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The Dance of Intermediality: Attempt at a Semiotic Approach of Medium Specificity and Intermediality in Film 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’. There is instead – we could add with Murray Krieger – an increased preoccupation with the socio-cultural-political subtext of works of art. Moreover, the late twentieth century witnessed the overturning of the classical narrative of art history (with, among others’, A. C. Danto’s subversive essays on ‘the end of art’). Different arts are no longer simply responding external theories, recipes, discourses, manifestos, illustrations of what they then become, but they tend to be the discourses themselves, and, most importantly on themselves, their own mediality or/and intermediality. Marshall McLuhan’s famous utterance ‘the medium is the message’ has never been this actual: the medium is not only mediating, holding the message, but it is the message (of) itself. Beginning with the 1990s, two powerful cinematographic trends have addressed – from various institutional backgrounds – the problem of medium specificity and intermediality in films: the so-called ‘writer’s movies’ and the contemplative, extremely slow-paced movies, mostly coming from the Far East, defying all complex narratological accomplishments of the film-medium. The writer’s movies, many of them from the popular and ‘midcult’ register – for example, Shakespeare in Love (John Madden 1996), Quills (Philip Kaufman 2000), Adaptation (Spike Jonze 2003), Tupsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh 1999), A Cock and a Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom 2005) – represent writing and observing (spectatorship) as complementary and reciprocally conditioning activities. We are often seeing the writer struggling to write the story we are watching; or, conversely, we are witnessing the effort of a director to mediate between the writer and spectators. This is no longer simply a ‘self-reflective’, stylistically identifiable feature (formerly an exclusive characteristic of arthouse movies), but a mediatic gesture of self-awareness: both the writer and director are stepping over the limits of their own medium to satisfy the expectation of their spectators. Film does not need to define itself as ‘art’ anymore – the urge to delimitate itself from other arts, to prove its representational competence has expired. Instead it regards itself as a medium, inseparable – as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it in his Picture Theory – from its socio-cultural, institutional background and foreground, its spectators and the various discourses of spectatorship. This accentuated self-awareness, which deals with its own intermediality or mixed mediality (so ferociously attacked by the long lasting comparative tradition of ut pictura poesis ...) , is systematically overturning the strict delimitation between literature and film along with the idea of conceptuality of the first and visuality of the latter. In fact, the conceptuality of film has found defenders from the very beginnings of its history (the avant-gardes, Russian film theories, the Nouvelle Vague, the semiologic approach and, lately, the cognitive theory of David Bordwell) – but this time the ‘meaning making’ is often happening (is being modelled) in the film diegesis itself. The huge amount of visually extremely rich movies coming from the Far East, with their intensely chronotopic imagery and slow-paced, minimalistic narrative, on the other hand, continuously turn the ‘running time’ of the narrative into ‘space’, a static, ‘plastic’ visual work of art: a picture (for example, Zhang Ke Jia: Still Life, 2006). This is already an intermedial relationship involving film and painting: we are watching the film as we contemplate a painting, ‘scanning’ and ‘making meaning’ of all the details included in the frame. These versions of intermediality in films – the self-conscious inclusion of literary and painterly modalities – are not loudly proclaimed as they once were in the form of manifestos, as with isolated works of Jean-Luc Godard or Peter Greenaway, but appear as naturally integrated in films with the most varied institutional backgrounds, belonging already to the everyday experience of the film medium. Films have become our medium, our ‘natural environment’. This is partly due to the ‘nature’ of the medium: as Joachim Paech puts it in his medium–form comparison, the medium is not observable in itself, only the form is, and the medium appears in whatever form it makes possible. ‘The medium can only be observed in its Other’. Its disappearance aids the other’s emergence, in which it participates in a ‘parasitic way’. He continues: The only possibility to reach the medium behind the form consists in selfobservation of the observation and the re-entry of the medium as form or as a back link, in which mediality as the constitutive difference in the oscillation between medium and form becomes observable as the ‘parasitic third’, whose background noise renders the event of the difference, thus, the message, perceptible and comprehensible. However, as already mentioned above, the ‘noise’ made by this parasitic third, the medium or the ‘intrusion’ of another medium, is becoming less and less perceptible: the ‘surprising’ forms of montage, superimpositions, framing techniques or sound-effects are now common characteristics for any film register – popular, midcult or arthouse movie. Instead, the film medium tends to appear in the complete lack of these learned or technological features – or, according to Paech’s terminology, in the ‘breaks, gaps and intervals’ of the form: extreme (narratological) minimalism, uncomfortably long shots and almost complete lack of dialogue. Together with this obvious return to its origins – considered a sign of maturity by Rudolf Arnheim and Erwin Panofsky, among others – along with a growing interest in cultural and post-colonial studies, film is also acquiring an increased socio-cultural responsibility. It is showing, unmasking, symbolically repre- senting cultural, social, political reality. These minimalist movies rely on the aesthetics of the frame, instead of that of the cut, and the changed role of the spectator consists of ‘scanning’ and interpreting the signs and symbols it contains. It is a more active form of spectatorship: a continuous effort of meaning-making instead of losing ourselves in a perfect diegesis. We become increasingly aware of the presence of the medium and our role as spectators. The – almost forgotten – semiotic analysis appears to gain relevance in the interpretation of these symbols, but, this time, it is strongly related to cultural discourses of the film as medium. As Marc Laverette argues in his contribution to Image and Narrative, the necessity of a discipline embracing both semiotic and medium theory principles – a so-called ‘semiotic mediatics’ – has never been so actual. The delay of this merger is possibly due to the fact that, with the emergence of medium theory, semiotics is already considered exhausted and old-fashioned: Medium theorists need to incorporate semiotics into their paradigm to gain a respect for content and the overarching importance of meaning. And while medium theory needs semiotics to better understand the signs of life, semioticians need medium theory in order to better understand the ‘allness’ of our signified environment. Below I attempt a semiotic analysis, going beyond close textual reading, of Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s adaptation of Satan’s Tango (1994). This seven-and-a-half hour long film merges both trends mentioned above; the writer’s movie, raising the issue of film–literature relationship and of the adaptation, and the slow-paced, contemplative trend incorporating the painterly tradition. Interestingly enough, in this ménage à trois or complex intermedial relationship, the painting mediates between the other two: the aesthetics of the frame, chronotopes such as the perspective, the circle, the interior–exterior (house and road) opposition and the threshold, are all transmediatic symbols which reconcile mediatic differences between literature and film. This approach, using Greimas’s semiotic square model, aims to contribute to the methodology of analysing medium specificity and mixed medium or intermediality, in the spirit of an old or new discipline: semiotic mediatics.