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Words and Images on the Screen: Language, Literature and Moving Pictures
Editor: Ágnes Pethő
Date Of Publication: Oct 2008
Isbn13: 9781847188434
Isbn: 1-84718-843-5
The screen has never been merely a canvas for the images to be displayed but also – to quote Jean-Luc Godard – “a blank page”, a surface for inscriptions and a “stage” for all kinds of linguistic occurrences be their audible or visual. Word did not come into the world of cinema at the time of the talkies but has been a primordial medial “companion” that has shaped the cinematic experience from its very beginnings. This volume offers a collection of essays that question the role of words and images in the context of moving pictures covering a wide area of their interconnectedness. How can we analyse literary adaptations? What is the role of adaptations in the evolution of specific national cinemas? In what way are written texts used in films? Is the model of the word and image relations used in silent films still applicable today? What major paradigms can be discerned within the multiplicity of ways Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema plays with words and images? Are these models of modernist or postmodern cinema reflected in films of other directors like R. W. Fassbinder? How do avant-garde works deal with the word and image debate? What are the connections of animation or computer games with verbal text and narrative? What is the phenomenon of jet-setting and how does it connect to the ideological implications of the relations between the culture of books and films? What happens when Hamlet is completely rewritten reflecting the ideology of late capitalism? What happens from the point of view of literariness or rejection of literariness when films are made vehicles of national propaganda? How do words get mediated through images? These are some of the questions addressed in the present volume by in-depth case studies of cinematic intermediality or more general surveys regarding cinema’s long lasting liaisons with language or literature.

ÁGNES PETHŐ is an associate professor at the Babes-Bolyai University and at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), where she is head of the Department of Photography, Film and Media. Her research interests are the relationship of cinema and the other arts, cinematic intermediality and self-reflexivity. She is the author of a book in Hungarian entitled Mirror of the Muses. The Poetics of Intermediality and Self-Reflexivity in Cinema [Múzsák tükre. Az intermedialitás és az önreflexió poétikája a filmben, 2003] and the editor three volumes of essays on intermediality and film theory (also published in Hungarian).

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