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 JØRGEN BRUHN AND ANNE GJELSVIK

CINEMA
BETWEEN
MEDIA
A N I N T E R M E D I A L I T Y A P P ROAC H
Cinema Between Media
An Intermediality Approach

Jørgen Bruhn and Anne Gjelsvik

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial
and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more
information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Jørgen Bruhn and Anne Gjelsvik, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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The right of Jørgen Bruhn and Anne Gjelsvik to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and
the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Figures image credits

1.1–1.4 © Warner Brothers; 2.1 © RKO; 4.1–4.6 © Motlys; 5.1–5.4 © Final Cut
Productions; 6.1–6.8 © Werc Werk Works & Telling Pictures; 7.1–7.2 © Columbia
Pictures; 7.3 © Pete Souza/The White House; 7.4 © Richard Drew; 7.5–7.7 ©
Columbia Pictures; 8.1–8.2 © Eskwad Production; 8.3–8.5 © Exposure Productions; 8.6
© James Balog
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgementsv

1 Introduction: Cinema Between Media 1

2 Media Behind the Scenes: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane 24
3 Cinematic Theatre: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman 38
4 A Novelist on Film? Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs 51
5 Between Cinema and Photography: Jan Troell’s Everlasting
Moments 70
6 Mixing Senses and Media: Epstein and Friedman’s Howl86
7 Surveilling Media: Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty 103
8 Cinematic Representations of a ‘Super Wicked Problem’:
Climate Change in Documentary Film (Ice and the Sky and
Chasing Ice)119
9 Conclusion and Further Perspectives 135

Bibliography139
Film References149
Index152
Preface and Acknowledgements

For some years now, we have been studying and teaching intermediality,
film studies, narrative theory, and neighbouring subjects; and for some
time we have written articles and given presentations, individually or
together, on these and related matters. At a certain point, we agreed to
collect some of our thoughts on intermediality and cinema in a more
well-­organised and substantial f­orm – a­ form that would eventually
become this volume.
As we will note a few times in the following pages, the basic idea
behind this book is to attempt to merge two fields of study that have
not been sufficiently linked and related thus far: the field of intermedial
studies and the field of film theory and analysis. We hope we have found
a way of doing so in this book, which is directed towards students (in the
widest sense of the word) of film who are looking for useful new ways
of understanding narrative ­cinema – ­be that conventional mainstream
cinema, documentary, or art house cinema.
Time will tell if our method will succeed in offering others a richer
and more rewarding understanding of cinema but, at the very least,
we have ourselves taken pleasure in developing this analytical and
theoretical methodology, and we find the practical application of it very
worthwhile. Aspects of our methodological suggestions and theoretical
arguments can certainly be criticised, and parts of them probably need
reformulation or rethinking by students, colleagues, or film buffs around
the world. This is exactly the kind of conversation we hope to open
with this book, and we welcome any future discussions sparked by our
thoughts. We are certain that such dialogue will be fruitful and even
necessary to the fields of both intermedial studies and film studies.
We are each aware that we could not have written this book alone;
this is why we decided to join forces in the first place. But besides
understanding and praising the gifts and possibilities of co-­writing, we
need to mention a number of smart and critical colleagues who offered
invaluable feedback on different drafts of our chapters. Marta Eidsvåg,
Dag Sødtholdt, Lars Elleström, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, Ágnes Pethő,
Niklas Salmose, Sara Brinch, and Henriette Thune have all contributed
insightful comments on individual chapters of the book: Thank you. A
few of the chapters have been discussed at seminars at the Centre for
v
vi cinema bet ween media

Intermedial and Multimodal research centre in Växjö, which gave us

many important ideas and perspectives. Chapter 7, which is on Zero
Dark Thirty, benefited from a discussion at the Face of Terror workshop
in Trondheim in September 2017. Concerning the chapter on climate
change documentaries, we want to give a warm thank you to Master
of climate science Torr Cumming, who published an article on this
subject with Anne Gjelsvik, but agreed to let the ideas be rethought
in an intermedial direction. Also, we want to thank the anonymous
reviewers at Edinburgh University Press who gave many helpful sug-
gestions and critiques. Last but not least we will thank Gillian Leslie for
her enthusiasm and support for this book from the very first day that we
approached her with the idea.

