The contemporary validity of this idea, or more accurately, IDEAS, is relevant to a contemporary artwork, in the context of an information environment that includes social media and use of the internet today. The value in this version of "montage theory" is that the work, cinema in the Soviet context, was designed for a quality of audience participation and involvement, generated through modes of presentation, rather than re-presentation of whatever the content of the message might be.
Today, an art project that "presents" rather than "represents", relies heavily on understanding how audiences are involved in processes of interpretation. In particular, it is the search for ways of "enabling" audiences to identify patterns in the "blizzard of information" we encounter in our "searching". Searching is what we must do. Each search engine creates its own geography, now, more than ever, tied to advertising revenues, so the artistic imperative is to generate a counter geography, a creative geography, "bringing things together" to "reveal the patterns and lines of force", and "affecting" our experience and our understandings of the wider world. In other words, our ideologies.
Lev Kuleshov's work is largely considered the basis from which all montage theory is derived.
The Kuleshov Group, composed of Kuleshov and his students, set out to determine the essence of cinema. Rote repetition of the components of the cinema plagued their initial findings: competent acting, provocative lighting and elaborate scenery were not intrinsic to the filmic form. In a study of two films- "an American and a comparable Russian one"- the group identified the American film as extraordinary given the short average shot time. They then inferred that the American organization of shots was perceptually appealing to audiences.
Lengthy shots, as seen in the Russian film, make the task of mentally interpreting a pattern difficult.In an essay published in Vestnik Kinematografii in 1916, Kuleshov first coined the term montage to explain the phenomena of shot succession.
In an experiment, Kuleshov combined independent shots of Ivan Mosjoukine, a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a woman on a sofa. The strategic ordering of the shots had a marked effect on audience interpretation of the Mosjoukine's neutral expression. This experiment demonstrated cinema's unique capacity as an art form to conjure specific reactions from the relationship between indexical images. It further demonstrated that montage is dialectical in nature, and that the synthesis of images creates unique political meanings.
A three ring circus is better than one!
Future Web Trends
Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man
Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (На всякого мудреца довольно простоты) is a five-act comedy by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The play offers a satirical treatment of bigotry and charts the rise of a double-dealer who manipulates other people's vanities. It is Ostrovsky's best-known comedy in the West.
The Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski (left) as General Krutitski and Vasili Kachalov (right) in a production of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's (Александр Николаевич Островский) Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (На всякого мудреца довольно простоты) at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1910.
While the seminal Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky directed the play with his Moscow Art Theatre in 1910, it is the production of the play in the most significant of the early theatre work of the Russian Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein, that introduces a theory and practice that Eisenstein called;
"the montage of attractions."
The playwright Sergei Tretyakov transformed Ostrovsky's text into a revue, which was entitled Wiseman, and tested Eisenstein and Tretyakov's experimental approach, an approach that was part of the Russian avant-garde Futurist movement known as "Eccentricism," and which sought the "circusisation" of the theatre.
In celebration of the centennial of Ostrovsky's birth, the production opened in April 1923, staged by the First Workers' Theatre of the Prolekult in its theatre in an ornate mansion on Vozdvizhenka Street. Eisenstein drew on popular theatre techniques such as farce and the commedia dell'arte in his staging, which sought to make every metaphor concrete and physical; he wrote:
“A gesture turns into gymnastics, rage is expressed through a somersault, exaltation through a salto-mortale, lyricism by a run along a tightrope. The grotesque of this style permitted leaps from one type of expression to another, as well as unexpected intertwinings of the two expressions.”
A screening of Eisenstein's first film, entitled Glumov's Diary, concluded the performance.
Writing in 1928, Eisenstein explained that he had aimed "to achieve a revolutionary modernization of Ostrovsky, i.e., a social re-evaluation of his characters, seeing them as they might appear today."
