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‘The solid reality of a piece of ore’: Alain Resnais’s Guernica (1950), by Dr Tamara Trodd (Edinburgh College of Art)
Tuesday, 27 February, 5.15pm
40 George Square, Lecture Theater B
Still from Alain Resnais, Guernica, 1950.
Alain Resnais’s 14-minute film, Guernica (1950), co-directed with Robert Hessens, with a script by Paul Éluard and music by Guy Bernard, is a film composed entirely of a montage of still images: a combination of historic photographs of the bombing of the Basque town, Guernica, in 1937, with close-ups of paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso. To an extent it may be understood as continuing a tradition of the European ‘art’ film: a once-popular and mainstream form of cinema, represented for example by the films of Italian director, Luciano Emmer, or the Belgian director Henri Storck. And yet Resnais’s film also radically departs from this genre: its reference to the recent, real-world atrocity of the bombing and its use of an intensely expressive musical score transforming the work into a film which speaks forcefully not just about art, but also about recent history and politics. Marking a break too with Resnais’s own previous style, as established in his more conventional earlier films, Van Gogh (1948) and Gauguin (1949), Guernica is still astonishing in its impact on the viewer today; as well as in the extent to which it announces a seemingly fully-formed, radical and accomplished style, which can be seen to have shaped later works of French cinema including Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). In this talk I will examine the ways in which, with Guernica, Resnais shows us how the close scrutiny of art may in André Bazin’s words, ‘take on the solid reality of a piece of ore’: in so doing contributing to a wider reworking of the way in which art may take purchase on ‘reality’, at this moment in mid-century modernist art.
Tamara Trodd is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art in the History of Art department at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently completing a new book, Realism Reconfigured: Historical Returns in Contemporary Art. She is the author of The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital (Chicago, 2015), and the edited collection, Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester, 2011). Her essay, ‘Creation and Decreation in Tacita Dean’s Antigone’ is forthcoming in October.
In this first joint workshop of the research partnerships in intermedial studies between the University of Edinburgh and Meiji University (Tokyo, Japan), Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Aix-Marseille University (France), with guests from IULM Milano (Italy), we wish to explore exciting new developments in the field of Intermediality studies, both in terms of theories and practices. What are the most prominent ways of approaching intermediality and multimodality today, and how can these trends, critical traditions and their respective concepts be put into dialogue, combined or transformed in artistic practice? How can ideas and methods used in one of these analytical or artistic modes facilitate creative innovation in another? How can critical approaches conventionally applied to one medium or art form help us to better understand another? More generally, how can bringing into contact different artistic traditions ranging from classic to more contemporary media spur creativity and the construction of new kinds of aesthetic experience and semiotic interpretations? How do specific media and art forms interact in and between different cultures and historical eras, in the context of pressing lines of enquiry such as eco-criticism, gender studies, and postcolonialism and decolonization studies?
Exchanges in this workshop will be greatly enriched by crossed cultural and academic perspectives between our respective institutions. We seek to initiate a discussion between established scholars of intermediality, early-career colleagues and research students that will help us forge new creative and critical positions in this fast-developing field of study—a field which has prompted some of the most original concepts and critical theories since the beginning of the 21st century.
Each paper should be around 15 minutes. Question sessions should be 20-30 minutes and are held after all the papers on the panel.
Thursday 14 March
Morning sessions, 40 George Square; Afternoon sessions, Appleton Tower
-Yagmur Atlar (Linnaeus), ‘Remediation of Actualisation Through Semi-Virtuality in Tim Crouch’s Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel’
-Déborah Prudhon (Aix-Marseille), ‘Intermedial Dialogue Between the Page and the Stage: Tim Crouch’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019)’
14:15-15:30 Panel 4: Intermedial Modernity, Generic Hybridity and The Poetics of Gameplay (Chair: Rumiko Oyama)
-Gil Charbonnier (Aix-Marseille), ‘“A little too much is just enough for me”: Jean Cocteau’s Intermediality in Menton’
-Julia Larsen (Edinburgh), ‘“To Literally Become a House”: Gothic Cinematic Intermediality in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015)’
-Emanuela Patti (Edinburgh), ‘Analysing Electronic Literature through Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta’
15:30-15:45 Coffee break
15:45-17:00 Panel 5: Between Speech and Writing, Images and Texts, Bodies and Faces (Chair: Niklas Salmose)
-Mariko Naito (Meiji), ‘Poetry as a Phonetic and Temporal Art Form or a Graphic and Spatial One? The Intermediality of Japanese Poetry in Medieval Japanese Poetics’
-Matthis Hervieux (Edinburgh), ‘Dany Laferrière’s Intermedial Practice: Between Haiti and Japan, Text and Painting’
-Alex Watson (Meiji), ‘The Face of the Pacific: Sydney Parkinson’s A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773)’
Friday 15 March
50 George Square, Project Room (Room 1.06, First floor)
09:15-10:30 Panel 6: Digital Environments and Pedagogical Matters (Chair: Ruth Menzies)
-Rumiko Oyama (Meiji), ‘Exploring Multimodal Factors in Literature: A trans-modal Approach to Literary Texts in the L2 Classroom’
-Anna Calise (IULM, Milano), ‘Museum MOOCs, Intermedial Landscapes of Experience’
-Elodie Burle-Errecade and Valérie Gontero-Lauze (Aix-Marseille), ‘How to Analyze a Medieval Manuscript through the Prism of Intermediality?’
