Table Of Contentjacques aumont
Montage
Second revised
and expanded edition
kino -agora
Jacques Aumont
Montage
second revised
and expanded
edition
caboose
Montreal
published without financial assistance, public or private
Second revised and expanded edition.
copyright © 2013, 2020 Jacques Aumont
translation copyright © Timothy Barnard
ISBN 978-1-927852-21-7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form or by any means without the express written permission of the
publisher, which holds exclusive publication rights.
Montage is part of the caboose essay series Kino-Agora
Published by caboose, www.caboosebooks.net
Designed by Marina Uzunova and Timothy Barnard. Set in Cala type,
designed by Dieter Hofrichter, by Marina Uzunova.
Montage
‘‘AA lloovveellyy wwoorrdd.. IItt hhaass
eevveerryytthhiinngg iitt nneeeeddss ttoo bbee ppooppuullaarr’’..
The Western and the Scientist, or the Paradox of Editing
The cliché of the absent-minded professor is ubiquitous: someone
whose head is so full of serious things that there is no room for
everyday trifles. Scientists forget their umbrellas just about every-
where, when they aren’t opening them up to sit on them, thinking
they are chairs. Niels Bohr, the inventor of quantum physics, liked
to go to the movies. Upon leaving a silent western with Tom Mix, he
said something to this effect: ‘That the scoundrel runs off with the
beautiful girl is logical; it always happens. That the bridge collapses
under their carriage is unlikely but I am willing to accept it. That
the heroine remains suspended in mid-air over a precipice is even
more unlikely, but again I accept it. I am even willing to accept that at
that very moment Tom Mix is coming by on his horse. But that at
that very moment there should also be a fellow with a motion-pic-
ture camera to film the whole business—that is more than I am will-
ing to believe’.1
Like many silly stories, this one touches a trouble spot. What do
we see when we watch a ‘classical’ film? A series of moving images,
each of which comes from the continuous recording of an event that
took place before the camera. As long as one of these images remains
on screen,2 we have an analogical trace of the event. To call it the
result of looking makes it more metaphorical still: machines don’t
look, only people look. Yet the moving picture camera, a machine
4 Jacques Aumont
for transacting the visible in a directional manner, resembles our eye
so closely on this point that the comparison is almost natural: the
camera lens is like an eye, thus it is an eye, and each moving image
on screen is a trace of ‘looking’ at a real event. When the next image
appears, it depicts another event from a different camera angle at
another moment. The trouble arises from the fact that, on screen,
the second image follows on from the first without a break. We are
presented with a baffling experience (and one which baffled many
in the beginning) whose continuous visual flow nevertheless refer-
ences events produced discontinuously. It is because of this imaginary
reversion, which makes us see the referent where there is only an
image, that we can share Niels Bohr’s astonishment and have the
impression of a look that jumps through space in the wink of an eye.
Naturally, no one’s eye has jumped. The human eye of the oper-
ator and the metaphorical eye of the camera took their time finding
their spot, taking up position and waiting for what had to be filmed
to be organised and set up before them and then finally recorded. The
film is the intermittent trace of this shooting; its changing images
are the conventional signal that we are passing from one segment of
the shooting to another. Because viewers of the Tom Mix western
didn’t pay to see fragments of the trace of a shooting, but rather to
be told a story in images, they see the film as a fabricated image of an
imaginary world: a complete image made up of many partial images
following on one after the other. The paradox arises when one sees
the film as the natural image of a fabricated world—as the recording,
the continuous indexical trace, of the world of the diegesis. To do so
is to mix up two quite different contracts: either the film is a series
of traces of what went on in front of the camera, or it is a narrative
instrument which exists purely by agreement. Either the film shows,
or it tells: this distinction is the rudiment of film narratology and
Montage 5
has been explored from back to front.3 To put Bohr’s mind at ease, it
would have been enough to point out to him that he was mixing
up the reference to reality (the film shoot) and the reference to the
imaginary (the diegesis). (As for the implausibility of the story, which
is a product of the script alone, it has little to do with the ‘unlikelihood’
of the camera operator’s ubiquity.)