Clowns and clowning
It is a farcical and parodist adaptation of Ostrovsky’s 19th Century play which goes by the same name. (Some people at the time thought this to be a politically dangerous move). It juxtaposes images in order to have a subversive effect. For example, attraction 13 reads:
13. A general dance. Business with a placard: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” [When he has finished his song, the mullah dances a lezghinka, in which he takes all of the parts. The mullah picks up the plank on which he was sitting: On the back is the inscription: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The mullah goes out holding the plank in his hand.] We can see here that he is juxtaposing several images and motifs- Marx’s famous statement from The German Ideology, the dance from Caucasus named the ‘lezghinka’ and a mullah. It uses the characters from Ostrovsky’s play, but he changes the names. Thus: ‘Mamaev became Pavel Mamilyubov-Proliving (satyrizing Pavel Milyukov, Foreign Minister in the Provisioanl Government), who emigrated at the time of the Revoluition); Kruititsky was transformed into General Jofre, Marshal of France and commander-in-chief of French forces until 1916; Mashenka turned into a woman stock broker, Mary Mac-Lac; Gorodulin became Goredulin, a Fascist; Kurchaev expanded into trhee husars; Glumov was George the clown at one and the same time; and the clown in the red wig, who first appeared in the prologue. Two other woman’s parts – Manyfa and Turusina – were played by men, and all the servants were played by one actor. Strictly circus charcters were also added such as the uniformed attendants and “the act in the ring.”’
Golutvin was also portrayed as an NEP-Man, so we can see how Eisenstein is being playful with the material in order to suit the ideological ends that he aims to achieve.
In Eisenstein’s version of The Wiseman all metaphors become physical gestures expressed by clowns, so for instance a feeling of joy would have been expressed in a somersault. Logical dramatic technique is also undermined by humour-the attempted suicide towards the end of the prologue is replaced by clowns parodying the act of trying to take one’s own life - attraction 22 reads: “Clowns parody the hero’s attempt and cascade from the wire.”
Samuel O'Connor Perks (see below)
In a presentation on Eisenstein's Essay 'Montage of Attractions' in the Soviet journal LEF in May, 1923, Samuel O'Connor Perks says:
He writes that this work was the first work to use the technique of agit based upon his concept of a Montage of Attractions.
The concept of Montage of Attractions has several features….
Firstly, “The spectator himself constitutes the basic material of the theatre.” (pp. 78) We can see Meyerhold’s influence on Eisenstein here. The success of a production depends upon its ability to affect the audience, and for Eisenstein, this will be both intellectual and physiological.
Another feature of Montage of Attractions is that it is an aggressive aspect of the theatre. I think that this passage merits being quoted in full as it leans towards the essence of what Eisenstein is getting at in this piece of writing:
An Attraction (in relation to the theatre) is any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is, any element of the theatre that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks which, when placed in their proper sequence within the totality of the production, become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated – the ultimate ideological conclusion. (The means of cognition –“ through the living play of the passions” – apply specifically to the theatre.)
(pp. 78)
He then goes on to outline and describe in an elliptical manner the types of images that could be employed to achieve such an effect on the viewer, such as “gouging out eyes or cutting off arms and legs on the stage”. It is here that we can notice an aspect of the theatre which would later be taken up and expanded on by the French theatre theorist Antonin Artaud- namely, what would become the Theatre of Cruelty (Eisenstein actually cites the Grand Guignol theatre which is discussed at length in The Theatre and its Double.
He continues . . .
The Montage of Attractions, by focussing on the effect it can have on the audience, destroys the aesthetic (and anaesthetic) illusion that the spectacle can have on an audience (he writes “an attraction has nothing in common with a trick”) in order to awaken the audience from their dogmatic ideological slumber.
