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The Polaroid and the Cross. Media-Reflexivity and Allegorical Figurations in Lucian Pintilie’sThe Oak(1992)

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Sándor K.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

2016

vol. 12

issue 1

45-66

The paper discusses the question of media reflexivity and allegorical figuration in Lucian Pintilie’s 1992 film, The Oak. Through a fictional narrative, the film reflects on the communist period from the historical context of the post-1989 transition strongly marked by the after-effects of dictatorship and by political, social and economic instability. By incorporating a diegetic Polaroid camera and a home movie, The Oak displays a reflexive preoccupation with the mediality and the socio-cultural constructedness of the image. The figurative, allegorizing tendency of the film – manifest in the subversive recontextualization of grand narratives, iconographic codes or images of art history – also foregrounds the question of cultural mediation. I argue that by displaying the non-transparency of the cinematic image and the cultural mediatedness of the “real,” the media-reflexive and allegorical-figurative discourse of the film can be regarded as a critical historical response to the social and representational crises linked to the communist era, but at the same time it may be symptomatic of the social, cultural, political anxieties of post-1989 transition.1

‘Own Deaths’ – Figures of the Sensable in Péter Nádas’s Book and Péter Forgács’s Film

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Sándor K.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

2014

vol. 8

issue 1

21-40

The paper examines the figures of ‘sensable’ intermediality in Péter Nádas’s book, Own Death (2006), an autobiographical account of the author’s heart failure and clinical death and in the screen adaptation of the book by Péter Forgács with the same title (Own Death, 2007). The book and the film problematize the cultural, discursive, and medial (un)representability of a liminal corporeal experience (illness, death) in which the very conditions of self-perception, bodily sensation, and conceptual thinking appear as “other.” In the film corporeal liminality and its medial translatability are not only thematized (e.g. through the untranslated German word umkippen ‘tip over,’ ‘fall over’), but shape the embodied experience of viewing through the use of photo-filmic imagery, still frames, fragmented close-ups, slow motion, or medially textured images. These do not only foreground the foreign, undomesticable experience of the body and “own death” as other, but also expose the medium, the membrane of the film, and confer the moving image a “haptic visuality” (Marks). The haptic imagery directs the viewer’s attention to the sensuality of the medium, to the filmic “body,” enabling a “sensable” (Oosterling) spectatorship, an embodied reflection on the image, on the “sensual mode” (Pethő) of becoming intermedial

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2 Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

2 Sándor K.

1 2016

1 2014

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The Polaroid and the Cross. Media-Reflexivity and Allegorical Figurations in Lucian Pintilie’sThe Oak(1992)

‘Own Deaths’ – Figures of the Sensable in Péter Nádas’s Book and Péter Forgács’s Film