Earlier versions of some of the chapters have previously been published

in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 4/2012, (Chapter 5), Word and Image
4/2014 (Chapter 6), Ekfrase 6/2016 (Chapter 8, Anne Gjelsvik and Torr
Cumming).
1 Introduction:
Cinema Between Media

In the second half of the nineteenth century, several different techno-

logical apparatuses for reproducing the external world were invented.
Many words were used to describe these new d ­evices – s­uch as
Kinetoscope or Theatrograph – created to show moving pictures to
audiences.1 As a result of inventions such as these, artists found new
ways to narrate stories and reflect the world. In the following, we will
call these inventions, created to record and project moving images,
‘cinema’. Step by step, these technologies and traditions became part
of an art form,2 but as one of the newest of the arts, it has often been
described as an art form between media. This is the starting point for our
book, Cinema Between Media.
As cinema shares its basic material with photography (the exposure
of an image on photographic film) it has sometimes been described as a
mechanical, direct reproduction of reality, but early cinema borrowed
heavily from traditional performing arts, like theatre, vaudeville, and
tableau vivant. Narrative forms of literature, particularly the novel,
have also played important roles in shaping narrative cinema. The list
of influencing forms goes on, and includes music, opera, magic, archi-
tecture, photography and painting; and following the recent historical
advents of technical media such as the VCR and the DVD, and the
importance of the digitalisation of the medium, the notion of cinema as
a mixed medium has become even more prominent within film theory.
In other words: cinema is currently and always has been intermedial.
However, it could be argued that the acknowledgement of this has
not had enough of an impact on the practice of academic film analysis.
One reason for this is that theorists and critics have been more occupied
with discussions of what cinema is (and can be) in distinction to other
art forms. Accordingly, our aim in this book is to rethink the practice of
film analysis, using concepts and analytical tools derived mainly from
the fields of media theory and intermediality. An important exception
to film scholars’ lack of interest in intermedial theory has been Ágnes
Pethő, who in her book Cinema and Intermediality: the passion for the
in-between (2011) provides a valuable history of the methodological
questions concerning film and intermediality, and also offers several
examples of specific intermedial film analyses. The major difference
1
2 cinema bet ween media

between our attempt at combining the fields of cinema and intermedial

studies (which we describe below) and her work is that we are eager to
provide a relatively hands-­on repeatable methodology, whereas Pethő
develops a more historical and philosophical argument (Pethő 2011).
What happens if we understand cinema as a mixed medium? How
should one approach film analysis from an intermedial perspective?
What thematic and formal traits will become clear when we look at film
as a mixed mediality? These are some of the questions we aim to answer
in Cinema Between Media.
This volume is primarily intended for higher-­ level students at
universities and colleges, but we also hope film scholars as well as
others interested in film analysis may be inspired by our efforts. In order
to answer the questions outlined above, we will in this Introduction
present the major analytical concepts we find necessary to building a
bridge between intermediality theory and film analysis. To demonstrate
the value of our theory and our three-­step methodology, presented
below, and to offer hands-­on suggestions for how to conduct interme-
dial analyses of narrative cinema, we provide seven case studies after
this initial chapter (in the last case study we discuss two documentaries).
The cases chosen will be presented towards the end of this chapter;
their purpose is primarily to exemplify our method, and as such they
are not comprehensive or representative, but we hope to offer new and
interesting insights to the films. The cases are, however, not representa-
tive for contemporary cinema, or for cinema as such, neither in terms
of historical representation and geographical breadth nor cinematic
genres, but they should nonetheless cover a fairly wide spectrum of
narrative cinema.
Generally, we hope that readers will begin with the Introduction and
then move on to the case studies, but we have tried to write each case
study in a style and form that makes it accessible even to readers who
have browsed only casually through the terminological and methodo-
logical arguments of this chapter. Our suggested methodology follows
a sequential structure that we hope is illuminating and easy to follow.
However, there are certainly other ways of conducting intermedial film
analysis, and there will be a certain formal variation in our chapters;
some chapters follow the methodology step by step, others move more
freely through their analysis. We hope our way of working can be
inspirational also to those who might choose to structure their analyses
differently.

