered to the language of the machine as a new
Prometheus lighting up the dark place with only his cigarette lighter. As a
private eye he keeps taking photos with his little amateur camera and
brings the redemptive powers of poetry and love, as if enacting another
myth as well, that of Orpheus and Eurydice.20 He rescues Natasha (the
daughter of Professor Nosferatu, whose name recalls the father figure of
the living dead) from this underworld by using the enlightening force of
sheer poetry and teaching her the meaning of words like love (luard) in
a world that aggressively disconnected emotions from the use of language
20
See more about the use of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in Godards
philosophy over media in the next chapter entitled From the Blank Page to the
White Beach: Word and Image Plays in Jean-Luc Godards Cinema.
244 Chapter Five
and made it mechanical and arbitrary. [Figs. 5.2122.] Yet Lemmy

Caution, also known as Ivan Johnson (mocking cold war spy stories) is
himself a clich, an embodiment of the mythology of the pulp fiction
detective stories and B-rated sci-fi stories clashing with the emerging
modern mythology of the machine and artificial intelligence.21 And even if
in the end luards poetry is the decisive factor in the quest of modern
days Orpheus to bring back Eurydice into the world of the living, and
escape Alphavilles (or as Lemmy renames it, Zerovilles) authoritarian
control over linguistic expression, through this reference Godard
introduces fine allusions to Cocteaus cinematic rendering of the Orpheus
myth, moreover the final scene in which Lemmy and Natasha leave the
dark city behind and talk about love, rewrites a dialogue from Howard
Hawkss classic movie, The Big Sleep (1946).22 So poetry, cinema and
pulp fiction are once more interwoven in forging a new kind of mythology
and filmic writing in Godards world, the redemptive powers of poetic
words seem only able to function if cross-fertilized with the mythology of
the screen itself.23
5. The Contempt
The theme of the conflicting relation of the sexes, that of a break or
struggle, the imposition of some kind of authority is as we have seen in
the previous examples recurrent in the narrative allegorizations of media
relations in Godards films made in the fifties and sixties. It reflects this
problematic side of intermediality: imposing the newly constructed
authority of the moving pictures, repressing and displacing the authority of
literature in the form of the literariness of the films and that of cinema
conceived as writing. These media-allegories usually present a paradoxical
love-and-hate towards both literature and films, due perhaps to the fears of
an ambitious film author that the medium of film may never be able to
rival literature.
21
The alleged early version of the films title, Tarzan versus IBM, eloquently bears
out this duality.
22
Robert M. MacLean suggests that it is the scene with Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall (as Marlowe and Vivian) exchanging declarations of love as they
drive away from a preliminary showdown at Eddie Marss farmhouse (1979, 238).
23
A similar ambivalence in the authority of cinema strengthened with the authority
of language can be seen in the figure of Fritz Lang appearing in Le Mpris (The
Contempt, 1963) as the embodiment of both the culture of words and of what
cinema has best to offer.
The parable is repeated again relying on the rewriting of well-known

cultural myths by The Contempt (Le mpris, 1963). The contempt
named in the title can be interpreted beyond its primary reference to the
relationship between the two protagonists of the film, as a metaphor of the
impossibility of inter-art or inter-cultural translations.24 It is the story of
the estrangement of a man and a woman set in the narrative context of
shooting a film adaptation of the Odyssey. So the imminent break up in
their personal relations is framed by an impossible endeavour: the re-
mediation of literature. Among the multicultural film crew several languages
are spoken (Italian, French, English, German), and there are also tangible
cultural differences and tensions between the American producer, the
French writer, and the German film director, played by Fritz Lang as
himself. Francesca, the Italian interpreter helps them by translating their
words, but each time we realize as the film unfolds her translations are
in fact interpretations, comments rather than word for word transpositions
of meanings. The other person in this film means also another language,
another culture, another world. The introductory image of the tacking shot
of the approaching figure of Francesca holding a book in her hand is
emblematic for the main theme of the film: reading, interpreting, re-
mediating emerge as key notions of the whole film.
Within such a context the film presents the contempt of a man called
Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) who is a writer, towards his picturesque wife
Camille, played by Brigitte Bardot [Figs. 5.2324] and whom despite
hints at their previously idyllic relationship her husband considers empty
headed. Bardot, who was Frances best selling visual commodity at the
time, appears beautiful as a goddess with a perfect body resembling
antique sculptures. I too happen to think sometimes says Camille.
While during their argument, Paul knocks at an iron sculpture portraying a
nude female body only to see how hollow it is. During the scene, Camille
is shot more than once in a way that bears out her resemblance with the
sculpture. [Figs. 5.2526.] The woman, played by Bardot, on the other
hand, despises the man for prostituting himself by taking a job merely for
the money in the cinema industry and for being willing even to prostitute
his wife literally by turning a blind eye towards the producers attempt at
seducing her. The conflict between the two is played out, similarly to
Charlotte et son Jules, mainly in the form of vehement verbal attacks. This
time it is not a monologue that contrasts a talkative man with a silent,
picturesque woman, but we have series of (ineffective) dialogues. In one
24
Tom Conley (2000) interpreted in the same way the title of Godards Pierrot le
fou as the metaphor of language gone mad, of the chaos of different media
signifiers that confuses the viewer.
246 Chapter Five
of the most famous scenes that takes place in the half-furnished apartment
(a metaphor of their crumbling and/or unfinished relationship) as they
argue sitting face to face at a small table, Godards camera pans from side
to side, alternately showing us the man and the woman in a different
frame, as if they were on two ends of a seesaw and there is a small desk
lamp that is turned on an off in the middle. [Figs. 5.2324.] The flickering
of the light brought to the centre of the frame in close up by the camera
swaying between the man and the woman divides the continuous frame,
and becomes the visible projection of the break between the characters and
of the vibrant tensions undermining the communication between the two.
Moreover, their talk is actually more like reported speech than actual
conversation: each time they say something, it is a comment over something
that has already been said, in other words they perform an inner
translation from language to language,25 as if the layers of even one and
the same language were so intricate that they fail in a Sisyphus-like
attempt to grasp each others true meanings. (They say sentences like: I
said and then you said, I only said, I didnt say that, but you
said) Spontaneity gives way to reflexivity, and while on the surface
they speak about whether they love each other or not, actually they discuss
about speech. Moreover this indirectness is emphasized by the fact that
while they are talking, they pick up some books and leaf though them, as if
in search for other, more suitable words for their conversation. Kaja
Silverman (SilvermanFarocki 1998, 35) sees in this the thematization of
two kinds of concepts over language. Camille, she says, longs for the
language of Eden, the language before the Fall, a referential, creative
language that does not construct itself upon metaphors, translations and
interpretations.26 This ideal language is in contrast with a language that
operates with indirect references, making use of translations, an ideal that
seems to be present in most aspects of the narrative (Paul is hired to re-
write the Odyssey for the screen, the interpreter is hired to help people
communicate, Fritz Lang is hired to re-mediate the epic masterpiece onto
the screen, and finally, the producer is there to make sure this is done
according to his own taste).
The film proceeds to show over and over again the failure of such a
multiplication of translations and re-mediations. And in all of this the
linguistic viewpoint of the man and the picturesque qualities of Brigitte
Bardot are always contrasting the media of words and images. The famous
25
Much in the same way that Francesca, the official interpreter, translates
everybodys words and tries to interpret their intentions at the same time.
26
As Kaja Silverman explains: Before the Fall, language was referential: God
spoke, and in speaking, created. (SilvermanFarocki 1998, 35.)
bed scene at the beginning of the film is a good example of how words fail
in front of the images. We see Bardot stretched out naked in bed with
Michel Piccoli, and she keeps asking him questions about the different
parts of her body. [Figs. 5.2729.] Piccoli answers in short, one word
sentences, as if it were the famous ekphrastic fear (Mitchell 1994, 154)
that keeps him from even trying to describe the beauty of a female body in
words. This ekphrastic fear is in fact consistent with Lessings well-
known ideas from his Laocon essay according to which the beauty of a
female body can only be rendered by painting and not literature which
should therefore refrain from speaking about such things, because
language can only do this in a sequence of time, fragmenting what is a
whole and perfect vision. Godard seems to foreground the same contrast
described by Lessing in this scene: the words which fragment the body are
shown as inadequate in contrast with the whole picture that can be viewed
like a painting. Moreover, the scene can be understood as a re-mediation
as well as a modernist deconstruction of a traditional literary blazon: the
parts of a female body being praised in turn by the words of a man in love.
This literary pattern that has its examples ranging from the Song of Songs
to medieval chivalry tales and love poems provides the framework to a
modernist list-making and collage effect of the media of words and
images. While visual beauty (and their corporeal love) fails to be re-
mediated into words,27 the photographic image of Bardots body is being
translated by Godards camera, only not into literature, but into a sort of
abstract painting through the use of the different monochrome (yellow,
blue, red) filters.28
Godard clearly treats Brigitte Bardot throughout the film as a picture.
Moreover Camille seems to be preoccupied with almost nothing else but
the changing of her appearance: changing clothes and hair colours, looking
at herself in the mirror all the time. She is presented in the double role as
27
Harun Farocki observes: The two seem to be repeating a lingual game they
have often played before; the words they speak are a mantra proving the existence
of their corporeal love (SilvermanFarocki 1998, 34).
28
This re-mediation that fails in the direction of literature but succeeds in the
direction of other visual arts is also emphasized in the film by the fact that the
adaptation of the Odyssey is much debated throughout the film and its success is
highly questionable, while the ancient sculptures seem to come alive and take over
the screen without any problem. The sculptures with their arms stretched even
seem to observe the living people in the film. Moreover, Kaja Silverman remarks:
The statues are partially painted, indicating that the marble is beginning to yield
to flesh. Eventually the statues are replaced by human figures, as if the transition to
life has been successfully effected (SilvermanFarocki 1998, 38).
248 Chapter Five
Camille, the beautiful woman concerned with her appearance and Bardot,
the cinema icon, in short: again as a picture in movement. And just like in
Charlotte et son Jules the ironic remarks of the male protagonist about
cinema can be referred to the woman. Arent movies great? says Paul,
One sees beautiful girls wearing dresses, and in the next minute, we see
their asses. As if an illustration to this statement about the cinema, Bardot
appears naked all of a sudden three times throughout the film (at the
beginning, towards the middle and before the end in Capri).29 The story
viewed as a media allegory goes beyond a mere contrast between the
medium of words and images and the contempt, or ekphrastic
indifference (Mitchell 1994, 156) of one medium towards the other. Also
like in Charlotte et son Jules we have ambivalences that displace the two
sides of the equation. On the primary level of the diegesis the conflict
arises from the question whether they can love and respect each other. On
the meta-narrative level, the woman and the man both try to invade each
others territory of medial dominance. The writer tries to switch careers
and work in the motion picture industry, but ironically the venture is
linked to literature, it is the adaptation of Homeric grand literature which
in turn is about to be perverted by Hollywood style Technicolor
filmmaking. The whole project involves a director of the magnitude of
Fritz Lang and Godard himself as his assistant.30 The woman, Brigitte
Bardot (the much advertised French sex symbol) is repeatedly presented in
the company of books. [Figs. 5.3035.] Ironically, however, all of them
are about visual culture: they are about Greek art with which she is
compared to, and one book that she reads in the bathtub is about F. Lang.
In Capri while she is lying in the sun, the role of the book she is seen with
is nothing else but to cover up her nakedness [Fig. 5.33]. The failure of
such a switch from one media territory to another is masterfully illustrated
29
All these scenes work in a double way: on the one hand the view of the naked
Bardot (no matter whether this was real nakedness or merely faked as the
discussions suggested at the time of the films release) seems to satisfy the
voyeuristic expectations of contemporary viewers (and according to anecdotes
circulating around the film, the explicit expectations of the producers of the film),
but at the same time, the stylistic techniques that aestheticize the pictures of
Bardot, also de-eroticize the image and almost become proof of a real contempt
towards such expectations.
30
The writers aspiration to identify with the filmmakers (or vice versa) is
emphasized by the fact that Godard appears in the film as a kind of alter-ego of
Paul. Several critics tell the anecdote how Michel Piccoli considered that Godard
failed to give him enough instructions for the role, and started to imitate Godard in
the film, while Godard also seems to imitate Paul when appears in the second half
of the film dressed in the same grey suit and wearing a similar hat as Piccoli.
by the scene in which, Camille, decides to defy her husband by using dirty
words that conventionally should not be spoken by a pretty woman. Her
naked body wrapped in a bath towel, she enumerates a series of filthy
words in front of the monochrome background of the bathroom tiles. But
the sensual quality of the words seem to drip down from her figure just
like bathwater, the visual impression of the half naked Bardot annihilates
the force of verbal expressiveness. [Fig. 5.34.] Her husband tries to show
his affinity with the movies by imitating Dean Martin from Vincente
Minellis film entitled Some Came Running (made in the year of A bout de
souffle, in 1959), and wears a hat even when sitting in the bathtub.
(Camille finds this ridiculous and calls him an ass.) Dressing into robes
similar to antique Romans or Greeks, washing are all activities which
symbolize in a theatrical manner the characters ambitions to change, to
become something else. In the end Camille leaves Paul and decides to go
back to her original job as a typist. But she can only communicate this
decision to the producer by way of pantomime, as he does not speak
French. Finally she announces her break up with Paul in a handwritten
letter. [Fig. 5.35.] The handwriting is shown full screen by Godard as if
emphasizing in this form of writing the imprints of the hand, the visual
quality of the handwritten graphic signs (that Godard associates with
Camille just as he did with Nana), in contrast to the abstract, conceptual
nature of language and more canonical forms of print literature. At the end
of the movie when Camille and the producer are killed in a stylized car
crash, what remain of her are these graphic lines traced on a paper and a
stilled image in which her head is no more than a bright coloured yellow
patch on the canvas-like screen. Instead of crossing over into the realm of
language, she becomes entrapped within a picture (again very much like
Nana, who is entrapped in the ekphrasis of the oval portrait in Vivre sa
vie). And Paul, realizing that he does not fit into the world of commercial
filmmaking, quits his job, and leaves the living legend, Lang to fight his
battles with the narrow minded American producer. Lang, whose name
means language in French, embodies in one person the complexity of
Godards ideals: he is a filmmaker who once made classic art films and
was later forced to cross the ocean and make commercial films in
Hollywood. He is a man who not only managed to survive such a career
change with dignity, but also a learned man of books, whom we see in the
film elegantly quoting and commenting Hlderlin or Dante in more than
one language. Fritz Lang, the filmmaker, and the man of letters is the
emblem of what Godards cinema strives for.
250 Chapter Five
6. Dialogue of the Senses

Pierrot le fou (1965) can be considered as a sort of synthesis in many
respects within Godards filmography. Among other aspects, it also
projects media tensions onto the level of the relationship of a couple. The
story begins as a romantic love affair and escape from the phoniness of
consumerist society. Pierrot changes his name into Ferdinand, leaves his
family behind and flees with Marianne experiencing an uninhibited joy of
life. However, at a given moment in the film, the two characters reach a
point where they realize they cannot really communicate with each other.
Pierrot asks Marianne: Why do you look so sad? And she answers:
Because you talk to me with words, and I look at you with feelings.
Conversation with you is impossible. The reason for this impossibility of
communication is given in the two domains of media that the two
characters are correlated with and which prove not to be commensurable.
The male character is once again in command of the different media forms
of language: he is associated with literature (he reads and quotes literature,
and also, literary references name parts of the film and structure Pierrots
story according to the model of literary chapters), he dedicates most of his
time to writing a diary and has quite a vehement argument with Marianne
in which he explicitly tells her that literature comes before all other arts.
Marianne, on the other hand, is associated with analogies in painting (her
surname, Renoir, is a direct reference to this) [Figs. 5.3637], and acts like
a character out of a Hollywood action movie (Pierrot once even refers to
her as a girl who is like a movie star). But more importantly she comes to
symbolize in the film something that is impossible to convey in words and
can only be equated by music.31 The polarization of the media differences
in this way, that man becomes the representative of words and woman
the representative of images, respectively of all domains that fall beyond
the reach of language and belong to the grand mystery of nature itself, is
actually a cultural clich, something that has shot through social practices
and prejudices for ages.32 Women have been considered as mysterious
31
When he tries to define what she means for him, Pierrot can only come up with
this: She reminds me of music. And the scenes in which Marianne dances and
sings in the middle of nature are the most enchanting in the film.
32
An earlier rendering of this can be seen in The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat,
1963), in which Godard includes a charming and nave drawing test in the
sequence of Bruno taking pictures of Veronica: both characters have to add
something to the outlines of a square, triangle and circle: the girl, Veronica, draws
matchstick figures of a boy and a girl (as she perceives the forms as belonging to
the medium of pictures), whereas the young man, Bruno completes the forms so as
pictures that puzzle men, and men have been supposed to be representatives
of the culture of the logos, women are stereotypically considered as
emotional and men rational, and so on. However, once again Godards
storytelling goes beyond merely highlighting the essential opposition
between man and woman or between the words and images, and presents
the dynamics of tensions and easing of tensions, of the characters coming
together in harmony and then being pulled apart. Whenever there is
harmony between them, the scenes are staged in archetypal settings of
universal totality (e.g. scenes of nature that include the primary elements:
they playfully jump into the sea, bury themselves in the earth, talk to the
moon and dance in the woods). [Figs. 5.3840.] On the other hand, when
conflicts arise, there are always one or more elements that seem to be cut
out of cheap spy novels, comic books or gangster movies. Pierrot le fou
achieves in this fashion not so much a narrativization of these tensions but
instead reaches a level of sheer cinematic poetry. The model for this
paradoxical tensional yet also possibly harmonious relationship is to be
found in the kind of synesthetic poetry practiced, among others, by
Rimbaud (Rimbaud being one of the primary literary references in the
film). Synesthesia is the structure that unites and mixes in unexpected
combination image sound and meaning, and Pierrot le fou offers a
splendid example of how this literary quality can be re-mediated on
different levels within moving pictures. Writing becomes a play upon the
letters that construct it, it becomes sensual drawing, an imprint of the hand
and thought, it becomes painting with light, moving pictures in the neon
signs of the urban landscape, it is incorporated within the world of the
comic books, etc. Paintings become counterpoints of cinematic shots,
functioning as some kind of intermedial punctuation marks, sometimes
they illustrate the texts we hear, other times they remain enigmatic inserts
within the flow of the narrative acquiring a musical quality within the
general score of the film (just like Marianne, whose image is moulded
by the analogies with painting but who also emerges as the embodiment of
music).
As a conclusion we may find that these models of re-mediations and
intermediality all show that Godard senses media relationships far from
being complementary or resulting in a commonplace harmony, but as
relationships that generate extreme tensions in a great variety of forms
owing to their incommensurable differences. As Ropars Wuilleumier sums
it up speaking of Breathless, but the idea is applicable to all these early
they become letters, and writes a text: Je vous aime/I love you (perceiving the
same forms as belonging to the medium of language).
252 Chapter Five
films Godards film asserts itself as writing inasmuch as it practices

dismantling writing while drawing its resources from it.33
In all these films what we ultimately experience is cinema coming to
terms with its own re-mediating processes: a cinema that is inseparably
linked to literature in a sort of painful intimacy, but which attempts to
reach the prestige and impact of high literature through devices
characteristic of its own visual medium. Godards films in their own
uncompromising manner highlight a fundamentally tense relationship with
literature and more generally with the medium of language: a love-hate
relationship that his cinema seems unable or unwilling to circumvent in its
most ambitious endeavours.
Figures
Figure 5.1. Jean-Luc Godard, A Woman is a Woman (1961): the reference to Louis
Malles Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans la metro, 1960) emphasizing the idea of the
cross-fertilization of the medium of the book and the film, Zazie being a possible
embodiment of the cinematic child brought to life by a love affair with
literature.
33
Rodowick quotes the English translation of the text (2001, 102).
Figures 5.23. Alfred Lubitsch used by Godard as a vehicle for cinematic

references, including a mimicking of Burt Lancasters toothy grin from Vera Cruz
(directed by Robert Aldrich, 1954).
Figures 5.45. Emile and Angla communicate through random quotations chosen
from books.
254 Chapter Five
Figure 5.6. Angla is imitating a song-and-dance sequence typical of Hollywood

musicals in the street.
Figures 5.710: Charlotte and her Boyfriend (1958): Jean, the man commands the
mediality of language, the power of words. Charlotte, the woman is associated
with the mediality of images: speechless but expressive (gestures, her photos on
the wall, etc.). According to the parable the relation between literature and film is a
love-hate double bind, but the elements of the two sides are continually questioned.
Figures 5.1112. Breathless (1960): the opposition of signs correlated with the
division of the sexes, Patricia appears as a female body inscribed with letters and
is associated with logocentrism, while Michel identifies with genre film
mythology.
Figures 5.1316. Patricia is presented in narcissistic poses looking at her

reflections in mirrors and in the reproductions of paintings. Michel is reflected in a
series a lookalike figures in the street, among them Godard himself in a cameo
role.
256 Chapter Five
Figures 5.1720. The final scene reiterates and interchanges elements of the films
beginning in which an image of a woman (in the newspaper spread open) screens
the image of the man. Similarly Patricias close-up fills the frame blocking our
view from seeing Michel any more, and while she takes over Michels gesture,
Michel is this time laid out flat on the pavement.
Figures 5.2122. Alphaville (1965): a private eye who keeps taking photos and
brings the redemptive powers of poetry and love to Natasha lost in the shadowy
world controlled by a machine.
Figures 5.2324. The Contempt (1963): an allegory about the impossibility of

inter-art or inter-cultural translations. The series of ineffective dialogues in the film
achieve a complex narrativization of media rivalries and tensions (the flickering
light of the desk lamp placed between them marks the tensions flaring up between
them).
258 Chapter Five
Figures 5.2526. Brigitte Bardot appears with a perfect body resembling antique
sculptures, while Piccoli mocks the statuesque form she has.
Figures 5.2729. The failure of words in front of the images: the short, one word
sentences reflect a kind of ekphrastic fear, they do not even try to describe the
beauty of a female body.
260 Chapter Five
Figures 5.3035. The woman and the man both try to invade each others territory
of medial dominance. Paul, the writer tries to switch careers and work in the
motion picture industry working with Fritz Lang, while Camille is presented in the
company of books.
262 Chapter Five
Figures 5.3641: Pierrot le fou (1965). Marianne is associated with analogies in

painting and acts like a character out of a Hollywood action movie. Pierrot is
associated with literature. The two characters find harmony in a synesthetic
communion with nature but are separated by narrative turns reminiscent of
gangster movies or comic book situations.
CHAPTER SIX
FROM THE BLANK PAGE

TO THE WHITE BEACH:
WORD AND IMAGE PLAYS
IN JEAN-LUC GODARDS CINEMA
I live on the border [] I am someone whose real

country is language and whose territory is movies.
(Jean-Luc Godard1)
1. Word and Image Relation in Godards Cinema:

A Picture Shot in the Back?
Godards highly controversial King Lear (1987) begins with the following
enigmatic inscription: a picture shot in the back. Immediately after this
we see the figure of an angel leaning backwards as if the angel had just
been shot in the back. [Figs. 6.12.] The play upon the words and the
image is not simple. On the one hand it can be read as an ironic
commentary upon the content of the image, as it might suggest a possible
literal explanation of the facial expression of the angels pain. However,
we must keep in mind that angels belong to a realm that is outside the
reach of physical experience, so the idea of a shot in the back in this case
sounds absurd; also, the words refer to a picture being shot in the back
not the angel itself. So the irony might be reversed, and directed against
the spectator who jumps too easily to conclusions, or in a more general
sense, against any viewer caught in the trap of interpreting a
decontextualized image. The angel that we see here is in fact a detail (a
dcoupage) of one of the angel figures mourning the death of Christ on
Giottos fresco in the Arena Chapel in Padua. If we consider it in its
1
Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum made in 1980, republished in Jean-Luc
Godard. Interviews, edited by David Sterritt (1998, 102).
266 Chapter Six
original context, the expression of pain gains a totally different significance,

and Godards selection of this detail emphasizes Giottos uniquely
naturalistic style in a cinematic manner of presenting it in a close up. To
make things even more complex, the word picture in English can denote
both a still image and a film; and shooting can also refer to making a
moving picture. So in this case it is not only the content and the
interpretation of the painted image that we have here, but also a possible
reference to the content, the interpretation and even the making of the film
itself.
We have a similar situation as with Magrittes famous this is not a
pipe inscription below the image of a pipe, where the inscription can
either be referring to the object of the drawing or the drawing itself.2 Only,
if possible, here we have even more twists of meaning. Since an angel
itself, as we have noted before, is not a material being but a personification
of an idea, as such essentially always a picture; the forms by which it
can be perceived are paintings or fantastic visions, revelations. An angel is
a mediator between something unnameable and unseen and something that
we can see and name. A picture is also always mediating between
unnamed or even unnameable contents and visually perceivable form.
Godards film seems to bring into play both a more universal meaning of
transcendence and one referring to the angelic, mediating nature of the
cinematic image itself.3
Without exhausting all possible interpretations, there is one final
observation about these two introductory frames of King Lear. The
expression of shooting something in the back can also mean an
unexpected attack (something many critics would agree4 that Godard
has performed many times against the conventions of classical cinema),
and it can also stress the idea of filming something from a reverse angle
(i.e. from the back).5 In this case we have a shot of a text and its reverse
2
See the famous analysis made by Foucault (1983).
3
The idea of the image as mediator runs through as a leit motif Godards most
significant series of cinematic essays entitled Histoire(s) du cinema (19881998).
4
Robert Stam considers that Godards career consists of a series of guerrilla raids
on orthodox continuity (1992, 259).
5
Timothy Murray (2008) elaborates on this meaning drawing attention to the
repeated instances in the film in which characters are shot with their backs to the
camera. He writes: Clearly related to the films destruction of perspective (which
is traditionally established from a frontal view), this provocative intertitle might
also refer to Godards betrayal of the realistic codes of cinematic and dramatic
adaptation. More than once, for example, Godard positions his two primary
protagonists, William Jr. and Cordelia, so that they face away from the camera at
important moments in the film (2008, 94).
From the Blank Page to the White Beach 267
shot: an image. Text attacks the image following it, entrapping it within
its context of meaning (text is death, image is life Godard has stated
many times6). But also if we take another look at the letters from the
viewpoint of the subsequent shot, we see that they resemble the stretched
wings of the angel. So the text becoming a visual figure in association with
the following image, and the image that is torn from its realm of silence by
the words, initiate a dynamic intermedial discourse. Neither of the two
shots is cinematic in its classical sense: one is merely a text, the other is
a merely a photographic image of a painting, nevertheless, their cinematic
montage is something Eisenstein would probably be proud of. To add to
the complexity of filmic images being shot in the back, the soundtrack
also opens up a new dimension: while watching these two frames we hear
a phone conversation between Godard himself and one of his producers
who expresses his concerns whether the film, King Lear, the one that we
have just begun to watch, will ever be finished. So both text and image are
shot in the back by the off screen voice that comes from the supposedly
real context of the movie. The subtle irony in the background cannot be
missed: the fact that Godard, the famously maverick filmmaker has been
assigned to perform a visual translation of King Lear, which is not only
one of the most prestigious Shakespeare texts, but the title of which can
also be read as a pun on the French word lire meaning to read. In this
way perhaps the angel/picture that is being shot in the back can also be
read as an allegory referring to the paradoxes of the adaptational process
itself: the intermedial games that can be initiated, and the fallacies inherent
in the venture. Inquisitive newspaper reporters smell newsworthy material
in the project, so the producer repeats somewhat nervously that Godard
and his crew are shooting. They are shooting, they are shooting, we
hear, and the ambivalence in the meaning of the words becomes obvious.
Thus the triangle of text image reality turns like a kaleidoscope into yet
another configuration.
Godard himself admitted in an interview about his cinematic experiments:
We are not looking for new forms; we are looking for new relationships
(Bergala 1991, vol. III. 83). Texts, images and their placement in the
context of the real are a constant pattern that is continuously attacked
6
Pour moi, les images cest la vie et les texts, cest la mort. This is a statement
Godard usually wraps into the context of an allegory about Orpheus and Eurydice
in which cinema is embodied by Eurydice and Orpheus represents the murderous
gaze of literature upon whatever mysterious and unnameable significances Eurydice
symbolizes. The thought is of course, reminiscent of Blanchots Orpheuss Gaze
essay (1955) and appears, besides other texts, in a conversation he had with Serge
July on the occasion of the death of Hitchcock (Godard 1991, 180181).
268 Chapter Six
from unusual angles within Godards films. Without even attempting to

exhaust this subject here, I propose to sketch two important paradigms,
two distinguishable underlying principles and sets of artistic devices
through which intermedial relationships are actualized in Godards
cinema. These also seem to define the major differences between his films
made within the decade of the French New Wave (19591969) and the
films made in the period beginning from the late 1970s.7 The key notions
of these paradigms are offered by Godard himself. In the Scenario of the
film called Passion (Scnario du film Passion, 1982), he describes what
the screen means for him by way of two metaphors. Standing in front of
the empty screen he contemplates its resemblance first with a white page
(page blanche) and then with a white beach (plage blanche). The pun
on the two words in the French is symptomatic for Godards thinking: the
reflection upon the nature of film is done from a consciously linguistic
perspective and emphasizes not merely the importance of language but of
linguistic patterns in general. These two metaphors in turn can be
associated with characteristics that define two different approaches of the
word and image relations in Godards cinema.
1. The paradigm of the white page: brings into mind first of all
literary associations (e.g. Mallarms notion of the white page is directly
cited by Godard); and also it can be related to the French New Wave ideal
of the camera stylo (camera as the pen of a writer), as it defines the screen
as a surface awaiting the inscriptions of different signs. The metaphor can
be further associated with other literary-type models, like the concept of
the palimpsest, the idea of a text that is woven by way of repeated
processes of erasures and overwriting.
2. The paradigm of the white beach crystallizes around the
metaphor of the screen likened to a beach basked in blinding sunlight and
covered in a rhythmic flow by the images coming in time like the waves of
the ocean.
7
Godards so called Maoist period that begins around 196768 is a kind of
transition between these two paradigms. In fact the arguments for speaking of this
period as a distinct unity in Godards oeuvre are based more on institutional and
ideological differences than on artistic concerns and stylistics. The search for new
relationships that begins with the New Wave merely turns to new generic forms
of artistic creation (e.g. documentary essay instead of fictional narrative or avant-
garde workshop films instead of an auteur type filmmaking), while radicalizing
some earlier forms (the technique of collage). And also many of the ideas
expressed in these films (like the philosophic investigation of the relationship of
image and thought, image and history, or even the relation of words and images)
will reappear in the films of his later period.
Both metaphors emphasise the underlying, primordial emptiness of

the screen, and both operate with images denoting a surface that is about to
be filled over and over again. In this way actually both metaphors are
traces of the typical modernist obsession with nothingness and its
paradoxical Other: totality. However, the dynamics of the two differs. In
the first case, the blank screen that stares the modernist author in the face
shifts the emphasis towards explicitly linguistic models of writing and
towards the collage-like assembling of the different elements of signification.
In the second case we have the ebb and flow of images which suggests
movement, repetition (camera pinceau/camera as paintbrush) and places
the film images on the borderline of being and non-being and also into an
impossible, heterotopic space of the in-between of different media
appearing in films. In the connotations of the first metaphor texture and
mosaic like fragmentation emerge as key features; the second metaphor
suggests a shift towards a more fluid model, towards the emphasis of time
and rhythm, a shift from mosaical to musical.8 Godard seemed to be
conscious of this shift when he signed the film that initiated his return to
fiction films, Every Man for Himself/Slow Motion (Sauve qui peut la vie,
1979) by writing in the credit sequence: un film compos par Jean-Luc
Godard (a film composed by JLG).
The quintessential film for the first paradigm would be Her Life to Live
(Vivre sa vie, 1962) while the second paradigm could best be exemplified
by nomen est omen New Wave (Nouvelle Vague, 1990). In Vivre sa vie
the film is divided into scenes like chapters of a book, however the
analogy with literature stops here, as instead of telling the story of a
persons life we have fragments of different representational layers of
different media (written and spoken language, various modes of pictorial
representation, etc.). The scene at the police station in which Nanas full
name is spelled out for us, is symbolic. The name Klein-Frankenheim
associates not only the meaning of commonplace through the first part
denoting smallness, but also, more importantly, seems to suggest a
connection with the Romantic creation ideal expressed in the literary myth
of Frankenstein. Nana (and implicitly, Anna Karina) is moulded as a
creation of Godards. Just like Frankensteins creature, who is patched up
from bits and pieces from other, dead people, and brought to life by the
8
Speaking about Godard Jean-Louis Leutrat also connected the two terms,
mosaical and the musical, but in a different sense, not as key notions of
different paradigms, but as complementary principles, implying a possible
connection with what Dante called legame musaico, the signifying power that
opens the particular up to multiple symbolizations, kept together by a rhythm
whose reality remains out of reach (Leutrat 1992, 26).
270 Chapter Six
prototypical Romantic creator-artist, Nana is also a kind of patchwork.

