Eugeni Bonet
A “montage movie” is the more normal expression used in romance languages applied to that kind of motion picture based largely, if not entirely, on pre-existing footage, extracts from archives or some other source, and reused to create a new discourse. I deliberately refer to the word “movie”, as opposed to the more highbrow “film” (preferred by the more conscientious scholars of cinema in the strictest sense), because that definition today has to encompass a series of media, contexts and transfers. Not only amongst those manifestly interconnected, as are cinema, television and video, but also insofar as multimedia systems are concerned, where movie caters for all content that is vehicled by a sequence of moving images, whether it be on a digital disk or through the intangibility of the net. For it is, precisely, that archival cultures and sources have, for many years now, encountered a new extension in those media or metamedia.
In spite of the fact that when referring to montage movie one suggests that a work is basically assembled on the editing bench, rather than through the filming of one’s own images, some languages, foremost amongst which, English, have preferred to apply the concept of compilation film, placing greater emphasis on the idea of collating, hunting down and capturing the suitable material – in certain cases unexpectedly, discovered by chance or by luck – being the essential and preliminary operation to the tasks of cutting, editing and montage. Furthermore, the concept of montage refers to a process that is generally one that is usually common to all film or audiovisual production. Such was the view propounded by the film historian Jan Leyda, author of one of the major reference books on the subject: Films Beget Films: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama.
All in all, the expression montage movie refers us accordingly to the vital contribution of the Soviet filmmakers, who identified the very essence of the white-glove cinematic process of the production of meaning. Editing, the surgery performed on the film, is the technique par excellence of the factory; that allegory of the artistic avant-gardes amidst the clamour of the socialist revolution, between the proclamations of constructivism and productivism. Yet, in addition, it is also within that framework wherein lie the irrefutable origins of a compilation cinema, in the strictest sense of the term, of the renowned experiments in “creative geography” by Lev Kuleshov, the documentary film-poem by Dziga Vertov Three songs about Lenin (1934). Yet if there is one name deserving of special mention then that has to be Esther Shub with her trilogy on the history of Russia from 1896 (when the cinematographer Lumière filmed the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II), comprising The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), The Great Road(1927) and The Russia of Nicolas II and Leo Tolstoy (1928). The work of Shub founded the archival process of cinema insofar as it encompassed the search, identification and restoration of documents that were scattered all over the place and almost forgotten, at the same time as it introduced one of the patterns characterising the genre of compilation: the historical chronicle reconstructed by means of the assembly of images taken from newsreels and reportages. Furthermore, in the first of the films mentioned, which runs from the twilight of the Tsarist regime to the triumph of the 1917 Revolution, this film-maker has also resorted to the private films of the deposed Tsar himself, a privileged forerunner of amateur film making, which become a crucial testimony through the ruse of editing; for example, by juxtaposing the parties and leisure activities of the imperial family with telling scenes of the suffering and oppression of the Russian people.
The standard form of the compilation film is, indeed, the documentary that narrates – the voice-over becomes precisely one of its common features – a subject that is usually historical or biographical, in the guise of information, propaganda or nostalgic memory, resorting to the clips stored in the archives that begin to be instituted with the arrival of the talking pictures. Later on, from the middle of the 20th century, archival and documentary material was in great demand on television; the small screen always hungered for morsels and shreds of reality – content of, relatively, little cost – for the purpose of padding out up their insatiable programme schedules, committed to providing an endless supply to the home screen. A consequence of this home service, further increased by the spread of the domestic video and the multimedia computer, is our ever-increasing familiarity with the public archive of images, depictions, archetypes; the world’s database, well-stocked by the merchandise and scraps from the media factories. Accordingly, it is from its periphery and through critical interaction with the messages and massages of the media that another kind of compilation and archive culture has taken root, with an antagonistic and disassembling slant that has its own prominence and background within the coordinates of alternative media practices.
In order to address this aspect, many years ago I tackled the notion of démontage, in which I encountered a suggestive and clarifying nuance, somewhat akin to the flip-side of the more common practice of editing and its constructive approach, both of the compilation/montage and of its “edifying” connotation. Démontage, however, has a familiar air with other expressions such as deconstruction or the situationists détournement. This notion strikes me as being more productive that another in vogue within the context and jargon of cinema and video where English is the lingua franca, under the term of found footage – which unequivocally conjures up the poetics of the vulgar, episodic, ready-made object found –, and amongst whose major referents it is worth including the tradition of the assemblage in American art (from Joseph Cornell to Bruce Conner), the “dissenting” cinema of the lettrists and SITUATIONISTS in France or British scratch video.