10:30-10:45 Coffee break
10:45-12:00 Panel 7: Intermedial Transfers – Multimodality and Databases (Chair: Alex Watson)
-Alexandra Huang (Edinburgh), ‘Exploring the Performativity of Affect in the Intermedial Musical Poetry of Ojārs Vācietis’
-Martin van der Linden (Linnaeus), ‘Shinto, the Sacred, and “Like and Subscribe”: Theorizing the Potential for a Multimodal-Intermedial Analysis of YouTube Videos’
-Ema Tanaka (Meiji), ‘An Implication from the Linking between “Japan Search” and “Media Arts” Database – How popular culture became recognized as media art?’
12:00-13:00 Lunch break
13:00-14:00 Panel 8: Music, Song and Poetry (Chair: Emanuela Patti)
-Martin Knust (Linnaeus), ‘Speech, Song and the Materialities of Music’
-Benoît Loiret (Edinburgh), ‘Yves Bonnefoy and Musicians: Music, Poetry, Silence’
14:15-15:30 Panel 9: Film, Theatre, Drawing and Other Media – between Aesthetic and Ethical Concerns (Chair: Inma Sanchez-Garcia)
-François Giraud (Edinburgh), ‘Bodies and Screens: The Practice of Online Life Drawing during the Covid-19 Lockdowns’
-Anna Ishchenko (Linnaeus), ‘The Poetics of Gameplay and the Poetics of Ambience in the Video Game Kentucky Route Zero (2013-2019)’
-Katie Pleming (Edinburgh), ‘Staging symbolic violence at the interstices of film and theatre: Alice Diop’s La Mort de Danton (2011)’
15:30-15:45 Coffee break
15:45-16:45 Panel 10: Intersemiotic Adaptations and Remediations (Chair: Fabien Arribert-Narce)
-Vincenzo Di Rosa (IULM, Milano), ‘The Exhibition as Fiction: Intermedial practices in curatorial adaptations’
-Ruth Menzies (Aix-Marseille), ‘From Gulliver to Goveller: an intermedial reappropriation of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels’
Cinematic sensations have become a ubiquitous part of our lives, of a world unfolding as a moving spectacle in front of our eyes. Furthermore, today’s media landscape is dominated by the diverse forms of digital images coexisting with the traditional arts. Accordingly, the study of cinematic intermediality needs to remap its own terrain to include more subtle interactions within this new area of intermedial connections occurring between the old and new regimes of images, between the traditional theatrical cinematic experience and the cinematicity of artworks in a gallery, of moving images on our digital devices.
“Cinematicity” can be attributed to various forms of moving images, and – as Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau specify in their book on Cinematicity in Media History (2013) – it can only “be understood intermedially:” as any characteristic of cinema that we recognize in something other than cinema itself. It may precede and prefigure the invention of cinema, it can infuse literature, photography, painting, and new media, as well as everyday phenomena – and all of these can be self-reflexively highlighted in film. We need to consider therefore cinematicity as a highly challenging area of intermedial studies.
In this presentation, I will address this challenge by focusing on films that foreground occurrences of cinematicity: through brief case studies of a variety of moving image artworks (experimental, gallery film, feature film made for cinema), I will explore the juxtaposition of stasis and motion, cinema and the other arts, the pre-cinematic impressions of audio-visual animation and the post-cinematic proliferation and relocation of cinematic experiences. These aesthetic strategies involving intermedial dialogues through cinematicity all convey an affective encounter with reality and accordingly, their particular politics of impurity highlighting the intersections of art and life, as well as key issues regarding our
relationship with images.
