The Danube Exodus is a 1998 film created by Hungarian film and video artist Peter Forgacs. The film consists almost entirely of amateur footage made by Hungarian Captain Nandor Andrasovits on two of his consecutive voyages on the Danube. On the first voyage, in the summer of 1939, his ship carried a group of Slovakian Jewish refugees from Bratislava to the Black Sea, from where they would continue their journey to Palestine. The next year, sailing upstream, he was tasked with taking a group of Bessarabian Germans uprooted from their homeland in the Danube Delta and relocated to Nazi-occupied Poland. Forgacs’s film sets the Jewish and the German exoduses in a comparative relation to each other, challenging lingering taboos on discussing German suffering in relation to the Holocaust. This article examines the editing techniques that Forgacs employs to renegotiate the distinction between victims and perpetrators through the lens of memory’s relation to identity. The article demonstrates that the ethical stance Forgacs embodies in The Danube Exodus resonates with the ethics of multidirectional memory in Michael Rothberg’s sense (2009).
This is the introduction to the volume Impression(s). The articles presented in this cluster discuss literary and visual impressions from the premise that literary impressionism and printmaking share the trope of impression as “impress” and as “imprints” in a technical and epistemological sense. Most works on Impressionism and literary impressionism dwell on the genealogy and mutual influence of fiction and painting, but few authors tackle the importance of printmaking. The five essays presented here all examine impressions as theme, trope and technique in 19th and 20th-century texts and images. These essays discuss intermedial practices, the mutual influence of artistic practice and textual production, as well as the dual meaning of impression as a mode of reception and of expression by exploring the relationship between art criticism, literary impressionism, illustration, and printmaking from the late 19th century to the 1920s in Britain. They address how the shift from late-Victorian aesthetics to modernist experimentation was negotiated in these fields according to an inclusive view of print culture. They sugges tthat the aesthetic foregrounding and polysemic use of impressions paved the way for the transition from late nineteenth-century aesthetics to the modernist period.
This article proposes that the inclusion of the spectator in a photographic act begets an eventalplace that remains outside of all times and spaces. Through discussing the confrontational aspects of places, it argues that the transient but incessant encounter between the spectator and the photograph accounts for place as that which eludes any permanent localization. To do this, it closely examines Ariella Azoulay’s formulation of “the event of photography,” as a potential encounter between the spectator and the photograph, vis-a-vis the concept of event as postulated by Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Slovoj Žižek. Same as the event that becomes an effect that exceeds its establishing causes, my theoretical comparison shows that “the event of photography”, too, surpasses its founding structures and comes to pass without heralding its arrival time. Accordingly, this paper puts forward that “the event of photography” manifests an evental place that fugaciously but perpetually comes into being between the spectator and the photograph.
Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) is a box containing fourteen items that can be read in any order, and for this reason it appears to offer its readers a great deal of choice over the narrative structure of the work. This paper contrasts Building Stories with the video games Fallout: New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to demonstrate that that although Building Stories does offer choices, these choices are not ultimately meaningful because while the reader can decide the order of presentation, they cannot decide the order of events as they can in the games, and in other examples such as Marc Saporta’s novel Composition No.1. The article draws upon the work of Seymour Chatman, Gonzalo Fresca and Espen Aarseth in analysing narratives in games and texts, and concludes by considering the implications of choice in narrative. Keywords: Building Stories, choice, Chris Ware, comics, games, narrative, plot
This article explores a current trend of tattooing specifically devoted to children’s literature, examining the manner in which adults use inked marks to redefine their own identity through imaginary literary childhoods. Such literary tattoos might take the form of a quotation or they might replicate an illustration of a cherished iconic text. The article attributes the rise of tattoos inspired by British children’s fiction to the unique status of children literature as a cult phenomenon in Britain. It also argues that such tattoos use children’s literature as a way of reclaiming the body to rewrite the self by producing an illustrated autobiography. Finally, the article examines how children’s fiction has recently reacted to this trend by producing tattooed tales to deconstruct prejudices against the practice and illustrated parents particularly.
This article aims at examining how adaptations functions smoothly with legends, as a blend of fiction and history, across various media. By studying intermedial interpretation, it examines the role of narrative fluditiy in facilitating this process of interpretation. Narrative fluidity is a narrative feature that may be defined as the authorless nature of the narrative and a structural simplicity of the fabula that keeps it lingering in state between truth and fiction. This fluidity, in turn, invites reinterpreting and rewriting, lending a fabula to re-narration across various media. A case in point is the Persian legend of Khosrow and Shirin. This study applies a narratological analysis of three textual and visual interpretations of this legend as examples of the role of narrative fluidity in an intermedial process: Nizami Ganjavi’s poem Khamsa, Ferdowsi’s miniature paintings, and Abbas Kiarostami’s film, Shirin.
