Papers by Melinda Blos-Jáni
STUDIA UBB HISTORIA ARTIUM, 2023
The Visibility of a City in the Interwar Period. Scopic Regimes in the Photographs of Lajos Orbán... more The Visibility of a City in the Interwar Period. Scopic Regimes in the Photographs of Lajos Orbán (1897-1972) from Cluj. Lajos Orbán was an amateur photographer, whose main body of work was produced starting from the 1920s when he became the employee of a local shop specialized in photographic equipment and member in local photographic societies, e.g. the Tessar Bowling Society. His photographs were displayed at international photo exhibitions, but he was organising regional photo contests and exhibitions as well. His photographs show the influence of the pictorialist photography, but traces of modernism or the new objectivism are present as well. These pictures became archival documents, and they are also important resources to the visual culture of Transylvania, the visual literacy of the people living in the interwar years. The paper offers an in depth analysis of the scopic regimes detectable in the photographic heritage of Lajos Orbán based on the ways human figures and spatial relations are represented in his pictures.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2023
Found footage filmmaking, or "archiveology" (Russell, 2008), has become a contemporary mode of un... more Found footage filmmaking, or "archiveology" (Russell, 2008), has become a contemporary mode of understanding the collective past. At the same time, in some recent European documentaries we have a more intimate, personal use of archival (and animated) images. They construct two-strand narrative structures showing both the trauma of losing a parent and the excavation of the unresolved traumas of those ailing and passing. In Us against Us (Noi împotriva noastră, Andra Tarara, 2021) the director/ daughter initiates a highly reflexive video dialogue with her schizophrenic father. Fragile Memory (Крихка пам'ять, Igor Ivanko, 2022) is a grandson's story about a former cameraman affected by Alzheimer's. Postmemory and post-generational trauma work is in the focus of Aliona van der Horst's films like Love is Potatoes (2017), in which her own mother's emigration story is recovered through intermediality, or Turn Your Body to the Sun (2021), in which the digitally manipulated archival footage accompanies a woman's quest for her father's repressed memories. These are all medially hybrid films, which rely on the affordances of intermediality, and which combine present day footage with images from personal or public archives. Archiveology becomes in these films an affective tool in caring for family, and a reflection on the precarity of life and memory in general.
Apertúra, 2024
A vizsgálat tárgyát olyan audiovizuális dokumentumok, mozgóképek és szövegek alkotják, melyek tém... more A vizsgálat tárgyát olyan audiovizuális dokumentumok, mozgóképek és szövegek alkotják, melyek témája a romániai magyarok (és más etnikumok) migrációja a rendszerváltás előtti években, vagyis az illegális határátlépések, majd a fordulat utáni munkamigráció Magyarország felé. Ezek a határátlépések eltérő módon csapódtak le a romániai és a magyarországi nyilvánosságban: mindkét országban a szociológiai kutatások mélyrehatóan megvizsgálták a jelenséget, de a befogadó közegnek tekintett anyaországi dokumentarista projektekhez képest Erdélyben a kulturális emlékezet nyilvánosságán kívül maradt. A tanulmány azt vizsgálja, hogy a dokumentumfilm formátuma, a videóinterjú és az átírt hangfelvétel milyen médiumai, tanúi lesznek az elbeszélt sorseseményeknek. Három audiovizuális projekt: a Fekete Doboz 1988-as nyersanyagai, Almási Tamás Valahol otthon lenni (2004) című dokumentumfilmje és Sugár János Időjárőr (2003) című köztéri művészeti akciója, szolgáltatja az apropót az interjús formátum újraértékeléséhez a portrék vizualitása és az elbeszélt történetek nézőre tett hatása alapján.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Apr 12, 2019
INTERMEDIAL ENCOUNTERS. Studies in Honour of Ágnes Pethő/ INTERMEDIÁLIS TALÁLKOZÁSOK.Tanulmányok Pethő Ágnes tiszteletére, 2022
Panoptikum, 2013
Home Movies as Everyday Media Histories. Approaching Home Made Imagery in the Age of New Media Th... more Home Movies as Everyday Media Histories. Approaching Home Made Imagery in the Age of New Media The author presents methodological concept devoted to studies of home movies. She combines in an original way broad range of discourses. For example she utilizes Andre Gaudreault’s and Philippe Marion’s studies on the genealogy of media, the concept of intermediality, media convergence, theory of remediation and researches on media domestication. This medium-focused perspective convincingly links together social and technological history – studies on “the history of the media-shaping man and the user-shaping media”.