In dismantling the metaphysical barrier between spectacle and audience, Eisenstein aims at changing the role art has in society- that being, for Art to have a direct influence on man and society. This radically new approach is for Eisenstein, a way of freeing the theatre from the logical rigidity of mimetic theatre which merely portrays events without a critical slant. The space that is freed up under this understanding of the theatre, is an interweaving of representational segments- each part expressing the thematic whole. (In this way the drama is not limited by what Deleuze baptizes the “movement image”, thus a space for the “time-image” opens up. The time image understood unambiguously is that it doesn’t adhere to the classical understanding of time- i.e that it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end) It is in the space of the in-between that has an effect on the audience that interrupts the “definitive and inevitable” identity of representational theatre in order to affect the audience. This approach also allows for multiple interpretations of the work as the sole basis of the work does not lie in “the correct interpretation of the author”, but in immanent effective attractions.
Eisenstein cites his own production The Wiseman in the essay.
In his later writings, Eisenstein argues that montage, especially intellectual montage, is an alternative system to continuity editing. He argued that "Montage is conflict" (dialectical) where new ideas, emerge from the collision of the montage sequence (synthesis) and where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of the edited sequence. A new concept explodes into being. His understanding of montage, thus, illustrates Marxist dialectics.
Testing the theory
The Kuleshov effect has only been studied by psychologists in recent years. Prince and Hensley (1992) recreated the original study design but did not find the alleged effect. The study had 137 participants but was a single-trial between-subject experiment, which is prone to noise in the data. [1] Mobbs et al. (2006) did a within-subject fMRI study and found an effect for negative, positive, or neutral valence. When a neutral face was shown behind a sad scene, it seemed sad, when it was shown behind a happy scene it seemed happy.[2] More recently, Barratt, Rédei, Innes-Ker, and van de Weijer (2016) tested 36 participants using 24 film sequences across five emotional conditions (happiness, sadness, hunger, fear, and desire) and a neutral control condition. Again, they were able to show that neutral faces were rated in accordance with the stimuli material, confirming Mobbs et al. (2006) findings.[3]
Thus, despite the initial problems in testing the Kuleshov effect experimentally, researchers now agree that the context in which a face is shown has a significant effect on how the face is perceived.
To find out whether the Kuleshov effect can also be induced auditorily, Baranowski and Hecht intercut different clips of faces with neutral scenes, featuring either happy music, sad music, or no music at all. They found that the music significantly influenced participants’ emotional judgments of facial expression.[4]
1. Prince, S., & Hensley, W.E. (1992). "The Kuleshov effect: Recreating the classic experiment". Cinema Journal, 31, 59–75.
2. Mobbs, D., Weiskopf, N., Lau, H., Featherstone, E., Dolan, R., & Frith, C. (2006). "The Kuleshov Effect: The influence of contextual framing on emotional attributions". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 95–106.
3. Barratt, D., Rédei, A.C., Innes-Ker, A., & van de Weijer, J. (2016). "Does the Kuleshov effect really exist? Revisiting a classic film experiment on facial expressions and emotional contexts". Perception, 45, 847–874.
4. Baranowski, A.M., & Hecht, H. (2016). "The auditory Kuleshov effect: Multisensory integration in movie editing". Perception, 0(0), 1–8
Creative geography, or artificial landscape, is a film making technique invented by the early Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov sometime around the 1920s. It is a subset of montage, in which multiple segments shot at various locations and/or times are edited together such that they appear to all occur in a continuous place at a continuous time.
An example of creative geography occurred in the film Just a Gigolo in a dialogue scene featuring the characters played by David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich.
Bowie and Dietrich actually filmed their respective parts separately, in two different rooms months apart: editing and shot-matching were employed in an attempt to convince the audience that these two people were in the same room at the same time. At one point, Dietrich's character gives a memento to Bowie's character: to achieve this, she handed the prop to an "extra actor", who then walked out of frame. In a separate shot, a different "extra actor" (playing the same person) walked into frame and gave the prop to Bowie.
A logistic problem?
