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This chapter assesses alternative cinemas. In the 1920s, there were a series of film movements that were motivated by very different interests than mainstream cinema, primarily political. The most important at the time and the one that has had an enduring influence in world cinema became known as Soviet Montage. Because of their influence, there is an extensive selection of Soviet Montage films available. The chapter then considers filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. It also looks at the avant-garde and the late silents. Meanwhile, documentary film and especially animation crossover with the mainstream cinema. The developments in the 1920s and John Grierson's founding of the British Documentary Film Movement initiates an important trend in documentary film that still influences film and television today. It also feeds into an idea of ‘British realism’ still apparent in British films.

The subject of this chapter is the Oscar-winning film All Quiet on the Western Front. After discussion of why the Laemmle family’s Universal Studios wanted to make film of Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated novel, the chapter considers the screenplay adaptation, casting of Lew Ayres in leading role, the revolutionary sound design, influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique, reception and political reaction to the film in the United States, and changing attitudes towards World War I. The final section focuses on the hostile reception of the film in Germany, where it was used by the Nazi leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels, for propaganda purposes, and how the film’s global renown changed Milestone’s life.

In the museums analysed in this chapter, cinema could be understood as a model for the very conception of the exhibition space. The chapter argues that, in some relevant cases, museum narrative could be compared to film narrative, not only because they both unfold in time following a “script”, but also because the first employs, thorough its own media­ specific means, filmic techniques such as montage, zooms, close­ups, as well as a complex articulation of the story and characters. The case studies include the Trento Tunnels (Trento, Italy), two former highway tunnels reconverted into a museum, where film and photographs were projected on the curved walls and on the floor, and where, in a kind of “film in reverse”, it was the visitors’ movement that created a montage between the images.

Computer simulations are centered around events and come to the fore where prefabricated paths are avoided. However, these calculated constructs have nothing to do with phantasies of limitless possibilities. In order to frame the repertoire of available actions in a real time scenery, 'purpose filters' are built in. If a situation can be described as allowing only a limited set of events, then situationality is a major feature of simulations. Some further apparent characteristics are manifold variability, the provision of co-presence and simultaneity of the occurrences, a certain 'flatness' of events or uniformity of the whole constellation, as well as its interruption with montage-like cuts on the surface and substrate. These characteristics contribute to a better understanding of which kind of design set is at stake with simulations, where their borders and their strengths lie. What design strategy is to be adopted in order to provide an iconicity capable of contributing and constituting an instantaneity and flexibility?

Alongside the radical Constructivism of the New Playwrights Theatre, the American avant-garde’s most sympathetic engagement with Soviet revolutionary culture was in cinema. Unlike Soviet theatrical productions, Russian films were fairly widely viewed by Americans, especially in the years before sound technologies partitioned national cinemas, and received extensive commentaries in American publications, from specialist magazines to newspapers. This chapter considers the cinematic productions and discourses of radical Left in terms of a sustained response to Soviet cinema, in particular relation to the enthusiastic reception of montage. One key instance was the 1929 screening of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera at the Film Guild Cinema in New York, a building designed by Frederick Kiesler. In Experimental Cinema, a short-lived magazine that ran from 1930 to 1934, montage developed from a machine aesthetic myth into the standard in a cinematic battle against Hollywood. Alongside some sporadic experiments, the Experimental Cinema group developed a textual form of montage scenario. The magazine was affiliated with the Workers Film and Photo League, a group that considered film as a ‘weapon in the class struggle’, and used a rudimentary form of montage to attack American capitalism and the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations.

