Transcultural Montage

INTRODUCTION

Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility

Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr

Montage, in its broadest sense, simply implies the joining together of different elements in a variety of combinations, repetitions, and overlaps. It is customarily associated with cinematic editing, but the basic principles of montage play a crucial role in a broad range of artistic, cultural, and academic practices. This volume presents experiments with ethnographic prose, film studies, photo essays, and theoretical arguments by anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and exhibition designers—all of whom employ montage and theorize its significance in their works.

But why the need for a book on montage? Cinematic montage has been around for more than a hundred years, experiencing its heydays just around the First World War. Today, having passed into the new millennium, montage may easily be regarded as an obsolete principle, with little capacity to evoke or provoke issues of a social and existential nature. In fact, Theodor Adorno declared the death of montage already back in the 1960s: The principle of montage was supposed to shock people into realizing just how dubious any organic unity was. Now that the shock has lost its punch, the products of montage revert to being indifferent stuff. . . . The method of montage has therefore been neutralized (1984: 223).

Has the scholarly and artistic vitality of this audacious technique been entirely exhausted? The message of this book is clear: For those ready to look, think, and make new connections, montage retains the power to suggest fresh ways of perceiving relations between artistic expression, scholarly imagination, and social life. Its techniques for troubling commonsense notions of reality are as powerful as ever (Phillips 1992: 35).

One key contribution of montage to social theory is its capacity to generate analytics and anti-analytics while maintaining a space for the invisible. As the contributors to this volume testify, strange things happen when two elements are brought together in montage. Never is the result simply the sum of the single components. Something extra, a surplus or an excess, is always produced. This extra speaks back to the elements and produces a state of generative instability, where each part transforms and takes on new shapes within the wider constellation. We see in the juxtaposition of montage components the opening of a gap or fissure, through which the invisible emerges.

Within realist schools of anthropological writing, exhibition making, and filmmaking, montage has traditionally been regarded with a good deal of suspicion as a disruptive principle that potentially could pollute the direct correspondence between scholarly representations and the social world, thereby obstructing our possibilities for understanding human life across the boundaries of culture. However, the assertion of this volume is the opposite: the destabilization and rupture of our common-sense perception is the very condition for transcending cultural boundaries. Montage, we venture to propose, is a means to this end.

The book is divided into four sections, each presenting a variety of current experiments with: Montage as an Analytic; Montage in Writing; Montage in Film; and Montage in Museum Exhibitions. Each of the four parts begins with an outline that briefly introduces the theoretical, analytic, and aesthetic questions raised by the contributions. At the end of the book, George Marcus, whose seminal article on The Cinematic Metaphor of Montage (1994) sets the antecedent for this book, provides an afterword on the traffic in montage over the past twenty years. This introduction discusses in general terms how the capacity of montage for transcending the boundaries of culture can be used to push social theory beyond the visible and into the uncharted regions of the invisible. First, we consider the role of the invisible in social theory and how classic filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov used montage to address it.

The Visible and the Invisible

Clearly, the invisible, whether understood in terms of vision or in the form of hidden ideological, economic, psychological, or magico-religious structures, is central to human life. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the invisible, with its various problems, mysteries, and implications, has become both a paradigm and an obsession for much modern intellectual life. This is evident in the Marxist claim that the true significance of social processes often goes on behind the backs of individual agents (Eagleton 1990: 198). In psychoanalysis, it has likewise been argued that the real meanings of our actions are quite imperceptible to the watchful mind, but are to be found underground in the unconscious. In anthropology, structuralism further decentered the empirical subject by arguing that myths think themselves through people, rather than vice versa.

All of these grand theories have, each in its own way, contested what could be denoted naïve realism—that is, the commonsensical attitude which holds that our senses give us a direct and transparent window to reality as it is, and that objective truth entails only accurate reportage of its observable detail. Instead, these theories exposed the shocking truth that the visible world is not necessarily the real one and that facts of life lie beyond our apparent view. Often the ambition of these theories was to provide people with a new enlightened vision that could liberate them from the invisible forces governing their lives, as in the Marxist struggle to expose false consciousness or in the attempt of psychoanalysis to uncover the unconscious. Within anthropology, as Arnd Schneider (2011: 179) writes, to make ‘visible the invisible’ is a trope not unfamiliar . . . and is indeed good to think with, if we consider the many phenomena (not only those classed by us or others as supernatural) which are not immediately visible or perceptible to us in ethnographic research. Too often, however, efforts of this sort appear to cement already well-known ideas of the invisible—effectively eradicating the invisible by substituting it with the visibility of preestablished rationalities (Suhr and Willerslev 2012). Take, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss (2001), who saw the immense heterogeneity of myths as based in certain constant universal structures that could be mapped out and to which any particular myth could be reduced. In a similar way, psychoanalysis perceived dreams as something to be deciphered and made visible as symbolic texts. While these grand theories may have avoided the fallacies of naïve realism, they nevertheless liquidated the invisible as something in its own right and replaced it with other forms of visibility.

