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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, written 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 Vanya. 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 responded to Chekhov’s extreme pessimism about the human condition. The third part discusses role playing, silence, speaking and acting, and the significance 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 multimedia artist Sandor Valy. The project was deemed by the artist as a reconstruction 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 widely 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 actual singing and interpretation of the original text ends up being largely improvised. 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 Transposition. Accented Hungarian Cinema (Roland Vranik: The Citizen, 2016) focuses on “accented cinema.”” In this chapter, Danél analyzes Roland Vranik’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 Hungarian 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 permanently 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 +