Only this time, it is a modernist collage of pieces of texts and
representations, quotations borrowed from other, once organic wholes,
that are reassembled without hiding the stitch marks.
Interestingly enough a famously enigmatic quotation from Rimbaud
Je est un autre (I is another) is shared by both films mentioned
above. In the first case it seems to point at the elusive nature of things
within the multiplication of layers of representation and media, a kind of
infinite regress, in which the I always appears as another, never directly
accessible, and always trapped like in amber, within the intermedial weave
of cinema.9 In Nouvelle Vague it appears as an intertitle that introduces the
second half of the film, the appearance of the figure of Richard Lennox, a
double of Roger Lennox seen earlier, and the beginning of a variation to
the theme of the first part of the film. As the matter of fact, the changes in
the role of the doubles could also be analysed as symptomatic in this
respect. While in the New Wave period, in a film like Pierrot le fou
(1965), double identity constitutes an alternative that can be explored in a
desperate Romantic flight to freedom, and ends with the absurd failure of
such an attempt; in Nouvelle Vague the character is doubled more as a
variation on a theme.10 Events are repeated and changed as in a mirror, but
there is no sense of failure or absurdity, instead there is merely the poetry
of the images alongside the poetry of literary quotations, a true polyphony
of cinema. The I is another enunciation in this paradigm suggests not so
much a difference, but the possibility of a metamorphosis in the
mythological tradition of Ovid, something again that can be continued ad
infinitum.
Bearing these general principles in mind, let us examine in what
follows each paradigm in turn and give some more examples of what they
entail.
9
Deleuze attributes the quotation to a phenomenon he calls the powers of the
false: contrary to the form of the true which is unifying and tends to the
identification of a character [], the power of the false cannot be separated from
an irreducible multiplicity. I is another has replaced Ego = Ego. (Deleuze 1989,
133.) Beside the films of Welles, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais and Rouch, it is mainly in
Godards characters that we see these powers at work. The different intertextual
references always irreducibly multiply them even when they do not change
names/identities so obviously as in Pierrot.
10
This is true also for Hlas pour moi (Woe is Me! 1993) in which the alter-ego
motif is contextualized into a Greek myth that the film paraphrases (a myth that
itself exists in many variations, of Zeus descending in human form in order to
seduce a mortal woman).
2. Words and Images Written over (and over)

a Blank Page
Godards New Wave films offer in fact an archaeology of cinema as a
medium, discovering in cinema a space in which different languages,
and different media can be inscribed. The most characteristic self-reflexive
metaphor in Godards films for this space is the much commented image
of the blackboard. [Fig. 6.36.] And if for instance Vivre sa vie showed
how a cinematic portrait of a woman can be assembled using different
images and texts, the message of the Band of Outsiders (Bande part,
1964) seems to be that a cinematic world is nothing else but an inter-art
playground11 free to be filled by images and texts pilfered in an
unscrupulous manner. However, most of the times this territory is not
neutral, but appears like an intermedial battlefield. Tensions between
word and image infuse Godards early films12 almost to an extent to which
they displace classical dramatic conflicts onto the field of a self-reflexive
and intermedial discourse. And also, in many occasions the classical
dramatic conflicts shown in the films are possible allegorizations of inter-
art and intermedial relations.13
Godards early fictional movies abound in instances in which
characters read a book or in which they engage in the act of writing.
Reading and/or writing appears not only as a preferred pastime of the
characters (Bande part), or as their attempts at self identification and
expression (Vivre sa vie, Pierrot le fou, etc.), but also constructs a world
made of texts and books and picture illustrations to texts that they are
immersed in, much like the context of a comic strip (the quotations of
which are also present). [Fig. 6.715.] As the matter of fact on the most
basic level these Godard films can be seen as an encyclopaedic voyage
through different medial aspects of language and the various possibilities
of their re-mediation within cinema.
The use of language is always visibly performative and bearing the
traces of intermedial tensions, in the sense that diegetic texts are not
merely transposed onto the screen, but they are always subjected to some
kind of action. They are read aloud/being written, they are translated
11
The famous scene that transforms the Louvre from a repository of artefacts into
a playground is eloquent in this respect.
12
To a certain extent this is true for the films of the New Wave in general. As T.
Jefferson Kline has written, for these films literature is both a model and an
authority to be challenged (1992, 5).
13
See more about this in the previous chapter, Tensional Differences. The
Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godards Films.
272 Chapter Six
(remember the aggressive translation of Shakespeare in Bande part),

rewritten, misquoted, etc. Visible texts are cut up, broken into pieces by
the camera angle or partially masked by another object. Text is always
subjected to violent de-contextualization and re-contextualization as it
enters the screen: it is torn out of context, and broken down to words and
letters, these pieces in turn are often re-arranged and multiplied (we see
extraction of words from words, inversions, anagrammatic plays with
letters and onomatopoeia). [Figs. 6.1619.] Collage and texture are key
notions of both image and text. And while on one level this aspect can
emphasize the authorial and authoritative gesture of the filmmaker who is
in the position of inscribing them on the surface of the screen as if it were
a blackboard for his ideas, and who can introduce the personal aspects of
language (via both speech and writing, Godards own voice and handwriting
most of the times) into the impersonal images. On another level there is
always the possibility by way of the word and image relations to discredit
the authority of such a personalized and authoritarian author. (See for
instance the playfully unreliable off screen narration that appears in
Bande part, or the ambivalence of the status of diegetic writings, like
Pierrots journal entries, as free indirect speech or as poetic subtext of
the narrative.)
It seems that the key feature of word and image relations in this
paradigm is that they continuously deconstruct each other and consequently
the unity of the cinematic image, of cinema as a cohesive medium itself.
On the one hand we have a struggle for assertion of media dominance:
visuality takes hold of language and forcibly integrates the other
medium into its own texture, on the other hand this also lays bare aspects
of language that are otherwise not seen. The categories Robert Stam used
to distinguish different types of reflexivity might be applicable to the word
and image relations in these films as well. Stam speaks of a playful (ludic),
an aggressive (dehumanizing, typically modernist) and a didactic mode
(1992, xvi-xvii). So beside the re-contextualizations that can be seen as an
aggressive mode of intermedial self-reference, we can identify more
playful and didactic figurations. The visual materiality of language for
instance enables it to be modelled into a kind of lettrist, moving visual
poetry. The visual form breaks the everyday transparency of language,
coherent verbal discourse being fragmented into mosaic-like pieces of
visual signs, the fundamental building blocks of writing. In the credit
sequence to Pierrot le fou the blank spaces, rhythm, non-conceptual
(visual) analogies (shape, colour) are emphasized. [Figs. 6.2023.]14 The

letters both deconstruct and re-construct a text,15 like a typically structuralist
approach to art and media: they emphasize a set of paradigmatic elements
(both linguistic and visual) and their arrangement into a meaningful
syntagmatic order. In the same time, these playful sequences also connect
Godard to another poetic tradition, namely to that of the aesthetics of
Rimbaud. The notorious poet-gangster is explicitly conjured up in Bande
part which has a protagonist named Arthur Rimbaud and includes many
quotations from him. The texts recited in Pierrot le fou are also indebted to
Rimbaud. His famous synesthetic poem, The Vowels (Voyelles) seems as a
direct source for the play with letters of different colours and texts written
on different coloured surfaces. Rimbauds often quoted poetic ideal of the
deliberate artistic confusion of the senses (le drglement de tous les
sens) together with a Proustian cult of the senses of hearing, tasting and
touch also has traces in the way Godard deals with language in these early
films. I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix
everything up and say everything Godard declares at one time.16 Writing
not only appears in colour, and speech does not only become poetic by
repetition and the onomatopoeic play on musicality but there is always an
emphasis on the tactile sensuality of handwriting (and doodling). This is
done not through their presentation as corporeal actions (unlike Greenaways
1995 Pillow Book which explored the erotic presentation of writing),
Godards written texts and letters acquire a sensual quality by way of their
crazed playfulness, a spatialization that works both from within,
deconstructing linear writing in a Foucauldian sense and both from the
outside, by the way in which the occurrences of reading/writing are
staged. The images of nature (the elements of earth, water, sky, air in
Pierrot le fou) always emphasize the sensation of touch combined with a
kind of airy eroticism expressed by the pleasures of dance, music mixed
with poetry. Pierrots famous monologue surrounded by the reeds or the
14
Tom Conley relates Godards film to Foucaults ideas on the madness of
language and writes in connection with the crazed language practice of Pierrot
that a madness of language is palpable when it becomes a spatial object. []
Space invades [] not from without [], but from their own form. Space
opens an otherwise closed, unquestioned, or impermeable relation of discourse
to meaning. It gives rise to liberation of meaning from the conventions of
pragmatic exchange (Conley 2000, 8687).
15
This is also true for the credit sequences of Bande part, The Chinese Girl (La
chinoise, 1967).
16
David Sterritt (1999, 1) quotes Godards words that were originally published in
an article in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1966. October 12.
274 Chapter Six
instances in which speech/reading/writing are connected with playful

movement or touch all exemplify a multisensual and even cosmic extension
of the linguistic expression [Figs. 6.2427].
Urban landscape also functions as a similar centrifuge of textuality:
words get dispersed and populate the space. Sometimes Godard seems to
take delight in merely placing side by side different types of language, in a
reflexivity that can perhaps be called, using Stams categories, as didactic.
Consider for instance a scene from Bande part in which Franz and Odile
talk outside the language studio standing in front of a wall filled with
writing. The letters behind Franz are examples of the typical Godardian
decontextualization and mutilation of words, while Franz is recounting
Odile a coherent story by Jack London gesticulating in a vivid manner.
The letters that appear behind him as some petrified remains of a
discursive language are shot against the primordial magic power of live
speech17 that gives birth to vibrant images [Figs. 6.2829].
Language and image, however not only contrast but often mirror each
other. This practice can result in sequences of sheer visual poetry of the
screen, like the second half of the credit sequence of Bande part. Here
the different meanings of the word bande (band) appear as a generative
force behind the intermedial complexity of the cinematic image: band
interpreted as a gang, a group of criminals, band understood as a lane on
a two way street, band meaning a soundtrack as opposed to the filmstrip
carrying the image. Staged at the crossroads, the visual arrangement of
the text also shows how different bands of filmmakers crossed ways to
make the film, the sequence ending with the famous hallmark of the
director himself, who identifies with no less than the totality of cinema and
the centre for all the bands to be reunited [Figs. 6.3033].
Other times the intermedial resonances between word and image are
not so explicit. Marie Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier (1982) has analysed in
detail these aspects in Godards Breathless ( bout de souffle, 1959)18 and
compared the effect of words or phrases reflecting the images to the work
of the unconscious. For example when we see the close up image of a few
coins in Michels hand, the implied French phrase: a bout de sous
(meaning short of money) rhymes intermedially, via the mediation of
the image with the films title a bout de souffle (meaning short of
breath). The verbal meaning in this case disrupts the unity of the image
that is perceived in this way as both a diegetic picture within a narrative
17
The story that is told is also an anecdote about the clash of primitive and modern
culture.
18
See more about Ropars-Wuilleumiers analysis in the previous chapter, Tensional
Differences. The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godards Films.
sequence and an isolated illustration of a verbal meaning. Another

example is the image of Michel running across an open field that is shown
after he has shot the policeman and that reappears at the end of the film in
the name of the place he is about to die, Rue Campagne Premire (also
denoting a field, and reminding us of the image of the empty field Michel
was placed in at the beginning of the film, an image that is echoed here
that we might have already forgotten about).
Such disruptions however, may also not only disintegrate the image
at the level of perception, but they may also endow the image with an
increased quality of poeticity. In Pierrot le fou we have a literary title that
works both ways by functioning either as a specific reference to a literary
work or as an unmarked quotation: pulling the image apart (i.e. dispersing
its meaning) as well as making it mysteriously opaque. In the collage of
images that substitutes the explicit love scene between Pierrot/Ferdinand
and Marianne the following words are repeated by an off screen voice:
Tender is the night. If we recognize in it the title of F. Scott Fitzgeralds
novel, then the intertextual value of the reference to an unconventional
love story can work for us, if we go even further and know that the title is
actually a quotation from a Keats poem (Ode to a Nightingale), then we
have a self-reflexive metaphor of Godards mixture of romantic poetry and
modernist anxiety, if we recognize neither references, then the synesthetic
quality of the phrase in itself can emerge in full. In either cases language
penetrates and fertilizes the screen. And of course this is always a two way
process: poetry opens up the images and the images structure language as
a visual and poetic construction in these films.
Sometimes Godard achieves poetic quality not by inclusion of poetic
fragments or references but by the sheer repetition of found objects of
language. Words (re)gain a poetic aura and complexity of meaning
through their visual recurrence and decontextualization. The first and
foremost example is how Godard uses the serial number of the license for
distribution at the beginning of each of his films as a personal trademark: a
commercial and impersonal stamp on the film marking it as something to
be sold becomes a personal signature for an author. Another example: the
sign of a common gas station that can be seen all over Europe, named
TOTAL becomes an all powerful poetic image in Godards films pointing
to both the doomed aspirations of the protagonists and to the complexity
of Godards cinema. The name of Balzac quoted in Pierrot le fou
combines these last two features. On the one hand, Balzac represents
nothing less for Godard than this totality his art aspires to: the ideal of
276 Chapter Six
grand narrative literature, an all comprising fictional universe.19 On the

other hand we find out in Pierrot that Balzacs name has been assigned to
a telephone zone in Paris, but also that it too has already been replaced by
common area codes and nobody cares about Balzac. This process is also
symptomatic for early Godard films: the finest quality of literature
contrasted with pieces of texts and words shown as a commodity of a
society of never ending spectacle that transforms words into images, texts
into labels, and exhibits of a cultural wasteland. The city is revealed as a
collection of trademark names; interiors of homes, outdoor scenes are
shown littered at every step by the cultural debris of language [Figs. 6.34
37].
To sum up the key features of this paradigm, we can say that Godards
New Wave films stage word and image relationships mainly as an
archaeological site, a playground and/or as a battleground of media
differences in which both word and image have the power to disjoint the
other from conventional perceptual patterns.
3. Waves of Texts and Images Flowing over a White Beach

In speaking about the second paradigm that seems to come together
around the metaphor of the plage blanche we have to start from the idea
stressed by Godard, that the screen is some kind of borderland of the
images coming like waves to the shore. Instead of the page or the
blackboard implying literary analogies and a collage-like patchwork, what
is important in this model is the idea of a space of in-between that is
continually constructed and deconstructed by the ebb and flow of the
images, by their appearance and disappearance.
At the end of the New Wave period in Week End (1967), in a film that
was self-reflexively acknowledging the passing of an era (let us remember
only the final word plays inscribed on its black screen fin du
cont(e)/the end of the story/storytelling and fin du cinma/the end of
cinema), Godard introduces a grotesque exterminating angel20 who
announces the end of the Grammatical Era and the beginning of
19
This passion for Balzac is shared not only with other New Wave filmmakers like
Chabrol or Truffaut who similarly pay homage to the great writer in their films, but
also with Sam Fuller (whose cameo appearance is so famous in Pierrot le fou).
Fuller confessed his admiration for Balzac in a documentary made in 1996
(Typewriter, Rifle, Movie Camera) with the collaboration of Quentin Tarantino,
Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch.
20
The name is also a reference to the title of Buuels film Exterminating Angel
(Lange exterminateur, 1962).
flamboyance, especially in cinema. The words can be interpreted as a

visionary statement predicting the transition from modernisms focus on
the relentless deconstruction of previously established grammatical
forms (in Godards case the attacks directed at classical conventions of
narrative cinema and the grammar of seamlessness in the sequence of
shots) to a much more explosive post-modern imagery, completely
detached from any conventional cinematic grammar, as a declaration
that anticipates exactly this change in paradigm in Godards filmography
from the increasingly grammatical concern with the building blocks of
cinema (the technique of the assemblage/collage) to a flamboyant
polyphony of the images (namely this second model based on the metaphor
of the waves and the beach), marked by more fluid territorializing
moves, incursions into the domains of the other arts.
Although in the most general terms cinema can be considered as the
ultimate heterotopia (as Foucault himself acknowledged it) perhaps it is
adequate to specify that films that make use of explicit intermedial
relations (like those of late Godard) display not only a heterotopic
mediality but also a kind of diegetic heterotopia. In the first model
described earlier word and image tensions were projected into narrative
allegories and narrative displacements characteristic to linguistic
inversions (chiasmus). See for example the main characters of Le mpris
(1963) who are each defined by the dominance of a specific medium:
images (Camille/Brigitte Bardot) and words (Paul/Michel Piccoli), and
each want to prove that they can cross over onto the others field of
dominance. 21 In this second model the phantom-like, unattainable quality
of the medium is often projected into diegetic images of heterotopia:
several late films are staged in typical heterotopic spaces, and their
relations with universal myths are emphasized.
In earlier films the characteristically New Wave cinematography, the
hand held camera movements, the people in the street caught unawares
staring right into the camera, the cinema vrit quality of the images
introduced a sense of real place and time even if the sequence of scenes
was fragmentary and erratic. This was not any place whatever as
Deleuze (1989, 272) described one of the typical modernist spaces in
films, most of the times it was the spontaneous flow of people in the
particular streets that were captured on film. This directness of early
Godard films counteracted the symbolic quality of the atemporal collective
spaces, of the typical New Wave locations emphasizing a transitory
21
A more detailed analysis of this can be read in the previous chapter, Tensional
Differences. The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godards Films.
278 Chapter Six
existence and a state of being dislocated and on the run (like hotel rooms,
bars, cinemas). If New Wave Godard was all about spontaneity and
contingency, a search for the definitive by chance,22 and most of his
New Wave films can be interpreted as confessions of a cinematic ars
poetica of spontaneity and uninhibited artistic freedom, late Godard seems
to be all about transcendence and ritual, the search for the essence of the
image itself. Thematically this is reflected in a more conscious use of
metaphorical spaces and sacred imagery. In these late films we have
beautiful, painterly rendered images of fields (Sauve qui peut la vie),
interiors of hotels (Detective, 1985), winding paths in luxuriant landscapes
and lush forests (Woe is me!/Hlas pour moi! 1993), gorgeous lakeshores
(Nouvelle vague, Hlas pour moi!), a proliferation of nature images that no
longer bear the stamp of cinema vrit type directness, but can always be
seen in analogy with painting, music or poetry. In a New Wave film like A
Woman is a Woman (Une femme est une femme, 1961), the scenes
accompanied by loud extradiegetic music, and imitating Hollywood
musicals are cut next to scenes of almost amateur like street cinematography
(and diegetic noise/silence), thus alternating artifice and reality in a
collage-like technique, and both qualities are discernible as differences of
cinematic texture. Late Godard films also present cuts between scenes,
images and sounds that defy conventional logic, however, this is no longer
perceived as a clash of differences, much more as a complexity resulting
from an orchestration of different elements of the cinematic discourse
into a polyphonic score of an incredibly rich soundscape overlapping a
ravishing variety of images.
The defining features of this second paradigm can also be grasped in
relation with the changes regarding the reflexive quality of Godards films.
Ever since his very first works one of the fundamental aspects of Godards
reflexivity had been to fill with tension the dimension of the cinema that
we call off-screen. Both the viewer and the author could step in and
step out of the flow of images, and ultimately a form of pseudo-
communication could be staged (the actors seemingly addressing the
spectator directly or the author being physically present in small roles or as
a voice etc.). The oscillations of illusion and frustration of this illusion
became the trademark of New Wave Godard. A crucial issue of modernist
self-reflexivity was in this way the ability to express whatever the cinema
screen could absorb from the world lying before and beyond the
image in a self-conscious manner. Thus self-reflection became the great
22
Kaja Silverman quotes these words from Godard (Silverman and Farocki 1998,
35).
myth of modernism, the last bastion of the representability of reality (see

Rodowick 1990). A self-thematizing work of art may have revealed its
own mechanisms, still this exposure merely meant that the film referred to
itself, or rather, that it created another illusion, that of filming itself. The
fragmentariness of Godards early films suggested that we witnessed a
work in progress of an author that we were allowed to know (through his
own presence, his personal cultural experiences and friends included in the
films) and we were made parts of the creative process. In this second
paradigm, however, this form of reflexivity seems to fade in Godards
oeuvre, and a new, post-reflexive concept of the cinematic state of in-
between emerges. In Godards films made in the last two decades images
are perceived as images without any reflexive framing getting in the
way of their transparency, first of all due to the their extra-diegetic nature
and also, perhaps more importantly, due to the fact that their interrelation
with other media is enigmatically multiplied. Images are allowed to reach
the viewer in a flow of associations. The media space of cinema
becomes therefore much larger, much more indefinite and dynamic than
the one provided by the earlier techniques. His 1993 film, Woe is me!
(Hlas pour moi!) for instance presents a traveller who is in search of
stories, and at the beginning of the film we are informed by an intertitle
that what we are about to see was conceived after a legend (daprs
une legende). Yet the word after turns out to be misleading as it does
not only hint at mythical texts used as inspiration, but in the film it can be
interpreted as the impossible position of reconstructing an experience after
the events have taken place. Godard seems in this way no longer to be
preoccupied so much with the presentation of how narratives are
constructed (as in earlier films), but with what lies beyond and before
a coherent narrative be that visual or verbal.
The images themselves come to be separated in a never before seen
frequency by blank black spaces. These blanks are also not the same as
Godards famous cinematic blackboards used for intertitles. In Nouvelle
vague for instance we have a repeated intertitle which declares: things,
not words dwelling on the paradox of denying language by a linguistic
statement, while being nothing other than a graphic image, namely a thing.
Language penetrates the image and the image penetrates language, this
being literally performed in the film as the inscription comes as an
intertitle that cuts into the flow of images and the inscription being at the
same time a separate frame of the moving image as well. In other films
while still preserving a strong link with literature (in Hlas pour moi! for
example they name parts of the film as books and declare the film to be a
proposition du cinma), the blank spaces become a more integral part of
280 Chapter Six
the flow of images as they present a continuity of language: the inscription

beginning and continuing several scenes later. This time it is the image
that acts as a cut between the words and interrupts the continuity of the
linguistic statement, thus the images and words become literally
interlaced. On the other hand while the blank disrupts the linearity of
perception, there is also an auditive consciousness that behind the
impenetrable screen the action is still going on. The blank screen becomes
the shore of a cinematic ocean where the waves can be either images or
sounds, something that is close to what Blanchot considered as the
saturation of emptiness (Foucault 1998). The technique adds a new
dimension to the Deleuzian spacing signifying that each image is
plucked from the void and falls back into it (Deleuze 1989, 179), as this
void in this case is not devoid of mediality, it merely operates with the
absence of pictures in the conventional sense.
The most characteristic medium that reflects upon this new quality of
cinema is no longer literature but music, and an aural sensuality in general.
Instead of the encyclopaedic variety of writing used in earlier films we
have an almost incessant flow of verbal discourse that accompanies
Godards later films and the prominence of the domains of hearing in
general. The eye is considered to be the organ of distance, the ear is
something that directs our attention to the inside, and also beyond vision
(you can hear in the dark, as indeed we do during the black screen
sequences), sounds and music become passages of transcendence: from
one person to another, from present to past (verbal recollections), from
blindness to vision (images evoked by words), from the abstract/immaterial
and the corporeal, etc. Godard has explicitly formulated an aesthetics
based on the notion of hearing (entendment) as understanding, based on
the quality of music and the auditive sense in general that has access to
areas unreachable by the conceptual domain of language. The music of
the images appears in this context as the text of silence.23 The
transcendental qualities of the images are emphasized, the fundamental
mystery of art: a passage towards everything that we would very much like
to see but we can at best only listen to. Accordingly, music becomes in
many ways a metaphor for the quintessence of a total cinema in late
Godard, as he declares in front of an audience gathered to listen to his
personally delivered lecture in Our Music (Notre musique, 2004) in a
23
The black screen inscription in Hlas pour moi: Le loi de silence (also a
possible reference to Hichcocks I Confess, this being the films French title) can
be translated: both as the law of silence or the text of silence (a notion that can
be linked to Foucaults and Blanchots murmur of the Outside (Foucault 1998).
poetic definition: the principle of moviemaking: to go to the light ... and

shine it upon our night, our music.
As a conclusion, we can say that in this paradigm it is not the
aggressive interaction of words and images that is staged on screen, but
notwithstanding their differences their fusion and similarity, as the same
screen acts as both image and text.24 Let me quote only two examples from
later works. In one of the last scenes of Hlas pour moi! we see the
traveller/detective at the railway station contemplating his failure of not
having been able to detect/reconstruct a story, and while he is waiting, two
men run along the railway tracks shouting the first part of a biblical
quotation: He who has not sinned The quotation (that comes as a
commentary on the detectives thoughts) remains unfinished verbally;
however, immediately after this we see the men throwing stones at the
departing train, and thus the image finishes the sentence (shall throw
the first stone). The two media are sutured together without visible marks
of difference. Text and image flow not just one after the other, or over
each other but into each other in Histoire(s) du cinma (19881998),
Godards quintessential work composed for the musical instruments
of words and images. If we take two of the many calligram-like images
appearing in this series of video essays [Figs. 6.3839] we can see that it is
becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether we should understand the
frames of this video essay primarily as text, or we should consider it as a
moving picture of overlaid words and letters in which the performative
value of language becomes visible. In case we look, for example, at two
moving images of Rita Hayworth that are superimposed in a photographic
collage, we may wonder whether this amounts to more like a kind of
hieroglyphic writing using the imagery of cinema in which the conceptual
constructive force of images is expressed.25
Godards latest work, Film Socialism (Film socialisme, 2010),
described as a symphony in three movements by its subtitle, seems to
summarize this second paradigm in his art, at the same time offering a
kind of playful loop into the first model as well, by staging most of its
scenes on board an allegoric ship sailing along the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea, washing together languages, cultures, memories and
24
This in fact seems much closer to the philosophy of Jacques Rancire than to
any essentialist viewpoints over media differences, as Rancire sees in the
intermedial relation of word and image as a relationship which plays on both the
analogy and the dissemblance between them (Rancire 2007, 7).
25
A more detailed analysis of the relation between words and images in this
ekphrastic video essay can be read in Chapter Eight: Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema
and Media Archaeology in Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma.
282 Chapter Six
sensual impressions. At first sight we might even think that the film marks
the final victory of images over words as the film ends with the inscription:
no comment, a similarly revealing intertitle as the one concluding Week
End, almost half a century ago. Whats more, the mockingly unrevealing
official English subtitles (instead of translating the dialogue offering
merely two or three word clusters sometimes artificially melting together
separate words) that are provided to the otherwise polyglot film, and that
Godard marked as Navajo English also seem to stand as clear evidence
of the impossibility of all kinds of translations and of the impossible task
of matching the flow of images with words. Nevertheless, the film which
is Godards first experience conducted entirely in the medium of digital
photography in cinema does not sail away from the known patterns
established in the second half of his career. The soundscape of the film is
again awe inspiring in its musical polyphony and craftsmanship (mixing
together off screen voices, on screen sounds, excerpts from other films,
commentaries, fragments of dialogues and so on), the images are
encyclopaedic in their variety, and the texts are again both aphoristic and
perplexing: the whole film unfolding a poeticity both on the level of the
images and on the level of words that is not too easily defined.
So if the earlier model emphasized the rifts of both linguistic discourse
and pictorial representation, challenging coherence and unity both on the
level of image and narrative, what we have here, in this second paradigm
is the transmutation of word into image and image into word, an infinite
process that challenges the dismantling of a culture or a cultural memory
itself into words and images. This having been said, it has to be noted that
exactly Godards latest endeavour attests to the fact that these two
paradigms are far from being contradictory or exclusive, for beginning
from the first films to the last, essentially Godards cinema has always
meant: images shot through with poetry and shot as poetry.
Figures
Figures 6.12. The introductory shots of King Lear (1987): the inscription and the
detail from Giottos fresco in the Arena Chapel in Padua.
Figures 6.36. The blackboard as a metaphor for the screen: Bande part (1964),
the credit sequence of Les Carabiniers (The Carabineers, 1963), La Chinoise (The
Chinese Girl,1967).
284 Chapter Six
Figures 6.715. Instances of reading and writing in Godards New Wave films
appearing as preferred pastime, self-definition and immersion into a textual and
comic-strip like context: Bande part (1964), Vivre sa vie (1962), A Married
Woman (Une femme marie, 1964), Gai savoir (The Joy of Learning, 1969), Made
in USA (1966), Pierrot le fou (1965).
286 Chapter Six
Figures 6.1619. Pierrot le fou (1965): text torn out of context, broken down into
words and letters, re-arranged and multiplied.
Figures 6.2023. Pierrot le fou (1965): coherent verbal discourse fragmented into
mosaic-like pieces of visual signs.
288 Chapter Six
Figures 6.2427. Pierrot le fou (1965): a multisensual and cosmic extension of the
linguistic experience.
Figures 6.2829. Bande part (1964): non-discursive graphic signs in contrast

with the evocative force of live speech.
Figures 6.3033. Bande part (1964): credit sequence based on the different
meanings of the word bande.
290 Chapter Six
Figures 6.3437. Made in USA (1966) 2 ou 3 choses que je sais delle (Two or
Three Things I Know about her, 1967): the word Total confronted with words
shown as cultural debris of a consumer society.
Figures 6.3839. Histoire(s) du cinma: the fusion of texts and images, word and
text undergo the same processes of fade in, dissolve, superimposition.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EKPHRASIS AND JEAN-LUC GODARDS

