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The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker's Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière's concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens – film image, television image, electronic image and video game image – in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard's theory of the image, Marc Augé's of non-places and Fredric Jameson's of the postmodern historicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard's essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-Eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals' role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to embody an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse female authorship in the materialisations of contemporary epistolary cinema, focusing on epistolary films and epistolary essay films. The works of various filmmakers are essential to understand the evolution of this enunciation device and the exploration of female alterities materialised through it. Women filmmakers' epistolary practices delve into the exploration of intimate space, authorial vindication, epistolary materiality, intersubjectivity and cinematic thinking to create diverse experiences of female alterity, developing this postmodern paradigm inherent in the epistolary device. Since Chantal Akerman started the practice of the epistolary film with News from Home (1977, other women filmmakers have developed this cinematic form. The reading of a personal correspondence allows the exploration of female intimate alterities—Measures of Distance (1988), Punto impropio (2015), A Minha Avó Trelotótó (2018). Besides, the epistolary film is fictionalised, displacing it to the intellectual space—From Hetty to Nancy (1997), Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009). Other people's real correspondence is also instrumentalised to create their recreations and representations, vindicating female alterities both socially and personally—Letter #69 (2016), The Dreamed Ones (2016). Finally, women filmmakers addressed the cinematic form of the essay film—Letters from Panduranga (2015), Correspôndencias (2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse of the relevance of female authorship in the creation of contemporary epistolary cinema, focusing on letter-films and filmic correspondences. The works of various filmmakers are essential to understand the evolution of these enunciation devices since the emergence of cinematic modernity to the present moment. Since Agnès Varda represented an epistolary correspondence between women – L'une chante, l'autre pas (1977) – and Marguerite Duras created an epistolary diptych as two identity-alterity variations – Aurélia Steiner (1979) –, other women filmmakers have developed these cinematic forms. Letter-films delve into epistolary seriality and materiality – Cartas visuales (Tiziana Panizza, 2005–2012), and Envíos (Jeannette Muñoz, 2005–2017) – and deepens the concept of alterity – Elena (Petra Costa, 2012). Filmic correspondences work on emotion-image – This World (Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1996), In Between Days (Naomi Kawase and Isaki Lacuesta, 2009) – and show female intersubjectivity – Correspondencia: Fernando Eimbcke – So Yong Kim (2011), Life May Be (Mania Akbari, Mark Cousins, 2014), A Moon for My Father (Mania Akbari, Douglas White, 2019), Transoceánicas (Meritxell Colell Aparicio, Lucía Vassallo, 2020). Women's letter-films and filmic correspondences delve into the exploration of intimate space, authorial vindication and epistolary materiality, in order to create diverse experiences of female alterity and intersubjectivity that become sisterhood practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autofiction as realized in cinematic practice adds a figure of identification to the literary author-narrator-character: that of actor/actress. The filmmaker, playing him/herself, employs innovative strategies in audiovisual narration to generate this autofictional identity. This article analyses these strategies as seen in French cinema, on which literary autofiction has a determining influence. My analysis of this practice is mapped along a double axis. The first classifies the films in a progressive evolution from the factualisation of the fictional (documentary's starting point) to the fictionalisation of the factual (fiction's starting point). The second analyses the films with regard to the filmmaker's presence: from the filmeur/filmeuse who stands behind the camera and records the images him/herself to the acteur/actrice who exclusively appears in front of the camera. This cinematic exploration of the self thus situates the filmmaker in all possible positions so as to develop autofictional strategies for exploring postmodern identity and alterity, using parody and irony as effective tools. In this laboratory of the self, filmmakers experiment with the topics they address – reflection on cinema, artistic exploration, self-knowledge, ideological reasoning, and sociopolitical criticism – as well as create valuable screen manifestations of resilience, empathy, sorority, and even pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rita Azevedo Gomes' Correspondências (2016) draws on the epistolary correspondence between Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Jorge de Sena, as well as their respective poetic works, to build an epistolary-poetic, audio-visual and sensory-emotional kaleidoscope based on their reading, reciting and representation in different languages. In this way, the filmmaker generates a kind of phenomenology of reception that uses all the