The Dance of Intermediality: Attempt at a Semiotic Approach of Medium Specificity and Intermediality in Film

Abstract

During the centuries following the Italian Renaissance, numerous philosophers, theologians, literary men and artists found it necessary to delimitate poetic and visual arts, and, accordingly, to establish an accurate hierarchy of them. Intriguingly enough, this comparative tradition has persisted after the advent of the film, considered from the beginning — although pejoratively — a ‘mixed art’. The long-lived textual era, though it managed to level the differences between different arts by imposing a universal terminology and interpretation methodology (considering all works of art as simply texts, that is, as readable sign systems), mostly provided close readings of isolated texts, without attempting to place them in a wider, cultural and specific sign system, characteristic for different arts or media. As Mitchell puts it in his Picture Theory, the ‘pictorial turn’ has engendered ‘a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.), and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality’.1