POETICS OF THE IN-BETWEEN
Because the real cinema is a cinema that you

cannot see.
(Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinma.
Une vague nouvelle)
Intermediality, the Cinematic In-Between

and Ekphrasis
The complex mediality of cinema is unique among all other arts in it
paradoxes and raises a constant challenge not only to theorists who try to
define its characteristics but also to filmmakers who consciously explore
its boundaries. On the one hand, cinema is the most transparent or
invisible medium possible, operating with moving pictures that result in
the illusion of reality (we seem to see the things themselves and not their
representation), and engaging all our senses in their perception. On the
other hand, it is also the most abstract and constructed medium possible
that has no palpable material form (all the sensual complexity of the
cinematic image being nothing but an illusion). And more importantly,
from a media theoretical point of view, the moving picture as a medium
can re-mediate all other media forms used by human communication. The
mixed mediality of cinema although it has often been described in terms
of the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal is not a result of an additive process (a
unity of moving pictures, language, sound, etc.), but consists of a very
unstable set of interrelationships that has undergone lots of changes in its
configuration throughout its technical and stylistical history.1
Cinematic experience itself can be defined by the tensions of being in a
state of in-between: in between reality and fantasy, in between empirical
1
See more about this in the second chapter included in this volume, Reading the
Intermedial: Abysmal Mediality and Trans-Figuration in the Cinema.
294 Chapter Seven
experience and conscious reflection, in between words and images, in

between the different art forms and in between media. The mediality of
cinema can always be perceived as intermediality, as its meanings are
always generated by the media relations that weave its fabric of
significations. Cinema can be defined as an impossible, heterotopic space
where intermedial processes take place, and where figurations of medial
differences are played out.2 Jean-Luc Godards films have long been
associated with the idea of intermediality; in fact it seems that no theory of
cinematic intermediality can be forged without references to his works (cf.
Mller 1996). Godard has discovered in cinema a space in which all
other forms of representations can be inscribed and all other media can be
re-mediated, conceiving cinematic discourse moving constantly in-
between other media and arts.3 In his films images are always closely
related to words4 and cinema is always conceived in a dynamic relation
with the other arts, a relation that connects Godards cinema to a more
general artistic tradition: the phenomenon known as ekphrasis.
Ekphrasis, as we know, is a rhetorical device elaborated in the
antiquity consisting in the detailed description of a gallery of painting or a
group of statues, a case where a verbal text is produced in competition
with the plastic arts. In essence, it is generally understood to stand for the
urge of an artist working in the medium of language to express whatever
falls beyond the realm of language, to use linguistic expressivity as a
tactile or visual sense and thus cross over into the domains of the visible.
Ekphrasis has been a much debated question of literature, but its
applicability to questions of cinema has not been thoroughly investigated.
Nevertheless, in a medium so tied up with all other forms of human
expression, questions of media borders are bound to emerge. We can say
2
See Joachim Paechs theory of cinematic intermediality in this respect (1998,
2007, 2011).
3
Deleuze recognized this quality of in-betweenness in Godards films, and
considered that in his works film ceases to be images in chain an uninterrupted
chain of images each one the slave of the next, and whose slave we are. He
called it the method of BETWEEN, between two images, which does away with
all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, this and then that, which does
away with all the cinema of Being = is. Between two actions, between two
affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two
sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the
frontier, visible (Deleuze, 1989. 180).
4
I have elaborated on the questions of the multiplicity of word and image relations
in Godards cinema in the essay included in this volume with the title: From the
Blank Page to the White Beach: Word and Image Plays in Jean-Luc Godards
Cinema.
Ekphrasis and Jean-Luc Godards Poetics of the In-Between 295
that certain tendencies in film history have undoubtedly aspects that can be
related to what theorists call ekphrastic impulse, a tendency to challenge
cinemas conventionally established perceptive frames, and therefore it
seems that the possibilities of a theory of cinematic ekphrasis are worth
exploring. What should be clarified first of all, however, is why this
particular term should be taken in consideration, and not the term of
remediation that Bolter and Grusin (1999) consider as denoting a very
similar process within media relations. W. J. T. Mitchell defines ekphrasis
as the verbal representation of visual representation (1994, 152). Bolter
and Grusin call the representation of one medium in another remediation
(1999, 45). Are these two terms interchangeable, as Bolter and Grusin
seem to suggest? Mitchell explains quite clearly that there is a possibility
of overgeneralizing the term by considering ekphrasis as the name of an
overarching principle, and he finally gives a definition that clearly
concentrates on the presence of some kind of representation both as
signifier (verbal representation) and as signified (visual representation).
Bolter and Grusin in their more general media theoretical framework
consider ekphrasis as a case of media being incorporated, repurposed by
other media. Taking into consideration both viewpoints, I consider that we
should not merge the idea of ekphrasis with the idea of remediation or use
the two terms as synonyms, but we should consider them as complementary
terms. Given also the fact that the idea of ekphrasis is usually linked more
closely not only to the idea of representation but also to the aesthetic value
of texts, whenever the relations of cinema and the other arts, the
representations of other arts are involved, the term ekphrasis seems
more adequate; and whenever we can speak of more general media
relations (like the use of written or verbal language within a film, for
example), the term remediation would be more suitable.
So what would be the main characteristics of a cinematic ekphrasis?
Do all artworks represented in a film result in an ekphrasis, when can we
consider that film attempts a challenging of its own boundaries? To list
only a few important aspects, the following conditions for the relevance of
the term cinematic ekphrasis can be named.
a) A film cannot be called ekphrastic simply whenever it includes an
embedded representation of another artwork.5 A condition for interpreting
it as ekphrasis is that this embedded art form should go beyond the
function of a diegetic representation (for example: a painting on the wall),
5
Laura M. Sager Eidts book on ekphrasis Writing and Filming the Painting:
Ekphrasis in Literature and Film (2008) includes examples of filmic transpositions
of paintings but is far from offering a more nuanced examination of ekphrastic
phenomena within cinema.
296 Chapter Seven
and should be manifest as a medium that is different from that of the

cinematic image it is embedded in. In short, an ekphrasis requires the
perception of intermedial relations, as transformative inscriptions or
figurations of mediality in a work (Paech 1998, 1430).
b) Cinema can also be perceived as ekphrastic not merely through the
media differences of embedded other media forms, but on a more general
level, in any situation when cinema explicitly attempts to rival another art
form (or style developed in another art form). Expressionist films in which
we have the characteristically painted settings would be a good example of
such and attempt to transform the moving pictures into a sequence of
moving paintings.
c) One of the most important features of cinematic ekphrasis is that in
fact, in cinema, we can usually speak of multiple or multidimensional
ekphrastic tendencies in which one medium opens up the cinematic
expression in order to mediate towards the ekphrastic assimilation of
another. In most of the cases when cinema imitates another art form this
imitation is not the primary target of an ekphrastic impulse, but a
vehicle, a mediator towards yet another medium, the essence of which is
perceived as something beyond concrete expression, something
infigurable. Common examples of this are the so called picto-films,
which have acquired somewhat the status of a sub-genre among literary
adaptations, and in which literature is not directly translated into moving
images, but a sense of literariness is conveyed through imitations of
specific paintings or painterly styles that can be associated to the period in
which the drama unfolds, long descriptions of costumes and places are
substituted by references to well known historical styles of painting.6
An investigation into the ekphrastic aspects of Godards films seems to
be extremely fruitful, as his films can be considered ekphrastic not merely
because they often transpose representations from other arts onto the
screen and foreground essential features of cinematic intermediality, but
also because some of his films include explicit quotations from ekphrastic
literature and thus engage in a multiple or meta-ekphrastic cinematic
discourse.
In what follows from the variety of intermedial relations that can be
connected to the principles of ekphrasis in Godards films, I will outline
four such types:
1. A multiplication of media layers opening up towards each other

and remediating each other.
6
See also Chapter One, and Figs. 1.13.
2. Ekphrasis as a figure of oblivion. Ekphrasis via media erasures.

3. The function of ekphrastic metaphors.
4. The museum of memory and the essayistic expansion and
deconstruction of ekphrasis in later works.
1. The Vertigo of Media. Ekphrasis and Mise en Abyme

In Jean-Luc Godards films there are instances of cinematic intermediality
in which one medium becomes the mirror of the other in some way. In
other words we can speak of an intermedial mise en abyme.7 One of the
best known examples of this is Godards early masterpiece Her Life to
Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962) which also includes a direct reference to the
ekphrastic tradition itself.
Here in the last episode a young man reads out a fragment from Edgar
Allen Poes short story The Oval Portrait which includes an ekphrasis of a
painting. Poes story is about a man reading a book about a painter
painting a portrait of the beloved woman. The story within Godards story
is also a story within a story. Moreover, the images are over-codified by
the voice over narration (in fact Godards own voice). The woman
listening to the story of the painting, Nana (Anna Karina) becomes herself
virtually a cinematic painting losing all connections with real life just
like Poes model, whose life is paradoxically stolen away and transformed
into the painted image. Throughout the film the protagonist is shown in a
Brechtian split into actress (Anna Karina, casting occasional direct glances
at the camera, implicitly at her husband-author) and role (Nana).8 In the
Oval Portrait sequence we are shown the face of Nana against a blank
background, the camera outlining her portrait by nailing her to the wall,
rendering her a helpless object of representation. All of which is
additionally doubled by the mirror-like presence of a photograph of Liz
Taylor pinned to the wall, while Nana herself is painting her own lips in
a mirror. In earlier sequences in the film, we see her in turn either as a
mirror image of Dreyers Joan of Arc,9 or a variation on the topic of
lonely courtesan in a Parisian caf (so familiar in French impressionist
7
See more about the possibilities of an intermedial mise en abyme in Chapter 2,
Reading the Intermedial: Abysmal Mediality and Trans-Figuration in the Cinema.
8
The role itself, through the name Nana, is a hint at a literary text, Zolas novel
having the same title, Nana (the protagonist of which is also a prostitute that has
high hopes in working in the show business).
9
Nana is seen watching Dreyers film The Passion of Joan of Arc (La passion de
Jeanne DArc, 1928) in a cinema and the shotcounter shot rendering of the scene
clearly places her in a dialogue with Dreyers protagonist.
298 Chapter Seven
painting) or as an intertextual variation on Hitchcocks enigmatic multiple

identity woman in Vertigo (1958). [Figs. 7.16.] Godards film foregrounds
cinemas ekphrastic impulse that aims at rivalling the other arts by
remediating traditional forms of portraiture both in the visual arts and in
literature. The embedded representations flaunt cinemas multiple
mediality, but they also result in an endless process of signification, an
endless attempt at figurating the infigurable identity and beauty of
Nana/Anna Karina (through a vertigo of media embedded within media:
Poes literary text, the painting described by this text, Godards personally
voiced narration, the cinematic intertexts, the photography on the wall, the
earlier painterly analogies, etc). The ultimate image of Nana/Anna Karina
that we get is placed (or displaced) somewhere in an impossible space
between art and reality, between sensual presence and imagination,
between one medium and another. In this way the film offers instead of the
images of Nanas life (as the title would suggest), the paradoxes of the life
of the images of Nana/Anna Karina.10
Similarly, in other Godard films the numerous reflections of characters
in paintings, posters [Figs. 7.910, also 5.14], comic book drawings, genre
film iconography, literary figures, etc., may be seen in parallel with the
remediational logic of traditional literary ekphrasis. Even more so, as these
intermedial reflections are quite often not shown at the same time but
dispersed throughout the film and their ekphrastic quality can only be
perceived in retrospect (when we realize that a character resembles an
image seen earlier or presents qualities depicted by a literary quotation
heard earlier), through the associative imagination of the viewer.
2. Ekphrasis as a Figure of Oblivion

Beside this ekphrastic model of multiple remediations we have several
instances in Godards films in which quotations from Post-Romantic
French poetry are used both as a reference to a model for a relationship to
cultural heritage that Godard adopts and also as a means of infusing
cinematic language with poetry.
The poets referred to by Godard usually belong to a literary phenomenon
that Harald Weinrich (2004) described as the art of forgetting or the art
of oblivion. In contrast to the traditional art of memory (ars memoria)
10
Atom Egoyan has recognized this quality of mise en abyme of media ad
infinitum when he went on re-mediating images of Godards film in his short film:
Artaud Double Bill (included in the collection To Each his Cinema, 2007) as
images captured and sent on a mobile phone [see Figs.7.78].
present in European culture since the antiquity that was based on the
principle of preservation of knowledge by way of mnemonic devices of
visualization (association of images and places, for instance), the poetry
included in the art of oblivion was mainly concerned with the renewal of
poetic language, of forgetting old forms and finding new ways of
reinforcing the power of words, of cultivating the gaps between the
words, the fragmentariness and enigmatic quality of expression.11
According to some post-romantic poets true poetry can only be born out of
a so called deep and fertile oblivion. The birth of a new poetic language
is often allegorized in Verlaines, Rimbauds, Mallarms or Valrys
poems in a mise-en-scne of images that consist of the following
components: the traditional topos of the lake as a poetic site, the element of
water as the water of oblivion (Lethe), the mirroring surface of the water
that reflects phantom-like images, or ice that traps a world accessible only
as an image underneath it;12 fog, twilight, darkness and the shining stars
which shed mysterious light upon the landscape and isolate elements; a
boat that breaks the surface into ripples, symbolizing the process of
oblivion, the erasure of the images of memory (Verlaine, Rimbaud), music
and dance (of the muses at the lakeshore or above the water) as more
sensual ways of perceiving the world. The images emphasize the magic
moments of oblivion, loss of consciousness that break up the process of
remembering.13 Poetry derives its power from purification by way of
oblivion paradoxically in the presence of frozen images of the past.
Godards Band of Outsiders (Bande part, 1964) and Pierrot le fou
(1965) are not only full of quotations from these poets, but Band of
Outsiders is constructed almost entirely based on imagery that seems to be
derived from these poetic motifs. The cited texts enrich the image and
direct our attention towards another medium (poetry), distancing the image
from the real life location and weaving around it a texture of pure
imagination. There is no break in the pictorial flow, but another, verbal
picture hovers over the image that we actually see. The scenes gain an
11
Forgetting appears as a gap in the text, which must be filled in by means of
efforts of writing and thinking, but which perhaps also makes the text really
enigmatic and interesting in the first place (Weinrich 2004, 5).
12
See the famous Swan sonnet of Mallarm: the images on this surface are more
like the images of memory than the images of the world that can be subjected to
empirical investigation, and the beauty of the swan escapes like a phantom from
the image frozen into the water of the past.
13
Weinrich writes: The final phase of (post)romantic poetry of recollection is
most clearly realized in Mallarm and Valry. In their works dark recollection,
when it has reached its nadir, turns around in abyssal forgetting (2004, 138).
300 Chapter Seven
inner vibration. Godards ambition equals that of the quoted poets: he

hopes to enhance the expressivity of the cinematic image, and thus give
birth to a new kind of cinematic language by re-mediating the poetry
onto the screen.
In the Band of Outsiders we actually have a character whose name is
Arthur Rimbaud. One of the first scenes he appears in, together with his
opening remarks Its cold and lonely here, (Cest solitaire et glac par
ici) are paraphrasing Verlaines famous poem, Sentimental dialogue: In
the old, lonely and frozen park, two figures have just passed (Dans le
vieux parc solitaire et glac / Deux formes ont tout lheure pass). The
words that we hear from his friend as well as Godards own voice over are
also a mixture of quotations from Verlaine. The quotations are presented
in a Brechtian manner, the words do not sound poetic at all: the poetic
images seem to be frozen into the text of a casual dialogue and voice
over narrative. At the same time, the image they are looking at resembles a
painting, the river and the branches of the trees reflecting in the water, the
fog veiling the landscape could well be an ekphrastic paraphrase of a
number of poems by Verlaine, Rimbaud (like the narrator-authors
commentary quoting Rimbaud: It was under the crystal sky that Arthur,
Odile and Franz crossed the bridges suspended over the impassable rivers
/ Cest sous des ciels de cristal que Arthur, Odile et Franz traversrent
des ponts suspendus sur des fleuves impassibles.) or Mallarm. The
spectacular, foggy landscape in the background appears as a frozen surface
beyond which images of literature or painting can be sensed, but which is
ignored by the two men. [Figs. 7.1112.] The characteristic symbols of
post-romantic poetry: the mythical river of oblivion, Lethe, the reflecting
surface of water also seem to be recurrent (and otherwise unmotivated)
motifs of the film in which characters are repeatedly shown at the side of
the river, pondering about the world, rowing boats back and forth.14 [Figs.
7.1314.]
In a traditional (literary) ekphrasis we have an active, speaking subject
who contemplates in a present moment, suspended from the flow of time a
passive (and usually silent) object of the gaze15 (conjured up as a potent
absence, or a fictive, figural present Mitchell 1994, 158). In Godards
film we have an active, verbal component (speech) and a passive visual
14
As Weinrichs masterful analysis shows there are several poems by Mallarm or
Valry in which the poetic meditation is placed in a scenery involving water and
the reflection in water or the frozen surface of lakes.
15
The self is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the
other is projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object. W. J. T.
Mitchell (1994, 157).
component (image) which are placed in the same cinematic frame and can
both separately be called ekphrastic, but which are not in a direct
ekphrastic connection with each other. They become interrelated only on a
secondary level, where we recognize the type of poetry quoted here and
project the images from this poetry onto the screen. The painterly setting
erases the medium of language (as these pictures replace the poetic
imagery that they translate). The dialogue and voice over narrative
erases the medium of the (poetic) image (the unmarked quotations
become de-poeticized as they are weaved into the casual dialogue). The
opening up of the image into ekphrastic dimensions of poetry by way of
both quoting its lines and forgetting about them first of all by hiding
them within the dialogue (that is always primarily decoded in its relevance
regarding the diegesis), and also by way of re-mediating aspects of these
poetic texts into the images is paradoxical but effective.
There is another scene in Band of Outsiders that could also be linked to
the ekphrastic tradition. Godard includes a concrete defiant gesture into his
film that can be interpreted as an erasure of a traditional cultural space that
usually hosts ekphrastic meditations (and as an act of transforming the
museum from a repository of artefacts into a playground). I am referring,
of course, to the famous scene at the Louvre. The three young protagonists
race through the Louvre in a record of 9 minutes 45 seconds without
looking at the masterpieces hanging there. [Figs. 7.1516.] The scene that
seems to forget about the spirit of the place, the canonized context and
traditional visual artistry in favour of youthful spontaneity ultimately
expresses nothing else but this: the bursting energy of an act of sheer
inspiration something that could be (and, according to the aesthetics of
New Wave Godard, should be) a driving force behind any work of art.
In Franzs figure from the Band of Outsiders we have another,
interesting substitution, this time the medium of the film erases both
literature and painting: instead of Verlaines poetic ideal of musicality we
have a reference to a film musical (Franz repeatedly hums the main theme
from Jacques Demys The Umbrellas of Cherbourg/Les parapluies de
Cherbourg, 1964). This substitution for Verlaines musique avant tout
chose is also performed by the inclusion of decontextualized moments of
sing and dance sequences: like the famous Madison sequence in Band of
Outsiders [Fig. 7.17.], or the singing episode in the wood in Pierrot le fou.
And when in Arthur (Rimbauds) pair figure we have Franz (Kafka) and
not Rimbaud (although all the texts referred to in the film, point to these
two literary figures), we have another poetic viewpoint for fertile poetic
oblivion. After we hear Franzs words: Oublie-moi! (Forget me!
perhaps torn out of the lyrics of the song he was humming earlier), we see
302 Chapter Seven
another substitution of film instead literature: the incident in which

Verlaine took several shots at Rimbaud and consequently ended up in jail
is playfully re-enacted as a conventional western scene in which Billy the
Kid is shot by the sheriff of Tombstone. [Fig. 7.18.] The scene evokes the
famous episode behind the guise of genre film elements, or is it perhaps
the other way round? If behind the surface of the western scene, we catch
a glimpse of Verlaine and Rimbaud, we can finally forget the conventional
meaning deriving from the western narrative and we can enjoy a new kind
of cinematic poetry.
Pierrot le fou seems to be an entire film dedicated to such poetry of
oblivion. In the scene where Pierrot and Marianne, who have fled to the
sea to begin a new life and have a parrot and a pet fox in front of them is
symbolic in this respect. These animals represent two kinds of relations to
language in Godards films: the parrot symbolizes meaningless, mechanical
repetition (a memory without poetry),16 and the fox is the image of
duplicity, of the deconstruction of meaning. The parrot is also a quotation,
among other texts, from Paul Valry. In Valrys interpretation of
Robinsons story, Robinson is suffering from partial amnesia and is
surrounded by a flock of loud parrots, noting that: Without oblivion, we
are nothing but parrots.17
Another example of ekphrastic erasures in Pierrot le fou (1965)
occurs at the end of which Pierrot paints his face blue and thus makes it
resemble both the Picasso painting and the portrait of Rimbaud shown
earlier in the film. [Figs. 7.1922.] He is thus literally transformed into a
cubist image even before in the viewers imagination his face is blown up
into pieces similar to cubist portraits. The scene can also be interpreted as
a concealed reference to Verlaines poem entitled Pierrot in which a
frightening face of a scarecrow seems to be blown up, his eyes sizzling in
their hollow socket. Once more, we have multiple erasures: first Godard
erases the filmic character and re-mediates it as a painted portrait, and
when Pierrot blows up his face as an image, the scene also screens a
literary allusion, opens up the image for literature (also in a literal way, as
the film ends with the two disembodied voices of Pierrot and Marianne
16
David Will wrote a detailed interpretation of how Godard presents the duplicity
of language and the symbolism of the fox and the parrot in this sequence in his
introduction (Oui, bien sr Oui, bien sr) to the volume dedicated to Pierrot le
fou (2000, 121).
17
See Weinrichs analysis in the chapter with the title: Dark Remembering and
Abyssal Forgetting, with a Warning against Parrots (Mallarm, Valry) in his
Lethe. The Art and Critique of Forgetting (2004, 137147).
uttering a final playful and poetic dialogue projected over the almost blank
image of the infinity of the sea).
In the old ars memoria tradition pictures had a privileged role. In
Godards films images of cultural heritage, quotations of paintings (see the
many inserts in Pierrot le fou) become most often decontextualized
pictures associated to words. These paintings seem to appear as relics of
past beauties on the icy surface of a world presented more like a mirror
than a real environment. (We crossed France as if crossing the surface of
a mirror they say in Pierrot le fou). In contrast to them the act of verbal
commentary or taking handwritten notes emerges not as an act of
recording the past, but of performing continuous rewritings: the momentary
registration of emotions and the fluidity of thoughts. Likewise the most
memorable images of these films are not the quotations of paintings but
the images which seem to have been filtered through language, and
respectively, literature. Simonidess ancient adage much quoted in the
comparative aesthetics of ut pictura poesis that painting is mute
poetry,18 can be interpreted in this context as the principle of ekphrastic
oblivion. In Godards early films cinema must forget painting as an
image, but it must rediscover it as poetry. Godard, the so called
intertextual terrorist, is not merely set out to attack and destroy, but to
re-create cinematic language as an ekphrastic practice that repeatedly
freezes language into picture and pictures into language resembling a post-
romantic interplay of memory and oblivion.
3. Ekphrastic Metaphors Pointing to the Other

of the Filmic Image
There are cases when the mutual erasure, re- or displacement of text
and image and an opening up towards the infigurable is achieved by a
single ekphrastic metaphor in Godards films. This is the case with literary
quotations of only a few words included within Godards films time and
again without any specific mark or clue. On one level these short
quotations which are introduced without reference to their source act as a
kind of poetic unconscious of the images. On another level these
unmarked inclusions of poetic texts have the effect of what Foucault
described in his Las Meninas essay in connection with the interdiction of
using proper names: if one wishes to keep the relation of language to
18
The statement attributed to Simonides of Keos and first recorded by Plutarch in
his work De gloria Atheniensium posits that: Poema pictura loquens, pictura
poema silens (poetry is a speaking picture, painting mute poetry).
304 Chapter Seven
vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as starting point for
speech instead of an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as
possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the
infinity of the task. (Foucault 2002, 10.)
In certain cases, however, in Godards films exactly the opposite
happens, as Godard randomly drops references to specific names of
authors/characters or titles of whole literary works. At the beginning of
Pierrot le fou, for instance, the main character, Pierrot complains
vehemently about the fact that people no longer think of Balzac when
dialling the area code on their phone. This principle of associating
literature by way of a one word reference with commonplace, everyday
phenomena is characteristic for many of Godards films.19 In the same
Pierrot le fou for instance we hear the narrator say: Marianne had the
eyes of both Aucassin and Nicolette. [Fig. 7.23.] Likewise, in the Band of
Outsiders, Godard tells us that the characters stopped at a bookstand and
Franz bought the novel which reminded him of Odile. The reference acts
as a sort of ekphrastic metaphor, as we have one word acting as a
metaphor that refers to a whole literary text. It does not suggest one
particular image, but points to something too complex to be captured
within a single image, therefore ultimately unimaginable (we may either
not know the texts referred to or we may know them and then the
meanings generated are virtually infinite). However this placement into a
narrative textual context, this mise en histoire can also parody clichs of
narrative cinema, which conventionally works by dissolving images within
the process of storytelling. As we have learned from the cognitive theories
of cinema the classical dynamics of filmic narrative always consists in
images having the role of directing the viewers attention towards the
construction of a coherent story. In this case the literary reference projects
the concrete image into a void that the viewer is confused how to fill.
Classical ekphrasis operates with the absence of the image as the Other of
the text,20 Godard plays with the absence of the text as the Other of the
image.
19
It is also consistent with Tamar Yacobis views according to which ekphrasis
can consist of a single ekphrastic simile of no more that one phrase, as this
functions as an abbreviated reference to a whole pictorial set of works which
silently refers the reader to the original itself for details and extensions (Yacobi
1997, 42).
20
As W. J. T. Mitchell explains: ekphrastic poetry is the genre in which texts
encounter their own semiotic others, those rival, alien modes of representation
called the visual, graphic, plastic, or spatial arts (1994, 156). In the case of
cinema, what is specific is that all the other modes of representation can act as
Such ekphrastic metaphors also work in the direction of painting. In

the Band of Outsiders for instance we hear this: The Seine resembled a
Corot. [Figs. 7.2425.] In The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat, 1963) the
narrator says similarly, that the sombre blue sky reminded me of a
painting by Paul Klee. [Figs. 7.2627.] The images of the foggy river or
of the streets at night that appear throughout the film may resemble a
painting in general but the particular image it is spoken over may or may
not, even if we find elements that do resemble some of the named artists
paintings. The image is nonetheless displaced, the word (Corot or Klee)
projects it into an impossible space between cinema and painting, just as
the earlier example of Mariannes eyes being compared to Aucassin and
Nicolettes projected the singular concrete image against mediaeval
narrative literature and the whole myth surrounding it. Also in The Little
Soldier we have another piece of conversation with the similar logic. First
Bruno tells Veronica that she reminds him of a character in a Giraudoux
play and later he muses upon the question whether the colour of the girls
eyes is Renoir-grey or Velzquez-grey.21 Susan Sontag in her famous
essay about Godard (included in Styles of Radical Will, 1969) considered
that such references are effective because the viewer cannot verify them.
We must add, that they cannot be verified not because of the possible
ignorance of the viewer, but because of the structure of the reference: the
concrete name is referring to a whole range of possible literary works or
paintings.22
Henk Oosterling compares the experience of intermedial in-between to
Barthes notion of punctum. He says: The spectator is hit: affected and
moved by the punctum. He considers that this resembles the
impossible experience of the breaks between two media. (2003, 3738).
In all these previous examples the intermedial reference does not only
such others. Further on Mitchell also remarks that this otherness is also
significant in its irretrievable absence: the ekphrastic image acts, in other words,
like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable black hole in the verbal
structure, entirely absent from it, just shaping and affecting it in fundamental
ways. (1994, 158).
21
We hear the following commentary in the film: Veronica...did she have
Velazquez-gray eyes, or were they Renoir-gray? Later, during the photo shoot
Bruno says the following: When photographing a face...look at me...you
photograph the soul behind it. And adds: She had deep shadows under her eyes.
They were Velazquez-gray.
22
The reference to Buuels Exterminating Angel (Lange exterminateur, 1962) in
Week End (1967) works much in the same fashion tagging a particular character
the bizarre and aggressive hitchhiker appearing in the film by using the title of an
entire movie.
306 Chapter Seven
underscore the medial difference (a radical alterity) between cinema,

literature or painting, but also identifies in these Others of cinema
something that is beyond perception, yet essential in the filmic image. This
intermedial opening up of the image achieves the ideal expressed more
explicitly by Godard in his later works that the real cinema is a cinema
that you cannot see.23 Oosterling considers this aspect as characteristic
for the reception of intermediality itself, a process that entails that the
sensible, as a reflective sensibility, balances between presence and
absence: going back and forth from one medium to the other, it is a
movement in which positions are articulated in the awareness that they are
principally relational and provisional (2003, 43).
4. The Museum of Memory and the Essayistic

