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This article examines remediated examples of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915). Eliot’s innovative dramatic monologue has sustained an enduring inter-media afterlife, mainly because visual artists generally capitalized on the poem’s residual Victorian painterly and semi-narrative qualities. Here I look at a wider range of visual forms from old and new media that, for both pedagogic and artistic purposes, remediate the poem’s ekphrastic, semi-narrative and modernist aesthetics: the comic strip, the animated film, the dramatic monologue film, the split-screen video poem and the photographic spatial montage. Together, they demonstrate the dialogic and multi-directional nature of remediation and articulate via inter-media strategies various literary properties and themes (e.g., character, setting, visual motifs, paralysis) of ‘Prufrock’.

This article considers All This Can Happen from an aesthetic point of view and connects this work, resulting from the tight collaboration of the dance film director David Hinton and the contemporary choreographer Siobhan Davies, to the history of avant-garde cinema. Apparently, All This Can Happen is not a dance film, although its rhythmic editing pays tribute to structural films of the seventies and deals with dance. It is not a run-of-the-mill “found footage” opus randomly organized, since the archives were discerningly selected. Subliminal shots, multi-screen images, photographic scratches, graphic signs, and pre-cinema elements associated with contrapunctal sounds produce fascinating effects, strange hallucinations, pure abstractions, and waking dream states, such as one could find in Georges Méliès films, as well as in Abel Gance’s, Maya Deren’s, or David Hinton’s. As a masterpiece worthy of the name, this film demands repeated viewing.

Almost as old as cinema itself, the split-screen – in which the filmic frame is divided into several parts – is one of the most prominent stylistic figures in 24, but is often used only to enhance the writing modes that are specific to cinema: alternate editing and shots/reverse shots are swallowed by the frame; link shots are evened out; framing choices are toned down; the different images are automatically reduced to one temporality only, etc. Through the division of images and the alteration of their ‘readability’ with confusing or defamiliarizing effects, the split screen stands as one of the preferred tools to create a certain kind of narrative sadism, which contributes to the series’ originality and to the viewing pleasure it provides.

24 (Fox, 2001-2010) was no doubt the War on Terror series of the George W. Bush presidency. Its groundbreaking aesthetic and narratological aspects – the 24-hour “real time” unfolding of events and its use of the split-screen – also function as a mise en abyme of a contemporary society defined by surveillance and by plots. The split screen exhibits the multiple narrative subplots, but also political plotting against America, in particular within the White House, in a reframing of the classic Cold War theme of the enemy within. The paranoid fracturing of the screen invites us to radically question what things seem, but also signals the split (hero/antihero) that characterizes Jack Bauer. This article will examine how the split screen functions less as a series of open windows than as a web closing upon Jack Bauer; and how it also reflects the ambivalence of those spectators who clearly perceive “real time” to create the conditions of the state of emergency that justifies the systematic use of torture, in the real-life context of a presidency that (even after the Abu Ghraib scandal) refused to consider waterboarding a form of torture.

This paper revisits a particular area of concern in computer generated (CG) visual effects, namely, the problem of the space in dynamic, multiple panels created by digital processes. The paper critiques recent statements made on narrative understanding, positing equivalences between a viewer's navigation across dynamic frames in CG images and human-computer interactions, as well as claims of narrative complexity in films using dynamic frames. This paper will argue that it is necessary to approach the meaning construction of cinematic space by distinguishing analytical levels of materiality from their discursive meaning, because the visual effect created by the manipulation of a dynamic spatial layout does not necessarily burden the viewer's linear path for constructing coherent spatial meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in the field of pedestrian navigation have shown advantages of map–image combinations. While in a previous work, the map view was either replaced with an image view in predefined situations, or the user was required to manually switch between both views, we suggest to use a split screen displaying maps and images at the same time. We developed two variants, one employing panoramic images aligned to the mobile device's orientation and the other using simple photographs, and we evaluated both against manual switching in a field study. While none of the interfaces outperformed the other, results indicate advantages of panoramic images independent of manual switching or the split screen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we apply methods under development in socio-functional semiotics to explore the transfer of resources originally developed for comics to the medium of film. We illustrate this concretely with respect to extracts taken from Ang Lee's Hulk (2003), a film we consider unique in its particular appropriation of expressive resources from the comic medium. Hulk is often been singled out in discussions of the relations between comics and film because many of the design decisions taken in the film evoke aspects of the comic page. Here, we argue that its use of the resources of comics goes substantially beyond 'evocation': Hulk is best considered a highly experimental hybrid, taking resources that were initially essentially comics based and 'translating' these filmically in order to extend the medium of film in interesting ways. We show this in two respects: first, we consider the filmic deployment of comicbook conventions for expressing movement; second, we establish that the film's use of split-screen techniques extends the ability of film to express narrative continuity and connection between perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical films usually reveal more about their own time than about the past. General Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish Government in exile during World War II, died on 4 July 1943 in Gibraltar. Polish cinema has twice taken up this story, first in 1984 and then in 2009: The first version was made during the period of martial law, so it is not difficult to see it as an allegory of the conflict between destructive ‘Solidarity’ and a well-intentioned, pro-Soviet regime. History is treated solemnly and the film is based on written records. In the 2009 film, several discourses intersect: a private television channel produced this version, and the influence of commercial factors is clearly visible. The film is part of the ‘political fiction’ genre and takes the form of a spy thriller, based on conspiracy theories. An uncommon launch strategy was also employed. At the same time, the film refers to the ‘politics of history’, a new trend in Polish public life, which aims to present historical truth from a Polish point of view as a means to educate Polish society. Finally, it displays some features of ‘auteur cinema’, with an impressive film form and references to the previous works of its director. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Navigating in large geometric spaces--such as maps, social networks, or long documents--typically requires a sequence of pan and zoom actions. However, this strategy is often ineffective and cumbersome, especially when trying to study and compare several distant objects. We propose a new distortion technique that folds the intervening space to guarantee visibility of multiple focus regions. The folds themselves show contextual information and support unfolding and paging interactions. We conducted a study comparing the space-folding technique to existing approaches and found that participants performed significantly better with the new technique. We also describe how to implement this distortion technique and give an in-depth case study on how to apply it to the visualization of large-scale 1D time-series data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines remediated examples of T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1915). Eliot's innovative dramatic monologue has sustained an enduring inter-media afterlife, mainly because visual artists generally capitalized on the poem's residual Victorian painterly and semi-narrative qualities. Here I look at a wider range of visual forms from old and new media that, for both pedagogic and artistic purposes, remediate the poem's ekphrastic, semi-narrative and modernist aesthetics: the comic strip, the animated film, the dramatic monologue film, the split-screen video poem and the photographic spatial montage. Together, they demonstrate the dialogic and multi-directional nature of remediation and articulate via inter-media strategies various literary properties and themes (e.g., character, setting, visual motifs, paralysis) of 'Prufrock'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]