1.1 The case study

We apply this analytical method to specific films we regard as relatively
autonomous entities – despite the fact that the notion of the autonomous
work has been criticised and deconstructed more than once. Susan
Sontag’s influential essay ‘Against Interpretation’ generated a big dis-
 introduction 3

cussion about the role case studies can play in art criticism, and the
relationship between content and form (Sontag 1966). Our aim is that our
model will show how form and content are closely related. Mieke Bal,
among many others, has also observed that ‘the case study has acquired
a dubious reputation as a facile entrance into theoretical generalization
and speculation’ (Bal 2010), and one does run two obvious risks when
using singular works as case studies: the critic might ‘cherry-pick’ works
that all too easily exemplify some preconceived ideas, or the case studies
may end up illustrating nothing but atomistic, isolated insights that cannot
be generalised. We find, actually, that our cases often encourage us to
stretch both our methodological approach and the theoretical terms, and
put pressure on the three-step model we suggest. This is not, we believe,
a sign that our model or methodology in general ought to be skipped;
rather, it shows the limits of any interpretative method when confronted
with artistic material. In addition, we think that a good case study can give
insight to the film, the method and even contribute to the development of
theory.

What does intermediality mean for cinema studies?

The scholarly study of ‘media’ or ‘intermediality’ encompasses broad
fields and has a long history that emerged from an interest in inter-­
aesthetic (often called ‘inter-­art’ phenomena) and analytical methods.
The term intermediality has gained popularity and influence despite
the sometimes disconcerting confusion about whether intermediality is
an object of study, a method of study, or a theory about a category of objects.
In this book, we will approach all of these categories, but we aim to be
clear about what level we work on, as well as the ‘kind’ of intermediality
in question.
Intermedial studies is often used synonymously with inter-­aesthetic
research or ‘interart’ studies. Compared to ‘interart’ studies, the term
intermediality designates a broader aesthetical and technological field of
investigation. Instead of focusing only on the conventional arts (music,
fine art, literature), intermedial studies open the investigation up to other
contemporary aesthetic forms such as performance art, digital poetry,
non-­artistic medialities such as advertising, political campaigns, or mass
media ­content – a­ nd, of course, film.3 Furthermore, as our case studies
will demonstrate, non-­aesthetic, everyday media such as computers,
telephones or newspapers may also play important roles in the analyses.
Although intermedial studies is better suited to cover the entire field
than interart studies, reservations have been raised concerning the
term. Intermediality seems to imply that the object of study is relations
‘between’ (inter) media or medialities. The prefix ‘inter’ restricts the
object of study to a specific, limited group of media products, as opposed
to ‘normal’, ‘pure’, or ‘monomedial’ phenomena, that is, media products
4 cinema bet ween media

that do not move between medialities or cross any mediality borders.

Consequently, the term seems to apply to a relationship between (inter)
texts or medialities, rather than express that a merging of media is
occurring within a single medium or artefact (Bruhn 2016, 2010a).
The point of departure for this book is that all specific media
products and medialities, including cinema, inevitably are mixed con-
stellations. We will argue that there is no such thing as autonomous
or pure medialities. The idea that cinema is a mixed medium is of
course not new, but other perspectives have dominated the discourse
in film studies. The conventions that make us think about media (or
art forms) as distinct forms separated from each other are the result of
media history, the history of media theories and, not least, the history
of academia. When cinema became an academic discipline in the 1960s,
film scholars, although drawing on other disciplines such as philosophy,
literary theory, and anthropology, sought to differentiate the new
discipline from older ones.
Even earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century when cinema
itself was a new-­born medium, film theorists foregrounded the unique-
ness of the medium when arguing that it should be considered art
proper. Accordingly, an important early goal for film scholars was to
find the essence of the new art form (Andrew 1976). Thus, cinema
has been described as motion pictures or moving images, based on
photographic technology (for most of cinema history film was on cel-
luloid, today most films are digital). The visual focus and the illusion
of movement are often the starting points for scholarly books about the
cinematic medium (Bordwell and Thompson 2017).
Typically for the focus on cinema as a visual media, the current
Wikipedia definition of cinema reads as follows: ‘A film, also called a
movie, motion picture, theatrical film or photoplay, is a series of still
images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving
images’ (for another brief definition, see our opening to Chapter 7). Of
course, it is common knowledge that cinema is more than its moving
images; it is by now convention in introductions to film analysis to
describe cinema as a medium based on four major categories: mise en
scène, cinematography, editing, and sound (Bordwell and Thompson
2017, Corrigan and Barry 2012). The emphasis on cinema as an audio-
visual medium has also been strengthened over the last decades, with
Rick Altman and composer and film theorist Michel Chion’s Audio-
vision: Sound on Screen (1994) as central contributors to the field (Altman
1992, 1980; Chion 1994). Chion argues that rather than see images
and hear sounds separately when we encounter cinema, we perceive
both elements together, and that what we interpret as rhythm, for
instance, is a mixture of sound, editing and camera movements (Chion
1994). Chion has also discussed voice in cinema, but despite him and
others arguing for more attention to sound (music and sound effects)
the visual elements of film still receive the most attention. The visual
 introduction 5