Re-Writing of Ekphrasis
As we have seen in the previous examples there appears to exist a
permanent duality in Godards cinema: the almost tactile quality of the
photographic image in cinema, the sensual presence of things doubled
with the absence of the physical reality that the image represents, or in
certain cases, a void in the signification that can be pointed out by
techniques of intermedial mise en abyme or ekphrastic metaphors mirroring
the other arts and thus keeping the relationship between signifier and
signified infinitely open, making the cinematic image reach beyond its
own media boundaries and into the domain of the unnameable.
In earlier examples the filmic image is placed into the ekphrastic,
imaginary space created by fragments of poetic language and visual
imagery which activate poetic sensitivity but erase literature or even
painting as a directly perceivable medium and the institution of museum as
a place for the arts or even as a place for meditation upon the arts. In the
cinematic essays of the later period the idea of the museum is revived, but
more in the spirit of Malrauxs muse de la memoire, as a collection of
virtually never-ending flow of texts and reproductions of images that
generate an also endless number of associations.
In Godards later films ekphrasis acts as a generative principle resulting
in the interlacing of a series of images and texts. One of the first examples
of this can be seen in Letter to Jane: an Investigation about a Still, a film
made in 1972 with the co-authorship of Jean-Pierre Gorin, in which
Godard and Gorin meditate upon a photograph of militant actress Jane
Fonda seen in the company of Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war.
23
Cf. Histoire(s) du cinma. Une vague nouvelle.
The film, as the title clearly indicates, is the product of an ekphrastic

impulse: the need for the verbal interpretation of a photograph and the
need for the voicing of the thoughts associated to it. But the process does
not stop here, from the beginning the photograph is connected to Godards
recently finished film which featured Jane Fonda (All is Well/Tout va bien,
1972), the same photograph being also used in the advertising leaflet of
the film. Godard declares in the voice over narration that this is actually a
detour, or a direct detour of talking about the issues raised by that film.
The presence of the still image, the photograph of the actress, is meant to
evoke the absent moving images of the film and provide relevant answers
to the questions asked by the film. [Figs. 7.2829.] So the ekphrastic chain
of media is extended from language through photograph into film. Several
other photographs and still images from movies are shown, while the
narration associates further ideas and memories to them as they appear or
reappear. In this way this unique twist of ekphrasis i.e. the photo meant
to evoke the film together with the text interpreting reflexively the whole
process constitutes a way to generate a new kind of discourse in
Godards cinematic world: an ekphrastic-intermedial essay.
The process works both ways in late Godard films: there is a surge of
texts interpreting pictures and a continuous juxtaposition of pictures
anchoring the meanings of texts. There is, however, an important deviation
from the principle of ekphrasis involved here, namely, the fact that these
texts and images are always conjured up not in each others absence, but in
each others presence. So the underlying principle can be called
ekphrastic, but otherwise we witness a more explicit word and image
relationship in which the two media come to be mutually overwritten and
intertwined. The narrative context from these films disappears and what
takes its place is the intermedial weave of text and image and an essayistic
expansion and deconstruction of the ekphrastic practice of words
describing images of the arts, and images acting as picto-graphic writing.
When in 1999, for instance, Godard and his collaborator-companion
Anne-Marie Mieville received a commission from the New York Museum
of Modern Art, they produced a moving picture essay called The Old
Place (Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century) in which
they explored a series of questions about the nature and evolution of the
arts. A kind of free association of ideas was presented (full of unmarked
quotations from different authors) while film clips, paintings and photos
were shown placed in different contexts or juxtaposed, testing the
308 Chapter Seven
resonances of the words like: art, legend and reality.24 [Figs. 7.30
31.]
The masterpiece in his last creative period and the ultimate ekphrastic
work of Godards, however, is undoubtedly his Histoire(s) du cinma
(Histories of Cinema, a project that he worked on between 19891999), a
meditation upon the archaeology of the seventh art, discovering in it layers
upon layers of mediality and culture. Cinema in this project appears as a
fundamentally ekphrastic endeavour: as painting in movement, as a
musical composition of visual rhythm and polyphony of poetical and
philosophical texts. 25 No wonder that some of the most important literary
quotations in the Histoire(s) come Prousts la recherche du temps perdu,
as Godard forces us to experience the cinematic image in all its
palpable, sensual splendour and mystery. This process of rendering the
invisible mediality of cinema itself visible by way of a complex set of
ekphrases and remediations that we witness here is in fact a feature that is
consistent with the essential principle of any Godard film: in it we
experience once more a cinema coming to terms with its own medial and
intermedial processes, a cinema that never ceases to open up towards other
arts and media in a constant quest to become as one of the sections of the
Histoire(s) tells us, borrowing a phrase from Malraux no less than the
currency of the absolute (la monnaie de labsolu).
24
One of Godards main question was in this case: whether art is a legend or
reality legend in this case meaning not only something close to myth, but also
referring to the rule of language of text over the image: a narrative, an inscription,
a caption, an explanatory key.
25
See a more detailed analysis of Godards Histoire(s) du cinema in the following
chapter of this volume.
Figures
Figures 7.16. Jean-Luc Godard: Vivre sa vie (1962). Nana/Anna Karina and the
text of the Oval Portrait. Nana/Anna Karina and the photo of Liz Taylor.
Nana/Anna Karina and Dreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc (La passion 1928) and
Hitchcocks mystery woman from Vertigo (1958).
310 Chapter Seven
Figures 7.78. Atom Egoyans Artaud Double Bill (part of the collection of short
films To Each his Cinema, 2007): cinematic images from Godards Vivre sa vie
quoting Dreyers film are captured and sent on a mobile phone.
Figures 7.910. Jean-Luc Godard, A bout de souffle (1959): characters reflected in

paintings.
Figures 7.1112. Band of Outsiders (1964): the images ekphrastically paraphrase

quotations from Verlaine and Rimbaud mixed without any references into the
everyday dialogue and voice over narrative.
Figures 7.1314. Post-romantic symbols of the reflective surface of water and the
river of oblivion, Lethe.
Figures 7.1516. The race in the Louvre in the Band of Outsiders: the erasure of a
traditional cultural space that usually hosts ekphrastic meditations in favour of the
bursting energy of an act of sheer inspiration.
312 Chapter Seven
Figures 7.1718. Substitution of literature with cinema: a decontextualized song

and dance sequence reminding us of film musicals instead of Verlaines musique
avant toute chose, and the incident in which Verlaine took several shots at
Rimbaud re-enacted as a characteristic gunfight from a western.
Figures 7.1922. Multiple erasures at the end of Pierrot le fou (1965): first Godard
erases the filmic character and re-mediates it as a painted portrait, and when Pierrot
blows up his face as an image, the scene also screens a literary allusion and opens
up the image for literature in the form of the two disembodied voices projected
over the image of the sea.
Figure 7.23. Pierrot le fou (1965): a reference to a whole literary text functioning
as an ekphrastic metaphor in the narrators speech (Marianne had the eyes of both
Aucassin and Nicolette.)
314 Chapter Seven
Figures 7.2425. Image from the Band of Outsiders (1964) accompanied by the
voice over: The Seine resembled a Corot. A reproduction of a painting by
Camille Corot (Corot. Le Tibre et le chateau Saint Ange, 18267).
Figures 7.2627. Image from The Little Soldier (1963) with the voice over: The
sombre blue sky reminded me of a painting by Paul Klee. Reproduction of Paul
Klees Red Bridge (1928)
Figures 7.2829. Letter to Jane (1972), the interpretation of a photograph used to

evoke the film, Tout va bien (1972), ekphrasis used as a generative principle
resulting in the interlacing of a series of images and texts.
Figures 7.3031. The Old Place (2000) as an exercise of the museum of memory:
artworks placed in different contexts, testing the resonances of the words like:
art, legend and reality.
CHAPTER EIGHT
POST-CINEMA AS PRE-CINEMA AND MEDIA

ARCHAEOLOGY IN JEAN-LUC GODARDS
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINMA
The image, capable of denying the void,

is also the gaze of the void upon us.
Maurice Blanchot (1971, 50)
1. The Intermedial Project and its Metaphors

It was in the autumn of 1998, not long after the centenary of cinema itself
that Jean-Luc Godards grand project, the Histoire(s) du cinma (The
Histories of Cinema) was finished and was finally made available to the
public in the form of four video cassettes.1 It was accompanied by four art
books featuring images and texts from Godards film, published by the
prestigious French publishing house of Gallimard. So right there at its
widespread public release we have a sort of acknowledgement of the
media ambivalence that is inherent to the project: it is a film that
supposedly assumes the role of a history of cinema a genre usually
written in the form of a book and speaks of cinema using the language of
cinema. As Douglas Morrey writes: Histoire(s) du cinma, then, is a
history of cinema that is made of cinema, that is constructed from the
images and sounds of cinema itself (2005, 221). On the other hand,
however, it immediately withdraws this media equivalence between the
subject (movies) and the medium reflecting on it (moving pictures) by the
parallel publication of the book format. And this is not a usual translation
1
Histoire(s) du cinma consists of eight parts (four larger chapters each divided
into two subchapters): 1A Toutes les histoires, 1B Une histoire seule; 2A Seul le
cinma, 2B Fatale beaut; 3A La monnaie de labsolu, 3B Une vague nouvelle; 4A
Le contrle de lunivers, 4B Les signes parmi nous. Godard began the project some
time in the late eighties and finished it, considerably re-editing the whole material,
in 1998.
318 Chapter Eight
either, it is not merely the publication of an illustrated script of the film, or

a reverse literary adaptation that so often happens: a kind of novelization
of a film,2 but an art book, a reproduction of images and words from the
film. The parallel project of these art books is clearly ekphrastic and adds a
new reflexive turn to the film: it foregrounds the mediality of both the
images and the words with unique emphasis. By printing individual shots
from the film, these become not only comparable to individual photos or
paintings but they are actually reproduced as equals by the same medium
of print together with images of famous paintings (quoted in the film).
Also, by quoting the texts in a book format, the words of verbal speech
(transcribed from the soundtrack) actually re-enter a world of written
discourse that they were originally taken from. (It has to be mentioned that
many of the texts that we hear as voice over narrative in the film are more
or less accurate quotations from various books.) So already at the outset of
the project we have a complex set of re-mediations: the medium of film
assuming the narrative-discursive role of a book form art history, and the
art book of reproductions re-mediating the flow of moving pictures.
Moreover, the origins and afterlife of the project also contributed
to its intermedial status. It has to be noted that the idea of the Histoire(s)
originated from a series of live lectures on film history delivered by
Godard at the request of the Conservatoire dArt Cinmatographique in
Montral, and the very first step in order to pour some of the thoughts
2
A novelization is a novel written with the explicit aim of being the literary
version/reproduction of usually a successful film or TV series. The novelization
is generally based on the screenplay and it is prepared simultaneously with the film
version, or it is published shortly after the films release. This is very similar to a
so called movie tie-in book, which is a book that has a direct relationship to a
specific film. Most often it is the original novel that has been used in a film
adaptation, and after the success of the film version the novel is explicitly
publicized as the source of the film (sometimes even renamed after the film),
featuring the films poster as cover art or using as illustrations pictures from the
film. This interrelated practice of marketing films and books is a much underrated
phenomenon of intermediality that has been brought to attention recently by
Randall D. Larson (1995) and Jan Baetens (2004). As a rule, novelization can be
considered a practice within the popular/mass art canon of both literature and film
(or has the effect of repurposing a text within the popular canon which is the case
of some classic novels that later come to be marketed as movie tie-ins, and as such
as popular literature, following their adaptations as popular films). Godards book
version of the Histoire(s) somehow challenged this practice itself, while at the
same time it also shared the same publicity purposes that all the novelizations
have, namely to draw attention to the film itself while re-mediating some of its
presumably most attractive features within another medium.
Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema and Media Archaeology 319
expressed there into a more durable form was to publish a book version of
these improvised lectures (it was entitled Introduction une vritable
histoire du cinma, 1980). Thus the film version was preceded by a book
that contained some of the thoughts that inspired the film, and then some
of the features of the film were projected again into a print format. Also,
the videos were followed not just by a book, but also by a boxed set of five
CDs (published by ECM, New Series) containing an edited version of the
soundtrack of the Histoire(s), thus further multiplying the intermedial
trans-forms of the cinematic project and adding a sound-image-text
book experience to the film.3 No wonder that the critic Jonathan
Rosenbaum, whose essay was included in this complex set, considered that
the project was comparable to James Joyces Finnegans Wake.4
It has been clear for everybody that the cinematic endeavour taken in
itself is also some kind of a hybrid media form that defies usual
categorizations of genre. In reviews written about it and in publicity material
accompanying the DVDs we can read characterizations of the following
kind: an epic and non-linear poem, a freely associative essay, a vast
and multi-layered musical composition. There is almost no review that
would not observe the inter-art qualities of the film, the way in which it
uses references from all the arts. Still, interestingly enough, most of the
more serious interpretations deal with it as if it were a regular documentary
(or a documentary essay), and address primarily the main ideas that
emerge without taking into account the actual medial forms that the
project has taken throughout the years. Several critics have found it most
problematic, for instance, that the whole presentation of the history of
cinema is far too centred on European films,5 that numerous landmarks of
3
Later the project would undergo yet another transcription, in 2004 Godard re-
edited the original 265 minutes filmic material reducing it to a more conventional
length of 84 minutes, releasing it with the title: Moments choisis des histoire(s) du
cinma.
4
Jacques Rancire compared the encyclopaedic nature of the Histoire(s) to
Deleuzes similarly ambitious volumes of Cinema 1 and 2, considering them two
works that attempt to sum up the power of cinema and that constitute an
ontology of the cinema argued for with bits and pieces gleaned from the entire
corpus of the cinematographic art (2006, 5). Later, in the same book, Film Fables,
Rancire declares that Godards Histoire(s) du cinma is the most stunning
contemporary manifestation of the Romantic poetics of everything speaks and of
the original tension that inhabits that poetics (2006, 179.)
5
E.g. the eurocentrism of the project has been the subject of a cultural studies
analysis written by a Japanese scholar, Junji Hori (2004), who identified the traces
of what he considers a geopolitics of the image manifest in the range of
cinematic quotations used by Godard.
320 Chapter Eight
world cinema are missing from the survey, it has also been criticised that
concerning the time span that the examples are taken from, there is a
visible preference of silent cinema or the cinema around World War II,
while the films of the latter decades of the twentieth century (except for
Godards own films) are absent from the list of references. Some of the
themes that have been singled out in individual analyses are: the recurring
idea of death, implicitly that of the death(s) of cinema,6 of the concept of
history7 itself, the inherent philosophy of the image,8 or the belief in
cinemas duty to represent/record reality (a duty that according to
Godard it failed to fulfil when filmmakers neglected their ethical
responsibility to show the horrors of the concentration camps, and so on).
The intertextual implications of the ideas of different philosophers, poets
or writers (like Blanchot, Malraux, Proust, Serge Daney) etc., has also
been the object of scholarly analyses.9 Although these are undoubtedly
very important aspects, in what follows, I would like to concentrate more
on questions of structure and form, as well as on the problems of mediality
and intermediality regarding Godards project.
The paradoxical mixture of different aspects can be seen at every level
of the Histoire(s): it starts with one of Godards characteristic text-
weaving devices, the word play. Godard fully exploits the double meaning
6
One such idea is the gradual erosion of cinema by the cancer of television (cf.
Witt 1999).
7
E.g. Colin Nettelbecks paper on Godards concept of history (2005), Kaja
Silvermans analysis of how Godards film presents the historic fulfilment of
several 19th century ideals (2002), Jacques Aumonts article (1999) elaborating on
Bazins metaphor of the embalming/mummifying nature of cinema that accounts
for its exceptional historiographic capacity. Douglas Morreys PhD thesis
submitted to the University of Warwick in 2002, entitled Jean-Luc Godard and the
Other History of Cinema also investigates the way in which: Godard makes a case
for cinema as a tool for performing the work of history. Morrey thinks that this is
partly because the film image, by virtue of always recording more of the real than
was anticipated or intended, necessarily has history itself inscribed within its very
fabric (2002, ii).
8
Most importantly, Godards work has inspired a great part of one of the most
intriguing philosophical explorations of the questions of the visual that has recently
been formulated, that of Jacques Rancires (see his Film Fables, 2006; The Future
of the Image, 2007; The Emancipated Spectator, 2009).
9
Perhaps the best in-depth analyses of Godards main themes and their philosophic
implications are to be found in the volume edited by Michael Temple and James S.
Williams (2000, The Cinema Alone) that comprises essays on the work of Jean-
Luc Godard made between 19852000. Yet none of them focus on the issue of the
intermedial quality of Godards later works.
of histoire in French: meaning both history and story. The stories that
cinema tells and the historicity of the seventh art become intertwined, but
not in any conventional way that we might see in certain documentaries in
which the recounting of the history of film is achieved through excerpts of
particular films. The whole project is organized not in a narrative order,
but in an associative one, the cohesion of which is ensured by a kind of
musical structure of rhythm and repetitions. Just as the plural in the title
suggests, there is no Grand Story of cinema told here, yet there are
thousands of stories touched upon by way of the different film clips and
associations a gesture that is not at all surprising in the age of Lyotards
postmodern condition.10 (As Godard himself tells us in part 1A:
Histories of the cinema, with an s, all the histories that might have been,
that were or might have been, that there have been.) The technique of
collage and fragmentation, of presenting image over image, sound over
sound in a dazzling speed prevails over storytelling. However, paradoxically,
the emotional factor of cinema is not lost. As Alain Bergala wrote about
this film: The very speed of this thinking in images generates emotions in
which it is difficult to distinguish the plastic from the intellectual, but their
blazing visual impact is such that these collisions of images are capable of
bringing tears to the eyes (1999, 240).11 Moreover, Godard even plays
with the word cinema, distorting it as cin-moi12 [Figs. 8.12], clearly
indicating this way the personal nature of these reflections. (They are his
visions upon the history of cinema.) And also the transitive aspect implied
by the suffix moi (me) suggests that these are visions induced by the
cinematic images Godard has seen throughout the years, these are samples
of the infinity of images that impressed him and produced these
associations. Theres a performative, generative power of images recorded
in the Historie(s), a constant process of images giving rise to images. This
generative aspect also means that cinema is not just reflected upon in
highly subjective commentaries and selection of images but it is projected
simultaneously over a multiplicity of medial screens.
There are several models and metaphors that could describe Godards
project that have been elaborated in a more or less detailed way in the
literature that the Histoire(s) itself has generated in film theory and criticism.
Let us have a look at some of them. In Hans Beltings view (2001) this
work does not only connect the collective imaginary to the personal and
10
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward
metanarratives. (Lyotard 1984, xxiv.)
11
English translation of the quotation by Douglas Morrey (2005, 220).
12
In another instance, he extracts similarly the pronoun toi from the word
histoire, with much the same connotative effect [Fig. 8.11].
322 Chapter Eight
subjective imaginary, but also maps out how our memory works: memories
imprinted in images, and images that free themselves from memories of
concrete contexts over and over again (eventually it is impossible to locate
the images in one particular film or another), so we can no longer tell
whether these are memories through images or memories of images. Most
reviewers connect this aspect of Godards work to one of its most
influential predecessors, Andr Malrauxs idea of the imaginary museum
(Le Muse Imaginaire, 1947) or museum of memory (muse de la memoire),
an idea which replaces more traditional views upon the preservation and
display of cultural values with the virtually never-ending flow of texts and
reproductions of images that generate an also endless number of
associations.13
There are other interpretations which consider that Godards project
can be associated with the idea of Freuds mystic writing-pad. For Freud
the appearance and disappearance of the writing on the popular
childrens toy that can immediately erase the visible traces by lifting the
thin sheet of plastic, is similar to the flickering-up and passing-away of
consciousness in the process of perception (1958, 230). Freuds concept
was also reinterpreted by Derrida (2002) who conceived perception itself
to be a kind of magic writing slate. None of us, Derrida claims, can
apprehend the world directly, but only retrospectively; our sense of that
which is beyond ourselves is the product of previous memories, previous
writings. The idea has been applied to many of Godards later works, in
which we have the appearing and disappearing signs of an intermedial
palimpsest (e.g. Alter 2000). The mystic writing pad lately has also
become one of the favourite metaphors of theories of the hypertext as
describing the operational logic of cyberdiscourse.14 And not surprisingly
the analogy of the hypertext is also one that often comes to mind whenever
one attempts to describe Godards project. In reading a hypertext, our
sense of immediacy, of a text unfolding before our eyes for the first
13
Godards whole project has also many similarities to Malrauxs Psychologie de
lArt, which was first published in three volumes, and was later transformed into a
four volume publication under the title Les Voix du silence. Some of Malrauxs
texts are also literally quoted in the Histoire(s). In episode 1B (Une histoire seule)
Godard cites Les Voix du silence, and episode 3A (La monnaie de labsolu)
borrows its title from Malraux. The correspondences between the two grand
projects were examined in detail by Michael Temple (Big Rhythm and the Power
of Metamorphosis, 2000), who used Blanchots essay about Malraux as a matrix
for analyzing some of the philosophical ideas in Godards film.
14
Cf. Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich: Memory Trade. A Prehistory of
Cyberculture (1997).
time, is underscored by the presence of other readings and other authors,

other versions of ourselves that throw into question the very concept of
being as a unified, coherent and stable whole existing in the plenitude of
the present. In hypertext, consciousness is displaced from the act of
apprehension, from the act of reading, to the experience of having been
written.15
This sense of immediacy of perceiving the moving images and sounds
here and now combined with the knowledge or sense of dj vu of
material coming from some kind of mixed repository of collective and
personal memories displayed on the elusive magic slate of the screen
seems indeed a key attribute of Godards project.
The metaphor of the Deleuze and Guattaris rhizome is also one that
has become somewhat of a commonplace in describing Godards latest
cinematic works in which seemingly everything connects or can be
connected to everything. As they write: a rhizome has no beginning or
end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.
The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree
imposes the verb to be, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,
and ... and ... and... (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 27). What is worth
mentioning beyond the mere association of the concept, is how already in
Godards earlier works the technique is foreshadowed by what Deleuze
called in his extensive analysis of Godards films, the method of the in-
between in which each image is plucked from the void and falls back
into it (1989, 179). Deleuze considered that already in his early fiction
films and video experiments in the late sixties and seventies film ceases
to be images in chain an uninterrupted chain of images each one the
slave of the next, and whose slave we are. He considered that the
generative principle was, (like in the rhizome) the AND, namely this
and then that, the result of which was that Godards cinema highlighted
the interstice, the irrational cut, between two actions, between two
affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between
two sound images, between the sound and the visual (Deleuze 1989,
180). The techniques of free indirect vision as practiced by Godard, and
described by Deleuze, seem to constitute a basic pattern that appears first
in the films of the New Wave and is carried on with shifts in emphasis
concerning several aspects of filmic narrative and structure16 to Godards
15
The Electronic Labyrinth, by Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin
Parmar. http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0257.html
16
See a discussion of the shift in paradigm within Jean-Luc Godards oeuvre in the
chapter entitled From the Blank Page to the White Beach: Word and Image
Plays in Jean-Luc Godards Cinema in this present volume.
324 Chapter Eight
later fiction films and cinematic essays. So no matter that time and again
film historians try to find a clear break between Godards earlier and later
works, these two are not so radically different exactly if the free
associative logic of the images and their intermedial aspects are taken into
consideration.
2. An Archaeology of the Medium and the Perspective

of the Outside
Godards Histoire(s) of cinema can be considered as a whole not only an
intermedial palimpsest reflecting on images from the history of cinema but
first and foremost as a meditation upon the complex mediality of cinema,
discovering in it layers of mediality and culture specific to an archaeology
of cinema as a medium. From this perspective cinema is not defined by its
storytelling capacity (as we are accustomed to: movies meaning engaging
stories made accessible through moving images), but most of all by its
possibilities of transcendence, of mediating as previously mentioned
first of all reality and/or memory. But it is also clear from the beginning,
however, that for Godard mediation in the movies means re-mediation, not
only a conscious acknowledgement of cinemas cultural associations but
also explicitly, the incorporation and re-fashioning of other media and arts.
As Jacques Rancire wrote the Histories of Cinema is wholly woven out
of [] pseudo-metamorphoses, [] imitations of one art by another
(2007, 41). Cinema appears as painting in movement, as theatre, as literature
written with the camera-stylo, and as a dance of images or as a musical
composition of shadows, forms and colours. Cinematic images are shown
literally through the filter of the other arts: like in the mystic writing pad,
the veil of painting falls over the cinematic image, and the camera-stylo
making the imprints of the painterly representation onto the cinema screen
(this superimposition and consequent fade-out, removal of layers is a
repeated visual pattern of the film). [Figs. 8.36.]
So what seems as an inner gaze the gaze of a filmmaker viewing and
reflecting over images of cinema is actually a gaze from the outside of
the conventional borders of cinema. If we view the film from an even
wider angle, we can say, that the whole project is somehow conceived for
an imagined, impossible gaze, one that is characteristic for artworks of
great proportions, as Slavoj iek pointed out.17 The gigantic scale of the
project in itself, its length of nearly five hours (which given the
17
These ideas can be found in two of ieks video lectures: The Reality of the
Virtual, The Spectators Malevolent Neutrality (2004).
weakened narrative aspects, and the lack of linear cohesion can seem
rather interminable) and the multiplicity of sounds and images projected at
the same time, makes it a perfect example of those works in the history of
culture that can only be grasped from the viewpoint an idealized, outside
gaze that is supposed to have seen and comprehended all. In this way it is
like the enigmatic giant landscape drawings (so called geoglyphs) in the
Nazca desert that iek mentions. The products of an ancient, Pre-
Columbian culture these drawings were discernible only by an eye that
could look down from a great height, a height to which no technology
could raise people at that time. ieks other examples are Lanzmans long
documentary film Shoah (1985), that most likely people do not watch from
beginning to the end, or the kind of oversized exhibitions of different
cultural products like the exhibitions of the Venice Biennale where only
the curator is supposed to have seen it all, but the individual spectator can
only visit a limited slice of the whole display, nevertheless having the need
to maintain the fiction that there is an idealized gaze that had seen it and
therefore is able to comprehend the whole in its totality.
This perspective of the outside is already present in the narrative
aspect as Jacques Rancire has observed in dismissing stories, to
write history by connecting directly up with their outside (2007, 55).18
A parallel could be drawn here to early cinema which also used a so called
external narrative, and in which the images had the role to ensure the
emotional immersion into an already familiar story for which the images
were merely reminders. (Only this time there is no such comprehensive or
familiar story.) This outside perspective is most intriguing, when we
examine more closely the actual language of the Histoire(s). It is fairly
18
Rancire, in a later work, The Emancipated Spectator (2009), elaborates on this
idea of Godards dismissal of stories and emphasizes the way in which Godard
experiments with a new kind of cinematic language based on different levels of
figurations. He writes: He employs the labour of the figure on three levels. First
of all he radicalizes the form of figurativeness that consists in intertwining two
logics of sequence: each element is articulated with each of the others in
accordance with two logics that of the narrative sequence and that of infinite
metaphorization. At a second level, figurativeness is the way in which several arts
and several media come to exchange their powers. However, at a third level it is
the way in which one art serves to constitute the imaginary of another. With
cinema images, Godard wants to do what cinema itself has not done, because it
betrayed its vocation by sacrificing the fraternity of metaphors to the business of
stories. By detaching metaphors from stories in order to fashion a different
history out of them Godard fashions the cinema that has not existed. But he does
so by means of video montage. On the video screen, with the resources of video,
he constructs a cinema that has never existed. (Rancire 2009, 130.)
326 Chapter Eight
obvious that this is not regular, narrative cinema, but a language that
resembles what Foucault calls relying on Blanchot, the murmur of the
Outside (1989). A language that borders on the void and nothingness,
not one representing clear-cut things by, but one that is open towards its
own infinity. It is neither fiction nor reflection, neither already spoken,
nor never-before-spoken, but something that is in-between, things stuck
in their state of latency, a language about the outside of language,
speech about the invisible side of words. This discourse of the outside is
a listening less to what is articulated in language than to the void
circulating between its words, to the murmur that is forever taking it apart
(Foucault 1989, 154). Godard seems to experiment with a medium that
resembles Foucaults description. By saturating each frame to the extreme,
by the sheer excess of superimpositions and kaleidoscopic variety of
cultural references, what we experience in Godards flow of cinematic,
painterly, musical and literary discourses blended together is the splendour
of cinema without walls, and also the continuous annihilation of all
meanings and references through the flickering multitude of images and
sounds. As a results we have a cinematic medium that remains throughout
the film open to its outside, and constantly gravitates towards its abysmal
collapse into its Others, the other arts. The extensions of the project into
the book or the CD format appear in this way as a natural consequence of
this perspective of the outside folded19 into the inside of the flow of
images, immanent to the language of the Histoire(s).
Furthermore, this interconnectedness of cinema with the notion of the
void, of the abysmal nature of such a multimedial discourse is also
reflected in the thematic recurrence of the idea of death within Godards
essay cycle, and it is a feature that positions the whole work somewhat
outside of history, conferring it a quality of mourning over something
already unattainable and that only such a paradoxical cinematic memory is
able to conjure up. The idea of the dislocated perspective from which we
can observe the death of cinema (the cinema of memory thus becoming
the memory of cinema) seems to haunt Godard, even if he has had some
paradoxical declarations on this subject over the years. In her book entitled
19
The use of the word is consistent with what Deleuze calls in his analysis of
Leibnitz and the Baroque, the fold (2006), and maybe it is not inappropriate to
associate it in many respects with Godards intricate and labyrinthine architecture
of moving images. For a more elaborate interpretation of Godards latest works in
the light of Deleuzes ideas see Timothy Murrays excellent essay, The Crisis of
Cinema in the Age of New World-Memory:The Baroque Legacy of Jean-Luc
Godard included in the volume Digital Baroque. New Media Art and Cinematic
Folds (2008, 85111).
The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (2003) Alessia

