Cinema and Intermediality (Second, Enlarged Edition): The Passion for the In-Between
One of the most comprehensive books to focus on the relationship between cinema and the other arts, this volume explores types and stylistic devices of intermediality through a wide range of case studies. It addresses major theoretical issues and highlights the relevance of intermedial relations in film history, mapping the theoretical field by outlining its main concepts and the research avenues pursued in the study of cinematic intermediality, including the most recent approaches and methodologies. It also presents some major templates of intermediality through various examples from world cinema, including closer looks at films by auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. Supplemented by three new chapters dealing with phenomena which came into view since its first publication, the revised and enlarged edition of this ground-breaking volume will serve as a useful handbook to clarify key ideas and to offer insightful analyses.
Ágnes Pethő is Professor of Film Studies at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she is currently Head of the Department of Film, Photography and Media. She is also the executive editor of the English language international journal, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies, and has published extensively on cinematic intermediality, the relationship between film and the visual arts, and on the aesthetic of the tableau vivant. She is also the editor of: Words and Images on the Screen: Language, Literature, Moving Pictures (2008), Film in the Post-Media Age (2012), The Cinema of Sensations (2015), and Caught In-Between: Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema (2020).
“Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between is more than a labour of love, it is a labour of passion. It faces the question of intermediality in the cinema with astonishing depth and erudition, and as such it enlightens and opens new paths in film and media theory. The book is beautifully presented in a black and shiny hardback, with a collage of images and texts partially adorning the front cover and enticing the reader with a paradoxical combination of surfaces in mise-en-abyme. This is Ágnes Pethő’s immeasurable contribution to the field, a culmination of years of research emerging from Cluj-Napoca in Romania that quietly but convincingly opened up the cinema world – and the world of film studies – with
the prism of intermediality. As Serge Daney puts it in the book’s carefully chosen epigraph, “passion is excessive, it wants cinema but it also wants cinema to become something else”. And it is Pethő’s passion for the in-between, which also means a rare combination of theorizing and analysis, that effectively enfolds individual films and sometimes whole oeuvres to this “something else”, over and over again.”
Cecília Mello
Professor, Department of Film, Radio and Television, Universidade de São Paulo; Significação, 48.56
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