There are various characteristics that distinguish these works, sometimes referred to also as collages, from the montage movie, the archive documentary, in its more common forms. Generally speaking, there is no voice-over (or, if there is one, it cannot be said to be an omniscient commentary or one that literally applies to the images), for neither does it resort to an instructive or educational tone. The preference is for things to find their own expression: through what those images still say, narrate, and through what is contributed by the “twists” of montage, or rather, of démontage, given that what the new work tells us tends to be quite different to the aim of the original material. Use is made indistinctly of a vast range of sources: not only of the treasure trove of newsreels and documentaries, but also of extracts from fiction, “tube” broadcasts, the off-cuts of our civilisation of the image and all kinds of sundry genres: educational, industrial, advertising and pornographic films, amongst others. Finally, the purpose of these disassembling rehashes is not so much concerned with reality as with its simulation; its representation and mediatisation through the public display of the images and their surplus.
Through the confrontation of the apparently antonymous notions of montage and démontage, there are nevertheless a numbdr of singular works and trajectories that might be placed at an intermediate point between the trends referred to beforehand: (1) compilation as a genre traditionally associated with the documentary and to archive collections; (2) the “allegorical deconstruction”, in the words of Benjamin Buchloh, of the collage, the plunder and exploitation of audiovisual debris (that found footage which, more frequently, is obtained by a patient process of search and selection). At this junction of the documentary démontage, the hoarding of one’s own arsenal or archive has often been a prior step and, in various cases, has given rise to long-term projects and even to the implementation of repertoires, stock film libraries and data bases made available to other users. A further and highly characteristic aspect involves challenging the superimposed commentary, affected or illustrative, in its stubborn imposition of a univocal reception or interpretation. Thirdly and finally, given the overabundance of images, their exhumation and relocation become meaningful as a “psychotherapeutic archaeology” of our culture.
Certain works, in order to address reality and history, rid themselves of the discrimination between documentary evidence of the facts and the fantasies surrounding them. In Brother Can You Spare a Dime? (1975), by Philippe Mora, this finds its raison d’être by dealing with a particularly sombre period in the history of North America, from the Depression to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, and its confrontation with the escapist distractions generated at the time by the entertainment business. More starkly, the entire output of Craig Baldwin, torchbearer of a “poor” cinema, employs all kinds of audiovisual detritus (going so far as to filch scenes from feature films through the method of filming the screen during projections in cinemas) in order to expound on the excesses of power and imperialism. In his freely appropriated megamix from the most heterogeneous sources and manifestations of the matter (media images and by-products), Baldwin seeks no other solution of continuity than scatterbrained story-lines, in a way closer to political-fiction and to the conspiracy paranoia of certain works of fiction, both literary and audiovisual, rather than to the true and verified information sought by the documentaries and compilations that he viciously lampoons. Nonetheless, in their own way, many of his works can be seen as surveys on history and on highly-topical issues: RocketKitKongoKit (1986) on the struggles for national liberation in Africa and the outrages committed through American interventionism; Sonic Outlaws (1995) on piracy in music and on anti-copyright sedition; Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) dealing with the control of telecommunications in the electromagnetic sphere.
The Archives Project is the generic name adopted by the group of enterprisers who produced Atomic Café (1982), a film that involved more than five years of trawling through archives for Jayne Loader and the brothers Kevin and Pierce Rafferty; all of whom, together with some other collaborators or associates, have a prominent subsequent trajectory in archive cultures. This film, which soon acquired cult status and became a benchmark for a new understanding of the compilation genre, explores, with manifest irony, the effects of the Cold War climate and nuclear paranoia on the proud countenance of America. Without resorting to what is commonly termed as fiction, in this case there is a juxtaposition between the footage from newsreels and television broadcasts and the terrifying and patriotic diatribes, between the hilarious and the embarrassing, from the crudest propaganda (making use of all kinds of resources: ranging from cartoons to mock documentaries). Insofar as the soundtrack is concerned, the pattern consists of radio broadcasts and popular songs that echo the nuclear hysteria and which, within the more festive approach of popular music, play their part in reinforcing the beneficial effect of sarcasm.
The dusted down images of this film largely correspond to what Richard Prelinger has termed “ephemeral films”, the “bastard genres” of educational, corporate or institutional production, the industrial or promotional documentaries, advertising and propaganda, and the out-takes and leftovers of products in themselves conceived for short-term purposes.