Ricciardi explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary
crisis of the experience and rites of mourning and dedicates an entire
chapter to Godards opus. She considers that in an age that is skeptical of
history and memory, the way that we relate to the past seems to be only as
a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace, a
problematic that Godards work eloquently mirrors. She states in this
analysis: What changes between the first and the second phases of
Godards career is not so much his aesthetic of repetition and saturation of
cultural signs, but the emergence of his melancholic awareness of the end
of history as a tragic event. This awareness prompts a search for meaning
that leads from the exuberance of the New Wave to the act of mourning of
Histoire(s) du cinma. It is telling in this respect that the directors
favoured method of editing shifts over time from a practice of disruptive,
defamiliarizing jump cuts to the haunted multilayering of superimposition,
a device that in Histoire(s) du cinma allows him to present his meditation
on the past as a continuous palimpsest of film images (2003, 178).
Youssef Ishaghpour also sees in the Histoire(s) an opening up towards
a dimension of the outside through a breach in cinema when he writes:
Godard has always worked in the gap, the in-between, on the blurred and
shifting frontier between fiction and document, in the space between art
and life (his art, his life), between the image of reality and the reality of
image. From the start, awareness of historicity has driven him to open out
this gap, to make a breach in cinema and then make his own cinema in the
breach, while pulling all the rest of cinema into the opening bit by bit. So
that, from this awareness of historicity and its relation to cinema history,
and because new video and image techniques, which Godard uses, have
altered the status of cinema and consigned it to history as a single
collection, outside time, of preserved elements available for juxtaposition,
shuffling around, collage, montage, manipulation and metamorphosis (the
same thing that the appearance of photography, Malraux says, did to the
pre-existing arts), the entire history of cinema has now been drawn
poetically into this gap and adds in that interstice between fiction and
document, image of reality and reality of image, historical and poetic,
immeasurable horror encounters the magical and demonic fatal beauty of
cinema ... along with their necessary redemption. (Godard and Ishaghpour
2005, 136-7).
Medially speaking, it is cinema deconstructed into a constellation of
words and images. It is cinema that is being continually re-mediated into
something else, but what? If ekphrasis is actually remediation as Bolter
and Grusin claim in their groundbreaking work entitled Remediation,
328 Chapter Eight
Understanding New Media (1999), and if as we have already stated, the

whole project is ekphrastic from the onset , then the question remains,
which is the medium that reflects, remediates the other? It is not the usual
case in which literature is seen through cinema or vice versa, it is not even
the case in which a newer medium remediates an older one, but quite the
opposite: cinema seen through the filter of a seemingly archaic medium of
moving pictures. However, this is a form that was constructed in
retrospection, a form that has never existed as such, never existed as a
vehicle for cinematic storytelling;20 it can only be called archaic because
the techniques used were already available at the earliest stages of cinema.
Godard took great care in using the most primitive techniques possible:
photographic inserts, slow motion, shadows projected on a wall, etc.,
deliberately avoiding the use of more modern technology,21 while
repeatedly showing an old fashioned editing table and a typewriter as each
others metaphors in representing the kind of ekphrastic filmic writing he
clearly prefers.22
Foucault says in his famous Las Meninas essay (2002) that there is an
infinite relation between what we say and what we see. Whats essential to
ekphrasis in the views of many theorists is always this gap, the
infinite relation. However, there is a common practice to cover up, or
short circuit this hole by different means of distributing information:
multimedia websites, books, leaflets, audio guides that we listen to in
museums all work on suturing texts with images. Godards attempt
seems to go exactly against this popular practice: his reflexions constitute
such a surprising flow of associations that the images retain all their
20
See also Rancires argument from another perspective on this (2009, 130; cf.
here footnote 18).
21
In this respect it can be seen as a counterpart of Chris Markers CD ROM
experiment: Immemory (1997) which similarly deals with issues of memory,
history, the medium of cinema and its inter-art relationships, and does this using a
media format that is deliberately more awkward or simplistic in its
fragmentation and collage-like nature than that of the fluidity of moving pictures,
choosing thereby a media form outside conventional channels of cultural
production in performing an archaeology of technology and culture (a format
which became somewhat obsolete as the popularity of the World Wide Web
increased, and which quickly receded therefore into a kind of archaic status).
22
The relevance of the principle of ekphrasis in fact extends to Godards whole
oeuvre. In earlier fiction films the filmic image is often placed into an ekphrastic,
imaginary space created by fragments of poetic texts, literary images or inserted
paintings which activate a poetic sensibility and open the image up to an
intermedial dimension (see more about this in the previous chapter, Ekphrasis and
Jean-Luc Godards Poetics of the In-Between).
sensual glory and mystique. So despite the commentaries upon the images,
which could be labelled as ekphrasis within ekphrasis (adding to the
initial ekphrastic transcripts of film and art book), the structure of this
ekphrastic language itself is more like that of a somewhat enigmatic
calligram. Text and image become equally important and subjected to the
same visual compositional principles of fade, dissolve, superimposition.
Text penetrates the image, and similarly rhythm and visuality appears as
key aspects of language, while in our minds there is a constant dynamics
of unity and dissolution of unity.23 Yet this clash of the elements is not
without tension. As Jacques Rancire has observed there is an
irreconcilable duality within the way the images in themselves are used:
the image as raw, material presence, (as seen in the individual shots and
photographic inserts) versus the image as a discourse encoding history
(2007, 11) (as seen in the sequences taken from fiction films that made
cinema history and recorded history, and that the viewer might know), or
as he says at another point: the anti-textual poetics of the icon versus
the poetics of the montage that makes these icons the endlessly
combinable and exchangeable elements of a discourse (2007, 67). Moreover
if we look at the visual associations and the commentaries associated with
them, we find that perhaps the only common measure to organize this
extremely heterogeneous material is that there is no common measure or
guiding principle. What we have is the solitude of the shot, that of the
photograph and that of the words which speak of something else entirely
in a quite different context. It is the clash of heterogeneous elements that
provides a common measure (Rancire 2007, 55). Perhaps we can
connect this feature of Godards film to what Lyotard considers one of the
fundamental characteristics of postmodern knowledge, namely that it
refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate
the incommensurable (1984, xxv). Although at a later point I will argue
how the term in Godards case should be used emphasizing qualities of the
modern that are reviewed and revived from this post(humus) position,
this does not efface the validity of seeing Godards work as dominated by
the incommensurable (a term that Deleuze also attached to Godards
cinematic associations, cf. 1989). Moreover, another idea of Lyotards
system of thought can also apply to the extreme to Godards highly
unconventional project: it is the notion of the Kantian sublime reconfigured
by Lyotard as meaning a figuration of the infigurable, an aesthetic
23
Cf. Foucaults view of Magrittes painting as a deconstructed calligram (1983).
330 Chapter Eight
experience linked to an irreducible, aporetical tension,24 something that is

to be found in the paradigm of avant-garde art (the kind of art that to a
certain extent all of Godards films can be included in), as it is defined by
infinite experimentation with the unpresentable.
Viewed from a closer perspective, the medium of the Histoire(s) is a
cinematic language derived on the one hand from photomontage [Figs.
8.710.], and on the other hand from calligrammatic writing [Figs. 8.11
14.] both connectable though to Eisensteins early experiments with
cinematic language. A calligram-like shot (in fact a detail of the cover of
Samuel Becketts book: The Image) that we can see in the part 1.B of the
cycle entitled Un histoire seule is perhaps emblematic for Godards
technique. [Figs. 8.1516.] We see the graphic signs of the word image
appearing as the pupil of an eye in the midst of a white circle of light. The
word seems to concentrate the meaning of the image, or the other way
round, we can also say that it is the image, the bright circle of light that
reveals the graphic signs as text. Moreover, the gesture of this cinematic
dcoupage of the detail of a book cover is also somewhat ekphrastic, as it
tears out the word from its literary context and transposes it onto the
screen as an autonomous image, it actually performs once again not
merely a decontextualization, but also, a multiple intermedial transfer and
plunges the title of a well known author into the realm of common
language (without proper names as indicated by Foucault) and pure
visuality. By way of the cinematic calligram the aura of the author (and
artwork) is lost, the aura of the word in its infinite possible relations and
that of the image that is worth a thousand words is regained.
As a whole, Histoire(s) manages a uniquely paradoxical fusion of the
photographic collage, calligrammatic text with the musical and spiritual
aspects of cinematic montage (in the vein of Eisenstein). And this inter-
medium is the one that ekphrastically mirrors what cinema is supposed to
stand for in-between the arts.
However, there is one final point that has to be made concerning the
way Godard handles this impossible medium. Clement Greenberg
(1965) formulated that collage and photomontage in particular provide
evidence of the modernist fascination with the reality of the medium itself.
Modernist techniques of arts emphasised not merely the hypermediacy, the
constructed nature of an artefact, but its primary qualities that engage the
senses of haptic vision and touch, its real and material presence in the
24
An aporetical meaning is something that can only be sensed but not articulated.
Lyotard says about Duchamp that he figurates the infigurable (Lyotard 1977,
13).
world.25 While the mediality of cinema is generally considered as invisible

and not of a material nature, Godard seems to continually work on ways of
making the invisible visible. In his New Wave films this was achieved by
way of an elaborate poetics of self-reflexivity. In the Histoire(s) du cinma
by deliberately using techniques that can be labelled as primitive or
archaic, Godard highlights the real, tangible mediality of cinema as it
once was, having its roots in photographic representation and indexicality,
with its infinite connections with the arts and culture, the mediality of a
cinema that came to be displaced, out of time, with the dawn of the
digital era.26 Then again this impossible ekphrasis, this never-before seen
medium seems to convey something familiar to us: it is modernist cinemas
fascination with the indexicality, the tangible materiality of art. Godards
cinema here is actually a highly personal and sort of hand-made cinema
that communicates primarily a sense of texture and manual craftsmanship,
emphasized also by the bodily implication into the artistic creation: the
work bearing the traces, the imprints of performing the artistic creation.27
It is Godards hand typing or leafing through books, cutting and assembling
the sequences; this is his voice, these are his thoughts, his quotations and
misquotations, and we can almost feel the smell of his cigar as the smoke
envelops the images. The whole film lies before us as the palpable body of
his visions.
And, conversely, this imagebody correspondence is underscored time
and again by the images which mediate and re-mediate his own body. All
of this conveying to the viewer that this is a direct imprint of his passion
for the images, and also at the same time, the performance of his own
personal passion play as an artist an artist who once defined himself as
Jean-Luc Cinma Godard28 transcending into words and images. [Figs.
8.1718.] The image will come at the time of resurrection, and also: the
image is of the order of redemption Godard affirms in the Histoire(s)
25
See a more elaborate reflection of the idea of how hypermediacy can also result
in our sensing the reality of the medium in Bolter and Grusins book,
Remediation (1999).
26
For an analysis aimed at explaining the fundamental differences between the
collage of analogue images (open to inter-art relationships) and the morphing of
digital images see: Yvonne Spielmann (1999).
27
Joachim Paech suggests something similar when he argues that the films main
figuration is the medial difference between video as individual medium (as
video-graphic writing, a medium suitable for personal archives) and the
dreamlike medium of cinema (cf. Paech 2002, 292297).
28
He uses this self-definition in the credit sequence of his 1964 film, Bande part
that since has risen to a cult status among cinphiles.
332 Chapter Eight
(accompanied by the recurring image of an angel or Christ). Image in this

case is understood not merely in Bazinian terms of being like the Shroud
of Turin or Veronicas veil, the imprint of flesh, skin peeled off reality
itself, but as Jacques Rancire explains it has to be understood as the
Image that is, the original image of Christian theology, the Son who is
not similar to the Father but partakes of his nature (2007, 8). Godard
seems to regard the image as a promise of flesh, capable of dispelling the
simulacra of resemblance, the artifices of art, and the tyranny of the letter
(Rancire 2007, 8).29
Ultimately it seems as if the images would cease to be the products of
Godards gaze over cinema, but in fact emerge as the products of an
impossible outside gaze of cinema over Godard, thus fulfilling the implied
action in the expression of cin-moi, that is eventually cin-fying him,
folding him into the cinematic in-between. So perhaps this is one of
the things Godard means when he says about his cinema that it is: Neither
an art, nor a technique. A mystery.
Figures
Figures 8.12. Word play with the title: Histoire(s) du cinma, Histoire(s) du
cinmoi.
29
In his Film Fables Rancire also calls attention to Godards belief that cinema
failed to recognize the redemptive power of the image, the nature the
cinematographic screen shares, through Goya s or Picassos painting, with the
religious image, with the natural image of the Son impressed on the veil of
Veronica (2006, 182).
Figures 8.36. The intermedial mystic writing pad of Godards cinema: the
camera-stylo makes the imprints of the painterly representation or composition
onto the cinema screen.
334 Chapter Eight
Figures 8.710. Photomontage: superimpositions of images from Fritz Langs Der

Mde Tod (1921) and Godards Alphaville (1965), images of Eisenstein, of
Eisensteins famous photomontage of the lion and Anna Karina (from a Woman is
a Woman, 1961).
336 Chapter Eight
Figures 8.1114. Examples of calligrammatic writing from the Histoire(s).
Figures 8.1516. A calligram-like shot (in fact a detail of the cover of Samuel
Becketts book: The Image) from part 1. B of the cycle entitled Un histoire seule:
the graphic signs of the word limage appearing as the pupil of an eye in the
midst of a white circle of light.
338 Chapter Eight
Figures 8.1718. The body of the artist folded into the cinematic in-between, the
performance of the personal passion play of an artist transcending into words and
images, the impossible outside gaze of cinema over Jean-Luc Cinma Godard.
RE-MEDIATING THE REAL:
PARADOXES (?) OF AN INTERMEDIAL

CINEMA OF IMMEDIACY
CHAPTER NINE
INTERMEDIALITY AS THE PASSION

OF THE COLLECTOR
(AGNS VARDA: THE GLEANERS AND I,
JOS LUIS GUERN: IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA
AND SOME PHOTOS IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA)
1. Hypermediacy versus Immediacy?

Theories of medium and mediality have a wide-ranging genealogy with
branches as far reaching as Cassirers philosophy of symbolic forms or
much more recent post-structuralist theories of literature and text, sharing
with them more or less the idea that was expressed in the infinite regress
of the real. Mediation is commonly understood as a process through
which one is able to communicate not only with the help of different
media, but one communicates through different media. Medium, as its
denomination suggests, is supposed to stand in the middle, to act as a
sort of mediator. Ever since Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium is
the message, theories of medium have also called attention to the way in
which it is never directly the meaning or the pure message that we
perceive in a communication but the material mediality of the signification
which unavoidably shapes our constructions of meaning. Based on
McLuhans idea that the content of any medium is always another
medium (1964, 2324) several theorists (like Joachim Paech 2000,
Henk Oosterling 2003, among others) have also argued that the term
medium highlights the possibilities of modalities of communications
acting as trans-forms, of being able to produce traces within other
media or being able to be transcribed onto other media.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin elaborated the idea even further in
coining a new term to describe media dynamics and evolution in our culture,
describing it as remediation in a book bearing the same title (Remediation.
Understanding New Media, 1999 a title openly referencing McLuhans
groundbreaking work). The main contention of this work is that new media
342 Chapter Nine
always repurpose and remediate older media.1 Furthermore, there is a

double logic of remediation that involves the concepts of immediacy (media
transparency) and hypermediacy (multiplication of media or self-conscious
over-signification). Bolter and Grusin view this duality not in an
antagonistic way, but as phenomena which are often intertwined. I quote
from the book: Although each medium promises to reform its
predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the
promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium
as a medium. Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy. The process of
remediation makes us aware that all media are at one level a play of
signs []. At the same time, this process insists on the real, effective
presence of media in our culture (1999, 19). So the desire for immediacy
inevitably involves the invention of different techniques that lead to
processes of hypermediacy and media consciousness, nevertheless, in our
present daily practices hypermediacy can often be integrated into our
sensations of the real.
Bolter and Grusins work constitutes a landmark not only in thinking
about the presence of media within media, but also in rethinking the
category of the real in an increasingly mediated world. Whereas theories
of postmodern culture most often emphasize the mediated nature of all our
experiences and the short circuiting of our experiences of texts into
texts, Bolter and Grusin claim that despite the fact that all media
depend on other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still needs to
acknowledge that all media remediates the real. Just as there is no getting
rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real (1999, 5556). They
find that the twin preoccupations of contemporary media is on the one
hand the transparent presentation of the real and on the other, none other
than the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves (1999, 21).
The relationship of mediation and the perception of reality is also a key
issue in Henry Jenkinss theory of media convergence (2006) that
stresses both the idea of the interrelatedness of media and their interaction
with an active consumer, who is not merely a more or less passive
reader of media messages anymore, but someone who takes the media
into his or her own hands and who lives in a world that can be defined as a
media environment. At the same time, Jenkins also emphasizes the role of
media messages in constructing ones personal image of the world.
Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however
1
Sometimes the process is mutual: as seen, for instance, in TV design today: TV, a
relatively older media is being more and more refashioned according to the newer
model of the world wide web hypertexts, which in turn can assume the function
more and more of television programs.
Intermediality as the Passion of the Collector 343
sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of

individual consumers and through their social interaction with others. Each
of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of
information extracted from the media flow and transformed into the
resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives (Jenkins
2006, 34).
Although Bolter and Grusin focus on general cultural tendencies and
take their examples from a great variety of sources, from the history of
visual arts to the evolution of computer design, and although Henry
Jenkinss book primarily refers to practices of different forms of media
convergence within popular culture, I have found that several key ideas:
the interrelationship between hypermediacy and immediacy, between
media consciousness, reflexivity and media transparency or the perception
of the real, as well as the various pragmatics of treating media not as
messages but as objects that populate our everyday life, could prove
productive in interpreting a kind of intermediality in recent cinema that
relies heavily on strategies of mediation, however does not give up the
ambition of representing both the real and the personal.
In what follows I will focus on films that undoubtedly qualify for the
label of reflexive and hypermediated (or intermedial) cinema, which
nonetheless also have the purpose of achieving the sensation of almost
palpable immediacy through these self-conscious intermedial techniques. I
will present Agns Vardas and of Jos Luis Guerns films as typical
examples of what I see as such hypermediated cinematic experiences of
the real. In both cases we have a cinema that is both markedly
remediational and self-reflexive. All of these examples have in common a
strong affiliation to a modernist aesthetics of film and share the quality of
using their techniques to the extreme, of exercising their special impact on
the viewer through a certain degree of excess. Among several other
aspects, the media to be remediated in each case are: painting, photography
and language/literature. These media within media produce an intermedial
structure that in each case conveys not a sense of infinite regress of
signification, an entrapment within a text that merely refers to another text
ad infinitum, or a mere play with differences, but a configuration that
conveys paradoxically a sense of immediacy both on a more general level
(exemplifying the multiple faces of media versus reality or media within
reality) and on a more specific, personal level (in the sense of recording
ones own personal experiences handling these media).
344 Chapter Nine
2. Modernist Collage and the Culture of Collecting

According to Clement Greenbergs influential formulation, it was not
until modernism, that the cultural dominance of the paradigm of
transparency was effectively challenged. In modernist art, the logic of
hypermediacy could express itself both as a fracturing of the space of the
picture and as a hyperconscious recognition or acknowledgement of the
medium. Collage and photomontage provide evidence of the modernist
fascination with the reality of the media Bolter and Grusin state (1999,
38). Collages always bear the physical marks of manual craftsmanship: by
assembling bits and pieces, the materiality of the medium of expression is
shown up as integral part of a palpable reality. Although cinema has no
materiality comparable to that of other visual arts like painting or
sculpture, modernism in cinema also meant a similar cult of collage-like
effects and fascination with the reality of the medium. On the one hand
this was achieved by narrative effects of fragmentation and self-
reflexivity. On the other hand, modernist cinema articulated in many ways
its deep-rooted relationship to the technology and art of photography and
cultivated a visual stylistics that highlighted the individual image, the
photographic frame.2 Photography (alongside painting) became the
prototype of visual abstraction, the model for the construction of the image
as a world in a frame and it was used to reveal the archaeology of the
medium of cinema.3 Then again, modernism made deliberate use of the
photographic image in film as the direct imprint of reality by techniques of
cinma vrit, or close to cinma vrit, in which people acted and reacted
consciously to the gaze of the cinematic apparatus by looking into the
lens, the films recording both the process of photographic representation
(the reality of the medium) and capturing moments from the infinite
flow of authentic reality.
2
This can be seen not only in the famous jump-cut technique of Godards films,
but also in the abstract, framed compositions of Antonionis or Bertoluccis films
in the sixties and seventies, in the open thematization of the relationship of
photography, film and reality in Antonionis Blow Up (1966) or Chris Markers La
Jete and so on (cf. Garrett Stewart 1999).
3
A modernist film constructed of individual shots of abstract composition (see for
example Jean-Luc Godards Une femme marie: Suite de fragments dun film
tourn en 1964) conveys the similar connotation as the medium of photomontage,
that can be seen according to Bolter and Grusin not as deviating from
photographys true nature as a transparent medium, but as exemplifying its
irreducible hypermediacy (1999, 39).
Thus modernist cinema achieved the combination of the cinema of the

apparatus with the cinema of the gaze and that of the cinema of the tactile
senses. The photo-flneur (who extends the eye with the photographic
apparatus and roams the streets armed with a camera-eye) joined the
photo-monteur (decontextualizing images, fragmenting and reassembling
the world into pictures). The twin fascination with the medium and the
reality it could make palpable, s well as the paradoxes deriving from the
acknowledgement of mediation was a defining feature of the modernist
aesthetics4 and also gave rise to the idea of art as collection (and film as a
collection images of life) in close relation to idea of the museum without
walls (or the imaginary museum, to quote Malrauxs term) that brought
together a virtually endless flow of texts and images that could generate an
also endless number of associations. The films of the French New Wave,
and especially those of Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, easily mix realistic
representations with reproductions of painting, colloquial dialogue with
intertextual references, thus the real and the mediated becoming
intertwined and perceivable as natural parts of a world consisting of
different mediations.
The films I am about to discuss were made well beyond the time frame
of modernism, but with techniques that derive from its aesthetic, all of
them carrying on the modernist ideals of collage (and its paradoxes of
mediation), and all of them are constructed with a collectors instinct and
passion for images of life and images mediated by all possible media.
On account of this latter feature all these examples in fact also constitute a
powerful artistic response to a culture of collecting in a consumer society
that emerged during the XXth century and that has its own paradoxes
linked to issues of objectification, possessiveness and self-assertion. The
collector in general and the collage maker share the act of de-
contextualizing and re-contextualizing involved in their work, and they
can also merge in a unique artistic way in the case of filmmakers discussed
below.5
4
As Ka-Fai Yau explains, interpreting Deleuzes categories about modern cinema:
The French New Wave can be said to be a cinema of the real, not owing to its
revelation of the consistency between everyday experiences and cinematic
presentation, but owing to its revelation of the discrepancies between everyday
experiences and the manipulation entailed in presenting such experiences in
cinema (1998, 61).
5
A question would be well justified to ask here: Why speak of a collection and
not of an archive? Certainly this latter term has also appeared often enough
linked to several films that have similar non-linear techniques (like the famous lists
of Peter Greenaways films, for example that amount to a so called database
346 Chapter Nine
Agns Varda is well known for her roots in the art of photography and
for her New Wave films. After several powerful fiction films that
established her prestige as one of the most important women filmmakers
alive, in her twilight years she surprised the world with a film called The
Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000). The genre of the film
is not easy to determine, one could perhaps most suitably call it a first
person documentary essay, as it combines elements of both actual
gathering of facts and self-reflexive elements of philosophical and deeply
personal meditation over the possibilities of the medium and the human
condition of the filmmaker: the little old lady, pleasantly plump and
talkative as she would characterize herself later in The Beaches of
Agnes (Les plages dAgns, 2008) with a movie camera. The film is
imbued with lots of sensitivity and empathy towards her interviewed
subjects, but also with a great sense of humour and openness towards
Vardas own role within this project involving a personal journey (a
humour that prompted one of its reviewers to consider the film as a ludic
road-documentary, cf. Rosello 2000).
As the title indicates, however, it is primarily a documentary dedicated
to the different forms of gleaning (i.e. collecting things others have
discarded or left for anyone else to pick). The starting impulse seems to
come from more than one direction: there is the word itself (gleaning)
and its common use by people and the changing social practices that the
word refers to, and then there is a compelling image seen in recurring
representations of rural scenes showing women or groups of people in the
fields that glean after the harvest (some of the paintings reproduced in the
film include Jules Bretons The Gleaner, Jean-Franois Millets The
Gleaners, Jean Hduins Gleaners Fleeing before the Storm). The quest
that the film pursues in this way, namely to uncover the forms of
contemporary gleaning is on the one hand a linguistic, sociologic,
anthropologic pursuit, and on the other hand, it is driven by an art
historians or collectors curiosity for discovering rare and forgotten
aesthetics). However, the culture of collecting differs exactly in this hands-on

quality that can be seen in modernist collages as well, whereas an archive,
especially in the digital age, always impresses not by its quasi tangible reality
but by its boundless virtuality. All the filmic examples discussed here convey a
physical sense of handling media, of the artists personal involvement in the
material processes of making his art. While in a digital environment the so called
immersion within a multilayered world, and even the possible interactivity of the
spectator, aims exactly to remove those traces of the medium, of the artists
handwork that are inscribed within a collection/collage, and that an essentially
modernist approach seeks to preserve (collect) and communicate.
objects (of art). However, there seems to be some significant differences in

how Varda pursues her desires of a collector and how it is generally
conceived by culture theorists today. Baudrillard considers for instance
that a defining feature of the system of collecting is the creation of the
collectors autonomous world the need of which originates in some kind of
failure in the individuals social communication. He writes: whatever the
orientation of a collection, it will always embody an irreducible element of
independence from the world. It is because he feels himself alienated or
lost within a social discourse whose rules he cannot fathom that the
collector is driven to construct an alternative discourse that is for him
entirely amenable, in so far as he is the one who dictates its signifiers the
ultimate signified being, in the final analysis, none other than himself
(Baudrillard 1994, 24). Roger Cardinal considers that the action of
prospecting in public spaces where the collector has no personal rights of
ownership is crucial to the attitude of a collector, who then gathers up his
booty and thus removes it from public circulation, upon which returning
to his private space, he unpacks his acquisitions, of which he is now the
undisputed owner (Cardinal 1994, 77). He thinks that to collect is to
launch individual desire across the intertext of environment and history.
Every acquisition, whether crucial or trivial, marks an unrepeatable
conjuncture of subject, found object, place and movement. In its sequential
evolution, the collection encodes an intimate narrative (Cardinal 1994,
68). Mieke Bal also emphasises the communicational aspect of each
collection, the fact that a collection of objects tells a narrative that falls
outside the realm of language: collecting is an essential human feature
that originates in the need to tell stories, but for which there are neither
words nor other conventional narrative modes (Bal 1994, 103). 6
Agns Vardas film is unique not only because it is a film about
collecting and collectors, but because the film itself amounts to a genuine
collection of media representations and also offers an authentic record of
the passion driving the filmmaker herself to collect and assemble and
display the booty found in the world. What is definitely missing in this
gesture is the withdrawal into a short-circuited world that characterizes
typical collections, the opposition between public and private spaces, and
the removal of the collected objects from cultural circulation. On the
contrary, the film records an unprecedented success (instead of failure) of
communication on several levels and in different social contexts, and
pursues a relentless incursion into public spaces that are made homogenous
6
For an extensive presentation of (mainly structuralist-semiotic) methodologies in
the interpretation of collections and collectors attitudes see the volume edited by
Susan M. Pearce, Interpreting Objects and Collections (1994).
348 Chapter Nine
with the private space of the filmmaker herself (the improvised shelters of
the homeless or the streets and fields or even museums shown in the film
become equal with Vardas own home). The spirit of it all is therefore
closer to Malrauxs imaginary museum, that seems to be transposed
from the virtual into the realm of the real and tangible. Through the
medium of the cinema, everything adds up to a patchwork put on display,
an intermedial weave that seeks to convey a sensation of a complex and
multifaceted reality, a purpose that the film follows uncompromisingly.
The extension of the project into its sequel, The Gleaners and I Two
Years Later (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse... deux ans aprs, 2002) that
traces the developments in the destinies of the first films protagonists
(including the newer revelations of Varda herself) only underscores this
ambition of an all encompassing recording of reality.
Beyond all these aspects, however, Vardas collection also tells a
self-narrative (a function not alien to any collection as we have seen in the
examples earlier), the film also amounts to an unusual self portrait: that of
Agns Varda who is first and foremost herself a collector of discarded,
disregarded things or artistic topics.7 The metaphor of gleaning is in this
way a self-reflexive one and as such it manages to avoid the connotations
of the commonplace metaphor of trash as treasure or any picturesque
glorification of poverty altogether. This is what raises the film above being
about the plight of the outcast, and makes it a film about life and about the
way a filmmaker can best record life with personal passion and self-
consciousness. In this way it can be related to the best qualities of cinema
vrit, in fact, to adopt Bolter and Grusins term, it can be seen as a
remediation or upgrading of cinema vrit to intermedial cinema. (Let us
not forget that according to some theorists, cinema vrit was itself none
other that a remediation of the kind of street photography that had been
practiced before by the likes of Henri Cartier Bresson, for instance.) And it
can also be seen as the remediation of a text-based encyclopaedic form to
a cinematic hypertext which is organized by the logic of metonymic
association and of different links that extend and enrich its texture.
Although in the presentation of the phenomenon of gleaning we have
a variety of media books, dictionary entries, pictures, paintings, archival
film footage, cinematic reportage, street images edited in a video-clip
style, later even highly personal meditations about aging and about
Vardas private life the result does not only foreground the hypertextual
7
As Mireille Rosello (2000) has already pointed out there are two narrative threads
interwoven in this film: Vardas poetic investigation of the subject of gleaning
accompanied by the exploration of the analogies between filmmaking and her
subject matter: the portrait of the artist as a glaneuse.
structure of intermedial cinema, but the media fragments in each case offer
the context of tangible reality to an abstract notion. For instance, the
showing of a particular book (with the close details of the leather cover)
on the bookshelf of Vardas home in the company of her pet cat is enough
to lift the text out of abstract signification and place it into the concrete,
palpable world of the real and the personal (the personal being perhaps the
most archetypal level possible of the perception of the real), the pictures of
the gleaners are shown not merely as illustrations but as exhibits in a
museum, where people can experience them in their auratic uniqueness
and record them with their own domesticated media tools (photo or
video cameras). [Figs.9.14.]
The film consists of a series of remediations in which the quality of
one medium is transformed onto the other medium (the gestures seen in
the painting are captured in real life and are multiplied by the techniques
of cinematic montage and other representations, see Figs. 9.58.), and also
to the level of Vardas identification with the world presented through
these media. [Figs. 9.912.] Direct reference and personal experience are
always the key highlights. The small digital camera presented to us in
technical detail does not only represent the cinematic apparatus but one
particular camera that fascinated Agns Varda and that she playfully
used.8 Not only that the presence of the camera is not hidden, but also,
Varda allows us to experience the reality of the medium, the way it
filters the world on its own (not cutting out in the final montage the images
when she accidentally left the camera on, filming the dangling of the lens
cover over random images), or reveals its digital texture next to images
of her own wrinkled and spotted skin or to other textures to be experienced
in the world. [Figs. 9.1316.] Reality and representation are continually
confronted, collaged, linked to another. Perhaps the most revealing part
from this respect is the final scene in which Varda insists on tracking
down a painting that lay forgotten in a museum cellar and insists on
carrying it out into the open air exactly in the middle of a heavy gust of
wind, taking genuine pleasure in participating in the act and in the fact that
the reality that in this way frames the painting reflects its theme and
authenticates the experience of the painting that shows Jean Hduins
Gleaners Fleeing before the Storm. [Figs. 9.1718.]
8
Fauvel (2005) interprets the self-reflexive presence of the digital camera as
having the role of creating an ironic tension between nostalgia and digital
technology, a tension that permeates Agns Vardas film and allows her to create
an effective, politically charged manifesto to denounce excess, waste and frivolous
behaviour in the contemporary world.
350 Chapter Nine
3. Immediacy through Hypermediacy: Handling Media

or Touching the Real?
Varda managed to create a cinematic encyclopaedia of the real that also
ultimately achieves a high level of immediacy and personal communication
comparable to Godards essay film cycle, Histoire(s) du cinma (1988
1998) that also presents the medium of cinema as both a vehicle for the
most personal self-reflection and a reflection of the collective memory of
mankind, a collection adding up to a sort of museum of the real, as he
calls it (Godard being well aware of the pun involved in the word
real/reel that works both in French and English.9) What is clear from
our point of view is that Godard presents the reality of the medium of
cinema once more as a complex set of mediations in which again abstract
notions come to be contextualized in concrete media representations
conjured up by subjective associations and assembled by the author who
insists on his own personal presence on screen and the techniques of
archaic photomontage that emphasize the material handling of the
celluloid strip.10 Both Vardas and Godards films can be seen in this way
as re-mediating in fact what can be considered as the indexicality of
modernist cinema epitomized by the chrono-photographic rifle of Jules
Marey whose heritage is directly evoked by Varda in her film or by
Antonionis photographer who hunted down his objects, shot his pictures,
then put them on paper after carefully pinpointing with a marker details to
be blown up.
This personal and tactile implication in manufacturing motion pictures
and clearly leaving a trace of the authors personal bodily experiences on
screen can be seen in Vardas film as well, not only in the images in which
she presents the skin of her aging hand, or close-ups of her hair, but in the
famous images in which she tries to capture reality itself within her palm,
as if transforming her own body into a camera, both framing the fleeting
images and recording the physical impulses, imprints of the world upon
her own eyes, body and skin. It is as if we have the opposite of Barthes
punctum from his Camera lucida (1980) that seems to touch the viewer.
It is a gesture of reaching out and touching the world through literally
9
In English the pun works on the level of pronunciations (reel and real), in
French it works on the level of spelling (the word rel meaning real that
resembles the English word reel meaning a roll of film). The expression itself of
the museum of the real is borrowed from Malrauxs Les voix du silence (1951).
10
I have elaborated on this subject in more detail in another essay included in this
present volume entitled Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema and Media Archaeology in
Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma.
hand made pictures. [Figs. 9.1920.] As we have seen earlier, it is

commonly accepted that the complex medium of cinema is an elusive one.
This gesture, however just like Godards hand-crafted photographic and
cinematic juxtapositions gives somehow a physical shape to the
materiality of the art of moving pictures.
Moreover, both Vardas two films and Godards Histoire(s) seem to
work on the re-construction of a certain aura of the moving image, an
aura that has been lost in according to Walter Benjamins famous essay
about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. As Laura
Marks emphasises the aura entails a relationship of contact, or a tactile
relationship. The Artwork essay implies that aura is the material trace of
a prior contact, be it brushwork that attest to hand of the artist or the patina
on a bronze that testifies to centuries of oxidation. Aura enjoins a temporal
immediacy, a co-presence, between viewer and object. To be in the
presence of an auratic object is more like being in physical contact than
like facing a representation (Marks 2000, 140). Although film can never
actually realize this actual co-presence of viewer and object, both Varda
and Godard, by insistently pushing their own body as mediator between
the represented reality and the reality of the viewer, and also by these
gestures of indexicality and touch that emphasize both the physical
presence of reality before the apparatus, before the directors body and the
palpable experience of images they behold or handle, at least manage to
effectively mediate a kind of auratic experience. It is an experience that
insists on the power of media in making accessible the sensual complexity
of life itself, a complexity that includes artworks as natural objects of a
multimedial reality. Likewise, by insistently arresting the flow of the
images, intervening, commenting and handling the images, the frames can
almost be observed as individual objects of contemplation, thus challenging
another crucial criterion of Benjamins.11
This challenging of films lack of auratic quality through the directors
marked personal implication and indexical traces of his handling of
media (something comparable to the brushwork of a painter) together
with paradoxical techniques of remediation conveying a sensation of
immediacy can also be seen in another type of film, practiced by Jos Luis
Guern. In his twin projects, In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia,
2007) and Some Photos Made in the City of Sylvia made in the same year
(Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia, 2007). Guerns art can also be
11
The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can
abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No
sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested
(Benjamin 2001, 62).
352 Chapter Nine
connected to the same genealogy of modernist photo-cinema as that of