versus verbal divide has been discussed and criticised in books such as
Kamilla Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (with special focus on
the problem of adaptation studies) and Sarah Kozloff’s book Overhearing
Film Dialogue (Elliott 2003; Kozloff 2000). Although Elliott shows that
novels can be visual and films verbal, and Kozloff demonstrates how to
analyse the use of dialogue in narrative film, the verbal element of film
is still often both overheard and overlooked.
When Bordwell and Thompson analyse the use and function of
sound in film, they investigate the perceptual properties of sound
(loudness, pitch, timbre), dimensions of film sound (rhythm, time, space,
etc.) and discuss the difference between diegetic and non-­diegetic
sound, but they do not pay much attention to dialogue, although the
focus on sound has been strengthened in the latest edition of Film Art
(Bordwell and Thompson 2017). Most of the films we watch are filled
with dialogue and/or other verbal elements, but close attention to this
cinematic device is usually only given when words have a particularly
important position in the film, e.g. My Dinner with Andre, Louis Malle
(1981), where the whole film is a conversation at a dinner table, or are
pivotal in the narrative, e.g. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival from 2016, a
science-­fiction film based on a short story by Ted Chiang, which is all
about language and communication. But we are often faced with the
argument that dialogue or a speech in a film is too ‘literary’, and that,
consequently, the use of voice-­over is un-­cinematic. However, the way
characters talk in films is a result of conventions, historical changes,
and influence from other media. Theatre, novels, and then later radio,
helped cinema in ‘finding its own voice’ (Leitch 2013).
Classical film theorists would praise cinema’s ability to capture
reality (André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer), create new meaning
through montage (Sergej Eisenstein), move in time and space (Hugo
Münsterberg), and thus stress its differences from painting, theatre or
literature (Andrew 1976; Elsaesser and Hagener 2009). Such medium
specificity ­claims – t­ hat there is something film can do or represent that
other art forms c­ annot – ­have generated a lot of debate both within film
studies and in neighbouring disciplines, such as adaptation studies.4
While some scholars are in favour of studying film by foregrounding
what they see as medium specificity, others argue against what they call
medium essentialism. This is the idea that each art form or medium has
distinctive traits that distinguishes it from other art forms and mediali-
ties (Carroll 1996).
The discussion about mixed versus pure art forms has a much longer
history than film and film theory. The concept of paragone (roughly
corresponding to ‘comparison’), originates in Renaissance art theory
and relates to a ranking competition among the a­ rts – e­ ach form vying
to be deemed the best and most valuable. Famously, Leonardo da
Vinci argued that painting was the highest example of artistic form,
and this contention was refuted by, among others, Michelangelo, who
6 cinema bet ween media

c­ounter-­argued for the primacy of sculpture. The paragone debate

has been a perennial discussion in Western cultural history; recently
a German collection of essays, inspired by intermedial studies, rein-
vigorated the idea of the ‘competition’ between the arts and media by
analysing not only the classical art forms, but also television, advertis-
ing, graphic novels, and computer games in a framework inspired by the
sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Degner and Wolf 2010). In our book, we
will pursue the idea that it is indeed possible to see current competi-
tions among the arts, and to trace a paragone debate in modern media
products such as film and television. While cinema was first compared
with theatre, and then later with the novel, it should come as no surprise
that comparisons between film and television (but also computer games)
are predominant in contemporary media criticism.
The complicated history of the blending of medialities and art
forms can also be illuminated by looking at the difference between the
tradition pointing out the benefits of the meeting and merging of art
forms and that which offers warnings about the consequences of such
mixing. Utilising terms from widely different periods, we can contrast
the Roman writer Horace’s dictum ‘ut pictura poesis’ (‘as in painting, so
in poetry’) with ideas found in G. E. Lessing’s eigthteenth-­century essay
on the monumental Laocoön Group s­ culpture – a­ n essay subtitled ‘On
the limits of painting and poetry’.5 Lessing’s interrogation is among the
inspirations for some problematic but often repeated ‘truths’ of aesthetic
theory concerning the relations between the arts: such as the claim
that literature deals with and represents time, whereas painting should
stick to spatial, or non-­temporal, presentation. His treatise has inspired
numerous debates about medium specificity, either as descriptive
formats or as normative dogma, from his own day to the present, across
the fields of literature, painting, and film.6
The struggle of ut pictura poesis versus the Laocoön tradition can be
traced back and forth through cultural history, and it can be found in
different academic disciplines and art forms (art, music, or literature).
Needless to say, there are huge differences in whether these aesthetic
ideas are seen as descriptive or prescriptive (­ or – ­ often – both).
Richard Wagner’s late Romantic and politically utopian concept of
a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, is one version of the ut pictura
tradition. Several of the so-­called historical avant-­gardes of the begin-
ning of the twentieth century believed that the mixing of art forms was
not only possible, but necessary in order to achieve the highest artistic
and political/spiritual goals (Bürger 1984). Ágnes Pethő continues this
appraisal of the aesthetic virtues of mixedness and offers stimulating
interpretations of a number of modern and postmodern auteurs (Pethő
2011). The numerous attempts at specifying the different art forms (or
media), as well as limiting them to their own formal investigation (as
in Clement Greenberg’s lifelong engagements with Modernist art), led
to the influential notion of medium specificity, which can be seen as a
 introduction 7