This particular need for a "creative geography" was due to the reluctance of Marlene Dietrich to travel from Paris to Berlin where most of the filming was taking place. So, a series of edits in film successfully connects two places, and creates the illusion that it is one place via (by way of) the impression of spatial continuity achieved in the apparent handing of the "gift" by Dietrich to one actor in one place, and another actor, in another place, handing the gift to Bowie.
How does this work? Why does it work? Is it because we are used to "wooden" performances, and "stilted" cinema, in other words, the method of continuity editing.
Creative geography and LODE 1992
A logistic gift?
The logistic constraints of LODE, and the journeys, and the places identified as locations for the creation of the 22 LODE cargoes, were unpredictable. Things happen along the way. Decisions are taken. Suggestions are made. Conversations happen too. All the while it is the LODE Line and its fuzzy logic, the zones it presents, that sets out "the way". Along the way, moments are captured in text and on film. The LODE way is a form of landscape art that works with the differences, emphasizing possible resonances, and resonances come out difference, not similarity.
The creative geography of LODE and Re:LODE is to show different places as connected in space and across time.
For Re:LODE 2017 and for Re:LODE Radio the potential provided by streaming video and the internet allows for the 'showing' of places along the line in a context of 'exchanges' taking place along the line and within the LODE zones.
Examples of this can be found on the The Camera as Actor - Screen as Placemaker page.
Discontinuity and the 30 degree rule
In an editing process applied to film or video, the apposition of one scene with another is usually experienced as being, quite simply, one scene followed by another. The general assumption will be that what is happening is a system where 'continuity' applies, and one scene, be it a long or a short take, has a 'continuous' relation to the next scene, and followed by another, as part of a narrative and structure relating to times and spaces. Where one space is clearly different to the preceding space, then there is an 'idea' that a translation in space and/or time has taken place, but the transition is experienced and interpreted as relating to the narrative structure. A question may arise: why are we looking at this different scene? but in editing, and looking, the answer, both for author and audience, will be swiftly, and usually unconsciously, created to maintain this primary sense of connection and continuity.
The 30 degree rule is a convention that reinforces this sense of connection and continuity. The 30-degree rule is a basic film editing guideline that states the camera should move at least 30 degrees relative to the subject between successive shots of the same subject. If the camera moves less than 30 degrees, the transition between shots can look like a jump cut—which could jar the audience and take them out of the story.
The audience might focus on the film technique rather than the narrative itself.
A jump cut is a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly if at all. This type of edit gives the effect of jumping forwards in time. It is a manipulation of temporal space using the duration of a single shot, and fracturing the duration to move the audience ahead. For this reason, jump cuts, while not seen as inherently bad, are considered a violation of classical continuity editing, which aims to give the appearance of continuous time and space in the story-world by de-emphasizing editing. Jump cuts, in contrast, draw attention to the constructed nature of the film.
Dziga Vertov's avant-garde Russian film Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is almost entirely composed of jump cuts. Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard (at the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s.
In Godard's ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible (see image) in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized and its jarring effect deliberate. In the screen shots to the right, the first image comes from the very end of one shot and the second is the very beginning of the next shot—thus emphasizing the gap in action between the two (when Seberg picked up the mirror).
Sir John Mandeville's trip to the library
Sir John Mandeville is the supposed author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a travel memoir which first circulated between 1357 and 1371. The earliest surviving text is in French.
By aid of translations into many other languages, the work acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference—Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Travels.
The blurb on the back cover of this Penguin Classic of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, translated with an Introduction by C.W.R.D.Moseley begins with this sentence:
It is still disputed how far Sir John Mandeville actually travelled; indeed, one critic has remarked brusquely that his longest journey appears to have been to the nearest library.
In the Introduction C.W.R.D.Moseley says: "But two factors have severely damaged Mandeville's credit. First, since the European voyages of discovery, we have a completely different picture of the world and no longer accept the stories of monsters and marvels that descended to the medieval mind from Pliny, Aethicus, Solinus and Herodotus. If Mandeville reported them, then he was a liar. But this is not an entirely valid argument; for what you see (and can write about) depends to a large extent on the conceptual and methodological structure you have in your mind . . ."
