Montage Principle Research Articles

The Montage Concept in the Play Roar, China! (The Meyerhold State Theatre, 1926) and in Traditional Chinese Theatre

Created based on real events, the Meyerhold State Theatre play Roar, China! was of a political nature, corresponding to Meyerhold's interest in one of the areas of theatrical politics of the 1920s, associated with the genre of political review. The political nature of the play is reflected in the stage presentation of two opposing forces and two socio-political systems behind them. The expression of the contradiction between the people and the opposing sides became an important political task of the play. To achieve it, the director of Roar, China! used the montage principle in the theatre. Such a principle of montage also exists in traditional Chinese theatre; however, on stage, it appears in the form of conventionality.

Semantics of Louis Durey’s vocal-instrumental cycle “Songs on Saint Léger Léger’s poems” (“Images à Crusoé”)

Statement of the problem. The article aims to investigate the semantics of the vocal-instrumental cycle “Songs on Saint Léger Léger’s poems” by Louis Edmond Durey (1888–1979), one of the representatives of the French “Group of Six”. This composition, which also has another name – “Images à Crusoé”, written in 1918, belongs to the period of formation of French modernism. The primary literary source, the poem of the same name by Alexis Saint Léger Léger, better known under the pseudonym Saint John Perce, has certain features of surrealistic aesthetics, which also influenced the musical dramaturgy of the cycle. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. Until today, this composition by Louis Durey has not been considered in domestic musicology, therefore, the task of the study is to describe the figurative sphere of the work, to identify its main intonation-semantic constructions and, ultimately, a more thorough explore of the individual style of the composer. The research was carried out using historical-contextual, comparative, and systemanalytical methods. Results and conclusion. According to his results, it was established that Louis Durey embodied not so much the content of Saint John Perce’s poetic stanzas as his personal attitude to his poetic images and metaphors. The composer operates with a whole semantic system of leit-intonemas and through- genre models (polka, lullaby, chorale, hymn) and builds semantic arches between numbers of the cycle. Cross-cutting musical and semantic elements also become components of arch dramaturgy: intonations of circles, “spindles”, bells, sighs, and the instrumental texture of all numbers of the cycle contains quarto-quint steps. Pentatonic, whole-tone and natural scales contribute to the reproduction of the atmosphere of the exotic nature of the deserted island, as well as the sound imaging techniques used by Durey. The dramaturgy of the cycle is built according to the montage principle, which is mostly subordinated to the type of verse and the semantic content of Saint John Perce’s poetry. Division of the musical form is carried out by changing the size, tempo, genre style. Thus, each number of the cycle consists of short sections connected to each other thanks to the collage technique. The rhythmic and thematic variety in the collage of episodes“frames” indicates the presence of game logic in L. Durey’s cycle. Certain influences on the music of the cycle of illustrations for Daniel Defoe’s novel “Robinson Crusoe”, created in the second half of the 19th century by Carl Offendinger, in perspective, allow us to consider the work in the context of the problem of the synthesis of arts as of a component of modernistic aesthetics.

Literary Cinematography as a Narrative Strategy in a Fiction Text (E. Canetti “Voices of Marrakech”)

The work of the Austrian writer, Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti (1905—1994) is studied in the aspect of literary cinematography, indicating the synthesis of literature and cinema, in particular, in the choice of means for implementing audiovisuality in a literary text. The phenomenon under study is considered on the material of the book “Voices of Marrakesh. Notes after a Journey” (“Die Stimmen von Marrakesch. Aufzeichnungen nach einer Reise”), the composition of which uses the montage principle, which combines fourteen chapters into a single whole. An attempt was made to identify the originality of Canetti’s idiostyle from the perspective of literary cinematography, which determines the novelty and relevance of the study. The authors proceed from the fact that literary cinematography can be considered as a narrative strategy that includes not only communication with the reader, but also “auto-communication” (Yu. M. Lotman). The question is raised about the significance of the acoustic element (“acoustic mask”) in creating the image of a foreign culture, linguistic means of realizing cinematography are revealed. The methodological basis of this article is the research of domestic and foreign scientists concerning both the narrative nature of a literary text and literary cinematography.