twentieth-­century version of Lessing’s idea of establishing strict formal

and normative borders between the arts.
In film theory, such perspectives had many consequences, one
of them being the difference between the so-­called realist position
and the formalist one. This distinction was foregrounded by leading
realist film theorists Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) and André Bazin
(1918–58). In ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Bazin argued
that ‘the indexical nature of the image means that realism is never
simple stylistic choice on the part of the filmmaker. Realism, in an
important sense, is already there in the image; realism is given’ (Bazin
2009a). Whereas the realist position often has been described as seeing
cinema as a window, the formalist position sees it as a frame (Andrew
1976:12; Elsaesser and Hagener, 2009). These metaphors suggest dif-
ferent qualities in cinema as ‘one looks through a window, but one looks
at a frame’, and where the window ideally becomes invisible and makes
cinema look real, the frame draws attention to cinema as something
artificial (Elsasesser and Hagener 2009: 14–15; see also Friedberg 2006
for interesting perspectives on these traditions). When discussing
the basic elements of the film medium, Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007)
foregrounded how cinema created a world of its own, distinct from
the physical world, due to film’s lack of colour and three-­dimensional
depth, and the margins of the frame (Arnheim 1958). Accordingly,
filmmakers should pursue, in Arnheim’s opinion, the elements that
distinguish film not only from other arts, but from life itself, and for
that reason Arnheim was in favour of black and white silent films
throughout his life. Such normative positions are not only found
among theorists; filmmakers have also voiced their opinions about the
specificity of the medium, such as when Ingmar Bergman describes
Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky as ‘the one who invented a new
language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life
as a dream’ (Gianvito 2006).
Such differing views of what cinema is, can do, or should be, have
also led to different approaches to what to study when analysing films:
the sound (Michel Chion), the movement (Tom Gunning), the close-­up
(Bela Balázs), et cetera (Chion 1994, Gunning 2008, Balázs 1924). We
will also investigate what cinematic elements do, for instance the role of
sound or motion in a film or a scene, and we will argue that the inherent
medial mixedness, or what we could term the ‘heteromedial’ aspect of
film, is a major characteristic. As suggested above, the term heteromedi-
ality has some benefits over the more common ‘intermediality’ (Bruhn
2010). Heteromediality (hetero: other, or mixed) emphasises that blend-
ing is an a priori condition in all media products and medialities, and
that the blending aspects consequently do not constitute a peripheral
phenomenon or a marginal subgroup: mixedness characterises all
medialities and all specific media products. Mixedness comes first, so
to speak; the supposed monomedial purity of any specific medial object
8 cinema bet ween media

is the result of an active purification, rather than the other way round
(Bruhn 2010, 2016).
This, we claim, could be the central starting point for the intermedial
study of c­ inema – ­all cinematic texts are medially mixed, but in infi-
nitely differentiated ways and to different effects and meanings. In the
following, ‘heteromediality’ signifies the general, a priori condition of
mixedness, whereas we employ ‘intermediality’ when discussing more
specific analytical questions.

What does media mean?