The amateur and private filmmaking practice during the socialist years in Romania (1945–1989) did... more The amateur and private filmmaking practice during the socialist years in Romania (1945–1989) didn’t become an extensively researched field, although the history of the non-professional use of the medium of film can disclose the intricate relationship between the socialist reality and the medium, but also between the totalitarian cultural project and the possibilities of the individuals living in its confines. The purpose of this is paper twofold: to delineate the history of amateur filmmaking in pre-1989 Romania, and to put under scrutiny the methodological possibilities and pitfalls of an endeavour like this. The researcher of amateur films in a post-socialist country might encounter wide-ranging difficulties, such as the absence of audiovisual archives or of institutionalized image collections and the lack of technologies to produce a proper digital transfer of the analogue documents; sometimes the researcher has to acknowledge that large amounts of films have been thrown to garb...
Metropolis, 2020
Tanulmányomban olyan filmeket vizsgálok, amelyek egyszerre vetik fel a kelet-európai történelem r... more Tanulmányomban olyan filmeket vizsgálok, amelyek egyszerre vetik fel a kelet-európai történelem reprezentációjának, de a képarchívumok és a médiumok szerepének problémáját is. Erre a polemizáló dokumentarizmusra gyakran találunk példát az 1989-es a rendszerváltás eseményeire vagy a szocializmus éveire reflektáló filmekben. A rendszerváltás és a médiatudatosság összenőtt: a vasfüggöny leomlását értelmezték már médiaeseményként, megkoreografált színjátékként is (ezt a tézist képviseli például Harun Farocki–Andrei Ujică Egy forradalom videogrammái [Videogramme einer Revolution, 1992] című film). A szocialista múltat értelmező filmek egyik sajátossága, hogy kevésbé a kulturális emlékezetre építenek; a nézőket közvetlenül kell megszólítaniuk, hiszen az események még elevenen élnek a kommunikatív emlékezetben. A reciklálás alapanyagai is sajátosak, hiszen a filmkészítők kelet-európai filmes-, illetve televíziós archívumokból, vagy amatőrök felvételeiből válogathatnak, és az ebből adódó sajátosságokat kreatív módon használhatják fel.
Caught In-Between: Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema (ed. by Ágnes Pethő), 2020
There is a tendency in recent nonfiction film to recontextualise archival photographs in creative... more There is a tendency in recent nonfiction film to recontextualise archival photographs in creative ways. In films like Felvidék. Caught In-Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photographs are part of a collage work, while films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) use photographs in animated environments. At the other extreme is Radu Jude's Dead Nation (2017) presenting a series of photographs as a film that paradoxically demonstrates the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. These films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema the complex relationship between photography/the indexical trace and history. This chapter builds upon the phenomenological approach to images by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay in order to discuss intermedial relations of nonfiction films and to present what the photographic image means in the post-media age documentary.
