Irina Melnikova (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2016.7.10
The paper focuses on representing a painted portrait (still image) in a film (moving picture). Consider questions of intermedial dialogue between cinema and painting, such as how cinema activates the ‘voice’ of another media and what effects such activation produces. Thus, both theoretical and practical questions are raised. Their discussion is built on the tenets of intermediality studies and on Roland Barthes’ model of codes that produce and control the processes of signification of the text. Rather than applying the theory of codes presented in S/Z, the paper uses the specific model of Barthes’ Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe, which covers five codes: the code of action or narrative code, the code of communication, the cultural code, the hermeneutic or enigma code and the symbolic code. The analysis is grounded in the idea by Thomas Elsaesser that a portrait in a film is radically insufficient as a signifier and contradictory as a sign, that it becomes the source of an enigma and activates the hermeneutic code. The operative value of the tools is demonstrated in the case study of the Italian film Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, 2009), directed by Luca Guadagnino. Examines the strategies deployed by the cinematic narrative to present a painting and uncovers the conflict between the functions performed by the painted portrait in the story and the narrative discourse. Questioning the nature of this conflict enables us to find a possible answer to the theoretical questions under consideration.
Keywords: film, intermedial, Roland Barthes, hermeneutic, Thomas Elsaesser