(Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial Cinema of Immediacy
(Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial Cinema of Immediacy

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on tendencies that qualify for the label of reflexive and hypermediated cinema, but which, nevertheless, also have the purpose of achieving the sensation of immediacy. Three different types of such hypermediated cinematic experiences of the real are analysed: Agnès Varda’s film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), presented as a sort of “encyclopaedia of the real,” then Godard’s essay film cycle, Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–1998), presented as primarily a hand-made cinema derived from photomontage and the calligrammatic fusion of image and text. The third type is exemplified by José Luis Guerin’s twin films En la ciudad de Sylvia and Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (2007), in which we can see an example of how the most transparent techniques can also end up as remediations. All these examples seen as re-mediating to an excess the indexicality of modernist cinema and challenging cinema’s lack of auratic quality through the director’s marked personal implication and traces of his “handling” of media. The paper also proposes the possibility of a “remediational metalepsis” in which cinema exposes the paradoxes of the everyday experience of metaleptic leaps between “real” and “mediated” and thus calls attention to metalepsis as integral part of reality itself.

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