audiovisual possibilities: the different formats, digital and analogue; their multiple textures; and the diverse options of the texts enunciation. The experimentation with their different combinations, also using various image and sound effects, materialises in an epistolary-poetic essay film which reflects on the aesthetic experience and attains a hybrid, complex image defining contemporary cinema: between person and character, diegesis and extradiegesis, digital and analogue images, voice-in and voiceover, private and public, life and work, present and past, absence and presence, that is, between reproduction and representation. Azevedo's essayistic reflection on creation, exile and absence is generated through parataxic thinking and interstitial thinking that create dialectical and symbolic sentence-images. Thus, Correspondências becomes an avant-garde expression of both contemporary epistolary cinema and contemporary essay film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yves Navarre's literary work is one of the greatest materializations of epistolary writing in postmodern literature. This article aims to analyze the different elements and procedures through which the epistolary matter becomes a practice of postmodern writing that continues to evolve throughout his prolix literary reuvre. First, the epistolary writing of fictional characters becomes an element of the renarrativization that participates in processes of discontinuity: a progressive fragmentai writing--from his first novel Lady Black (1971) to the last Dernier dimanche avant la fin du si'ecle (1994)--and the hybridization with diaristic writing and literary metadis-course--Le Petit Galopin de nos corps (1977), Kurwenal ou la Part des etres (1977), Le Temps voulu (1979), Romances sans paroles (1982). Besides, these same practices are brought into the autofictional space, where the possibilities of hypertextuality are further deepened by quotation, intertext and metadiscourse--Biographie (1981), Romans, un roman (1988). Finally, the two spaces converge in an auto/alter-fiction in which postmodern diversel materializes through experimentation with alterity, giving rise to recits indecidables--L'Esperance de beaux voyages (1984), La terrasse des audiences au moment de l'adieu (1990). Throughout his entire literary work, and in all the aforementioned spaces, the abundant metadiscourse about epistolarity enables a postmodern phenomenology of epistolary activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is an appropriation, intertextuality and transfiction exercise of four modern myths from nineteenth-century literature -Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1891) and Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)- to which the mythological figure of the lycanthrope is added. This myth syncretism is completed by linking these characters, located in the Victorian London of the late 19th century, with different mythologies: biblical, Egyptian, American West, Native American or witch mythology. The article aims to analyse, focusing on the final season of the series, how the narrative complexity of contemporary seriality and the different materialisations of postmodern image -multiplex-image, distance-image and excess-image-become perfect tools to both narrate the identity search of the different characters and subvert and resemantise these modern myths. Their identity searches emerge from an ontology of otherness that defines postmodernity -from otherness of conscience to otherness of other people-, using the mythical figure of the monster. It allows then the subversion and resemantisation of each mythical character, generating a kind of postmodern mythology that reflects on our contemporaneity: feminist emancipation and violent revolution, patriarchy and machismo, family institution, social marginalisation, individualism and lack of commitment, classism and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Área Abierta is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present article analyses the film Agatha and the Limitless Readings (1981) by Marguerite Duras as the final experience, together with ihe Atlantic Man (1981), of the so-called Durasian literary-cinematic coalescence, which began a decade earlier with Woman of the Ganges (1972). The fusion of both practices, born from the need to turn the literary text into voice refusing its mise-en-scene, generates a new filmic practice which is one of the highest materialisations of the time-image defined by Deleuze, characterised by the independence between the visual image and the sound image. In Agatha... the Durasian coalescence inserts a new semiotic and narratological strategy: the presentation of the literary text in the filmic image as part of its representation insofar as cinematic mise-en-scene. This new component of the visual image generates a literary scene opposed to the filmic scene that enables new metaphorical operations between image and sound, thus joining the network of irrational correspondences among the different elements of the sound image and the visual image that define this filmic experience as a poetics of invention, hypnosis and hallucination. In its final materialisation, the Durasian coalescence places itself at the epicentre of the problem of irrepresentability through the theme of incest. The showing of the unrepresentable, as a limit expression of the fusion between literature and cinema, is built through the relationships among their different elements, all of them defined by an absence that the author shapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Thélème is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)