But what exactly are these media that can be mixed, or rather, whose
very nature it is to be mixed? Historically, most discussions within
intermedial studies have employed the concept medium/media, but
the term is much-­debated. Central media studies scholar Werner Wolf
notes ironically that ‘[c]uriously, problems of definition and typology
have not hindered intermediality research. The most obvious among
these is the problem of defining ‘medium’ itself’ (Wolf 2005).
One ­solution – ­which has been employed more or less consistently
throughout this introductory ­chapter – ­is to use the more open form
mediality/medialities instead (Wolf 2008, Mitchell and Hansen 2010).
In Mitchell and Hansen’s anthology Critical Terms for Media Studies,
‘mediation’ plays an important role in changing the question of what
a medium is towards one of what media do – in other words what the
process of mediation involves. Mitchell and Hansen showed that media-
tion, unlike the objectified existence of a medium/media, is an a­ ctivity
– ­the process of ­mediating – ­which per definition also includes a media
product. These are some of the reasons why, in this book, instead of the
term ‘medium’ (with the implied conceptual connotations of object-­
hood), we suggest ‘mediality’ and ‘medialities’ (plural), which relate
to the process of mediation in communicative situations. However, as
the reader might have noticed, we do at times use medium/media and
mediality/medialities ­interchangeably – ­this is done in order to achieve
variation, or when ‘medialities’ feels particularly clumsy.
When it comes to a working definition and stratification of the
concept of medialities, we find that Lars Elleström’s theorisation offers
a precise but relatively flexible definition of mediality as a mixture of
media and modalities (Elleström 2010b, 2014). Elleström has ventured
to combine two often overlapping theoretical frameworks: intermedial-
ity and multimodality studies. These are two traditions that, each often
without acknowledging the respective achievements of the other,
work from more or less the same assumptions, namely that all com-
municative action takes place by way of devices that mix media (often
understood as communicative channels or art forms) or modalities
(often understood as more basic aspects of communicative action, such
as sound, images or other sensual signs). By means of Elleström’s cross-­
 introduction 9

fertilisation of intermedial studies and multimodality/social semiotics,

it becomes possible to construct an understanding of how all media are
really modally m ­ ixed – ­and consequently that there is no such thing
as a monomedial or ‘monomodal’ communicative situation or media
­product – ­which is another way of arguing for the heteromedial condi-
tion of all communication.
What is particularly useful in Elleström’s model is that it offers a
much needed clarification of the many different notions of medium that
are available and in use in everyday talk, as well as in academic discus-
sions and cultural criticism. A mobile phone, a Klee oil painting, a tel-
evision set, and the genre of opera may all in given contexts exemplify
‘medium’. Elleström however defines medium using a model consisting
of a basic, a qualified, and a technical media dimension. The main idea is
that what we normally call a medium, or perhaps an art form, needs
to be broken down into three interrelated dimensions that are often
confused and conflated: basic media, qualified media, and technical media.
The basic media dimension may be exemplified by written words,
moving images, or rhythmic sound patterns. These particular basic
media dimensions may, under certain conditions, be part of qualified
media, such as narrative written literature, a newspaper article, a
documentary film, or symphonic music. Thus, qualified media in the
arts are more or less synonymous with what is often referred to as art
forms. Cinema, written narrative literature, and sculpture are examples
of qualified media, but not all qualified media are aesthetic. We also find
qualified media outside the arts, in areas such as the verbal language
of the sports page in newspapers, advertising jingles, or in the non-­
aesthetic verbal language of legal prose. The third media component,
technical media, is the material-­technological dimension, which makes
qualified media perceptible in the first place, say, a TV screen, a piece
of paper, or a mobile phone interface. In short, technical media display
basic or qualified media.
This division of all media products into three media dimensions
makes it possible to include anything from the mobile phone interface
to a Renaissance poem into the investigation of medialities (the first
being a technical medium, the second an example of the qualified
medium of written literature), but it also enables us to differentiate
between them in analytical terms. The qualified medium of cinema
accordingly consists of basic media like moving images, words, music
etc., and can be watched (and heard) on technical media such as a com-
puter, a television screen or the display of a mobile phone. Throughout
our case studies, we will hopefully demonstrate the usefulness of these
distinctions.
Following this way of understanding medialities, any media product
(in its three dimensions) enables communication, but this positive
understanding of medialities is not the only way to understand commu-
nication. It is useful to remember that communication has historically
10 cinema bet ween media