Keywords: intermediality, documentary, archival photographs, index, photofilmic, George Didi-Hubermann, paradox visibility, haptic vision, collage
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2012
The title is referencing Hans Belting’s differentiation between image and medium: “images resembl... more The title is referencing Hans Belting’s differentiation between image and medium: “images resemble nomads in the sense that they take residence in one medium after another” (Belting 2005, 310). This paper tries to build a methodolgical framework for the research of the nomadic behaviour of home imagery in the new media age. While the practice of home movies was theorised in the age of the celluloid film and nuclear family, the refinement of these approaches occurred at the beginning of the 1990s, with the emergence of video technology. However, the literature of the new media reported the turning point-like changes of the habitus of amateur films: the home movie is just one of the amateur filmmaking habitus, neither more typical, nor more representative than any other practices. The technological, social, and cultural dimensions of the previous ritualised practice need to be rethought in this context. How have the content, status, and functions of the home movies regarded as places of memory changed in the age of presentist do-it-yourself media products? The paper argues that home movies and videos should be regarded as historical sources of the participative culture.
Aranymadár. Tanulmányok Tánczos Vilmos tiszteletére. Szerk. Jakab Albert Zsolt; Peti Lehel. Kiadók: BBTE Magyar Néprajz és Antropológia Intézet; Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület; Kriza János Néprajzi Társaság. Kiadás helye: Kolozsvár. ISBN: 978-606-9015-11-7; 978-606-739-129-9., 2019
Tanulmányom a videókészítésnek és -vetítésnek egy olyan esetét mutatja be, amelyik egy újfajta rá... more Tanulmányom a videókészítésnek és -vetítésnek egy olyan esetét mutatja be, amelyik egy újfajta rálátást nyújthat az 1989-as rendszerváltást megelőző és követő évtized mentalitására Gyergyószentmiklós és Székelyudvarhely térségében. Az 1980-as években három római katolikus pap megtakarított pénzéből közösen vásárolt egy JVC videókamerát, amelyet felváltva használtak. Ezzel egyidőben filmek, rajzfilmek VHS másolatát is beszerezték belföldi és külföldi forrásokból egyaránt. A saját készítésű videókat és a filmek videómásolatát egy ugyancsak kalandosan beszerzett színes televízióban vetítették a hittanteremben vagy a helyi adón egy igencsak népes, érdeklődő közönségnek. A felvételek kordokumentumként is érdekesek lehetnek, hiszen a 30 évvel ezelőtti ünnepnapokba, közösségi eseményekbe nyerhetünk betekintést, azonban a tanulmány az képanyagot mégis inkább médiumtörténeti, mint helytörténeti jelentősége felől közelíti meg, hiszen a videó médiumának ez a sajátos használata rávilágít arra, hogy a technika, a videókép, a filmkészítés mint lehetőség milyen jelentőséggel bírt a rendszerváltás körüli évek erdélyi társadalmában. Az elemzés három kérdés érint: a videó médiumának az 1980-as és az 1990-es években kialakult lokális jelentéseit vizsgálja az amatőr keskenyfilmformátumok és a házi videó társadalmi jelentésének az összehasonlításával. Másodsorban szemügyre veszi azokat a társadalmi kapcsolatokat és kommunikációs formákat, amelyeket a videótechnika beszerzése és társas használata végett létesítettek. A tanulmány harmadik részében a fennmaradt VHS-hagyaték tartalmáról esik szó, amelyek ugyancsak társadalmi igényeknek megfelelően alakultak.
Korunk, 2019
Keywords: Eastern Europe, non-fiction film, photography, Anca Damian, Vladislava Plančíková, Radu... more Keywords: Eastern Europe, non-fiction film, photography, Anca Damian, Vladislava Plančíková, Radu Jude.
There is a tendency in recent non-fiction film to re-contextualise archival photographs in highly mediated environments. In films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) photographs are
embedded in highly abstract, animated worlds, while in Felvidék. Caught in Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photos appear in an avantgarde montage. At the other extreme is Radu Jude’s
Dead Nation (2017) which presents a series of photographs in a cinematic context to paradoxically demonstrate the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. The selected Eastern European nonfiction works build ‘remembrance environments’ around photographs, they compile, juxtapose, structure photographs within the medium of film: they carry out this sequentially through montage, or form a multimedia collage within the confines of a single frame. The paper carries out the analysis from the perspective of intermediality, as these films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema (or the cinematic) the complex relationship between photography and history, or the indexical trace and history in general. In this analysis intermedial relations are addressed using the phenomenological approach to images developed by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay.