By breathing new life into these treasures of obsolescence – at times of an unexpected visual lyricism, however despicable their motives might have been- the stock compiled by the Prelinger Archives and by Pierce Rafferty, the latter through his company Petrified Films, has been, since the mid-eighties, amongst those most visited by film-makers, video-artists and televisions, in search of further documents on culture and barbarity with less mileage than those of a reality set in newsreels and documentaries, and in repetitive digests, compilations and documentary series. Joel Katz, in Corporation with a Movie Camera (1992) – whose title is an intentional paraphrasing of Man with a Movie Camera by Vertov –, made a particularly mordant use of such sources in his take on US imperialism, specifically on the ravaging of natural and human resources in the third world, with the counterpoint of a vibrant poem by Pablo Neruda condemning violations committed by the United Fruit Company; one of the sources of the petulant corporate cinema resurrected in this work.
Other films have dealt with the information omitted by the media. Emile de Antonio based a large part of his filmography on materials “kidnapped” from the mass media, collating images from the television screen and off-cuts from information selected or manifestly censored, stock that was often obtained surreptitiously and juxtaposed with incisive interviews. A committed and vehement film-maker, De Antonio addressed in this manner the more controversial or sinister figures and issues of US politics in the sixties: the activities of senator Joseph McCarthy (Point of Order, 1963), the assassination of Kennedy (Rush to Judgment, 1967), the Vietnam War (In the Year of the Pig, 1969) or Nixon’s effrontery (Millhouse: a White Comedy, 1972). The work of the Franco-German film-maker Marcel Ophuls shares this ardour, committed to what the documentary film historian Richard M. Barsam has described as “a cinema of truth and justice” , delving into those shameful episodes in history and in the collective memory by means of a similar combination that brings to light the more compromising documents and testimonies from both past and present. Thus, one of his more renowned films, the monumental Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969-71), was censored by the ORTF, where he was employed at the time, for exposing the less palatable side of French society during the Nazi occupation; a subject he would return to in Hôtel Terminus (1988), concerning the trial of Klaus Barbie, which reopened the old wounds of collaborationism and cowardice concealed behind the veil of the heroic resistance that salvaged the dignity of Occupied France.
The dedicated feeds of satellite transmissions, by means of which US television channels distribute raw broadcasts, have been dissected in Feed (1992), by Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway, using images provided by the video-activist Brian Springer, who would later produce Spin (1995), based on hundreds of hours seized from these behind-the-scenes transmissions, revealing all that which the news programmes omit: the cosmetics of the public image, off the record statements by politicians and media celebrities, their court of attendant advisers and communicators. The videographic production of Antoni Muntadas also contains various contributions to the deciphering of the codes and intricacies of television: Political Advertisement (in collaboration with Marshall Reese) is a compilation initiated in 1994 that is updated and extended every four years, revealing the evolution of the party political broadcasts in the US presidential elections, from the fifties to the present day; Cross-Cultural Television (1987, with Hank Bull) compiles an inventory of the archetypes made universal by the ubiquity of television formats, from the talking heads to the elements of continuity and corporate image; TVE: primer intento – Spanish Television: first attempt (1989), to mention yet a third work, deals with the long shadow of the Franco years bestriding Spain’s present Public Network and, produced by the organisation itself, its transmission was blocked due to its uncompromising approach in which archival footage was juxtaposed with sequences taken by Muntadas himself on the premises of TVE.
A further source that has been imbued with increasing importance is that of private film, amateur production, the hidden charm of home movies. In the same way as certain historical trends have opted for studying private life as opposed to a endless string of macro events, taking an interest in nameless individuals and the faceless masses rather than the hagiography of the dominant classes and the larger-than-life personages, the rehabilitation of the private and relaxed scenes of amateur film-making has paved the way for new archival projects and creative works based on this footage, besides encouraging theoretical and historiographic explorations involving an aspect that has traditionally been ignored. Amongst these contributions, attention should be drawn to the exemplary “Private Hungary Series” by Peter Forgács, a project undertaken in the eighties with the aim of collecting and preserving amateur and home movies in his country, whilst reflecting the experiences of a society ensnared by the authoritarian about-turn of Communism. The Family Album (1986), by Alan Berliner, is quite a different proposition, based on the synthesis of the more common and representative situations of home movies, combining scenes from various homes to compose a mosaic of the experiences and habits of the typical American family over a lapse of time that extends from the twenties through to the fifties, with a sound-track in turn consisting of a clutter of voices, conversations, excerpts from letters and other private records.