This paper explores the role played by the children’s tales of Queen Marie of Romania in the construction of a distinctive vision of royalty between 1913-29. Straddling the First World War, from which Romania emerged enlarged and unified, the tales reflect the changing status of their author: from Crown Princess to wartime saviour to ‘Mother of all the Romanians’. The relationship between word and image is thus a complex one, involving not just interpretive correspondences between the Queen’s stories and the drawings of a range of international illustrators, but also the careful crafting of an idiosyncratic image of monarchy that presented Marie as figurehead of the young country, both at home and abroad. Within this wider iconography, the children’s tales became an effective vehicle for her self-portrayal as mother and nurturer of Greater Romania. Core to the relationship was the way her tales appeared to give privileged insight into her own understanding of her changing role, breaking the boundary between fiction and lived reality. Conversely, they also became part of the performative nature of her public image, contributing to a theatrical vision of monarchy consciously enacted on the domestic and international stage. As such, this paper argues that there are identifiable links between the settings of the tales and Marie’s unusual interior design schemes. Bisected by the creation of Greater Romania, these related projects can be divided into two clear groups, each offering unique insight into the self-image of one of the most charismatic players in the early twentieth-century emergence of nations.
Le jeu est un phenomene central dans l’art conceptuel. Il est non seulement un moyen de se detourner des formes artistiques traditionnelles, mais il permet aussi d’activer des processus et des experimentations. Quand le jeu comporte des regles, il contient la possibilite d’echouer, ce qui cree un certain desordre. Dans ce cadre, l’appareil photographique peut devenir un objet du jeu et produire des rates et des erreurs.
This article departs from a well-known story behind the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. As the author makes clear in his correspondence, the idea for “a gothic story” was inextricably linked with his architectural project at Strawberry Hill. However, rather than delving into the spatial parallels between Otranto and Strawberry Hill, the article addresses the implied presence of Walpole’s gallery of portraits in the novel; in particular, it studies the narrative and ideological functions performed by the motif of the animated portrait in The Castle of Otranto as well as a number of post-Walpolean Gothic novels. By analysing both supernatural and metaphorical animation, the article argues that the animated portrait capitalises on the ideas and conventions central to the Gothic novel in general, such as the haunting presence of the past, doubling and desire for animation.
This article examines the Gothic project of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and two texts which engage the novella, Robert Jephson’s 1781 tragedy The Count of Narbonne and M. R. James’s 1923 ghost story “The Haunted Dolls’ House”, as works which in different ways handle the mimetic potential inherent in this project. A distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic types of mimesis is proposed and then used to address the realistic claims that these works make. The argument is put forward that the two post-Otranto texts are attempts to add a dimension of realism – that is to say, relevance – to Walpole’s medieval fantasy.
This paper explores the ways that Horace Walpole’s Gothic texts, The Castle of Otranto, The Mysterious Mother, and even the architectural Strawberry Hill, operate within a fascinating nexus of visual and narrative discourse. By analysing the intersections of the verbal and visual within these works, which combine and collide within liminal spaces that figure a threshold state between the supernatural and the subconscious, this paper explores the ways that Walpole’s texts work collectively to interrogate eighteenth-century theories of perception and imagination by positing a slippage between word and image that undermines the human attempt to make sense of the world.
L’erreur peut revetir, dans la pratique de la photographie, un double enjeu semantique : renvoyant a une maitrise technique insuffisante, elle manifeste une forme de spontaneite de l’operateur; dans le meme temps, elle revele la maniere dont le photographe participe de l’espace qui l’environne, dont il est partie prenante. Le travail de Bernard Plossu sera pris pour exemple d’une relation a l’espace qui est bien differente de celle qu’induit la tradition picturale du paysage.
Les deux artistes conceptuels americains, Mel Bochner et Robert Barry, nous invitent chacun a leur maniere a reconsiderer notre propre relation a la representation photographique et au reel par le biais de photographies soit « mensongeres », soit deficientes. La notion d’index, que l’on retrouve en filigrane a travers l’ensemble de la production photoconceptuelle, prend au contact du concept d’erreur une dimension preponderante dans la comprehension des oeuvres de ces deux artistes.
