Abstract
Abstract The formal, cinematic language specific to immersive motion pictures is an area of cinema theory that has been neglected up until now. This paper investigates a new language of cinematic montage specific to immersive cinema, somatic montage, while it examines historical precedents in the sciences, arts, and cinema of the twentieth century. We propose somatic montage as a model for developing new poetic structures in time-based works that inhabit a three-dimensional, architectonic space – a space of embodiment, motion, perception, and participation in the reception of a work of art. In this paper, we consider cinema as a four-dimensional artwork conceptually engendered by the principles of hyper-dimensions, the outgrowth of scientific discoveries made at the turn of the twentieth century. The expanded cinema mediums of fulldome cinema, immersive video and film installation, virtual reality, and extended reality, when approached as four-dimensional cinema space, allow for a spatialized, non-linear juxtaposition of the cinematic elements. Somatic montage is presented here as an extended, supra-dimensional notion of what Sergei Eisenstein called the ‘disjunctive method of narration’.
Highlights
The development of a formal, cinematic language for immersive motion pictures is currently in its early stage, a stage comparable to the invention of rhythmic montage pioneered by filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, by the early Soviet cinema movement, and by the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s
Somatic montage1 is a new approach to the established cinematic language of montage that marries chronological with spatial composition in the creation of narrative, presented here as an extended, supra-dimensional notion of what Eisenstein called the ‘disjunctive method of narration’
The historical development of disjunctive montage, faceted perspective, the curvature of space-time, n-dimensional spaces, spatial montage, and disrupted narrative that arose in the twentieth century culminated in a Modernist Zeitgeist that embraces spatial and temporal ambiguity; simultaneity; fragmentation; peripatetic, embodied perception; and a heightened personal participation with a work of art
Summary
The formal, cinematic language specific to immersive motion pictures is an area of cinema theory that has been neglected up until now. This paper investigates a new language of cinematic montage specific to immersive cinema, somatic montage, while it examines historical precedents in the sciences, arts, and cinema of the twentieth century. We propose somatic montage as a model for developing new poetic structures in time-based works that inhabit a threedimensional, architectonic space – a space of embodiment, motion, perception, and participation in the reception of a work of art. We consider cinema as a four-dimensional artwork conceptually engendered by the principles of hyper-dimensions, the outgrowth of scientific discoveries made at the turn of the twentieth century.
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