Beyond Spatial Montage

Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space

Michael Betancourt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138938663
• eBook ISBN: 9781317359142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space offers an extended discussion of the morphology and structure of compositing, graphic juxtapositions, and montage employed in motion pictures. Drawing from the history of avant-garde and commercial cinema, as well as studio-based research, here media artist and theorist Michael Betancourt critiques cinematic realism and spatial montage in motion pictures. This new taxonomic framework for conceptualizing linkages between media art and narrative cinema opens new areas of experimentation for today's film editors, motion designers, and other media artists.

1 Introduction

Theorizations of motion pictures, cinema, film have developed in two closely parallel relations with the finished work: the hermeneutic and the heuristic. While these analytics are intimately related, they remain distinct protocols, each developing according to its particular relationship to the practicalities and limitations of production. Those theories that are hermeneutic in nature dominate the academic analysis and historicization of motion pictures. Primarily interpretative, hermeneutic theories develop in the abstract, according to their own internal logic and propositions that are then applied to the discussion and analysis of completed movies. Any potentials for prescriptive application to film production is secondary to their form and purpose: This approach is fundamentally critical—the consideration of meaning and explanation of form—rather than empirically limiting on the techniques of production. The application of hermeneutic theory to production is not impossible or even unusual in the history of cinema but is rather a reflection of specific interpreted meanings being used to organize the materials on screen in advance of that interpretation. The best-known example of this relationship between hermeneutics and heuristics is Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage that both describe technical arrangements of material and propose protocols for arranging them to create specific meanings. His theorization is explicitly a grammatical one concerned with determinate interpretation (hermeneutics) but organized through a heuristic methodology. The connections and role of these elements in his theory are fluid and mutually reinforcing.

In direct contrast to critical hermeneutics is heuristic theory. These approaches, while occasionally being concerned with meaning, are more often dismissed and ignored by hermeneutics precisely because their primary concern is with the productive form taken by the motion picture: Protocols for exposure, technical instructions of all types, the methodologies employed in staging during and for production are all heuristic in nature. This type of theory is concerned with the mechanics of production, quite apart from whatever significance those techniques might produce. These theories tend toward a taxonomic foundation, empirically descriptive of both existing work and logically predictive of new potentials that may not currently exist. It is this formal basis in the description of physical potentials, independent of their semiotics, that differentiates the heuristic from the hermeneutic. There are many points of overlap, and the distinction between a heuristic and hermeneutic theory may be little more than an issue of emphasis in how it presents via logical argument.

The descriptive capacities that are so highly visible in early film theories result from this duality of hermeneutic and heuristic engagement. A brief consideration of this dynamic is instructive: Soviet montage theory describes a technique for the temporal organization of film at once both hermeneutic and heuristic. This theory was programmatically developed by filmmaker-theorists in the Soviet Union to be directly concerned with the form taken by edited sequences in a motion picture, but it is presented as a protocol for producing specific meanings, linking the heuristic to its hermeneutic interpretations. The result is a theory-complex situated both as a productive set of prescriptions and techniques and as a paradigm for understanding the significance of these same forms when encountered in a film. The duality of Soviet montage theory-practice emerges from its empirically grounded foundations in production methodology.

While Soviet montage is intimately concerned with the interpretation of the edited sequence, those meanings appear in their theorization only secondarily to the more dominant concern with formal description. Recognizing this distinction between meaning and form—conjoined in their theorization—enables a separation of empirical, taxonomic analysis of formal structures from their ideological application in Soviet propaganda.

The methodologies developed by the Soviet theorists are closely linked to their concerns with Marxist doctrine, yet these protocols do not necessarily have to produce films with specifically Marxist meanings. However, the duality that cannot be avoided in their theories reflects the ambivalent nature of technique versus interpretation. The heuristic and hermeneutic are distinct, independent types of consideration that are correlated but not irrevocably linked. As their appearance in all sorts of later films so ably demonstrates, the influence of the montage theory originates with their empirical descriptive heuristic, its taxonomic description of morphology and structure, rather than their Marxist interpretative hermeneutics that assigns meaning to these forms.