Yet, all things considered, the specific origins of the sources do not necessarily determine the bias of the work arising from the same. For example, in Human Remains (1998), Jay Rosenblatt has compiled the most personal and private footage of five of last century’s most ruthless dictators – Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Mao–, accompanied by their respective “monologues” that have been thoroughly researched and which reveal their most intimate habits and desires, thus giving expression to the “banality of evil” referred to by Hannah Arendt. Likewise, a number of the films by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi resort to the archive, largely recovered by them, of the pioneer of Italian cinema Luca Comerio –official film-maker to the court, subsequently seduced by fascism–, to further a new understanding of travelogues, of conquest and in praise of ethnocentric cultural superiority; for example, in Dal Polo all’Equatore (1986), the work that has lent an impulse to the tenacious and outstanding trajectory of the aforementioned duo.
Further questions on the archive of images have been channelled through alternative television proposals, noteworthy being the contributions of Jean-Luc Godard with Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98); Alexander Kluge with the series 10 vor 11, Die Stunde der Filmemacher and Prime Time / Spätausgabe; the pertinacious collective, Paper Tiger Television, or the productions of the FMS Studio of Hungarian television in the early nineties (as part of their open-door policy towards video-artists and young film-makers, such as Gusztáv Hamos, András Solyom and Ildiko Enyedi). Finally, a still incipient expansion is that of the Internet and new digital media. Until now, the precipitated succession of multimedia systems, and their constant improvement, has acted against its specific potential, which implies a new understanding of montage based on the rhizomatic principle of hypertext: the possibility of links or relays between one text and another, of any kind (still images, movie, sound, text), as opposed to the verticality implied by editing in its traditional sense. Amongst those examinations preceding these media we again encounter the names of Jayne Loader – with Public Shelter (1994), a CD-ROM that constitutes a multimedia sequel to Atomic Café, the film she directed with the Rafferty brothers– and Richard Prelinger, who, based on their extensive archives of ephemeral film, has produced documentary compilations like Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built (1992) and Our Secret Century: Archival Films From the Darker Side of the American Dream (1995-97) which, in the guise of visual encyclopaedias, address various aspects of American social history in an approach that is as entertaining as it is rigorous and redolent of critical meaning.
If the montage documentary, the most common and hackneyed compilation format, is characterised by aspirations of objectivity, neutrality and historical analysis, the hypothesis of documentary démontage would contrast criteria of subjectivity, a critical standpoint, a questioning of the modes of representation and of the sole semiosis of the images, independently of their background in reality or fiction, of a private or ephemeral nature, etc. By stripping these images of the sense, purpose and fate they originally had, a hidden subtext is often exposed, unexpected connotations are unleashed. Audiovisual archives and media saturation – which an appropiationist approach defines as the public domain, availing itself of the right to citation and reply – constitute the source that supplies these practices, whose current scope I have strived to elucidate by means of a number of creations and archival projects that range between media archaeology and an antagonistic interpretation of history and the interests that control the world.
NOTES
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964. There are later reprints.
2 Eugeni Bonet (ed.): Desmontaje: film, vídeo; apropriación, reciclaje (València: IVAM, 1993; book published to coincide with the travelling exhibition of the same name). Other publications and exhibitions to note are: Cecilia Hausheer / Christoph Settele (ed.): Found Footage Film (Lucerne: VIPER / Zyklop Verlag, 1992); William C. Wees: Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993); Yann Beauvais / Jean-Michel Bouhours (ed.): Monter/Sampler: L’échantillonnage généralisé (Paris: Centre Pompidou / Scratch Projection, 2000).
3 cf. Sharon Sandusky: “The Archaeology of Redemption: Toward Archival Film”, Millennium Film Journal, no. 26, autumn 1992.
4 Richard M. Barsam: Non-fiction Film: A Critical History. Revised and expanded edition. Bloomington / Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.
5 Both works, at the time published respectively in laserdisc and as a collection of ten CD-ROM (of the twelve initially scheduled), are no longer currently available. For further information and for a small sample of the same, access the website of Prelinger (www.prelinger.com) which, furthermore, constitutes a suitable gateway for access to other information and to a number of on-line archives.
Eugeni Bonet. A digital author using printed-paper and audiovisual means and multimedia, he mainly addresses experimental cinema and video and the techno-medial arts in general. He has also acted as a curator for exhibitions and shows, amongst which the latest have been El cine calculado- The calculated cinema (travelling show, 1999 and 2001), Movimiento Aparente – Apparent Movement (Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, 2000) and for the audiovisual area of Comer o no Comer- To Eat or not To Eat (Salamanca 2002). Interspersed with these activities are his own audiovisual productions, which include the series Lecturas de Cirlot – Readings of Cirlot (1997-98) and Música a máquina- Machine Music (2002). Associate lecturer of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Universitat de Barcelona.