Ágnes Pethő is Professor of Film Studies at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is the author of the monograph, Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion for the In-Between (2011), which was revised and enlarged for the second edition in 2020. She has also written several articles and edited a series of books on topics related to intermediality in cinema, including Caught In-Between. Intermediality in Eastern European and Russian Cinema (2020), The Cinema of Sensations (2015), Film in the Post-Media Age (2012), Words and Images on the Screen (2008).
She is the executive editor of the journal Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies (indexed and tracked for impact factor in the Web of Science – ESCI), which frequently publishes special issues and articles on intermediality. Currently she is the PI of the exploratory research project, Affective Intermediality. Cinema between Media, Sensation and Reality supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research.
In-person and online, Screening Room (G.04), 50 George Square
Ujaan Ganguly is an Indian actor, writer, and director, based out of Calcutta, working across live action and animation. His second film as an actor, An Angel’s Kiss (2022) featured in the Official Selection category of the Academy Awards qualified Heartland International Film Festival, the RapidLion International Film Festival (South Africa), and the Mar Del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina). After obtaining the prestigious Ertegun Scholarship, Ujaan post-graduated from the University of Oxford in 2022 with a distinction in World Liter atures. Since then, Ujaan has not only been writing shows for Indian OTT platforms, but also creating an animated series based on the Indian epic Mahabharata for Nickelodeon and Jio Studios. Ujaan remains an ardent admirer of the Intermediality programmes at the University of Edinburgh, and is enthused about speaking to the students about his limited yet enriching experiences as a storyteller.
Friday 22nd November from 4 to 5.30pm in 50 George Square (G0.6)
4.15-5.15pm: Film and the Other Arts
Barnaby Ralph (University of Tokyo), “Dancing with the Absent Centre: Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance and Mythologised Indifference”
Ayako Otomo, “Le Roi danse: Historical Realisation and Musical-Political Theatre”
***
5.30-6.30pm: Image and Text
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds), “Intermediality in Guadeloupe’s Cane-fields: Raphaël Confiant and David Damoison Cutting a Photo-text”
Fariha Asghar (Bahauddin Zakariya University/University of Leeds), “Text/image in Pakistani Political Discourse: Photographic Legitimation Analysis in Memoirs by Ayub khan and Pervez Musharraf”
Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence
6th February 2025, 2.00-3.30pm
4.01, Lister Learning and Teaching Centre
University of Edinburgh
In Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, the arts drew suddenly closer: a curtain was raised on a magical new hybrid art, cinema. There followed an escalation in the birth of new hybrid genres like sound art, video art, graphic art and performance art and new sites and technologies for hybridity were developed: television, video projection, museums as white boxes, computers, the Internet. Some of Italy’s best-known artists and groups got involved in various ways, from the Futurists to Bruno Munari, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Gruppo 63, Gianni Toti, Niccolò Ammaniti, and Wu Ming. Many artists we know less well often charted this in-between creative world. At this event, Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, and Giuliana Pieri will join Emanuela Patti to discuss their book Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence. Together, they will explore how the ever-evolving interplay between artistic practices has served as a powerful cultural force shaping creativity since the early twentieth century. Their volume attempts the first large-scale mapping of this force, providing a new framing, and along the way attempts to uncover some of the reasons behind this change.
Clodagh Brook is Professor in Italian at Trinity College, Dublin
Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at University College London
Giuliana Pieri is Professor of Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, London.
Over the past few decades, both World Literature and Intermediality have become well-established yet hotly debated concepts and fields of academic inquiry. However, they were developed and often treated as separate critical frameworks. In this second joint workshop of the research partnerships in intermedial studies between the University of Edinburgh and Meiji University (Tokyo, Japan), Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Aix-Marseille University (France), we wish to investigate the shared theoretical concerns between these two areas, renegotiating text-based approaches to World Literature with methods developed to study the intersections between other art forms.
World Literature designates the circulation of works from a global perspective, beyond their country and language of origin; it corresponds to an area of studies that emerged around the turn of the millennium with a specific set of theories informed by Postcolonialism, Cultural and Translation Studies. The emphasis of this critical framework is on the deconstruction of boundaries between disciplines, languages, cultures and media in the reception and study of literary works, beyond a Eurocentric perspective, an approach which makes it compatible with the interdisciplinary tenet of Intermediality. The latter has emerged as a prominent area of research in the Arts and Humanities since the 1980s. Focusing on the interrelationship between literature and other art forms, such as music, painting, photography, film, sculpture, architecture, dance, opera, video games, theatre and performance, Intermediality covers a broad range of border-crossing aesthetic phenomena like the graphic novel or photo-literature that we would like to investigate from the global and transversal perspective of World Literature. We also wish to explore the increasing reliance on a variety of media and art forms in the production of literary texts, which corresponds to a major aesthetic trend in World Literature. These aesthetic explorations fueled by migrations, multilingualism, transcultural interactions, and multi-media artistic practices are, indeed, rapidly reshaping the production, circulation, reception, and critical analysis of literary and artistic works on a global scale.
