Thinking Intermediality

Figures

Figure 1.1 Edward Francis Burney, ‘A View of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon’, drawing, 1782, British Museum Collection

Figure 1.2 Pieter Tillemans, View of London, &c. from One Tree Hill in Greenwich Park (1752), print, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Holland Collection

Figure 1.3 Phillip de Loutherbourg, ‘The Four Times of the Day: The Night’ (1757), etching, British Museum Collection

Figures 4.1 and 4.2 François Giro, ‘Pri’ and ‘Malcolm’, graphite on paper, 2020

Figures 4.3 and 4.4 François Giro, ‘Robert’, pastel and graphite on paper, 2020

Figure 5.1 Patrick Jouané, Guy Gilles and Claudia (film still) © guy.gilles@com

Figure 5.2 Patrick Jouané in Venice (film still) © guy.gilles@com

Figure 5.3 ‘Little Jeanne’ (Carole Achache) (Guy Gilles, Proust, l’art et la douleur, 1971)

Figure 5.4 Patrick Jouané and Claudia (Guy Gilles, Proust, l’art et la douleur, 1971)

Figure 5.5 Photo of Patrick Jouané (Guy Gilles, Proust, l’art et la douleur, 1971)

Figure 5.6 Venice (Guy Gilles, Proust, l’art et la douleur, 1971)

Figures 7.1 and 7.2 Yulia (Sara Luna Zoric) and Juliet (Dylan Jongejans) (Zara Dwinger, Yulia and Juliet, 2018)

Figure 7.3 The mise en scène brings the lovers together (Zara Dwinger, Yulia and Juliet, 2018)

Figures 7.4 and 7.5 Queering Tybalt disrupts the tragic ending (Julia Shalimova, Romeo and Juliet?, 2018)

Figure 8.1 29 July 1975, Pollonaruva, Sri-Lanka © Denis Roche, Courtesy Galerie Le Réverbère, Lyon

Figures 11.1 and 11.2 Students’ visualizations of Keiko’s room

Acknowledgements

The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and Meiji University’s Faculty of Humanities International Joint Research Project Support Program and Fund for Hosting International Conferences and Symposia. We would like to express our profound gratitude to these institutions and funding programmes. Our special thanks go to Miguel de Fontenay for allowing us to use a detail from his painting Istanbul (2007) as the cover image for this book.

François Giraud and Marion Schmid

FRANÇOIS GIRAUD AND MARION SCHMID

Introduction

At this first quarter of our twenty-first century, intermediality – the study of the intersections and hybridizations between art forms and media – faces new challenges as well as exciting new opportunities. Variably considered as a discipline, an area of studies, a theory or a method, intermedial research emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, gaining traction as analogue shifted to digital technology and as media increasingly began to converge in contemporary artistic practice. Developed in North America and Western Europe, with important centres in Canada (Centre of Intermedial Research in Arts, Literatures and Technologies, Montreal), Austria (Centre for Intermediality Studies, Graz) and Sweden (Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Linnaeus University), intermedial studies evolved from the older field of interarts studies,¹ which, in turn, crystallized out of a much longer interest in the dialogue between the arts, from Horace’s famous dictum ut pictura poesis [as is painting so is poetry] to Richard Wagner’s aesthetic ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the fusion of different art forms in a ‘total work of art’) and André Bazin’s concept of ‘impure cinema’ – to name only a few conceptual cornerstones. As an interdisciplinary approach, intermediality’s theoretical and methodological foundations have been shaped by cognate disciplines such as art history, film and media studies, musicology, theatre and performance studies, and comparative literature. Traditionally – and this is still true to some extent today – its objects of enquiry consist of the intersections and fusions between different art forms and media, as can be found in intermedial practices such as photo-literature, stage and screen adaptation, cinematic writing, the graphic novel, installation art or video games. While many earlier works in the field privileged a formalist approach – focusing on processes of rewriting, refashioning and transposition between media from a largely aesthetic or media-oriented point of view – in recent years, intermediality has undergone an important disciplinary expansion, embracing more contextualist approaches and drawing on research from non-Humanities fields, notably anthropology, the earth sciences, cognitive and neuroscience and artificial intelligence.² Indeed, the rapid rise of the latter, with its unprecedented possibilities for remixing and recreation, but also its proneness to manipulation and the spread of misinformation, not to forget the manifold challenges posed by our era of the Anthropocene, necessitates a broadening of the scope and reach of intermedial studies.

