This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue fills a gap in the current scholarship on literary collage, by addressing how different the interpretations of the concept are, depending on the author who uses the concept and the material and writers surveyed. The book studies writers who employed literary collage during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some whose works have been intensely analyzed from this perspective (William S. Burroughs and Walter Benjamin), but also some whose collage-writing style has recently been investigated by writers, being usually placed under the umbrella term of artist books (Stelio Maria Martini).

Reshapes the history of abstract animation and its importance to computer imagery and cinema Animation and technology are always changing with one another. From hand-drawn flipbooks to stop-motion and computer-generated imagery (CGI), animation’s identity is in flux. But many of these moving image technologies, like CGI, emerged from the world of animation. Indeed, animation has made essential contributions to not only computer imagery but also cinema, helping shape them into the fields and media forms we know today. In Pulses of Abstraction, Andrew R. Johnston presents both a revealing history of abstract animation and an investigation into the relationship between animation and cinema. Examining a rich array of techniques—including etching directly onto the filmstrip, immersive colored-light spectacles, rapid montage sequences, and digital programming—Pulses of Abstraction uncovers important epistemological shifts around film and related media. Just as animation’s images pulse in projection, so too does its history of indexing technological and epistemic changes through experiments with form, material, and aesthetics. Focusing on a period of rapid media change from the 1950s to the 1970s, this book combines close readings of experimental animations with in-depth technological studies, revealing how animation helped image culture come to terms with the rise of information technologies.

Collage Culture develops a comprehensive theory of the origins and meanings of collage and readymades in modern and postmodern art, literature, and everyday life. Demonstrating that the origins of collage are found in assembly line technologies and mass media forms of layout and advertising in early twentieth-century newspapers, Collage Culture traces how the historical avant-garde turns the fragmentation of Fordist production against nationalist, fascist, and capitalist ideologies, using the radical potential unleashed by new technologies to produce critical collages. David Banash adeptly surveys the reinvention of collage by a generation of postmodern artists who develop new forms including cut-ups, sampling, zines, plagiarism, and copying to cope with the banalities and demands of consumer culture. Banash argues that collage mirrors the profoundly dialectical relations between the cut of assembly lines and the readymades of consumerism even as its cutting-edges move against the imperatives of passive consumption and disposability instituted by those technologies, forms, and relations. Collage Culture surveys and analyzes works of advertising, assemblage, film, literature, music, painting, and photography from the historical avant-garde to the most recent developments of postmodernism.

Through a series of detailed film case histories ranging from The Great Dictator to Hiroshima mon amour to The Lives of Others, The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection explores the genesis and recurrence of antifascist aesthetics as it manifests in the WWII, Cold War and Post-Wall historical periods. Emerging during a critical moment in film history—1930s/1940s Hollywood— cinematic antifascism was representative of the international nature of antifascist alliances, with the amalgam of film styles generated in émigré Hollywood during the WWII period reflecting a dialogue between an urgent political commitment to antifascism and an equally intense commitment to aesthetic complexity. Opposed to a fascist aesthetics based on homogeneity, purity and spectacle, these antifascist films project a radical beauty of distortion, heterogeneity, fragmentation and loss. By juxtaposing documentation and the modernist techniques of surrealism and expressionism, the filmmakers were able to manifest a non-totalizing work of art that still had political impact. Drawing on insights from film and cultural studies, aesthetic and ethical philosophy, and socio-political theory, this book argues that the artistic struggles with political commitment and modernist strategies of representation during the 1930s and 40s resulted in a distinctive, radical aesthetic form that represents an alternate strand of post-modernism.

Montage, today, is a widespread procedure that doesn’t concern just artistic production, but also our daily lives and the use everyone makes of that huge visual archive that contemporary media place at our disposal. In a technologically advanced society, where the notion of postproduction regulates our relationship with images and objects, it is therefore necessary to thoroughly investigate the role, possibilities, and, most of all, anthropological and political connotations of montage; and to ask ourselves whether – in comparison to the heroic years of the avant-garde movements – montage has become a faded and standardized practice or if it is a more and more effective means to understand and reprogramme the world, especially in relation to the technical possibilities offered by new media and remix practices.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2008 in the subject Art - Photography and Film, grade: cum laude, University of Edinburgh, language: English, abstract: Photomontage has more to do with film than with any other art form - they have in common the technique of montage. (Sergei Tretyakov) By considering that photomontage and film use the technique of cutting and gluing as dominant artistic device, and that montage, a technique unifying art and technology for the first time, emerged as a dominant artistic feature of the avant-garde, this thesis will explore the ideological and perceptual implications of its advent in avant-garde art and film. The technological advances of the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly the advent of photography, allowed avant-garde artists to break free from traditional concepts of artistic production – they dispensed with the old criteria of uniqueness, originality, handicraft and personal style. At a time when many avant-garde artists abruptly ceased to paint, photomontage emerged as the privileged locus for a caesura with traditional art forms. Photomontage envisioned film aesthetics insofar as it combines and juxtaposes images of various perspectival planes and angles (Raoul Hausmann described his early photomontages as “motionless moving pictures”). A corresponding observation can be made on the use of montage in cinema, a technique which crucially underpins the illusion of movement created through the succession of photographic stills. The present thesis will investigate photomontage and film in order to examine the effect technological reproduction played in revolutionising artistic production, perception and ideology – where the technique and philosophy of montage was key.