Page 17 [17]
INTRODUCTION
story by Haruki Murakami, 2014. Murakami’s short story makes a cursory
reference to a stage production of Anton P. Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, writ¬
ten in 1896. Both the short story and the film deal with the problem of coping
with the pains and pangs of life, i.e. the plight of all characters in Uncle Van¬
ya. The first part of this chapter deals with Chekhov’s play and its reception.
The second part is intended to explore how Murakami and Hamaguchi re¬
sponded to Chekhov’s extreme pessimism about the human condition. The
third part discusses role playing, silence, speaking and acting, and the signif¬
icance of multilingual stage productions such as the one in Hamaguchi’s film.
Attila Molnar’s chapter entitled Performative German in Sandor Valy’s Die
Toteninsel analyzes the improvised lyrical opera Die Toteninsel by the multi¬
media artist Sandor Valy. The project was deemed by the artist as a reconstruc¬
tion of a lost work, specifically the musical aspect of an original German
language libretto written by Karl Georg Zwerenz in 1919, telling the story of
Arnold Bécklin’s painting of the same name Die Toteninsel or as it more wide¬
ly known, The Isle of the Dead. The multilingual examination of the piece lies
in the opera’s performative dimension. Since Valy’s cast, by intent, consists of
actors without having any German language knowledge whatsoever, the actu¬
al singing and interpretation of the original text ends up being largely impro¬
vised. Thus, the performed German transforms into an entirely different
language, becoming a performative tool, cutting ties with the rigorously
written native German. Metaphorically, Valy’s initially planned reconstructive
work turns out to be more of a deconstruction of language, form, and genre.
Monika Danél’s National Legacy in Transnational and Transmedial Trans¬
position. Accented Hungarian Cinema (Roland Vranik: The Citizen, 2016)
focuses on “accented cinema.”” In this chapter, Danél analyzes Roland Vran¬
ik’s multilingual movie placed in Budapest, in which, on the one hand, the
simultaneity of perspectives, the multifocality and the tactile optics develop
the film’s “accented style.” On the other hand, through the accented speech of
the diegetic characters, an African emigrant and an Iranian refugee, the Hun¬
garian language appears as foreign—learned. To obtain citizenship, Wilson
learns Constitution Basics of Hungary; through this long learning process in
his accented language Hungarian national culture and history turns into an
“accented national,” in which the foreign (accent) remains equally and perma¬
nently audibly present, and consequently the accent becomes the medium for
the national. The author argues how through the accent, the national language,
culture and heritage could be re-appropriated in a non-nationalistic way and
could turn into a medium for solidarity.
°5 Hamid Naficy: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton and Oxford,
Princeton University Press, 2001.
+15 +