In the 'Montage' essay in the volume Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène, French film historian Laurent Le Forestier starts from the premise that the concept 'montage' does not exist in the absolute but must always be considered in light of the time and place in which it operates and is understood, and must always be studied in relation to other arts and social phenomena.
Giorgio Agamben, taking up a topic - the cinema - he did not usually address, once remarked: 'The specific character of cinema stems from montage, but what is montage? Or rather, what are the conditions of possibility of montage?' Agamben proposes a solely theoretical response to these two questions: 'There are two transcendental conditions of montage: repetition and stoppage'. Le Forestier's essay on montage will start over from this two-part question, with the premise that this theoretical response is insufficient, or at least necessarily incomplete: montage, seen as a practice - editing - and/or as a form of thought - montage - speaks to quite diverse realities depending on the time and place. Agamben's 'conditions of possibility' are constantly fluctuating within highly variable parameters: production systems, the technologies available, the status of the professionals involved in the work of editing, the dominant ideas around cinema, film's social uses, etc.
Le Forestier's hypothesis is thus that what is called 'montage' at a given point in time is in fact a form of equilibrium between these variables, and that the concept's odyssey and transformations can be understood as modifications of this equilibrium. Drawing on his highly-regarded work as an early film historian, Le Forestier will examine three such transformative periods - early cinema, the 1920s and the 1950s - to lay the foundation for what could become an (undeniably utopian) total history of montage.
Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.