Just the same, wherein lies the force of this anecdote? Without a
doubt in the fact that this confusion is something we all share—
because cinema was invented, or at least developed, to cause it. The
reason the Lumière brothers’ invention had ‘no future’ was because
it was limited to the ‘view’, to the recorded trace. The future was the
fiction factory, serial westerns with unlikely yet accepted twists and
turns. By playing the fool, Bohr put his finger on this agreement,
more profound than that which leads us to accept the most idiotic
adventures: the agreement by which moving images on the screen
refer to the diegesis and not to the film shoot. In other words, quite
simply, the playful pretence which constitutes the fiction contract.4
We are all ready to accept as possible any story whatsoever, as long
as it does not differ too greatly from the catalogue of accepted stories
of our day. As for possibly sensing the presence of the filmer within
the filmed, this has taken so many forms over the past fifty years—
both direct, such as the appearance of the clapboard or camera in the
image, and indirect, such as the signals of every kind that remind us
that ‘this is an image’—that our awareness of what a moving image
is, and what a film made up of such images is, has evolved.5 And
yet the cinema of these first decades of the twenty-first century is
still defined, for the most part, as the art of telling stories through a
succession of disconnected yet linked points of view. Correlatively,
editing was initially and remains the art and manner of making
those links.
6 Jacques Aumont
From Machinery to Glue
The word ‘montage’, in French, was first used in connection with
machinery and plumbing. Sergei Eisenstein, who in 1923 took up
the word in the footsteps of others, informs us of this, amused at the
source and promptly drawing bold inferences from it. It has become
difficult, nearly a century later, to imagine that this was the first
meaning of the word, so much has its use in film become prepon-
derant, but Eisenstein was right to remark that this lovely word
had everything it needed to succeed. Changing the point of view
on a single event was not only the semiotic and aesthetic means by
which the animated pictures of Lumière and others like him eluded
the curse of the pure spatio-temporal trace; it was also the source of
an idea of the shot, and its correlative idea, editing. Over the past
twenty years several scholars have pointed out the existence in the
Lumière catalogue of ‘views’ containing several takes.6 In many
cases it was less a premeditated decision than improvised or even
accidental. When the operator filming Mr Loubet at the Races (M.
Loubet aux courses, Lumière cat. 1031, 1899) or The Duchess of Aosta
at the Exposition (La Duchesse d’Aoste à l’exposition, Lumière cat. 1184,
1899) saw that the place where he had chosen to stand while waiting
for these personalities was not the best, he simply changed spots.
And because he could not make these important figures repeat their
entrance, he changed position in ‘real time’ and provided us with a
trace of this: for a brief moment—the time it took him to move—he
did not film. For a viewer of the Lumière picture, this was a defect,
a hole in the normal fabric of the film. Effort was required (of
perception perhaps, of tolerance most definitely) to accept it. To a film
historian, this is the very beginning of shots being edited together.
In Firemen: Depart of the Fire Engine (Pompiers: La Sortie de la pompe,
Lumière cat. 76, 1896), the intervention appears more deliberate. It
Montage 7
is obviously composed of two quite similar half-pictures—either two
successive ‘takes’ or, more strangely, the joining back together of an
initial picture cut in two, with the second half becoming the first.