Soviet montage protocols are primarily sequential: the organization of singular images into a series that develops over the duration of a film’s projection. The various types of montage structure that Sergei Eisenstein described in his theory are literalizations of Marxist dialectics, an assignment of inherent meaning to specific form, quite apart from its means of production. The temporal organization of montage theory is a direct reflection of the available technology at that time: Initially proposed in the early 1920s, the compositing of multiple images into a single shot was a difficult, costly, and imprecise process; optical printing, which makes compositing shots much easier and more precise, was not invented until 1929. The particular structure of montage that was commonly employed in Soviet films reflects this technical limitation. Applications of Soviet montage via compositing do appear in some montage films, the best known being the climax of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera where multiple images appear superimposed or juxtaposed within the same shot, demonstrating concerns with juxtaposed imagery that are a common feature of modernist and avant-garde art during and after World War I. That these composite images were reserved for the climax of the film reflects not just their significance as summary montage images but their novelty in cinema. This placement comes as a “highlight” to the film as a whole.

The heuristic concern with meaning apart from, and against, technical methodology is a common feature of discussions of recombinant imagery, whether static or in motion. Soviet montage is a development that reflects then-current concerns with recombination and the potential of imagery to be organized as a “universal language”—aspirations common to the painterly avant-gardes working the 1910s and 1920s. The duality apparent in Soviet montage demonstrates the independence of heuristic taxonomies: It is a formal organizational device separate from whatever meaning such a technique might produce in a completed work.

Definitions and Scope

The combination and juxtaposition of images on screen, whether individually over time (via montage), or less commonly in simultaneity (via compositing), is a recurring feature of cinema in the twentieth century that has intensified with the advent of digital systems that make such combinations technically easy to produce, increasingly inexpensive, and a common aspect of everyday experience. The issues of editing are a logical product of the basic fact that every shot must have a beginning and an end. Distinguishing Sergei Eisenstein’s montage from the long takes in Orson Welles’s films is not simply a matter of when and how they choose to cut; it is also an issue of the imagery contained within their shots. The distinction between the standard narrative featuring live actors and composed from sequences of shots and the composited melding of multiple images, graphics, and animation has remained relatively constant even as the technologies making these constructions possible have become increasingly common. The apparent division and fragmentation of the screen into smaller, discrete units in narrative works remains relatively unusual even as similar forms appear more frequently in TV commercials and the designed title sequences accompanying these realist fictions. This concern with the combination of images appearing on screen is the focus of windowing; it is not exclusively or only a matter of editing but of the visual organization of materials within the frame. Since the 1980s there have been several competing terms used for this same morphology: collage, mosaic-screen, spatial montage, split screen, temporal image mosaic, and, less commonly, parallelism (video art) and windowing (digital art). All identify the presentation of multiple images (shots) simultaneously on screen, all juxtaposed in a fashion that has direct parallels in both graphic design and comics. These forms, as the range of different names for the same phenomena implies, are common features of media art. Video artist Tom Sherman discusses these converging developments in his article “Machine Aesthetics Are Always Modern,” where he examines “parallelism” in video art:

Artists combine and run two or three or four (multiple) divergent elements in parallel, setting up perceptual and conceptual counterpoints. There is an ongoing obsession with contrapuntal composition across time-based arts; that is, running multiple independent phrases, event sequences, melodies, narratives, above and below (and beside) each other. The strategy seems to be about the construction of complexity, shifting relationships and associations structurally, engineering density and weight, challenging the listener or viewers to the point of overload. Parallelism is good for generating open-ended texts, as closure is difficult when information is configured in arrays or stacks, or multiple channels in shared time.¹

The terminological plurality around this formal device makes the critical analysis of these theorizations difficult since each individual theory’s frame of reference—video/film, computers/design or more traditional art (such as painting)—results in radically different historical foundations for what is the same visible phenomenon on screen. Even without this range of competing descriptors for the same technique, terminology would still be a problem for the theorization of these phenomena because digital media theorist Lev Manovich has explicitly described spatial montage as an oppositional practice to how cinema has been structured through temporal montage. His conception of spatial montage as an accumulation of imagery on screen, immanent and graphically juxtaposed, rather than arranged over time, is a prominent, but limited, conception of the potentials for image relationships on screen. How this collection of terms have been conceived and defined inhibits a more general theorization.