Vardas or Godards only though a different branch. Here we can see an
example of how the most transparent techniques can end up as remediations.
To quote from Bolter and Grusins work: The [] paradox is that just as
hypermedia strive for immediacy, transparent [] technologies always
end up being remediations, even as, indeed precisely because, they appear
to deny mediation. Although transparent technologies try to improve on
media by erasing them, they are still compelled to define themselves by
the standards of the media they are trying to erase (1999, 54).12 In this
logic of thinking the technique of cinema can be seen as an upgrading in
effects of immediacy of both painting and photography. Nevertheless, in
Guerns work that has often been compared to Godards on account of
its techniques that seem to strip down cinematic storytelling to the bare
essentials of images and words , we see how the images lay bare the
photographic, painterly and literary undercurrent of the cinematic texture.
In this case it is the uninhibited flnerie of street photography that is
remediated and also remedied (refashioned and rehabilitated) by
cinematography. The flneur was an urban stroller who collected images,
sensations, and experiences along his loitering around the streets of the
city, a figure of the modern artist/observer active both in literature and in
the visual arts (film and photography). According to these fields the
theorists of the flneur vary from Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin,
Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag.13 Siegfried Kracauer, for instance,
regarded the flneuristic aspects of the cinema as defining traits of the
medium. As the subtitle of his Film Theory (1960) shows, he considered
that the gaze of a camera, like the gaze of the flneur, is meant to
accomplish the redemption of physical reality, and envisaged a
cinematography that transcends all plot structures except for those of
walking and seeing, a cinema that can do without traditional literary
action, and takes its objects directly from the matter of living reality
(1960, 296). Arguing against those theatrical, heavily-staged and plotted
films that do not move the medium closer to the world, he suggested that
the spectators primary aim was that of being free to get immersed into
the images (1960, 91; cf. also Gleber 1999, 148). Kracauer presents the
activity of the flneur in the following way: The street in the extended
12
For example: In general, digital photorealism defines reality as perfected
photography and virtual reality defines it as first-person point of view cinema
(Bolter and Grusin 1999, 55).
13
For a more detailed assessment of the role of flnerie in intermedial cinema see
another essay included in this volume with the title The World as a Media Maze:
Sensual and Structural Gateways of Intermediality in the Cinematic Image.
sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance
encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself.
Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving
anonymous crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified
shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out,
thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable
suggestions they offer. What appears to him are not so much sharp-
contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose
throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet
the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow of possibilities and near-
intangible meanings appears. This flow casts its spell over the flneur or
even creates him. The flneur is intoxicated with life in the street life
eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form. Each has a story
yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow of possibilities and
near-intangible meanings appears. (Kracauer 1960, 72.)
It was Sontag, who was the first to evaluate the application of the
notion of flnerie to photography. In her book On Photography (1977) she
describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early
20th century, the camera has become the most characteristic tool of the
flneur: Photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye
of the middle-class flneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by
Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker
reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller
who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of
the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flneur finds the world
picturesque (Sontag 2002, 55).
Jos Luis Guerns two interrelated films In the City of Sylvia (2007)
and Some Photos Made in the City of Sylvia (2007) seem to be perfect
examples of a renewed modernist aesthetics of the realism of cinematic
flnerie, as described by Kracauer, but also, somewhat paradoxically,
examples of an intermedial cinema that combine references to literature
and painting with an ostensible photographic hybridization of cinema,
refashioning and rehabilitating the uninhibited flnerie of street photography
that Susan Sontag wrote about.
354 Chapter Nine
In Guerns first film,14 however, we have a flneur in a disguised

form. The hero is not a photographer or a poet, but a graphic artist, who
also has a quest: he tries to find a woman whom he met only once. And
while in the first film we see this quest played out as a prolonged
sequence of flnerie within a fictional framework of a minimalist film
narrative, in the second film entitled Some Photos Made in the City of
Sylvia, we have the black-and white photos assembled as a quasi narrative
tracing the steps of Guerns own preparation for making this film. In
trying to find the face that once attracted him, both the protagonist (the
nameless alter-ego, played by French actor Xavier Lafitte) in the feature
film, and the (invisible) director of the photo essay film walks the streets,
watches the passers by, and observes the faces of strangers in a bust stop
or in a caf, draws maps trying to retrace his earlier steps and
sketches/photographs faces. In both films, the activity of the protagonist
(the fictional character, and Guern himself as the collector of the
images) reproduces perfectly the aestheticized existence15 as well as the
detachment (and excitement) of the flneur who can go on observing the
world and collecting the impressions about the world without actually
taking part in it, as Zygmunt Bauman has put it: the city stroller can go on
drawing the strangers around him into his private theatre without fear that
those drawn inside will claim the rights of [] insiders (1993, 172).
In this way in both films, while keeping the suspense of the search for
the woman named Sylvia alive throughout the interminably long scenes
shot in the street16 or throughout the succession of the series of
14
Being released within the same year it is arguable which film should be named
as first and which should be considered as second. I have opted to name the
film In the City of Sylvia as the first on account of being the primary fiction
film to which Some Photos Made in the City of Sylvia can be related as a sort of
werkfilm, or photo-essay, although the images that it is composed of were most
likely taken prior to shooting the fiction film, and although it is a full length film
on its own and its artistic qualities can be assessed independently of the other one.
15
Although the search for the woman gives the protagonists a purpose that is
comparable to the goals of a classical film narrative, this narrative dimension fades
in comparison to the aesthetic pleasure Guern finds and shows in the immersion
into the multitude of images.
16
Lee Marshall describes this aspect of the film in poetic detail: We are as rapt as
the unnamed hero by the successive faces: our initial question could this be
Sylvie gradually fades in importance as we tease out the characters of the
cameras subjects from their smiles and frowns, the way they talk or listen (not
their words, which are just a distant murmur). Then, through a window, our fey
hero catches a glimpse of a girl who we feel, from his electric reaction, must be
Sylvie. He trails her through cobbled streets in real time for what feels like an
photographs fading away and emerging again, Guern manages to keep the
suspense on another front as well: to sustain the viewers continuous
interest in the minute alterations within the given field of vision and the
unfolding of the images themselves. Following his and his protagonists
footsteps and gaze, the camera produces a moving picture album or
palimpsest of (often overlapping) human faces and details of people
singled out from the flow of the passers by. This palimpsest-like layering
of images the palimpsest of multiple faces shown in the depth of the
image, details of human figures (half of a face, a hand, a shoulder, etc.)
blocking the view in the foreground from something that emerges as
visually arresting the eye in the background, images reflected in windows
and partially hidden by reflections in windows has been also noticed and
described in vivid detail by David Bordwell on his now famous blog
where he also analysed the sophisticated use of the point of view shots in
the long caf sequence where the protagonist of In the City of Sylvia draws
photogenic faces of the crowd.17 A similar layering of faces and
eternity. [] In the end, the most impressive thing about En la ciudad de Sylvia is
the way Guern seems to have created pure drama without recourse to story. Were
always taught that story is the engine of drama. Not here: somehow Guern has
created an almost plotless film that has the dramatic tension of vintage Hitchcock.
(Past Perfect, Screen Daily, 19 October, 2007 online version:
http://www.screendaily.com/critical-mass-with-lee-marshall-past-perfect/
4035365.article, last accessed: 16. 07. 2010.)
17
Bordwell, who (like Lee Marshall quoted earlier) views the film with the
expectations for a dramatic structure of a narrative film, is nevertheless clearly
thrilled by the rewarding visual spectacle of the film that he dissects with the
trained eye of the scholar but also with a fair dosage of humour: The sequence is a
pleasure to watch, partly because of the constant refreshing of the image with
faces, nearly all of them gorgeous, most of them female. Either Strasbourg has an
extraordinary gene pool, or this caf attracts only Ralph Lauren models. Yet the
scene builds curiosity and suspense too, thanks to Guerns sustained and varied
use of optical POV. He gives us an almost dialogue-free exploration of a cinematic
space through one characters optical viewpoint. [] The young man, known in
Guerns companion film Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia as the Dreamer, is
almost expressionless as he scans the womens faces. Slight shifts of his glance are
accentuated by his habit of turning his head but keeping his eyes fixed. In over a
hundred shots, Guerin uses some ingenious cinematic means to tease us into ever-
greater absorption in the Dreamers visual grazing. [] And a search for story
plays a part here. Were primed for some action to start, and we browse through
these shots looking for anything that might initiate it. Each face the Dreamer spots
promises to kick-start a plot: when the Dreamer gets a full view of one of these
women, perhaps things will get going. [] And just as he finally gets a full view
of one fabulous face, his attention wanders to . . . another layer, this time one
356 Chapter Nine
photogenic framings and de-framings can be seen in the second, black and
white film as well. Only here because of the use of still images the
effect of juxtaposition is even more textural and the frequently used fades
and blurs emphasize the phantasmagorical dimension of the images that in
the first fiction film was only present as a sort of daydreaming or
intoxication with the images. [Figs. 9.2126.]
As the films progress also very subtly, this palimpsest acquires an
intermedial aspect as well: Guerns camera capturing the images of life
in a natural collage with advertisements and other artificial pictures of
the street, or in a collage with paintings. [Figs. 9.2732.] In this, on the
one hand, the sheer painterly and photographic beauty emerges from
underneath the thin story line, and on the other hand, we become aware of
the process how the cinematic experience of moving images itself is
transposed onto the occurrence of the ever changing images of the street
itself, amounting to a kind of cinema of the street (in the reflections seen
in the windows of trams or in the glass panes of advertisements, mixing all
kinds of images etc), and recording our everyday primordial encounters
with pictures and their traffic. At the same time, multiplying this
primordial or proto-cinematic experience in the world, at one point in
the film quite literally a sort of primitive, hand made archaic technique of
moving images emerges (images presented in their simple mechanical
juxtaposition in time and place), as we see the pages of the drawing book
blown in the wind. [Figs. 9.3334.] And in parallel with the accumulation
of separate images (as if being collected into a photo album) or the
overlapping of the images as if in a palimpsest, the minimalist story slowly
begins to emerge as a reminder, re-mediator (again stripped to bare
essentials) of several well known literary stories in which we have either a
passive voyeur faced with the infinite flow of life, or a man who discovers
that the end is never as exciting as the road that leads to it, or, most
importantly, a man who is haunted by or who pursues the overwhelming
image of the ideal woman that proves to be unattainable.
The forerunner of such a technique can be identified in the type of
modernist collage practiced by Godard that also mixed within a narrative
reminiscent of literary flnerie, fragmented images of advertisements, and
reproductions of paintings, etc. with images of the seemingly unmediated
flow of life. In Guerns case, we see that the paradoxical intermedialization
of visual perception mixes in a similar way in the natural field of vision
inside the caf. As he gapes at the woman inside, layers pile up, creating a cubistic
climax of all the optical obstructions weve encountered. (David Bordwells
website on cinema: Observations on film art.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=1457 last accessed: 16. 07. 2010.)
images of different levels of mediation, however, this does not convey a

metafictional discourse aimed at the exposure of the artificiality of the
medium or the ontological differences of reality and film, but it
manages to turn the cinematic discourse towards the paradoxes of a
continually remediated reality, of the everyday experience of the
convergence between the real and the mediated, and calls attention
to mediation being an integral part of reality itself. Guerins both films
locate the cinematic experience within the sensual reality of specific
places, street corners and urban landscapes filtered, however, constantly
through the medium of photography, painting and literature.18
The film entitled In the City of Sylvia is in colour and uses motion
pictures, its twin counterpart, Some Photos Made in the City of Sylvia, is a
more straight forward re-mediation: it consists almost entirely of black-
and-white photographs to which a few lines of text (sometimes poetry) are
added, without any music. This latter film is a worthy descendant of Chris
Markers La Jete (1962) incidentally a film that also shares this theme
of a man being haunted by the powerful image of a woman. Paradoxically
Guerns film is more powerful as a film not despite, but exactly because it
is an unashamed remediation of photography (and literature). And just like
in the earlier example of Vardas film, there is a tendency here to open up
the hypermediated cinema towards encyclopaedic generalization. Guern
explicitly refers in the second film to Goethes Werther, Dantes Beatrice,
Petrarcas Laura, as parts of a series of possible literary prototypes that his
film remodels. These literary references included in the form of direct
quotations (i.e. books read by women portrayed in snapshots) or captured
within the cinema of the street images (i.e. in the forms of graffiti) not
only contribute to the merging the real, the sensual with the mediated,
the cultural, but also prompt us to recognize the interrelatedness of
picturacy and literacy in contemporary life (cf. Heffernan 2006). At the
same time, similarly to Vardas or Godards case, the flow of images again
adds up to a highly personal collection of imagery and storytelling: these
are his (intermedial) experiences, his literary memories, his photographic
traces of his search and his gaze while wandering around the world. This is
his camera that is used as a personal tool again (as emphasized especially
in the black-and white photo-essay film) and his quest as a person, as a
man, as an artist. As a true-blood photographer-flneur, it is the director
18
See more about this technique that could also be considered as metalepsis in the
analyses presented in two other essays included in this volume (Chapter Three:
The World as a Media Maze: Sensual and Structural Gateways of Intermediality in
the Cinematic Image; Chapter Ten: Intermediality as Metalepsis. The
Cincriture of Agns Varda).
358 Chapter Nine
himself who is haunted, tantalized by the image of a woman or as we

know from W. J. Thomas Mitchell (1994b) , haunted by the image itself
presented as a woman. For it is ultimately not sure, whether the real aim of
the search was finding one particular woman or whether the aim of this
wandering around the maze of physical reality, following the
(intermedial) traces of the city and of personal memory was the search for
capturing the seductive quality of the image itself. Consequently this can
be interpreted as nothing else but a metaphor of the passion embodied in
the post-modern (or even post-postmodern?) flneur, drifting within an
increasingly re-mediated world, a flneur that is doubled by the photo-
monteur again in assembling a collection of images in order to convey a
multiple sensual experience of the world. Guerns films exemplify how
the redemption of the physical reality through cinematic flnerie can
converge with complex intermedial references. This is also consistent with
the findings of Vincent Colapietro, who states that in the markedly
aesthetic or mediated dimension of contemporary existence, the self-
referential or re-mediational tendencies evident in various media constitute
no argument against a direct encounter with the actual world; for
Peircean realism insists that all our encounters with reality are direct yet
mediated affairs (2007, 39).
To conclude this review of some possible examples of hypermediacy
leading to immediacy, let me return to the ideas of Bolter and Grusin, who
state the following: Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite
manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of
representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in
any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the
viewers experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and
therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications
seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital
hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create the
feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality
(1999, 53).19 Although these words refer to the world of digital media, in
the examples shown earlier, we can see that cinema, refashioning the
frameworks of some of its most traditional forms (rooted in photographical
representation) has managed to achieve the same satiety of experience of
the real by complex intermedial techniques.
19
One of Bolters latest studies again discusses the real not as a philosophical
category, but as cultural construction (2008, 567).
Figures
Figures 9.14. Agns Varda: The Gleaners and I (2000) the personal, sensual
and auratic context of an abstract notion.
Figures 9.58. Remediations: Millets painting, archival footage of gleaners,

gleaners in the film, Varda herself picking the potatoes with one hand and holding
a camera in the other.
360 Chapter Nine
Figures 9.912. Varda posing (remediating herself) as the gleaner in Jules Bretons
painting and self-reflexively acknowledging her acts of collecting and handling
the media.
Figures 9.1316. The experience of the reality of the medium: the texture of the
mediated images confronted with textures of the body.
Figures 9.1718. Carrying out Jean Hduins painting into the open air in the
middle of a heavy gust of wind: reality framing the painting and reflecting its
theme.
362 Chapter Nine
Figures 9.1920. Agns Varda capturing reality within her palm, transforming her
own body into a camera, touching the world through literally hand made
pictures.
Figures 9.2126. Jos Luis Guern: In the City of Sylvia (2007) and Some Photos
Made in the City of Sylvia (2007): layering of faces and photogenic framings and
de-framings of images captured in the street by the eye of the flneuristic artist.
364 Chapter Nine
Figures 9.2732. Images of life captured in a natural collage with images of

advertisements or paintings, artificial pictures of the street.
366 Chapter Nine
Figures 9.33-34. Jos Luis Guern: In the City of Sylvia (2007): a hand made
archaic technique of moving images shown in the pages of the drawing book
blown in the wind.
CHAPTER TEN
INTERMEDIALITY AS METALEPSIS:
THE CINCRITURE OF AGNS VARDA
1. New Wave Cinema and Metalepsis

Agns Varda, who was first referred to as the grandmother of the New
Wave when she was merely thirty years old, by the end of the first decade
of the twenty-first century seems to have finally lived up to her reputation
of being the grandmother of the famous French New Wave, perhaps not
so much in the sense of being the ancestor of the New Wave as it was
once suggested, but in the sense of becoming one of the most creative and
uncompromising surviving members of the legendary generation of
filmmakers. Her recent film, The Beaches of Agnes (Les Plages dAgns,
2008), is not only a playful and ironic re-evaluation of her life, but also,
inevitably, a remembrance of the New Wave. The success of this film
renewed the critical interest in her own artistic work, and in a way also
launched a challenge for a wider re-evaluation of what New Wave
filmmakers were all about, what their real legacy consists of. In setting
myself the task of such a re-evaluation I have found that Vardas films are
thought-provoking not only because she herself became almost obsessed
with conceiving filmmaking as a kind of ritual act of remembrance, but
also from another, more theoretical viewpoint: that of re-evaluating our
concepts about intermediality, hypermediacy and their correlations with
immediacy, or what we perceive as reality.
Post-structuralist literary and cultural theories often emphasize the
constructed and mediated nature of all our experiences and the short
circuiting of texts into texts. New Wave films, mostly those of Godard
have frequently been quoted as examples for such a hypermediated
experience in which the viewer is forced to navigate through an almost
inscrutable maze of images and texts. The famous cinphilia of the French
New Wave directors resulted in their films being packed with quotations
and references to all kinds of films, while at the same time being
extremely well read authors as well their films also abound in literary
368 Chapter Ten
quotations. Characters move in rooms with reproductions of famous

paintings, listen to classical music or jazz, drop hints at different
contemporary cultural or political events, and so on. In one word, these
films present an intricate web of references and a multiple layering of
significations, being perfect examples of a world constructed of signs
and texts. But at the same time, we must also acknowledge that the New
Waves other trademark techniques the preference for natural lighting,
for shooting with hand-held camera on authentic locations (streets, pubs,
public places) providing the viewer a sense of naturalness in contrast
with the Hollywood tradition of glamorous lighting effects and artificial
studio sets acted exactly the opposite way, counterbalancing the effect of
these multilayered textual environments. New Wave cinemas famous
cinma vrit technique itself combined the spontaneity of filming things
as they are found with a self-reflexive element of recognizing the
mediums (the cameras, the crews) intrusion into the natural world, of
the coexistence of the mediums artifice with the reality it captured (and
created).
In fact, what we see in French New Wave cinema seems to confirm
some of the ideas that surfaced in more recent studies on the nature of
mediation in general and which insist on the real, (inter)active presence of
media in our contemporary lives and on the experience that links reality
to media. In this respect, I think that the films of both Godard and Varda
offer ample material for such a reassessment of our general ideas on
hypermediacy, and more importantly, for a closer research into those
figurations of intermediality1 that combine hypermediacy with effects of
immediacy. And from this perspective I have found that the seesaw
experience, alternating the illusions of the real (the seemingly unmediated)
and the represented (i.e. framed, constructed media texts) that has
been a trademark of both Jean-Luc Godards and Vardas New Wave films
can remind us of the technique called metalepsis.2
Metalepsis, as we know, can be considered either a rhetorical figure or
a narrative device. As a rhetorical figure it refers to various kinds of
complex figures or tropes that are figurative to the second or third degree:
meaning that they involve a figure that either refers us to yet another
1
For we have to bear in mind that according to Joachim Paech (2002), intermediality,
as such, always manifests itself as a kind of figuration, a figuration that inscribes
or re-inscribes medial difference.
2
The essay published in this volume entitled The World as a Media Maze: Sensual
and Structural Gateways of Intermediality in the Cinematic Image also discusses
examples of intermedial metalepsis within cinema.
Intermediality as Metalepsis: The Cincriture of Agns Varda 369
figure or requires a further imaginative leap to establish its reference3 (this

leap can also be to a literary reference, resulting in a sophisticated form
of allusion). In more recent interpretations, those of John Hollander and
Harold Bloom, for example, metalepsis appears as a figure of literary
influence or legacy. In Paul De Mans theory of figuration it is one of the
key models, a sort of figure of figuration itself.4 When Grard Genette5
extended the use of the rhetorical term metalepsis and transformed it into a
narratological concept (that is: transposed the notion from figure to
fiction), he started form the idea that fiction itself is an extension of the
logic of the trope (the figure of speech) that always relies on our capacity
to imagine something as if it were real. In his view, the main feature of
metalepsis is that it performs a paradoxical loop between the ontological
levels of the real and the fictional, and as Genette emphasized, this
feature is often highlighted in metafictional works by the introduction of a
fantastic element (for example: the screen actor stepping out of the
projected film in Woody Allens film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, 1985).
As a narrative device, therefore, following Genettes arguments, it is most
commonly understood as a means of breaking the frame that separates
distinct levels of a narrative, usually between an embedded tale and
primary story, or as a way in which an author transgresses into the
narrative.
Genettes narrative reinterpretation of the classical trope has inspired
extensive researches into identifying a great variety of other forms of
metaleptic leaps in literature, in film (cf. Campora 2009), in diverse forms
of popular culture,6 and even in video games (cf. Harpold 2007).7 Although
research articles analyzing specific metaleptic instances that we see in
films are not as numerous as the ones referring to literature, we can say
that in the last decade the term metalepsis has been widely used by film
criticism, albeit mainly with a somewhat simplified meaning referring to a
structure of world within a world and any kind of jump between diegetic
and non-diegetic worlds.
3
For a comprehensive definition of the term metalepsis (, transsumptio)
see Baldick (2001, 152/3).
4
See a current evaluation of these theories by Brian Cummings (2007).
5
Cf. Grard Genette: Mtalepse: De la figure la fiction (2004).
6
See in this respect the conference on the topic of Metalepsis in Popular Culture
at Neuchtel held between 25. 06. 200927. 06. 2009, which provided a platform
for discussions about metalepsis observed in cartoons, TV shows or popular
comedy films.
7
See a theoretical assessment of the possibilities of using metalepsis as a
transgeneric and trans-medial concept also by Werner Wolf (2005).
370 Chapter Ten
What I would like to examine in this article is the way in which the
intermedialization of the cinematic discourse can also act as a metaleptic
force within a film both as a figure and as a narrative device. What is
more, I have found that this angle seems extremely fruitful in approaching
the cinematic writing (cincriture)8 of the films of Agns Varda. So,
in what follows, I will examine some of the techniques that can be
interpreted as metaleptic occurrences involving intermediality used by
Varda and compare them to the perhaps the better known model of Jean-
Luc Godard.9
2. Intermediality as Metalepsis: Leaps between Immediacy

and Hypermediacy
2.1 A Collage of the Real/Immediate
and of the(Hyper)Mediated
In Godards films very often we have street images or domestic scenes in
which life is shown against a backdrop of a visible text (a collage of
texts) or a fixed image: life appears as framed by artifice, characters
moving in a context populated by different media images and texts. In this
we can see a thematization not only of the since well exploited topic that
consumerism and media shape our daily activities, but also a presentation
of how the metalepsis of artifice and life is in fact becoming part of
the real, the everyday experience in our lives. Early Godard films, like
Breathless ( bout de souffle, 1960), A Married Woman (Une femme
marie, 1964), Band of Outsiders (Bande part, 1962), etc. are full of
such images.10 The same collage-effect is used by Varda in many of her
8
Cincriture is a complex word coined by Varda herself. It is in fact a kind of
intermedial notion combining the idea of cinematic authorship (comparable to that
of literary authorship) with the use of specific cinematic techniques rendering a
distinct cinematic style. As Varda herself and her interpreters have stressed many
times, it relies on the basic ideas that: A well-written film is also well filmed, the
actors are well chosen, and so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the
points of view, the rhythm of filming, and editing have been felt and considered in
a way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words,
number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break
the flow, etc. (Cf. Smith 1998, 14, and also Hurd 2007, 131.)
9
For a more detailed discussion of Godards intermediality see the analyses
included in the present volume in Part 3 entitled Cinema as the Currency of the
Absolute: The Godard Paradigm.
10
See for example: Figs. 3.6971.
films, but with different emphasis. Whereas with Godard such a metalepsis
can be perceived as basic figure within the sequence of images (initiating a
metafictional level of interpretation about reality and representation),
Varda uses it in an astonishing variety of ways. Already in Vardas first
feature film we have a narrative extension of this technique: the use of
parallel story lines of fiction and reality rendered in the double
intermedial transgression into literature and still photography. The Pointe
Courte (La Pointe Courte), made in 1954 consists of the intertwining of
two distinct story lines and stylistic worlds: a realistic, cinma vrit
portrayal of the fishermen (real life people captured in their own authentic
environment who consciously act out their own lives in front of the
camera) plus the fictional story of a couple on the verge of breaking up,
presented in a stylized manner, the whole script being written under the
influence of Faulkners double narrative structure of the Wild Palms. The
stylization of the fictional story line lies actually in both the audio and the
visual rendering of the story. The actors were instructed to deliver the
finely elaborated dialogues without any psychological realism, and the
artificiality of this recital of lines by the actors was also underscored by
the rift between sound and image: the dialogues can be heard just like a
voice over narration, with a total lack of sound perspective. The visual
compositions in which the couple appears are again constructed without
following the conventional dramatic purposes. This stylized manner of
presentation, however, achieves a level of directness in rendering a
feeling of alienation and unease that dominates the couples relationship.
The images rendering the real story line are also paradoxically, highly
artistic: the fishermens life appears in carefully constructed imagery in
which almost every frame could be taken in itself as a powerful
photographic representation of the world of the village of Pointe Courte.
[Figs. 10.14]. Thus the realistic images open up the medium of moving
images towards the art of still photography, while the fictional story
(through the Faulknerian undertones and the literary sounding dialogues)
breaks the cinematic frame towards literature. The double leap into
intermediality expresses both the distance of Varda herself from the world
portrayed (the view of an outsider who has a basic training in
photography) and her empathy (or nostalgia for immediacy) with a
world she tries to reach through the means she is most familiar with:
literature and the finest art of photography, the detachment we feel in the
stylizations is balanced by the passion of the filmmaker for her art and her
subject that is palpable throughout the film.
Her short film entitled Opera Mouffe (Lopra-mouffe, 1958) combines
the levels of the real and of the mediated in an even more radical way.
372 Chapter Ten
The film is an effective collage of genuine photographic flnerie, cinma

vrit on the one hand, and concept-art on the other. Varda, who was
pregnant at the time of making the film,11 alternates street images taken of
the Rue Mouffetard in the course of several months in a cinma vrit
manner with clearly fictitious visual compositions, carefully staged
imagery expressing her own feelings towards love and pregnancy. The
flow of images captured in the course of several walks taken in the
neighbourhood of Rue Mouffetard is centred around the motif of the gaze:
the gaze of the camera that records the images of the street and singles out
the faces and other details in its own mechanical ballet and the gaze of
the passers by who acknowledge the presence of the camera by staring into
the lens and thus making eye contact with us, the spectators of the
spectacle of the street. [Figs. 10.56.] The images of the people populating
the Rue Mouffetard are, however, not randomly presented, they are edited
in specific pace and musical rhythm (hence the reference to the musical
structure in the title: lopra), and also around some repetitive visual
motifs (movements and gestures of the passers-by) that confer the whole
sequence an air of buffoonery of grotesque charm parading an impressive
variety of faces (hence the allusion to opra bouffe12), and that
ultimately stage what we could see as a modernist cinematic comedie
humaine, a study of human condition from the subjective perspective of a
woman filmmaker (with emphasis on both terms).
The artistic compositions on the other hand, were considered
unusually bold at the time with associations that shocked contemporary
viewers (the belly of the pregnant woman compared in subsequent shots to
a pumpkin that was sliced open, the nude bodies and the love scene).
[Figs. 10.78.] The complex feelings of Varda towards the idea of
pregnancy and towards her own body, towards a sensation of the body in
general and the complex relationship binding sensual, bodily experiences
with the spiritual are rendered in an imagery constructed of dreamlike
sequences, painterly compositions and conceptual installations of visual
art transferred to film. [Figs. 10.912.]
This personal touch or idiosyncratic subjectivity seen here will
become one of the defining features of Vardas art: this is only one of the
first examples in which Varda starts from her own deepest personal
experiences but reworks them in a unique, stylized manner that
11
The film is also known with the English title: Diary of a Pregnant Woman.
12
Opra bouffe can be described as a short amusing piece of opera, a genre of
late 19th century French operetta known for its elements of comedy, satire, and
farce.
nevertheless retains both the qualities of subjectivity along with a sense of

conceptual detachment resulting from the techniques of abstraction.
As a true-blood flneuse Varda repeatedly records her walks in Paris,
incorporating extensive walking sequences not only into her well-known
fictional feature film, Cleo from 5 to 7 (Clo de 5 7, 1962), but into
several other films that she made along the years. Rue Daguerre, the street
that she has lived in ever since the 1950s has become a recurring muse
for her artistic mix of flnerie and abstraction. In one of her major works,
made in the seventies, explicitly intended to chronicle her experiences
linked to this street, Varda also betrays an increased interest in an already
dated form of photography, the daguerreotype. In fact, we can say that
here, in this controversially received documentary entitled Daguerreotypes
(1976), the daguerreotype emerges as a key model for the kind of
personalized, fetishistic and artistic cinema that she practices.
The documentary records the lives of the inhabitants of the Rue
Daguerre, as Varda strolls along the street with her camera, accompanies
her daughter visiting the shops, engages in everyday conversation with the
shop-owners, and observes minute details about the locations, the
activities, the faces, the hairdos, the peculiarities of her own neighbourhood.
This first person approach and realistic representation is, however, once
more combined with meticulously elaborated artifice. Varda alternates the
spontaneous, cinma vrit style cinematography with a visibly staged
performance (scenes envisaged as if conjured up by a magician), and
compositional structures reminding us of the framing techniques of still
photography made within a studio, and in the early years of the
photographic techniques when the taking of each picture still constituted a
sophisticated social event. We see people posing for the camera in
motionless postures in front of their shops or counters, with the emblems
of their profession as if posing for a daguerreotype. [Figs. 10.1310.16.]
At the same time these real life (moving) images that often acquire a
quality of stillness as a result of the poses for the camera get to be mixed
with actual still images that also populate the world of these people (the
advertisements, labels and all the other kinds of pictures that are
consumed and used for decoration and self-identification by these
people and that Varda visibly enjoys to photograph together with her
subjects). [Figs. 10.1718.] The shots in which people are portrayed in the
same frame with these commercial representations are playful and funny,
and the vision offered of Rue Daguerre becomes in this way generously all
inclusive: people are pictured in symbiosis with the images of their times,
the faces and postures are compared, life seems to imitate art, the
awareness of the image quality of these visual representations appears as
374 Chapter Ten
integral part of the complexity of sensuous experiences that emerge from