This chapter argues that Tarkovsky's Mirror encourages a fascination with its own process of cinematic imaging, in which images of everyday objects and nature are aesthetically transfigured through camera movements, filters and disjunctive editing. Sound is also transfigured, often isolated from habitual sources and modes of hearing sound, evoking a kind of cinephilia of sound, an audiophilia. The film's movements through a series of episodes linked together through rhythm, thematic association, and patterning, reduces the importance of narrative and draws awareness to a heterogeneous temporality. As the film's narrator expresses his desire to re-enter the memories or dreams of his childhood, Mirror makes clear the fragility and creativity of memory, which can never access a ‘pure’ past. Temporality destabilizes the corporeal and gives the film's textures an ephemeral dimension that is nevertheless powerfully affective. This chapter considers how a conceptualization of time can be undertaken through the long-take and through editing. Montage sequences within the film, in which archival footage is edited together, tends to present a notion of time as a series of perceptual shocks; the long-take, on the other hand, evokes a thematic awareness of nostalgia while questioning the irretrievability of the past.

This chapter traces the origins and implications of the ‘operational image’, as it has come to be explored in Harun Farocki’s texts and installations since 2000. Defined in Eye/Machine I (2000) as ‘Images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection,’ operational images pervade both the military and non-military realm of today’s life. To contextualise this type of image, three concepts are revisited that have explicitly informed Farocki’s understanding: Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘operational language’, Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’, and the project of a computer aided ‘Bildwissenschaft’ based on algorithmic image retrieval. After a closer analysis of some of the counter-operational strategies Farocki employs, the article suggests to distinguish three levels of operationality and to understand Farocki’s project as a film maker, video artist and thinker as a continuous examination of the operational potential of images.

This chapter surveys assemblages of images in the context of art history, anthropology, cinematic production, surveillance, and forensic science. The aim is to uncover both the logic and the flirtation with the a-logical and symptomatic in metapictures of pictorial totalities.

This chapter explores the translators’ craftsmanship when shaping the works for publication; it underlines how selecting and editing the materials inevitably transformed them. This meant co-translation could entail a specific form of co-authorship, the translations never appearing in quite the same format as the texts which Koteliansky acquired from his Russian and Soviet networks. Shaping them for a different readership could imply modifications in format, lay-out and even genre; the addition of specifically-selected critical materials also impacted on readerships, sometimes making the new works into modern case-books as well as literary revelations. Case studies demonstrate the timely, modern image of Tolstoy being fashioned in translation, and a carefully crafted vision of Chekhov as a playwright. Similarly, the critical materials added to works by Sophie Tolstoy and Dostoevsky reveal a new emphasis on alternative textual readings and critical thinking.

What we have in “Das Passagen-Werk” is a massive collection of fragments, tantalizing but unwieldy, a collection that could give rise to a number of alternative models. It cannot be called a Werk, although it was undoubtedly conceived in view of one. A number of commentators have proposed versions of the intended work, but it would be mistaken to suggest that Benjamin’s own conception might be recovered or reconstituted. When Benjamin writes, “To write history, then, means to cite history,” he is not talking about the dependence of the history writer on any source or archive but rather about his ability to wrest what materials he needs and model them for his purposes. Thus citing involves a dynamic intervention into the temporal process that activates a past in the present: citing as an inciting Through this focus on citation, Benjamin stresses, first, the isolate, fragmentary form of the historical datum, its resistance to assimilation into a narrative mold; then, its “monadic” structure, that is, its inclusiveness and complexity; and finally its “acceding to legibility,” its capacity to prepare the modality of its reception and thus to bring about a determinate effect.

Paul McCormick takes a narratological approach in examining the cinematic qualities of House of Leaves as part of the book’s ‘media interface.’ Borrowing the term ‘affordance’ from ecological psychologist J. J. Gibson, which signifies both the inherent properties of an artefact and its perceived usage, McCormick proposes that Danielewski transposes the media affordances of cinema into the book medium in four central ways: a video diary, the perceptual frame of a surveillance camera, the concept of cinematic montage, and a documentary film. These borrowings create what McCormick calls a ‘postmodern uncertainty’ and a ‘level of indeterminacy’ which render the novel both eternally incomplete and firmly situated within the media environment of 1990s America.