This article examines how sensual aspects of the moving image, such as visual errors, blurring an... more This article examines how sensual aspects of the moving image, such as visual errors, blurring and technical disturbances are employed in found footage films dealing with Eastern European socialist past and the regime changing events. In the selected films Eastern European socialist visual culture is reworked with the cinematic practices of the post-media age in order to shape the spectators' historical consciousness. By deliberate reframing and intensifying the medium-specific noises of the archival sources, or by an artificially created visual precariousness a new type of spectatorial awareness is created. The article delineates four different strategies through which the mediality of the recycled archival footage is brought to the fore and made operational (engaging the senses of its viewers). 1
The New Romanian Cinema, edited by Christina Stojanova, Edinburgh University Press, 93-107., 2019
The description of the films of the New Romanian Cinema/ Romanian New Wave as a unified trend, wi... more The description of the films of the New Romanian Cinema/ Romanian New Wave as a unified trend, with shared narrational and stylistic traits including the return to Bazinian realism (Gorzo 2013), Italian neo-realism, the French New Wave and modernist minimalism (Pop 2013), has set boundaries to the discourse about contemporary Romanian cinema. One might even say that the recent Romanian reinvention of realist cinema has prompted the need for an overarching definition of the Romanian national cinema, one that tends to situate its aesthetics within this realist/ minimalist paradigm, which however leaves much narrower space for works that do not fit in, and are therefore automatically marginalised. Such is the case with Nae Caranfil’s oeuvre, whose directorial debut in the 1990s received critical acclaim and was welcomed by audiences, yet theoretical interest for his films gradually diminished towards the end of the 2000s, marked by the growing attention to the new aesthetics. The status of his oeuvre remains problematic, and – because of adherence to the principles of classical narrative cinema and more popular aesthetics – he is considered either an outsider to the New Romanian Cinema paradigm or a precursor of it.
This article reconsiders Caranfil’s works in the context of the postmodern post-communist condition and its specific visual culture. Based on in-depth film analyses – focusing on cinematic realism, the role of the cinematic medium, as well as on representations of history – the paper situates Caranfil’s films in the contemporary Romanian cinematic landscape. Thus the concept of reflexivity becomes the most prominent theoretical tool for analysing his films as postmodernist, and as an illustration of a cinematic paradigm that hovered on the margins of the New Romanian Cinema when it emerged.
Aranyhíd. Tanulmányok Keszeg Vilmos tiszteletére Szerk. Jakab Albert Zsolt, Vajda András Kriza János Néprajzi Társaság – BBTE Magyar Néprajz és Antropológia Intézet – Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, Kolozsvár. ISBN: 978-973-8439-92-4; 978-606-739-075-9., 2017
A 19. században felbukkanó fotografikus kép használatának a terjedése Kolozsvárt sem kerülte el, ... more A 19. században felbukkanó fotografikus kép használatának a terjedése Kolozsvárt sem kerülte el, az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia városaival egyidőben jelentek meg a városban a fotóstúdiók, a városról készült képeslapok grafikáit fényképek váltották fel, és a Kolozsváron olvasható lapok is közöltek már illusztrációként fotókat az 1890-es évek végén. Ezek közül talán a fotóstúdiók, a hivatásos fényképészek történetéről született a legtöbb tanulmány. A fényképészet erdélyi történetéről írt karriertörténetek, monográfiák és tanulmányok kevésbé foglalkoznak a fénykép és társadalom kapcsolatával, vagy a vizualitás kultúrájának témakörével, és az 1918 utáni időszak az erdélyi fényképezés történetének vakfoltja marad. Jelen tanulmány a várostörténeti kutatások és a mediális kultúratudomány érdeklődési pontjait hasznosítva szeretné vizsgálni a két világháború közötti erdélyi vizuális kultúrát, a fényképezés médiumának hétköznapivá válását, a nem hivatásos fényképészek és a fényképhasználók vizuális műveltségének mintázatait. Mindez egy kolozsvári polgár, Orbán Lajos fényképeinek történetén keresztül válik majd láthatóvá.