Vardas cinema, along with the references to various scents (that we
almost feel in the small perfumery shop), or the haptic qualities of the
image resulting from a sense of texture and touch (most evident in the
images of the beauty shop).
In principle, the technique of combining still photography and moving
pictures resembles that of Godards, nevertheless the use is different.
Vardas whole cincriture in this work seems to be conceived in the
spirit of the daguerreotype: the film is meant to document the spirit of a
place captured as intact as possible but also framed. As we know, the
daguerreotype was an unusually lifelike representation with its hologram-
like features, but at the same time it was also a highly constructed image
that required a lot of patience from the part of both the photographer and
the model. Moreover, it was a unique image and not a mechanical
reproduction. Its long exposure time made it an imprint not merely of
reality but also of an elevated moment in time, something that resulted in
an object to be treasured. Unlike a snapshot that captures a fleeting
moment, a daguerreotype had to be planned and composed, like a painter
composes a picture on the canvas. Varda, who even declares herself at one
point la daguerreotypesse, has found that this kind of paradoxical
painting of reality represents the indexicality of cinematography in a
pure form with a fascinating fusion of the real and the artificial.
In her short film, Seven Rooms, Kitchen and Bath (7p., cuis., s. de b., ...
saisir, 1984) the collage effect of the artificial, the documentary and the
personal is even more extreme. This time Varda is inspired by an
exhibition entitled The Living and the Artificial created by Louis Bec13 in
1984. She uses the location and the bizarre collection of puppets,
sculptures and paintings on display as her setting and as her props for
filming a series of free associative images and dreamlike dramatic scenes
of a family life loosely based on her own personal memories related to her
parental home. [Figs. 10.1924.] The living can thus be interpreted as
both the fiction brought to life by her film (she feels free to imagine all
kinds of slices of life associated to the lifeless but extremely lifelike
puppets of the exhibition) and her personal reality behind the surrealistic
imagery. And despite the fact that she appropriates props from another
artists exhibition and wraps the whole film into a fictitious frame of an
13
Louis Bec, born in Algeria and living in France, a lifelong friend of the
philosopher Vilm Flusser, is an artist, a curator and a scientist working in the
fields of biology and artificial life. Not surprisingly, Varda who is herself
interested in techniques of mixing the real with the artificial, finds his ideas of
merging the biological with the technological captivating.
apartment being put on sale and shown to the visitors (the spectators of the
film) by an invisible narrator, the film becomes one of Vardas most
spontaneous works, as she herself declared in many interviews, a product
of uninhibited subjective imagination.
The film highlights in this way how the metalepsis between reality
and fiction, hypermediacy and immediacy has always had a double fold
in Vardas cinema. It seems that, for Varda, cinema is defined as an
artifice between two layers of the real: the reality of herself, the
individual world of the first person author and the reality captured most
of the times by cinma vrit style cinematography. The credit sequence
of Daguerreotypes, which can also be interpreted as an effective cinematic
paraphrase of Las Meninas, is an emblematic image in this respect that
sums up the essence of this type of metalepsis in her films [Fig. 10.25].14
The image presents the screen as a semi-transparent veil (or glass pane)
14
Las Meninas, a 1656 painting by Diego Velzquez is considered a complex and
enigmatic composition that raises questions about the nature of representation
itself. The interpretations focus on the self-reflexive aspects of the painting in
which the painter paints his own act of painting and also on the different points of
focalisation that the picture offers to the viewer. The object of the represented
painters gaze (the subject of his painting) is invisible; however, we can catch a
glimpse of it in the mirror placed behind the painter on the wall. In Foucaults
analysis (2002), what lies outside the painting gives meaning to what we see inside
the frame. The king and queen reflected in the mirror and standing outside the
space of the painting constitute in fact the centre of the depicted scene. They
create this spectacle-as-observation by providing the centre around which the
entire representation is ordered (Foucault 2002, 15). Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen
(1980) have challenged Foucaults interpretation by analyzing the spatial structure
of the painting, and arriving at the conclusion that the image seen in the mirror is
not a direct reflection of the real figures of the royal couple (the models of the
painting), but a reflection of the painting lying on the canvas in front of the painter.
In such an interpretation the painting is no longer a representation of classical
representation as Foucault claimed, but is more like a hall of mirrors in which
the role of the painter emerges as a controlling authority (instead of the authority of
the king), and representations mirror each other within the representation. Vardas
shot has several parallels with Velzquezs painting: the self-reflecting image of
Varda and her crew in the process of making the film (thus becoming models
themselves), the outside of picture reflected in the inside, the plane of the
canvas lying in between Vardas crew and the outside world. However, the
fact that the canvas in this case occupies the whole frame, and is actually like a
windowpane (that is both see-through and mirror-like), makes it an adequate
representation of the paradox of filmic representation itself: both of its transparent
and of its non-transparent nature (that makes it analogous to a painting or to a sheet
of paper).
376 Chapter Ten
a film that is in fact both a transparent and a reflective surface placed

between the filmmakers team and the reality that is the object of their
movie, and also, implicitly, between the filmmakers and spectators who
share their voyeuristic positions as if in a mirror. Varda captures in this
way not only the two real sides of cinema in a single image (a self
portrait of herself and the other filmmakers who gaze into the camera and
at the world that the camera records, the world that is reflected in the
transparent film image) but also the artificial nature of the veil that
displays the movie itself, both through the analogy of the sheet of paper on
which the credits are inscribed and where a visual word play can also be
made, and also through the artifice of the whole composition itself that
condenses elements from Vardas own backyard (i.e. the pot of geranium)
and the cans of the film stock piled up in front of the crew. Thus ultimately
all of the above amounts to a sophisticated installation that combines the
living with the artificial, and mixes the immediate, highly personal,
subjective gaze with hypermediated, constructed forms of representations
in a self-reflexive image that folds onto one another multiple layers of
reality and fiction.15
2.2 Intermediality as a Metaleptic Leap into the Domain

of the Figural
Henk Oosterling (2003) claims, under the strong direct influence of
Lyotards idea of the figural and of the sublime, that intermedial
occurrences belong to the domain of the figural and also, that they can in
fact figurate something infigurable, incommensurable. In fact, we can
observe ourselves that Lyotards argument around the notion of the figural
has certain key notions that make it easily connectable to the discourse on
intermediality. First of all there is the idea that the figural challenges the
order of discourse but is not simply opposed to the discursive. It can be
seen to quote the interpretation offered by Readings (1991, xxiv) as an
action that opens up discursive works to a radical heterogeneity or
singularity, a singularity that is excess of any meanings we may assign
15
This conscious combination of documentary style and artifice is acknowledged
by the word play in the title of her lesser known fiction film, Documenteur made
by Varda in 1981. The pun mixes the paradoxical meanings of the French words
documentaire (meaning: documentary) and menteur (meaning: liar). In
this film, made by Varda while temporarily staying in the US with her husband,
Jacques Demy, she explores within a fictional story the experiences of a French
woman in Los Angeles (an autobiographical character) who lives with her son
(played in the movie by her own real life son, Mathieu).
to it (Readings 1991, 4), or as other interpreters have put it: the figural
injects opacity into the discursive realm, working against the self-
sufficiency of discursive meaning, introducing an unassimilable heterogeneity
into putatively homogenous discourse (Jay 2006, 142). Lyotard formulates
his ideas in defence of the eye and in defence of the non-discursive and
sensual domains of human communication, yet finds that it is manifest on
both sides of the word and image (figure) dichotomy, where it acts like a
chiasmus,16 so ultimately discourse and figure are mutually implicated.
The figural in this way resonates well with the basic assumptions of
intermediality claiming that all communication is multimedial and challenging
the idea of monomedial texts. Moreover, the key notions of opening
up,17 transgression or disruption that describe the action of the figural
over discourse are also applicable to the way intermediality is supposed to
work within a text: intermedial occurrences can be perceived as
metaleptic figures that are meant to perform exactly such disruptions of
the logic of discourse and transgressions into the domain of the figural.
Studying the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Agns Varda, I have found
that the figural can function in more than one fashion within a cinema
relying on techniques of intermediality. In what follows, I will discuss
three ways in which intermediality achieves such a metaleptic leap into the
figural.
a) Discourse disrupted by the figural
This is the case in which we have a metaleptic sequence of images in

which the real cinematic image is associated for instance with a
painting, conveying in this way a less then clear (opaque) meaning, a
feeling of being propelled onto a more surreal level where it is impossible
to formulate an exact, discursive meaning. This is mainly how the famous
inserts of paintings work in Godards movies. The unusually fragmented
narrative of Pierrot le fou (1965) is full of such unexpected inserts of
paintings, for example, that pop up without any dramatic or contextual
motivation, and even if we may find some elements in the image or the
voice over narration that seem to connect the paintings to the moving
16
See Rodowicks ideas (2001) elaborating on the nature of the chiasmus involved
in the figural, or see Lyotards own famous example of the figural acting as a
force that erodes the distinction between letter and line.
17
Cf. Joki van de Poels hypothesis about intermedial processes in a 2005 thesis
written at the University of Utrecht with the title: Opening up Worlds:
Intermediality Reinterpreted, and posted online
(http://www.ethesis.net/worlds/worlds.htm, last date of access: 25 April, 2010.)
378 Chapter Ten
images, the sudden change of medium is perceived as a disruption of the

cinematic sequence. [Figs. 10.2627, also Figs. 5.3637.] If we contrast
these examples for instance with Vardas famous simile from Lopra
mouffe of a pregnant womans belly resembling a pumpkin [see Figs.
10.78.] we see that Vardas is a shocking pair of images, but a rather
straight-forward metaphor operating on the level of the same medium,
while Godards associations of paintings are clearly visual metalepses. In
other cases, however, Varda uses similarly metaleptic images that operate
with the same effect of opacity within the cinematic discourse (like the
ones with the conceptual installations see Figs. 10.912).
In Vardas latest autobiographical essay film, The Beaches of Agnes,
for instance, we find not only one, but three variations of this metaleptic
structure. The first type resembles the most the example taken from
Godards Pierrot le fou, and can be seen in the scene in which Varda
recalls her love for her husband, Jacques Demy. The scene begins as a free
association starting from some old film cards about French film directors
(among them Varda and Demy) found at the flea market and continues
with series of shots paraphrasing Magrittes famous painting of the lovers
with their faces covered with a white cloth. [Figs. 10.2829.] However,
this sequence is more than a simple association of ideas that result in a
metaleptic leap from representation to memory, and from memory to life
(the cardboard heads of Varda and Demy contrasted with the naked body
of the lovers, implicitly: schematic representation opposed to three
dimensional, imaging, and the illusion of flesh), it is also an intermedial
play with the moving image and the moving bodies that she shows first in
a tableau vivant and a travelling shot seen in naturalistic colour, then in a
painterly artificial coloration, and finally freezing the frame back into a
still, black and white composition. The outcome in contrast to Magrittes
panting is a sequence full of movement in all senses of the word
(movement of the camera, of the bodies, the changes in the quality of the
image and mediality) that manages to convey something about the
processes of memory but also about the way these processes are unfolded
through a creative imagination, the sequence becoming saturated with an
emotional and an aesthetic charge that cannot be easily expressed in
words or even in just one image, may that be as complex as Magrittes
enigmatic painting.
Then there are the images of the elaborate installations that Varda
repeatedly includes in the film [Figs. 10.3032] and that she repeatedly
includes herself in, both as an artist and as a model.18 These

constructions that she makes and that she films in the making are meant
to serve the same purpose: by way of these images of sophisticated
structures being put together by Varda on the beach using mirrors, found
objects and colourful veils and frames discursive remembering lapses
into the domain of the figural, or in a self-reflexive way the workings
of memory itself are figurated.
Finally, in the images in which Varda tries to capture the complexity of
emotions she feels for her children and grandchildren, she again resorts to
intermedial imagery. The infigurable quality of the subject is also
stressed by the fact that Varda is not satisfied with only one version; she
offers us two alternative renderings of the same idea. In each case
instead of a traditional family portrait she constructs an artificial collage of
cinema, photography and painting, clearly indicating the singularity of
this figuration. In the first version she stages a photo shoot of her children
and grandchildren using a large tree as a background (as if to suggest the
image of the family tree), but also places different paintings between the
branches disrupting the natural scenery with refined artifice, and continues
these images with a scene of moving images placed as if on the tree top.
[Figs. 10.3335.] The people in the image step lightly as if on a cloud,
dancing away in a setting that combines the visual elements of trees, grass
and painted background. In the second version the image of the family
appears as a vision projected within the frame of an abstract painting on
the wall of Vardas study. Here the dancing figures have the sea as the
background and the dancing waves. The whole scene performs a
chiasmus: first we have the realistic film image with the abstract painting
on the wall, and then the abstract painting becomes filled with realistic
movement inside the multiple frames remaining of the original texture
emphasizing a heterotopic spatiality. [Figs. 10.3637.]
In both cases Varda starts with a conventional film scene that she then
disrupts by way of intermedial techniques and that in this way becomes
less readable and more open towards the synesthetic qualities of the
image (the traditional family portrait gets disseminated into an amalgam
of movements, colours, sounds, textures). The images acquire at the same
time, a more eerie atmosphere and a spiritual charge, in the end the figures
of Varda herself and her children, grandchildren appear just like in a
dream (as if supporting Lyotards argument that the figural works on the
logic of the dream and of the subconscious).
18
This is not the first example of Vardas newfound interest in installations: since
The Gleaners and I she has repeatedly used this form of expression (which
prompted critics to speak even of a new career for her as an installation artist).
380 Chapter Ten
b) Discourse masked by the figural
In some scenes in Godards films we find characters totally immersed into

a stylized world, in such cases what should be perceived as reality
appears as fiction, as artifice, as a construction of images and texts.
Godards Made in USA (1966), The Chinese Girl (La chinoise,19 1967),
Joy of Learning (Le gai savoir, 1969) are perhaps well-known examples.
Vardas best known film in this respect is the highly controversial
Happiness (La bonheur, 1965). Here the story of a happy family being
disrupted by the love affair of the husband is presented with unusual, even
uncanny naturalness. A naturalness that paradoxically oozes out of
complete artifice, out of a stylized form that envelops the story: the images
are gorgeously coloured in a way so as to resemble beautiful impressionist
paintings, and instead of using fade to black or white, Varda marks the
transition between the scenes by fading to blue, red or autumnal gold.
[Figs. 10.3839.] The story unfolds but we gain no psychological insight
into the motivation of the characters, there is no explanation for things that
just happen. And while Godard usually emphasizes with similar
techniques of stylization a conceptual framework, the primacy of a meta-
narrative level (a defiant gesture of pulling a screen over conventional
narrative), and the emphasis on an ideological discourse (see for example
the bold colour scheme used in The Chinese Girl), here the lack of
lifelike melodrama and the lack of a philosophical meta-level gives rise
to a uniquely uneasy feeling.20 In this case the figural continually
frustrates the viewer as an impenetrable shield. The idyllic imagery, the
enthralling music (Mozart) obscures for us the real issues that we
continually suspect that lurk in the background and that Varda apparently
refuses to address head on: the shocking story of betrayal, adultery, lust,
self-centeredness, etc. Instead of all these, what we get is the surface of
the world, the impenetrable images of happiness.21 However, even this
19
Full original title: La chinoise, ou plutt la chinoise. Un film en train de se
faire.
20
The fact that the characters in the film are embodied by a real life family (Jean-
Claude Drouots wife and two children) adds an unusual personal dimension to the
fictional characters. This background knowledge about the husband, wife and the
children seen in the film could have increased the melodramatic aspect had Varda
chosen this approach for her story, but instead it merely contributes to the
disconcerting effect of the stylized representation.
21
The same stratagem is repeated to a lesser degree in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi,
1985) that makes use of a narrative rewriting of the flash-back technique of Citizen
Kanes (1941) multiple narrators. The film begins with an enigmatic image that
technique has a unique feedback to reality: complete artistic control in the

design of the images appears as an astounding contrast to no control
whatsoever over lifes occurrences as they are presented in the film.
In another puzzling example, a short film entitled The Story of an Old
Lady (Histoire dune vieille dame, 1985) Varda presents a documentary
style sketch of an old lady, Marthe Jarnias, who played a small role in
Seven Rooms, Kitchen and Bath and in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985).
Varda in fact re-uses, re-frames as an individual work of art an old piece
of celluloid that lay forgotten for some time, and the idea is that she
presents not just the film stock, but also the real life person captured on
film as a found object (an objet trouv) whose idiosyncratic laughter is
preserved by the 16 mm film that was partially decomposed by mould.
[Figs. 10.4041.] In this short film the images are hardly visible because
of the spots and scratches on the surface of the film, but somehow it does
not become frustrating to the viewer, as there is no story behind the shroud
of grainy film that we could follow; nevertheless, we feel that there is a
life, there is a personality in its complexity and singularity. Here the
decaying film stock is used as the almost corporeal figuration of the aging
lady. This example can furthermore lead us to another type of metalepsis
in Vardas work.
c) Leaps from figural into the corporeal
Perhaps one of the most debated type of intermedial images is the tableau
vivant: a site where painting and cinema can interact and also a site where
the figural gives way to the corporeal. Jean-Luc Godards well-known
Passion (1982) revealed multiple facets of this technique, and it certainly
seems to be of Vardas favourite devices as well. What is characteristic for
her is that beside classic tableaux vivants, that she extensively used for
instance in her film Jane B. by Agns V. (Jane B. par Agns V., 1988, see
Fig. 10.42) she tends to animate almost everything, taking visible pleasure
in staging live situations, accentuating the bodily sensation of the products
of her artistic imagination over and over again. If the figural serves as a
possibility of stepping beyond the discursive realm, the leap from the
figural into corporeal manages to perform another loop, this time, into
looks like a painting and introduces us to the story of a young homeless girl, but
instead of getting to know her, the subject becomes even lesser understood as the
narrative progresses: the character of Mona, the vagabond, gains no psychological
depth, while others keep weaving their own texts and memory images around her
figure.
382 Chapter Ten
the empirical domains of life, infusing it with the aura of uniqueness, of

figural singularity.
This is how she renews a classical trope of ekphrasis in her
documentary-essay, Ulysse (1982), for example. Interpreting a photograph
she took years ago on the beach [Fig. 10.43] she takes each element of the
photo (the naked man staring at the sea, the boy sitting on the ground, the
dead goat lying in the foreground) and expands on them by way of a series
of associations. In the course of these digressions she also creates a series
of real life, interpersonal situations through which the world of the picture
becomes tangible: she interviews the protagonists of the painting (the
young man and the boy), the one time models for an enigmatic photographic
composition, and she fleshes out the abstract, allegorical image with real
life stories. She places the photo in the hand of children who are invited to
comment upon it, and to recreate the image with fresh, innocent eyes in
drawings of their own, devoid of preconceptions. Other representations are
shown in comparison to the picture, and so on. It is as if each component
of the image would come alive and gain a corporeal dimension in not
merely one, but several possible alternate realities. The play with the
same photograph is continued in The Beaches of Agnes in a scene in which
she herself recreates the scene composition of the image with the naked
young man, only this time she includes herself as she earlier informs us
playing the part of a little old lady running towards the man with a
towel so as to cover him up in a protective gesture that pokes fun at
contemporary prudery [Fig. 10.44].
Throughout the Beaches of Agnes memories are not only represented
by photographs and film clips or installations, they are also playfully (and
personally) re-enacted, animated,22 each significant stage of her life is
introduced with the present day Varda dressed up in clothes or using props
that recreate the segment of life she is speaking about. The strange new
way of making a kind of playful first person installation using her own
body collaged into part real life setting and part painted scenery [Figs.
10.4546.] achieves a figuration that mixes imagination, memory, reality
and corporeality viewed with both emotion and ironic reflexivity.
As a conclusion we can say that for Varda cinema is an artefact in its
highest degree: craftsmanship, handiwork and ritual involving bodily
presence and interpersonal relations. Intermediality in these films serves as
a figuration that on the one hand performs these metaleptic leaps from
immediacy to hypermediacy, from discursive to figural, from transparent
22
This penchant for re-enactments, personifications can also be seen in Vardas
surprising gesture of dressing up as a potato to promote her film, The Gleaners and
I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) at the Venice Biennale.
to opaque, from real to fantastic, and back; and on the other hand
figurates the impossibility of such leaps, the infigurable, singular
quality of life itself. Yet, we see that Varda continues to transform this
impossibility into a challenge time after time with an enviable joy and
creativity. The final first person installation she presents in The Beaches
of Agnes is emblematic in this respect, she takes the celluloid film stock of
her film, The Creatures (Les Cratures, 1966) that was generally
considered as a failure, and literally transforms it into something
constructive, she builds a house out of it, a house of cinema in which she
feels she has her real place [Figs. 10.4748]. She uses The Creatures to
create an ultimate picture of complex metalepsis: leaping from the
illusory, fictive world of the movie (her own creation) back towards the
palpable fabric of the moving images (the film stock) and, subsequently,
leaping forward as an author designing and manufacturing herself an
artificial world out of the raw material of the medium that she (as a
creature, as her own creation) can nevertheless inhabit with her real
life emotions, memories and fantasies.
Figures
Figures 10.14. Agns Varda: The Pointe Courte (1954). The parallel story lines of
fiction and reality rendered in the double intermedial transgression into
literature and still photography.
384 Chapter Ten
Figures 10.56. Agns Varda: Lopra-mouffe (1958): the people on Rue

Mouffetard.
Figures 10.78. Agns Varda: Lopra-mouffe (1958): boldly naturalistic and

associative imagery.
Figures 10.912. Agns Varda: Lopra-mouffe (1958): dreamlike, painterly

compositions and conceptual installations.
Figures 10.1318. Agns Varda, Daguerreotypes (1976): framing techniques of

still photography (and of the daguerreotype), real life images mixed with images
of advertisements and labels that populate the world of these people.
386 Chapter Ten
Figures 10.1924. Agns Varda, Seven Rooms, Kitchen and Bath (1984): the
living and the artificial within a free associative, surrealistic vision inspired by
an exhibition and her own personal experiences.
Figure 10.25. The credit sequence of Daguerreotypes: a possible cinematic

paraphrase of Las Meninas.
388 Chapter Ten
Figures 10.2627. Discourse disrupted by the figural: a metaleptic sequence of

images in which the real cinematic image is followed by a painting. Godard:
Pierrot le fou (1965).
Figures 10.2829. The Beaches of Agnes (2008): the metalepsis from the film
cards to the images paraphrasing Magritte.
Figures 10.3032. Installations figurating (the workings of) memory.

390 Chapter Ten
Figures 10.3337. The intermedial family portraits.

Figures 10.3839. Happiness (1965): images shot in pastel colours, stylized as

impressionist paintings, the use of colour fades: the complete artistic control in the
design of the images set a shocking contrast to no control whatsoever over lifes
occurrences.
392 Chapter Ten
Figures 10.4041. The decaying film stock of The Story of an Old Lady (1985) and
the old lady, Marthe Jarnias both presented as a found objects.
Figure 10.42. A leap from the figural into the corporeal: one of the tableaux
vivants from Jane B. by Agns V. (1988).
Figures 10.4344. Ulysse (1982) and The Beaches of Agnes (2008): rewriting
ekphrasis, bringing to life the world of a photograph.
Figures 10.4546. Playful first-person installations.

394 Chapter Ten
Figures 10.4748. The celluloid film stock of The Creatures (1966) used to build a
house of cinema, an ultimate image of metalepsis: the author designing and
manufacturing herself an artificial world out of the raw material of cinema that
she inhabits with her real life emotions, memories and fantasies.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MESSAGE IN THE (INTERMEDIAL) BOTTLE.