The essay focuses on the applications, epistemological and political implications of montage and haptics in documentary practice. The author argues that documenting local cultures and cultural practices constitutes a critical departure from dominant ideological and political discourses surrounding the northeast region of India resulting in it being viewed as the distant other of the nation. The author concludes that a ‘move towards haptics leads to a documentary practice that is less motivated towards normative techniques of interpretation and exposition, and by contrast places viewers in partial and sensory encounters with the life-worlds of the subjects they encounter.’

The chapter re-evaluates the resources of the theory of “redactors” in view of the Talmudic virtual. The analysis heuristically juxtapose Kulechov’s and Eisenstein’s theories and practices of film-montage with the theories and practices attributed to alleged anonymous redactors of the Talmud in the modern theories of the Talmud’s redaction. Undoing the Cartesian assumptions of the redaction theory the chapter brings forth the purely peformative and a-personal power of both film montage and of Talmudic ways of remembering.

The book opens with a montage of ‘ethnographic snapshots’ which in very different ways exemplifies central aspects of development and planning. Each snapshot is 10-15 lines long and might be a conversation, a dilemma, a scene from a bureaucratic setting, a decision taken or a situation confronted. The prologue will in this manner introduce the reader to the book´s main analytical pair: the numerous attempts to make sensible decisions and the resulting experience of absurdity when confronted with the sum of them. The montage makes use of two writing techniques: American novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s dispensation with ‘beginning, middle and end’ in narratives, and Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘intellectual’ montage – here adapted with American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce as a principle for destabilizing conclusion.

Chapter 5 contextualises Didi-Huberman’s contribution to Holocaust discourse and the polemics that erupted following the Mémoire des camps exhibition in 2001. Didi-Huberman’s accompanying catalogue essay provoked impassioned debates concerning the relationship between images, history, trauma and the Holocaust. This chapter argues Didi-Huberman’s important text Images malgré tout (Images in Spite of All) marked a significant intervention in Holocaust discourse that promoted the ineffable, unrepresentable nature of the event. Furthermore, it signalled a turn in Didi-Huberman’s research, as he becomes increasingly concerned with the political efficacy of images from this point onwards. This chapter argues that Didi-Huberman is now influencing a younger generation of filmmakers who are taking up the task of representing the Holocaust. By way of a close reading of László Nemes’s Saul Fia (Son of Saul, 2015), Chapter 5 demonstrates the film was developed explicitly in dialogue with the arguments Didi-Huberman advanced in Images in Spite of All.

Chapter 6 charts Didi-Huberman’s final update in his ongoing critique of representation that commenced in his earliest writings. This chapter contends that Didi-Huberman advances a slippage in the subject–object relationship, with the image being understood as capable of engineering its own forms of knowledge. This chapter demonstrates that Didi-Huberman’s work must be situated in a long philosophical arc from Descartes through Foucault and Deleuze that seeks to decouple the subject from thought. Didi-Huberman extends Deleuze’s critique of the philosophical assumptions of what thinking is, the so-called ‘image of thought’ outlined in Difference and Repetition. This completes Didi-Huberman’s critique of mimetic representation as his commitment to immanence becomes explicit. Didi-Huberman reactivates some of the great avant-garde montage projects of the early twentieth century to explore a mode of representation capable of generating its own theoretical and intellectual undertaking.

Montage theory remains at the heart of filmmaking and film studies, although many of its original concerns and insights have perhaps receded from view. Sound montage, theorized with the arrival of recorded synchronized sound in films, was the first theory of sound, as well as image, and sometimes explicitly derives ideas and inspiration from music-based theory. Its most influential theorist was Sergei Eisenstein, who also tested and experimented with his ideas in feature films. Montage theory often focused on asynchrony as potentially progressive in aesthetic (and to a degree, political) terms. The crucial notion of sound/music parallel and counterpoint, while perhaps not generating a tremendously robust analytical method, has nevertheless remained an important analytical lens for filmmakers and film criticism. Using this concept, the chapter argues that there has been an unacknowledged persistence of the modes of silent and early sound film in contemporary cinema.