Eisenstein's Two Concepts of Montage and the Evolution of the Soviet Avant-Garde in the 1920s-1930s

In the 1920s, montage became one of the most characteristic strategies of avant-garde art, which was based on the understanding of the art work as a complex whole. It suggested the possibility of a recombination of relatively autonomous elements which was based on a rethinking of the general concept of artistic creativity and, in particular, the rejection of the traditional opposition of artistic labour to industrial, “alienated” labour. Sergei Eisenstein’s theory and practice of film editing were vivid manifestations of this approach. Thus, the scene “Kerensky in the Winter Palace” from the film October (1927) can be regarded as a thematization of his concept of montage and its ideological implications: dispersing the single image of the emperor and God, Eisenstein put the heterogeneity and discreteness of signifiers in place of totality. Such a model of montage can be called inductive: the movement proceeds from a particular representation to a general meaning by comparing this representation with others, particular and "non-correlative". At the turn of the 1930s, the concept was criticised within the anti-formalist campaign . However, in 1938, Eisenstein undertook a revision of his theory based on a deductive approach rather than inductive one. Now montage was carried out in the perspective of the initially given signifier: it appeared as a choice of a limited number of signifiers from a potentially infinite set for the best disclosure of the topic - to create its comprehensive representation". Eisenstein found examples of the use of this strategy in all forms of art, including painting and literature: everywhere, the image formation means the selection and comparison of a small number of components and the achievement of the effect of the identity of the particular and the general. At the same time, Eisenstein used the concept of the image (obraz), which played a key role in the aesthetic discussions of the 1930s; he understood the image as montage and extended the montage principle to all types of art, both temporal and spatial. His article “Montage 1938” contains one of the most convincing and articulate theories of the image in the history of aesthetic thought. By undertaking to rehabilitate montage, Eisenstein exceeded the level of the task at hand and defined this strategy as the universal basis of any artistic practice, rooted in the functioning of human consciousness itself.

Principe du montage et visibilité de l’histoire. Arrêt sur quelques images de la lutte pour l’amnistie au Brésil

Cet article revient à l’idée benjaminienne du montage comme méthode historiographique et propose des stratégies pour la reprise au cinéma d’un groupe d’images récemment retrouvées, concernant l’amnistie brésilienne. Principe organisateur de la masse documentaire d’une époque, le montage cite le passé et rend visible l’histoire. Deux approches esthétiques de ce procédé sont évaluées dans ce documentaire : l’association du matériel d’archive à une parole actuelle et la valorisation du témoignage du document même.

"Re - Vinil" e "Meta Remix"

Seguem duas proposições na mesma submissão, ambas baseadas na remontagem de discos de vinil a partir de recortes em máquina laser. Uma delas é um vídeo que mostra algumas das possibilidades visuais e sonoras da proposta. A segunda é um áudio situado no limite entre assemblagem sonora e música, criado a partir da execução dos discos. Na edição, se procurou um equilíbrio entre o casual e o concatenado, de maneira a estimular o ouvinte a modificar espontaneamente sua escuta na medida em que trechos são repetidos em loop. Como um todo, a proposta explora os contrastes entre o que é visível e o que é audível no projeto. Enquanto é possível um maior controle e planejamento no aspecto visual dos discos recombinados, não há como prever o resultado sonoro.