This volume is based on the overall assumption that montage offers alternative ways of venturing into the realm of the invisible. In particular, our work has been inspired by ideas about the invisible in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. Despite their theoretical differences, both thinkers emphasize not just a notion of the invisible as the necessary precondition for all human perception, but also that this invisibility needs to remain invisible in order to do its work. While Levinas (2002: 43) located the invisible in the irreducible face of the other, Merleau-Ponty discussed the invisible in terms of an infinite totality of vision: the impossible but ever-present view from everywhere (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 79; Kelly 2005: 91).

For Levinas, the invisible face beneath the forefront of the head conveys an excess of otherness—that which cannot be reduced to the same (Wyschogrod 2002: 191). This face cannot be directly perceived, visually depicted, or described in words. It is, so to speak, alterity beyond representation. The invisible, therefore, is not simply the result of incomplete perception or knowledge. According to Levinas: Invisibility results . . . from the inaptitude of knowledge as such—from its inadequation—to the infinity of the absolutely other (1987: 32). It is in this sense that the face is not seen and neither can be captured within thought. Rather, the face is the uncontainable—it is that which leads you beyond (Levinas 1985: 86–87).

According to Levinas, the self can neither appear nor sustain itself outside of its differentiation from the other, which is why it is always and indispensably obliged to preserve the other’s alterity (1979: 244–45). Importantly, it is not the case that alterity as such needs protection from being reduced to any order of the same. Rather, the self is conditioned upon its relation to the other and must therefore embrace the other’s irreducible and infinite otherness. The vulnerable and in fact powerless condition of the self in the face of the other is made clear by Levinas in his description of the impossibility of murdering alterity: The Other, whose exceptional presence is inscribed in the ethical impossibility of killing him in which I stand, marks the end of powers. If I can no longer have power over him it is because he overflows absolutely every idea I can have of him (1979: 87).

Merleau-Ponty (1964: 51; 2002: 79) proposes a parallel claim in theorizing on the nature of human perception. He asserts that an anonymous and infinite web of perspectives resides behind any actual embodied perspective. This infinity of viewpoints provides the invisible ground upon which any object presents itself as visible to us: It adds up to an inaccessible totality, the view from everywhere, which is the object as seen from all sides, at all times, all at once (Holbraad and Willerslev 2007: 335). This ideal viewpoint, though unreachable for our human perspective, operates as an invisible norm that provides the necessary ground for any perspectival seeing.

Take the example of what we commonly denote the color red. We may have seen this color in multiple shades and nuances as it appears in a great variety of lighting conditions. Yet, pure redness is something that we can only imagine, since its full appearance is inaccessible to sense perception. Our eyes may search over the surface of an object and we may move our perspective in order to better determine what color and form it has. But the real color, as Merleau-Ponty points out, persists beneath appearances as the background persists beneath the figure, that is, not as a seen or thought-of quality, but through a non-sensory presence (2002: 356).

Our motor-intentional search for the optimal viewpoint of an object’s color or shape is therefore directed by an ideal or normative world of vision, which perseveres beyond any actual perception (Kelly 2005: 86–91, 100; Holenstein 1999). According to Merleau-Ponty, we do, therefore, not simply see by our own power or force, but are dependent on this anonymous or general seeing, which is already in place, waiting to assign us a place within it (Willerslev 2011: 519). The visibility of any object is thus conditioned upon the larger field of anonymous invisibility that surrounds it and provides its supporting context (Kelly 2005).

Levinas’s infinite other and Merleau-Ponty’s normative ideal are a surplus, an excess—a plenitude of perspectives that we cannot do without. It underlies every perspective as the invisible background that allows things to stand out in their visibility. Yet it must hide itself in order for the visible world to appear before our eyes. As Merleau-Ponty expresses it: the proper essence . . . of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility . . . which it makes present by a certain absence (2000: 187). As such, the view from everywhere and the other cannot be an object of our own perspectival seeing except negatively—that is, through its absence.