THE POLITICS AND POETICS
OF INTERMEDIALITY IN EASTERN EUROPE:
THE CASE OF MIRCEA DANELIUC
1. Late Communism and a Glissando into the Symbolic

It is a rather uncanny coincidence that Mircea Daneliucs film, Glissando1
appeared in cinemas around Romania exactly in the ominous year of 1984,
considering the fact that at that time, Ceauescus Romania was the East
European country that came closest to fulfilling Orwells dark prophecies.
The accidental timing of this film2 added to its impact on an intellectual
audience who received it enthusiastically, while official criticism tried to
dismiss it by labelling it as too confusing. At the time when fiction films
in Romania were mainly used for the ideological propaganda of the
communist party, this film not only appeared as a rare example of art film
but also shocked its spectators as a message out of chaos: it managed to
capture the general disgust of a people fed up with a life of seemingly
never-ending humiliation, and to express at the same time a nostalgia for
artistic beauty. What was remarkable from an aesthetic point of view was
how it managed to set its story elements into a wider intertextual and
intermedial context, creating a unique allegory.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that, in times of dictatorship and
a general ban on individual and artistic freedom, a work of art deploys
techniques that raise the concrete elements of the story into the realm of
the symbolic, and tries to convey a message to its audience through the
1
Glissando (1984, Romania). Screenplay by Mircea Daneliuc, loosely based on
Cezar Petrescus short story The Man in the Dream. Directed by: Mircea Daneliuc.
Photography: Clin Ghibu. Music: Vasile irli. Cast: tefan Iordache, Tora
Vasilescu, Petre Simionescu, Ion Fiscuteanu, Rada Istrate.
2
Actually, the film was shot earlier, but censorship delayed its release until 1984.
396 Chapter Eleven
language of parables or allegories. What made this feature intriguing was

that it transcended its own age;3 it survived the fall of the Ceauescu
regime and the fall of communism, and resurfaced in only a slightly
changed form in the films Daneliuc made after 1990. A possible
explanation of this can be found in two aspects of Romanian cultural
heritage, which Glissando exemplifies eloquently. On the one hand, there
is an ambivalent relationship between Romanian art and its western
models, a relationship that becomes apparent in Romanian literature time
and time again, and that has not disappeared with the fall of the communist
regime. On the other hand, a deeply-rooted tradition of Balkanian
grotesque black humour mixed with a spirit of ruthless self-criticism also
defines Daneliucs style. This latter tradition links Daneliucs films not
only with the works of the Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, who
wrote plays that ridiculed petty provincialism and bourgeois political
demagogy at the turn of the twentieth century,4 but also with another
Balkanian filmmaker, Emir Kusturica.
Glissando is an almost three-hour-long, complicated and nightmarish
vision, which offers the parallel representation of a) the monstrous world
of the Ceauescu regime and b) a virtual world consisting of elements of a
more universal cultural heritage. Both are the result of a high degree of
stylization, which is mainly due to restrictions imposed by censorship.
Allegorical representation means in this case, as it always does, a
systematic multiplication of meanings on different levels of the cinematic
text. The first and perhaps most obvious duplication of meaning occurs on
the level of the storys temporal and spatial setting, and can be interpreted
clearly as a defensive attempt on the part of the filmmaker first to erase
from the film any direct links with the present (by setting the story into a
known historic past) and at the same time, indirectly, through hints hidden
in the dialogues, gestures, settings, costumes, and different visual motifs,
3
Mircea Daneliucs filmography includes many films with allegorical titles: The
Race (Cursa, 1975), Special Edition (Ediie special, 1977), Microphone Test
(Proba de microfon, 1980 an unusually realistic representation of the making of
a communist television reportage), Foxhunting (Vntoarea de lupi,1980), The
Cruise (Croaziera, 1981), Glissando (1984), Jacob (Iacob, 1988), The 11th
Commandment (A 11-a porunc, 1991), The Toothless War (Tusea i junghiul,
1992), The Conjugal Bed (Patul conjugal, 1993), Fed Up (Aceast lemahite,1994),
The Senator of Snails (Senatorul melcilor, 1995), Ambassadors Seek Country
(Ambasadori, cutm patrie, 2003), The Nervous System (Sistemul nervos, 2005).
4
Not surprisingly, another great film made in the last years of the Ceauescu age,
Lucian Pintilies adaptation of one of Caragiales plays (Why are they Sounding
the Bells, Mitica?/De ce trag clopotele, Mitic?), could not even be seen by the
general public before 1989.
Message in the (Intermedial) Bottle 397
to produce connotations that make this past (the Romania of the 1930s)
become a disguise of the present (the Romania of the 1980s). In this way
we have only a seemingly historic setting that consists of mostly symbolic
elements (a health resort, a hospital, a painters studio, a country estate,
etc.) that in themselves can become not only signs of the torments of a
diseased present but can also serve as timeless symbols of human condition
and settings which inspire great philosophical questions. This timeless
symbolism facilitates the appearance of another layer of symbolic meanings
that contrasts with this allegoric world of the present-presented-as-past (a
world viewed with disgust and bitterness): a world of aesthetic decadence
that is modelled by imitations of style, explicit or implicit intertextual
references and quotations (which is presented nostalgically). All these
heterogeneous elements are linked together by a non-linear5 and self-
reflexive, or meta-poetic textual strategy which reminds us of high
modernist, flow-of-consciousness cinema techniques similar to those of
Alain Resnaiss in Last Year in Marienbad (1960) or in Fellinis later
baroque visions (like Satyricon, 1969 and Rome, 1972).
But, as Michael C. Finkes theory of literary metapoesis explains
(1995), metapoetry should never be understood as merely a narcissistic
game, but one should consider it always as discourse pitched at a
particular addressee (Finke 1995, 168). The significance of meta-poetic
discourse cannot be understood in isolation from other communicative
functions at play in the creation and reception of any kind of text, be it
literary or cinematic, without a general and historic understanding of the
role of metapoesis in the broader arena of discourse to which it belongs
(Finke 1995, xii). Metapoesis in cases like Daneliucs film can offer a
way out of the double mirror effect of the infinite regression of meaning
mise en abyme celebrated in so many deconstructive treatments of
textual self-reflexion (Finke 1995, xii). If we take into consideration the
possibility of interpreting intertextuality and self reference in the sense that
Finke describes, then we can also have an explanation to the phenomenon
how Glissando was able to divide its audience into two sides: on the one
hand there were those who understood its esoteric film language and
intertextual plays, ultimately its allegoric message, and on the other hand,
those who did not, and therefore considered it merely confusing but not
alien to the ruling party ideology. In what follows I propose to show how
Daneliucs film offered a perfect example of such a communicative
5
The stylistic techniques of intertextuality have a delinearizing effect, as the
reception must always switch from the present text to a memorial metatext (cf.
Riffaterre 1971, 170), or in the case of direct (marked) quotations, from the text to
the implanted fragment and back.
398 Chapter Eleven
function of metapoesis that Finke describes by looking at some concrete

aspects of this films intertextuality and self-referentiality, which functioned
not as postmodern grammatica jocosa at the time but as a powerful
message conveyed to an audience who in times of ideological clichs was
starved for complex aesthetic experiences resulting from deciphering
perplexingly complex texts.
2. Referentiality and Self-Referentiality in Glissando

Glissando is a musical term referring to a way of interpretation: it means a
glissade of sounds where two sounds are connected by a rapid scale
passage of the intermediate sounds. Within the film it has manifold
connotations. As a musical term whose meaning was presumably grasped
only by connoisseurs at the time when it was released in Romania (and
could seem to be a fairly non-political term to contemporary censorship),
first of all it suggested a text of fine artistic care (something musical)
and anticipated an adequately cultured reception. Beside music in the film
we find two other motifs that bring into the complex intermedial play of
the cinematic text two other forms of art: the appearance of books
everywhere and the mysterious painting that the protagonist possesses in
many variations. It is as if all these arts (music, literature and painting)
were concentrated symbolically around the central character of the film.
We see him as he uses an old bookbinder machine to manually bind
books; at a certain point in the plot, in a surrealistic vision of a strange
hospital, nuns appear who tear and burn pages from a pile of books; and
people repeatedly read out loud from books or recite texts throughout the
film. A particular painting of a woman in an elegant hat is a central
element of the opening scene of the film in which it is placed as if on a
shrine above the washstand that the protagonist performs his daily ritual of
cleansing, the woman portrayed in it will appear later, along with other
paintings from supposedly the same painter portraying the same woman in
different clothes. In another dreamlike scene we see a huge black canvas
with the lady of the painting sitting in front of it with a brush in her hand.
[Figs. 11.15.] The protagonist refuses to sell the paintings and so on.
Music has a more diminished role in the film compared to these other
motifs (the non-diegetic music we hear is barely noticeable, it is used in
the conventional way of emphasizing the atmosphere of the different
scenes). It seems that the selection of the title serves a more general
expansibility of the connotations of music, or musical structure over
the whole text. It suggests a musical type of textual organization in the
film and its reception. Throughout the film the original sense of the term
glissade comes to be dissociated from music as a specific art form

(although occasionally we do hear glissading sounds in the background)
and is more and more directly associated with a more general meaning of a
downward slide, a fall, and eventually decadence: a) in a more concrete
literal, sense (meaning a gradual decay in existential and ethical values)
we are told in the film that things are continually getting worse; we see
bleak settings of decaying buildings and old people with sick and withered
bodies; the protagonist himself is a pale, melancholic man; some characters
steal, others are insane etc.), and b) in an aesthetic version of decadence
(meaning decadent art in general and more closely French literary
decadence and symbolism) that appears in a special artistic attitude and
style that the film evokes through intertextual and intermedial techniques.
3. Modelling Two Types of Decadence

The protagonist of the film, Teodorescu, is invited by a friend to spend a
few days at his estate in the country. In the first scenes that take place
there we see the following: Teodorescu gets up in the morning after a good
nights sleep, looks out of the window, then has breakfast with his friend
on the veranda overlooking the garden. He meets the friends ten-year-old
daughter, the governess, and later on his wife. The friend demands that the
child recite a poem in French, but she is too shy. They have a game of
cards in the garden. Teodorescu and the governess talk about Baudelaire
and Verlaine. The wife is holding their younger child in her lap while the
girl is watching them. The friend cheats and when the wife scolds him, he
turns to the child and repeatedly bawls at her, threatening to beat her with
his belt if she doesnt recite. Husband and wife begin to quarrel; the baby
cries. Teodorescu stands up and runs off in the direction of some ruins,
where everything becomes like a nightmare. The girl starts to shout the
French poem and nobody can stop her; the friend also recites, but in
Romanian, while he is smashing plates and gets half undressed. The wife
speaks about dreams; so does Teodorescu. The governess reads a fragment
from a critique about Baudelaire, in which he is called immoral and
decadent. At the end of these scenes, we see a long take that can be
interpreted as a subtle filmic paraphrase of one of Verlaines most famous
poems. [Figs. 11.610.] All these scenes are in fact built around two
literary texts: the Preface written to The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du
Mal) by Baudelaire and Verlaines Chanson dautomne (Autumn Chant).
These are what the characters speak about, what they quote, and what the
images imitate in atmosphere and visual elements. The scenes described
above are significant for weaving together in a continuous flow of diegetic
400 Chapter Eleven
events that take place in a coherent location (everything happens in the

large garden of the friends country house) different layers of signification
that can relate to the key notion of decadence: first we see the examples of
decadence in an ethical sense (the rude behaviour of the friend), then
gradually the images glissade through the quotations from French
decadent literature towards the transformation of the screen into a
palimpsest-like canvas overwritten with images and words of decadent
literature and the colours and forms of art nouveau.
The governess mixes French sentences in her speech; Teodorescus
friend insists that his children learn French and recite French poetry; he
has given his child a French name (Amlie); and he is proud that Teodorescu
has been to Paris at least a hundred times. All these elements construct a
certain frame of reference that reveals close connections to a cultural ideal:
France. The relationship is ambivalent to say the least, because the
reverence to this ideal that appears in the film is not based on understanding
or assimilation of essential cultural elements. The connection is
superficial: to imitate all things that are French is a snobbish mannerism
that signifies a certain social prestige. In this aspect the film presents a
characteristic attitude in the Romania before the Second World War,
which surreptitiously survived the years of communism an ideology that
could not tolerate a direct admiration of a western culture only to be
overtly revived after 1989, the fall of the Ceauescu regime.6 The
governess has never been to Paris; she finds Baudelaire disgusting and
immoral. The girl has a strong accent; it is obvious that she does not
understand a word of the poem she is reciting as, indeed, the lines from
Baudelaires Preface are not suitable for a child. The provincial landlord
speaks in a dialect and does not understand French. These linguistic
references are complemented by other gestures and acts of the characters
that cannot in the least be considered as cultured behaviour, but, rather,
suggest provincialism and moral decadence.
The quotations themselves also reveal the characters lack of
understanding of poetic texts. This is a sort of parodic trans-
contextualization (Hutcheon 1985, 8), where the irony is not directed
against the quoted texts. First we are shown an open book lying on the
veranda table. The typographic image of the page indicates that it is a
volume of poems. Next to it we see a few cards scattered on the table. The
6
Several of Daneliucs later films examine this aspect of Romanian culture, only
this time through the techniques of satire. For instance, The Conjugal Bed (Patul
conjugal, 1991) ends with a bitter prophecy: by the turn of the millennium, French
will be spoken on national television and people will live in great misery and moral
decay.
parallel (or better said, the contrast) of a book of poetry and a deck of
playing cards is borne out by the fact that Romanian uses the same word
(carte) to denote book and card. Playing cards (is a symbolic
activity which appears many times throughout the film that presents a
world ruled by haphazard turns of events and frighteningly chaotic
structures. (The protagonist himself a bookbinder and preserver of books
even declares himself to be first and foremost a gambler, yet one who
tries to play as honestly as possible under trying circumstances.) [Figs.
11.1112.] Here, the cards put beside the book represent the world in
which these characters are really at home, in contrast to the realm of
poetry. It also shows that for the proprietors of the mansion the text of the
poems is not considered as a possible source of aesthetic experience, but
just like the book is present in the image as an object, the text remains also
no more than an object for them. Reciting poems in this household is
important only as a gesture, as a speech act legitimizing the social position
of the family. So it is not surprising that we can only hear bits and pieces
of poems and texts, which are torn out of their context by people who do
not understand them.
Connoisseurs, however, can place the texts quoted in the film in the
larger context of a literary style that the film also imitates: literary
symbolism mixed with art nouveau. All the manifestations of this
imitation fall beyond the linguistic layer of the film, the dialogues we hear
are not in the least poetic. Literary symbolism is imitated, intermedially
transcribed into the acoustic and visual components of the image. What are
the characteristics of the images that can be considered as imitations? First
of all, the way in which they appeal to the complexity of perception.
Although film is unable to convey the sense of taste or smell, it can be
effective in producing the illusion of being able to do so by employing
different techniques. The protagonist finds pleasure in smelling the fruits
on the breakfast table or sipping the hot coffee. The sparkling golden
honey dripping from the spoon can almost be tasted as we see it in a close-
up. We hear the crunching of crisp toast under the teeth. Together with the
sound effects, the synesthetic quality of the picture is increased. Each
scene constructs atmosphere, and expresses a feeling, a state of mind,
rather than a narrative sequence. The films symbolism resists a purely
conceptual decoding. Symbolisms and art nouveaus preference for
decorativeness is evident in the carefully chosen settings: the pictures of
the country breakfast are framed by an ornamental iron railing of the
veranda; the garden features leafless trees with long, artistically winding
branches; and in the end of the scenes described above we are enthralled
by enigmatic, lart pour lart views of the castle in ruin. It is autumn, but
402 Chapter Eleven
the camera avoids conventionally striking, bright colours: the whole

picture (including costumes, furniture, and various other objects) appears
in the fading colours of late October/November. As a summary of these
elements, at the end of the scenes that take place in the friends garden,
Verlaines famous opening lines of the Chanson dautomne are transposed
onto the pictorial world of the images: a thicket of grey branches appears,
the protagonist is seen tensely concentrating on the image, then the soft,
mournful sound of violins is heard, in sharp contrast with the vulgar noise
of a country farm and the quarrel of people, heard so far. [Figs. 11.1316.]
A sort of glissando also characterizes the structure of time and space in
the film. The filmic space is continuously expanded in time. Within a
single take this is achieved by deep focus photography, which enlarges the
field of vision and consecutively actualizes a foreground, middle ground
and background within the same frame. This also alerts the viewer to the
fact that there are hidden meanings to be discovered. Successive scenes
exhibit a similar tendency of spatial expansion: in the scenes mentioned
earlier, the camera starts out from an enclosed room; it then takes us to the
veranda, which offers a larger view over the surroundings and the game of
cards is set in the garden. The movement continues among some ruins,
where the boundaries between human habitation and natural setting fuse.
We can see a process in which the concrete, identifiable setting is diffused
into a symbolic space that lacks clear dimensions [see Figs. 11.610]. As
in Baudelaires poems in The Flowers of Evil, everything moves towards
the unlimited immensity of a unique symbolic universe and annihilation
of time in the form of dissolutive degradation.7 In Daneliucs film we
find the same nocturnal type of spatialization as in the trans-contextualized
Baudelaire. Through the evolution of the spatial structure, the clear,
diurnal orientation is gradually dissolved into the oneiric setting of a
chaotic universe. Typical settings, which we can initially identify through
costumes and objects as those of a health resort in the Romania of the 30s,
disappear or alternate in a confusing manner. The strangest spatial
formation, which appears repeatedly and also marks the films conclusion,
is a combination of a casino, a hospital and a madhouse spaces that, in
turn, have several possible intertextual connections of their own far
beyond the terms of modernist visionary cinema (reaching into the realm
of surrealistabsurd literature, for example). And while the setting of the
health resort evokes serene associations of belle poque, the presence of
madmen marching in the streets and the withered old, naked bodies lining
up inside the public bath fill the viewer with anxiety and apprehension on
7
Cf. Antonio Garcia-Berrios analysis of Baudelaire (1992, 400).
the sight of the cameras shameless exposure of these people. [Figs.

11.1718.]
Corresponding to the spatial structure of the film, the linearity of the
narration is interrupted by memories, dreams and imaginary scenes to the
extent that they become undistinguishable. The digestive nature of the
nocturnal scheme is mirrored by the nightmarish image in which intestines
are suddenly thrown up by a dark street canal. The film (just like the
sequence described earlier) begins in the morning, with the awakening to a
new day, but continues with a fantastic vision and ends with death. In
between, instead of witnessing the formation of a character, we witness the
de-construction of the protagonist into symbols: he has two alter-egos:
an old man and a boy. The dominance of half-subjective shots, that present
not only a subjective view, but also the character who sees the things
shown to us, constitute a subjective vision and, eventually, pictures of pure
fantasy. However, this technique does not individualize the character, but,
rather, demonstrates what Edward Branigan characterizes as the potential
of subjective photography to reduce the character to a mere point of
view, an observer who stands in for the viewer of a painting or a movie
(cf. Branigan 1984, 6). In this film, the point of view that the protagonist
embodies can ultimately be interpreted as a general intellectual attitude
with an ethical resonance. It could be defined as the essential human
dignity of reflection, the attitude of cogito ergo sum expressed in an age
that tolerated nothing but blindfolded submissiveness. At the same time,
this is why this movie could be received not as a particular story but as a
vision of a haunting nightmare: a recording of a collective experience.
While contemporary Western European filmmakers such as Peter
Greenaway searched for vehicles of artistic self-reflexivity in the aesthetic
of the baroque or of popular media, Daneliuc constructed, at one extreme,
a reference base out of French decadent literature and modernist
filmmaking techniques. At the other extreme, he proceeded systematically
to deconstruct and overwrite a textual world all too well known to
contemporary viewers. This rewritten or erased text of official genre
movies and ideological clichs lies as a hidden canvas behind Daneliucs
own cinematic images and is responsible for the films exceptional
emotional-intellectual impact.
Just consider the surrealistic, yet highly suggestive images of the
inhabitants of the madhouse/hospital being lined up in the street and
ordered to do gymnastic exercises with a person standing on a table and
showing them the movements (while another persons reads the
instructions from a book and we hear the screeching sounds of a military
parade) [Figs. 11.1920], all these images being received at a time when
404 Chapter Eleven
parades and mass choreographies (including gymnastic elements)8 were

daily experiences of the people in Romania.
Ultimately, referentiality (the films transparency in the direction of
contemporary reality) and self-reflexivity become intermingled in a unique
way in this film (reflexivity meaning the aspect of the film that sends us in
the cognitive process of deciphering meanings towards other parts of the
film where similar elements appear, and also towards other texts, in this
case other films and literary works, this aspect being reinforced by
choosing a central character whose main activity is to observe things
throughout the film). How can these two, seemingly opposite tendencies
be united? Metaphorically speaking, how can we see through a window
(refer to reality) by being focused all the time on the texture of the
windowpane itself (reflect on the medium itself)? Well, in a certain
historic context (the darkest years of Ceauescus Romania) this is exactly
what happened and what proves Finke to be right about suggesting a
communicational function of reflexivity: the expression of the need for
reflection and the repeated thematization of the act of reflection itself, the
imprints of certain explicit, hidden or erased intertexts have the power of
becoming authentic traces of the reality of a certain age. In the eighties
people were alert to hidden messages in artistic texts and the complexity of
Daneliucs allegory stood out as a huge contrast to easily accessible films
of party propaganda. The whole film could be interpreted as a giant,
metaphorical wipe-cut that cleaned the cinema screen of all the lies and
kitschy propaganda images that filled it earlier. What it referred to on a
concrete level was far from peoples everyday reality, still the more the
film glissaded into symbolic and intermedial dimensions, the closer it got
to becoming an accurate portrayal of not what Romania looked like at the
time, but of what the Romanians felt and what kind of thoughts and
images haunted them in the eighties.
4. The World of a Post-Communist Original Democracy

and a Glissando into the Grotesque
In the films that Daneliuc made after 1989, the allegorical representation
persists, but some of its cryptic characteristics have disappeared. Perhaps
his most representative work from this period is The Conjugal Bed (Patul
conjugal, 1991), a black comedy with shockingly grotesque elements. The
main theme is the same as in Glissando, the decadence of human values,
8
This was a model that Ceauescu apparently picked up from the huge mass
productions of choreographies hailing the rule of communism in North Korea.
the panorama of a moral and cultural junkyard. The conclusion is also

similar: one can only gamble, go insane or commit suicide in such a world.
The title is symbolic: what should be the emblem of human tenderness,
love and communication becomes a rented place for shooting amateur
porn films, pornography becoming the underlying metaphor of the whole
film. Just like this more vulgar concept of pornography replaces the
sophisticated allusion of the musical term of the glissando, the allusions to
artistic experiences also disappear and the film abounds in representations
of concrete places and lively everyday situations of a Romania in
transition from communism to capitalism. The only book that we see in
the film is entitled Future of Romania, a book that appeared in
Ceauescus times to honour the communist dictator, only to become a
much-valued marketable asset in the years following the fall of the
communist regime. Self-referential elements are still present, however,
mainly around the motif of a movie theatre, where the protagonist, Potop
Vasile (Vasile Deluge), works, but which soon becomes the headquarters
of a new party called The Party of Original Democracy.
While in Glissando the official communist party propaganda films
formed an erased textual surface over which the film projected its
haunting images, here it is exactly the opposite: the new ideological texts
(the demagogy of obscure little parties that appear like mushrooms after a
summer rain) are out in the open (parodied in all their absurdity) and the
absence of artistic texts, such as the ones that we saw in Glissando
(Baudelaire, Verlaine) forms a new background against which an even
more sinister human comedy, a macabre allegory of ethical and artistic
prostitution is played out. The characters of The Conjugal Bed and of later
films such as Fed Up (Aceast lehamite, 1994) or The Senator of Snails
(Senatorul melcilor, 1995) are not interested in Europe as a cultural
concept. All they care about is European currencies (while their business
ambitions continue to drive them towards Turkey). What child can be
born in such a brave new world? Daneliuc seems to ask in these films
repeatedly. Or implicitly: What can the future behold for a country that is
burdened with such a past and cursed with such a present? In The
Conjugal Bed we have a mentally defective child who survived his
mothers desperate attempts at abortion and his fathers attempt to cut up
the mothers womb with a knife. In Fed Up we have a pregnant mother
who lies half dead in a coma throughout the film, but sees everything that
goes on around her. In another post-communist work by Daneliuc, entitled
the Nervous System (Sistemul nervos, 2005), we have a sixty something
woman (Nica) intoxicated by the new mass media of Romania. The
woman is obsessed with a handsome TV anchor around whom she builds
406 Chapter Eleven
herself a personal cult that turns upside down the old personal cult of the
Ceauescu regime and parodies the newfound democracy dominated by
the stupid idols of mass media that are marketed as culture in post-
communist Romania. Her obsession drives her to wage ridiculous battles
for the sole possession of the TVs remote control within the family, and
to weave in her paranoid mind all kinds of conspiracy theories around her
idol. At the time of the films premiere it was compared to Pier Paolo
Pasolinis Mamma Roma (1962) on account of the extraordinary
performance of its leading actress (Rodica Tapalag) and the grotesquely
symbolic figure created in grandma Nica (quickly renamed in the press as
Mamma RomaNica, or Mamica Romania in Romanian).9 [Figs. 11.21
24.]
It is true that Daneliuc made two more attempts at devising complex
allegories more detached from contemporary realities. In the film entitled
The Eleventh Commandment (A 11-a porunc, 1991) in which he
presented a surrealistic-absurd story of a group of people in a fictitious
post-apocalyptic situation examining as if in a laboratory the birth of
any dictatorship (the eleventh commandment referred to in the title being:
Thou shall not command!). In the next year he also undertook the
rewriting of an old Romanian folk tale, The Toothless War (Tusea i
junghiul, 1992), a grotesque fable about human weaknesses and greed.
Nevertheless, Daneliucs best works after 1990 offer instead of an
Orwellian modelling of abstract ideas a renewal of Caragiales spirit of
vitriolic comedy, only with even darker and more grotesque tones. It is not
merely human dignity and decency that is absent from the world that
Daneliucs films denounce, but Beauty itself: reality is continually
working against aesthetic experience;10 and art remains outside the limits
of the space these characters are set in to struggle for survival.11
Daneliuc himself was an outsider in the Ceauescu era, although,
paradoxically, he had a privileged position among intellectuals: beside
Lucian Pintilie, he was the topmost auteur of the time. Today, while
those who were shamelessly subservient to Ceauescus regime are now
9
See Mircea Daneliucs webpage quoting contemporary reviews of the film:
http://www.mirceadaneliuc.ro/html/sistemul4.html (last accessed: 15 August 2010).
10
It is not an artistic film but a porn movie that they are shooting in Potop Vasiles
small bedroom.
11
The three films: The Conjugal Bed (1993), The Senator of Snails (1995), The
Nervous System (2005) have also been referred to in the Romanian press as the
trilogy of the disaster of being Romanian in the conditions within a post-
apocalyptic world of post-communism. (See the directors website:
http://www.mirceadaneliuc.ro/html/sistemul4.html, last accessed: 15 August 2010.)
busily forging themselves new political careers,12 and while there has also
risen a completely new generation of young filmmakers (also called as the
Romanian New Wave) who reach international audiences and take
prestigious prizes at international film festivals, Daneliuc is still an
outsider. Given a context in which filmmaking in Romania is becoming
more and more commercial on the one hand,13 and as such more and more
a battleground for generations of filmmakers grouped in enemy camps
fighting for survival under the new, radically changed conditions of film
production, he continues to be some kind of a maverick: he addresses the
most painful issues and ridicules them in an uncompromising way (even if
his latest works prove to be of a more uneven quality). On the one hand he
can be considered as a pioneer, whose footsteps have been followed
(consciously or unconsciously) by a number of young filmmakers making
satires of contemporary life. On the other hand, however, his relentless
(considered sometimes even extreme) criticism has also sidetracked him in
a cinematic world that is steered either more and more towards popular
forms of entertainment or is dominated by the new post-communist
authors who demand centre stage having reached international acclaim
within the last decades. Belonging to an unfortunate generation of true
artists that preceded the fall of communism, he remains somewhat of a
lonely and eccentric figure of Romanian and East European cinema. Not
surprisingly, although he still continues to make films, we find him
searching for new forms of expression not only film, but in the medium
that he always admired: literature. The title of one of his latest novels,
Homeless Ghosts or Ghosts without a Country (Strigoi fr ar) is
revealing in this sense. As an artist, no matter whether he makes
multilayered, palimpsest-like films, or writes with the keen eye of a
filmmaker, he is still concerned with universal and eternal ghosts of
Romanian existence, which have not left with the changes in political
forms, but are here to stay and haunt us. His art is still in essence based on
themes of moral decadence and a style dominated by bitter self-criticism
mixed with genuine cultural nostalgia for art forms that are as complex
and cathartic as those quoted in Glissando. For, according to Daneliuc,
despite all the visible changes, the unique forms of Romanian decadence
persist, the glissando which he loves and hates, continues.
12
For instance, they become senators, as did Sergiu Nicolaescu shortly after 1990,
although he used to be the chief propaganda filmmaker of communist Romania.
13
Film studios outside Bucharest offer cheap labor and breathtaking Carpathian
locations nearby for more and more American superproductions that are shot here.
Film magazines in Romania nowadays are filled with day-to-day reports about
Hollywood megastars working in Romanian studios.
408 Chapter Eleven
Figures
Figures 11.15. The mysterious presence of paintings in Glissando (1984).
410 Chapter Eleven
Figures 11.610. Scenes built around two literary texts: the Preface written to The
Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) by Baudelaire and Verlaines Chanson
dautomne (Autumn Chant). These are what the characters speak about, what they
quote, and what the images imitate in atmosphere and visual elements performing
a glissade through the different meanings of decadence.
412 Chapter Eleven
Figures 11.1112. The parallel of a book of poetry and a deck of playing cards is
borne out by the fact that Romanian uses the same word (carte) to denote book
and card.
Figures 11.1316. Symbolisms and art nouveaus preference for synaesthesia and
decorativeness present in the carefully chosen images and settings (the ornamental
iron railing of the veranda; the leafless trees with long, artistically winding
branches appearing in the fading colours of late October/November); Verlaines
famous opening lines of the Chanson dautomne transposed onto the image of a
thicket of grey branches.
414 Chapter Eleven
Figures 11.1718. While the setting of the health resort evokes serene associations
of belle poque, the presence of madmen marching in the streets and the withered
old, naked bodies lining up inside the public bath fill the viewer with anxiety and
apprehension.
Figures 11.1920. The inhabitants of the madhouse/hospital lined up in the street

and ordered to do gymnastic exercises resembling the parades and mass
choreographies of the Ceauescu era.
Figures 11.2124. The Nervous System (2005): Mamma RomaNica obsessed

with a TV star, the parody of the newfound democracy dominated by the stupid
idols of mass media that are marketed as culture in post-communist Romania
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Cinema and Intermediality

Cinema and Intermediality:

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright 2011 by gnes Peth

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2879-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2879-6

Serge Daney: The Godard Paradox. In: Michael

For my children who share my passion for the visual arts

Cinema In-Between Media

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 55

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 95

The Intermedial Demon of the Cinematic Image

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 179

Cinema as the Currency of the Absolute: The Godard Paradigm

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 231

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 265

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 293

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 317

Re-Mediating the Real: Paradoxes (?) of an Intermedial Cinema

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 341

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 367

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 395

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 417

CINEMA AND THE PASSION

have occurred following the multiplication of the forms of moving images

methodologies aiming at modelling intermediality in film and mapping the

towards illusory inter-media and inter-art transgressions I claim that this

collage, it can be perceived as a marker for metaleptic leaps, intermediality

painterly images are always revealed to belong to an ontologically

films each consisting of two parts accompanied by the publication of an art

on the indexical nature of cinema, of cinema mediating between the

typical Eastern-European version of an intermedial cinema that on the one

never be [] grasped as a whole (Oosterling 2003, 41). Accordingly, the

1. Theorizing Intermediality in the Cinema:

mapping the proliferation of media relations. The other factor that

primarily the object of scientific investigation (namely, intermedial

So is it only a problem of a somewhat unbalanced interdisciplinarity,

1.2 Intermediality: A Rift in Film Theory, a Matter of Politics,

seems to be very little communication between the scholars on each side

global politics of science? Or does it have to do with the implicit

institutions in the context of which a strategy of interdisciplinarity might seem

consider it primarily from an aesthetic point of view, and place it into a

Jost (2005, 111) again. In addition, most mainstream theoretical writings

1.3 Film as an Incredible Shrinking Medium,

have come ungrounded and thus we are compelled to revisit continually

2. Routes along the Historical Research Axis

2.1 Film as Synesthetic Experience and the Spirit

the ambition of Lessings synthesis in his Laocon) to find correspondences

2.2 Trans-Medial Theories of Cinema

2.3 Comparative Analyses, Inter-Art Theories

before, exhibit such duality in their methodology within a single work.

(or colonization) or a kind of extended palimpsest (2006, 33). Or, we

2.4 Parallax Historiography and Media Archaeology

2.5 Modelling Cinematic Intermediality and Mapping

of philosophy, literary theory or communication studies has been done

a) Intermediality described as a system or a network of interrelations

This model is perhaps best presented by Yvonne Spielmann in her

the category of transformation. But where intertextuality expresses a text

b) Theorizing the perception of intermediality in film: as a reflexive

All these are ostensibly indebted to Derridas ideas of difference and

Paech elaborates on the idea, saying that: Strictly speaking, intermedial

summary of his basic ideas on intermediality for a compendium of film theories