On the Role of Diegetic Electronic Screens in Contemporary European Films

Abstract

Given the present proliferation of profilmic electronic screens in narrative feature films, it is of some interest to examine their role apart from that of denoting objects pertaining to everyday reality. Electronic screens within the European-type filmic diegeses – characterized by adhering to conventions of (hyper)realism, non-hypermediation and character-centered storytelling – in a digital era are used not only as props, but as frames that re-order and aestheticize levels of reality (Odin 2016), while focusing, in a hypnotic manner, the viewers’ attention (Chateau 2016) on traumatic memories related to usually female characters, and consequently to the collectivities they represent in the respective diegetic worlds. These electronic screens force the viewer to constantly shift between the actual cinematic screen conventions and the mental screen (Odin 2016) of smaller formats, training the film viewers for experiences of expanded and fragmented cinema (Gaudreault and Marion 2015).

Television and Video Screens in Filmic Narratives: Medium Specificity, Noise and Frame-Work

“…First, animated letters fill the cinematic screen, their candy colours and rudimentary design disturbing, evidently, the cinematic immersion, and a shortly visible screenic glitch of a black-and-white nonfigurative formation informs the actual viewer that the sensible surface of this screen does not bear messages as usual/as normative. The analogue/cathodic television screen's first decipherable message in Videodrome is, as suggested previously, a female figure (Virginás 2018), who appears before a background composed of at least seven different frames that circumscribe differently scaled, (non-electronic) framed screens bearing different messages. This female figure is Bridey, the secretary of Videodrome's main male character, Max Renn, and she remains a diegetic electronic screen presence throughout this introductory sequence, with the television's black screen frames visible while she addresses her boss with a wakeup message of organizing work.…”

“…According to the main argument of this article, media differences conceived in this manner are also sustained by such constructions in the diegetic worlds of films where these various media, indexed by corresponding screens, are present as apparently afilmic, but actually profilmic objects with serious functions in the narrative development. This argument may be conceived of as a consequence of the author's previous analysis (Virginás 2018) which attributed to electronic screens embedded in the diegetic worlds of films the role of training the film viewers for experiences of expanded and fragmented cinema (Gaudreault and Marion 2015) as they force the audience to constantly shift between the actual cinematic screen conventions and the mental screen (Odin 2016) of smaller formats.…”