Intermediality, re-mediation and inter-sensuality: the poetics and aesthetics of the In-Between in Stephen Poliakoff’s ’slow television’ from Shooting the Past (1999) to Dancing on the Edge (2013) Magali Aries To cite this version: Magali Aries. Intermediality, re-mediation and inter-sensuality: the poetics and aesthetics of the In- Between in Stephen Poliakoff’s ’slow television’ from Shooting the Past (1999) to Dancing ontheEdge (2013). Humanities and Social Sciences. 2016. dumas-01858346 HAL Id: dumas-01858346 https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01858346 Submitted on 20 Aug 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License UNIVERSITE TOULOUSE JEAN JAURES U.F.R. Etudes du monde anglophone Intermediality, Re-mediation and Inter-sensuality in Stephen Poliakoff's 'slow television': The Poetics and Aesthetics of the In-Between from Shooting the Past (1999) to Dancing on the Edge (2013) Mémoire de Master 2 Recherche sous la direction de M. Laurent Mellet Magali Aries 2016 I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Laurent Mellet for his continous guidance and meticulous suggestions as well as his encouragement, enthusiasm and availability. I would also like to thank my family for their general support and Agnes for her practical help and advice. For my daughter Cléo TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.....................................................................................................1 Television aesthetics Part one: A METALEPTIC AND IMMERSIVE VOYAGE ACROSS MEDIA AND TIME I-REMEDIATING THE PAST: REMAKING HISTORY...........................................6 A-Placing the Past B-Mediality and the remediation of history C-Cultural differences II- THE POLITICS OF INTERMEDIALITY: BORDER CROSSINGS AND CONTACT ZONES.........................................................................................................21 A-Media migration, hybridity and intercultural exchange B-Intermediality and the subversive performative power of remediation C-Insidious boundaries Part two: THE POETICS AND AESTHETICS OF THE IN-BETWEEN I-THE POLIAKOVIAN INTERMEDIAL RHETORIC.............................................38 A-Poliakovian tropes B-(Meta)cinematic figures C-Trans-medial adaptation of traditional rhetorical tropes II- THE TIME-IMAGE OF POLIAKOFF'S 'SLOW TELEVISION'........................45 A-The photo-filmic 1-Image vs narrative 2-Shooting The Past's new Laocoon of the photographic art of memory 3-The embedded photo-narrative as a palimpsest of intermedial artistic references B-The tableau shot and the threshold of media 1-Comtemplative television and social criticism 2-The transmedial paradigm of the Dutch interior III- THE POETICS OF INTERMEDIALITY AND SERIALITY...............................73 A-Echoes, recurrence and variations 1-Painterly composition 2-Musical structure B-Remediation and seriality 1-Remediation and storytelling: echoes and variations on recurring scenes 2-Remediated voices, words and images: reflexive figures of serial storytelling Part three: INTERMEDIALITY AND INTER-SENSUALITY I- THE MATERIALITY OF THE SURFACE: HAPTIC IMAGERY AND AURAL TEXTURE..........................................................................................................88 A-Haptic visuality 1-The haptic gaze 2-Shaped aurality: the ''shape-aspect'' of sounds B-Cinematic body as spectacle: filmed and filmic body 1-The physicality of the body: the body as textured substance 2-The skin of the film II- THE BODY OF THE MEDIUM AND THE MEDIATION OF BODIES.............97 A-The medium as interstitial space between bodies B-The body as interstitial space between media 1-Synaesthetic montage and sensable spectatorship, the body as a conduit for sensory perception 2-Corporeality of perception and corporeal liminality in Anderson's photo-story C-Art installation and Gesamtkunstwerk experiment III- THE REPRESENTED AND SENSED BODY AS A SITE OF INTERMEDIAL RELATIONS.....................................................................................103 A-The body as an emotive and emotional vector B-The representation of the unconscious and sensable intermediality: figuring the infigurable Conclusion....................................................................................................117 Bibliography.................................................................................................121 INTRODUCTION Television aesthetics constitute a relatively recent innovation in the broader field of television studies where few scholars tackle the medium from a primarily aesthetic approach. Television scholars have typically been reluctant to focus their analyses on the medium's form, as television studies emerged from the twin paradigms of mass communications and cultural studies, both of which tend to foreground social impacts over aesthetic analysis. As television studies developed out of sociology and cultural studies, the main focus has been on television's import in political and socio-cultural terms rather than in artistic terms. Besides, as television is still regarded as artistically impoverished in comparison with other arts, it is generally 'used' to study something else (for example, society, ideology, gender politics), a customary focus which has had deleterious consequences for television studies as the neglect of close analysis in the field entailed overlooking and undervalueing challenging and engaging programmes. This work follows Sarah Cardwell and Jason Jacobs' movement towards a recognition of television programmes as specific artworks as I share their belief that some television is worthy of sustained scrutiny and critical attention for its aesthetic qualities. While Jacobs considers television as 'a medium for artistic expression'1, Cardwell advocates the potential that an aesthetic approach might bring to the study of television if we consider television programmes as 'expressive works of art, replete with significant aesthetic properties'2. They both suggest a methodology that moves from close 'textual'3 analysis outwards: in his 2001 article, Jason Jacobs argues that one can only determine the possibilities of a medium by looking at instances of works within it and Sarah Cardwell claims that the most responsive and persuasive theorising arises from careful observations of the particularities of television texts and convincingly demonstrates how the methodology of close 'textual' analysis can enhance television studies, by focusing on aesthetic matters.4 Both scholars also outline the exploration of medium-specific traits as the final area of television aesthetics within which I wish to add seriality as a potentially fruitful domain to investigate. The objective of this work is to provide a critical appraisal of a sample of the work of Stephen Poliakoff who is a very distinctive writer/director in television today. Through a diachronic study of his idiosyncratic style, I will try to demonstrate the individuality and distinctiveness of two of his televisual series and will address more theoretical questions that are raised by Poliakoff's 1999 landmark series Shooting the Past and his much more recent 2013 series Dancing on the Edge. I 1 Jacobs, 2001, p. 427. 2 Cardwell, 2006, p. 78. 3 Cardwell's word. 4 Cardwell, 2005, pp. 179-194. 1 believe it is important to emphasize that the interest in conceptual questions arises from close analysis of specific television programmes as it is the minute attention to the series which brought to the fore the in-betweenness of media. Similarly, it is through the diachronic study of the series' evolving aesthetics that the passage from the quaint photo-graphic intermediality of Shooting the Past to the photo-filmic media convergence of Dancing on the Edge was brought to light. Stephen Poliakoff is a British writer-director who has produced a body of work across the media of theater, film and television over the last fifty years, exploring the recurring themes of family, history and memory as well as technology. He is a multifaceted artist whose artistic versatility (for theater, cinema and television) comes across in his filmic oeuvre in favour of a very marked authorial discourse. The medium of television is the one which has most successfully cultivated Poliakoff's talent as a writer and director, it is within television that he has developed his authorial rhetoric and his most critically acclaimed work has been the television work he has made since his 1999 series Shooting the Past in which he has developed a distinctive textual and visual style. As both writer and director, he combines the writer-led traditions of British theatre and television with the more cinematic conceptions of director as creator and has thus developed a very idiosyncratic style. In this way, Poliakoff has generated a public image of himself as British television auteur par- excellence: writing, directing and overseeing every aspect of his work, which made him claim that he had written his 2013