Diegetic existence: transmedia instauration in artists’ cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article engages with differences of experiences generated by transmedia migration of filmic content in artist-filmmaker Albert Serra’s two-channel installation Personalien and feature film Liberté (2019). Made from the same raw footage, the films were seen as iterations of one fictional world. How is diegesis transformed by Serra’s distinct negotiation of viewers’ patience and perversity at the museum and the film theatre? Responding to this issue requires retrieving Anne and Etienne Souriau’s concept of diegesis. Diegesis was exported to narratology and semiotics, though the notion was soon robbed of its relevance: its equal sensitivity to medial environments, circumstantial conditions of experience, and modulations of fictional existence. Reintegrating diegesis within Souriau’s multilayered and intensive ontology of filmic universes is of renewed interest in times of cinematic relocation, when cinematic experiences are reactivated in new contexts. Artists’ moving-images require us to give due weight to the ontic thickness of film. What environments do each experience configurate? Which operations are required in the theatre and the museum? Will viewers support the existence of Serra’s precarious worlds? Resituating diegesis within Souriau’s philosophy of instauration, I address intermedial differences in Personalien and Liberté and reflect on logical and metaphysical disparities.