We should steer clear of teleology, but we can already read
much into these two examples, and at the very least the essential
difference between ‘editing in the camera’ and editing after the film
shoot. The former, editing without glue during the film shoot, would
become rare, the preserve of a few experimentalists who turned it
into a theoretical manifesto: didn’t Jonas Mekas, for years running,
keep a filmed ‘diary’ in this form? For the industry soon to be born
and rapidly develop, the latter prefigured a much better solution:
the editing of takes separated in time and carefully glued together
afterwards. A better solution because, as the little story about Bohr
illustrates, it makes it possible to link anything one wants however
one wants. In principle unrestrictedly, in any event; the history of
films is there to remind us that this lack of restriction quickly became
relative. In the space of a few years, the range of what was possible
was limited by the appearance and then the elaboration and con-
solidation of rules designed to make these successive partial pictures
acceptable to our eye and to our mind.7
The most remarkable lesson in all of this is that the initial con-
cern was for the viewer’s mind (or, more modestly, for their under-
standing) before any concern for their eye. Films made before 1910,
which had very quickly become narrative vehicles, linked already
complex units containing an event followed over time. These units
were reminiscent of theatrical ‘tableaux’ and followed on from one
another according to purely logical considerations: if a character
was eating in a restaurant, it was not surprising to see him walking
in the street afterwards and then to see him at home, without any
concern for showing the transition or for giving this sequence a
8 Jacques Aumont
fluid form. It was up to the viewer to make rather simple deductions
or inferences on the basis of their likelihood. Nevertheless, these
activities required some small degree of mental labour. If necessary,
the viewer could be helped by a written indication (or, given the
reality of the film show, by verbal explanations, as we now know
that films were often accompanied by ‘lecturers’ who facilitated their
viewing).
Earlier there had existed expressive and representational forms
which, in order to be correctly interpreted, required recipients to
use their imaginations, filling in the intervals by establishing con-
nections between their parts. Most importantly, in literature. The
nineteenth-century novel, whose principal narrative techniques
cinema long borrowed, rested on this ability of the reader to mentally
fill in the gaps in a narrative that could never tell the whole story:
both small gaps within a single action sequence (a single ‘scene’) and
larger gaps between one chapter and the next. This is the principle of
the ellipsis, which Roger Leenhardt called the ‘essence of cinema’,8
because there is always the possibility that between two successive
shots an interval of diegetic time of varying degrees of importance
will be put in play or suggested. This is even more apparent in
theatre, where quite often ellipsis reigns from one scene or act to the
next. A play such as Peer Gynt (which predates the cinema by twenty
years), with its linear development (it looks neither backwards nor
forwards) requires viewers to add much to what they see and hear
if they are to understand the shifting locations of, and temporal
relations between, the successive events on stage. At a time when
filmmakers were looking for visual models for the linking of shots,
it did not go unnoticed that there existed a similarity between this
linking and series of images which, to tell a story, join up moments—
the Bayeux tapestries, for example (so very often held up as an
Montage 9
ancestor of cinema), Uccello’s Miracolo dell’ostia profanata (Miracle
of the Profaned Host) or Duccio’s Maestà. If I wish to understand the
connection between one image and the adjoining one on the level of
meaning, I must thus contribute something myself.
The difficulty for viewers of early film was of the same order—
except that literature and theatre employed language and ‘narrative’
painting was always based on a pre-existing text. Early film viewers,
on the other hand, generally had no written tradition to fall back
on,9 or an established artistic language whose grammar and use of
verb tenses and syntax in written narratives provide so many valuable
indications. And yet these viewers had to establish a connection
between successive images, without which nothing could be made
of the film. Naturally, there was the lecturer (the bonimenteur, the
benshi), who could do this work in their place. But, first of all, not
every film venue had the means to provide this luxury; more fun-
damentally, understanding a film is not the same as listening to
a commentator’s version of it: it consists in managing to establish
logical connections between the images for oneself. For that, the
viewer had to overcome the small trauma that each jump from one
moving image to the next created.
Apparition, Context
All of us today were born into a world familiar with the cinema,
and even, for most of us, with talking film. It is thus very difficult
for us to place ourselves in the shoes of someone seeing this enter-
tainment for the first time. It is a rather strange entertainment when
you think about it: an image of a girl dangling from a precipice is
followed by one of Tom Mix galloping on his white horse, and it asks
us to understand by this that the gallant hero is riding to the rescue
of the beautiful heroine. Or try to imagine the surprise of someone