Testifying to intermediality’s relevance beyond the strict confines of the arts, the recently published Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality – a monumental volume that examines the histories, theories and trajectories of intermediality within a global perspective – highlights the pertinence of intermedial studies for addressing urgent societal issues such as the ecological crisis, sustainable development and posthumanism.³ Likewise, the third part of Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, demonstrates ‘how the intermedial approach can contribute to better understanding specific cultural and communicative phenomena in order to reflect upon or even respond to current phenomena and societal challenges’.⁴ Individual contributors emphasize, amongst others, the role of intermediality in communications about climate change or in our perception of truthfulness and disinformation. Homing in on the former, Niklas Salmose and Jørgen Bruhn weld intermedial and ecocritical approaches in their innovative study Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis through Art and Media, which examines the ways in which climate change is represented and communicated across a range of media, including documentaries, feature films, popular science, graphic novels and advertising.⁵ Seen in this light, intermediality proves to be a useful tool not only to understand some of today’s most pressing issues but also to develop media strategies to raise awareness and foster change.

Arguably, in our troubled times, it is precisely this capacity to mediate, interrogate and drive societal change that becomes one of the core missions of intermedial research and practice. Such a conception of intermediality, which goes beyond the merely formalistic – without of course neglecting the aesthetic strategies of meaning-making that underlie all artistic and media production – also emerged from a roundtable discussion with editors of book series and journals specialized in intermediality that first took place at the Affective Intermediality conference (Sapienza Hungarian University of Transylvania, 20–21 October 2023), an expanded version of which has been published online.⁶ Indeed, one key issue that is recurrent among almost all contributors is the need to connect intermedial criticism to other prominent fields of research. Sophie Stoke-Aymes and Xavier Guidicelli, members of the editorial board of Polysemes: A Journal of Intertextual and Intermedial Studies, succinctly outline the types of approaches they consider particularly fruitful for ensuring the future dynamism and relevance of intermedial studies:

Our main challenge is thus to foreground how intermedial studies may bring together various strands of research, such as postcolonial and decolonial studies, queer and gender studies, ecocriticism, book studies, etc. Originally, intermediality studies has been based on formalist analyses (relations between media), owing to its links with the notion of intertextuality, as deployed by Julia Kristeva, Michael Riffaterre or Gérard Genette. The political dimension of intermediality has often been downplayed and we do feel that it should be foregrounded to attract young scholars.⁷

In retrospect, Birgit Neumann’s pioneering article ‘Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures’, published in Handbook of Intermediality: Literature-Image-Sound-Music, can be considered a milestone in the re-examination of intermediality in light of other fields of interdisciplinary research. Neumann argues for a broadening of the critical scope of intermedial analysis by considering intermedial forms in relation to the sociopolitical frameworks in which they operate:

Examinations of intermediality in postcolonial literatures will therefore necessarily go beyond formalist approaches to take into consideration the ideology and politics of symbolic forms, i.e. the intricate interplay between intermediality on the one hand and larger cultural issues, such as the supposed authority of Western signifying practices, on the other.⁸

