Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

ekphrases, we can gain insight into the similarities and differences in the
interpretation of famous works of art in high and in popular culture.
For this ekphrastic process, this concretization, I prefer to use Bruhn’s
term “transmedialization,” which she coins by referring to the existence of the
adjective “-medial” in German as well as French (Musical 51). Having shown
how other terms suggested by literary critics for the ekphrastic process, such as
transposition, transformation, or translation, invite misreadings and possess
music-specific meanings, she proposes this term as one that adequately captures
the essence of that process. While this term seems to convey the same meaning as
Clüver’s “intersemiotic transposition” (translation or transmutation), I find
“transmedialization” both simpler and more precise. Moreover, its English usage
is prefigured in terms such as “intermedial” and “intermediality.” 34
My own reading of films in the light of the ekphrastic process has
benefited from Siglind Bruhn’s analysis of musical ekphrasis, Claus Clüver’s
various expansions of literary ekphrasis, and Donna L. Poulton’s discussion of the
uses of art in film. None of these investigations, however, touches on the ability
of film to transmedialize a work of art by adapting the pictorial into the
cinematographic language. In fact, although there are a number of studies on film-
painting relationships, none has investigated the possibility of filmic ekphrasis.
However, one does not need to go as far as Zahlten and claim that the discourse
34 See for example the publication Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and
Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). The terms
“intermedial” and “intermediality” are also used by Claus Clüver in his “On Intersemiotic
Transposition,” and Valerie Robillard in her “In Pursuit of Ekphrasis (an intertextual approach),”
Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, eds. Valerie Robillard
and Els Jongeneel (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), 53-72.
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