Hungarian Avant-Garde between East and West: The Exploration of European and Russian Scenic Practices in Ödön Palasovszky’s Stage Productions of the 1920s

Experimental theatres led by Ödön Palasovszky stand out among the attempts to renew the Hungarian theatrical culture of the 1920s. He was the central figure of the creative community that worked under different names, but the performances were a result of a collective effort. Contemplating on the nature and possibilities of theatrical art, young experimenting artists set themselves the goal of creating a reflective art that was aimed at creating a new society. In their search of new ways of expression, they turned to various forms of cabaret, revue, compere-entertainer, choral genres, and simultaneous play based on the principle of montage and eurhythmics, and they used many scenic innovations. In this paper, the author focuses on the parallel between the theatrical practices of Palasovszky and theatrical experiments made in the USSR and Germany in the 1920s. The analysis is based on an example of Palasovszky’s avant-garde direction in the staging of Nikolai Evreinov’s monodrama The Theatre of the Soul , a production Palasovszky carried out together with his company Extraordinary Stage (Rendkívüli Színpad). The play by Evreinov was presented only once, on October 3, 1928, during the Happy End evening. Among other things, the article focuses on the design of the stage which was made partly with the contribution of Eva Zeisel (Striker), a Hungarian artist, who worked in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and later became a world-famous ceramist in America. Since the scenery depicting a living organism was presented on the stage as part of the action, the performance can be considered one of the most original experiments in the life of the Hungarian avant-garde theater.

The Time-Space Dimension in mass and multifigure scenes of “Manon Lescaut” by G. Puccini

The Time-Space Dimension in mass and multifigure scenes of “Manon Lescaut” by G. Puccini

Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices by Catherine Russell (review)

Reviewed by: Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices by Catherine Russell Joshua Wiebe Catherine Russell. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Duke University Press, 2018. 280 pages. $26.95 There are two constitutive problems at the heart of Catherine Russell's 2018 book. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. The first is a definitional one, motivating Russell to return again and again to declarative statements intended to articulate just what 'archiveology' is and how it functions. For Russell, "archiveology is above all a means of returning to the images of the past that were produced to entertain, or produced for more serious purposes of documentary recording, and reviewing them for new ways of making history come alive in new forms."1 She explains: "Etymologically, archiveology might mean the study of archives, but the Greek suffix '-ology' actually refers to someone who speaks in a certain manner. When applied to film practice, it refers to the use of the image archive as a language."2 "Archiveology names the process by which the image bank in its fundamental contingency and instability becomes a means by which history can speak back to the present."3 The second concern centers around the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, and the conceptual applicability his work on collecting, criticism, translation, memory, and aesthetics has for the extensive practices of archival/found footage filmmaking. Synthesizing the two interests, Russell contends that "archiveology as a cultural practice is a crucial point of convergence of many of Benjamin's central ideas," an argument which directly addresses film studies' thirty-year love affair with Benjamin.4 Drawing the neologism from a brief piece from 1991 by Joel Katz entitled "From Archive to Archiveology," Russell performs the very function she analyzes, re-purposing Katz's work to new, unpredictable ends. Conspicuously, the lineage of archiveology from Katz's essay is established through a single reference without direct quotation: Russell cites Katz in the first chapter and then he disappears. This mindful attention to the force of citational practices (demonstrated by omission, in this case) shows an affinity with Benjamin that goes beyond the instrumental. Russell's re-purposing of Katz's notion exemplifies her methodological attraction to Benjamin's style of citation. "Quotations in [Benjamin's] work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of [their] conviction."5 We might think of Katz in Archiveology as another kind of thief, trussed up and disarmed, left by the side of the road having been relieved of his weapons. In the case of Katz, 'archiveology' was intended to introduce an approach "more archaeological than historiographic," reflexively interrogating the "archival film […] as representation of history within particular economic, social and cultural constructs, and not as pure History itself."6 Russell here pushes further, insisting that images "are constitutive of historical experience and not merely a representation of it."7 Where Katz confines archiveology to "those who attempt to interrogate the archive in its own terms," Russell regards it as the very language of the archive itself.8 Interrogation being only one mode of enunciation, Russell's expanded terminology (though not so inclusive as to become what Derrida proposes-- "archiviology, […] designat[ing] a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive"9) enables her [End Page 10] to more attentively work through a larger filmography with broadened concerns informed by the vast and contentious discourse surrounding the archive. The most obvious reference point for Russell's work is Benjamin's never-ending opus, The Arcades Project, which sought to introduce "the principle of montage into history" by way of an immense network of references and criticism.10 Already a privileged element in theories of the cinematic, Benjamin's montage is elevated to that exclusive filmic means by which "the work of art" is produced.11 Following Benjamin's conjoining a theory of the cinematic to a theory of history, Russell closes the circuit by returning to the cinematic with all the benefits of having been steeped in Benjamin's historical analysis. In the famous "Work of Art" essay, Benjamin states: The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke. It is...

