Caught In-Between: Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema

• Provides in-depth and comparative analyses of films, with case studies covering fiction films, documentaries, avant-garde experiments, arthouse movies and mainstream cinema
• Cinematic case studies are drawn from Romania, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia
• Discusses different strategies of intermediality and covers the analysis of a wide range of intermedial and inter-art phenomena, including the relationship between film and painting, film and sculpture, film and photography, cinema and the graphic novel, words and images and images and music

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc.

As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema’s relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society.

Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. The diverse theoretical approaches that unravel this in-betweenness contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole.

• Melinda Blos-Jáni, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
• Malgorzata Bugaj, University of Stirling and the University of Edinburgh
• Fátima Chinita, Lisbon Polytechnic Institute
• Zsolt Gyenge, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
• Hajnal Király, Eötvös Loránd University
• Bence Kránicz, Eötvös Loránd University
• Gabriel Laverdière, from Laval University, Quebec
• Ágnes Pethő, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
• Judit Pieldner, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
• Katalin Sándor, Babeș–Bolyai University
• Mareike Sera, Humboldt University of Berlin