The amateur and private filmmaking practice during the socialist years in Romania (1945–1989) did... more The amateur and private filmmaking practice during the socialist years in Romania (1945–1989) didn’t become an extensively researched field, although the history of the non-professional use of the medium of film can disclose the intricate relationship between the socialist reality and the medium, but also between the totalitarian cultural project and the possibilities of the individuals living in its confines. The purpose of this is paper twofold: to delineate the history of amateur filmmaking in pre-1989 Romania, and to put under scrutiny the methodological possibilities and pitfalls of an endeavour like this.
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Papers by Melinda Blos-Jáni
Keywords: intermediality, documentary, archival photographs, index, photofilmic, George Didi-Hubermann, paradox visibility, haptic vision, collage
There is a tendency in recent non-fiction film to re-contextualise archival photographs in highly mediated environments. In films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) photographs are
embedded in highly abstract, animated worlds, while in Felvidék. Caught in Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photos appear in an avantgarde montage. At the other extreme is Radu Jude’s
Dead Nation (2017) which presents a series of photographs in a cinematic context to paradoxically demonstrate the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. The selected Eastern European nonfiction works build ‘remembrance environments’ around photographs, they compile, juxtapose, structure photographs within the medium of film: they carry out this sequentially through montage, or form a multimedia collage within the confines of a single frame. The paper carries out the analysis from the perspective of intermediality, as these films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema (or the cinematic) the complex relationship between photography and history, or the indexical trace and history in general. In this analysis intermedial relations are addressed using the phenomenological approach to images developed by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay.
This article reconsiders Caranfil’s works in the context of the postmodern post-communist condition and its specific visual culture. Based on in-depth film analyses – focusing on cinematic realism, the role of the cinematic medium, as well as on representations of history – the paper situates Caranfil’s films in the contemporary Romanian cinematic landscape. Thus the concept of reflexivity becomes the most prominent theoretical tool for analysing his films as postmodernist, and as an illustration of a cinematic paradigm that hovered on the margins of the New Romanian Cinema when it emerged.
Keywords: intermediality, documentary, archival photographs, index, photofilmic, George Didi-Hubermann, paradox visibility, haptic vision, collage
There is a tendency in recent non-fiction film to re-contextualise archival photographs in highly mediated environments. In films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) photographs are
embedded in highly abstract, animated worlds, while in Felvidék. Caught in Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photos appear in an avantgarde montage. At the other extreme is Radu Jude’s
Dead Nation (2017) which presents a series of photographs in a cinematic context to paradoxically demonstrate the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. The selected Eastern European nonfiction works build ‘remembrance environments’ around photographs, they compile, juxtapose, structure photographs within the medium of film: they carry out this sequentially through montage, or form a multimedia collage within the confines of a single frame. The paper carries out the analysis from the perspective of intermediality, as these films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema (or the cinematic) the complex relationship between photography and history, or the indexical trace and history in general. In this analysis intermedial relations are addressed using the phenomenological approach to images developed by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay.
This article reconsiders Caranfil’s works in the context of the postmodern post-communist condition and its specific visual culture. Based on in-depth film analyses – focusing on cinematic realism, the role of the cinematic medium, as well as on representations of history – the paper situates Caranfil’s films in the contemporary Romanian cinematic landscape. Thus the concept of reflexivity becomes the most prominent theoretical tool for analysing his films as postmodernist, and as an illustration of a cinematic paradigm that hovered on the margins of the New Romanian Cinema when it emerged.
Concordantly early cinema is bound with the image of children as well, especially when the demonstration of the medium specificity is at stake (the most famous example is the Lumière brothers 1985 film Repas de bébé, which was part of the first public film screening). The image of the child thus represents, or to use Hans Belting terms: produces the visual excess that is embodied in the medium of the moving images. Departing from these references I will examine the representation of children in a Transylvanian home movie collection from the 1930’s.
