This study argues that different types of artistic montage correspond to different conceptions of history, dividing the history of montage aesthetics and techniques into three periods: (1) constructing, (2) post-utopian, and (3) historicizing or analytic montage. This book intends to demonstrate how the revolutionary montage aesthetics of the 1920s was reinterpreted and adapted for critical analysis of utopian consciousness in unofficial literature and art of the 1960s and 1970s. This change became possible because unofficial art, unlike Soviet socialist realism, was connected with the experiments of European and American radical modernism and postmodernism.
The main points of this book can be summarized as follows.
Montage as a specific aesthetic method emerged in the very beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1900s and continuing throughout the 1920s, expressive, «sharp» montage — not only in cinema but also in visual arts and literature — was implemented as a method for the dynamic representation of contemporaneity. Montage produced an aesthetic portrayal of contemporaneity by depicting it as a space of emerging utopia/dystopia, full of conflicts and antagonistic oppositions. Moreover, «montage modernity» acquired the status of a totally new historical period, anthropologically and aesthetically different from all previous epochs. The aesthetics of montage was based on the experience of psychological trauma originating from urbanization, globalization (including the extensive contact of Western artistic circles with the art of China and Japan), WWI, and the subsequent civil wars in Russia and Germany. This book suggests that sharp montage was an element not only of avant-garde art, but also of the diverse movements of modernism and, later, postmodernism.
In the USSR of the 1920s, montage aesthetics acquired the features of a «grand style.» The difference between «present-day society» and the previous condition of society and culture was ideologized and politicized. In Soviet productions, the Bolshevik party and «progressive» men and women were dubbed the «avant-garde of humanity,» and were represented as the leading force in creating a new historical reality. This creation was represented — in Sergei Eisenstein’s films, Boris Pilniak’s novels, Gustav Klutsis’ photo-collages, and Sergei Tretiakov’s theater plays — as a creative violence that overcomes the dark, impersonal violence of non-regulated history. The aesthetics of montage was a tool to either glorify or stoically accept this violence. Stoical acceptance was chosen by, among others, Yuri Tynianov and Artem Vesioly. El Lissitsky’s 1920s works reveal the hidden mystical and occult sources of the «montage representation of history,» and undermine the common understanding of avant-garde art as «atheist» and «aggressive.»
Several times, Soviet montage was interpreted as a radicalization of Western European and pre-revolutionary Russian (e.g. Andrey Bely) montage aesthetics. However, Soviet montage also strongly influenced left-wing artists in various countries: the image of history as a dynamic-conflicting becoming corresponded with leftist worldviews, and with Marxist and socialist ones first of all.
Meanwhile, different versions of montage aesthetics developed in Western Europe and in the USA. Take, for example, the work of Alfred Döblin, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Ruttmann in Germany; Karel Čapek in Czechoslovakia; John Dos Passos in the USA; James Joyce in Ireland and France; and Ezra Pound in Great Britain. Not all of these artists were connected with socialist circles: Čapek was a liberal, Joyce’s political opinions were also more or less liberal, and Ezra Pound was, as is well-known, close to Italian fascism.
«Epic Polyphonic Political Art» (EPPA) was the most important montage movement formed during the twenties and early thirties. This movement includes the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Vsevolod Vishnevskii, the theater performances directed by Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and, as strange as it may seem, the
