Articles

Marc Vernet: Superimposition

The third chapter of Marc Vernet's Figure de l'absence investigates the workings and effects of superimposition and dissolve. Through a close analysis of photographs, paintings, posters and film sequences the author maps out the different functions of the figure: its flattening (two-dimensional) effect, the markers of containment and subjectivity, the metonymical and metaphorical relations of the two superimposed images, and above all the transformation of space structures. [Full text in Hungarian]

Fabienne Liptay: Empty places in film. The interplay of picture and imagination

The essay of Fabienne Liptay explores the way the notion of empty spaces (as introduced by the German literary critic Wolfgang Iser) explains the way visual artworks and films rely on the supplementary imagination of the spectator. According to Liptay this mechanism can be detected on several plains: first, the spectator always supplements the space of the spectacle; making the consequent errors themselves part of the interpretation process - both from the point of view of reception history as well as the formation of the given topical meaning. Second, the empty spaces pertaining to an image have temporal meaning apart from their spatial one, as long as the moment represented by the image is considered within the context of a larger time interval that is made up of the moments preceding and succeeding it. The essay offers a wide range of examples from art history and film history to illustrate the way the idea of empty space functions, pointing out, at the same time, the roots of the question in film history beginning with the montage experiments by Kulesov to the film theory of Deleuze. [Full text in Hungarian]

Gábor Gelencsér: Connections between film and literature in Hungarian cinema after 1945

The study examines connections between film and literature beyond the question of adaptations; it concentrates on the functional changes and interrelations regarding the two media. The functional change between film and literature, the interdependence of the two media is mapped out, and an analysis of the context of this interdependence and the possible formal connections is offered. Gelencsér's study is an important summary not only regarding questions of adaptation, but more generally of the post-1945 era of Hungarian cinema. [Full text in Hungarian]

Melinda Szaloky: The Time-Image Today: A Brief Look at Deleuze, Cinema, and the Digital

This paper will revisit the question of the pertinence and critical applicability of basic concepts of European film theory, and especially Gilles Deleuze's notion of the cinematic time-image, in the age of global electronic media. It will be argued that the Deleuzean rationale of the mutually reversible cinematic time-image is highly relevant for coming to grips with the experience of immersive virtual worlds and global electronic networks. The paper will establish links between the tradition of European film theory, including Deleuze's cine-philosophy, and post-Kantian continental philosophy and philosophical aesthetics, which advocate a reflexive production of reality and the lack of an ultimate referent. The paper aims to show that the crystalline aesthetic through which cinema offers a direct presentation of the indiscernibility between real and imaginary, actual and virtual, is not only a continuation of the Kantian rationale of aesthetic reflection, but it also constitutes a reaction avant la lettre to today's digitally (in)formed and increasingly self-enclosed, self-referential, and one-dimensional reality. [Full text in English]

Pepita Hesselberth: It's about Time (Or Is It?) Warhol anno 2007

In this paper I focus on the audiovisual work of Andy Warhol as it was presented in the Warhol exhibition "Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms" which took place in Amsterdam in 2007. By investigating the self-reflexive play with cinematic temporality performed upon the viewer I wish to address how a (sense of) "self" emerges from the multiple temporalities and non-spaces as they are both present in Warhol's films and re-presented in the 2007 exhibition, a "me" that is at once extruded and imploded. With his calculated distance and his passionless presence, I will argue, Warhol managed to suspend his effective response as an observer, and in doing so his films enable the viewer to enter into his transactions of art. The films, especially in this exhibition-as-setup, however, do not open up an unknown world for us, but refocus (or rather: "re-scale") our own familiar but paradoxically unrecognized one. Closing in on the pro-filmic reality and slowing it down, the camera's gaze forces the beholder at a distance, complicating the double spatiality of the close-up as expounded by Mary-Ann Doane. In the paper I thus focus on the specific - self-reflexively explored - relation between the "subject" of the exhibition (Warhol) and the "subject" in the exhibition (the visitor/"me"), around the notions of a Deleuzian "pulsed" temporality, an "inside-out" Bazinian cinematic ontology, and a re-scaled subject-object division (in Doane's sense of scale). In doing so I seek to identify the media-infused ways of world-making that challenge and change our sense of time and space, and consequently, the way these shifting parameters of time and space in their turn redefine our sense of "being-in-the-world." [Full text in English]

László Tarnay: On the Metaphysics of Screen Violence and Beyond

The paper deals with the problem of representability of entropic change, such as extreme violence or death by means of motion, i.e. moving pictures. It argues that film or moving images by nature are not capable of expressing or meaning once-for-all changes, contrary to the photograph. Moving images trigger a sense of continuity in the viewers, a feeling that takes its force from the thesis of the continuity of existence; a sense that things do not go out of existence whenever they move out of sight. [Full text in English]

Thomas Morsch: Corporeal Discourse and Modernist Shock Aesthetics in Takashi Miike's Film Audition

Analyzing the shock tactics of the film, the paper discusses Takashi Miike's film AUDITION as an example of a corporeal cinema, in which the body of the spectator is employed as a medium of the film's narration. The article shows how the film's strategies of visceral engagement are indebted to a radical aesthetic modernism. [Full text in English]

Dennis Göttel: Towards a Deconstruction of the Screen: Skin, Chalkboard, and the Expanded Cinema of Valie Export

The text searches for metaphors of the cinematographic screen in film theory on the one hand, and for the use of the screen in art performances of the so called Expanded Cinema on the other. Referring to Jacques Derrida's definition of a material based metaphoricity I try to find a very special connection between screen and the use of metaphors. [Full text in English]

Student's Workshop

Éva Török: The Vice and the Machiavel in film adaptations of Richard III

I present Richard from Shakespeare's Richard III as a mixture of the Vice and the Machiavel. My aim is to explore the extent to which film adaptations preserve this bond of character types. As a result I find that Laurence Olivier's film (1955) stresses the Machiavel features, Richard Loncraine's film (1995) emphasises the Vice features, while György Fehér's film (1972) tries to keep the balance of the two characters. [Full text in Hungarian]

Szilárd Szarvas: The Blue Velvet in the mirror of psychoanalysis

The purpose of this essay is to give a comprehensive psychoanalytic interpretation of David Lynch's Blue Velvet. I initiate my research discussing the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalytic approach in film theory, without omitting the highly disputed validity and authenticity of the critical direction that is marked by Slavoj Žižek. After defining my position, I briefly summarize some key concepts of psychoanalytic film theory relevant to my argumentation. Subsequently, I turn to the works of Lynch, and highlight those aspects of the movie which make it his most important and most peculiar piece so far. After describing the storyline of Blue Velvet, I investigate the connection between film and theory, juxtaposing the key points that I outlined previously. My intention is to solve the mystery of the blue velvet, that is to say, to answer the question: what is blue velvet? Interestingly, answering the most trivial question seems to reveal how the structure of the entire film works. [Full text in Hungarian]