"The second factor is the convincing demonstration of Mandeville's vast dependence on a large number of earlier accounts of the East. This has led one critic to say roundly that Mandeville's longest journey was to the nearest library. But this again is far from conclusive. The medieval convention - not only accepted but admired - of reworking 'olde feeldes' for 'newe corne', olde bokes' for 'newe science', the reliance on auctoritas, would make a book that did not only rely on others unusual in the extreme. Plagiarism is a charge beside the point; borrowing is an accepted artistic norm."
"If this man did not travel at all, our opinion of his literary ability must be the higher: his book conveys a superbly coherent illusion of a speaking voice talking of first hand experience, even to the important (and often amusing) disclaimers when he is unable to tell us of something: 'Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I have not been there; and that I regret' (p. 184). The irony is that the more one questions Mandeville's truthfulness, the higher one has to rate his literary artistry."
"The journey narrative has the great advantage of being inclusive of many diverse elements (a quality beloved of the medieval mind) and provides a basic structuring for the material against a landscape (in the first half of the book at least) geographically and politically recognizable to fourteenth century eyes."
"The language and form are accessible to a wide audience, and thus provide an ideal medium for a haute vulgarisation of authoritative 'geographical' thought. Mandeville was a serious writer, taking his matter from sources he believed (generally correctly) to be accurate; his book was as accurate and up to date an account of knowledge of the world as he knew how to make it.He deliberately draws together - remember the medieval delight in the summa and the compendium - material of very different kinds that could not so readily be found elsewhere; but unlike the compendium writer - for example Vincent of Beauvais, whose Speculum Naturale and Speculum Historiale he used - he does not compile."
"One of his most remarkable and interesting achievements is to have synthesized so many sources so that the joins do not show."Making sure that all the joins show!
For LODE and Re:LODE, as far as the conceptual and methodological approach is concerned, there are several overlaps with this medieval 'geography', for example:
- Of "reworking 'olde feeldes' for 'newe corne', olde bokes' for 'newe science', the reliance on auctoritas", as well as relying on contemporary and everyday voices.
- A trajectory, rather than journey narrative, but like the journey narrative "has the great advantage of being inclusive of many diverse elements" and provides a basic structuring for the material against a landscape geographically and politically recognizable to audiences.
- "The language and form are accessible to a wide audience."
- Taking matter from sources believed to be accurate.
Making sure the joins show!It is multiple juxtapositions that enable, evoke, a view of 'elsewheres', and stimulate a sense of difference, resonance, and, above all, a waking consciousness of a global connectedness emerging out of diverse and multiple everyday realities.
Text & Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is more than the addition of one thing to another. The space between things is one where potential links happen and create something new. The way text has and is changing nowadays from the linear and sequentially hyper-visual order probably begins with the electric communication of information on a global scale. Space is abolished! Everywhere and everyone is a centre.
Juxtaposition of juxtapositions
So the use of pages from newspapers, each a mosaic of stories, a text based image, capturing a dateline, was extended to the juxtaposition of these datelines stories in a geographic framework along the space-line rather than a timeline. This is where pattern, or patterns emerge in the context of a "field" where when something is added to the field the whole configuration will change. a note added to a melody brings a new melody into existence. In music, unified field is the 'unity of musical space' created by the free use of melodic material as harmonic material and vice versa.
Travel and conversations
Although a trip to the library is, and can be, very useful in assembling a picture of the world, as we can see with the mysterious Knight Mandeville, there are other methods that are of equal and superior value.
In his lecture series of 1976 at the College de France, Michel Foucault (published in English translation as Society Must be Defended, 2004) talks about using the research tools of the ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ at a local level, but in order to do this, he says the theoretical unity of their discourse needs to be ‘suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatised, theatricalized and so on (Foucault 2004 p. 6) This forms the local character of the critique, a critique that resembles;
a sort of autonomous and non-centralized theoretical production, or in other words, a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity. (Foucault 2004 p. 6)What makes his notion of the critique possible is what he calls the ‘returns of knowledge’.
