The authors reflect on the phenomenon of border crossing in intermedia theories. At the same time, they test a possible form of its functioning in a concrete situation, in the Austrian director Gustav Deutsch’s film Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013), which provides ideal scope for the interpretive exploration of the relationships between several types of media by the re-mediation of some of the artworks of the American painter Edward Hopper. The film stages the situations depicted in some of Hopper’s paintings that evoke a suspended camera shot of a staged theatrical situation. The intermedia references of the scenes offer an opportunity to ponder not only the questions of how visual codes remain present in the film, to what extent the authorial poetics of the original paintings is respected, and to what extent the language of the film transforms the dispositions of the language of fine art, but also open up debates about intermedia relations and interdisciplinary overlaps in the broader contexts of visual culture. The authors carry out this cautious probe into the already extensive and diverse space of intermedia theories predominantly through the German theorist Irina O. Rajewsky (Intermedialität, 2002), who was among the first to process the phenomenon of border crossing within the framework of a fundamental and, up to that time, most systematic review of intermediality against the backdrop of intertextuality and historically related concepts.
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