Further complicating the theorization of windowing are the technological limitations and production costs reflective of what André Bazin described as the ontological foundation of the cinematic image—the historical basis of motion pictures in photosensitive chemistry—that is a central part of his realist theory that demands an inviolable image. The historical scarcity of films that stage, combine, and fuse images in ways described by windowing is a result not of a unitary logic of inviolability but of the difficulty and expense in making the types of combinations that digital technology renders common. Citizen Kane employs complex, virtually seamless optical printing not only to create continuous shots (most famously the crane shot through the sign and then down into the window) but also to juxtapose and fuse space and time on screen for the introduction/ending of each flashback narrative.²

The underlying issue posed by spatial montage and its related terms is not exclusively hermeneutic: It is fundamentally a heuristic structure whose formal parameters determine (in advance of interpretation) the possibilities for meaning. The temporal element remains fundamental to all these structures encountered in a motion picture because the time of cinema remains linear, whether the materials are structured in a simultaneous composition of distinct individuated elements or composited as a singular unitary image on screen. The spatial arrangement of elements is always a component of the image’s meaning, whether as a relationship existing across multiple images composited together or between elements contained within an apparently singular image.

The limitations of a narrow opposition of spatial to temporal montage becomes apparent when situating spatial montage within a broader framework of material relations focused around the cinematic frame—those motion pictures, whether produced chemically or electronically—that engage with the formal combination and organization of kinetic imagery on screen. Thus, the issue is elaboration over a specific duration rather than the accumulation of materials on screen. It is not an issue of compositing but temporal development that is determinant of meaning for cinematic materials: what comes before and after any particular image. Historically, the technical means employed to produce these kinds of displacements in film have ranged from the custom-built, specialized apparatus to the industry-standard optical printer and animation stand; yet they are not limited to celluloid—analogous types of displacement have been possible with electronic means since the earliest years of experimentation with television. There is substantial formal overlap between film and electronic-image composites. The repetitions of imagery common to “step-printed” films made with an optical printer are apparent in video feedback. The discovery of this process in the early 1950s by Norman Taylor found commercial application in title sequences for the BBC television program Doctor Who in the 1960s, and in Maurice Binder’s title sequence for the film Arabesque in 1966.³

The term used throughout this heuristic analysis of multiple image juxtapositions, “windowing,” was selected because it encapsulates a broad range of media practices, not only those that use the digital computer (in the form of the GUI, or “graphic user interface”) as metaphor but earlier technologies and approaches as well. It evokes the historical conception of the realist painting employing linear perspective and the cinematic screen or “proscenium” as an imaginary window opening onto a virtual space. As such, it is a general term not tied to specific, formal cinematic structures under consideration. By invoking the history of representational painting since the Renaissance invention of linear perspective, while at the same time linking that formal system of representation to more contemporary language used to describe computer interfaces, “windowing” acts as an explicit bridge between these otherwise disparate formal approaches to imaging.

Any consideration of a contemporary morphology for compositing images in simultaneity must begin with the simple recognition that this particular approach to the motion image is one that runs counter to the historically dominant aesthetic-theoretical paradigms of cinematic realism and so historically occupies a minor position in the history of cinema. Finding examples and precedents for these structures in motion pictures must draw from commonly neglected sources: the experimental film, motion graphics (such as title sequences), and their parallels found in comics, graphic design, and collage-based art.

The taxonomy of structures described by windowing are not necessarily narrative or realist in nature; for some of these formal potentials, realism is specifically problematic as their formal character tends toward non- and anti-realist applications much more than the common realism familiar from commercial cinema. However, as with the term “windowing,” this taxonomy of morphology and structure is “open”: It neither requires nor denies realism, even t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Realism
• 3 Windowing
• 4 Taxonomy
• 5 Conclusions
• Appendix
• Index