About this event
Colleagues in the department of Intermediality at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures are pleased to welcome four academics to present four talks. They will be discussing topics such as dance in theatre, photo-text and manual labour, and photography in political memoirs. You can find the abstracts below.
How to attend
This event is open to all, and free to attend. No registration is necessary - simply come along on the day!
Abstracts
Barnaby Ralph (University of Tokyo), “Dancing with the Absent Centre: Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance and Mythologised Indifference”
Fundamentally an imaginative staging of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, the framing device in the 1988 Ken Russell film Salome’s Last Dance offers the viewer an imagined, decadent-beyond-decadent Wilde whose self-indulgent callousness drives both the internal and external narratives. Neither protagonist nor antagonist, his role rather seems that of a motivic force, transforming him into “Wilde-as-machina.” Wilde serves as a cathartic and disruptive presence, and as a kind of cultural trope, but never quite seems to be represented as a genuine character.
The film is based around the conceit that a secret performance of the play, starring Lord Alfred Douglas as John the Baptist, takes place in a London brothel in 1892. In reality, the play Salome was never performed in England in Wilde’s lifetime (the only two such performances being at the Théâtre de la Comédie-Parisienne and the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris in 1896, both of which took place while Wilde was serving his prison sentence for homosexuality). In the film, Wilde attends this clandestine staging of his work and seems aroused and stimulated by its overwhelming decadence, yet oddly unmoved by a subsequent revelation of an unspeakable act of violence. His reaction to the twin forces of Eros and Thanatos is fundamentally nothing more than detached amusement.
This paper argues that part of this filmic version of Wilde stems from his mythologizing within British culture, and part from Russell’s somewhat complex usage of literary figures within his oeuvre, as previously seen in his representation of Romantic poets in Gothic (1986). In this film, a number of leading lights of the era, including both Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, gather at the Villa Diodati and experience a night of terror. For Russell, making use of such well-known characters with a significant amount of cultural capital allows him to assign them roles which approach the archetypal rather than the individual. Wilde is no different, and, as the focus of Russell’s lens, becomes a kind of absent centre, inhabiting a caricature of his already exaggerated public persona.
Ayako Otomo (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University), “Le Roi danse: Historical Realisation and Musical-Political Theatre”
Louis XIV, le Roi-Soleil, is a figure that, for many, embodies the historical culmination of the idea of absolute monarchism. The realisation of such political force was due in part to an authoritarian and strategic utilisation of arts such as literature, dance, and music, along with architecture, painting, and gardening. These arts were pressed into service as elements in a strategy of political propaganda that promoted the glorification of the Sun King and the justification of the ideology of a divine right. Physical evidence for this still exists today, as the chateau of Versailles remains representational of political theatre. Within such a context, music and performance took on an essential role. For example, the court painter Hyacinthe Rigaud depicted the King as a ballet dancer, placing him as a central figure in this discourse.
These themes are explored in the film Le Roi danse, directed by Gérard Corbiau in 2000. The theatrical-political dynamics are foregrounded, and the narrative focusses in part on the King as a dancer. Corbiau seems deeply concerned with certain elements of authenticity in his depiction of events, yet the narrative itself offers a highly-dramatised version of history that veers at times into fantasy. This creates a kind of paradox, in that careful detail is applied to the settings, costuming, dance, and music, drawing upon historically-informed performance practice. On the other hand, a core element of the work is a fictionalised biography based on the latter part of the career of Jean-Baptiste Lully, a composer who became a central figure in the aesthetic theatre of politics that was to characterise much of the historical Grand Siècle.
This discussion analyses various aspects of the film, considering particularly its simultaneous functioning as history, musicology, and aesthetic presentation, focusing on the concept of authenticity. In terms of music, for example, the use of diagetic and extra-diagetic sound reflected the latest scholarship at the time of filming of a historically-informed style of French Baroque music, even down to pitch, instrumentation, and temperament, yet the story is factually dubious at best. This juxtaposition of the authentic and the fanciful creates an effect that should be ideologically jarring, yet is familiar to film audiences, and leads to a question about whether an intensive focus upon authenticity in limited areas enhances the experience of a fictionalised narrative overall.
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds), “Intermediality in Guadeloupe’s Cane-fields: Raphaël Confiant and David Damoison Cutting a Photo-text”
The collaborative work of Raphaël Confiant with David Damoison, Le Galion. Canne, douleur séculaire, Ô tendresse ! is a short photo-text involving 30 photographic images, in black and white. These documentary photographs are accompanied by five written vignettes which comment directly, but not necessarily from a direct proximity, the photographs of cane-field workers, male and female, taken in the Galion region of Guadeloupe. How does the contemporary photo-text approach the world of work? Can intermediality provide a specific insight into manual labour? Whose voice(s) does the photo-text allow us to hear?
Fariha Asghar (Bahauddin Zakariya University/University of Leeds), “Text/image in Pakistani Political Discourse: Photographic Legitimation Analysis in Memoirs by Ayub khan and Pervez Musharraf”
Political discourses such as autobiographies and memoirs of politicians have gained significant interest in recent times as complex artifacts. These discourses employ an integration of visual and textual elements across different media. The present study investigates the role of text and photographs in the political discourse of two significant military generals Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf. With an intermedial perspective, this research seeks to examine how these discourses strive to achieve legitimation through photographs and text. The interplay between photos and their captions highlights how the two leaders construct their political identities and build up a narrative of Pakistani politics favoring their perspective. This research reveals that such memoirs are not just vehicles of personal reflection but are instruments of political legitimacy. The framework used for analysis takes insights from Jefferson Hunter’s image and word (1987). The findings reveal how the two dictators make strategic use of photos and text to portray their positive image and legitimize their policies, hence shape public perception and political history in Pakistan.
The research contributes to understanding the dynamics of intermediality and complex relation between various media forms such as Text and Image in shaping political discourses. The impact of visual culture as revealed in this nuanced analysis reveals how multiple media forms enhance, strengthen and complement each other in conveying ideologies, engaging the reader and building a narrative.
Are you interested in studying Intermediality?
As the first UNESCO World City of Literature, home of the Edinburgh International Festival and a major cultural hub, Edinburgh is the ideal place for the study of intermediality. Our one-year taught masters programme draws on world-class teaching and research expertise across media, from literature to film, music, painting, photography and visual culture more widely.
The programme will make you conversant with intermedial theory and equip you with the critical tools and historical background for understanding and analysing a wide range of intermedial phenomena across different periods and cultures. It can also be completed part-time over two years.
