Montage
as a Radical Ethical Act: Revolutionary Film-making from Eisenstein
to Anakiev
(Journal
of Creative Geography)
Stuart
C. Aitken
Department
of Geography
San
Diego State University
Over
twenty years ago I wrote an essay that focused on montage as it is
contextualized in what I called
the image-event of film. Within this context, I defined these events
as “images in motion over
time through space with sequence” and produced an elaborate diagram
to illustrate the process (Aitken
1991, 109). As a prosaic film technique, one of the primary intents
of sequencing image events
through montage is to condense space and time in particular ways –
usually in short bursts – that
leave an audience with an abridged but understandable narrative.
Alternatively, as an extraordinary film technique, I wrote about
image-events as creative processes where certain images when
juxtaposed with others heighten awareness as a precursor to
transformation and change; I was concerned about how montage shocked
audiences into new realities. This was the original intent of Russian
filmmaker, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who pioneered montage as a
"collision" of shots used to manipulate emotions
(Eisenstein 1949).
He believed that an idea should be derived from
the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of
collage into film that told a new and different story. Eisenstein
first used montage effectively in the Odessa steps sequence of
Battleship Potemkin (1925) where a massacre by Tsarist troops is
portrayed through a juxtaposition of images of neatly ordered
soldiers firing repeated volleys of shots at the top of the stairs,
Cossacks charging the crowd at the bottom of the stairs and, on the
stairs themselves the montage jumps from an old woman wearing
glasses, a young student, a schoolgirl and, famously, a mother who
loses control of the pram containing her baby. The scene comes
together to leave the audience with feelings about the undeniable
brutality of the imperial Tsarist regime. This, I think, is the power
of montage: it can take us beyond the mundane to an intense emotional
and political engagement.
Run-of-the-mill
filmmakers use the technique to abridge and condense narrative. Good
filmmakers use
it to engage audiences and shake them out of their sensibilities. Gilles
Deleuze (1986, ix) suggests that movies grab us because they present
preverbal intelligible content,
which is not about any kind of existential or psychoanalytic lack or
repressed desire but, rather,
is about desire that is always positive. This takes Eisenstein in a
different direction, because not
only does it remove us from the bind of desire as a hole or lack we
try to fill, but it positions us as
active and positive in the creation of our own identities. Well,
almost. Thankfully, Deleuze does not
fall into the neo-liberal trap of burdening us with complete
responsibility for our desires. He acknowledges
that there is also something distinguishable from us (perhaps
external but integrally tied
to who we are) that affects our desires (It is Lacan’s big Other,
Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle,
Fred Jameson’s political unconscious, or whatever you want to call
it). Here’s how Deleuze
characterizes the internal/external processes interwoven through
image-events: movementimages are comprised simultaneously of a
perception-image that moves us from indistinguished knowledge at the
periphery of our universe to a central subject position, and an
action-image that is about our perception of things at the center of
our universe and grasping the ‘virtual action’ of those things.
Concurrently, there is the affection-image that “surges in the
center of indetermination” between our perceptions and our actions
(Deleuze 1986, 65). This is very much what Eisenstein had in mind
when he talked about montage as a dialectical process. It is also
precisely about the spatiality of montage; it is an affect that
alludes to the “motion part of emotion that sloshes back and forth
between perception and action” (Aitken 2006, 494). The effect of
montage, then, points to an intensity that exceeds representation,
but is also about shocking us into action. Montage, when done well,
is more than just about condensing a series of images to proffer
information efficiently.
As
I sit in the movie theatre I want to be moved; I want to understand
bodily and viscerally in ways that
do more that suspend my disbelief, I want them to take me to new
revolutionary places. I want the
images speak to my poetic soul, and to the activist part of me that
desires change in the form of radical
ethical acts.
Eisenstein
was working his magic with montage in the post-revolutionary
communist Soviet Union. Dimitar
Anakiev is a Serbian-born film-maker working in post-independence
democratic Slovenia.
Both
filmmakers are revolutionary in their politics and film practices.