It is our assertion that montage may perform exactly this operation—that is, to make present by a certain absence the invisible ground of the visible world. By no means do we claim that montage can show or make the invisible visible. If the invisible is not simply hidden, masked, or concealed forms of visibility, but is as such invisible, then it follows that the invisible cannot be made visible. Consequently, any attempt of uncovering or fully accessing the invisible and the alterity it entails is impossible. Rather, montage provides a technique for evoking the invisible through the orchestration of different perspectives encroaching upon one another. Montage can break the visual skin of the world, but it can never show the invisible in and of itself (Suhr and Willerslev 2012).

Surplus

As Eisenstein (1949) made clear, a certain form of surplus is produced when disparate units are brought together in montage. This surplus is not a simple translation of the unknown into the same. In Eisenstein’s conception, intellectual montage, as opposed to mundane montage, refers to the juxtaposition of dissimilar objects, which when put in confrontation with each other provide the viewer with a reality that is more real than the objects seen in isolation: if montage is to be compared with something, then a phalanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine (in Jacobs 1979: 130). Such radical montage has the potential—through shock-effects—of providing the classic Hegelian-Marxist dialectic of thesis-antithesis leading to synthesis (Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2007: 81). Thus, according to Eisenstein, the building blocks of montage are not to be placed next to each other but rather on top of each other, so that each juxtaposition consists in a qualitative leap (Deleuze 2005: 38).

The extra thing that is created through montage can, however, also be conceived in terms of a gap (see Nielsen, chapter 2, and Salamon, chapter 8)—that is, as the opening up of a kind of incongruence, fuzziness, or vibrating dissonance erupting through the confrontation of unlike elements. Stuart McLean (chapter 3) expounds the gap through the dramatic figure of convection currents beneath the crust of the Eurasian and North American plates, giving rise to volcanic activity along the Almannagjá fault line in Iceland. It is from within the depth of such fissures that the invisible may become present, without, however, revealing itself in totality. Something within the gap seems to be taking shape, but the shape remains imperceptible as elusive dark matter. Building on Gilles Deleuze’s (2000: 80) theory of cinema, Bruce Kapferer (chapter 1) argues that this is the domain of the virtual giving itself to us from beyond the fracturing juxtapositions of montage. Deep beneath the visible crust, the invisible becomes present as the absence of visibility. For what purpose would this emergence of the invisible as absence be useful in the context of anthropology and social theory?

The disruptive power of montage is especially in need when a theory’s desire for laying bare and illuminating the invisible has become so dominant that it is driven toward total and unambiguous visibility. As scholars who have undertaken long-term training in making other peoples’ worlds intelligible, anthropologists are perhaps especially disposed to the dangers of such total luminosity. It is not necessarily pleasant or comfortable to allow the invisible and its alterity to play its part in analysis. Often it seems easier to merge the alterity of others into preestablished categories. This tendency to consume the other within already established forms of vision and knowledge rather than allowing alterity to contaminate and transform perception was pointed out by Paul Stoller more than three decades ago: Although anthropologists, like painters, lend their bodies to the world, we tend to allow our senses to penetrate the Other’s world rather than letting our senses be penetrated by the world of the Other. The result of this tendency is that we represent the Other’s world from the outside in a generally turgid discourse which often bears little resemblance to the worlds we are attempting to describe (1989: 39).

Stoller’s plea for anthropologists to allow themselves to be transformed by the encounters in the field was a milestone. Yet we may need to go even further, namely to abandon the idea of resemblance or correspondence as the goal of analysis altogether (Taylor 1990: 108). More than twenty years after the eruption of the crisis of representation (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus 1994) that so profoundly shook anthropology, Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007) observe how anthropologists are continuing business as usual—replacing the infinite otherness they encounter in the field with concepts and theories of their own making. What anthropology should be about, they suggest, is to upturn our own assumptions so as to make room for imagining the possibility of people inhabiting a multiplicity of worlds. This echoes the Levinasian claim that respect for the other’s alterity should not be equated with the mistaken view that all alterity is derived from a shared existential ground. If informants tell us that there is such a thing as a powerpowder, the anthropological exercise should not be about translating the idea of a powerpowder into concepts already known to us, but rather, as Holbraad (2007: 204) asserts, about upturning our assumptions so as to make it possible for us to imagine how powder in this world actually is power.

