The Montage Principle

Book excerpt: This book of essays is quite unique in that it intervenes in a still contested area within many universities, that of the relevance of film to literature, critical theory, politics, sociology and anthropology. The essays were commissioned by Jean Antoine-Dunne whose research has explored the impact of Eisenstein s aesthetics on different areas of modernist literature and drama. The essays in this collection use Eisenstein as a point of departure into divergent fields of analysis and are concerned with the principle of montage as a transforming idea. They gather within the pages of one work contributions from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Richard Taylor, Paul Willemen and emerging scholars entering and altering the field of interdisciplinary scholarship, film and literature. These hitherto unpublished essays not only extend and elaborate on previous treatments of Eisenstein and montage in areas such as semiotics, film theory, and feminist film practice, but also introduce his work to areas which have not yet been considered in relation to Eisenstein and montage, such as Beckett scholarship, Caribbean aesthetics, Third Cinema, and debates around digital imagery. No other collection of essays has explored the idea of montage as a structuring cultural and critical principle and the elasticity of Eisenstein's legacy in quite this way.