{"id":25,"date":"2014-09-10T08:11:02","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T08:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/?page_id=25"},"modified":"2014-09-11T09:42:07","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T09:42:07","slug":"cristina-alvarez-lopez-adrian-martin","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/frankfurt-papers\/cristina-alvarez-lopez-adrian-martin\/","title":{"rendered":"CRISTINA \u00c1LVAREZ L\u00d3PEZ & ADRIAN MARTIN"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h2>\n

<\/h2>\n

THE ONE AND THE MANY
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Making Sense of Montage in the Audiovisual Essay<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u00a0[toc]<\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

By Cristina \u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez and Adrian Martin<\/strong><\/p>\n

I.<\/h4>\n

The field of the audiovisual essay, as it exists and grows today, comes in two main forms, with two major tendencies.<\/p>\n

The first tendency is towards what we might call pedagogical demonstration<\/em> \u2013 an enhanced form of the illustrated lecture, using new tools and means. To value and appreciate this form of the audiovisual essay, we believe it is important to place it within an entire, expanded history of film criticism that has navigated between text commentary and quoted\/excerpted audiovision. This history would include: the live, multi-media lecture; film magazine design and layout; audio commentaries on DVD; in-depth television segments devoted to cinema; and much else (see, for instance, the research assembled at the website Kunst der Vermittlung<\/em>: http:\/\/www.kunst-der-vermittlung.de\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The second tendency is more obviously artistic, because it belongs to the history of cinema, video and digital media pieces that make collages from found footage and other sampled material. This is the tradition, very often, of the cine-poem<\/em> \u2013 we call it the sublime<\/em> tradition.<\/p>\n

In an epic such as the Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> series (1988-1998), we find Jean-Luc Godard drawing equally on both of these major traditions, willy-nilly \u2013 to the point that it is hard to tell where demonstration ends and cine-poem begins.<\/p>\n

Where both these forms of the audiovisual essay meet is in the material they use to compose themselves: excerpts or extracts (sometimes very small slices) from pre-existing audiovisual works. Putting those pieces together to form a new work, pedagogical or poetic, is always going to be a matter of montage<\/em>. Montage considered as a charged activity or practice goes well beyond, of course, mere, mechanical editing or simple joining end-to-end. Montage, as we all know (at least in theory!), makes<\/em> meaning, forges connections, creates juxtapositions.<\/p>\n

The Australian artist\/writer Philip Brophy once said something profound about the practice and theory of montage. He asserted, in the course of a public forum on video art, that it does not matter how good a critic you are, how deep a theorist or how extensive a historian of film you may be; unless you have sat down and actually grappled with what it means and what it takes to cut two images and their accompanying sounds together, you will never understand what montage is, or the processes it entails. Cristina and I, as (initially) mainly text-based critics who then started to explore audiovisual montage, can testify: Mr Brophy is absolutely correct on this point.<\/p>\n

What makes two images, or an image and a sound, or two images and two sounds, go together or work together \u2013 what creates the frisson of a montage connection? This is often a mystery \u2013 you can only solve it by doing it, as so many great artists have provisionally solved the mystery for themselves, each and every time, in action. But it is also a vast, endlessly explorable material<\/em> practice with a huge number of variables, some of which we hope to sketch in this text.<\/p>\n

Think of the Big Question in this way: what creates a good match, a good cut, a good connection \u2013 and what results in a bad match, a faux raccord<\/em> or mismatch, not in a limited technical-professional sense of classical editing, but in an extensive aesthetic, rhythmic, emotive, graphic and even political sense? Bound up in this Big Question is another, which we think is germane to all current reflection on the audiovisual essay. Do we want to fuse our array of diverse, sampled elements into a \u2018seamless whole\u2019 (as it is often, tellingly, called) \u2013 or do we want the seams, intervals, gaps and discrepancies to not only be visible, but also play a driving, energetic, formative role in the finished work?<\/p>\n

We find it useful, for the sake of a new reconsideration of audiovisual montage, to mine some terms from the film semiotics of the 1970s. In particular, the twin notions of homogeneity<\/em> (smoothness, fusion, unity) and heterogeneity<\/em> (evident internal difference).<\/p>\n

We take it as axiomatic, from the material, semiotic perspective, that any piece or element of cinema is inherently, irreducibly heterogeneous \u2018at birth\u2019, as it were, in its raw state. (This was also the basis of Paul Willemen\u2019s life-long argument [2008] against critical discernment on the basis of \u2018richness\u2019: any fragment of any film, he protested, is \u2018rich and complex\u2019, precisely because it is heterogeneous!)<\/p>\n

Every element we pluck out has many simultaneous levels, and multiple channels<\/em> or tracks. When we confront any two elements, we are confronting two heterogeneous, internally multiple blocks. Montage means \u2013 and every editor knows this intuitively \u2013 finding which<\/em> channels or tracks across these two pieces can be connected in some way, creating a \u2018through line\u2019, a passage or movement.<\/p>\n

It is as if editing is all about, at heart, finding a means to \u2018turn down the volume\u2019 on some of the channels of a fragment, while simultaneously upping the volume on those that are important for you \u2013 and then forging<\/em> that connection in the cut, making the channel flow on and forward a little more.<\/p>\n

We could propose (somewhat provocatively) that the audiovisual essay, in its current state of evolution, is menaced by two major threats: on one side, too much homogeneity in the montage; and on the other side, too much heterogeneity! Meaning: on the one hand, smoothing things out too much, creating an overly fused, self-enclosed, too perfect object (such as we see often on television); or, on the other hand, having too much chaos and not enough connection \u2013 just bad matches and a lack of generative, productive correspondence between the pieces.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

II.<\/h4>\n

Let us consider a very brief work which offers an intriguing balance of homogeneity and heterogeneity \u2013 something between a good, simple, elegant gag and a radical critique. It is the trailer<\/a>, only 98 seconds long, that Robert Bresson invited Godard to make for his film Mouchette<\/em> in 1967. History does not record Bresson\u2019s reaction to this trailer, but surely he got more than he bargained for.<\/p>\n