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

Репрезентация идентичности в практиках виртуальной коммуникации

The article analyzes the current state of virtual communication social space as a specific field of construction and representation of identification strategies. The peculiarity of this process is not only inherent in all virtual communications interactivity, anonymity, globality and constant involvement, but also in the emergence of new areas of so-called professional Amateur, stimulating the development of additional skills in various fields. These changes are the basis for transformation identification of policies and practices in the environment of virtual communication, presenting new requirements for 4K competencies of the modern person and creating conditions for the development of avtoproekt identities with virtual publicity capital in the space of the global network, subsequently exerting enormous influence on the actual everyday practices of identification and representation in connection with a smaller separate online and offline space. Contemporary global socio-cultural virtual space "is formed from collapsing blocks of text culture, konstruirujas on the principle of montage or collage. However, the cognitive subject aims to recreate the integrity culture, give her some, let loose and loose, but the form "[Sayapin, 2012:109]. This form gives a new reason for identification strategies, manifested in creative designing interactive content on the basis of a real personal experience. Virtual practice amateurishness, therefore, have a significant impact not only on identification processes, but also in the field of culture in General, while on par with professional in the field of a single media space, getting feedback, recognition and the possibility of personal realization and identification in new spheres.

Montage as the Meaning-generative Principle of Avant-garde: From Montage in Cinema to Montage in Theatre (Soviet and Post-Soviet Theatre and Cinema)

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The Violence Within: Canadian Modern Statehood and the Pan-territorial Residential School System Ideal

AbstractDrawing upon Walter Benjamin's “principle of montage,” this article excavates the political salience of what is referred to herein as the residential school system's “pan-territorial ideal.” The pan-territorial ideal materialized in 1930 with the opening of the Shubenacadie Residential School in the Maritimes, the system's final frontier. It was envisioned, forged and secured, in part, with the overt understanding that so called Indian education could be used as a vector of violence to control Indigenous peoples and their lands. This history clashes with dominant narratives that interpret residential school system violence as the product of mismanagement and neglect. From the early days of Confederation to its almost full legal autonomy from Britain in the early twentieth century and beyond, the Dominion's pursuit of the pan-territorial vision involved the selective harnessing of the residential school system as a field of state-sanctioned force to quell Indigenous resistance. In this, residential school violence cannot be reduced to a deviation from the norm. In crucial respects, it was an inherent feature of the system and Canadian modern statehood itself.

