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Author: Billy Marshall Stoneking Published on: April 15, 2004 at http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/4847/107835 |
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In the language of film, 'montage' means the uniting of shots of seemingly unrelated objects in the same film sequence so that they take on a new relationship, one to another, in the mind of the viewer. The classic example of montage technique can be seen in the film Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein (1927) - however, the creation and perception of montage is much more pervasive than this Eisensteinian example. We are, in fact, bombarded by montage nearly every time we watch television; most TV commercials employ it as a matter of course, as do almost all video clips and the like. What is even less appreciated is its fundamental operation in creation and apprehension of modern poetry. |
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Ezra Pound, unaware of Eisenstein’s filmic experimentations a half a world away, devised his own theory of montage. Borrowing from what he had learned of Chinese written language from Ernest Fenollosa, Pound decreed that the lynchpin of modern poetry was the association of images. The construction of these word vortexes multiplied the meaning or emotional significance of a poem by virtue of what they did not say. Instead of denoting meaning, modern poetry – employing what Pound called “the ideogrammatic method” - implied or connoted meaning as a consequence of the relationships that existed between and among the images that are presented by the poem, and the imaginative apprehension of these relationships by the reader/listener. In Potemkin, the famous sequence on the Odessa Steps shows the same event from multiple points of view. There is only one time stream. Televised football and basketball matches routinely employ this "real time" montage technique, cutting rapidly from reaction shots of the crowd, to plays on the field or on court, to close-ups, to the manager on the sidelines, and back to the crowd. But, as Eisenstein and Pound were to discover, there is no technical reason the shots in a montage need to be in "real time". What is important is intelligibility. Certainly, without the organizing principle of the single time stream the viewer can become disoriented. But why locate the stream of images in time at all? Music videos tend not to, and in not doing so are able to create a surreal effect. It is the music that orients the viewer, and so a coherent narrative time stream is unnecessary. The same applies to poetry, and when written ideogrammatically allows the reader/listener a sense of creative participation that is not possible otherwise. |
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In his autobiography, Eisenstein demonstrates the way in which montage may be applied to written images; frequently, he covers 30 years or more on a single page, including "shots" from incidents thousands of miles and decades apart. There is no narrative stream. And yet we are not confused, because he imbeds meanings and interpretations within individual vignettes. These vignettes, each composed of only a few "shots" and hence only 15-30 seconds long, each carry one thought or interpretation. The vignettes are combined with individual "shots", which do not carry any meaning on their own. Imagine a web of such vignettes through which the viewer navigates. The choices the viewer makes build up a unique interpretation of the material. The viewer has become a co-creator of a new, unique, evanescent art form: an interactive montage. "I once asked myself,: Eisenstein wrote, “what had been the most frightening thing in my life, and I vividly recalled the railway lines at Smolensk during the civil war… In 1920 I lived in a boxcar on a side track... Hammers knocked against axles, as in Anna Karenina's nightmares. The whistles blared in the dark... "But this was not what was most frightening. Not the hours spent at night in searching for your car along miles of silent railroad cars... But the tail of a long endless train, dozens and dozens of cars long, moving backward, bearing down on you with the blunt snout of the last car. "The red rear lantern glimmered like a solitary unseeing eye. Nothing to stop it nor hold it back. "How many times during my hours of wandering along the tracks have night monsters of trains snuck up on me so treacherously, alongside me, scarcely clanking, out of the darkness and back into the darkness! Their implacable, blind, pitiless movement has migrated to my films, now dressed in soldier's boots on the Odessa steps, now directing their blunt snouts into knights' helmets in the "Battle on the Ice", now in black vestments sliding over the stone slabs of the cathedral, in the wake of a candle shaking in the hands of the stumbling Vladimir... This image of a night train has wandered from film to film, becoming a symbol of fate. "Later, I myself fall into the tenacious clutches of the image, now come alive." An interactive montage – which is really what a great poem is - is one where the viewer actively chooses which shots and vignettes are presented via an interface. At present, a great number of these interfaces are based on a narrative metaphor. But they need not be limited by such. The best of modern poetry – Pi O’s, Christina Conrad’s and Richard Zola’s for example - points to a different organizing metaphor - i.e.: the short, meaning-carrying vignette. |
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