To upturn our assumptions is by no means an easy task and it involves more than simply taking native concepts for granted and building up a line of theoretical reasoning around the supposition that concepts such as power and powder are the same. As made clear by Merleau-Ponty (2002), concepts and perceptions are inseparably tied into our being-in-the-world and cannot easily be broken apart. If it is not possible in this way to separate a realm of pure conception from our immediate perceptible experiences of the world, a much more thoroughgoing destabilization is in need. What has to be acknowledged is that anthropological thinking is a creative endeavor, which should not be confused with the accurate echoing of the textures of authentic social life. A faithful correspondence or fidelity between representation and actuality is not only impossible but also unwanted. Anthropology should express social reality by making it alive again—that is, by tampering with its source material in such way that the invisible ground of the visible is allowed presence (see Høgel, chapter 12, and Schüssler and Mes, chapter 16) (see also Willerslev 2011; Suhr and Willerslev 2012). How could montage perform this destabilizing function that would prevent us from falling into the trap of rendering visible the ethnographic other to any order of the same? And what happens on the other side of the shattering of elements and perspectives performed by the operation of montage? Is there not a risk that the shattering through montage will simply produce and naturalize new constellations of stable order?

Let us proceed with these questions by considering cinema, which more than any other art form has taken on and sophisticated the theory and practice of montage while also acting as a powerful stimulus to the artistic production of photography, writing, and exhibition making (Teitelbaum 1992). The key value of cinematic montage derives in our view from its capacity to disrupt the normative space of naturalistic film footage, thus allowing for a sudden burst in the experience of a multifaceted reality. So how has the problem of the invisible been dealt with in traditions of cinematic montage?

The American Montage Tradition

In French, montage refers to the technical process of film editing in the strict sense of the word. The cut from one shot to another may convey action and reaction, make an effect of continuity or time passed, visualize a shift of perspective, make a jump from the whole to a part or vice versa, perform a flashback, show parallel simultaneous action, or simply contrast that which was seen in the first shot with that which takes place next.

Some forms of film montage deal with the invisible by making the viewer jump between divergent perspectives. This way of editing can be traced back to the early American film director D. W. Griffith, who first and foremost used montage to depict organic unity in diversity in which perspectives act and react on each other, threaten each other, and enter into conflict before unity is eventually restored (Deleuze 2005: 31).

Griffith’s work rebels against the doctrines of naïve realism mainly by showing that the notion of time passing is inseparable from the experience of the visual. What you see depends upon where you are and when. In his famous scene in The Birth of a Nation (1915), we are shuffled back and forth between the perspectives of a group of black bandits ransacking a house of helpless women and the approaching rescuing team of Confederate soldiers. The scene forcefully reveals that what one sees is relative to one’s position in time and space. It is, therefore, no longer possible to imagine that everything converges on the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity (Berger 1972: 16)—an idea inherited from perspectival painting since the Renaissance. Griffith’s extensive use of shot-reverse-shot to couple divergent viewpoints within a scene exposes the fact that looking is much too complex to be reduced to the single eye of the beholder. In Griffith’s montages, we find our seeing tangled with other perspectives, which become part of our vision and therefore part of us. Vision becomes in this sense reciprocal: I am not just doing the looking; vision is also something that happens to me, beyond my control from an external vantage.

The Soviet Montage Tradition

Griffith’s films, as with much American cinema, draw our attention to what goes on in the films, but not to the constructed nature of film itself, how the images they contain were selected, what forms of work went into the making of them, and so on. Thus, part of the seductive power of these films lies in their suppression of what can be called their mode of production (Eagleton 1983: 171). In this sense, these films—though they defamiliarize commonsensical vision—also share with it a curious resemblance in that both tend to suppress the process of their own making.

Early Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, by contrast, sought to remedy this illusion by laying bare the devices of their own production so that viewers would be encouraged to reflect critically on what they saw. Early Soviet cinema experimented with speeding up film footage, slowing it down, making shots overlap so as to repeat actions, or violently shortening the real-time duration of events through jump cutting (Thompson and Bordwell 2003: 131). By employing such helter-skelter effects of montage, they forced the viewer not simply to stare through this obtrusive operation to the things seen but to realize something of the image’s own relative, artificial status as well. When watching the fierce cinematic manipulations of the early Soviet filmmakers, we are forced to recognize the images seen as the product of a specific set of technical and social processes, not a natural or given reality that the camera is simply there to reflect. In the words of Eisenstein: The spectator is compelled to proceed along that selfsame creative path that the author travelled in creating the image. The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the mergence of the image (1942: 32).

