Encounters in the Cinematic Gallery: Reading Intermediality in Diana Markosian's Santa Barbara BAFTSS New Connections and Film Studies Speaker Series: Beth Pyner, Cardiff University

Abstract: Journeying to Santa Barbara, California with her mother, Svetlana, Diana Markosian had no idea that they would not return to Russia. Escaping the turbulence of Moscow following the Soviet Union's collapse, Svetlana had secretly become a ‘mail-order bride.' When Markosian discovered the truth about her migration 15 years later, she embarked on a different journey—to understand her mother and reconnect with her own identity in light of the past.
Markosian restages these journeys in Santa Barbara (2023), an installation artwork founded on a series of strange human and material encounters. In reconstructing a past unknown to her, Markosian enlisted Svetlana, as well as a screenwriter and actors to play the roles of herself and her family members. The resulting artwork is intermedial, juxtaposing archival and reconstructed family photography and film alongside artefacts and elements of an American soap opera of the same name—consumed by Markosian as a child—that are integral to its style. Staged in the contemporary gallery, Santa Barbara emphasizes its intermedial seams via a series of representational repetitions and conspicuous traces of the artwork's production, resulting in a strange affect for its spectator, who is confronted with a narrative that, like soap opera in Martha Nochimson's terms, ‘seems odd' (1992:45).
Taking Santa Barbara's strange encounters as its starting point, this paper considers the potentialities of encounters in the intermedial gallery as a cinematic space that ‘radically differs from the one commonly known from theatrical cinema, with its fixed spectators and single back projection, its divided spaces and linear unfolding' (Hesselberth, 2014:15). Santa Barbara's intermediality makes as it unmakes the past, centring the migration narrative's impossibilities, as it also extends the artwork's collaborative production methods to include the spectator, signalling the potentialities of intermediality for stimulating collaborative, ethical, and reflexive modes of meaning making.

Bio: Beth Pyner is a Teaching Associate in English Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She has a PhD in English Literature from Cardiff University and the University of Exeter, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Interdisciplinary in scope and intersectionally feminist in approach, Beth's doctoral research examines the affordances of intermediality in representations of encounters between women and girls, as they are framed within women's contemporary accounts of conflict and migration.