Between Images
Montage and the Problem of Relation
by Ryan Conrath
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Book Presentation:
In the early days of moving pictures, filmmakers learned that the montage could be an effective tool to show changes in time or locale. Casablanca's iconic travel montage is mimicked by filmmakers to this day. Since its use in Rocky, the training montage has become a staple for sports films. In the 2004 film Team America, the song "Montage" is a meta explanation of the device's universal use and understanding. Its history and affects are studied and practiced by student and professional filmmakers alike.
"Between Images proposes a unique theory of montage a technique of relation: a way of rethinking and reshaping how humans relate―to ourselves and each other, to the material world, to the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants. Historically, film criticism has cast editing in one of several roles: as a device of spatiotemporal continuity to maintain the viewer's investment in the story-world; as an agent of disorder that confounds conventions of realism to prompt the viewer's intellectual engagement; and as an expressionistic device for augmenting the duration and combination of shots to leave a sensory impression. While not abandoning such accounts, this book ventures closer to the heart of montage by distinguishing the space between images as itself a powerful source of political, emotional, and aesthetic formation. Venturing into an "expanded field of montage," this study traces the cut and the splice across photographic and cinematic media, where the space between images becomes a setting for navigating and renegotiating the terms of relation, of the "being-with" that connects all forms of life. Between Images brings together a diverse cast of established and emerging film artists―Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Steve McQueen, and Cauleen Smith, Daïchi Saito, and Ja'Tovia Gary among others―to demonstrate the abiding capacity of cinema to effect change."
About the Author:
Ryan Conrath is Associate Professor of English in the Film Program at Salisbury University.
Press Reviews:
"Ryan Conrath condenses the issue of montage into a simple, political formula: Montage is a relation between people. How to build this relation across screens and even through them? How to punch across? How to withdraw? Between Images brilliantly frames montage as a political and aesthetical algorithm, a crucial operator of people's relations to one another and themselves." -- Hito Steyerl
> On a related topic:
Editing and Montage in International Film and Video (2017)
Theory and Technique
Beyond Spatial Montage (2016)
Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space
Contemporary Post-Production (2025)
Create, Cut, Collaborate, Color, Deliver
The Aesthetics of Digital Montage (2024)
Film Editing and Technological Change
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