Such was the theory behind the Intellectual Cinema proposed by Eisenstein, and its most effective weapon was montage. By way of montage, Eisenstein argued, humankind now possessed a new powerful cognitive instrument for denaturalizing social life by recasting it through unfamiliar eyes—thereby allowing for a clearer and fuller understanding of the world, a means of its decoding (Michelsen 1992: 63).

Perhaps the finest example in which the world presents itself differently to the movie camera than to the naked eye is Vertov’s (1929) The Man with the Movie Camera. The film is, among other things, a movie about the making of a movie. Its sequences and the assembly of those sequences are continually made visible to us. The cameraman is shooting; we see the product of his shots. We also see the editor at work; she pulls clips off the shelf that suddenly fill the screen before us. There is a political message to all of this: Vertov is saying film is made by people, and therefore is not magic but labor, the very labor we see on the screen. However, Vertov’s aim extends beyond demystifying filmic representation. He also wants to create a new reality modeled on Soviet industrial utopia, a futuristic reality where man and machine work together in perfect symbiosis. We see this vision of peace between man and machine in several scenes, such as when saws are made to dance at a sawmill or when our eyes are made to spin like the propellers of an airplane. But it is perhaps most powerfully evoked in the film’s recurring logo of the human eye superimposed on the camera lens.

Ethnographic Cinema

In both Griffith’s and Eisenstein’s films, but even more so in those of Vertov, the camera and its associated techniques of montage were to be liberated from any demand to reproduce an imitation of life as the human eye saw it. Quite another idea has prevailed within ethnographic filmmaking, which has been dominated by a tradition that goes under the name observational cinema (Banks 1992: 124; Kiener 2008: 405). As a movement, observational cinema aims at inquiring into the role played by ordinary lived time and space in the constitution of social life. As such, it operates within an essentially realist cinematic paradigm, using film mainly as a medium of mimesis (Taylor 1996: 75; Stam 2000: 72). However, it is clearly misguided to confuse observational cinema with naïve realism. In fact, observational cinema was partly developed as a reaction against the detached fly on the wall film approach as seen, for example, in Gregory Bateson’s and Margaret Mead’s Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (1952; see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 539–40). By contrast, observational cinema builds on the epistemological premise that deep insight into social life entails transmission of sufficient material detail of the observable world from the viewpoint of a normal human participant (Henley 2004: 114). The mimetic camera is, therefore, used as a kind of physical extension of the cameraperson’s body, thus allowing viewers intimate access to the filmmaker’s sensuous engagement with the life portrayed (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 548).

The invisible in the context of observational cinema can perhaps best be understood as that which is seen but not usually noticed (Suhr and Willerslev 2012). By focusing on the most apparently trivial details of everyday activities, the cameraperson, along with the audience, comes to observe the finest grains of day-to-day human existence. For this reason, observational films such as David and Judith MacDougall’s To Live with Herds (1972) or Herb Di Gioia and David Hancock’s Peter Murray (1975) are known for their long unobtrusive takes, firmly dwelling on an abundance of observable ethnographic details. By favoring in this way seeing over assertion, wholeness over parts, matter over symbolic meaning, specificity over abstraction (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 539), observational cinema proposes that the strangeness of even the most exotic people can be counterbalanced by a sense of familiarity (MacDougall 1998: 245)—that is, a sense of how, despite cultural differences, we are ultimately all subject to the same plane of embodied spatial and temporal existence. This is exactly what MacDougall points to when he writes that the image transcends ‘culture’ . . . by underscoring the commonalities that cut across cultural boundaries (1998: 252).

In observational cinema, the camera is, so to say, humanized and submitted to a particular humanist ethics premised upon humility or respect, expressive of the filmmakers’ sensitivity towards their subjects (Grimshaw 2001: 129–30, 138). As Grimshaw (chapter 13) points out, such an approach to filmmaking does not entail the rejection of montage. Indeed, this would be impossible since montage is a necessary part of all cinema. Yet, this humanist sensitivity has resulted in an approach to filmmaking where the observational filmmaker tends to be highly cautious with any form of cinematic effect—abnormal framing, grading, extradiegetic music, commentary, disruptive juxtaposition of shots, etc.—that runs the risk of disturbing the transmission of the cameraperson’s lived experience of the life-world filmed (Henley 2004: 115–16).