The Genealogy of Home Movies.
Transylvanian Amateur Media Practices from Photography to New Media
Private film makers continue the line of the ancient cultural activity of observation, recording and contemplation: „home movies, also known as amateur films or private films are the continuation of the tradition of the bourgeois family portrait gallery, in former times painted, and from the last century recorded on photographs” (Forgács 1995. 109–111). The quote condenses the approach of this book. Péter Forgács in his essayistic writing formulates the idea, which had become the cornerstone of contemporary theories of media practices and media culture: new media build on older ones, that is to say, they function as a kind of media history archive and carry in themselves their own genealogy. In this conceptual framework picture usage at the beginning of the 20th century is connected to picture usage at the beginning of the 21st century: since the superimposition of media is not a new phenomenon, it offers a theoretical framework in which picture-making practices that are far from each other in time can be interpreted in their historicity. However, the term private film or home movie, gradually becoming out-dated, draws attention on the changing demands of media users towards pictures in the new media age, and the changing social conventions of media practices.
The first chapters of the book provide an overview of contemporary approaches to the historicity of media. By mapping out the different approaches, methodological aims are defined. Media genealogy has elaborated an interpretative model for grasping the processes of media history. The genealogy of the increasingly familiar (home) movie can also be relevant in theorizing the dissemination and the chameleon-like aspect of media. The theory of remediation also models the interdependence of media within the framework of communication theory. Remediation can be relevant from the viewpoint of home movies/videos especially when it reflects on the relation between media and reality: all mediation is real (not a simulation) and the end-products are real as artifacts. We can also examine remediation as a social phenomenon with historically changing aspects (see media genealogy). A medium can mediate not only images and other media, but – as a part of reality – it also mediates certain norms and decisions made and written into its material by other people. If we focus on the meanings of the moving image within the space and reality of home, the domestication of objects and technologies can also be relevant. The researchers of media domestication study the way in which different information and communication technologies become part of households: why family members choose a certain technology, how they harmonize it with their everyday environment and habits and what kind of power structures, task distributions and rites appear as a consequence. Looking at the various research directions presented above this analysis considers media genealogy to be a theoretical framework which can hold together the collected data and films. Domestication, remediation, intermediality are concepts and at the same time media historical and social perspectives which can further refine the reflection on the practice of home movie making.
The theoretical conclusions are followed by the in-depth analysis of three Transylvanian home movie collections from the following perspectives: the genealogy of the family and family life, the media practices of the family, the content and the structural, formal aspects of the collections and the habits of preserving them. This segment results in a chronological series of data from which the specific historical periods can be unfolded together with the analysis of technology – family – everyday life – home movie/video. In this case the focus is on the practice of the respective family embedded into the context of everyday life. It is examined the way in which technologies of film-making became part of and structured a community’s life (both in a physical and metaphorical sense) in a given period. What kind of identities did families construct for the media they used, what sort of media practices characterized their everyday life in a given period of social history? How did home movies/videos connect people in the process of making, watching and archiving them?
In the films we can decipher the stories and the periods of paying attention to each other, as well as the scenes of familial life. To put it more concretely: we can follow the story of the father observing his children (in a further research one could examine how this turns into the story of the observing mother). More rarely the lens of the camera is directed towards the generation of the film-maker’s parents. It seems that children represent a different social order, and for this reason they are regarded as photographic and filmic themes in different periods. At the same time we can witness how film-making becomes part of parental duties and how the recording of childhood becomes a social requirement.
Media are objects and consolidated human relations at the same time. Consequently, the home movie/video can be not only a film but also an object, it can mirror the symbiosis with media technologies, it can connect the intimate sphere and the formal frameworks of our everyday life and it can be about friendship, motherhood, fatherhood, community life and genealogies.