been understood in two, fundamentally different ways and thus two

ways of understanding the function of medialities in communication.7
One strong, but also heterogeneous tradition, beginning with
Plato’s Phaedrus, is suspicious and even fearful toward any mediating
objects. In Plato’s case, writing was the new medium that threatened
both authentic communication and the human being’s ability to use
memory as the major storage medium. But in subsequent historical
contexts, this anxiety came to relate to all imaginable medialities that
threatened to interfere with the face-­to-­face dialogue between speaker
and interlocutor, sender and receiver. This tradition of understand-
ing media in communication as an estranging and destructive threat
to authentic co-­presence and deep, mutual understanding, will be
referred to as the ‘mediaphobic’ position from here on. John Durham
­Peters – ­and we follow ­him – ­is highly critical of this tendency,
because it tends to idealise face-­to-­face presence as the only legitimate
communicative relation:
The image of two speakers taking turns in order to move progressively
toward fuller understanding of each other masks two deeper facts: that all
discourse, however many the speakers, must bridge the gap between one
turn and the next, and that the intended addressee may never be identical
with the actual one.
(Peters 1999)

As an alternative to this face-­ to-­face dialogue-­model, which often

implicates a communication magically unfettered by any medialities,
Durham Peters demonstrates that a notion of communication as dis-
semination is a much more fruitful model for how communication
works. For our purposes this model is interesting because it does not
exclude or ban medialities.
Communication-­ as-­
dissemination implies a fundamental distance
between sender and receiver, and it is this distance that implies the
necessity of the presence of medialities: medialities create communica-
tion, they do not disturb it. The idea of communication as dissemina-
tion entails real bodies sending open-­ended signs, by way of material
medialities, to whoever wants to interpret t­ hem – b­ e it the person next
to you on the train, the reader of a book, a radio programme listener, or
the participant in a social medium like Facebook. This is a much more
realistic and indeed attractive understanding of all the communicative
aspects of people’s lives, which we, in contradistinction to the suspi-
cious ‘mediaphobic’ position, will call the ‘mediaphile’ position. This
dichotomy between a friendly or a hostile stance towards the function
of media will pop up as a theme in some of our case studies.
 introduction 11

Combination or transformation
The problem of describing the mixed media of cinema may be simpli-
fied by dividing the heteromediality of cinema into two dimensions: one
consisting of a process of transformation and another of the phenomenon
of combination.
Transformation concerns the medial content or form, which in a tem-
poral process is transformed from one medium to another. Adaptation
studies, for instance the study of the transport from novels to film, is
one particular investigation of an extremely broad phenomenon. Allen
Ginsberg’s poem Howl, parts of which are transformed into the film Howl
(see Chapter 6), is an example of this. In the film, the transformation
takes place when the poem written on paper is being read out loud,
when the poem is being partly reproduced on written pages in the film,
and when it is being represented in court as a printed book.
Combination aspects, on the other hand, concern phenomena where
two or more medial form aspects co-­exist in the same medium at the
same ­time – ­for instance when a Cézanne painting is represented in
a film(Howl) accompanied by jazz music. These two dimensions of
intermediality are not mutually exclusive, and in our analysis, we shall
alternate between seeing specific fragments as part of a transformational
change and as part of the combination of media in the film.
The transformation per definition contains a temporal perspective.
First, there is a play, then it is turned into a film; first there is a film,
then it is turned into an amusement park; first there is a painting, then
there is a poem representing this painting, etc. Computer games are
made into films (Assassins Creed 2016) and films are made into computer
games (Ice Age 2002). In this large corpus, introduced and discussed
in Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon 2006; see also
Bruhn, Gjelsvik, and Hanssen 2013), the medial mix lies, so to speak, in
the procedure: certain aspects of the novel (typically: themes, parts of
the plot, certain characters, setting etc.) are transported into a film, but
certain aspects of the adapted work are necessarily left out or changed
beyond recognition. The process is transferring certain aspects while
also transforming everything into a new media product (and a different
technical medium). A lot of films are based on such transformations,
in contemporary media culture the typical process being a bestselling
novel or series of comic books turned into a Hollywood film. Notable
examples are the many films based on the Marvel universe, the direct
adaptation of the Hunger Games books, the comprehensive Harry Potter
franchises or the television series Game of Thrones.
In the other large group, we have the combination of otherwise
distinct medialities inside the same media product: in a pop song,
the verbal, sung text is combined with music; on a Facebook page,
photographs are combined with text and graphic design; on a poster,
images exist side by side with words. In this group, aspects of different
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