Theories and practices of montage. From Cinema in the 1920s to found footage movies and contemporary exhibition practices

This lecture will be divided into two sections. The first section will analyze the origins of the concept of montage and the way it spread among many theories (especially Ejzenštejn and Vertov as well as Kracauer and Benjamin) over the course of the 1920s. These theories presented montage not only as a compositional process in the arts and film, but also as an hermeneutic and historiographic tool. The second section will examine the legacy of 20s theories on certain film practices that are based on the use of found footage. This paper will refer in particular to Harun Farocki’s movies and installations. Furthermore, the lecture will analyze the impact of this legacy on several exhibitions organized recently using montage as their exhibition principle (for example, the exhibitions recently supervised by Georges Didi-Huberman, such as “Atlas”, 2011, and “Nouvelles histoires de fantômes”, 2014).