Montage as a gesture of mediation and education

Abstract

Combining images, comparing and linking them in chains, clusters and texts is a cultural practice that was not invented with digitisation. It dates back to the nineteenth century, when the invention of photography facilitated the task of copying artworks and other cultural material, and putting them in different contexts. Later, with the invention of the moving image, the gesture of montage was developed as an entirely new device of narration and thinking. Alain Bergala refers to this cultural practice when he proposes, in The Cinema Hypothesis, the combination of film clips as a film-pedagogical praxis as well as a research method. This article investigates the theoretical, cultural and practical aspects of this method, in revisiting a wide range of writings by Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, André Malraux and Wsewolod Pudowkin, as well as materials from Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas and the found footage film Why Don’t You Love Me? by Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller (1999). Furthermore, by comparing an extract from Grigris by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (2013) to Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485/6), the didactic potential of this method is explored. The article thus considers the pedagogical, aesthetic, cultural and filmic aspects of the practice of ‘montage’ in its most basic sense: the combination of (audio)visual material.