Affective Intermediality (Guest Lecture)

Question 1

Major paradigms of intermediality interpreted in connection with cinema
—> divergent perspectives:

Answer 1

• “media borders” –> crossing media borders
• “in-betweenness” –> being in-between
• “passages” –> connecting media and reality (–> “affective intermediality”)

Question 2

Crossing Media Borders

Answer 2

• Borders as “the founding category” of intermediality studies (Rajewsky)
• Borders are constructed (historically, cognitively and conventionally) and perceivable as differences that frame each medium. (Elleström)
• Intermediality = the result of the following operations:
  a. combination=media are combined to form a complex multimedia or hybrid entity,
  b. representation = media (products) are represented, referenced by other media,
  c. transfer/ transformation = characteristics are transferred, remediated (Bolter and Grusin), trans-semioticised (Gaudreault and Marion), trans-mediated, transcoded.

Question 3

The tradition of inter-art theories:

Answer 3

• the idea of the “sister arts” (literature and the visual arts)
• the rivalry (paragone) between the arts (painting and sculpture)
• the limitations of the arts (G.E. Lessing: normative aesthetics)
• unifications of the arts (Gesamtkunstwerk)

Question 4

Intermediality studies rooted in semiotics:

Answer 4

a pivotal shift from art forms, artworks and aesthetics to texts, signs and modes of communication

Question 5

Jean-François Lyotard’s Notion of The Figural:

Answer 5

–> an “interworld” of sensual excess

“something a linguistic space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification” but remains “steadfastly within the sensory” and “every form of discourse exhausts itself before exhausting it” (Lyotard, 2011)

Question 6

Joachim Paech

Answer 6

Intermediality = “a perceivable figure of media difference which disturbs the order of the discourse” as a “radical heterogeneity.”
Intermediality appears as a kind of figuration in film through which medial differences are re-inscribed within the moving image.
–> Viewing intermediality in terms of the figural is therefore the perfect model of in- betweenness: instead of delimiting media boundaries, it reveals the deep imbrication between the discursive and the non-discursive.
–> The performativity of intermediality: it is something that actively “does,” “performs” something, and not merely “is.”

Question 7

Trans-semiotic/inter-media trespasses, “crossing the borders”:

Answer 7

the operations and categories of intermediality (e.g. Lars Elleström, Irina Rajewsky, Jens Schröter, Jürgen E. Müller, etc.)

–> towards a “grammar” of intermediality, intermediality studies, taxonomies applicable to any media

Question 8

“The uncharted land” of In-Betweenness mapped through post-structuralist philosophies:

Answer 8

the figurality of intermediality, (e.g. Dick Higgins, Hens Oosterling, Joachim Paech, etc.)

–> “poetics”, sensual excess of intermediality
–> de-centring the field

Question 9

Intermedial Cinematicity
–> Interconnectedness of Art and Life

Answer 9

• images framed through a presence in the world: as an affective encounter with reality
• the intertwining of the non-human and the human, artifice and nature in Kiarostami
• a critical engagement with reality
• with the opacity of another culture in Syed’s gallery movie
• with today’s economy of images cultivating an obsession with mediated presence
• with life filtered, not framed by images, in Jude’s film