Abstract. The paper surveys two modes of representation present in contemporary Hungarian and Romanian cinema, namely magic realism and minimalist realism, as two ways of rendering the "real" in the Central Eastern European geocultural context. New Hungarian Film tends to display narratives that share the features of what is generally assumed as being magic realist, accompanied by a high degree of stylization, while New Romanian Cinema is more attracted to creating austere, micro-realistic universes. The paper argues that albeit apparently being forking modes of representation that traverse distinct routes, magic realism and minimalist realism share a set of common elements and, what this study especially focuses on, converge in the preference for the tableau aesthetic. The paper examines the role of tableau compositions and tableaux vivants in representative films of the Young Hungarian Film and the Romanian New Wave, namely Szabolcs Hajdu's Bibliothèque Pascal (2010) and Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (După dealuri, 2012). An excessive use of the tableau can be detected in both films, with many thematic connections, in subtle interwovenness with female identiy and corporeality performed as a site of traumatic experiences, upon which (institutional, colonial) power relations are reinscribed. The tableau as a figuration of intermediality performs the tension between the sensation of the "real" and its reframed image, and proves especially suitable for mediating between low-key realism and highly stylized forms. 1

Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup, 2003) depicts a grim vision of the world in the aftermath of an unnamed catastrophe. Haneke turns the genre of dystopia into an experimental terrain where he can test the limits of the cinematic medium in the sense of “negating cinema in order to let reality speak for itself” (Nagib 2016, 147). An existential parable, Time of the Wolf envisions a sombre post-millenium age. It is a sharp analysis of what remains of man and society when the frame of civilization collapses. It scrutinizes the functioning mechanisms of the individual, the family and the social community in times of civilization undone. A harsh experiment towards a negative dialectics of the image, the film’s exceptionally austere cinematic language confronts the spectator with the aesthetics of the “unwatchable” (Baer et al., 2019) and “cinematic unpleasure” (Aston 2010). The paper explores the ways in which Haneke’s “intermedial realism” (Rowe 2017) also manifests in this film through photo-filmic images and painterly compositions, perceptions of stillness and motion, and cultural remnants of the past, giving way to affective sensations of intermediality.

A historical drama that can be interpreted at the juncture of theoretical discourses (heritage film, auteur film), genres (historical film, western, road movie) and representational modes (connecting to, but subverting the master narrative of Romanian historical cinema), Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015) has attracted the attention of the international public by the unique response that it gives to the tradition of representation of the (Romanian) historical past. Its unmatched character even within New Romanian Cinema can be attributed to the fact that it does not focus on tensions of the post-communist condition or their antecedents in the recent communist past; instead, it goes back in history to a much earlier period, to the Romanian ancien régime, after the Ottoman occupation and before the abolition of Gypsy slavery, only to point at the historical roots of current social problems. Through its ingenuous (inter)medial solutions (black-and-white film, with an implied media-archaeological purport; period mise en scène but with an assumed artificiality and constructedness; a simple linear plot infused with a dense dialogue in archaic Romanian, drawn from a multitude of literary and historical sources; a sweeping panorama of 19th-century Wallachian society presented in a succession of tableau compositions), Radu Jude’s ironical-critical collage defetishizes the traditional historical iconography and debunks the mythical national imaginary, unveiling the traumatic history of an ethnic and racial mix.1

In close intratextual connection with earlier pieces of Jafar Panahi’s oeuvre, pre-eminently The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Offside (2006), his recent films made in illegality, including This Is Not a Film (In film nist, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardeh, Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, 2013) and Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015), reformulate the relationship between cinema and the “real,” defying the limitations of filmmaking in astounding ways. The paper addresses the issue of non-cinema, pertaining to those instances of cinematic “impurity” in which “the medium disregards its own limits in order to politically interfere with the other arts and life itself” (Nagib 2016, 132). Panahi’s overtly confrontational (non-)cinematic discourse is an eminent example of “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001). His artisanal and secret use of the camera in deterritorialized conditions and extreme limitations as regards profilmic space – house arrest, fake taxi interior – gives way for multilayered reflexivity, incorporating non-actorial presence, performative self-filming and theatricality as subversive gestures, with a special emphasis on the off-screen and remediated video-orality performed in front of, or directly addressed to the camera. The paper explores the ways in which the filmmaker’s tactics become powerful gestures of “politicized immediacy” (Naficy 2001, 6) that call for the (inter)medial as an also indispensably political act ((Schröter 2010).

Th e narrative-poetical specifi cifi es of W. G. Sebald's works -the fi rst-person narration whose narratorial voice hides a "Sebald-like" fi gure, the border-crossings between reality and fi ction, the blend of the generic specifi cities of memoir, travel journal and essay as well as the illustrations, photos, paintings, drawings, maps, etc. -systematically inserted in the text make the Sebaldian textual universe idiosycratic and recognizable. Th us, Sebald's essay-novels contain not only texts but also pictures, which display the literary text as the remix of the verbal and the visual, as a remediated scene. Th e present study aims to examine this visual-textual scene in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.