Transcultural Montage

This book is premised upon the clear assumption that montage by no means stands in opposition to our possibility for transcending cultural boundaries—neither in filmmaking nor in any other mediums of artistic and scholarly expression. Rather montage offers a tool for making present by a certain absence (Merleau-Ponty 2000: 187) the invisible ground of social life and human perception. As Michael Taussig puts it, montage is a manner of interruptedness—a device for provoking: sudden and infinite connections between dissimilars in an endless or almost endless process of connection-making and connection-breaking . . . which on account of its awkwardness of fit, cracks, and violent juxtapositionings can actively embody both a presentation and a counterpresentation (1986: 441–43).

For Taussig, a zone of vacuity or imageric possibility—what we call the invisible ground of alterity—arises when self and other, in ordered disorder and continuous discontinuity, are turned upside down and made strange.

As Julia Binter (chapter 10) points out, getting at the transcultural does not necessarily entail the sacrifice of cultural differences in favor of a notion of abstract shared humanity. Quite to the contrary, it requires us to give up our tendency to subsume difference under such totalizing notions of sameness. Andrew Irving eloquently pointed this out in a recent debate: Shared reality is not . . . pregiven by virtue of being human but is formed through an active process of interaction between self and others—including the anthropologist, informant, and audience—whereby difference is made visible and negotiated. As such, strangeness, diversity, and otherness are not the opposite of mutuality but the conditions that bring it into being (in Suhr and Willerslev 2012: 296).

Even though filmmakers such as Griffith, Eisenstein, and Vertov were caught up in various political ideologies (see Russell, chapter 9), they did succeed in bringing into presence viewpoints that pushed the limits of how we are able to perceive the world. Montage, as understood here, may expand our possibilities for transcultural perception only by shattering commonsense understandings of the constitution of the world, thereby allowing the invisible ground of social life to take presence.

As the chapters in this volume testify, there are a wide variety of ways in which the work of montage may appear, ranging from analytic models of bureaucracy of the Danish labor market (Vohnsen, chapter 7) to aesthetic techniques for conveying the paradoxes of Brazilian favela tourism (Antick, chapter 6), or for conveying the inner emotional dynamics of the anthropologist in the field (Dalsgaard, chapter 5). The sweeping breadth of definitions and applications may give rise to the assumption that montage could be everything. Certainly our intention here has not been to find and nail down one irrefutable definition of the concept. Rather, our ambition is to offer a variety of uses and critical perspectives—some of them mutually contradictory. The trickery of montage operates in multiple ways by intentionally or unintentionally spurring fractures between established perceptual orders and the monstrous paradoxical spectacle that we call reality. But to freeze montage itself into a single figure or model would be to kill it. Yet, would we not also be murdering montage by conflating the concept to cover almost anything? If it is not productive or possible to limit the concept of montage to any particular definition, we may instead attempt to delineate it in the negative by asking what it is not. Would it be possible to think of something that definitely is not montage?

In fact, a variety of figures come to mind. At least, it seems reasonable to say that the operation of montage is different than the progressive linearity that functions as the driving force behind most scholarly arguments. Furthermore, in the context of filmmaking, montage appears to be clearly distinguished from a single camera shot. In general, it seems difficult to disagree with the statement that montage is not just one thing. Montage seems necessarily to be a collection and juxtaposition of at least two things. Let us consider—and complicate—these negative definitions in turn.

Surely, montage must take a different form than the standard style of linear and rational argumentation that we have grown accustomed to in academia (see Marcus 1994: 47). In fact, several chapters in this volume, including this introduction, seem to offer pretty straightforward linear arguments. However, a linear argument, while it has the semblance of appearing as a logical straightforward progression, usually still emerges from an ensemble of disparate units—diverse forms of social theory along with empirical material and observations. The argument then crashes into the world of scholarly debate, and here we may observe new constellations of montage taking place. The linear academic argument in its ideal form may not itself be a montage. Perhaps we can even define it as an antonym to montage. Yet, the linear argument can be the outcome of montage and it may well become a component or cell in another montage.

