Addressed here from Lundemo’s book, is a question of montage in film towards a particular aesthetic work generates inquiries of Sergei Eisenstein’s space/time dynamics within conceptual, material, even retinal “image riddles” or perception of movement during a still shot and how image sequencing is not only “framed” but also how spectator’s involvement “melting together” images towards a “qualitative” shift synthesizing art history’s periods towards a “universal language” where montage is fundamentally similar in structure to consciousness. In a theory of phi phenomenon, cinematic montage, in a complex and sometime contradictory way presents a psychology of perception, as a universal structure or “basic phenomenon.”
A German term “urphanomen” in montage is the juxtaposition of static images as perceived movement and perception between shots. It presents the viewer’s conceptual consciousness to oneself and within the long arc of art history, where artworks “mirror” montage structures. “Existing works of sculpture and architecture serve a ‘potential’ for montage.” Rosalind Krauss compared Eisenstein’s choice to use Rodin’s sculpture’s in his film, October to a “virtual museum.” Walter Benjamin paralleled Eisenstein’s retinal to conceptual shift of montage to set thought into motion. Specifically, the Battleship Potemkin’s “moment of danger” in a historical context shifts what is static visually with what montage “detonates” in the analogy of combustion engine, where the viewer’s perceptions of this photogram in motion is different from the literal moving image. This requires contextualizing a post WWI collective trauma related to iconic human experiences and deep memories absent of specificities to uniquely individual experiences.
In this sense the origin of the word montage, from the Japanese ideography that structures haiku poetics or Kabuki theater represents a spatial extension of the viewer’s conceptual and mental levels which suggests a universal human capacity, structure, and consciousness. In this sense, montage overcomes the division of special/temporal, which we now know as a single condition or phenomenon and informs an underlying aesthetic before the “order” was given. In this sense, art’s highest or deepest capacity to sense, notice, and reveal before science’s “proof” asserts itself again and unifies more than deciphers and discerns differences in film, sculpture, painting and architecture’s shared aesthetic of montage as meta-structure.
- jiyun park, April 8, 2020
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