Themes, issues and methodologies to be explored include:
-creative code- and mode-switching practices such as photo-literature, the graphic novel, screen adaptation, ekphrasis, and word and music/image combinations.
-intercultural and intermedial relations in all literary genres (novels, life writing, poetry, theatre…) produced in English and other languages across the globe.
-critical inquiries fostering interdisciplinarity and a global approach to literature and other art forms, including music, painting, drawing, photography, cinema, theatre and performance, opera, video games, installation art, architecture, dance, graphic novels and manga.
-translation between languages, cultures and media, i.e. intermedial translation processes.
-translingualism, multilingualism and medial transpositions.
09:15-10:00 Keynote 1: Niklas Salmose (Linnaeus), “The Medial Affordances of Nostalgia”
(Chair: Fabien Arribert-Narce)
10:00-11:15: Panel 1: Intermedial border crossings – from theatre and poetic prose to various screen (non-)adaptations and live performances (Chair: Inma Sanchez-Garcia)
-Federica G. Pedriali (Edinburgh), “‘Invisible Cities’: Intermedial Variations and the Global Utopia of Art”
-Sébastien Lefait (Aix-Marseille), “Seeing Shakespeare everywhere. From the intermedial presence of Shakespearean patterns to a definition of non-adaptation”
-Lily Beckett (Bristol), “On the Perimeters of Poetry and Performance: ‘Significant Geographies’ and Intermedial Form in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2014)”
11:15-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-12:45 Panel 2: Intercultural adaptations between Eastern and Western canons – from pre-modern literature to film and other contemporary media (Chair: Beate Schirrmacher)
-Benoît Tane (Aix-Marseille), “Intermediality and Interculturality in the Globalized Reception of Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses”
-Mariko Naito (Meiji), “Humans like dolls or dolls like humans? A transmedial analysis of the premodern Japanese play The Courier for Hell (1711) and the film Dolls (2002)”
-Yufeng (Lincoln) Li (Edinburgh), “Reimagining the Epic of Gilgamesh through Generative AI: a Vision for a Posthuman Literature-to-film Adaptation”
13:45-14:35 Panel 3: Intermedial afterlives – the journey of iconic characters across cultures and media (Chair: Sébastien Lefait)
-Saana Sutinen (Linnaeus), “The Journey of Superhero Film Music Across Media and the Globe”
-Ruth Menzies (Aix-Marseille), “Popularity, politics and populism: Gulliver’s travels in cartoon and caricature”
14:35-15:25 Panel 4: Poetry, music and painting – the transmission of affect between silence and singular voices (Chair: Sarah Tribout-Joseph)
-Benoît Loiret (Edinburgh), “Poets listening to the silent music of painting: John Ashbery’s and Yves Bonnefoy’s art criticism”
-Alexandra Huang-Kokina (Edinburgh), “AI Crafting Collective Creativity? The case of adapting Yotsuya Kaidan (a Kabuki Play) into science-fiction opera”
15:25-15:45 Coffee break
15:45-17:00 Panel 5: On the production, translation and circulation of books in a global market (Chair: Jørgen Bruhn)
-Beate Schirrmacher (Linnaeus), “What is literature if not a book? An intermedial approach to literature in a digitized world”
-Alex Watson (Meiji), “Packaging Japan: Paratexts for English Translations of Japanese Literature”
-Martin van der Linden (Linnaeus), “Dark Academia and Its Discontents: The Aesthetics of the Western Canon on BookTube”
09:15-10:00 Keynote 2: Shuangyi Li (Bristol), “Intermediating Sino-African Transcultural Memory: Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea and Zao Wou-Ki’s Paintings”
(Chair: Fabien Arribert-Narce)
10:00-10:50: Panel 6: Museums, archives and memory – articulating multiple voices and identities via reclamation and resistance (Chair: Alex Watson)
-Laura Osorio Salazar (Edinburgh), “Hidden possibilities in the ‘museum world’: An Experience of Interaction and Resistance at the Museo de la Ciudad Autoconstruida”
-Andy Stafford (Leeds), “‘Belsunce, Don’t forget me!’ Anonymous Passport Photos in Marseille and Multiple Voices of Reclamation”
10:50-11:05 Coffee break
11:05-12:20 Panel 7: Intermedial ecocriticism – storytelling and eco-media in a global economic system (Chair: Niklas Salmose)
-Anna Ishchenko (Linnaeus), “Environmental Melancholy in Disco Elysium as an Intermedial Narrative Experience: Exploring Transmediations of the Ecological Crisis Conditions in Narrative Video Games”
-Yagmur Atlar (Linnaeus), “Creating Ecologies to Communicate: An Intermedial Analysis of Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila”
12:20-13:20 Lunch break
13:20-14:10 Panel 8: Transcultural re-interpretations and appropriations in global literature and cinema (Chair: Alice Blackhurst)
-Julia Larsen (Edinburgh), “The Monstrosity Between: The Remediated and Transculturated Zombie, from Haiti to the United States”
-Evan Falls (Edinburgh), “Poetry of the Mundane: How Directors Use Musicality to Develop Theme in Paterson and Perfect Days”
