<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p> The paper examines the figures of ‘sensable’ intermediality in Péter Nádas’s book, Own Death (2006), an autobiographical account of the author’s heart failure and clinical death and in the screen adaptation of the book by Péter Forgács with the same title (Own Death, 2007). The book and the film problematize the cultural, discursive, and medial (un)representability of a liminal corporeal experience (illness, death) in which the very conditions of self-perception, bodily sensation, and conceptual thinking appear as “other.” In the film corporeal liminality and its medial translatability are not only thematized (e.g. through the untranslated German word umkippen ‘tip over,’ ‘fall over’), but shape the embodied experience of viewing through the use of photo-filmic imagery, still frames, fragmented close-ups, slow motion, or medially textured images. These do not only foreground the foreign, undomesticable experience of the body and “own death” as other, but also expose the medium, the membrane of the film, and confer the moving image a “haptic visuality” (Marks). The haptic imagery directs the viewer’s attention to the sensuality of the medium, to the filmic “body,” enabling a “sensable” (Oosterling) spectatorship, an embodied reflection on the image, on the “sensual mode” (Pethő) of becoming intermedial </p></abstract>

The paper examines the figures of ‘sensable’ intermediality in Péter Nádas’s book, Own Death (2006), an autobiographical account of the author’s heart failure and clinical death and in the screen adaptation of the book by Péter Forgács with the same title (Own Death, 2007). The book and the film problematize the cultural, discursive, and medial (un)representability of a liminal corporeal experience (illness, death) in which the very conditions of self-perception, bodily sensation, and conceptual thinking appear as “other.” In the film corporeal liminality and its medial translatability are not only thematized (e.g. through the untranslated German word umkippen ‘tip over,’ ‘fall over’), but shape the embodied experience of viewing through the use of photo-filmic imagery, still frames, fragmented close-ups, slow motion, or medially textured images. These do not only foreground the foreign, undomesticable experience of the body and “own death” as other, but also expose the medium, the membrane of the film, and confer the moving image a “haptic visuality” (Marks). The haptic imagery directs the viewer’s attention to the sensuality of the medium, to the filmic “body,” enabling a “sensable” (Oosterling) spectatorship, an embodied reflection on the image, on the “sensual mode” (Pethő) of becoming intermedial

‘Own Deaths’ – Figures of the Sensable in Péter Nádas’s Book and Péter Forgács’s Film

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

The paper examines the figures of ‘sensable’ intermediality in Péter Nádas’s book, Own Death (2006), an autobiographical account of the author’s heart failure...

‘Own Deaths’ – Figures of the Sensable in Péter Nádas’s Book and Péter Forgács’s Film

Published Online: Sep 25, 2014

Page range: 21 - 40

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2014-0024

Keywords
sensable intermediality, photo-filmic, stillness, Péter Nádas, Péter Forgács

© 2014

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

‘Own Deaths’ – Figures of the Sensable in Péter Nádas’s Book and Péter Forgács’s Film

Published Online: Sep 25, 2014

Page range: 21 - 40

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2014-0024

Keywordssensable intermediality, photo-filmic, stillness, Péter Nádas, Péter Forgács

© 2014

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
sensable intermediality, photo-filmic, stillness, Péter Nádas, Péter Forgács