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media by Marit Grøtta

Reviewed by: Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media by Marit Grøtta Aimée Boutin Marit Grøtta. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 216 pp. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics invites us to look back at Charles Baudelaire’s writings through the specificity and historicity of new technologies of vision rather than with the naked eye alone. Norwegian scholar Marit Grøtta argues that Baudelaire was not only taken with the cult of images of his era; rather, he reflected on the act of “seeing, framing, and interpreting [End Page 143] images” and responded to a new perceptual regime (8). The book analyses a thought-provoking combination of media—ranging from newspapers and photographs to optical toys and pre-cinematic devices, such as the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, the stereoscope, the panorama, and the phantasmagoria—to study similarities between Baudelaire’s encounters with different media and assess how media played a role in shaping his idea of modernity. The eye-catching cover design by Eleanor Rose based on a phenakistiscope disk does an excellent job of conveying the significance of media and movement to this study. In her Introduction, Grøtta carefully builds a solid theoretical framework one block at a time. The entire book is clearly argued and logically presented. In line with the recent upswing in interest in Le Spleen de Paris, Grøtta’s analysis focuses on the prose poems rather than Les Fleurs du mal. As a work of visual studies, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics builds on the scholarship of Tom Gunning and Jonathan Crary for whom “the gaze of the flâneur” signaled in the book’s subtitle is a shorthand for the mediated gaze of the mobile spectator of the big modern city. The argument’s two main anchors are Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, who provide the essential theoretical tools to build on the four main concepts Grøtta deploys: movement, montage, mediation, and play. The first chapter focuses on newspapers, which are laid out using the principle of montage, and require a new kind of reader equipped to deal with fragmentation and speed. Newspapers shape visual experience, thus producing a new kind of visibility (33). Chapter one builds on critical discourse on nineteenth-century French literature and the press, and more specifically on Baudelaire’s relationship to the newspaper to argue that the poet’s vision of urban life was mediated through the newspaper. The combination of anecdote and allegory in his poems also creates tension between different modes of reading that suggest the influence of the newspaper on his aesthetics (39). The second chapter on photographs takes a fresh path down a well-traveled road in Baudelairean studies; most recently Françoise Meltzer in Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, 2011) and Tim Raser in Baudelaire and Photography: Finding the Painter of Modern Life (Legenda 2015) have written about the poet and art critic’s visual aesthetic and his condemnation of photography in the Salon de 1859. Though well known, Baudelaire’s attack on photography does not tell the whole story; chapter two reconsiders the use of photographic images in three prose poems (“Les Fenêtres,” “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” and “Le Joueur généreux”) that draw [End Page 144] on the camera’s gaze and framing. Grøtta examines the framed view in “Les Fenêtres” in terms of the “dispositive” of photograph and caption, meaning that she reads the “window-image” of the woman in “Les Fenêtres” and the poet’s writings or literalization of the image as corresponding to a photograph and its caption. After an analysis of the violence of photography in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” Grøtta turns her attention to the traffic in souls as trade or circulation in/of images and carte de visite photography in “Le Joueur généreux.” As a “poet in the age of technological reproducibility” (71), Baudelaire is interested not only in photography’s ability to arrest images but also to put them into circulation. In this way, argues Grøtta, Baudelaire “battle[s] the passive consumption of images encouraged by the...

Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tret’iakov to Prigov

AbstractThis essay examines Sergei Tret’iakov’s and Dmitrii Prigov’s turn to the newspaper in their search for a symbolic form adequate to the geopolitical flux at the beginning and endpoints of Soviet history. Fusing the epic and the sublime with the modernist montage principle, both present the newspaper as embodying simultaneously totalizing and disintegrative imaginings of space. Reflecting his avant-gardist and statist commitments, Tret’iakov’s newspaper-epic andocherkjournalism figure the tension between socialist internationalism and socialism in one country and between federal and centralist models of the state. Prigov’s newspaper art embodies the contrary pressures of resurgent nationalisms and globalization in perestroika-era and post-Soviet Russia. Having linked the decline of print culture to the Soviet Union’s demise, Prigov addresses the return of an imperial Russian spatial imaginary by highlighting how the tension between spatial boundlessness and totality in the print newspaper anticipates and complicates the information sublime of the digital age.

Preface. Montage principle and the semiotics of culture

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From stage to brain: Montage as a new principle of scientific narrative

German Dadaists, Italian and Russian Futurists and Constructivists created in their experiments multi-medial orthopedic bodies as products of collage and montage. Sergei Eisenstein, who was influenced by these experiments, organized his theatrical productions as a chain of independent fragments capable of entering any possible combination/recombination and labelled this method “montage of attractions”. He used the same montage principle not only for a new theatrical or cinematic narrative but also to conceptualize the expressive movement of the theatrical or cinematic body created on stage and on screen. Finally he conceptualized montage not only as a means of conveying movement, but also of conveying a way of thinking. This inspired him to create a new form of scientific narrative in his two unfinished books. The subject to be analysed in the first book from 1929 – montage – inspired him to look for a new structure by organizing different texts in the form of a sphere. This form defined the method of writing his second project on the theory of the arts as a hypertext. Eisenstein gave this book the title Method (1932–1948).