250-word Abstract Submission deadline: 1st December 2024
Over the past few decades, both World Literature and Intermediality have become well-established yet hotly debated concepts and fields of academic inquiry. However, they were developed and often treated as separate critical frameworks. In this second joint workshop of the research partnerships in intermedial studies between the University of Edinburgh and Meiji University (Tokyo, Japan), Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Aix-Marseille University (France), we wish to investigate the shared theoretical concerns between these two areas, renegotiating text-based approaches to World Literature with methods developed to study the intersections between other art forms.
World Literature designates the circulation of works from a global perspective, beyond their country and language of origin; it corresponds to an area of studies that emerged around the turn of the millennium with a specific set of theories informed by Postcolonialism, Cultural and Translation Studies. The emphasis of this critical framework is on the deconstruction of boundaries between disciplines, languages, cultures and media in the reception and study of literary works, beyond a Eurocentric perspective, an approach which makes it compatible with the interdisciplinary tenet of Intermediality. The latter has emerged as a prominent area of research in the Arts and Humanities since the 1980s. Focusing on the interrelationship between literature and other art forms, such as music, painting, photography, film, sculpture, architecture, dance, opera, video games, theatre and performance, Intermediality covers a broad range of border-crossing aesthetic phenomena like the graphic novel or photo-literature that we would like to investigate from the global and transversal perspective of World Literature. We also wish to explore the increasing reliance on a variety of media and art forms in the production of literary texts, which corresponds to a major aesthetic trend in World Literature. These aesthetic explorations fueled by migrations, multilingualism, transcultural interactions, and multi-media artistic practices are, indeed, rapidly reshaping the production, circulation, reception, and critical analysis of literary and artistic works on a global scale.
This event will mark the launch of the new EUP book series “Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality”, which shares the key aims of the workshop. We invite abstracts for twenty-minute papers in English exploring the topic of the workshop as broadly and creatively as possible. Contributions on other topics related to intermediality and multimodality studies will also be considered.
Themes, issues and methodologies to be explored and considered include:
-creative code- and mode-switching practices such as photo-literature, the graphic novel, screen adaptation, ekphrasis, and word and music/image combinations.
-intercultural and intermedial relations in all literary genres (novels, life writing, poetry, theatre…) produced in English and other languages across the globe.
-critical inquiries fostering interdisciplinarity and a global approach to literature and other art forms, including music, painting, drawing, photography, cinema, theatre and performance, opera, video games, installation art, architecture, dance, graphic novels and manga.
-translation between languages, cultures and media, i.e. intermedial translation processes.
-translingualism, multilingualism and medial transpositions.
SUBMISSIONS OPEN TO: Anyone working with intermedial concepts in their research, whether traditional, practice-based, or somewhere in between. Established academics, early career academics, creative practitioners, independent researchers, and postgraduate students are all welcome to submit. Please see the submission guidelines and make sure your work follows them prior to your submission.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Monday, 1 September 2025
Issue 2 of In/Between aims to expand on the creative and academic intentions and ideas explored in Issue 1. Read our manifesto here to get a sense of why In/Between exists and what type of work and engagement we are looking for.
ISSUE 2 THEME
What does the act of translating constitute? An action, an experience, an emotion, a work of art? What is the relationship between the original work and the translated work? Between the original creator and the translator? Between the various intended audiences? We are interested in work that engages with any and all forms of translation: translation of texts into other languages; of one medium into another; of one mode of experience or interaction into another; translation between cultures, between ways of thinking, between time periods. We take an expansive view of what translation means and intend for this issue to encompass as many interpretations as possible.
An International and Interdisciplinary Workshop