Beneath the whole thematic of ‘life, not knowledge’, ‘the real, not erudition’, ‘travel not books’, he says; ‘through it and even within it we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, M. 2004 p. 7).Using this term he refers to the historical contents that have been buried or masked in the formal systematizations of knowledge, but have provided him with the wherewithal for his research;
quite simply because historical contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask. (Foucault 2004 p. 7)The critique was then able to reveal these ‘blocks of historical knowledges’ by using the tools of scholarship, but it is ‘the re-appearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible’ (Foucault 2004 p. 8).
A method employed by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi provides a model for a very productive method that involves other people's journeys, conversations, interviews and a critical filtering process, resulting in a montage of the stuff of the world in a book with seventy maps that provided the King of Sicily with the most accurate medieval map for 300 years, and two centuries before Mandeville's travels were possibly garnered mostly from books.
The methods employed in this marvel of human geography is a model for the future work of Re:LODE.
The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands
The Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq (Arabic: نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق, lit. "the book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands"), most often known as the Tabula Rogeriana (lit. "The Book of Roger" in Latin), is a description of the world and world map created by the Arab geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi, in 1154.
Al-Idrisi worked on the commentaries and illustrations of the map for fifteen years at the court of the Norman King Roger II of Sicily, who commissioned the work around 1138.
The book, written in Arabic, is divided into seven climate zones (in keeping with the established Ptolemaic system), each of which is sub-divided into ten sections, and contains maps showing the Eurasian continent in its entirety, but only the northern part of the African continent. The map is oriented with the North at the bottom. It remained the most accurate world map for the next three centuries. The map even shows the source of the Nile. The text incorporates exhaustive descriptions of the physical, cultural, political and socioeconomic conditions of each region and each of the seventy sections has a corresponding map.
To produce the work, al-Idrisi interviewed experienced travelers individually and in groups on their knowledge of the world and compiled "only that part... on which there was complete agreement and seemed credible, excluding what was contradictory." Roger II had his map engraved on a silver disc weighing about 300 pounds. It showed, in al-Idrisi's words, "the seven climatic regions, with their respective countries and districts, coasts and lands, gulfs and seas, watercourses and river mouths."
Al-Idrisi settled in Palermo, Sicily, at the tolerant and enlightened court of the Norman king Roger II of Sicily, where he was charged with the production of a book on geography. It was to contain all available data on the location and climate of the world’s main centers of population. King Roger himself enthusiastically interviewed travelers passing through his kingdom, and agents and draftsmen were dispatched to gather material—a research process that took some 15 years. In 1154, just a few weeks before the king died, al-Idrisi’s book was finally complete.
Written in Arabic and Latin and accompanied by maps, it presented the world as a sphere. It calculated the circumference to be 37,000 kilometres (22,900 mi) — an error of less than 10 percent — and it hinted at the concept of gravity. Following the classical Greek tradition, al-Idrisi had divided the world into seven climate zones and described each in turn, supported by 70 longitudinal section maps which, when put together, made a rectangular map of the known world. This was complemented by a smaller, circular world map in which the south was drawn at the top and Arabia, being the site of Mecca, was depicted centrally. Al-Idrisi’s book came to be known as Kitab Rujar (Roger’s Book) and the circular world map was engraved onto a silver tablet.
Sadly, both the book and the silver map appear to have been destroyed during civil unrest shortly afterward, in 1160. Thus our understanding today of al-Idrisi’s conclusions is based on an abbreviated version of a second book that he wrote for Roger’s son, William II. Manuscripts of this so-called “Little Idrisi” are held today in a handful of European libraries."
Professor Robert Bartlett examines the extraordinary human geography and medieval map produced at the court of Roger II of Sicily by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, in 1154.