Montage in Russian Imaginism: Poetry, theatre and theory

The article discusses the concept of montage as used by the Russian Imaginist poetic group: the montage principle in their poetry, theoretical writings and theatre articles. The leading Imaginist figures Vadim Shershenevich and Anatolij Mariengof were active both in theorizing and practising montage in their oeuvre at the beginning of the 1920s. Shershenevich’s application of the principle in poetry was called “image catalogue”, a radical poetic experiment in the spirit of both Walt Whitman and Sergei Eisenstein. Mariengof ’s main contribution to the montage poetics was his first fictional novel The Cynics (1928). The article also discusses the Imaginists’ writings on the essence of theatre as an autonomous art form – Shershenevich’s actitivy in the OGT (Experimental Heroic Theatre) and Mariengof ’s participation in the work of the MKT (Moscow Kamerny Theatre).

Starry Skies and Frozen Lakes: Alexander Kluge's Digital Constellations

Since its beginnings in cinema and literature, the work of Alexander Kluge has manifested itself in increasingly diverse formats and media environments, including television and, more recently, the digital realm. Kluge’s cinematic debut was the 1960 Brutality in Stone (Brutalitat in Stein), co-directed with Peter Schamoni, the first in an extended sequence of short films, most of them executed according to a montage principle in which documentary segments are juxtaposed with static visual material (including illustrations and printed pages) in combination with often asynchronous sound samples and commenting voice-overs. Subsequently, Kluge also began to experiment with longer durat ions in his cinematic work, start ing with Yesterday Girl (Abschied von Gestern) of 1965, in which he introduced acted sequences that can be read as nuclei for potential filmic plots, though these often unfold only in a fragmented manner. These elements are interspersed with fields of onscreen lettering. Reminiscent of silent film’s intertitles, these written-word screen projections provide commentary and punctuation, and have become a visual trademark of his work. Like his films, Kluge’s literary texts emerge from an aesthetic commitment to brevity. His 1962 short-story collection Lebenslaufe (Case Histories) was the first in what has become a sequence of volumes constructed out of brief core components and presented in sequential, non-narrative order. Kluge’s subsequent literary works include the 2007 Geschichten vom Kino (Cinema Stories), his chronicle of both the history of cinema and his own history as a filmmaker; and the slender volume Dezember (2010), a collaboration with the artist Gerhard Richter, whose photographs of the snowed-in woods surrounding the Swiss Alpine resort town of Sils Maria are juxtaposed with Klugean tales

L’ontologia del cinema negli scritti di S.M. Ejsenštejn

Although Ejzenštejn never writes about the ontology of cinema as such, the fundamental traits of such an ontology may be reconstructed by analysing some of the recurrent ideas that reappear throughout his large body of writings, from the essays on montage written during the 1920s, to the unfinished book projects of Metod (1932-48), Montage (1937), Nonindifferent Nature (1945-47), all the way up to the still unpublished notes for a General History of Cinema which he wrote in 1947-48. Throughout these writings cinema emerges as a medium based on montage whose goal is that of activating, emotionally and intellectually, the spectator. In order to pursue this goal, all the elements of the cinematic dispositif may be modified, and the most effective forms of montage disseminated throughout the history of the arts have to be located, analyzed, and taken as examples for the cinema of the future. Cinema thus emerges as a medium which is at the same time unstable (since its features may be modified at will) and diffused (since the principle of montage does not constitute its medium specificity but is rather a principle which manifests itself throughout the entire spectrum of media).