Something similar can be said about the long observational camera take hailed by realist ethnographic filmmakers for its way of allowing us glimpses into a pure being-with-others that cuts across the boundaries of culture (Henley 2004: 114; MacDougall 2006: 4). This book may in part be read as an argument against taking any scholarly assumptions of shared humanity for granted. The value of montage lies, as we see it, in its capacity to splinter such totalizing ideas of pan-human commonalities. Difference precedes sameness and disruptive montage provides a powerful tool for recognizing this. But let us take a look at the long observational shot again. Could it be that the long take of observational cinema did not, in fact, show us the commonalities of human existence? Often it is the case that the longer a camera shot is, the more disruptive it becomes. As explored by Alyssa Grossman (chapter 11), the long take then becomes a cell in a montage, not of actual cinematic perspectives, but of the perspectives of the camera along with the imaginary perspectives we as viewers are forced to create in order to compensate for the stubbornly persistent camera shot. Powerful forms of montage may emerge in the oscillation between such imaginary viewpoints that are provoked by a single camera shot. A single camera take is perhaps not in itself a montage. Yet, it may be part of a montage and not necessarily in the conventional sense—that is, by being juxtaposed with other camera takes. It may quite simply be part of the montage created in the mind of the viewer (see Irving, chapter 4).

Let us turn to the third negative definition, namely that montage cannot just be one thing—certainly, it must consist in the juxtaposition of at least two things. Several contributors in this volume (Bjerregaard, chapter 14; Empson, chapter 15; Schüssler and Mes, chapter 16) demonstrate how montage is at work in ethnographic exhibitions where various material objects are juxtaposed to each other and in combination produce hues of immaterial aura that transform the constellation of objects into new appearances and shapes. But sometimes also a single object takes on such aura merely by its insertion into a new environment. As Merleau-Ponty (2002: 78) in his theory of object perception tells us, no object can be seen in isolation. Rather it stands out to us as visible only because of the infinite world of perspectives that makes up its invisible ground. It makes no sense to talk about the perception of an isolated single object. In this broadest understanding, we could locate montage in the very fabric of the world as a place of constantly shifting connections and juxtapositions (Irving, chapter 4). As also Kapferer (chapter 1) points out, we need not limit ourselves to a conception of montage as a method for representing the world. The cells of montage as well as montage itself cannot be reduced to a mirroring of realities. Any montage is inescapably an engagement with and thus already part of the ongoing re-creations of the world into new forms and shapes. Hence, we take montage as a heuristic concept that may be applied in a wide variety of ways—as a theoretical and analytical model with which to make sense of the fragmented and fragmentary nature of social reality and as a practical device stirring generative juxtapositions in the anthropological altering of its source material.

A final assumption about montage needs to be considered: namely, that the principle of montage somehow by itself carries an intrinsic power of emancipation. Could montage be defined by such an inherently destabilizing, anti-totalitarian function? We do find that the rupturing effects of montage are powerful means for allowing the emergence of the invisible. But on the other hand, new stable visual orders often appear to take form on the other side of such ruptures. Arguably, this happens to some extent in the classic works of montage by Eisenstein and Vertov, but perhaps the most violent example can be found in Leni Riefenstahl’s artistically crafted Triumph of the Will (1935). Here every shot and juxtaposition seems to contribute, not to a shattering of vision, but to a single unified image of a nation joyfully celebrating and submitting itself to its Führer. Hence, montage in Riefenstahl’s film is not applied to create fissures in the actual observational scene. Rather, it removes and hides fissures so as to combine all shots into a spectacular visual display of a single ideal world. As Riefenstahl’s film exposes, montage as a principle does not in itself offer any guarantee for setting free the human spirit and it does not by necessity result in destabilizing the will to power in social, economic, and political life. Rather, montage is a balancing act, which, as Catherine Russell (chapter 9) points out, consists just as much in the construction of connections as in taking things apart.

Amplifying Invisibility

In his classic essay on the modernist sensibility in ethnographic writing, Marcus points out how the sacrifice of coherence may be too great in extreme forms of supposedly disruptive montage: The larger problem becomes how to retain the equivalent of a storytelling coherence while retaining the powerful critical advantages of montage (1994: 46). Here Marcus points to the fact that the most radical and abstract montage is not by necessity the most subversive—neither politically nor in terms of challenging established anthropological schools of thought. Rather it seems that the subversive capacities of montage depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.