Amongst Anakiev’s films are three
documentaries that portray the plight of the 25,671 people (including
5,600 children) who were
officially erased from Slovenia’s permanent residents’ register
and, as a consequence, lost basic human rights to health-care, education, housing and so forth. As a
Slovenian of Serbian descent
Anakiev was erased as part of the 1990s purge. Rubbed Out (2004) and
Citizen A.T. (2010) tell
the story of activist Aleksandar Todorović and other activist
members of the Association of Erased
Residents. Slovenia, My Homeland (2012) focuses on Irfan and Nisveta,
who suffered horrendous
abuses and privations during their erasure. Slovenia, My Homeland
(2012) begins with a
scene from Bled, an iconic picture-postcard lake in the Julien Alps
used for touting Slovenia’s beauty,
and a choir singing “Gloria in Excellus Dio.” The scene then
switches to a ramshackled room
where an American filmmaker is interviewing Irfan and Nisveta as they
describe some of the abuses
they suffered with erasure. Later, in a particularly poignant scene,
Anakiev’s camera bounces
between Irfan and Nisveta who are now in their respective apartments
talking about the joy of
their youth in Tito’s Yugoslavia and how their families were torn
apart by the erasure. With each corresponding
shot the camera pans in until we are focused on Irfan and Nisveta’s
eyes. The whole movie
is a powerful montage between state violence, erased people’s
plight, official ambivalence, the
destruction of youthful dreams and families torn apart. We are opened
to Irfan’s joy in memories
of youth when he was part of Yugoslavia’s Youth Work Brigade;
Nisveta’s strength is seen
as emanating from her Islamic faith and anger at being unable to
return to Bosnia for her mother’s
funeral. There is juxtaposition with the resilience of erased people
and their willingness to organize
politically and fight back. The final, powerful juxtaposition comes
at the end of the film when
we realize that Nisveta is one of the Catholic choir-members singing
“Gloria in Excellus Dio.”
Her ability to transcend religious differences between her Muslim
culture and the Catholic choir
are in sharp contrasted to the state violence against difference in
the “ethnic cleaning” (to quote
Todorović) of erasure.
As
part of my embeddedness in Slovenia these last six months I’ve been
talking to erased children and
their families, as well as to filmmakers like Anakiev. I’ve also
read everything by Slavoj Žižek that
I can get my hands on; a tough task given that he writes faster than
I read. Žižek (2014) latest tome
is about events and transition, which speaks in some ways to the
power of montage. He writes that
“an event is [about] the effect that seems to exceed its causes –
and the space of an event is that which
opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes”
(2014, location 63 of 2411). In this
book, as elsewhere, Žižek is indebted to Deleuze. He also points
out that there is something miraculous
about events in terms of the ways they disturb the sensible (“the
pure flow of (non)sense”
(2014, location 96 of 2411)) and this is where he gets to political
ruptures and radical ethical
acts. Radical ethics are elaborated best by Žižek’s (2010, 326)
Marxist focus on the “base” of
freedom that disrupts “a traditional ethic of common sense and
common decency among ordinary people,”
As a neo-Lacanianist, Žižek wants to find ways to topple the big
Other. He argues that this
is only possible when there is simultaneously change from within that
also changes “ensuing and
pursuant external forces through un passage à l’acte” (Žižek
2010, 326) that radical transforms the
subject and all her contexts.
By
moving from despair to hope through activism, Nisveta, Irfan and
other erased people radically transform
themselves and those around them; last week (March 15, 2014) the
European Court found in
favor of the Slovenian government paying reparations to erased people
who had filed suite, opening
the door for more reparations and reconciliations. As an erased
person, Anakiev’s radical ethical
act was to give up practicing medicine to become a film-maker. He
helped educate a generation
of Slovenians through powerful films that juxtaposed the actions of
politicians and rightwing nationals with the day-to-day privations of
erased people. His use of montage reflects Eisenstein’s
revolutionary dialectics and, ironically, Anakiev’s film practices
raise awareness of the brutal
imperialism that is sometimes embedded in what we have come to think
of as democracy.
Aitken,
Stuart C. (1991). A Transactional Geography of the Image-Event: The
Films of Scottish
Director, Bill Forsyth. Transactions, Institute of British
Geographers. New Series. Vol.
16 (1), 105-118.
Aitken,
Stuart C. (2006). Leading Men to Violence and Creating Spaces for
their Emotions. Gender,
Place and Culture. 13 (5), 491-507.
Deleuze,
Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image. Translated by Hugh
Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press.
Eisenstein,
Sergei (1949) A Dialectical Approach to Film From. Essay in Film
Form. New York. Accessed March 16, 2014.
http://interactive2.usc.edu/blog-old/wpcontent/ uploads/2010/08/Film_Form.pdf
Žižek,
Slavoj (2010). Living in the End Times London and New York: Verso.
Žižek,
Slavoj (2014). Event: Philosophy in Transit. New York: Penguin Books
(Kindle
version).
