Cinema and intermediality: Enhancing the spectator

The introduction to Loukia Kostopoulou’s interesting work, Intermediality in European Avant-Garde Cinema (Routledge, 2023), explains that the book will address some “important research questions”, such as: “How do intermedial experiments convey meaning in films? And how are the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lars Von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov innovative and experimental?”. The book lives up to its promise by proposing to gather these three contemporary filmmakers under the label of “avant-garde cinema,” both for their experimental approach to film techniques, which includes work on the materials and forms of cinema, and for their search for contamination, transformation and hybridisation of languages in an intermedial way, for instance with respect to painting and theatre with the use of tableaux vivants, or with respect to literature and music.