In his work on the mimetic faculty, Taussig (1993) draws attention to the montage of ethnographic films such as Jean Rouch’s widely debated Les Maîtres Fous (1955), about a hauka spirit-possession cult in Accra during the last days of British colonial rule. For Taussig, the hauka cult appears as a parodic form of resistance and a subversion of imperial power. This interpretation is evoked by Rouch’s juxtaposition of a shot featuring hauka performers cracking an egg on the head of a statue, presumably representing the British governor, with a shot of the real governor wearing a white plumed helmet (Taussig 1993: 243; see also Russell 1999: 224). From such examples, Taussig comes to the optimistic conclusion that in the paradoxical mimicry made visible through Rouch’s montage, colonial—and by extension anthropological—mastery is no longer possible: What remains is unsettled and unsettling interpretation in constant movement with itself . . . because the interpreting self is itself grafted into the object of study. The self enters into the alter against which the self is defined and sustained (1993: 237).

The subversive potential of montage lies in its capacity for altering the obvious first sense of an object, image, or perspective by combining two or more elements. As Walter Benjamin argued, montage thereby facilitates a denaturalization, which may convey just how deeply questionable that which we tend to take as reality actually is (Buck-Morss 1991: 71, 218). Yet, montage is not only an amplifier of invisibility and instability. As made clear by several contributions to this volume (Salamon, chapter 8; Russell, chapter 9; Grimshaw, chapter 13; Empson, chapter 15), montage is the splintering of preestablished orders of visuality, but it is also the reassembling; and beyond these assemblages, new order may appear.

In a thought-provoking article, Paul Henley (2006: 40) reevaluates Jean Rouch’s classic film about the hauka in Accra and points out that what goes on in the actual observational scene cannot be reduced to simply a parodic subversion of colonial mastery. Instead, Henley (2006: 754–56) finds sufficient evidence in the film footage and in ethnographic descriptions on spirit possession in West Africa to argue that, rather than an example of counter-hegemonic resistance, the cultic event is in fact a fertility ritual, modeled on the North African zar cult, where ritual participants attempt to assimilate the power of influential figures for religious purposes. The colonial mockery suggested by Rouch’s montage, which in Taussig’s view worked to pinch alterity right beneath our skin, is in Henley’s reevaluation better understood to be an attempt of making the possession ritual acceptable to the political preferences of anthropologists and African intellectuals in Paris (Henley 2006: 37)—a mimicry, if you like, of taken-for-granted assumptions about counter-politics within the Western academia. We may take this example as a reminder against quick assumptions of montage as being somehow intrinsically emancipative. There simply is no way of determining and validating the effects of montage in the abstract. Just as montage may be applied for multiple purposes, so might the outcome of montage point in a virtually infinite number of directions. Hence, only through close observation of how montage operates and is applied in actual artistic and scholarly orchestrations with particular intensions in mind may we discern the effects that it produces.

Perhaps there is some truth to the conservative stance of art critic Rudolf Arnheim (1957: 170), who argued that in order for art to be more than a naïve simulacrum of reality, it must interrupt and challenge our conventional visual logic—but only partially, for no statement can [ultimately] be understood unless the relations between its elements form an organized whole. Successful evocation, in Arnheim’s (1971: 30–33) view, rests not with the pleasures of chaos, but with the author’s success in counterbalancing disruption with a general compositional order.

This might sound somewhat conformist to anthropologists, filmmakers, and museum curators inspired by constructivist and postmodern forms of disruptive montage, but perhaps it points to a need for carving out a position between realism and constructivism, simplicity and complexity, resonance and dissonance. As Eisenstein (1949: 37) argued, montage consists in the conflicts that erupt in the tension between juxtaposed parts. Sometimes the most effective montage sequences are found in films, texts, and exhibitions that insist on faithfully documenting a reality out there, yet somehow fail in this endeavor.

Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s much debated ethnographic film The Ax Fight (1975), about a conflict that broke out among two groups of Yanomamö Indians, is a case in point (see Acciaioli 2004: 141; Nichols 2004). In a discussion of the film, Asch points out how the highly disturbing effects produced through the juxtaposition of no less that five distinct analytic perspectives was not at all the result of a conscious attempt to create a rupturing viewer experience (in Ruby 2000: 129). Rather, the ruptures emerged as a result of the conflictual collaboration between two strong authors, who both were determined on particular yet almost incompatible perspectives on what constitutes the real. The conflicts in the production of the film are revealed through cracks and fissures in the cinematic montage. Here anthropological and cinematic claims start to fall apart and the producers are forced to reconsider previous explanations. The reality of the pro-filmic event quite clearly surpasses any attempt of containing it within