While the relationship between aesthetics and politics has received significant academic attention in recent decades,⁹ the question arises as to what extent postcolonialism is conceptually relevant to thinking intermediality. Which theoretical bridges can be built between these two interdisciplinary fields of research? What novel perspectives can postcolonial studies bring to intermediality and vice versa? Neumann emphasizes how both disciplines share a common terminology – in-between-ness, hybridity, impurity, heterogeneity, plurality, interstitial space, exchange – which, despite their conceptual differences, establishes direct and fruitful connections: ‘intermediality may bring to the fore the heterogeneity and plurality of meaning-making and, in a wider sense, reflect the impurity and – to use a central concept of postcolonial studies – hybridity of all cultural formations.’¹⁰ Intermedial interactions within a text can transgress and cross aesthetic borders but also challenge structures of power and cultural Eurocentric hierarchies, such as the hierarchies between the arts established in Europe since the Renaissance. These important reflections are pursued further in a co-authored book by Neumann and Gabriele Rippl – the editor of the Handbook of Intermediality – which explores visual-verbal relations in postcolonial Anglophone texts as a means to reflect critically on visual hegemonies and initiate more equitable modes of exchange.¹¹

Thinking intermediality thus requires us not only to think intermedially about the aesthetic, sociocultural and technological transformations that have shaped modern forms of visual representation up to the twenty-first century but also to consider the formation of in-between spaces – or ‘third spaces’, to refer to Homi Bhabha’s concept¹² – where cultural identities and borders, alongside ethical concerns and media relations, can be renegotiated. Indeed, intermedial practice can open up a dialogical space of co-formation – a borderland where arts and media do not only fuse in a totalizing whole but also intersect in their differences – or in their ‘distance’ as French philosopher Jacques Rancière would put it.¹³ It is worth noting that the concept of borderland has crystallized in intersectionality theory, notably under the influence of queer Chicana writer and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.¹⁴ As a site of multicultural and multiracial experience, a borderland – specifically, in Anzaldúa’s book, the Texan/US Southwest/Mexican border – is thought not only as a space regimented by alienating power dynamics but also an interstitial and ambiguous space of resistance, not fully determined, where ‘dormant areas of the consciousness are being activated’.¹⁵ Crucially, for Anzaldúa, the liminal space in which she exists as ‘a border woman’¹⁶ is a creative, embodied, interlingual and intermedial space where she communicates with both words and images. ‘Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create’, she explains, turning the geographical border into a metaphor for the practice of the arts.¹⁷ Drawing on Anzaldúa’s ideas, Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes the relevance of the spatial metaphor of the borderland to conceptualize intersectionality as a dialogical ‘space of co-formation’,¹⁸ or in other words, ‘an in-between space—not just between disciplinary knowledges of the social sciences and the humanities, but more importantly, between Western and non-Western epistemologies’.¹⁹

The concept of border can be used to draw a parallel – or rather forge a conceptual space of co-formation – between intersectionality and intermediality, two interdisciplinary fields, which can open up new perspectives of research when thought of in relation to each other. As Irina O. Rajewsky reminds us, ‘the crossing of media borders has been defined as a founding category of intermediality’.²⁰ The notion of ‘media borders’ relies on the understanding that media have specific properties and unique features that distinguish them from each other; from this perspective, intermediality theory aims to conceptualize the extent to which media can be combined together and cross their borders in spite of their inherent differences. Whilst such a theorization of intermediality has been criticized for over-essentializing media properties, thinking intermediality as a borderland resists any conceptualization of media as fixed categories or in terms of rigid taxonomies. Instead, the metaphor of borderland requires us to envision the relation between media as a dynamic in-between space of co-formation of meanings and plural identities, where media and arts co-exist and cross over. For Rajewsky,

the notion of boundaries […] should be shifted from taxonomies to the dynamic and creative potential of the border itself. The borders or – perhaps better – ‘border zones’ between media can thus be understood as enabling structures, as spaces in which we can test and experiment with a plethora of different strategies.²¹

Crucially, these ‘border zones’ should not be thought exclusively in terms of media interrelations, as they also create a zone of indeterminacy between art and existence, ethics and aesthetics. Intermedial thinking is not separate from existence – in all its social, embodied, individual and collective manifestations – nor is it separate from the geographical locations and transcultural dialogues in which intermedial practice flourishes.